“Oh, leave me alone.”
“I know what she’s doing.” Grandma was rocking as usual in the living room. “She’s peeking around for that heathen Captain of hers.”
Caroline burst into a giggle and then tried to cover it up with fake coughing. Once we were both in the kitchen and out of sight, she rolled her eyes at me and twirled her finger at her temple to indicate that she thought our grandmother was nuts.
“Yep. Yep.” The voice continued from the other room. “Can’t keep her eyes off that wicked man. I see it. ’Deed I do.”
Caroline began to giggle in earnest then. I didn’t know which one I wanted to kill more.
“I told Susan no good would come of letting that man into the house. Like letting the devil himself march in. Don’t take much to bedevil a foolish girl, but still—”
My throat choked up like a swamp pond listening to her drone on and on.
“But still, they that lets the devil in cannot count themselves blameless.”
I was holding a jar of string beans in my hand, and I swear, if my mother had not happened down the stairs at that moment, I might have hurled that quart at the old woman’s nodding head. I don’t know what my mother heard, if anything, but I suppose she sensed the hatred, the air was so thick with it. At any rate, she gently pried my grandmother from the rocker and helped her upstairs for her afternoon nap.
When she came back to the kitchen, Caroline was practically dancing across the linoleum, simply bursting to tattle. “You know what Grandma said?”
I turned on her like a red-bellied water snake. “Shut your mouth, you fool!”
Caroline blanched, then recovered. “Whosoever shall say, ‘Thou fool,’ shall be in danger of hell fire,” she quoted piously.
“Oh, my blessed,” said Momma. She didn’t often resort to such a typical island expression. “Is the world so short on trouble that you two crave to make more?”
I opened my mouth but shut it again hard. Momma, I wanted to cry out, tell me I’m not in danger of hell fire. My childhood nightmares of damnation were rising fast, but there was no place for me to run. How could I share with my mother the wildness of my body or the desperation of my mind?
As I finished putting away the canned goods in frozen silence, my own hands caught my eye. The nails were broken and none too clean, the cuticles ragged. There was a crack of red at the edge of my index finger where a hangnail had been chewed away.
“She’s lovely, she’s engaged, she uses Pond’s” the advertisement read, showing two exquisitely white hands with perfectly formed and manicured nails, long nails, and a diamond ring sparkling on the gracefully curved left hand. A man with strong clean hands would never look at me in love. No man would. At the moment, it seemed worse than being forsaken by God.
The five of us were already at the supper table when the Captain got back. He knocked formally at the door. I jumped and ran to the screen to open it, even though my mother had not indicated that I must. He was standing there, his blue eyes sagging with tiredness, but with a warm smile parting his lips above the beard. In his arms he was carrying the huge orange tomcat.
“Look what found me,” he said, as I opened the door.
Caroline came running. “You found the old orange cat!” she cried, just as though she had had some relation to the creature. She reached out for it. I was almost glad because I figured the tom would go wild at her touch. But it didn’t. The storm must have broken its spirit, for it lay purring close to Caroline’s chest. “You sweet old thing,” she murmured, rubbing her nose in its fur. If Caroline had been relegated to the devil, she probably would have tamed him as well. She gave the cat some of our supper fish in a bowl and set it on the kitchen floor. The cat plunged its head blissfully into the bowl.
The Captain followed Caroline to the kitchen and rinsed his hands by pouring a scant dipper of our precious fresh water over them. Then he took out a large white handkerchief and wiped them carefully before he came back into the living room to sit down at the table. I concentrated on keeping my eyes off his hands, knowing now that they were more dangerous for me than his face, but sometimes I couldn’t help myself.
“Well,” he said, as though someone had asked him, “I hitched a ride to Crisfield today.”
Everyone looked up and mumbled, though it was evident that he was going to tell us what he had been up to whether or not we prodded.
“I went to see Trudy in the hospital,” he said. “She has that perfectly good house standing there empty. It occurred to me she might not mind my staying there until I can work out something more permanent.” He carefully unfolded his large cloth napkin and laid it across his lap, then looked up as though awaiting our judgment.
My grandmother was the first to speak. “I knowed it,” she muttered darkly without a hint of what it was she knew.
“Hiram,” my father said, “no need for you to rush away. We’re proud to have you with us.”
The Captain flicked a glance at Grandma, who had her mouth open, but before she got her words past her teeth, he said, “You’re mighty gracious. All of you. But I could be cleaning out her place while I live there. Make it fit for her to come home to. It would be a help to both of us.”
He left right after supper. He had nothing to move, so he simply walked out with the orange tom at his heels.
“Wait,” called Caroline. “Wheeze and I will walk you over.” She grabbed her light blue scarf and tied it loosely about her hair. She always looked like a girl in an advertisement when she wore that scarf. “Come on,” she said, as I hung back.
So I went with them, my legs so heavy that I could hardly lift them. It’s better, I tried to tell myself. As long as he is here I will be in danger. Even if I do not give myself away, Grandma will see to it. But, oh, my blessed, did I hate to see him go.
School opened, and I suppose that helped. With Mr. Rice gone, there was only one teacher for the whole high school. Our high school, which had about twenty students at full strength, was down now to fifteen since two had graduated the previous spring and three had gone off to war. Six of us, including Call and Caroline and me, were freshmen, five were sophomores, three juniors, and a lone senior girl, Myrna Dolman, who wore thick glasses and doggedly maintained the ambition she had harbored since first grade to become a primary schoolteacher. Our teacher, Miss Hazel Marks, used to hold Myrna up to the rest of us as an example. Apparently, the ideal pupil in Miss Hazel’s eyes was one who wrote neatly and never smiled.