Jacob Have I Loved

“You mean a poem’s supposed to lie?”

“It’s not lying.”

“Go on. Ain’t neither gull on this Bay up there boohooing ’cause some sailor’s gone to war. If that ain’t a plain out lie, I don’t know what is.”

“It’s a different way of talking. Makes it prettier.”

“It ain’t pretty to lie, Wheeze.”

“Forget about the gulls. How about the rest of it?”

“The rest of what?”

“The rest of my poem, Call. How does it sound?”

“I forget.”

I gritted my teeth to keep from yelling at him and then with super patience read it through again.

“I thought you’s going to forget about the gulls.”

“No, you forget them. How does the rest sound?”

“It don’t make neither sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“Either the guy’s away or he ain’t. You got to make up your mind.”

“Call. It’s a poem. In real life he is far away, but she thinks about him all the time, so she feels like he’s real close.”

“I call it dumb.”

“Just wait until you fall in love.”

He looked at me as though I’d proposed some indecent act.

I sighed. “Did you hear the one about the Australian who wanted to buy a new boomerang but he couldn’t get rid of his old one?”

“No. What about him?”

“Get it? A boomerang. He wanted to buy a new boomerang, but he kept getting the old one back every time he threw it away.”

“Why should he even want a new one? The old one’s still perfectly good, isn’t it?”

“Call. Just forget it.”

He shook his head, the picture of patient disbelief, and I forgot I was pretending not to care about crabs and devoted my full attention to the pesky varmints. I like to recall that we netted two full baskets of rank peelers that day.

No one had told me to turn over all the money I made crabbing. I just always had. When I started, I guess, it hadn’t occurred to me that it was mine to keep. We always lived so close to the edge of being poor. It made me feel proud to be able to present the family with a little something extra to hold on to. While my parents never carried on much over it, I was always thanked. When my grandmother would criticize me, I could remember, even if the laws of respect kept me silent, that I was a contributing member of the household in which she and Caroline were little more than parasites. It was a private comfort.

But no one ever said I had to turn over every penny I made to the stoneware pickle crock in which the household money was kept.

Why then did I feel so guilty? Wasn’t it my right to keep some of my hard-won earnings? But what if Otis should say something to my father about all the crabs he was buying from us? What if Call’s mother should brag to my mother about how much money Call was bringing home these days? I divided my share exactly down the middle. If there was a penny in doubt, the penny went into the crock. I was contributing almost as much as I had during the previous summer, but I wasn’t taking the money proudly to Momma for her to count out and put into the crock. I was slipping it in myself and then saying later, “Oh, by the way, I left a little in the crock.” And my mother would thank me quietly, just as she always had. I never said I was putting everything in. I never lied. But then no one ever asked.

If only there were some other way to make money. Call’s total lack of enthusiasm for my poem had had a dampening effect. I knew perfectly well that he was as qualified to judge poetry as he was to judge jokes, which was not at all, but still, he was the only human being I could risk reading it aloud to. If only he could have said something like, “I don’t know anything about poetry, but it sounds fine to me.” That would have been gracious, almost honest, and would have given me a real boost when I needed it.

As it was, I waited a week or so, then pulled myself together enough to copy the poem out on clean notebook paper and mail it to Lyrics Unlimited. Even before it could have been delivered to the P.O. Box in New York, I began haunting the docks when the ferry (which also served as the mail boat) came in. I didn’t have the nerve to ask Captain Billy directly if there was any mail for me, but I hoped that if I just happened to be standing there, he’d see me and let me know. I didn’t know that he never opened the sack before he took it to Mrs. Kellam, who served as postmistress. But I did know that Mrs. Kellam was a noisy gossip. I dreaded the thought of her asking my grandmother about a mysterious letter arriving from New York addressed to me.