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I watched her coldly, my right hand at my mouth.
“It—it—well, it is a wonderful chance for her, you know. A chance we, your father and I, could never hope—Louise?”
“Yes?” I bit down savagely on a hangnail and ripped it so deeply that the blood started.
“Don’t do that to your finger, please.”
I grabbed my hand from my mouth. What did she want from me? My permission? My blessing?
“I-I was trying to think—we could never afford this school in Baltimore, but maybe Crisfield. We could borrow something on next year’s earnings—”
“Why should Caroline go to Crisfield when she has a chance—”
“No, not Caroline, you. I thought we might send you—”
She did hate me. There. See. She was trying to get rid of me. “Crisfield!” I cried contemptuously. “Crisfield! I’d rather be chopped for crab bait!”
“Oh,” she said. I had plainly confused her. “I really thought you might like—”
“Well, you were wrong!”
“Louise—”
“Momma, would you just get out and leave me alone!” If she refused, I would take it for a sign, not only that she cared about me but that God did. If she stayed in that room—She stood up, hesitating.
“Why don’t you just go?”
“All right, Louise, if that’s what you want.” She closed the door quietly behind her.
My father came home as usual on Saturday. He and my mother spent most of Sunday afternoon at the Captain’s. I don’t know how the matter was settled in a way that satisfied my father’s proud independence, but by the time they returned it was settled. Within two weeks we were on the dock to see Caroline off to Baltimore. She kissed us all, including the Captain and Call, who turned the color of steamed crab at her touch. She was back for summer vacation a few days before Call left for the navy, at which time she provided the island with another great show of kissing and carrying on. You couldn’t doubt that she’d go far in grand opera judging by that performance.
After Call left, I gave up progging and took over the responsibility of my father’s crab floats. I poled my skiff from float to float, fishing out the soft crabs and taking them to the crab house to pack them in boxes filled with eelgrass for shipping. I knew almost as much about blue crabs as a seasoned waterman. One look at a crab’s swimming leg and I could tell almost to the hour when the critter was going to shed. The next to the last section is nearly transparent and if the crab is due to moult in less than a couple of weeks, the faint line of the new shell can be seen growing there beneath the present one. It’s called a “white sign.” Gradually, the shadow darkens. When a waterman catches a “pink sign,” he knows the moulting will take place in about a week, so he gently breaks the crab’s big claws to keep it from killing all its neighbors and brings it home to finish peeling in his floats. A “red sign” will begin to shed in a matter of hours and a “buster” has already begun.
Shedding its shell is a long and painful business for a big Jimmy, but for a she-crab, turning into a sook, it seemed somehow worse. I’d watch them there in the float, knowing once they shed that last time and turned into grown-up lady crabs there was nothing left for them. They hadn’t even had a Jimmy make love to them. Poor sooks. They’d never take a trip down the Bay to lay their eggs before they died. The fact that there wasn’t much future for the Jimmies once they were packed in eelgrass didn’t bother me so much. Males, I thought, always have a chance to live no matter how short their lives, but females, ordinary, ungifted ones, just get soft and die.
At about seven I would head home for breakfast and then back to the crab house and floats until our four-thirty supper. After supper sometimes one of my parents would go back with me, but more often I went alone. I didn’t really mind. It made me feel less helpless to be a girl of fifteen doing what many regarded as a man’s job. When school started in the fall, I, like every boy on Rass over twelve, was simply too busy to th
ink of enrolling. My parents objected, but I assured them that when the crab season was over, I would go and catch up with the class. Secretly, I wasn’t sure that I could stand school with neither Caroline nor Call there with me, but, of course, I didn’t mention this to my parents.
We had another severe storm that September. It took no lives, in the literal sense, but since it took another six to eight feet of fast land off the southern end of the island, four families whose houses were in jeopardy moved to the mainland. They were followed within the month by two other families who had never quite recovered from the storm of ’42. There was plenty of war work on the mainland for both men and women at what seemed to us to be unbelievable wages. So as the water nibbled away at our land, the war nibbled away at our souls. We were lucky, though. In the Bay we could still work without fear. Fishermen of the Atlantic coast were being stalked by submarines. Some were killed, though we, like the rest of the country, were kept ignorant of those bodies that washed ashore just a few miles to the east of us.
Our first war deaths did not come until the fall of 1943, but then there were three at once when three island boys who had signed aboard the same ship were lost off a tiny island in the South Pacific that none of us had ever heard of before.
I did not pray anymore. I had even stopped going to church. At first I thought my parents would put up a fight when one Sunday morning I just didn’t come back from the crab house in time for church. My grandmother lit into me at suppertime, but to my surprise my father quietly took my part. I was old enough, he said, to decide for myself. When she launched into prophecies of eternal damnation, he told her that God was my judge, not they. He meant it as a kindness, for how could he know that God had judged me before I was born and had cast me out before I took my first breath? I did not miss church, but sometimes I wished I might pray. I wanted, oddly enough, to pray for Call. I was so afraid he might die in some alien ocean thousands of miles from home.
If I was being prayed for mightily at Wednesday night prayer meetings, I was not told of it. I suppose people were a little afraid of me. I must have been a strange sight, always dressed in men’s work clothes, my hands as rough and weathered as the sides of the crab house where I worked.
It was the last week in November when the first northwest blow of winter sent the egg-laden sooks rushing toward Virginia and the Jimmies deep under the Chesapeake mud. My father took a few days off to shoot duck, and then put the culling board back on the Portia Sue and headed out for oysters. One week in school that fall had been enough for me and one week alone on the oyster beds was enough for him. We hardly discussed it. I just got up at two Monday morning, dressed as warmly as I could with a change of clothes in a gunny-sack. We ate breakfast together, my mother serving us. No one said anything about my not being a man—maybe they’d forgotten.
I suppose if I were to try to stick a pin through that most elusive spot “the happiest days of my life,” that strange winter on the Portia Sue with my father would have to be indicated. I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part of it was the discoveries—who would have believed that my father sang while tonging? My quiet, unassuming father, whose voice could hardly be heard in church, stood there in his oilskins, his rubber-gloved hands on his tongs, and sang to the oysters. It was a wonderful sound, deep and pure. He knew the Methodist hymnbook by heart. “The crabs now, they don’t crave music, but oysters,” he explained shyly, “there’s nothing they favor more than a purty tune.” And he would serenade the oysters of Chesapeake Bay with the hymns the brothers Wesley had written to bring sinners to repentance and praise. Part of my deep contentment was due, I’m sure, to being with my father, but part, too, was that I was no longer fighting. My sister was gone, my grandmother a fleeting Sunday apparition, and God, if not dead, far removed from my concern.
It was work that did this for me. I had never had work before that sucked from me every breath, every thought, every trace of energy.
“I wish,” said my father one night as we were eating our meager supper in the cabin, “I wish you could do a little studying of a night. You know, keep up your schooling.”
We both glanced automatically at the kerosene lamp, which was more smell than light. “I’d be too tired,” I said.
“I reckon.”
