Jacob Have I Loved

“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.