Heads shook knowingly. “You can’t be too careful ’bout the earache.”
“Surely cannot. Remember, Lettice, when little Buddy Rankin come down with that bad ear? Martha thought nothing of it, and the next thing she knowed he got this raging fever. A pure miracle of the Lord the child didn’t go deaf, they said.”
Little Buddy Rankin was a seasoned waterman with two children of his own. I wondered idly what fixed memory they would have of me in twenty or thirty years.
Captain Billy’s son Otis emerged from the unpainted crab shipping shed. That meant the boat was coming in. He walked to the end of the pier ready to catch the line. Those of us waiting moved out of the lee of the building to watch the ferry chug in. It was small and, even before it was close enough to reveal its peeling paint, seemed to sag in the water. Grandma was right. It was an old boat, a tired boat. My father’s boat was far from new. It had belonged to another waterman before he bought it, but it was still lively and robust, like a man who’s spent his life on the water. Captain Billy’s ferry, though much larger, drooped like an old waiting woman. I buttoned my jacket against the wind and concentrated on Captain Billy’s sons Edgar and Richard who had jumped ashore and were helping Otis tie up the ferry with graceful, practiced steps.
My father had walked up. He smiled at me and touched my arm in greeting. For a happy moment, I thought he’d spied me from his boat and had come on purpose to say hello. And then I saw his gaze turn toward the hatch of the under deck passenger cabin. It was Momma he had come to meet and Caroline, of course. Hers was the first head out of the opening, wrapped against the wind in a sky blue scarf. Just enough of her hair had escaped to make her look fresh and full like a girl in a cigarette ad.
“Hey, Daddy!” she called out as she came. “Daddy’s here, Momma,” she said back over her shoulder toward the cabin. Our mother’s head appeared. She was having more trouble on the ladder than Caroline, for, in addition to a large purse, she was trying to negotiate a huge shopping bag.
Caroline, meantime, had skipped quickly around the narrow deck and jumped lightly to the dock. She kissed our father on his cheek, a gesture that never failed to embarrass me. Caroline was the only person I knew who kissed in public. It was simply not done on our island. At least she wouldn’t try to kiss me. I was sure of that. She nodded, grinning. “Wheeze,” she said. I nodded back without the smile. Daddy met Momma halfway round the deck and took the shopping bag. No unnecessary touching, but they were smiling and talking when they got off the boat.
“Oh, Louise. Thank you for bringing the wagon. There’re still more groceries in the hold.”
I smiled, proud of my thoughtfulness, conveniently forgetting it was Grandma who had sent me down to the dock.
Two other island women emerged from the cabin door, and then, to my surprise, a man. Men usually rode up top on the bridge with Captain Billy. But this was an old man, one whom I had never seen before. He had the strong stocky build of a waterman. His hair, under a seaman’s cap, was white and thick and hung almost halfway down his neck. He had a full mustache and beard, both white, and was wearing a heavy winter overcoat, despite the fact that it was April. And he was carrying what I imagined one might call a “valise.” It must have been heavy because he put it down on the dock as he waited quietly with the rest of us for Captain Billy’s sons to hand up the luggage and groceries from the hold.
Momma pointed out her two boxes, which my father and I loaded precariously onto the wagon. They were too large to fit into the bed of the wagon, so we perched them slantwise, tilting down into the middle. I knew I would have to go slowly, for if I hit a bump, there were likely to be groceries all over the narrow street.
All the time I was watching the stranger out of the corner of my eye. Two more ancient bags and a small trunk were brought up and put beside him. By now everyone was staring. No one would have so much baggage unless he planned to stay for quite some time.
“Somebody meeting you?” Richard asked, not unkindly.
The old man shook his head, staring down at the luggage piled around him. He looked a little like a lost child.
“Got a place to stay?” the young man asked.
“Yes.” He lifted his overcoat collar up as though to protect himself from the cold island wind and jerked his hat down almost to his bushy eyebrows.
By now the crowd upon the dock was positively leaning in his direction. The island held few secrets or surprises beyond the weather. But here was a perfectly strange man. Where had he come from, and where was he planning to stay?
I felt my mother’s elbow. “Come along,” she said quietly, nodding a good-bye at my father. “Grandma will be worrying.”
I had seldom felt so exasperated—to have to go home in the middle of this unfolding drama. But both Caroline and I obeyed, leaving the little scene on the dock behind, making our slow progress up the narrow oyster-shell street between the picket fences that enclosed each house. The street was only wide enough for four people to walk abreast. The crushed oyster shells underfoot rattled the wagon so that I could feel the vibrations in my teeth.
There was such a scarcity of high land on Rass that for generations we had buried our dead in our front yards. So to walk down the main street was to walk between the graves of our ancestors. As a child I thought nothing of it, but when I became an adolescent, I began to read the verses on the tombstones with a certain pleasant melancholy.
Mother, are you gone forever
To a land so bright and fair?
While your children weep unstopping
Can you hear us? Do you care?
Most of them were more bravely Methodist in flavor.
God will keep you little angel
Till we greet you by and by,
For a moment is our sorrow
Joy forever in the sky.
My favorite was for a young man who had died more than a hundred years before, but to whom I had attached more than one of my romantic fantasies.
Oh, how bravely did you leave us
Sailing for a foreign shore
How our hearts did break within us
At the thought of Nevermore.
He had been only nineteen. I fancied that I would have married him, had he lived.
I needed to concentrate on the groceries. Momma still had the large shopping bag. Caroline could hardly bear to go as slowly as the two of us had to, so she tended to skip on ahead and then come back to share some of the details of her trip to the mainland. It was one of these times when she was walking toward us that she suddenly lowered her voice.
“There he is. There’s that man from the ferry.”
I looked back over my shoulder, being careful to keep my free hand on the grocery boxes.
“Don’t be rude,” Momma said.
Caroline leaned toward me. “Edgar is pulling all his stuff in a cart.”
“Hush,” Momma warned. “Turn around.”
Caroline was slow to obey. “Who is he, Momma?”
“Shh. I don’t know.”
Despite his age the man was walking remarkably fast. We couldn’t hurry because of the wagon, so he soon overtook us and walked purposefully down the street ahead as though he knew exactly where he was going. There was no longer any sense of a lost child in his manner. The Roberts’ house was the last one on the street, but he walked right past it, to where the oyster-shell street gave way to the dirt path across the southern marsh.
“Where’s he think he’s going?” Caroline asked.
The only thing farther along the path besides the marsh itself was one long-abandoned house.
“I wonder—” Momma began, but we were turning in at our own gate, and she didn’t finish the sentence.
5
The stranger from the ferry offered no explanation for his presence on the island. Gradually, the people of Rass built one from ancient memory lavishly cemented with rumor. The man had gone to the Wallace place, which had been deserted for twenty years since the death of old Captain
Wallace six months after his wife. He had found it without asking anyone the way and had moved in and begun to put it into repair as though he belonged there.
“He’s Hiram Wallace,” Grandma had announced—everyone over fifty had come to the same conclusion. “The old ones thought he was dead. But here he is. Too late to bring them neither comfort.”
Bit by bit, straining my short patience to its utmost limit, the story of Hiram Wallace emerged. Call’s grandmother told him that when she was a child, there had been a young waterman by that name, the only child of Captain Charles Wesley Wallace. It was back in the days when nearly every boat on the Bay was under sail, before hard blue crabs brought in much money. Captain Wallace and his son tonged for oysters in the winter, and in the summer they netted fish, chiefly menhaden and rockfish. That they had made a tidy profit was evidenced by the size of their house, which stood apart from the rest of the village. As my grandmother remembered it, their land had been large enough in those days for real grass to grow in a pasture, enough to support one of the few cows in the island’s history.
What was left of the land was now all marsh, but the house, though neglected, had survived. We children had always regarded it as haunted. There were tales that Captain Wallace’s ghost appeared to chase off intruders. It took me years to figure out that the purpose of the ghost story was to keep young courting couples from wandering down the path to the old Wallace place and taking advantage of the privacy.
One day I had talked Call into exploring the house with me, but just as we stepped onto the porch, a huge orange-colored tomcat came shrieking out a broken window at us. It was the only time in our lives that Call outran me. We sat gasping for breath on my front stoop. One part of my mind was saying that it had only been one of Auntie Braxton’s cats. She was said to keep sixteen, and anyone who had ever been as close as her front door would have sworn by the smell that there were at least that many and more. The other part of my mind was reluctant to let it go as simply as that.
“Have you ever heard,” I asked, “have you ever heard that ghosts will take an animal form when they are angry?” Now that my breath was back I let my voice glide out in a dreamy way.
Call jerked around to look me in the face. “No!” he said.
“I was reading this book,” I began to improvise (of course, I’d never seen any such book). “In this book, this scientist investigated places where ghosts were supposed to be. He started out saying that there was no such thing as ghosts, but being a scientist he had to admit finally that he couldn’t explain certain things any other way.”
“What things?”
“Oh—” I thought fast while drawing out the syllable. “Oh—certain furry beasts that took on the personality of a dead person.”
Call was clearly shaken. “What do you mean?”
“Well, for instance, suppose old Captain Wallace when he was alive didn’t want any visitors.”
“He didn’t.” Call said darkly. “My grandma told me. After Hiram left, they lived all by themselves. Never spoke to nobody hardly.”
“See?”
“See what?”
“We were fixing to visit him without an invitation,” I whispered. “He was yelling at us and chasing us away.”
Call’s eyes were the size of clam shells. “You’re making that up,” he said. But I could tell that he believed every word of it.
“Only one way to be sure,” I said.
“How you mean?”
I leaned close and whispered again. “Go back and see what happens.”
He jumped to his feet. “Suppertime!” He started out the yard.
I had done my work too well. I was never able to persuade Call to return to that old empty house with me, and somehow, I was never quite able to go there alone.
Now that the strange old man was there, the house was no longer empty, and the whole island was trying to unravel the mystery. All the old people agreed that Hiram Wallace was, in his youth, the hope of every island maiden’s heart, but that he had left Rass with his father’s money and blessing to go to college. It was an unusual enough occurrence that even someone from our island who had gone to college fifty years ago was remembered for it. People also recalled, though this point was discussed at considerable length, that he had returned home without a degree, and that he had, in some undefinable way, changed. He had never been too sociable before he left, but he was positively silent when he returned. This only made the hearts of the young girls beat the harder, and no one had suspected that anything was wrong with him until the day of the storm.
The Bay is famous for its sudden summer storms. Before they can read their school primers, watermen learn how to read the sky and to head for the safety of a cove at the first glimmer of trouble. But the Bay is wide, and sometimes safety is too far away. In the old days, the watermen would lower their sails and use them as tents to protect themselves from the rain.
This is the story that the old people told: Captain Wallace and his son, Hiram, had let down their sails and were waiting out the storm. The lightning was so bright and near that it seemed to flash through the heavy canvas of the sail, the roaring and cracking enough to wake the dead sleeping in the depths of the water. Now, a man who is not afraid at a time like this is a man without enough sense to follow the water. But to fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another. This, Call’s grandmother said, was what Hiram Wallace had done: terrified that the lightning would strike the tall mast of his father’s skipjack, he had rushed out from under his sail cover, taken an ax, and chopped the mast to the level of the deck. After the storm passed, they were sighted drifting mastless on the Bay and were towed home by an obliging neighbor. When it became apparent that the mast had been chopped down, rather than felled by lightning, Hiram Wallace became the butt of all the watermen’s jokes. Not long after, he left the island for good….
Unless, of course, the strong old man rebuilding the Wallace house was the handsome young coward who had left nearly fifty years before. He never said he was, but then again, he never said he wasn’t. Some of the islanders thought a delegation should be sent to ask the old man straight out who he was, for if he was not Hiram Wallace, what right did he have taking over the Wallace property? The delegation was never sent. April was nearly over. The one slow month of the watermen’s year was coming to an end. There was a flurry of overhauling and painting and mending to be done. Crabs were moving and the men had to be ready to go after them.
“I bet he isn’t Hiram Wallace,” I said to Call one day in early May.
“Why not?”
“Why would a man come to Rass in the middle of a war?”
“Because he’s old and has nowhere else to go.”
“Oh, Call. Think. Why would a person come to the Bay right now of all times?”
“Because he’s old—”
“The Bay is full of warships from Norfolk.”
“So? What does that have to do with Hiram Wallace?”
“Nothing. That’s just it, dummy. Who would want to know about warships?”
“The navy.”
“Call. Don’t you get it?”
“There’s nothing to get.”
“Warships, Call. What better place to spy on warships than from a lonely house right by the water?”
“You read too much.”
“I suppose if someone was to catch a spy they’d take him to the White House and pin medals on him.”
“I never heard of kids catching spies.”
“That’s just it. If two kids were to catch a spy—”
“Wheeze. It’s Hiram Wallace. My grandma knows.”
“She thinks he’s Hiram Wallace. That’s what he wants everyone to think. So they won’t suspect him.”
“Suspect him of what?”
I sighed. It was obvious that he had a long way to go before he was much of a counterspy, while I was putting myself to sleep at night performing incredible feats of daring on behalf of my embattled
country. The amount of medals Franklin D. Roosevelt had either hung around my neck or pinned to my front would have supplied the army with enough metal for a tank. There was a final touch with which I closed the award ceremony.
“Here, Mr. President,” I would say, handing back the medal, “use this for our boys at the front.”
“But, Sara Louise Bradshaw—” Franklin D. Roosevelt for all his faults never failed to call me by my full name. “But, Sara Louise Bradshaw, this medal is yours. You have earned it with your great cunning and bravery. Keep it and hand it down to your children’s children.”
I would smile, a slightly ironic little smile. “Do you think, Mr. President, with the life I lead, that I will live long enough to have children?” That question never failed to reduce Franklin D. Roosevelt to silence touched with awe.
In my dreams I always went in alone, but in real life it seemed selfish. Besides, I was used to doing things with Call.
“Okay, Call. First we got to work out a plan.”
“A plan for what?”
“To catch this kraut in the very act of spying.”
“You’re not going to catch him spying.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not a spy.”
What can you do with a man who has no faith? “All right. Who is he then? Just answer me that.”
“Hiram Wallace.”
“Good heavens.”
“You’re cussing again. My grandma—”
“I am not cussing. Cussing is like ‘God’ and ‘hell’ and ‘damn.’”
“See!”
“Call. How about pretending? Just for fun, pretend the guy is a spy, and we’ve got to get the proof.”
He looked uncertain. “Like one of your jokes?”
“Yes. No.” Sometimes Call could be perfectly sensible and at other times you could have gotten more sense out of a six-year-old. “It’s like a game, Call.” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “Come on.” I started running for the path through the salt meadow marsh with Call puffing behind me.