Diann Ducharme (17 page)

“Listen, Pap, we both know you can’t fish forever. You get tireder by the day—heck, by the
hour
. I got a job that can support us both. You can finally rest, lay abed! Sounds good enough to me!”

“I thought I raised you up better ’n that, you ungrateful boy. But I see I failed you in your sense of fam’ly. Your ma must be wreaking some kind of pandemony in heaven, to hear you talk so to me.”

Duffy heard his agitation and came to lie down next to him. Pap sat rubbing her ears and muttering under his breath, “First he starts learning his letters … hobnobbing with town folk, thinking better of himself … Now he’s gonna leave his old pap, Duff.”

He brought his head up quick and said right loud, “Well, here it is—if I can’t fish, I’ll die. How’s that? I’ll lay around this old shack some poor sample of a man, and die dreaming of the water, his own flesh and blood having left him for a godless gov’ment job, no less. Just like every other young man out here, thinks he’s gonna make something of himself. What they don’t know. Suck out their souls, more like it.”

Duffy barked at me, two short, angry yips. “Pap, I have to do this, for both of us. Now, you’ll be fine. Jacob’s a good man, and a hard worker. I don’t want you to kill yourself off over this.”

I looked to our house, a one-room cabin made of lopsided pieces of broken wood, washed ashore from some hapless ship. The roof—if you could rightly call it that—leaked in about a hundred places when the littlest drop of rain came. We slumbered on pieces of old ticking stuffed with seaweed, and owned just a few burnt-up
pots and pans, left over from Ma’s long days of working over a cook fire.

It was hard to admit, since we worked so damned hard every day, but we barely scraped by, never knowing what the winds of fortune were going to bring. It was a tough life, and I wanted something better. And not even my pap was going to keep me from trying to raise myself up.

“Pap, I aim to start this coming autumn.”

It just about killed me how quiet Pap was on the boat. I kept trying to make conversation about this and that, but he’d have none of it. Just sat slouched over, smoking on his pipe, and made me stake all the nets, even though my arms still felt like stewed dumplings in sauce. The sun came out awful hot, too, so that the back of my neck burned fierce and my whole body turned to runny clabber by the afternoon.

To make the time pass, I thought on Abby, and how I was to see her again, after that bad turn of events the other day. How Jacob had told me what Abby had said yesterday, that she’d “be waiting on me.” I made him repeat what she had said, word for exact word, ’til his eyes rolled back in his head. I featured those words written in gold writing on a piece of Abby’s nice paper, they sounded so good to me.

I had been kicking myself for letting my temper get the best of me that day we argued, and it gave me no end of grief during my fitful recuperation on my flimsy pallet. Her flinty green eyes and red hair came a-blowing into my dreams full of tall waves and drowning folks reaching for the sky.

It wasn’t like me to get so angry, ’specially not at a lady like Abby.
There was just something about her that got my blood pumping. I wanted to make her sit up and think. I wanted her to know that she was pure iron underneath that puffed-up outer layer of hers.

She didn’t see it yet. To me, she always looked like she wanted to say more than she ended up saying. Like the truth of her was still inside her, bursting to get out. I just knew she was something special, a pearl in a oyster.

And when I finally got to her cottage later in the day, I saw her there at our learning spot on the porch, all alone and “waiting on me,” I reckoned. And I have to say, it felt real good to be back at that strange house again.

“I thought you’d given up on me,” she said.

Feeling giddy as a forgiven dog with his tail thumping low and his ears back, I fairly ran up the steps. “Well, I still got some learning to do, ain’t that right?”

“Everybody does,” she said, a little smile on her mouth.

Before she could say anything else, I said, “Look, Abby, I had a notion of you that wasn’t right. But I hardly gave you a chance to explain yourself, and that wasn’t nice of me. ’Specially after all you done for me.”

Her eyes danced in the sunlight. “You
were
quick to judge me. The fact that my family owned slaves must have been bothering you for some time, from the sound of it.”

“I just wanted to know you better is all,” I said. “You haven’t been too forthcoming about yourself, and here I am, spilling my guts to you all the time. It ain’t fair.”

“I’m not in the habit of discussing those kinds of things. You just … took me by surprise.”

“I’d think a smart gal like you would want to mull over such notions as racism.”

She took a deep breath and started fiddling with her thumbs. “My
uncle died fighting for the South. He was a good man, Ben. I can’t just disregard everything he died for.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I can’t seem to let him go.”

I looked at her, sitting there with her lower lip wiggling up and down, and I wanted to hug her tight to my body and never let go. She was struggling mightily against some unseen demons in her breast.

“He called me Little Red Reb because I was such a dutiful defender of the cause,” she said. “I liked that he thought of me in that way. I wanted him to be proud of me.”

I bit my cheeks with my back teeth so I wouldn’t grin at the nickname. If she was the little one, then her daddy just had to be Big Red Reb.

She rubbed the cover of
Robinson Crusoe
and said softly, “I would have sent him this very book, but he died before I could do a thing to help ease his pain. I had so many books he might have liked, and now they’re just collecting dust …”

With that, I figured she was set to cry, but she surprised me, for her eyes looked almost happy. She said, “When we first met, I felt superior to you. Me, with my clean clothes and big, important books. I thought those things meant something.” She pounded on the book cover with a little fist and said, “But I’m the ignorant one here. All my education, all those books, didn’t teach me to think with plain common sense. To question the things around me.”

“It ain’t your fault, Abby. It’s what you were born to.”

“I know that. But I still think the same way I always have. I don’t know why, but my mind doesn’t want to think differently. I
like
feeling superior! The other day, with Jacob, I tried to see past the color of his skin, to carry on as if it didn’t matter. But it was still there, his blackness.”

I laughed. “He’ll always be a Negro. Can’t change that.”

She slammed her hand over her heart. “It’s
me
that I’m afraid I can’t change. You were right to be hard on me. And I won’t begrudge you if you don’t want anything to do with me anymore.”

“Aw, you can’t get rid of me that easy, Reb. Sounds to me like some shifting’s gonna take place up there in your brain, so that folks sit on a more even place, all together like.”

Abby sighed and rubbed her forehead with a shaky hand.

“Oh, come on now. Take a look at me, sitting here every afternoon, displaying my ignorance day after day in the company of a pretty gal. You’ve got to know anything’s possible if you just want to work at it.”

She reached across the table then and grabbed my wrist real hard. It was the first time that I had actually felt her. Just like I had thought, her skin was soft as a butterfly wing. But her bones underneath were hard as nails. My whole arm burned up to the shoulder socket. She just lit me up.

But I couldn’t even enjoy the feeling on account I heard someone cough real loud, right close to the window. It gave me pause, wondering if someone was spying on us. Abby must have worried, too, for she let go of my wrist right quick. I started to wonder if I had dreamed the whole thing up.

We sat for a while, shy like, watching a long line of pelicans flap down the shore. After a bit she said, “I let the horse go. I couldn’t feature her pulling our cart around the very land she used to roam free. It just wasn’t right.”

I chuckled at her newfound pluckiness. And I felt such goodness, like the pop of a backbone, thinking on that red pony wandering the beaches free again. I never should have offered her up to begin with. “Your daddy know you did that?”

“No, not yet.” She grinned. Then she pulled out her slate, but after
all that talking there wasn’t much time left for the lesson. Soon enough, though, we got to
Robinson Crusoe
.

Maybe it was just me, but I felt she read the words with a new fire in her voice. She read right loud, too. She was rooting for Friday, I could tell.

Eliza lived close by Pap and me, out in the scrubby wooded flats just a touch south of the Nags Head Hotel, with her mama, her two young brothers, and her old granny. Their diggings was near to as small as ours, but had a real fine view of the sound through an opening in the trees.

Taking the view, I waited on a rotten step for Eliza to freshen up after work at the fishery, where she spent her days mending the seine nets. She was real good with needle and thread—her granny having taught her back when her eyes were good—and was now making regular pay doing what she was good at. I was right proud of her.

But I was starting to sweat with nerves, thinking on what I was about to do to the woman I’d thought to marry someday. I tried to black out the memories I had of Eliza as a youngun, full of grit, with her dark eyes and brown body, running the sand hills and swinging on the treetop grapevines with me.

She always took to playing with the boys, having no desire at all for more feminine accomplishments. We were so alike, looking at Eliza was like looking in a mirror. We guzzled moonshine, snuffed tobacky, swam naked in the ocean, ran away to Roanoke Island and hid in the marshland—we did all that with each other. Now a grown woman, she shot, rode, fished, and managed the boats as good as any strong-armed Banker man.

But as good a woman as she is, she never made me want to look inside her brain, to see all the things that she knew piled up like freshly cut firewood. She never made me want to reach inside her and pull out a long-lost treasure, swipe the sand off it, and hold it up to the sun to admire its quality.

And her touch never burned down to my bones, the way Abby’s touch did today.

Soon I heard the screen door slam and her old boots clomping. I smelled her particular scent of woodsmoke and chicken fixings. But when I turned to see her, she was wearing a real fine dress I’d never laid eyes on before. And her brown hair was pinned up on top her head in a circular fashion. I just stared at her, my mouth agape.

She guffawed. “My, my, I never seen a man so dumbfounded for words. What d’you think, Mister Whimble? You like me in it?”

She twirled ’round two whole times so I could see the full display of the white dress. It hung a little in back, where a gal like Abby might have worn something or other underneath, but otherwise it fit her just fine.

“I think it might make a real fine wedding dress …” she hinted, a twinkle in her eye.

I had trouble convincing my mouth to spurt out its words. “Wedding dress? Oh, well, I don’t know … Where did you come by it? Did you make it yourself? I could believe that, with your fingers.” Eliza spun her own cloth and made her own clothes, long as I could remember.

“Some housekeep gave it to Mama at the market a while back, said there was no need for it anymore in her lady’s house. Mama—who’s not much for handouts from townsfolk, you know—looked it over and declared it to be almost brand-new and made right well, so she agreed to take it off her hands. The dress being as fine as it is, I think
she was looking ahead to the day of our nuptials, too. Whenever
that
may be!” She kicked me in the left hind cheek with the toe of her boot, and not so gentle, neither. “But I don’t care for it that much—it don’t even have pockets. There’s nowhere to put anything. And I’m bound to get it dirty in a split second.”

I knew my face was a block of stone about then. The dress looked all wrong on her, like she was playacting in the theater. Can’t say why, but it made me angry, seeing Eliza trying on a dress that didn’t suit her.