It was the last week in November when the first northwest blow of winter sent the egg-laden sooks rushing toward Virginia and the Jimmies deep under the Chesapeake mud. My father took a few days off to shoot duck, and then put the culling board back on the Portia Sue and headed out for oysters. One week in school that fall had been enough for me and one week alone on the oyster beds was enough for him. We hardly discussed it. I just got up at two Monday morning, dressed as warmly as I could with a change of clothes in a gunny-sack. We ate breakfast together, my mother serving us. No one said anything about my not being a man—maybe they’d forgotten.
I suppose if I were to try to stick a pin through that most elusive spot “the happiest days of my life,” that strange winter on the Portia Sue with my father would have to be indicated. I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part of it was the discoveries—who would have believed that my father sang while tonging? My quiet, unassuming father, whose voice could hardly be heard in church, stood there in his oilskins, his rubber-gloved hands on his tongs, and sang to the oysters. It was a wonderful sound, deep and pure. He knew the Methodist hymnbook by heart. “The crabs now, they don’t crave music, but oysters,” he explained shyly, “there’s nothing they favor more than a purty tune.” And he would serenade the oysters of Chesapeake Bay with the hymns the brothers Wesley had written to bring sinners to repentance and praise. Part of my deep contentment was due, I’m sure, to being with my father, but part, too, was that I was no longer fighting. My sister was gone, my grandmother a fleeting Sunday apparition, and God, if not dead, far removed from my concern.
It was work that did this for me. I had never had work before that sucked from me every breath, every thought, every trace of energy.
“I wish,” said my father one night as we were eating our meager supper in the cabin, “I wish you could do a little studying of a night. You know, keep up your schooling.”
We both glanced automatically at the kerosene lamp, which was more smell than light. “I’d be too tired,” I said.
“I reckon.”
It had been one of our longer conversations. Yet once again I was a member of a good team. We were averaging ten bushels of oysters a day. If it kept up, we’d have a record year. We did not compare ourselves to the skipjacks, the large sailboats with five or six crew members, that raked dredges across the bottom to harvest a heavy load of muck and trash and bottom spat along with oysters each time the mechanical winch cranked up a dredge. We tongers stood perched on the washboards of our tiny boats, and, just as our fathers and grandfathers had before us, used our fir-wood tongs, three or four times taller than our own bodies, to reach down gently to the oyster bed, feel the bottom until we came to a patch of market-sized oysters, and then closing the rakes over the catch, bringing it up to the culling board. Of course, we could not help but bring up some spat, as every oyster clings to its bed until the culling hammer forces a separation, but compared to the dredge, we left the precious bottom virtually undisturbed to provide a bed for the oysters that would be harvested by our children’s children.
At first, I was only a culler, but if we found a rich bed, I’d tong as well, and then when the culling board was loaded, I’d bring in my last tong full hand over hand, dump it on the board, and cull until I’d caught up with my father.
Oysters are not the mysterious creatures that blue crabs are. You can learn about them more quickly. In a few hours, I could measure a three-inch shell with my eyes. Below three inches they have to go back. A live oyster, a good one, when it hits the culling board has a tightly closed shell. You throw away the open ones. They’re dead already. I was a good oyster in those days. Not even the presence at Christmastime of a radiant, grown-up Caroline could get under my shell.
The water began to freeze in late February. I could see my culling like a trail behind us on the quickly forming ice patches. “Them slabs will grow together blessed quick,” my father said. And without further discussion, he turned the boat. We stopped only long enough to sell our scanty harvest to a buy boat along the way and then headed straight for Rass. The temperature was dropping fast. By morning we were frozen in tight.
There followed two weeks of impossible weather. My father made no attempt to take the Portia Sue out. The first day or so I was content simply to sleep away some of the accumulated exhaustion of the winter. But the day soon came when my mother, handing me a ten o’clock cup of coffee, was suggesting mildly that I might want to take in a few days of school since the bad weather was likely to hold out for some time.
Her kindly intended words lay on me like a wet sail. I tried to appear calm, but I was caught and suffocated by the idea of returning to school. Didn’t she realize that I was by now a hundred years older than anyone there, including Miss Hazel? I put my coffee down, sloshing it over the saucer onto the table. Coffee was rationed then and to waste it, inexcusable. I jumped up mumbling an apology to get a rag, but she was quicker and began sponging the brown liquid off the oilcloth before I could move, so I sat down again and let her do it.
“I worry about you, Louise,” she said, mopping carefully and not looking at me. “Your father and I are grateful, indeed. I hardly know what we’d have done without you. But—” She trailed off, reluctant, I suppose, to predict what might become of me if I went on in my present manner of life. I didn’t know whether to seem touched or annoyed. I was certainly irritated. If they were willing to accept the fruits of my life, they should at least spare me the burden of their guilt.
“I don’t want to go back to school,” I said evenly.
“But—”
“You can teach me here. You’re a teacher.”
“But you’re so lonely.”
“I’d be lonelier there. I’ve never belonged at that school.” I was becoming, much to my own displeasure, a bit heated as I spoke. “I hate them and they hate me.” There. I had overstated my case.
They had never cared enough about me one way or the other to hate me. I might have from time to time served as the butt of their laughter, but I had never achieved enough status to earn their hatred.
She straightened up, sighing, and went over to the sink to wash the coffee from her cloth. “I suppose I could,” she said finally. “Teach you, I mean, if Miss Hazel would lend me the books. Captain Wallace might be willing to do the math.”
“Can’t you do that?” Although I was no longer in love with the Captain, I did not wish to be thrown in such close company with him again—just the two of us. There was a residue of pain there.
“No,” she said. “If you want to be taught at home, I’d have to ask someone else to do the math. There is no one else with the—with the time.” She was always very careful not to seem to sneer at the rest of the islanders for their lack of education.
I’m not sure how my mother persuaded Miss Hazel to go along with the arrangement. The woman was very jealous of her position as the one high school teacher on Rass. Perhaps my mother argued that my irregular attendance would be disruptive, I don’t know, but she came home with the books, and we began our kitchen-table school.
As for my lessons with the Captain, my mother, sensitive to the least hint of inappropriate behavior, always went with me. She would sit and knit while we had our very proper lesson, no more poker or jokes, and afterward, she and the Captain would chat across my head. He was always eager for news of Caroline, who was prospering in Baltimore as the Prophet Jeremiah claimed only the wicked do. Her letters were few and hurried but filled with details of her conquests. In turn, the Captain would share news from Call, from whom he heard nearly as often as we heard from Caroline. Between letters there was a lot of “Did I remember to tell you…?” or “Did I read the part about…?” Censorship kept Call from revealing very much about where he was or what was going on, but in what he didn’t say there was enough to make my flesh crawl. The Captain, having been through naval battles before
, seemed to regard the whole thing with more interest than fear.
There were only a few more days of oystering left that winter of ’44. During the end of March and most of April, my father caught and salted alewives for crab bait, overhauled the motor on the Portia Sue, and converted it once more for crabbing. After he had caught and salted his crab bait, he did a little fishing to pass the days and even some house repairs. I crammed in as much schooling at home as possible, because once the crabs were moving, I’d be back on duty at the floats and in the crab house.
My mother heard the report of D day on our ancient radio and walked up to the crab house to tell me. She seemed more excited than I, to whom it signified only more war and killing. Besides, it was not the European war that concerned me.
16
Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in the fall of 1944 without the help of Rass, which went solidly Republican as usual. And yet, when he died the following April, we shared the shock of the nation. As I heard the news, I remembered instantly the day the war had begun, Caroline and I standing hand in hand before the radio. The chill that went through me was the same coldness of that winter day in 1941 when Caroline and I had begun to grow up.
Some days after Roosevelt’s death, I received the only letter I had ever gotten from Call. I was surprised to see how my hands trembled opening it, so much that I was obliged to turn my back on my mother and grandmother in the living room and go to the kitchen. It was very brief.
Dear Wheeze,
What do you think St. Peter said to Franklin D. Roosevelt? Get it?
Call
I got it, but as was usually the case with Call’s jokes, I didn’t find it the least bit funny.
On April 30, the day that Hitler committed suicide, I was permitted to take the exams for graduation. I passed, much to my satisfaction, with the highest grades recorded from Rass. Not that Miss Hazel told my mother this. It was the mainland school supervisor who had graded the exams who took time to write me a note of congratulations.
When the war in Europe ended eight days later, it was overshadowed by the news from Baltimore that Caroline had been accepted by the Juilliard School of Music in New York on a full scholarship.
I looked upon this announcement with enormous relief as the end of any sacrifice I would ever be asked to make for Caroline. My parents hoped it meant that she could take a rest and come home for the summer, but she wrote at the last minute to say that she had been offered a chance to go to summer school at Peabody—an opportunity her voice teacher felt she must not pass up. I’m sure my parents were disappointed, but I was not. The war was coming quickly to a close. Soon, I felt sure, Call would be back.
Exactly what Call’s return would mean to me, I could not say. I had not despised my life of the past two years, but I began to realize that it had been a time of hibernation, for I felt stirrings I had almost forgotten. Perhaps when Call came home—perhaps—well, at the very least when he came I could turn over my tasks to him. My father would be overjoyed to have a man to help him. And I—what was it I wanted? I could leave the island, if I wished. I could see the mountains. I could even take a job in Washington or Baltimore if I wanted to. If I chose to leave—there was something cold about the idea, but I shook it away.
I began to cream my hands each night, sloshing lotion all over them and sleeping in a pair of my mother’s worn white cotton gloves—perhaps the pair she was married in. Is that possible? It was stupid, I decided, to resign myself to being another Auntie Braxton. I was young and able, as my exams had proved. Without God, or a man, I could still conquer a small corner of the world—if I wanted to.
My hands stubbornly refused to be softened. But I was determined not to give up on them this time.
Something was happening inside of Grandma, too. Suddenly that summer she decided that my mother was the woman who had stolen her husband. One afternoon I came in for supper from the crab house to find Momma trying to bake bread. I say trying, because it was a sweltering August day, which was hard enough to fight on the island, but as Momma worked, her face shining with sweat, her hair plastered against her head, Grandma was reading aloud to her, in a voice that could be heard from the street, the section in Proverbs chapter six entitled, “The mischiefs of whoredom.”
“‘Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?’” my grandmother was crying out as I came into the back door. We were used to Grandma reading the Bible to us, but the selections were not usually quite so purple. I didn’t even understand what it was all about until Grandma, seeing that I had come in, said, “Tell that viperish adulteress to listen to God’s Word!” And proceeded to read on into chapter seven, which details the seduction of a young man by a “strange woman.”
I looked down at my poor mother, struggling to pull several loaves of bread out of the oven. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Susan Bradshaw as a scarlet woman? It’s a joke, get it? I began banging pots and pans, more to cover my giggles than to help with supper.
I looked up to see my father in the front doorway. He seemed to be waiting there, taking in the scene, before he determined what his part should be.
Grandma had not seen him. She stumbled on through the passage. “‘He goeth after her straightway, as an ox to the slaughter…’”
Without even removing his boots, my father walked straight across the living room to the kitchen and, pretending not to care who watched, kissed my mother on her neck where a tendril of hair had pulled loose from her bun. I blushed despite myself, but he didn’t seem to notice me. He whispered something into her ear. She gave a wry grin.
“‘Till a dart strike through his liver…’”
“Liver?” My father mouthed the word in mock horror. Then he turned to Grandma, all teasing dropped. “Mother. I think your supper is on the table.”
She seemed a little startled by his voice, but she came to the table determined to finish the terrible passage, yet not willing to miss her supper to do so. “‘Her house is the way to hell—’” My father took the Bible gently from her hands and put it on a bookshelf above her head.
She twisted away from him like a startled child, but he took her arm and led her to the table and held her chair for her. The gesture seemed to satisfy her. She directed a triumphant look at my mother and then set herself with great energy to her food.
My father smiled across the table at my mother. She pushed her wet hair off her face and smiled back. I turned away from the sight. Don’t look at each other like that. Grandma might see you. But was it only the fear of Grandma’s foolish jealousies that made me want to weep?
It was, ironically, the news of Hiroshima that made our lives easier. My grandmother, catching somehow the ultimate terror that the bomb promised, turned from adultery to Armageddon. We were all admonished to fight the whore of Babylon, who was somehow identified in Grandma’s mind with the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, and repeatedly warned to prepare to meet our God. A rapid scurrying through her well-worn Bible and she had located several passages to shake over our heads—telling us of the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood. How could she know that the Day of the Lord’s Anger was an almost welcome relief from her accusations of lust and adultery? There never had been any Catholics on Rass, and the end of all things was, after all, almost unimaginable, and therefore had far less power to shake one’s core.
We did not take a holiday when peace was declared. There were still crabs moving in the Bay and peeling in the floats. But we ate our supper with a special delight. Toward the end of the meal, my father, turning to me as though peace had brought with it some great change to our meager fortunes, said, “Well, Louise, what will you do now?”
“Do?” Was he trying to get rid of me?
“Yes,” he said. “You’re a young woman now. I can’t keep you on as a hand much longer.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I like the water.”
“I mind,” he said quietly. “But I’m grateful to ha
ve had you with me.”
“When Call comes back,” my mother said as my heart fluttered at the words, “when Call comes back he could lend a hand and you could take a trip. Wouldn’t you like that?”
A trip. I’d never been farther than Salisbury.
“You might go to New York and see Caroline.” She was getting excited for me.
“Maybe,” I said. I wouldn’t hurt her by saying that I had no desire to see either New York or my sister. There was that old dream of mountains. Maybe I would go far enough to see a mountain.
At the tail end of the crab season Call came home. I was still at the crab house, but bored with lack of crabs to watch and pack, when suddenly the light from the doorway was blocked. The body of a large man in uniform was filling the door. There was a bass laugh that sounded vaguely familiar and a voice. “Crabby as ever, I see,” it said. And then, “Get it?”
“Call!” I jumped, nearly tripping over a stack of packing boxes. He was holding out both his arms, inviting an embrace, but I was suddenly shy. “Oh, my blessed, Call. You done growed up,” I said to cover my confusion.
“That’s what the navy promised,” he said.
I was aware of his clean, masculine smell and at the same time of the smell of salt water and crab, which was my only perfume. I wiped my hands on my pants. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.
He glanced around. “Can you leave?”
“Mercy, yes,” I said. “I don’t get more’n a boxful every couple hours.”
We walked the board planking to where the skiff was tied. He handed me down into the bow as if I were a lady. Then he jumped into the stern and took up the pole. He stood there in his petty officer’s uniform, tall and almost shockingly broad-shouldered and thin-hipped, his cap pushed slightly back, the sun lighting on the patch of reddish hair that showed. His eyes were bright blue and smiling down at me, and his nose had mysteriously shrunk to fit his face. I realized that I was staring at him and that he was enjoying it. I looked away, embarrassed.