I looked upon this announcement with enormous relief as the end of any sacrifice I would ever be asked to make for Caroline. My parents hoped it meant that she could take a rest and come home for the summer, but she wrote at the last minute to say that she had been offered a chance to go to summer school at Peabody—an opportunity her voice teacher felt she must not pass up. I’m sure my parents were disappointed, but I was not. The war was coming quickly to a close. Soon, I felt sure, Call would be back.
Exactly what Call’s return would mean to me, I could not say. I had not despised my life of the past two years, but I began to realize that it had been a time of hibernation, for I felt stirrings I had almost forgotten. Perhaps when Call came home—perhaps—well, at the very least when he came I could turn over my tasks to him. My father would be overjoyed to have a man to help him. And I—what was it I wanted? I could leave the island, if I wished. I could see the mountains. I could even take a job in Washington or Baltimore if I wanted to. If I chose to leave—there was something cold about the idea, but I shook it away.
I began to cream my hands each night, sloshing lotion all over them and sleeping in a pair of my mother’s worn white cotton gloves—perhaps the pair she was married in. Is that possible? It was stupid, I decided, to resign myself to being another Auntie Braxton. I was young and able, as my exams had proved. Without God, or a man, I could still conquer a small corner of the world—if I wanted to.
My hands stubbornly refused to be softened. But I was determined not to give up on them this time.
Something was happening inside of Grandma, too. Suddenly that summer she decided that my mother was the woman who had stolen her husband. One afternoon I came in for supper from the crab house to find Momma trying to bake bread. I say trying, because it was a sweltering August day, which was hard enough to fight on the island, but as Momma worked, her face shining with sweat, her hair plastered against her head, Grandma was reading aloud to her, in a voice that could be heard from the street, the section in Proverbs chapter six entitled, “The mischiefs of whoredom.”
“‘Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?’” my grandmother was crying out as I came into the back door. We were used to Grandma reading the Bible to us, but the selections were not usually quite so purple. I didn’t even understand what it was all about until Grandma, seeing that I had come in, said, “Tell that viperish adulteress to listen to God’s Word!” And proceeded to read on into chapter seven, which details the seduction of a young man by a “strange woman.”
I looked down at my poor mother, struggling to pull several loaves of bread out of the oven. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Susan Bradshaw as a scarlet woman? It’s a joke, get it? I began banging pots and pans, more to cover my giggles than to help with supper.
I looked up to see my father in the front doorway. He seemed to be waiting there, taking in the scene, before he determined what his part should be.
Grandma had not seen him. She stumbled on through the passage. “‘He goeth after her straightway, as an ox to the slaughter…’”
Without even removing his boots, my father walked straight across the living room to the kitchen and, pretending not to care who watched, kissed my mother on her neck where a tendril of hair had pulled loose from her bun. I blushed despite myself, but he didn’t seem to notice me. He whispered something into her ear. She gave a wry grin.
“‘Till a dart strike through his liver…’”
“Liver?” My father mouthed the word in mock horror. Then he turned to Grandma, all teasing dropped. “Mother. I think your supper is on the table.”
She seemed a little startled by his voice, but she came to the table determined to finish the terrible passage, yet not willing to miss her supper to do so. “‘Her house is the way to hell—’” My father took the Bible gently from her hands and put it on a bookshelf above her head.
She twisted away from him like a startled child, but he took her arm and led her to the table and held her chair for her. The gesture seemed to satisfy her. She directed a triumphant look at my mother and then set herself with great energy to her food.
My father smiled across the table at my mother. She pushed her wet hair off her face and smiled back. I turned away from the sight. Don’t look at each other like that. Grandma might see you. But was it only the fear of Grandma’s foolish jealousies that made me want to weep?
It was, ironically, the news of Hiroshima that made our lives easier. My grandmother, catching somehow the ultimate terror that the bomb promised, turned from adultery to Armageddon. We were all admonished to fight the whore of Babylon, who was somehow identified in Grandma’s mind with the pope of the Roman Catholic Church, and repeatedly warned to prepare to meet our God. A rapid scurrying through her well-worn Bible and she had located several passages to shake over our heads—telling us of the sun turning to darkness and the moon to blood. How could she know that the Day of the Lord’s Anger was an almost welcome relief from her accusations of lust and adultery? There never had been any Catholics on Rass, and the end of all things was, after all, almost unimaginable, and therefore had far less power to shake one’s core.
We did not take a holiday when peace was declared. There were still crabs moving in the Bay and peeling in the floats. But we ate our supper with a special delight. Toward the end of the meal, my father, turning to me as though peace had brought with it some great change to our meager fortunes, said, “Well, Louise, what will you do now?”
“Do?” Was he trying to get rid of me?
“Yes,” he said. “You’re a young woman now. I can’t keep you on as a hand much longer.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “I like the water.”
“I mind,” he said quietly. “But I’m grateful to ha
ve had you with me.”
“When Call comes back,” my mother said as my heart fluttered at the words, “when Call comes back he could lend a hand and you could take a trip. Wouldn’t you like that?”
A trip. I’d never been farther than Salisbury.
“You might go to New York and see Caroline.” She was getting excited for me.
“Maybe,” I said. I wouldn’t hurt her by saying that I had no desire to see either New York or my sister. There was that old dream of mountains. Maybe I would go far enough to see a mountain.
At the tail end of the crab season Call came home. I was still at the crab house, but bored with lack of crabs to watch and pack, when suddenly the light from the doorway was blocked. The body of a large man in uniform was filling the door. There was a bass laugh that sounded vaguely familiar and a voice. “Crabby as ever, I see,” it said. And then, “Get it?”
“Call!” I jumped, nearly tripping over a stack of packing boxes. He was holding out both his arms, inviting an embrace, but I was suddenly shy. “Oh, my blessed, Call. You done growed up,” I said to cover my confusion.
“That’s what the navy promised,” he said.
I was aware of his clean, masculine smell and at the same time of the smell of salt water and crab, which was my only perfume. I wiped my hands on my pants. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.