Jacob Have I Loved

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.