Jacob Have I Loved

“Adultery?” The Captain started laughing out loud. “Well, I’m too old to worry about that one. Now there was a time—” He grinned mischievously. I suspect Call wanted him to go on as much as I did, but the old man stopped right there. Like offering candy to a child and then yanking back your hand with some excuse about saving his teeth, I thought.

“Today is Tuesday,” Call said as we started for the house.

“Tuesday! Then—then—” the Captain seemed terribly excited. “Then tomorrow is Wednesday, and after that comes Thursday! Friday! Saturday! Sunday! And Monday!!”

I thought Call would die laughing on the spot, but he managed to control himself enough to gasp, “Get it, Wheeze? Get it?”

If I couldn’t smile at “Wheeze and Cough,” how was I to force a laugh at a recitation of the days of the week?

“Don’t mind her, Captain. She don’t catch on too good.”

“Too well.” At least I could demonstrate proper grammar. “Too well.”

“Too well. Too well,” repeated the Captain chirpily, lifting his hand to his ear. “Hark? Do I hear the mating call of a feathered friend of the marsh-land?”

Call, naturally, collapsed. All I could think of was if we’d netted a spy like this, Franklin D. Roosevelt would have thrown him back. Good heavens.

Eventually, Call recovered from his hysterics enough to explain to the Captain that since it was Tuesday and not yet suppertime, he and I would be glad to lend a hand fixing up the old dock or house or whatever else the Captain might want doing around the place. In fact, Call added, we could come at about this time every afternoon, except Sunday of course, and help out.

“I’d want to pay you something,” the Captain said. My ears stretched practically to the top of my head, and I opened my mouth to utter a humble thanks.

“Oh, no,” said Call. “We couldn’t think of taking money from a neighbor.”

Who couldn’t? But for once in his life Call talked faster than I could think, and the two of them snatched away my time and energy and sold me into slavery before I had breath to hint that I wouldn’t be insulted by a small tip every now and then.

That was how we came to spend two hours every afternoon slaving for the Captain. I noticed grimly that he didn’t mind at all ordering us around, even though we were supposed to be doing him a favor. We didn’t have our tea break after the first week because tin was becoming scarce and the Captain was short on canned milk. And, as he explained, since he could no longer offer Call milk, it would have been mean for the two of us to stop for tea. I would have been glad to stop for any excuse, even that awful tea. When you’re fourteen and your body is changing as mine was that summer, you just plain get tired, but I couldn’t admit it. Both Call and the Captain seemed to regard me as mentally deficient, since I couldn’t appreciate their marvelous humor. I couldn’t let them make fun of me physically as well.

Nothing went right for me that summer, unless you count the fact that when my periods began, almost a year after Caroline’s of course, they began on a Sunday morning before I left the house for church instead of after, but the stain went clear through my pants and slip to my only good dress. Momma let me pretend to be sick. What else could she do? I couldn’t wash and dry my dress in time for Sunday school.

My grandmother kept saying things like “What’s the matter with her? She don’t look sick to me. Just don’t want to worship the Lord.” And “If she was mine, I’d give her a good smack on the rear. That’d perk her up fast enough.”

I was terrified that Momma would betray me and tell Grandma the real reason I was staying home. But she didn’t. Even Caroline tried to shush Grandma up. I don’t know what Grandma told her old friends, but for weeks after that they’d all ask sweetly about my health, both physical and spiritual.

My spiritual health was about on a par with a person who’s been dead three days, but I wasn’t about to admit it and get prayed for out loud on Wednesday night by that bunch of old sooks.

8

I used to try to decide which was the worst month of the year. In the winter I would choose February. I had it figured out that the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day. December and January are cold and wet, but, somehow, that’s their right. February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down. Christmas is over and spring seems years away. So February sneaks in a couple of beautiful days early on, and just when you’re stretching out like a cat waking up, bang! February hits you right in the stomach. And not with a lightning strike like a September hurricane, but punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse—except August.

There were days that August when I felt as though God had lowered a giant glass lid over the whole steaming Bay. All year we had lived in the wind, now we were cut off without a breath of air. On the water the haze was so thick it was like tryin

g to inhale wet cotton. I began to pray for a real blow. I wanted relief that badly.

In February the weather sometimes gave us a vacation; in August, never. We just got up earlier every morning until finally we met ourselves going to bed. Call and I didn’t get up quite as early as my father, who may have never gone to bed between tending to his floats and going out to crab, but we were up well before dawn, trying to sneak a fair catch of crabs from the eelgrass before the sun drove us off the water.

I had a faint hope that the Captain, not being an islander, would take the heat as an excuse to slow down a bit. But Call fixed that.

“We’re coming in from crabbing early these hot mornings,” he blabbed. “We could come on over here and get lots more done of a day.”

“I can’t come before dinner,” I said. “Momma expects me home to eat.”

“Well, fiddle, Wheeze,” Call said. “You all eat by eleven. Don’t take more’n ten minutes to eat.”

“We don’t stuff like scavengers at our house,” I said. “I couldn’t possibly get here that fast. Besides, I got chores.”

“We’ll be here by noon,” he told the Captain cheerily. I could have choked him. That meant at least four and a half hours of gut-ripping work in the heat for nothing. Nothing.

The Captain, of course, was delighted. His one concession to the temperature was that we work indoors and not on the dock in the sun. He began planning out loud all the projects the three of us could complete by the time school opened. I managed, with a lie about my mother needing me, to get away by four-fifteen. I wanted to get to the post office before supper. It would have been better perhaps if I had not, for there it was, my letter from Lyrics Unlimited. I ran with it to the tip of the island, to my driftwood stump, and sat down to open it, my hands shaking so they made a poor job of it.