If Call’s family was as poor as my grandmother said they were, I could never figure out how Call got so fat. As a matter of fact, both his mother and grandmother were fat. I thought that if you were poor you were skinny. But the evidence seemed to contradict this. And Call had other problems with running besides his weight. Like all of us, his shoes came from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. To order shoes from a catalog, you stood on a piece of brown wrapping paper, and your mother drew a pencil line around both your feet. These outlines were sent to the mail-order house, and they sent you shoes to fit the brown wrapping-paper feet. But the brown paper outlines didn’t tell the mail-order house how fat your feet were on the top. For that reason, poor Call never had a pair of shoes that would lace properly. The tops of his feet were so fat that once he got his shoes laced up, there was nothing left to make a proper bow. So when he ran, his shoes often came unlaced and flapped up and down on his heels.
It was low tide, so I left the path and began making my way through the marsh. My plan was to give the old Wallace house a wide berth and come up on it from the south side. The old man would never expect people from that direction.
“Wait!” Call cried out. “I lost my shoe.”
I went back to where Call was standing on one leg like an overweight egret. “My shoe got stuck,” he said.
I pulled his shoe out of the mud for him and tried to clean it off on the cordgrass.
“My grandma will beat me,” he said. It was hard for me to imagine Call’s tubby little grandmother taking a switch to a large fifteen-year-old boy, but I held my peace. I had a greater problem than that. What would Franklin D. Roosevelt say about a spy who lost his shoe in the salt marsh and worried aloud that his grandma would beat him? I sighed and handed Call the shoe. He put it on and limped back to the path.
“Sit down,” I commanded.
“On the ground?”
“Yes, on the ground.” What did he expect, an easy chair? Then I cleaned his shoes and mine as best I could with my handkerchief. My mother had trouble persuading me to carry one because I was a lady, but I now realized that a handkerchief was an invaluable tool for a counterspy—to erase fingerprints, and so forth. “Now,” I said, “I’m going to fix your shoestrings.” I unlaced his strings and started again, skipping the second and fourth holes. This way I could make the lace long enough to provide a decent bow.
“There,” I said, tying them for him as though he were a little child.
“You left out four holes.”
“Call. I did it on purpose. So they wouldn’t come loose all the time.”
“They look dumb.”
“Not as dumb as you’d look in your sockfeet.”
He pretended to ignore this and stared at his shoelaces, as though trying to decide whether to retie them or to leave them be.
“Why don’t you think of it as a secret signal?”
“A what?”
“Counterspies have to have ways of identifying themselves to other counterspies. Like secret code words. Or wearing a special kind of flower. Or—tying their shoes a certain way.”
“You can’t make me believe that spies tie their shoestrings funny.”
“Just ask Franklin D. Roosevelt when we meet him.”
“That’s one of your jokes.”
“Oh, come on. You can tie them again later, after the mission.”
He had his mouth set to argue, but I didn’t wait for a retort. Good heavens. The war would be over and he’d still be sitting there fussing about his shoestrings. “Follow me and keep low.”
The cordgrass was about two feet high. There was no way, short of crawling through the mud on our bellies, that we could approach the Wallace house unseen. But there is a way of feeling invisible that makes one almost believe it’s true. At any rate, I felt invisible, creeping bent over toward that great gray clapboard house. My heart was beating as fast and noisily as the motor of the Portia Sue.
There was no sound of life from the house. Earlier I had heard sawing and pounding. Now everything was quiet except the gentle lapping of the water on the nearby shore and the occasional cry of a water bird.
I signaled for Call to follow me to the southwest corner of the house, and then, keeping close to the side, we slipped silently to the first window facing south. Carefully, I raised my head until my eyes could peer over the sill into the room. It was evidently the room that the old man had chosen for his workshop. Weather-beaten chairs, their cane bottoms sagging and broken, were arranged to serve as sawhorses. The floor was covered with wood curls and sawdust. The sounds I had heard from across the marsh came from here, but the old man was no longer in the room. I gestured Call to stay down, that there was nothing to see, but of course he stuck his head up and peered in, just as I had done.
“No one there,” he said in what he mistook for a whisper.
“Shhhhh!” I waved my hand in a violent “get down,” but he was in no hurry. He gazed into the room as though it were full of great art rather than pine boards and wood curls.
I gave up trying to signal him and crept ahead to the next window. Slowly, very slowly, bracing my hand against the side of the house for support, I raised my head to the level of the window—straight into a great staring glass eye. I must have screamed. At least I did something to make Call begin to run as fast as he could around the house and in the direction of the path. I didn’t run—not because I wasn’t terrified, not because I wouldn’t have liked to run, but because my feet had lost all power of movement.
The glass eye raised itself slowly from my face and a human voice said, “There you are. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
I tossed my head, trying vainly to imitate the counterspy of my imagination, hoping that a clever, careless remark would float effortlessly from my lips, but my mouth was dry as sawdust and no remark, careless or otherwise, was about to emerge.
“Would you like to come in?”
I turned frantically to find Call and located him a hundred feet away on the path toward the village. He had stopped running. I felt a surge of gratitude for him. He hadn’t deserted, not really.
“Your friend, too,” the old man said, putting his periscope down on a table and smiling warmly through his white beard.
I licked my mouth, but my tongue was almost as dry as my lips. Franklin D. Roosevelt was hanging the Congressional Medal of Honor around my neck, saying, “Without regard for her personal safety, she entered the very stronghold of the foe.”
“Ca-all.” My voice cracked wide open on the word. “Ca-all.”
He started back in a sort of zombielike walk. I could feel the presence of the man in the window above me. Call came up and stood right behind me, his breath coming from his open mouth in noisy pants. We were both fixed on the form above us.
“Won’t you come in and have a cup of tea, or something?” the man said invitingly. “I haven’t had any visitors since I got here except for an old tomcat.”
I could feel Call stiffen like a dead fish.
“He acted like the place belonged to him. I had a time convincing him otherwise.”
Call butted me in the back with his stomach. I butted him back with my behind. Good heavens. Here we were on the very trail of a spy and Call was going to get upset by a ghost—a made-up ghost, one I had made up. Annoyance drove out panic.
“Thank you,” I said. My voice was a little too loud and there was a distinct quaver in it, so I tried again. “Thanks. We’d like tea, wouldn’t we?”
“My grandma don’t allow me to drink tea.”
“The boy will have milk,” I said grandly and flounced around to the front door. Call followed at my heels. By the time we got around the house, the man was there, holding the door open for us. Without regard for her personal safety…
There was very little to sit on inside the house. The man pulled a rough plank bench around for Call and me, and after he’d put a kettle on a two-burner propane stove and puttered about his kitchen a bit, he came in and sat down on a homemade st
ool.
“Now. You are—”
I was still in the process of deciding whether or not counterspies gave their actual names in a situation like this when Call spoke up. “I’m Call and she’s Wheeze.”
The man began unaccountably to laugh. “Wheeze and Call,” he said gleefully. “It sounds like a vaudeville act.”
How rude—to sit there laughing at our names.
“It would be better if it was Wheeze and Cough. Still, Wheeze and Call is pretty good.”
I sat up very straight on the bench. To my utter amazement, not to say disgust, I realized that Call was giggling. I gave him a look.
“It’s a joke, Wheeze.”
“How can it be a joke?” I asked. I almost said “It’s not funny,” but I stopped myself in time. Fortunately, the kettle whistled, and the man got up to make the tea. I gave Call a glare that should have stopped the tide, but he kept on laughing. I’d never heard him laugh in my life and here he was shrieking like a gull over garbage about something that was just plain insulting.
The man handed me a mug of very black tea. “I’ve only got tinned milk,” he said to Call while returning to the kitchen.
“That’s okay,” Call said, wiping the tears off his face with the back of his wrist. “Wheeze and Cough,” he repeated to me. “Don’t you get it?”
“Of course I get it.” I was trying to figure out how I was going to get down the black stuff I had been handed. “I just don’t think it’s funny.”
The man came back from the kitchen carrying a mug. “Not funny, eh? Oh, well, I’m out of practice.” He handed the mug to Call. “It’s half tinned milk and half water.”
Call tasted it. “Good,” he said.
I waited for him to offer me something to put in my tea, but he didn’t. He just got himself a mug of the black brew and sat down.
“My real name is Sara Louise Bradshaw,” I said, forgetting that minutes ago I had decided against revealing my true name.
“That’s a very nice name,” he said politely.
“My real name is McCall Purnell, but everybody calls me Call.”
“I see,” he said slyly. “If I want you, I just call Call.”
“Call Call!” cried Call, as though it was the most original idea as well as the funniest thing he had ever heard. “Call Call! Did you get that, Wheeze? It’s a joke.”
Good heavens. “I don’t suppose,” I said, loading my voice with significance, “I don’t suppose that you would tell us your name.”
The man feigned surprise. “I thought everyone on this island knew my name.”
Both Call and I leaned forward, waiting for him to say more, but he didn’t. I was puzzling it out, whether to press him further or to play it casually, when Call blurted out, “You don’t seem like neither spy.”
The old man raised an eyebrow at me. I’m sure I turned the color of steamed crab. How do counterspies keep from blushing? He stared at me unmercifully for a minute. I was shrinking into the bench. “Why,” he asked accusingly, “why aren’t you drinking your tea?”
“Tin—tin—tin,” I stammered.
“Rin tin tin,” shrieked Call.
The man laughed, too, but at least he got up and brought the tin of milk over to me. My hands were shaking with rage or frustration or exasperation, who knew which, but I managed to fill the mug to the brim with the thick yellowish milk. He waited in front of me until I had sampled the brew. I took a scalding sip. It was too hot to know how it tasted, but I shook my head to indicate that it was fine. Halfway into the mug, I realized I should have asked for sugar, but then it seemed too late.
That was the way most of our early visits to the Captain’s house went. We decided, Call and I, simply to call him “the Captain.” On Rass any waterman who owned his own boat was called Captain So and So after he had passed fifty. I wouldn’t call him Captain Wallace, because he’d never actually claimed the name. I kept going to see him in the fading hope that he’d turn out to be a real spy and I could have a medal after all. Call kept going because the Captain told great jokes, “not like yours, Wheeze, really good ones.”
At any rate, it was Call the Captain liked, not me. If I’d been a more generous person, I’d have been happy that Call had found a man to be close to. He didn’t remember his own father, and if any boy needed a father it was Call. But I was not a generous person. I couldn’t afford to be. Call was my only friend. If I gave him up to the Captain, I’d have no one.
6
It is hard, even now, to describe my relationship to Caroline in those days. We slept in the same room, ate at the same table, sat for nine months out of each year in the same classroom, but none of these had made us close. How could they, when being conceived at the same time in the same womb had done nothing to bind us together? And yet, if we were not close, why did only Caroline have the power, with a single glance, to slice my flesh clear through to the bone?
I would come in from a day of progging for crab, sweating and filthy. Caroline would remark mildly that my fingernails were dirty. How could they be anything else but dirty? But instead of simply acknowledging the fact, I would fly into a wounded rage. How dare she call me dirty? How dare she try to make me feel inferior to her own pure, clear beauty? It wasn’t my fingernails she was concerned with, that I was sure of. She was using my fingernails to indict my soul. Wasn’t she content to be golden perfection without cutting away at me? Was she to allow me no virtue—no shard of pride or decency?
By now I was screaming. Wasn’t it I who brought in the extra money that paid for her trips to Salisbury? She ought to be on her knees thanking me for all I did for her. How dare she criticize? How dare she?
Her eyes would widen. Even as I yelled, I could feel a tiny rivulet of satisfaction invading the flood of my anger. She knew I was right, and it unsettled her. But the lovely eyes would quickly narrow, the lips set. Without a word, she would turn and leave me before I was through, shutting off my torrent, so that my feelings, thus dammed, raged on in my chest. She would not fight with me. Perhaps that was the thing that made me hate her most.
Hate. That was the forbidden word. I hated my sister. I, who belonged to a religion which taught that simply to be angry with another made one liable to the judgment of God and that to hate was the equivalent of murder.
I often dreamed that Caroline was dead. Sometimes I would get word of her death—the ferry had sunk with her and my mother aboard, or more often the taxi had crashed and her lovely body had been consumed in the flames. Always there were two feelings in the dream—a wild exultation that now I was free of her and…terrible guilt. I once dreamed that I had killed her with my own hands. I had taken the heavy oak pole with which I guided my skiff. She had come to the shore, begging for a ride. In reply I had raised the pole and beat, beat, beat. In the dream her mouth made the shape of screaming, but no sound came out. The only sound of the dream was my own laughter. I woke up laughing, a strange shuddering kind of laugh that turned at once into sobs.
“What’s the matter, Wheeze?” I had awakened her.
“I had a bad dream,” I said. “I dreamed you were dead.”
She was too sleepy to be troubled. “It was only a dream,” she said, turning her face once more to the wall and snuggling deep under her covers.
But it was I who killed you! I wanted to scream it out, whether to confess or frighten, I don’t know. I beat you with my pole. I’m a murderer. Like Cain. But she was breathing quietly, no longer bothered by my dream or by me.
Sometimes I would rage at God, at his monstrous almighty injustice. But my raging always turned to remorse. My wickedness was unforgivable, yet I begged the Lord to have mercy on me, a sinner. Hadn’t God forgiven David who had not only committed murder, but adultery as well? And then I would remember that David was one of God’s pets. God always found a way to let his pets get by with murder. How about Moses? How about Paul, holding the coats while Stephen was stoned?
I would search the Scriptures, but not for enlighten
ment or instruction. I was looking for some tiny shred of evidence that I was not to be eternally damned for hating my sister. Repent and be saved! But as fast as I would repent, resolving never again to hate, some demon would slip into my soul, tug at the corner, and whisper, “See the look on your mother’s face as she listens to Caroline practice? Has she ever looked at you that way?” And I would know she hadn’t.
Only on the water was there peace. When school let out in the middle of May, I began getting up long before dawn to go crabbing. Call went along, somewhat grudgingly, because I was unwilling to explain my great zeal for work. I had formulated a plan for escape. I was going to double my crab catch and keep half the money for myself, turning over to my mother the usual amount. My half I would save until I had enough to send myself to boarding school in Crisfield. On Smith Island to the south of us there was no high school, not even the pretense of one that we had on Rass. The state, therefore, sent any Smith Islanders who continued school after the elementary level to a boarding school in Crisfield. The prices were not out of sight. Too high, it was true, for an island family without state aid to contemplate, but low enough for me to dream and work toward. It seemed to me that if I could get off the island, I would be free from hate and guilt and damnation, even, perhaps, from God himself.
I was too clever to pin all my hopes on crabs. Crabs are fickle creatures. They always know when you need them too much and pick precisely that season to make themselves scarce. I must give the impression, therefore, despite my early risings, that I didn’t much care how lucky we were. When we were on the water, poling through the eelgrass, I took pains to say at just about dawn, “This is the nicest time of day, isn’t it, Call? Who cares if the crabs are here or not? Let’s just relax and enjoy ourselves.”