I would search the Scriptures, but not for enlighten
ment or instruction. I was looking for some tiny shred of evidence that I was not to be eternally damned for hating my sister. Repent and be saved! But as fast as I would repent, resolving never again to hate, some demon would slip into my soul, tug at the corner, and whisper, “See the look on your mother’s face as she listens to Caroline practice? Has she ever looked at you that way?” And I would know she hadn’t.
Only on the water was there peace. When school let out in the middle of May, I began getting up long before dawn to go crabbing. Call went along, somewhat grudgingly, because I was unwilling to explain my great zeal for work. I had formulated a plan for escape. I was going to double my crab catch and keep half the money for myself, turning over to my mother the usual amount. My half I would save until I had enough to send myself to boarding school in Crisfield. On Smith Island to the south of us there was no high school, not even the pretense of one that we had on Rass. The state, therefore, sent any Smith Islanders who continued school after the elementary level to a boarding school in Crisfield. The prices were not out of sight. Too high, it was true, for an island family without state aid to contemplate, but low enough for me to dream and work toward. It seemed to me that if I could get off the island, I would be free from hate and guilt and damnation, even, perhaps, from God himself.
I was too clever to pin all my hopes on crabs. Crabs are fickle creatures. They always know when you need them too much and pick precisely that season to make themselves scarce. I must give the impression, therefore, despite my early risings, that I didn’t much care how lucky we were. When we were on the water, poling through the eelgrass, I took pains to say at just about dawn, “This is the nicest time of day, isn’t it, Call? Who cares if the crabs are here or not? Let’s just relax and enjoy ourselves.”
Call would give me a look that indicated that I had lost my mind, but he was smart enough not to think it out loud. I can’t swear that I fooled the crabs, but our catches were good that summer. Still, I wasn’t going to count too heavily on crabs. I began casting about for other ways to make money.
I found what seemed a sure thing in the back of a Captain Marvel comic book in Kellam’s store. I even squandered a dime of my hard-earned cash to buy the book, which I hid with my other treasures in the underwear drawer.
WANTED: Song Lyrics
Cash for your poems!
Cash. That was a word to make the creative juices flow. The fact that most of the poetry I’d ever read came off tombstones didn’t stop me. I listened to the radio, didn’t I?
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
There’ll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, when the world is free.
Any idiot could figure it out. Two rhyming lines, stuffed with romance, a third that neither rhymes nor makes sense right away, two more romantic ones, then the third that also rhymes with the earlier unrhymed one and sort of makes sense.
When the gulls fly over the Bay
They cry that you’re far away.
But we didn’t part.
Though you’re far across the sea,
You’re not far away to me,
You’re in my heart.
It had all the elements—romance, sadness, an allusion to the war, and faithful love. I fancied myself the perfect lyricist—romantic, yet knowledgeable.
I tried it out on Call in the boat one day.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The girl’s boyfriend is away at war.”
“Then why are the gulls crying? Why should they care?”
“They don’t really care. In poems you can’t say plain out what you mean.”
“Why not?”
“Then it’s not poetry anymore.”