What was left of the land was now all marsh, but the house, though neglected, had survived. We children had always regarded it as haunted. There were tales that Captain Wallace’s ghost appeared to chase off intruders. It took me years to figure out that the purpose of the ghost story was to keep young courting couples from wandering down the path to the old Wallace place and taking advantage of the privacy.
One day I had talked Call into exploring the house with me, but just as we stepped onto the porch, a huge orange-colored tomcat came shrieking out a broken window at us. It was the only time in our lives that Call outran me. We sat gasping for breath on my front stoop. One part of my mind was saying that it had only been one of Auntie Braxton’s cats. She was said to keep sixteen, and anyone who had ever been as close as her front door would have sworn by the smell that there were at least that many and more. The other part of my mind was reluctant to let it go as simply as that.
“Have you ever heard,” I asked, “have you ever heard that ghosts will take an animal form when they are angry?” Now that my breath was back I let my voice glide out in a dreamy way.
Call jerked around to look me in the face. “No!” he said.
“I was reading this book,” I began to improvise (of course, I’d never seen any such book). “In this book, this scientist investigated places where ghosts were supposed to be. He started out saying that there was no such thing as ghosts, but being a scientist he had to admit finally that he couldn’t explain certain things any other way.”
“What things?”
“Oh—” I thought fast while drawing out the syllable. “Oh—certain furry beasts that took on the personality of a dead person.”
Call was clearly shaken. “What do you mean?”
“Well, for instance, suppose old Captain Wallace when he was alive didn’t want any visitors.”
“He didn’t.” Call said darkly. “My grandma told me. After Hiram left, they lived all by themselves. Never spoke to nobody hardly.”
“See?”
“See what?”
“We were fixing to visit him without an invitation,” I whispered. “He was yelling at us and chasing us away.”
Call’s eyes were the size of clam shells. “You’re making that up,” he said. But I could tell that he believed every word of it.
“Only one way to be sure,” I said.
“How you mean?”
I leaned close and whispered again. “Go back and see what happens.”
He jumped to his feet. “Suppertime!” He started out the yard.
I had done my work too well. I was never able to persuade Call to return to that old empty house with me, and somehow, I was never quite able to go there alone.
Now that the strange old man was there, the house was no longer empty, and the whole island was trying to unravel the mystery. All the old people agreed that Hiram Wallace was, in his youth, the hope of every island maiden’s heart, but that he had left Rass with his father’s money and blessing to go to college. It was an unusual enough occurrence that even someone from our island who had gone to college fifty years ago was remembered for it. People also recalled, though this point was discussed at considerable length, that he had returned home without a degree, and that he had, in some undefinable way, changed. He had never been too sociable before he left, but he was positively silent when he returned. This only made the hearts of the young girls beat the harder, and no one had suspected that anything was wrong with him until the day of the storm.
The Bay is famous for its sudden summer storms. Before they can read their school primers, watermen learn how to read the sky and to head for the safety of a cove at the first glimmer of trouble. But the Bay is wide, and sometimes safety is too far away. In the old days, the watermen would lower their sails and use them as tents to protect themselves from the rain.
This is the story that the old people told: Captain Wallace and his son, Hiram, had let down their sails and were waiting out the storm. The lightning was so bright and near that it seemed to flash through the heavy canvas of the sail, the roaring and cracking enough to wake the dead sleeping in the depths of the water. Now, a man who is not afraid at a time like this is a man without enough sense to follow the water. But to fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another. This, Call’s grandmother said, was what Hiram Wallace had done: terrified that the lightning would strike the tall mast of his father’s skipjack, he had rushed out from under his sail cover, taken an ax, and chopped the mast to the level of the deck. After the storm passed, they were sighted drifting mastless on the Bay and were towed home by an obliging neighbor. When it became apparent that the mast had been chopped down, rather than felled by lightning, Hiram Wallace became the butt of all the watermen’s jokes. Not long after, he left the island for good….
Unless, of course, the strong old man rebuilding the Wallace house was the handsome young coward who had left nearly fifty years before. He never said he was, but then again, he never said he wasn’t. Some of the islanders thought a delegation should be sent to ask the old man straight out who he was, for if he was not Hiram Wallace, what right did he have taking over the Wallace property? The delegation was never sent. April was nearly over. The one slow month of the watermen’s year was coming to an end. There was a flurry of overhauling and painting and mending to be done. Crabs were moving and the men had to be ready to go after them.
“I bet he isn’t Hiram Wallace,” I said to Call one day in early May.
“Why not?”
“Why would a man come to Rass in the middle of a war?”
“Because he’s old and has nowhere else to go.”
“Oh, Call. Think. Why would a person come to the Bay right now of all times?”
“Because he’s old—”
“The Bay is full of warships from Norfolk.”