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The next day he caught the ferry to Crisfield. He never even told us he was going. We had to get the word from Captain Billy. And he didn’t come home that night or the next. We knew because we met the ferry each evening.
On the third day there he was, waving to us from the deck. My heart jumped to see him, and my body felt all over again how it was to be crushed against the rough material of his clothes, his heart beating straight through my backbone. Call and Caroline were waving back and calling out to him, but I was standing there shivering, my arms crossed, my hands hooked up under my arms and pressed against my breasts.
The boat was tied up, and now he was calling us by name. He wanted Caroline and me to see to something in the hold and Call to come aboard and give him a hand.
Caroline, as usual, moved faster than I. “Come, look here!” she yelled. When I got to where Captain Billy’s sons were handing up the freight, I saw the chair. It was huge and dark brown with a wicker seat and back and large metal wheels rimmed in hard black rubber. It took both Edgar and Richard to lift it up onto the pier. Caroline was grinning all over. “I bet he’s done it,” she said.
Whatever was in my look made her correct herself. “I mean,” she said with an impatient sigh, “I just mean, I bet he’s gone and married her.”
I had no place to run to, and even if I had, it was too late. They were already emerging from the cabin. Very slowly up the ladder, first Call’s head, his neck bent. Then at last the three of them, the Captain and Call carrying Auntie Braxton on a hand sling between them, she with an arm about each’s shoulder. When the three of them turned around at the top of the ladder, I could see that she was wearing on her shoulder a huge chrysanthemum corsage.
“He did marry her.” Caroline said it softly, but it was exploding like shrapnel inside my stomach. She ran for the wheelchair and pushed it to the end of the gangplank as proud as though she were rolling out the red carpet for royalty. Call and the Captain carefully lowered the old woman into the chair.
As he straightened up, the Captain saw me hanging back and called to me. “Sara Louise,” he said. “Come on over. I want you to shake hands with Miz Wallace here.”
The old woman looked up at him when he said that, as worshipful as a repentant sinner testifying in church. When I came close, she put out her hand. Shaking her hand was like holding a bunch of twigs, but her eyes were clear and steady. I think she said, “How are you, Sara Louise?” The words were hard to decipher.
“Welcome home, Miss Trudy,” I muttered. I couldn’t for the life of me call her by his name.
14
I suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We didn’t have many. I know that now. I have been to libraries on the mainland, and I know that between my home and the school there was very little. But I had all of Shakespeare and Walter Scott and Dickens and Fenimore Cooper. Every night I pulled the black air raid curtains to and read on and on, huddled close to our bedroom lamp. Can you imagine the effect of The Last of the Mohicans on a girl like me? It was not the selfless Cora, but Uncas and Uncas alone whom I adored. Uncas, standing ready to die before the Delaware, when an enemy warrior tears off his hunting shirt revealing the bright blue tortoise tattooed on Uncas’s breast.
Oh, to have a bright blue tortoise—something that proclaimed my uniqueness to the world. But I was not the last of the Mohicans or the only of anything. I was Caroline Bradshaw’s twin sister.
I cannot explain why, seeing how the storm had affected our family’s finances, I never told anyone that I had almost fifty dollars hidden away. Among the first things that had to be given up were Caroline’s mainland voice and piano lessons. Even on generous scholarships, the transportation was too much for our slender resources. I suppose it is to Caroline’s credit that she seldom sulked about this deprivation. She continued to practice regularly with the hope that spring would mark the end of a successful oyster season and give us the margin we needed to continue her trips to Salisbury. I might say to my own credit, as I needed every bit of credit available in those days, that I did not rejoice over Caroline’s misfortune. I never hated the music. In fact, I took pride in it. But though it occurred to me to offer the money I had saved to help her continue her
lessons, I was never quite able to admit that I had put it away. Besides, it was not that much money—and it was mine. I had earned it.
I went once to see the Captain after he got married. He invited the three of us—Caroline, Call, and me—to dinner. I suppose he meant it for a celebration. At any rate, he pulled out a small bottle of wine and offered us some. Call and I were shocked and refused. Caroline took some with a great deal of giggling about what would happen if anyone found out he had smuggled spirits onto our very dry little island. I was annoyed. The absence of alcohol on Rass (we never counted Momma’s sherry bottle as real alcohol) was a matter of religious, not civil, law. We didn’t even have a policeman, and there certainly was nothing resembling jail. If people had known about the Captain’s wine, they would have simply condemned him as a heathen and prayed over him on Wednesday night. They’d been doing that ever since he arrived.
“I used to buy this kind of wine in Paris,” the Captain explained. “It’s been hard to get since the war.” I assumed, of course, that he meant the war of the moment. Thinking back, I guess he must have meant World War I. I had a hard time keeping in mind how old he was.
With Auntie Braxton, there was no question. She sat at the head of the table in her wooden and wicker wheelchair, smiling a lopsided, almost simple smile. Her hair was white and so thin you could see the pink of her skull shining through. I suppose the strange angle of her smile was the result of the stroke, which is what had caused her to fall and break her hip. She tried to hold her glass in the tiny claw of her hand, but the Captain was there to hold it steady at her mouth. She took a sip, a bit of which dribbled down her chin. She seemed not to mind, keeping her clear, childlike eyes devoted to his face.
He patted her chin with a napkin. “My dear,” he was saying. “Did I ever tell you about the time I had to drive a car across the city of Paris?”
For those of us who had lived all our lives on Rass, an automobile was almost more exotic than Paris. It irritated me that the Captain had never thought to tell, or chosen to tell Call and me about this adventure. For it was an adventure, the way the Captain told it.
Settling back in his own chair, he explained that he had driven a car only once before in his life, and that on a country road in America, when his companion, a French seaman, suggested that they buy a car someone was hawking on the dock at Le Havre and take it into Paris. The Frenchman felt that it would be a wonderful way to pick up some girls, and the Captain, his pockets full of francs and with a week’s shore leave in which to spend them, saw the car as a means to independence and excitement. He did not know until after the purchase was made that his companion had never driven a car before.
“‘But no matter,’” the Captain imitated the Frenchman. “‘Is easy.’” With difficulty, the Captain persuaded his friend to let him drive and then began their hair-raising trip from Le Havre to Paris, culminating in a cross-city ride at the busiest time of the afternoon.
“And then I came to a huge intersection—carts and automobiles and trucks coming at me from what seemed to be eight directions. If I stayed still I would be plowed under but to go forward was suicide.”
“What did you do?” Call asked.
“Well—I shifted into first gear, grabbed the wheel as tight as I could with one hand, squeezed the horn with the other, jammed down on the accelerator with both feet, shut my eyes, and zoomed across.”
“What?” cried Call. “Didn’t you kill yourself?”
A peculiar noise, more like a chicken cackle than anything else, came from the end of the table. We all turned. Auntie Braxton was laughing. The others all began to laugh then, even Call, who knew the joke was at his expense. Everyone began to laugh but me.
“Don’t you get it, Wheeze?” Call asked. “If he’d of killed himself—”
“Of course I get it, stupid. I just don’t happen to think it’s funny.”
Caroline turned to Auntie Braxton and said, “Don’t mind her.” She flashed a beautiful smile at Call. “Wheeze doesn’t think anything’s funny.”
