“Wheeze. What happened?” Caroline jumped up from the piano at the sight of me, hair streaming, clothes dripping all over the floor. I stomped past her and my mother, who had come to the kitchen door, up the stairs to our bedroom and slammed the door. I didn’t want to see anyone, but of all people in the world, Caroline was the last one I wanted to talk to. I still smelled of sardines, for goodness’ sake.
She opened the door a crack and slid through, leaning on it to shut it gently behind her. There was no way, now, to get down to the kitchen and wash.
“Can’t you see I’m dressing?” I turned my back to the door.
“Want me to get you a towel?”
“Don’t bother.”
She slid out the door and came back carrying a towel. “You’re a mess,” she said pleasantly.
“Oh, shut up.”
“What happened to you?”
“None of your business.”
She got that hurt look in her great blue eyes that always made me want to smack her. She didn’t say anything, just put the towel down on her bed and climbed up and sat down cross-legged beside it, dropping her shoes neatly to the floor.
“You and Call didn’t go swimming, did you?”
No one was supposed to know that Call and I sometimes went swimming together.
I tried to run my fingers through my wet knotted hair. She slipped off her bed and came over carrying the towel. “Want me to rub your hair?”
My first impulse was to shake her off, but she was trying to be kind. Even I could tell that. And I was feeling so awful that the kindness broke down all my usual defenses. I began to cry.
She got my bathrobe for me, and then she dried my hair with those powerful fingers of hers as gently as she might coax a nocturne from our old piano. So although she never seemed to urge me to talk, I began to do so, until, finally, I was pouring out my anguish, not for the cats, but for myself as murderer. It didn’t matter that I had not actually thrown them into the Bay. I had cleverly lured them to their death. That was enough.
“Poor Wheeze,” she said quietly. “Poor old cats.”
At last I stopped crying, dressed, and combed my hair.
“Where are you going?” she asked. It was none of her business, but she had been too nice for me to say so.
“Auntie Braxton’s,” I said. “We have to get it cleaned up before the Ladies’ Society makes it a missionary project.”
“Can I come?”
“Why would you want to come? It’s a filthy stinking mess.”
She shrugged, blushing a little. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing better to do.”
We borrowed a bucket and mop and a bottle of disinfectant as well as a pile of rags from my mother, whose face was set in a question she did not ask. As we entered Auntie Braxton’s house, I watched Caroline closely. I suppose I wanted to see some sign of weakness. “Smells terrible,” she said cheerfully.
“Yeah,” I said, a bit disappointed that she hadn’t at least gagged.
We had hardly filled the bucket with water when Call and the Captain appeared at the front door. They just stood there, hanging back a little, like a pair of naughty kids.
“Well,” I said. “Back so soon.”
The Captain shook his head sadly. “We couldn’t do it.”
Call looked as though he were about to cry. “They sounded just like little babies,” he said.
I’m sure I should have felt joy and relief. Actually, what I felt was annoyance. I had spent a lot of guilt and grief over the death of those dratted cats. They had no right to be alive. “Well,” I said, the dried salt was making my skin itch and adding to my irritation, “what are you going to do with them, then? We can’t keep them here. You said so yourself.”
Wearily, the Captain sat down in Auntie Braxton’s easy chair right on top of the pile of rags I’d left there. He scrunched around under himself and fished them out. “I don’t know,” he was saying. “I just don’t know.”
“We can give them away.” It was Caroline, taking over the problem just as though someone had asked her to.
“What do you mean, ‘we’?” I was furious at her.
“I—you,” she said. “What I mean is, just give the cats to as many people as will take them—”
“Nobody is going to take these cats,” I said. “They’re wild as bobcats and half-starved to boot. Nobody in their right mind would take a cat like that.”
The Captain sighed his agreement. Call nodded his Methodist preacher nod. “They’re wild as bobcats,” he repeated. Not that any of us had ever seen a bobcat.
“So?” Caroline was undaunted. “We tame them.”
“Tame them?” I snorted. “Why don’t you just teach a crab to play the piano?”
“Not permanently,” she said. “Just long enough to get them new homes.”
“How, Caroline?” Call was definitely interested.
She grinned. “Paregoric,” she said.
Call went to his house to fetch the family bottle, and I went to our house and got ours. Meantime, Caroline had prepared an assortment of sixteen saucers, cups, and bowls, rationing out the cans of tuna fish to each container. She laced each liberally with paregoric. We set them all around the kitchen floor and then brought in the gunnysacks and untied them.
Lured by the smell of food, the cats came staggering out of the bag. At first there was a bit of snarling and shoving, but since there were plenty of dishes for all, each cat eventually found a place for itself and set itself to cleaning away every trace of the drugged feast set before it.
In the end, it was as much Caroline’s charm as the paregoric that worked. She took one cat to each house along the street, leaving Call and me to mind the sacks, slightly out of sight. Nobody on Rass would dare slam a door in Caroline’s face. And no matter how determined the housewife might be against taking in a cat, Caroline’s melodiously sweet voice would remind her that it was no small thing to save a life—a life precious to God if not to man—and then she would hold out a cat who was so doped up with paregoric that it was practically smiling. Some of them even managed a cuddly, kittenish mew. “See,” Caroline would say, “he likes you already.”
When the last cat was placed, we went back to Auntie Braxton’s. The Captain had put chairs on top of tables and was beginning to mop the floor with hot water and disinfectant. Call told him the whole story of Caroline’s feat, house by house, cat by cat. They laughed and imitated the befuddled women at the door. Caroline threw in imitations of the happy, drunken cats while the Captain and Call hooted with delight, and I felt as I always did when someone told the story of my birth.
10
The blow that I had been praying for struck the next week. While not as severe as the storm of ’33, which became a legend before its waters receded, the storm of ’42 is the one I will never forget.
During the war, weather was classified information, but on Rass we didn’t need a city man on a radio to warn us of bad weather. My father, like any true waterman, could smell the storm coming up, even before the ominous rust-colored sunset. He had made his boat fast and boarded up the windows of our house. There was not much he could do about the peelers in our floats, except hope the storm would leave him a few of the floats and spare his crab shanty for one more season.
It is a mysterious thing how cheerful people become in the face of disaster. My father whistled as he boarded up the windows, and my mother from time to time would call to him happily out the back door. She obviously was enjoying the unusual pleasure of having him home on a weekday morning. Tomorrow they might be ruined or dead, today they had each other. And then there are things you can do to prepare for a hurricane. It is not like a thunderstorm on the water or sudden illness before which you are helpless.
Just before noon Call came by and asked if Caroline or I was going down to the Captain’s.
“Sure,” said Caroline cheerfully. “Soon as we finish carrying the canning upstairs.” High water had more than once washed through ou
r downstairs, and my mother didn’t want to take a chance on having the fruits and vegetables she had bought on the mainland and put up for the winter dashed to the floor or swept away. “You coming, Wheeze?”
Who did she think she was, inviting me to go see the Captain? As if she owned both him and Call. Call, who had always belonged to me because nobody else besides his mother and grandmother would have him, and the Captain, who finally through all our troubles and misunderstandings had become mine as well. Now, because of one afternoon of giving away a batch of drugged cats, she thought she could snatch them both for herself. I muttered something angry but unintelligible.
“What’s the matter, Wheeze?” she asked. “Don’t you think we ought to help the Captain get ready for the storm?”
There she was, trying to make me look bad in front of Call. Her voice had its usual sweet tone, and her face was all concern. I wanted to smack it. “Go on down,” I said to Call. “We’ll get there when we can.”
Later the four of us boarded up the Captain’s windows. Call, Caroline, and the Captain were calling back and forth cheerfully while we worked. The Captain didn’t want to move anything to the second floor, and he laughed away my fear that the water might rise higher than his front stoop. We carried our hammers and nails and boards up to Auntie Braxton’s and started on her windows. Before long my father joined us, and with his help, the work was quickly done.
“Want to spend the night at our place, Hiram?” my father asked.
The Captain smiled quickly as though thanking my father for calling him by name. “No,” he said. “But I thank you. Any port in a storm, they say, but I take home port if I got a choice.”
“It’s going to blow mean tonight.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” But the Captain gathered his tools, waved, and headed for home.
I was a sound sleeper in those days and it was my father, not the wind that woke me up.
“Louise.”
“What? What?” I sat up in bed.
“Shh,” he said. “No need to wake your sister.”
“What is it?”
“The wind’s come up right smart. I’m going to go down and take off my motor and sink the boat.”
I knew that to be an extreme measure. “Want me to help?”
“No, there’ll be plenty of men down there.”
“Okay,” I said and turned over to sleep again. He shook me gently. “I think you better go down and get the Captain. Bring him up here in case it gets worse.”
I was fully awake now. My father was worried. I jumped up and pulled on my work overalls over my nightgown. The house was shuddering like Captain Billy’s ferry.
“Is it raining yet?” I asked my father at the front door. The wind was so loud that it was hard to tell.
“Soon,” he said, handing me the largest flashlight. “Better wear your slicker. Now you take care and be quick.”
I nodded. “You, too, Daddy.”
The blow came up faster than even my father had guessed. Every now and then I would grab the paling of one of the picket fences lining the street to steady myself against the wind. It was blowing from the northwest, so making my way southeast toward the Captain’s house, I had the feeling that at any moment the wind might lift me off my feet and deposit me in the Bay. When I reached the last house, where the narrow street turned into a path across the marsh, I went down on my hands and knees, shoved my slicker up out of the way, and crawled. The wind seemed too powerful now to tempt with my upright body.
If our house had been shaking, protected as it was in the middle of the village, imagine the Captain’s, hanging there alone so near the water. The beam of my flashlight caught for a frightening moment the waters of the Bay, which the wind had whipped into a fury. And everyone that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house….
I began to cry out the Captain’s name. How he heard me over the roar of the wind, I don’t know, but he was out on the porch before I reached the house.
“Sara Louise? Where are you?”
I stood up, bracing my body as best I could against the wind. “Hurry!” I yelled. “You got to come to our house.”
He came quickly, put his body in front of mine, and pulled my arms about his waist. He took my flashlight so I could grasp my hands together in front of him. “Hold tight!”
Even with his stocky waterman’s body to break the wind, our journey back up the path was a treacherous one. The rain was coming down now like machine-gun fire, and the water from the marsh began to swirl up around our feet. The Captain cried out something to me, but his voice was lost in the moaning of the wind. Like all the rest of me, my hands were wet. Once they slipped apart. The Captain caught my left arm and held on tightly. Even when we got to the first picket fence, he held on. The pain in my arm became the only real thing, a sharp point of comfort in the midst of a nightmare. In the narrow street the dark houses of the village gave us some shelter from the wind, but the water of the Bay was already washing across the crushed oyster shells.
My father was not home when the Captain and I got there. The electricity was out. My mother, white-faced in the light from the kerosene lamp, was at the stove getting coffee. Grandma was rocking back and forth in her chair, her eyes squinched shut. “Oh, Lord,” she was praying out loud. “Why don’t you come down and still the wind and waves? Oh, Jesus, you told the storm on Galilee, ‘Peace, be still,’ and it obeyed your word. Ohhh, Lord, come down now and quiet this evil wind.”
As if in defiance, the moan of the wind shifted into a shriek. We were all so startled that it took us several seconds to realize that my father had come in the front door and was now pushing the old food safe against it. The door was leeward, but we all knew that later the wind would shift. We had to be ready.
“Best douse the lamp, Susan,” my father said. “And the stove. Things get banging around down here and we’ll have a first-class fire.”
Momma handed him a cup of coffee before she obeyed.
“Now,” he said. “Best be getting upstairs.” He had to shout to be heard but the words were as calm as someone telling the time. “Come along, Momma,” he called to Grandma. “Can’t have you floating away on your rocker.” He waved his flashlight toward the staircase.
Grandma had stopped her litany. Or else the wind had swallowed it. She went to the steps and began to climb slowly. My father nudged me to follow. “Oh, my blessed,” Grandma was saying as she climbed. “Oh, my blessed. I do hate the water.”
Caroline slept on. Caroline would probably have slept through the Last Trumpet. I started toward her bed to wake her up. Daddy called me from the hallway. “No,” he said. “Let her sleep.”
I came back to where he was. “She’ll miss the whole hurricane.”
“Yeah. Probably will,” he said. “Better get off those wet things, now. Then you should try to get some sleep yourself.”
“I couldn’t sleep through this. I wouldn’t want to.”
Even through the shriek of the wind, I could hear his chuckle. “Nope,” he said. “Probably wouldn’t.”
When I had changed out of my wet things and cleaned myself off as best I could, I went into my parents’ room. Daddy had gone down and fetched Grandma’s chair so she could rock and moan as was her custom. Somehow, the Captain had changed from his wet clothes into my father’s bathrobe, which barely met at his middle. Daddy and Momma were perched on the side of their bed, and the Captain sat on the edge of the only other chair. They had lit a candle in the room, which flickered because of the wind coming through the chinks of the house. Momma patted the bed beside her. I went and sat down. I wanted to snuggle up on her lap like a toddler, but I was fourteen, so I sat as close to her body as I dared.
We gave up trying to talk. It was too hard to fight the wind screaming like a giant wounded dove. We could no longer hear the sounds of
Grandma’s prayers or the rain or the water.
Suddenly there was silence. “What happened?” Though as soon as I asked, I knew. It was the eye. We were in the quiet eye of the storm. Daddy got up, took the flashlight, and went to the stairs. The Captain rose, pulled the bathrobe together, and followed him. I started to get up, too, but Momma put her arm across my lap.
“You can’t tell how long it will last,” she said. “Just let the men go.”
I wanted to object, but I was tired. It wouldn’t have mattered. The men were back almost before they started.
“Well, Sue, there’s two foot of Bay water sloshing about down there.” Daddy sat down beside her. “I’m feared it’ll make a mess of your nice parlor.”
She patted his knee. “As long as we’re all safe,” she said.
“Ohhhh, Lord,” Grandma cried out. “Why must the righteous suffer?”
“We’re all safe, Momma,” my father said. “We’re all safe. Nobody’s suffering.”
She began to cry then, bawling out like a frightened child. My parents looked at each other in consternation. I was angry. What right had she, a grown woman, who had lived through many storms, to carry on like that?
Then the Captain got up and went to kneel beside her chair. “It’s all right, Louise,” he said, as though he were indeed talking to a child. “A storm’s a fearsome thing.” When he said that I remembered the tale I’d heard about him cutting down his father’s mast. Was it possible that a man so calm had once been so terrified? “Would you like me to read to you?” he asked. “While it’s still quiet?”
She didn’t answer. But he got up and, taking the Bible from the bedside table, pulled his chair in close to the candle. As he was flipping through for the place, Grandma looked up. “T’ain’t fitting a heathen should read the Word of God,” she said.
“Hush, Momma!” I had never heard my father speak so sharply to her before. But she did hush, and the Captain began to read.