Jacob Have I Loved (2 page)

I
f my father had not gone to France in 1918 and collected a hip full of German shrapnel, Caroline and I would never have been born. As it was, he did go to war, and when he returned, his childhood sweetheart had married someone else. He worked on other men's boats as strenuously as his slowly healing body would let him, eking out a meager living for himself and his widowed mother. It was almost ten years before he was strong enough to buy a boat of his own and go after crabs and oysters like a true Rass waterman.

One fall, before he had regained his full strength, a young woman came to teach in the island school (three classrooms plus a gymnasium of sorts), and, somehow, though I was never able to understand it fully, the elegant little schoolmistress fell in love
with my large, red-faced, game-legged father, and they were married.

What my father needed more than a wife was sons. On Rass, sons represented wealth and security. What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone's attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself.

When my mother and grandmother told the story of our births, it was mostly of how Caroline had refused to breathe. How the midwife smacked and prayed and cajoled the tiny chest to move. How the cry of joy went up at the first weak wail—“no louder than a kitten's mew.”

“But where was I?” I once asked. “When everyone was working over Caroline, where was I?”

A cloud passed across my mother's eyes, and I knew that she could not remember. “In the basket,” she said. “Grandma bathed you and dressed you and put you in the basket.”

“Did you, Grandma?”

“How should I know?” she snapped. “It was a long time ago.”

I felt cold all over, as though I was the newborn infant a second time, cast aside and forgotten.

Ten days after our birth, despite the winter wind and a threat of being iced in, my mother took Caroline on the ferry to the hospital in Crisfield. My father had no money for doctors and hospitals, but my mother was determined. Caroline was so tiny, so fragile, she must be given every chance of life. My mother's father was alive in those days. He may have paid the bill. I've never known. What I do know is that my mother went eight or ten times each day to the hospital to nurse Caroline, believing that the milk of a loving mother would supply a healing power that even doctors could not.

But what of me? “Who took care of me while you were gone?” The story always left the other twin, the stronger twin, washed and dressed and lying in a basket. Clean and cold and motherless.

Again the vague look and smile. “Your father was here and your grandmother.”

“Was I a good baby, Grandma?”

“No worse than most, I reckon.”

“What did I do, Grandma? Tell me about when I was a baby.”

“How can I remember? It's been a long time.”

My mother, seeing my distress, said, “You were a good baby, Louise. You never gave us a minute's worry.” She meant it to comfort me, but it only distressed me further. Shouldn't I have been at least a minute's worry? Wasn't it all the months of worry that had made Caroline's life so dear to them all?

When Caroline and I were two months old, my mother brought her back to the island. By then I had grown fat on tinned milk formula. Caroline continued at my mother's breast for another twelve months. There is a rare snapshot of the two of us sitting on the front stoop the summer we were a year and a half old. Caroline is tiny and exquisite, her blonde curls framing a face that is glowing with laughter, her arms outstretched to whoever is taking the picture. I am hunched there like a fat dark shadow, my eyes cut sideways toward Caroline, thumb in mouth, the pudgy hand covering most of my face.

The next winter we both had whooping cough. My mother thinks that I was sick enough to have a croup tent set up. But everyone remembers that Captain Billy got the ferry out at 2:00
A.M
. to rush Caroline and my mother to the hospital.

We went that way through all the old childhood
diseases except for chicken pox. We both had a heavy case of that, but only I still sport the scars. That mark on the bridge of my nose is a chicken pox scar. It was more noticeable when I was thirteen than it is now. Once my father referred to me teasingly as “Old Scarface” and looked perfectly bewildered when I burst into tears.

I suppose my father was used to treating me with a certain roughness, not quite as he would have treated a son, but certainly differently from the way he treated Caroline. My father, like nearly every man on our island, was a waterman. This meant that six days a week, long before dawn he was in his boat. From November to March, he was tonging for oysters, and from late April into the fall, he was crabbing. There are few jobs in this world more physically demanding than the work of those men who choose to follow the water. For one slightly lame man alone on a boat, the work was more than doubled. He needed a son and I would have given anything to be that son, but on Rass in those days, men's work and women's work were sharply divided, and a waterman's boat was not the place for a girl.

When I was six my father taught me how to pole a skiff so I could net crabs in the eelgrass near the
shore. That was my consolation for not being allowed to go aboard the
Portia Sue
as his hand. As pleased as I was to have my own little skiff, it didn't make up for his refusal to take me on his boat. I kept praying to turn into a boy, I loved my father's boat with such a passion. He had named it after my mother's favorite character from Shakespeare to please her, but he had insisted on the Sue. My mother's name is Susan. In all likelihood he was the only waterman on the Chesapeake Bay whose boat was named for a woman lawyer out of Shakespeare.

My father was not educated in the sense that my mother was. He had dropped out of the island school at twelve to follow the water. I think he would have taken easily to books, but he came home at night too tired to read. I can remember my mother sometimes reading aloud to him. He would sit in his chair, his head back, his eyes closed, but he wasn't asleep. As a child, I always suspected he was imagining. Perhaps he was.

Although our house was one of the smaller of the forty or so houses on the island, for several years we owned the only piano. It came to us on the ferry after my mainland grandfather died. I think Caroline and I were about four when it arrived. She
says she remembers meeting it at the dock and following while six men helped my father roll it on a dolly to our house, for there were no trucks or cars on the island.

Caroline also says that she began at once to pick out tunes by ear and make up songs for herself. It may be true. I can hardly recall a time when Caroline was not playing the piano well enough to accompany herself while she sang.

My mother not being an islander and the islanders not being acquainted with pianos, no one realized at the beginning the effect of damp salt air on the instrument. Within a few weeks it was lugubriously out of tune. My inventive mother solved this problem by going to the mainland and finding a Crisfield piano tuner who could also give lessons. He came by ferry once a month and taught a half-dozen island youngsters, including Caroline and me, on our piano. During the Depression he was glad to get the extra work. For food, a night's lodging, and the use of our piano, he tuned it and gave Caroline and me free lessons. The rest, children of the island's slightly more affluent, paid fifty cents a lesson. During the month each paid twenty cents a week to practice on our piano. In those days, an
extra eighty cents a week was a princely sum.

I was no better or worse than most. We all seemed to get as far as “Country Gardens” and stay there. Caroline, on the other hand, was playing Chopin by the time she was nine. Sometimes people would stand outside the house just to listen while she practiced. Whenever I am tempted to dismiss the poor or uneducated for their vulgar tastes, I see the face of old Auntie Braxton, as she stands stock still in front of our picket fence, lips parted to reveal her almost toothless gums, eyes shining, drinking in a polonaise as though it were heavenly nourishment.

By the time we were ten, it became apparent, though, that Caroline's true gift was her voice. She had always been able to sing clearly and in tune, but the older she grew, the lovelier the tune became. The mainland county schoolboard, which managed the island school more by neglect than anything else, suddenly, and without explanation, sent the school a piano the year Caroline and I were in the fifth grade, and the next year, by what could only have been the happiest of coincidences, the new teacher appointed as half of the high school staff was a young man who not only knew how to play a piano but had the talent and strength of will to
organize a chorus. Caroline was, of course, his inspiration and focal point. There was little to entertain the island youth, so we sang. And because we sang every day and Mr. Rice was a gifted teacher, we sang surprisingly well for children who had known little music in their lives.

We went to a contest on the mainland the spring we were thirteen and might have won except that when the judges realized our chief soloist was not yet in high school, we were disqualified. Mr. Rice was furious, but we children figured that the mainland schools were too embarrassed to be beaten out by islanders and so made up a rule to save their faces.

Sometime before that Mr. Rice had persuaded my parents that Caroline should have voice lessons. At first they refused, not because of the time and effort it would take to get Caroline to the mainland every Saturday, but because there was no money. But Mr. Rice was determined. He took Caroline to the college in Salisbury and had her sing for the head of the music department. Not only did the man agree to take Caroline on as a private pupil, he waived the fee. Even then the two round-trip tickets on the ferry plus the taxi fare to Salisbury put an
unbelievable strain on the weekly budget, but Caroline is the kind of person other people sacrifice for as a matter of course.

I was proud of my sister, but that year, something began to rankle beneath the pride. Life begins to turn upside down at thirteen. I know that now. But at the time I thought the blame for my unhappiness must be fixed—on Caroline, on my grandmother, on my mother, even on myself. Soon I was able to blame the war.

E
ven I who read
Time
magazine from cover to cover every week was unprepared for Pearl Harbor. The machinations of European powers and the funny mustached German dictator were as remote to our island in the fall of 1941 as
Silas Marner
, which sapped our energies through eighth-grade English.

There were hints, but at the time I didn't make sense of them: Mr. Rice's great concern for “peace on earth” as we began at Thanksgiving to prepare for our Christmas concert; overhearing a partial conversation between my parents in which my father pronounced himself “useless,” to which my mother replied, “Thank the Lord.”

It was not a phrase my mother often used, but it was a true island expression. Rass had lived in the
fear and mercy of the Lord since the early nineteenth century, when Joshua Thomas, “The Parson of the Islands,” won every man, woman, and child of us to Methodism. Old Joshua's stamp remained upon us—Sunday school and Sunday service morning and evening, and on Wednesday night prayer meeting where the more fervent would stand to witness to the Lord's mercies of the preceding week and all the sick and straying would be held up in prayer before the Throne of Grace.

We kept the Sabbath. That meant no work, no radio, no fun on Sunday. But for some reason my parents were out on the Sunday afternoon that was December 7, my grandmother was snoring loudly from her bed, and Caroline was reading the deadly dull Sunday school paper—our only permitted reading on the Sabbath other than the Bible itself. So I, bored almost to madness, had wandered into the living room and turned on the radio, very low so that no one could hear, and pressed my ear against the speaker.

“The Japanese in a predawn surprise attack have destroyed the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. I repeat. The White House has confirmed that the Japanese…”

I knew by the chill that went through my body that it meant war. All my magazine reading and overheard remarks fell at once into a grotesque but understandable pattern. I rushed up to our room where Caroline, still innocent and golden, lay stomach down on her bed reading.

“Caroline!”

She didn't even look up. “Caroline!” I ripped the paper from under her hands. “The Japanese have invaded America!”

“Oh, Wheeze, for pity sake.” And hardly looking up, she grabbed for her paper. I was used to her ignoring me, but this time I would not allow it. I snatched her arm and dragged her off her bed and down the stairs to the radio. I turned the volume up full. The fact that the Japanese had attacked Hawaii rather than invaded the continental United States was a distinction that neither of us bothered to quibble over. She, like me, was totally caught by the tone of fear that even the smooth baritone of the announcer's voice could not conceal. Caroline's eyes went wide, and, as we listened, she did something she had never done before. She took my hand. We stood there, squeezing each other's hand to the point of pain.

That is how our parents found us. There was no remonstrance for having broken the Fourth Commandment. The crime of the Japanese erased all lesser sinning. The four of us huddled together before the radio set. It was one of those pointed ones that remind you of a brown wood church, with long oval windows over a cloth-covered speaker.

At six, Grandma woke, hungry and petulant. No one had given any thought to food. How could one think of supper when the world had just gone up in flames? Finally, my mother went to the kitchen and made plates of cold meat and leftover potato salad, which she brought to the three of us hunched about the set. She even brought coffee for us all. Grandma insisted on being served properly at the table. Caroline and I had never drunk coffee in our lives, and the fact that our mother served us coffee that night made us both realize that our secure, ordinary world was forever in the past.

Just as I was about to take my first solemn sip, the announcer said, “We pause, now, for station identification.” I nearly choked. The world had indeed gone mad.

Within a few days we learned that Mr. Rice had volunteered for the army and would be leaving for
the war soon after Christmas. In chorus one morning the irony of celebrating the birth of the Prince of Peace suddenly seemed too much. I raised my hand.

“Yes, Louise?”

“Mr. Rice,” I said, standing and dramatically darkening my voice to what I imagined to be the proper tone for mourning, “Mr. Rice, I have a proposal to make.” There were a few snickers at my choice of words, but I ignored them. “I feel, sir, that under the circumstances, we should cancel Christmas.”

Mr. Rice's right eyebrow shot up. “Do you want to explain that, Louise?”

“How,” I asked, my glance sweeping about to catch the amused looks of the others, “how dare we celebrate while around the world thousands are suffering and dying?” Caroline was staring down at her desk, her cheeks red.

Mr. Rice cleared his throat. “Thousands were suffering and dying when Christ was born, Louise.” He was clearly discomfited by my behavior. I was sorry now that I had begun but was in too deeply to retreat.

“Yes,” I agreed grandly. “But the world has not
seen, neither has it heard, such a tragic turn of events as we face in this our time.”

Tiny little one-syllable explosions went off about the room like a string of Chinese firecrackers. Mr. Rice looked stern.

My face was burning. I'm not sure whether I was more embarrassed by the sound of my own voice or the snorts of my schoolmates. I sat down, my whole body aflame. The snorts broke into open laughter. Mr. Rice tapped his baton on his music stand to restore order. I thought he might try to explain what I had meant, would try in some way to mediate for me, but he said only, “Now then, let's try it once more from the beginning—”

“God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,” sang everyone except me. I was afraid if I opened my mouth, I might let go the enormous sob that was lurking there, right at the top of my throat.

It was nearly dark when school got out that afternoon. I rushed out before anyone could catch up with me and walked, not home, but across the length of the marsh on the one high path to the very southern tip of the island. The mud had a frozen brown crust and the cordgrass was weighed down by ice. The wind cut mercilessly across the barren end
of Rass, but the hot shame and indignation inside me made me forget the wind as I walked. I was right. I knew I was right, so why had they all laughed? And why had Mr. Rice let them? He hadn't even tried to explain what I meant to the others. It was only when I came to the end of the path and sat down upon a giant stump of driftwood and stared at the sickly winter moon waveringly reflected on the black water that I realized how cold I was and began to cry.

I should not forget that it was Caroline who came and found me there. Sitting on the stump, my back to the swamp and the village, I was crying aloud, so that I did not even hear the crunch of her galoshes.

“Wheeze.”

I jerked around, angry to be found out.

“It's past time for your supper,” she said.

“I'm not hungry.”

“Oh, Wheeze,” she said. “It's too cold to stay out here.”

“I'm not coming back. I'm running away.”

“Well, you can't run away tonight,” she said. “There's no ferry until tomorrow morning. You might as well come in and have supper and get warm.”

That was Caroline. I would hope for tears and
pleadings. She offered facts. But they were facts I couldn't argue with. It would be next to impossible to run away in a skiff at any time of year. I sighed, wiped my face on the back of my hand, and rose to follow her. Even though I could have walked the path blindfolded, I felt foolishly grateful for the homely bobbing comfort of her flashlight.

The watermen of Rass had their own time system. Four-thirty was suppertime winter and summer. So when Caroline and I walked in, our parents and grandmother were already eating. I expected a reprimand from my father or a tongue-lashing from my grandmother, but to my relief they simply nodded as we came in. Mother got up to bring us some hot food from the stove, which she put before us when we had washed and sat down. Caroline must have told them what had happened at school. I was torn between gratitude that they should sympathize and anger that they should know.

The school concert was Saturday night. Sunday was the only day the men did not get up before dawn, and therefore Saturday night was the only night anyone of the island would consider spending in a frivolous manner. I didn't want to go, but it would have been harder to stay away and imagine
what people were saying about me than to go and face them.

The boys had helped Mr. Rice rig up footlights, really a row of naked bulbs behind reflectors cut from tin cans, but they gave the tiny stage at the end of the gymnasium a magical distance from the audience. As I stood there on the stage floor in front of the risers, I could barely make out the familiar features of my parents in the center of the second row of chairs. I felt as if those of us on the stage were floating in another layer of the world, removed from those below. When I squinted my eyes, the people all blurred like a film that has jumped the sprockets and is racing untended through the machine. I think I sang most of the program with my eyes squinted. It was a very comforting feeling thus to remove myself from the world I imagined was laughing at me.

Betty Jean Boyd sang the solo for “O Holy Night,” and I hardly flinched when she went flat on the first “shining.” Betty Jean was considered to have a lovely voice. In any other generation on Rass she would have been worshiped for it, flat as it was, but in my day on Rass, everyone had heard Caroline sing. No one should have had to bear that comparison. Poor
Betty Jean. I was puzzled that Mr. Rice should give her this solo. Caroline had sung it last year. Everyone would remember. But this year Mr. Rice had chosen a different solo for Caroline, a very simple one. I had been angry the first time he had sung it over for us. Caroline's voice, after all, was our school treasure. Why had he given the showy song to Betty Jean and a strange thin melody to Caroline?

Now Mr. Rice left the piano and stood before us, his arms tense, his long fingers slightly curved. His dark eyes traveled back and forth, willing every eye to meet his. There were a few polite coughs from the shadowy darkness behind him. It was time. In just a few seconds it would begin. I didn't dare to shift my gaze from Mr. Rice's face to Caroline's head, two rows behind and to the right of me in the back row, but my stomach knotted for her.

Mr. Rice's hands went down, and from the center of the back row Caroline's voice came suddenly like a single beam of light across the darkness.

It was a lonely, lonely sound, but so clear, so beautiful that I tightened my arms against my sides to keep from shaking, perhaps shattering. Then we were all singing, better than we had all night, better than we ever had, suddenly judged, damned, and purged in Caroline's light.

She sang once more by herself, repeating the words of the first verse so quietly that I knew surely I would shatter when she went up effortlessly, sweetly, and, oh, so softly, to the high G, holding it just a few seconds longer than humanly possible and then returning to the last few notes and to silence.

A sharp report of applause suddenly rattled the room like gunfire. I jumped, first startled by the sound and then angered. I looked from the dark noisy blur to Mr. Rice, but he was already turning to take a bow. He motioned Caroline to step down and come forward, which she did. And when she turned to go back to her place, I was disgusted to see her dimpled and smiling. She was pleased with herself. It was the same expression she wore when she had thoroughly trounced me in checkers.

When we left the gymnasium, the stars were so bright, they pulled me up into the sky like powerful magnets. I walked, my head back, my own nearly
flat chest pressed up against the bosom of heaven, dizzied by the winking brilliance of the night. “I wonder as I wander…”

Perhaps I would have drowned in wonder if Caroline, walking ahead with my parents, had not turned and called my name sharply. “Wheeze, you better watch out walking that way,” she said. “You're likely to break your neck.” She had now moved beyond my parents in the narrow street and was walking backward, the better, I suppose, to observe me.

“Better watch out yourself,” I snapped, annoyed and embarrassed to be so yanked away from the stars. I realized suddenly how cold the wind had become. She laughed merrily and, still walking backward, doubled her speed. She was not likely to run into anything. She never stumbled or bumped into things. That, she seemed to be saying, was what I did—often enough for both of us.

Grandma was prone to arthritis and did not go out on a winter's night, even to prayer meeting. So once home, we had to tell her all about the concert. Caroline did most of the talking, singing a snatch of this or that to remind Grandma of a carol she claimed never to have heard before.

“Did you sing the Holy Night one again?”

“No, Grandma, remember, I told you Betty Jean Boyd was doing that this year.”

“Why was that? She can't half sing like you can.”

“Caroline sang a different one this year, Mother.” My mother was making cocoa for us and calling in a word here and there from the kitchen. “Betty Jean sounded very sweet.”

Caroline gave me a look and snorted out loud. I knew she was expecting me to contradict Momma, but I wasn't going to. If Caroline wanted to be snobbish about Betty Jean, she could do it on her own.

Caroline had begun to imitate Betty Jean's singing of “O Holy Night.” It was almost perfect, just a fraction flatter and shakier than Betty Jean's voice had been, the o's and ah's parodies of Betty Jean's pretentious ones. She ended the performance with a mournful shriek more than a little off pitch and looked around, grinning for her family's approval.