Red Sky at Morning (2 page)

This whole singing business had started about three years before, when a marine architect from Connecticut came to our house and mentioned that the only thing he liked better than a yar hull was listening to spirituals. Mother told him we had a colored woman working for us, and all colored women could sing, so she called Lacey out and asked her if she sang at church. Lacey said she sometimes hummed along with the choir, especially on "Stabat Mater." The Little Flower of Jesus Catholic Church had an all-white choir.

"Do you know 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot'?" the man from Connecticut asked her.

"No, sir."

"You know 'Deep River'?"

"No, sir."

"Lacey, don't be silly," said Mother. "All of your . . . everybody knows those songs. They're traditional."

That night we taught Lacey two verses and the chorus of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and the man from Connecticut said her heart might be with Rome, but she sang like a Baptist.

The next day I drew a month's allowance in advance and bought Lacey a copy of "One Hundred Twenty Negro Spirituals, arranged for Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass," and we picked out the tunes on the piano together. Lacey learned to sing "Hold On," and "Sweet Li'l Jesus Boy," and "Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho," and "Ain' Gwine Study War No Mo'," and "Dry Bones," and ten or twenty others, and every Saturday she went to confession and laid her soul bare about backsliding.

On this last night, we started off with "Swing Low," and Lacey sang it just the way Mother liked, with lots of sliding up to notes and putting blues catches in her voice, which she'd learned by listening to my Bessie Smith records, and Amalie helped her by squawking out what she thought were African Baptist exclamations during the dotted notes:
LACEY
Swing low, sweet chariot Comin' for to carry me home

AMALIE
Sweet, Jee-eee-sus!

LACEY
Swing low. . . .

AMALIE
Ha' mercy!

LACEY
. . . sweet chariot
Comin' for to carry me home.

AMALIE
Hallelujah!

Every time Amalie let out a howl Dad winced, but Mother and Jimbob and Corky just beamed and congratulated themselves on their appreciation of the genuine, right-from-the-belly, folk music.

Lacey sang till eleven, and then she and Paul had to catch the last bus across town. We gave each other hugs, and I cried and Lacey cried, and Paul told me to stay out of the wine and to write to them if I could think of something to say that wasn't childish. When they left I walked Corky to her house around the corner, kissed her good-by, and went home.

It was still hot and damp when I went to bed, and the sheets were gummy. The usual lone mosquito whined around the room, waiting to pounce and drink a little blood. The room was empty and spooky, with nothing in it but my suitcase and the big tester bed.

I thought about Sagrado, and how cool it would be there, even in summer, but I was going to miss Mobile and the lumpy old house and Paul and Lacey and those Swedes at the shipyard and sailing on the Bay and swimming on Santa Rosa and even old Corky, with those hands like a pair of warm oysters.

Someone knocked on my door, which startled me, because people usually just busted right in. I said, "Come in," and the big carved door swung open. In the light from the hall I could see it was Amalie Ledoux, carrying her bourbon and water and blinking her eyes.

Nobody had ever mentioned it right out to me, but I understood that twenty years before, when Dad first came down from Baltimore with his new degree in Marine Engineering, a couple of good ideas, and a chinchy bank loan, it had been a sort of tossup between Amalie and Mother, the acknowledged belles of the season. Even in those funny 1924 flat-chested dresses they had been knockouts. Amalie had looked fresh and rosy and jolly, then. Maybe Dad could read her bone structure the way he could read a marine blueprint, and prophesy that her stern would begin to draw more and more water, and her prow would thicken enough to impair her headway. I don't know. He married Ann Dabney Devereaux, anyway, the one the young men brought punch to and opened windows for, and Mother's lines were trim as ever while Amalie, as he put it, had become "beamy, deep and able."

"Where's your light switch, Josh?" Amalie said, groping around.

"It's on the other wall, on the other side of the door. The architect had a great sense of humor."

"It's just too much bother in all this heat." She closed the door and slid her feet over the floor until her knees bumped against the bed. "May I sit down here on the side of your bed?"

"Sure," I said. "Plenty of room. Me and the Dionne quintuplets could fit in here, with space left over for a couple of half-hounds."

"My," Amalie said, taking a pull at her bourbon, "that sounds like quite a scene." She sat on the edge of the bed and the mattress tipped way over to her side.

"You're going to miss your house, aren't you? This beautiful old place."

"I'll live through it, Amalie. We'll be back as soon as the war's over."

"Well, I promise I'll rent it to some real nice people who'll take care of it. When you all get back from the West it'll be just like it was. Everything will be just like it was."

"Amalie, can I have a sip of your drink?"

"Why, sure, honey. It's real weak anyway." She handed me the glass, and patted my knee through the sheet when I took it. "I didn't know you were a bourbon drinker."

"I'm not, really," I said, "but it's hot up here. The water out of the tap's warm." As I drank, I could taste her lipstick on the glass, like strawberries.

"That little Courtney's a cute girl," Amalie said. "Did you say good-by to her properly. Or, uh, improperly?"

"I kissed her, and told her to stay off Bubba Gagnier's catboat while I'm gone."

"That sounds terribly proper to me."

"Either way, she'll probably be crewing for Bubba inside a week, and sticking cleats in the wrong grommets."

"Doing what for Bubba?"

"Crewing. Aw, come on, Amalie, you know what I mean. Helping out on the boat."

She swallowed the last of her drink and stood up, smoothing down her dress. "May I kiss you good-by, Josh?"

"Okay," I said. "Sure." Always the continental lover. I knock the ladies over with my epigrams.

She leaned over and kissed me right on the mouth, and we breathed a little bourbon on each other. Then she patted my leg, and squeezed. "You take good care of your mama out there, hear? Maybe I'll come see you." She walked to the door and opened it. The light from the hall didn't do her a bit of good.

I lay in the hot dark and thought about the Bay, and how it smelled on an April day with a ten-knot breeze from the north. There wasn't any sailing water at all in Sagrado, not even a good-sized river. Dad didn't have to send us out there to the boondocks. That stuff about how showy it was to keep two houses running in wartime made a little sense, but his other reason—that Grand Admiral Doenitz was probably going to order Admiral Raeder to sneak up the Bay in U-Boats and shell the Semmes Hotel—that was crazy. I think he just wanted us out of here, for private reasons.

It was just too hot to sleep, so I got out of bed, turned on the wall light and lay on the carpet to do push-ups, which sometimes help. There was a mark on the floor where my faithful, genuine horsehair rocking horse, Skipper, had stood for years. He belonged to the Orphans' Home now. As I did the push-ups I said, in rhythm: "Good-by, old Skip, I'm a-leavins Cheyenne."

I didn't hear Dad come in, but when I'd done about thirty-five, and was about poohed out, he put his foot in the small of my back and like to scared me to death.

"Boy, you are really out of your head. I have raised me up a genuine imbecile, with documents to prove it."

"I was just doing some push-ups," I said. "You do push-ups sometimes."

"I don't very often do them at one o'clock in the morning, with a belly full of ham and a snootful of sauternes. And I don't recite poetry to myself."

"What sauternes?"

"That white wine you and Paul polished off was a sauternes. I gave it to Paul, but I don't recall making you any offers. Did you like it?"

"It was a little sweet."

"Well, that's good to hear. Maybe there'll be some left for Papa when he comes back from the wars. That stuff's expensive, and the French are shipping it all to Hermann Goering these days. Why don't you get up off the deck and get back in bed?"

"Can't I just lie here on the old rug?"

"What you really ought to do is take a shower. You have that locker-room smell."

So I went into the bathroom and took a shower, standing up in the high, old tub with lion's feet, that Paul had gilded for me. Nothing like gold claws under your tub to make you feel like the Emperor Solomon J. Nero.

Dad was smoking a cigar when I came out, dry from the shower but starting to sweat some more from the heat. He wasn't sweating, and he was wearing a tie. He told me once that it wasn't in the nature of a Dane to sweat unless the going really got tough, and the going didn't get tough that often. I've seen him sweat twice. Once, in a Manta-class race in the Gulf, south of Dauphin Island, the wind changed sixty points to everyone's surprise and he had to fight a jibing boom with his bare hands. He had sweat all over his upper lip that time. The other time was when I got my scar. I was six, and horsing around by myself with a poker in the living room. I'd picked up a little swordplay from the movies, and I was giving the old thrust and parry to the coals in the fireplace. I'd gallop across the waxed floor, stick the poker in the coals, and say, "Die, Saracen pig!"

My last thrust was a little off balance. I skidded on the floor, got the poker jammed in the grate, and hit my head on the cinder guard. It was a good clonk, and they say I was out for an hour. But when I hit the floor, a loose coal was under my head, glowing. It was Lacey who smelled burning meat, and she knew something was wrong, because she was cooking redfish that day.

I woke up at the hospital, with a hole in my temple the size of a Franklin half-dollar. The first thing I saw was Dad, sweating on his upper lip, his forehead, and even under the arms of his shirt. After the graft took, and all I had to show was a round, discolored spot, he claimed I'd smelled like a very poor grade of hamburger, but he didn't fool me. He'd been sweating.

"You feeling better, Josh?"

"I didn't feel bad in the first place. I was just doing a few push-ups."

"So you told me. Well, you smell better, anyway. Here . . ." He offered me his cigar. "You want a smoke, too?"

"I don't smoke. Not even in secret. It's bad for my wind."

"I see. But they serve Château Yquem at the Point Clear training table, I suppose. When you do start smoking, and I give you two years, maybe three, you sure as hell better lay off my Exquisitos. You start with corn silks, like everybody else."

"Yes, sir."

"Sit down and cool off. My God, you've got hair all over your legs. You're getting grown up everywhere but in the head."

This was just the kind of talk to make me squirm, and he knew it, so I sat there for a while and squirmed, and he puffed on the Havana and grinned. He took it out of his mouth, and looked at the tip, and then shot a left at me that caught me on the shoulder and stung down to my kneecaps.

"Hell, you'll be all right," he said. "A few more muscles and a lot more brains, and you can walk down a public street without a keeper and a shake-rag."

"Thanks."

"Don't thank me. Thank that eight-hundred-dollar-a-year school and all that fine Southern blood your mother gave you. How is school?"

"A's in World Literature, Beginning Algebra, Spanish, and Fizz Ed."

"And . . . ?"

"That's pretty good right there."

"What about History of the Confederacy?"

"C minus. I don't think I see it their way."

"Neither do I. What happened?"

"I said I thought Sherman was as good a general as Jeb Stuart."

"Anyplace else but here, that would be debatable. Don't they give any courses in tact?"

"I had a little trouble in Life Science, too. Not really trouble, but old Henlien caught me helping Courtney out with her frog. He told her to take the scalpel and separate out the tendons in the thigh, and she said she wasn't going to touch the nasty thing with a ten-foot slaughter pole. So he caught me cutting on her frog."

"Very chivalrous of you. Are you going to miss Point Clear?"

"I guess so. I'm used to it, even that lousy lunch they give you."

"You feel going to a public school is going to ruin your social standing?"

"I hope so."

"You'll make out. It's wartime. Everyone has to make sacrifices."

"Dad, I told you, I'm really looking forward to it. I like Sagrado, anyway, even if I haven't been there for a long time."

"We'll see if you like the winters, too. You've never seen any snow, have you?"

"No, but I hear it's cold and white."

"That about sums it up. You've been doing some research, I see."

I don't remember when we started this kind of conversation, but we've had a lot of them. The general theme is that I'm barely able to keep from drooling on my collar, and require full-time professional help so I won't injure myself through stupidity. Dad blames it all on his family, who he claims have set records for Scandinavian incompetence since the days of Leif Ericson. While Ericson was discovering Nova Scotia, he says, a dragon boat commanded by one of his own ancestors—they were named Arnulfssen in those days—got lost sailing across the Oresund Strait from Köbenhavin to Malmö, a fifteen-mile stretch of smooth water which could be navigated by a springer spaniel with a mallard in its mouth. He often spoke of Uncle Sven, who couldn't wave bye-bye until he was eighteen; of his great-grandfather, Gunnar, who was fired from his post of Village Idiot in Viborg because the quality of his work wasn't high enough; of Aunt Minna, who announced, at the age of twenty-five, that she was tired of speaking Danish because it was "too hard," and spent the rest of her life not talking at all, just pointing and gesturing and being misunderstood. It seemed to give Dad a kind of pleasure to downgrade the Arnolds. It was a relief, too, after a spell of listening to Mother or Jimbob drone on about their families.