Melody (22 page)

He was in the living room reading his paper after
dinner as usual. I approached him with my request. “Excuse me, Uncle Jacob,” I said from the doorway.

He slowly lowered the paper, his eyebrows tilting and the skin folding along his forehead. I couldn't recall speaking to Daddy without seeing a smile in his eyes or on his lips.

“Yes?”

“Some of the girls in my class at school are having a party on the beach tomorrow night and they have invited me. Aunt Sara said I should ask your permission. I would like to go. It's the fastest way to get to know people,” I offered as a practical reason.

He nodded.

“It don't surprise me you'd like to go to a party where they'll be no adults supervising.”

“What do you mean?”

He leaned forward with a wry smile. “Don't you think I know what goes on at those beach parties: how they drink and smoke dope and debauch themselves?”

“De . . . what?”

“Perversions,” he declared, that irritating forefinger raised like a flag of righteousness again. “Young girls parade around with their revealing clothing and then roll around on blankets with young men to lose their innocence. It's pagan. While you are under my roof, you will
live
decent,
look
decent, and
act
decent, even if it flies in the face of your instincts.” He snapped his paper like a whip. “Now, I don't want to hear another word on it.”

“What instincts?” I asked. He ignored me. “I am decent. I've never done anything to shame my parents.”

He peered over the paper at me.

“It would take something to shame them, I suppose, but I know what's in the blood, what's raging. If you give it free rein, it will take you straight to hell and damnation.”

“I don't understand. What's raging in my blood?”

“No more talk!” he screamed. I flinched and stepped back as if slapped. My heart began to pound. A white line had etched itself about his tightened lips as the rest
of him flamed with bright red fury. I had never seen rage inflamed by so small a spark. All I had asked was to go to a party.

I turned away and marched up the stairs. The girls were right, I fumed. I should have just lied and said I was going to Janet's to study. Lying to such a man wasn't wrong. He didn't deserve honesty.

Cary was at the foot of the attic stairway, waiting for me to reach the landing.

“What was all the yelling about?”

I told him and he snorted.

“You should have asked me. I would have spared you his reaction to such a request.”

“Why is he so mean?”

“I told you. He's not mean, he's just. . . afraid.”

“I don't understand. Why should he be so afraid?”

Cary stared at me a moment and then blurted, “Because he believes it was his fault and that he was being punished.” He turned away to go up his ladder.

“What was his fault?” I drew closer as he moved up the rungs. “Laura's death? I don't understand. How could that have been his fault? Was it because he gave her permission to go sailing that day?”

“No,” Cary said, not turning, still climbing.

“Then I don't understand. Explain it!” I demanded. My tone of voice turned him around. He gazed down at me with a mixture of anger and pain in his face.

“My father doesn't believe in accidents. He believes we are punished on earth for the evil we do on earth, and we are rewarded here for the good we do as well. It's what he was brought up to believe and it's what he has taught us.”

“Do you believe that, too?”

“Yes,” he said, but not convincingly.

“My daddy was a good man, a kind man. Why was he killed in an accident?”

“You don't know what his sins were,” he said and turned away to continue up the stairs.

“He had no sins, nothing so great that he should have
died for it! Did you hear me, Cary Logan?” I rushed to the ladder and seized it, shaking it. “Cary!”

He paused at the top and gazed down at me before pulling up his ladder.

“None of us knows the darkness that lingers in another's heart.” He sounded just like his father.

“That's stupid. That's another stupid, religious idea,” I retorted, but he ignored me and continued to lift the ladder. I seized the bottom rung and held it down. He looked down, surprised at my surge of strength.

“Let go.”

“I'll let go, but don't think I don't know what you're doing up there every night,” I said. His face turned so red I could see the crimson in his cheeks even in the dim hallway light. “You're running away from tragedy, only you can't run away from something that's part of you.”

He tugged with all his strength, nearly lifting me from the floor with the ladder. I had to let go and the ladder went up. He slammed the trapdoor shut.

“Good riddance!” I screamed.

May, locked in her world of silence, emerged from her room with a smile on her face. In my mind, she was the luckiest one in this damnable home.

She signed to me, asking if I would let her come into my room. I told her yes. She followed me in and watched me angrily poke the needle and thread into the picture her sister Laura had drawn just before she died. As I worked I glared up at the ceiling and then down at the floor, below which my coldhearted uncle sat reading his paper. After a while the mechanical work was calming and meditating. I began to understand why Laura might have been entranced with doing so much of it. Everyone in this house was searching for a doorway.

May remained with me until her bedtime, practicing communicative skills, asking me questions about myself, my family, and our lives back in West Virginia. She was full of curiosity and sweetness, somehow unscathed by the turmoil that raged in every family member's heart.
Perhaps her world wasn't so silent after all. Perhaps she heard different music, different sounds, all of it from her free and innocent imagination. When her eyelids began drifting downward, I told her she should go to bed. I was tired myself. I felt as if I had been spun around in an emotional washing machine, then left in a dryer until my last tear evaporated.

Cary lingered in his attic hideaway almost all night. I was woken just before morning to the sound of his footsteps on the ladder. He paused at my doorway for a moment before going to his own room.

He was up with the sunlight a little over an hour later and had gone out with Uncle Jacob by the time I went down for breakfast. Aunt Sara said they were going to be out lobstering all day. I walked to town with May and we spent most of the afternoon looking at the quaint shops on Commercial Street, then we watched the fishermen down at the wharf. It wasn't quite tourist season yet, but the warm spring weather still brought a crowd up from Boston and the outlying areas. There was a lot of traffic.

Aunt Sara had given us some spending money so we could buy hamburgers for lunch. She didn't mind my taking May along with me. She saw how much May wanted to be with me, and I was growing more confident with sign language.

Aunt Sara remarked at how quickly and how well I had been learning it. “Laura was the best at it,” she told me. “Even better than Cary.”

“What about Uncle Jacob?” I asked her. “Doesn't he know it?”

“A little. He's always too busy to practice,” she said, but I thought it was a weak excuse. If my daddy had to learn sign language to communicate with me, nothing would be more important, I thought.

About midday, I counted the change I had left and went to a pay phone. It wasn't enough for a call to Sewell, but I took a chance and made it collect to Alice. Luckily, she was home and accepted the charges.

“I'm sorry,” I told her. “I don't have enough money.”

“That's okay. Where are you?”

“I'm in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, living with my uncle and my aunt.”

“Living with them? Why?”

“Mommy's gone to New York to get an opportunity as a model or an actress,” I said. “If she doesn't get a job there, she's going on to Chicago or Los Angeles, so I had to stay here and enroll in the school.”

“You did? What's it like?”

I told her about the school and about my life at my uncle's house, Laura's disappearance and death, and May's handicap.

“It sounds sad.”

“It's hard to live with them, especially with my cousin Cary. He's so bitter about everything, but I keep telling myself I won't be here long.”

“What are the girls like at school?”

“They're different,” I told her. “They seem to know more about things and do more things.”

“Like what?”

I told her how they had given me a joint of marijuana in the school cafeteria.

“What did you do? You haven't smoked it, have you?”

“No. I was scared. Actually, I was terrified when a teacher came to our table. Afterward, when the girls weren't looking, I threw it in the garbage.”

“That's what I would have done,” Alice said. “Maybe you should stay away from them.”

“They invited me to their beach party tonight, but my uncle won't let me go.”

“A beach party!” She hesitated and with some envy said, “Sounds like fun. Maybe you're going to like living there after all.”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I wish I were back home.”

“I was passing the cemetery yesterday and I thought about you so I went in and said a little prayer at your father's grave for you.”

“Did you? Thank you, Alice. I miss you.”

“Maybe, if you're still there, I can come up to visit you this summer.”

“That would be great, but I expect to be gone from here by then. Mommy's coming to get me as soon as she gets settled. Which reminds me, have you seen Mama Arlene? Mommy was supposed to contact her to send me my things.”

“I saw her, but George is real sickly.”

“I know.”

“I think he may be in the hospital.”

“Oh no! Would you please tell Mama Arlene I called?”

“I'll go right over to see her,” Alice promised.

I gave her my uncle's name and telephone number and she promised to call me the next weekend.

“I really have no friends since you left,” she admitted at our conversation's end. It brought tears to my eyes. After I hung up, May wanted to know why I was crying. I tried to explain, but I really didn't know enough sign language to reveal all the pain in my heart. It was easier just to go home.

When we arrived, Aunt Sara explained that dinner was going to be different this night. Uncle Jacob had invited another lobster man and his wife, the Dimarcos. May, Cary, and I were to eat first and be gone by the time the adults sat at the table. I thought that was a blessing and was grateful for a meal without Uncle Jacob glaring at me as if I were one of the Jezebels he saw on every corner.

However, late in the afternoon, Cary and Uncle Jacob returned home in a very happy mood. Apparently, they had one of their best days at sea, a catch of fifteen lobsters as well a dozen good-size striped bass.

To celebrate, Cary declared that he, May, and I were going to enjoy a real New England feast: clam chowder, steamed muscles, grilled striped bass, potatoes, and vegetables. Cary said he would prepare the fish himself outside on the barbecue grill. “Mother's busy with her own dinner. We can have our own picnic,” he said.

“Fine,” I told him.

“It won't be as exciting as the beach party, I'm afraid.”

“I said, fine.”

He nodded and told May, who was very pleased with the idea.

“You two can set the picnic table, if you like.”

I nodded without smiling, even though I was happy with the idea.

Cary went about preparing the meal meticulously. He was much better at it than I had expected. None of the boys I had known in West Virginia knew the first thing about preparing fish and vegetables. He thanked me when May and I finished setting the table. I decided to make civil conversation.

“I still don't understand how you fish for lobster,” I said standing nearby and watching him grill the fish. “You don't need a pole?”

He laughed.

“We don't fish for them exactly. We set traps at the bottom of the ocean floor and attach buoys that float above.”

“How do the other fishermen know which trap is theirs and which is yours?”

“Each lobster fisherman has his own colors on his buoys. We're using the same colors my great grandfather used. They sort of belong to our family, like a coat of arms or something. Understand?”

I nodded.

“After we bring up a trap, if there is a lobster in it, we measure it with a gauge from its eye socket to the end of its back. An average lobster runs anywhere from two to five pounds. My father once brought up a trap with a lobster in it that weighed over thirty.”

“Thirty!”

“Yeah, but someone else trapped one closer to forty last year. Lobsters with eggs on their tails have to be thrown back in immediately. We have to do all we can to keep up the supply. It takes about seven and a half years for a lobster to grow to decent size.”

“Seven and a half years?”

“Uh huh,” he said smiling. “Now you know why we grow and harvest cranberries, too.”

“Is this what you want to do for the rest of your life?” I asked him.

He nodded.

“You don't want to go to college?”

“My college is out there,” he said pointing toward the ocean with the fork.

“There's more to life than just fishing and sailing, and there are wonderful places to visit on land, wonderful things to see.”

“I see enough here.”

“I never saw someone so young act so—”

“What?” he asked quickly. I swallowed back the words and chose less painful ones. “Grown up.” He nodded.

“Go on,” he said. “If you want to call me Grandpa, too, you can. I don't care.”

“You're nothing like a grandpa.”