“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” He read well, better than the preacher, almost as well as Mr. Rice. “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof…”
Into my mind came a wonderful and terrible picture of great forested mountains, shaken by a giant hand that scooped them up, finally, and flung them into the boiling sea. I had never seen a mountain, except in a geography text. I was fourteen, and I had never even seen a real mountain. I was going to, though. I was not going to end up like my Grandma, fearful and shriveled.
They told me later that I finally slept through the worst part of the hurricane. When the eye passed, the wind came up from the south even more fiercely than before. “Grabbed this old house by the scruff of the neck and shook the bejeebers out of it,” my father said. “But I couldn’t wake you for nothing. Snoring away like an old dog.”
“I didn’t snore!” I was horrified at the thought of the Captain watching me while I snored.
“Snored so loud, you plumb drowned the wind.” He was teasing me. At least I hoped my father was teasing.
It was not one of those hurricanes like the one that was to hit the Atlantic Coast in ’44, not one of those hurricanes that go down in the books. No island lives were lost in the storm of ’42. No human lives, at any rate. The storm did accomplish without conscience what we had been too fainthearted to do. It reduced the island’s cat population by at least two-thirds.
11
It was the bluest, clearest day of the summer. Every breath of air was delicious with just enough of a clean, salt edge to wake up all your senses. If the Captain and I had just stood on the porch with our eyes closed, it would have been a perfect day. For while our noses and lungs feasted on nature’s goodness, our eyes were assaulted by evidence of her savagery.
The water had left our living room, but it was still in the yard, level with the porch. Riding the muddy surface were sections of picket fence, giant tree limbs, crab pots, remnants of floats and crab houses, boats, and…“What’s that?” I had grabbed the Captain’s arm.
“A coffin,” he said matter of factly. “These storms will dig them up sometimes. Just replant them is all.” His mind was clearly not on the dead. “Look here,” he said. “There’s no safe walking to my place this morning. We’d best go back in and give your mother a hand.”
The thought of our sodden, muck-filled downstairs dragged at me like a lead weight on a crab pot. “Don’t you want to see what happened to your house?” I asked. This was a day for adventure, not drudgery.
“Plenty of time to see later when the water’s down,” he said, turning to go back inside.
“My boat!” That was it. We could pole the skiff down to his house, maneuvering around the debris as we would ice floes. He cocked his head. I’m sure he doubted that my stubby little skiff could have survived the storm.
At first we couldn’t tell. The gut had disappeared under the foot of water flooding the yard, bringing with it the same floating dump heap we had seen swirling about the front yard. The day before, my father had tied the boat, not just to the pine to which I usually secured her bowline; he had run lines from her stern to the fig tree on one side and the cedar on the other. The three trees were still there, looking a bit like little boys after their summer haircuts, but still there. From the porch I could, at last, make out the three now taut lines, and then I caught sight of her washboards just above the water line.
“She’s here!” I was half off the porch when the Captain grabbed me.
“You want lockjaw or typhoid or a combination?” He indicated my bare legs and feet.
I was too happy to be offended. “Okay,” I said. “Just a minute.” He waited until I fetched my father’s old boots. He had worn his good ones when he left earlier to see about his own boat and the crab shanty.
We bailed out the skiff until it was bobbing merrily on the surface. The Captain loosed the lines on the house side of the still invisible gut, and then I climbed into the boat, pulled myself along the rope to the cedar tree, and loosed that knot as well. The Captain fetched the pole from the kitchen, and after he had handed it in to me in the stern, he climbed in and sat down facing me, his arms tightly folded across his chest.
He let me maneuver the skiff through the wreckage of the flood without even peeking over his shoulder to see what I might be about to hit. I poled us along what I thought might be the line of the gut. The water was too murky and trash-filled to tell. Usually my pole was only a foot or so in the water, but then suddenly it would go down three feet and I knew I had found the gut again.
The Captain looked so somber, I could almost imagine I was an Egyptian slave taking Pharaoh on a tour of the flooded Nile Delta. In fifth-grade history we had spent a lot of time worrying about the flooded river deltas of the ancient world. I would be one of those wise slaves who could read and write and dare to advise their masters. Now, for example, I would be reassuring the Pharaoh that the flood was a gift from the gods, that once it receded, the rich black earth of the delta would bring forth abundant grain. Our storehouses would be full to overflowing even as they had been when the great Joseph had been the Pharaoh’s minister.
My reverie was punctured by a raucous cackling and complaining from a tiny house floating past us. “Hey!” I said. “That looks like the Lewises’ chicken coop.” The live occupants of the coop were squawking their unhappiness to the world as they traveled along.
The storm had been capricious. Some roofs were gone, while the next door house was not only intact but the fence and shed as well. In some yards people were already trying to collect things and clean up the debris lodged against their fences. I called out to them and waved.
They waved back and shouted greetings like, “Hey there, Wheeze. Y’all make out all right?”
And I’d answer, “Yessir. Least the house is all right.” Seldom had I felt such warmth from my island neighbors. I nodded and waved and smiled. I loved everyone that morning.
I was well past and around the last house on the village street when I realized that I had lost my bearings. I should be over the marsh now. The sun was starboard, so I should have been heading straight for the Captain’s house.
I made a funny squeak in my throat that startled the Captain. “What is it?” He jerked around to see what I was staring at.
I was staring at nothing. Nothing. Not a tree, not a board. Nothing was left at the spot where the Captain’s house had stood the night before.
It took us both a few minutes to take it in. I circled the spot in the boat, or tried to. My pole was going down too deep for me to dare venture out too far. There was nothing to tell us if we were over the south marsh or the place where the Wallace house had stood. It was all Bay now.
At first I could do nothing but stare at the muddy water. Finally, I stole a look at the Captain. His eyes looked glazed, and he was pulling at the hair of his beard with the fingers of his left hand. He realized that I was watching him and cleared his throat.
“We used to have cows,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“I heard it. Yes.”
“Though the earth be removed,” he was mumbling. “Though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”
I wanted to say how sorry I felt, but it seemed childish. I hadn’t even lost my boat pole. He had lost everything.
He crossed his arms once more even more tightly across his chest. Squinting his eyes, he said in a rough voice, “Well. That’s that.”
As I turned the boat, I tried to read his meaning. At last I said, “Where do you want to go?”
His laugh came out something like a snort. I shipped the pole and sat down on the thwart opposite him. “I’m really sorry,” I said.
He shook his head as though to shake off my concern, his eyes glittering. His hands dropped to his lap. He was wearing
clothes borrowed from my father, an old blue workshirt and denim pants that were a little too tight for him. He seemed to be watching his right thumb rub the knuckles of his left hand. For all his white beard, he looked like a little boy trying not to cry. I was terrified that I might actually see tears in his eyes and so to avoid that sight more than anything else, I slipped off the thwart, crossed the narrow space between us on my knees, and put my arms around him. The rough shirt scraped my chin, and I was aware of the pressure of his knees against my stomach.
Then, suddenly, something happened. I can’t explain it. I had not put my arms around another person since I was tiny. It may have been the unaccustomed closeness, I don’t know. I had only meant to comfort him, but as I smelled his sweat and felt the spring of his beard against my cheek, an alarm began to clang inside my body. I went hot all over, and I could hear my heart banging to be let out of my chest. “Let go, stupid,” part of me was saying, while another voice I hardly recognized was urging me to hold him tighter.
I pulled back abruptly and, putting the thwart between us, grabbed up the hard, solid pole, stood and jammed it down into the water. I didn’t dare speak, much less look at him. What must he think of me? I knew that anything that made a person feel the way I felt at that moment had to be a deadly sin. But I was less concerned at the moment with God’s judgment than the Captain’s. Suppose he laughed? Suppose he told someone? Call or, God forbid, Caroline?
I dared a glance at his hands. The fingers of his right hand were nervously tapping his knee. I had never noticed how long his fingers were. His nails were large, rounded at the bottom and blunt and neat at the tips. He had the cleanest fingernails of any man I’d ever seen—it was the male hand in the ad reaching to put the diamond on the Pond’s-caressed female hand. Why had I never noticed before how beautiful his hands were? I wanted to hold one in both of my hands and kiss the fingertips. Oh, my blessed, I was going crazy. Just looking at his hands was doing the same wild things to the secret places of my body that holding him had done.
I poled faster and tried to keep my eyes and mind totally on getting the boat back to the house. I kept banging into debris. I was sure he could tell how agitated I was. I kept waiting for him to say something. Anything.
“Well,” he said. My heart went straight through my ribs at the sound. “Well.” A short explosive sigh. “That’s that.”
That’s what? something inside my head was crying. I rammed the boat into the back porch, leaped out, and secured the line on a post. Then, without looking back, I raced into the house up into the sanctuary of my bedroom.
“What’s the matter, Wheeze?” No sanctuary. No hiding place. Caroline was there to question me as I dived onto my bed and buried my head under the pillow. “For goodness’ sake, Wheeze? What on earth is going on?”
When I refused to answer, she finished dressing and went downstairs. I could hear voices, muffled as they were by the pillow. I waited for laughter. Slowly, as I calmed, I knew that the Captain would never tell my mother or my grandmother what had happened in the boat. Call and Caroline, perhaps, but not the others.
But even if he never told a soul, how was I to face him again? Just thinking of his smell, his feel, his hands, made my body go hot all over. “He’s older than your grandmother,” I kept saying to myself. “When your grandmother was a child, he was nearly a man already.” My grandmother was sixty-three. She seemed like a hundred, but she was sixty-three. I knew because my father had been born when she was sixteen. The Captain had to be seventy or more. I was fourteen, for mercy’s sake. Fourteen from seventy was fifty-six. Fifty-six. But then my mind would go to the curve of his perfect thumbnail, and my body would flame up like pine pitch.
I heard my father come in the front door. I jumped off the bed and tried to compose myself before our small streaky mirror. I could not pretend I had not heard him, and no one would understand any excuse for my not coming down to hear his report. I would have to be stretched out dead to remain upstairs. I ran a comb through my wild hair and banged down the steps. Everyone turned at the racket. I just caught the Captain’s face. He was smiling. I’m sure I flushed all over, but no one, after that first glance, was taking notice of me. They wanted to find out what was happening at the harbor.
“The boat’s all right.” That was the first and only really vital thing we needed to know.
“Thank the Lord,” Momma said quietly, but with a force that surprised me.
“There’s plenty,” Daddy went on, “that aren’t so lucky. A lot of the boats not sunk are all tore up. It’ll be a hard year for many.” Our crab house was gone and the floats as well, but we had our boat. “The dock’s tore up right smart, but folks got their homes.”
“Not the Captain.” Caroline said it so quickly and loudly that no one else had a chance. It didn’t seem right to me that the Captain should be robbed of the chance to tell his own tragedy. He had nothing else to call his own. He should have at least had his story. But Caroline was like that, snatching other people’s rights without even thinking.
“Oh, my blessed,” said my father. “And here I was thinking how lucky we were. Is it clean gone?”
The Captain nodded, tightening his arms across his chest as he had earlier. “Even the fast land where she stood,” he said. We were all quiet. My grandmother ceased her eternal rocking for a time. At last he said, “That whole marsh was a meadow back when I was a boy. We used to keep cows.” It bothered me intensely that he should be repeating the information about the cows. I couldn’t understand why it meant so much to him.
“Well,” my father said. “Well.” He went over to the table and sat down heavily on a chair. “You best stay with us for a while.”
The Captain opened his mouth to protest, but Grandma beat him to it. “Ain’t neither room for another body in this house,” she said. She was right, but I wanted to kill her for saying it. Just the look on the Captain’s face ripped my heart right out of my chest.
“The girls can double up for a few days, Mother,” my father said. “And you can have the other bed up there.”
She opened her mouth wide, but he shushed her with a look. “Louise’ll help you carry up a few things now.”
“I couldn’t think of putting you to trouble,” the Captain said. The tone was a meek, broken one I’d never heard before.
“It’s no trouble,” I said loudly before my grandmother could interfere again. I rushed into her room and cleared her drawers in a few swoops and carried her things upstairs on a run. Half of me was bursting with joy at the thought of having him so close, the other half was in mortal terror. I seemed to have no control over myself, I who had always prided myself on keeping the deepest parts of me hidden from view. I dumped my own things into a bag and pushed it under Caroline’s bed, and then as neatly as I could, folded Grandma’s things and put them in my drawers. I was shaking all over. Grandma had come thumping up the stairs. She was in a rage.
“I can’t think what your daddy’s up to,” she said, still panting from her rush up the stairs. “Letting that heathen into our house. Into my bed. Oh, my blessed. Into my very bed.”
“Stop it!” I didn’t say it loudly, but I said it into her face. It may have scared her. She sniffed and backed up. She climbed up on my bed. Naturally, she assumed that I would be the one to give up a bed. “I’m resting,” she said. “If anybody cares.”
I slammed the drawer shut and went back downstairs. How dare she hurt his feelings? He had lost everything he had in this world. I saw his beautiful hands lovingly sanding the back of one of his old chairs. He had worked so hard on that house. We all had. He and Call and I. Not Caroline. It didn’t belong to her, just to the three of us. But when I got to the living room, there was Caroline, giving him a cup of coffee, practically falling all over him while she did so. Then she got herself a cup and sat down beside him, her beautiful eyes mooning with pity.
“Would you like some coffee, Louise?”
“No,” I said sharply. “Somebody’s g
ot to remember this is no picnic.” There was no place to run to, no tip of the marsh where I could sit alone on a stump of driftwood and watch the water. I wanted to cry and scream and throw things. Instead, under almost perfect control, I got a broom and began savagely to attack the sand that was stuck like cement in the corner of the living room.
12
For the three days that the Captain lived with us, I avoided looking him in the eye. I was, instead, obsessed with his hands. They were always moving because he was intent on paying his way by helping to clean the house. By the time the water had left the yard and street, most of our downstairs, though smelling more like a crab shanty than a proper house, was at least cleaned out. We carried the stuffed chair and the couch to the front porch to let them air as best we could. Grandma’s high bed had escaped the water but still smelled damp, so we put the mattress on the porch roof to sun.
The Captain treated me as though nothing had happened between us. At least I think he did. My brain was so feverish, it couldn’t have judged what was natural and what was not. He called me “Sara Louise,” but he had done that for some time, hadn’t he? Why then did his voice speaking my name seem so heartbreakingly sweet? Tears would start in my eyes at the sound.
The second afternoon after the water was gone, he left the house for several hours. I wanted to go with him, but I couldn’t trust myself. What insane thing might I do, finding myself suddenly alone with him? But after he was gone I began to worry. Would he do something foolish now that he had lost everything? I had one horrible vision of him walking straight out into the Bay until he was swallowed up. Oh, if only I could tell him that he had me—that I would never desert him. But I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t.
I forgot my work and began to watch for him. Caroline and I were supposed to be putting fresh paper on the lower kitchen cabinet shelves, so that the canned goods could be brought down once more from upstairs and put away.