Caroline waited until he had generously salted and peppered his potatoes, then she laid her elbows on the table and propelled herself a bit closer to it and thus to him. “We heard that Auntie Braxton is going to be back in a couple of days,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said, taking a large bite of potato.
“We’ve been worried about where you’re going to live.”
He raised his hand to stop her talking and held it there until he had chewed and swallowed the bite. “I know what you’re going to say, and I thank you, but I just can’t.”
See? See? I was smiling inside and out.
Caroline was not. “How do you know what I’m going to say?”
“You’re going to ask me back to your house—and I’m grateful, but you know I can’t come in on you again.”
Caroline laughed. “Oh, I’ve got a much better idea than that.”
All my smiles had dried up.
“Have you now, Miss Caroline?” He was spearing another piece of potato with his fork.
“I sure do.” She leaned toward him with the kind of smile you see a woman give a man when she’s got something more than politeness on her mind. “I’m proposing that you marry Miss Trudy Braxton.”
“Marry?” he asked, putting down his fork and staring wide-eyed into her face. “You’re suggesting that Trudy and I get married?”
“Don’t worry,” Call began earnestly, “you wouldn’t have to—” at which point my bare heel slammed down on his bare toes. He stopped talking to give me a look of hurt surprise.
Caroline ignored us both. “Think of it this way,” she said in her most sophisticated tone of voice. “She needs someone to take care of her and her house, and you need a house to live in. It would be a marriage of convenience.” I noticed she didn’t say “in name only.” At least she had a whiff of delicacy.
“I be damned,” he said under his breath, looking from one face to another. I pretended to study a torn cuticle to miss his scrutiny. “You kids do beat the limit. Who would have ever thought?”
“Once you get used to the idea, it’ll make a lot of sense to you,” Caroline said. “It’s not,” she added quickly, “that you couldn’t find someplace else. Plenty of folks would take you in. But no one else needs you. Not like Auntie Braxton.” She turned to me, then to Call for support.
By now I was biting away at the offending cuticle, but out of the corner of my eye I could see Call nodding his head vigorously, pumping up for a big affirmative statement. “It’ll make sense,” he repeated Caroline’s theme. “It’ll make plenty of sense, once you get used to it.”
“It will, will it?” The Captain was shaking his head and grinning. “You sound like my poor old mother.” Eventually he picked up his fork and, using one side of it, thoughtfully scraped the pepper off one of the potatoes. “People,” he said at last, no shadow of a grin remaining, “people would say I did it for the money.”
“What money?” Caroline asked.
“Nobody but you ever heard tell of no money,” Call said. “Me and Wheeze are the only ones you told. And now Caroline.”
“I wouldn’t take a cent of her money, you know.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” Caroline said. What did she know?
“There probably isn’t any,” I said huffily. “We cleaned good and we never saw any.”
He smiled appreciatively at me as though I had helped him. “Well,” he said grinning. “It’s a crazy idea.” Something about the way he said it made me feel cold all over.
“You’re going to think about it,” Caroline said, rather than asked.
He shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “No harm thinking crazy.”
The next day he caught the ferry to Crisfield. He never even told us he was going. We had to get the word from Captain Billy. And he didn’t come home that night or the next. We knew because we met the ferry each evening.
On the third day there he was, waving to us from the deck. My heart jumped to see him, and my body felt all over again how it was to be crushed against the rough material of his clothes, his heart beating straight through my backbone. Call and Caroline were waving back and calling out to him, but I was standing there shivering, my arms crossed, my hands hooked up under my arms and pressed against my breasts.
The boat was tied up, and now he was calling us by name. He wanted Caroline and me to see to something in the hold and Call to come aboard and give him a hand.
Caroline, as usual, moved faster than I. “Come, look here!” she yelled. When I got to where Captain Billy’s sons were handing up the freight, I saw the chair. It was huge and dark brown with a wicker seat and back and large metal wheels rimmed in hard black rubber. It took both Edgar and Richard to lift it up onto the pier. Caroline was grinning all over. “I bet he’s done it,” she said.
Whatever was in my look made her correct herself. “I mean,” she said with an impatient sigh, “I just mean, I bet he’s gone and married her.”
I had no place to run to, and even if I had, it was too late. They were already emerging from the cabin. Very slowly up the ladder, first Call’s head, his neck bent. Then at last the three of them, the Captain and Call carrying Auntie Braxton on a hand sling between them, she with an arm about each’s shoulder. When the three of them turned around at the top of the ladder, I could see that she was wearing on her shoulder a huge chrysanthemum corsage.
“He did marry her.” Caroline said it softly, but it was exploding like shrapnel inside my stomach. She ran for the wheelchair and pushed it to the end of the gangplank as proud as though she were rolling out the red carpet for royalty. Call and the Captain carefully lowered the old woman into the chair.
As he straightened up, the Captain saw me hanging back and called to me. “Sara Louise,” he said. “Come on over. I want you to shake hands with Miz Wallace here.”
The old woman looked up at him when he said that, as worshipful as a repentant sinner testifying in church. When I came close, she put out her hand. Shaking her hand was like holding a bunch of twigs, but her eyes were clear and steady. I think she said, “How are you, Sara Louise?” The words were hard to decipher.
“Welcome home, Miss Trudy,” I muttered. I couldn’t for the life of me call her by his name.
14
I suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We didn’t have many. I know that now. I have been to libraries on the mainland, and I know that between my home and the school there was very little. But I had all of Shakespeare and Walter Scott and Dickens and Fenimore Cooper. Every night I pulled the black air raid curtains to and read on and on, huddled close to our bedroom lamp. Can you imagine the effect of The Last of the Mohicans on a girl like me? It was not the selfless Cora, but Uncas and Uncas alone whom I adored. Uncas, standing ready to die before the Delaware, when an enemy warrior tears off his hunting shirt revealing the bright blue tortoise tattooed on Uncas’s breast.
Oh, to have a bright blue tortoise—something that proclaimed my uniqueness to the world. But I was not the last of the Mohicans or the only of anything. I was Caroline Bradshaw’s twin sister.
I cannot explain why, seeing how the storm had affected our family’s finances, I never told anyone that I had almost fifty dollars hidden away. Among the first things that had to be given up were Caroline’s mainland voice and piano lessons. Even on generous scholarships, the transportation was too much for our slender resources. I suppose it is to Caroline’s credit that she seldom sulked about this deprivation. She continued to practice regularly with the hope that spring would mark the end of a successful oyster season and give us the margin we needed to continue her trips to Salisbury. I might say to my own credit, as I needed every bit of credit available in those days, that I did not rejoice over Caroline’s misfortune. I never hated the music. In fact, I took pride in it. But though it occurred to me to offer the money I had saved to help her continue her
lessons, I was never quite able to admit that I had put it away. Besides, it was not that much money—and it was mine. I had earned it.
I went once to see the Captain after he got married. He invited the three of us—Caroline, Call, and me—to dinner. I suppose he meant it for a celebration. At any rate, he pulled out a small bottle of wine and offered us some. Call and I were shocked and refused. Caroline took some with a great deal of giggling about what would happen if anyone found out he had smuggled spirits onto our very dry little island. I was annoyed. The absence of alcohol on Rass (we never counted Momma’s sherry bottle as real alcohol) was a matter of religious, not civil, law. We didn’t even have a policeman, and there certainly was nothing resembling jail. If people had known about the Captain’s wine, they would have simply condemned him as a heathen and prayed over him on Wednesday night. They’d been doing that ever since he arrived.
“I used to buy this kind of wine in Paris,” the Captain explained. “It’s been hard to get since the war.” I assumed, of course, that he meant the war of the moment. Thinking back, I guess he must have meant World War I. I had a hard time keeping in mind how old he was.
With Auntie Braxton, there was no question. She sat at the head of the table in her wooden and wicker wheelchair, smiling a lopsided, almost simple smile. Her hair was white and so thin you could see the pink of her skull shining through. I suppose the strange angle of her smile was the result of the stroke, which is what had caused her to fall and break her hip. She tried to hold her glass in the tiny claw of her hand, but the Captain was there to hold it steady at her mouth. She took a sip, a bit of which dribbled down her chin. She seemed not to mind, keeping her clear, childlike eyes devoted to his face.
He patted her chin with a napkin. “My dear,” he was saying. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had to drive a car across the city of Paris?”
For those of us who had lived all our lives on Rass, an automobile was almost more exotic than Paris. It irritated me that the Captain had never thought to tell, or chosen to tell Call and me about this adventure. For it was an adventure, the way the Captain told it.
Settling back in his own chair, he explained that he had driven a car only once before in his life, and that on a country road in America, when his companion, a French seaman, suggested that they buy a car someone was hawking on the dock at Le Havre and take it into Paris. The Frenchman felt that it would be a wonderful way to pick up some girls, and the Captain, his pockets full of francs and with a week’s shore leave in which to spend them, saw the car as a means to independence and excitement. He did not know until after the purchase was made that his companion had never driven a car before.
“‘But no matter,’” the Captain imitated the Frenchman. “‘Is easy.’” With difficulty, the Captain persuaded his friend to let him drive and then began their hair-raising trip from Le Havre to Paris, culminating in a cross-city ride at the busiest time of the afternoon.
“And then I came to a huge intersection—carts and automobiles and trucks coming at me from what seemed to be eight directions. If I stayed still I would be plowed under but to go forward was suicide.”
“What did you do?” Call asked.
“Well—I shifted into first gear, grabbed the wheel as tight as I could with one hand, squeezed the horn with the other, jammed down on the accelerator with both feet, shut my eyes, and zoomed across.”
“What?” cried Call. “Didn’t you kill yourself?”
A peculiar noise, more like a chicken cackle than anything else, came from the end of the table. We all turned. Auntie Braxton was laughing. The others all began to laugh then, even Call, who knew the joke was at his expense. Everyone began to laugh but me.
“Don’t you get it, Wheeze?” Call asked. “If he’d of killed himself—”
“Of course I get it, stupid. I just don’t happen to think it’s funny.”
Caroline turned to Auntie Braxton and said, “Don’t mind her.” She flashed a beautiful smile at Call. “Wheeze doesn’t think anything’s funny.”
“I do, too. You liar! All you do is lie, lie, lie.”
She gave me her most pained expression. “Wheeze,” she said.
“Don’t call me Wheeze! I’m a person, not a disease symptom.” It would have sounded more impressive if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle of the word disease.
Caroline laughed. She acted as though she thought I had meant to be funny. When she laughed, Call laughed. They looked at each other and hooted with pleasure as though something enormously witty had been said. I propped my forehead on my elbowed hand and steeled myself for the cackle from Auntie Braxton and the laugh, which reminded me of an exuberant tuba, that would come from the Captain. They didn’t come. Instead, I felt a scratchy arm about my shoulder and a face close to my ear.
“Sara Louise,” he was saying gently. “What’s wrong, my dear?”
God have mercy. Didn’t he know that I could stand anything except his kindness? I pushed back my chair, nearly knocking him down as I did so, and fled from that terrible house.
I never saw Auntie Braxton again, until she was laid out for her funeral. Caroline reported to me regularly how happy both the old woman and the Captain were. She and Call visited them almost every day. The Captain always asked Caroline to sing for them because “Trudy loves music so.” He seemed to know a lot about this old woman that most people who had lived all their lives on the island didn’t.
“She can talk, you know,” Caroline said to me. “Sometimes you can’t understand, but he always seems to. And whenever I sing she listens, really listens. Not with half her mind somewhere else. The Captain’s right. She loves it. I never saw anyone who loved music so much, not even Momma.” When she would say things like this, I’d just bury myself more deeply in my book and pretend I hadn’t heard.
On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Auntie Braxton suffered a massive stroke and was rushed to the hospital by ferry in the middle of the night. She was dead by Christmas.
There was a funeral service for her in the church. It seemed ironic. Neither she nor the Captain had been to church for as long as anyone could remember, but the preacher in those days was young and earnest and gave her what was warmly regarded as a “right purty service.” The Captain wanted our family to sit with him in the front pew, so we did, even Grandma who, I’m glad to say, behaved herself. The Captain sat between Caroline and me. While the congregation recited the Twenty-third Psalm—“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for thou art with me…” Caroline reached over and took his hand as though he were a small child in need of guidance and protection. He reached up with his free hand and wiped his eyes. And, sitting closer to him than I had in months, I realized with a sudden coldness how very old he was and felt the tears start in my own eyes.
Afterward my mother asked the Captain to come home and have supper with us, but when he refused, no one pressed him to change his mind. Caroline and Call and I walked him to the door of what was now his house. No one said a word along the way, and when he nodded to us at the door, we just nodded back and headed home. As it turned out, it was a good thing he had not come home with us. Grandma went on one of her worst rampages to date.
“He killed her, you know.”
We all gaped in astonishment. Even from Grandma this was strong stuff.
“He wanted her house. I knew soon as he moved in there this was bound to happen.”
“Mother,” my father said quietly. “Don’t, Mother.”
“I reckon you want to know how he did it.”
“Mother—”
“Poisoned her. That’s how.” She gazed about the table in triumph. “Rat poison.” She took a large bite of food and chewed it noisily. The rest of us had stopped eating entirely.
“Louise knows,” she said in a sneaky little voice. She smiled at me. “But you wouldn’t tell, would you? And I know why.” She broke into a child’s singsong jeer. “Nah nah nah nah nah nah.”
br /> “Shut up!” It was Caroline who yelled what I could not.
“Caroline!” both our parents said.
Caroline’s face was red with rage, but she pinched her lips together.
Grandma continued unperturbed. “Ever see how she looks at him?”
“Mother.”
“She thinks I’m only a foolish old woman. But I know. ’Deed I do.” She stared at me full in the eyes. I was too afraid to look away. “Maybe you helped. Did you, Louise? Did you help him?” Her eyes were glittering.
“Girls,” my father was almost whispering. “Go to your room.”
This time both of us obeyed immediately. Even behind the safety of our door we could not speak. There were no more jokes or excuses to be made for the silly, grumpy old woman we’d known from birth. The shock was so enormous that I found my own puny fear of exposure melting into a much larger darker terror that seemed to have no boundaries.
“Who knows?” the voice from The Shadow asks. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Now we knew.
Much later, when we were getting ready for bed, Caroline said, “I’ve got to get away from here before she runs me nuts.”
You? I thought but did not say. You? What harm can she possibly do? You do not need to be delivered from evil. Can’t you see? It’s me. Me—I who am so close to being swallowed up in all that eternal darkness. But I didn’t say it. I wasn’t angry at her—just deadly tired.