“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.
“Wheeze, what on earth are you doing? You’ve been to the front door five times in the last five minutes.”