The Shore (21 page)

“I won't forget.”

After his uncle had gone, Jackie took a basket through the woods and over to the dunes, to search for plover's eggs. The small birds themselves were also tasty, but it was their nesting season, and he knew they would be just as good when there was less food to be found. Though they needed the eggs he liked taking his time about it, and so instead of choosing the fast but risky cut across Sam Fields's property he set off north through the woods and bogs.

Assateague Island was nearly forty miles long, and a good part of the southern end was too marshy to plant. The village itself had first sprung up as a resting place for men that worked the water or ran the rescue station on Tom's Hook, and for a long while that was all that it had been, a place to tie up and repair, perhaps eat and catch a few hours' sleep. Then the men began bringing their wives across, buying up plots of land from the county and building their own snug homes. Though they could still row out into the bay or trap squirrels and muskrats in the marsh, the loss of the oyster beds and fishing grounds of the Hook had been too much for the community. Chincoteague offered an easier life for the people who could afford to leave, but even though he understood the logic of it the loss of the church, the loss of the neighbors who he'd grown up around, felt like abandonment.

As he trekked through the marsh, eyes peeled for copperheads and cottonmouths, Jackie considered his uncle's offer. It had pained him sorely to hear that the school would not reopen in the fall; he had enjoyed learning, the routine of it, the full feeling he got when he'd just learned something interesting. He
could go work at the oyster-packing factory on Chincoteague, or for one of the fishermen, but his mother wouldn't like the idea of him out on the water; she'd made him promise over and over that if he died young he'd leave her a body to bury. But he didn't want to spend the rest of his life shucking oysters or digging clams. He wanted to be like Uncle Leo and do business with people.

He passed out of the forest and onto marshier ground. The water between the hummocks of grass was thick and greasy, and he hopped from tuft to tuft to avoid sinking into it. Elsewhere the trees were in full leaf, but because of all the salt in this low-lying patch the few trees were spiny, gnarled, nearly choked to death. Even this part of the island had its own wild beauty, the sunlight reflecting off the slick surface of the mud, the twisted shape of the trees, the blueness of the sky above it all.

A flash of brown caught his eye, and he crouched low in the grass. A small herd of ponies shifted in a stand of twisted evergreens, cropping at the salty grass and stomping to dislodge the greenhead flies that nipped at them. No one knew where the ponies had come from, just that they were as much a part of the island as the greenheads and the cottonmouths. Jackie settled in to watch them. They weren't especially noble, not like racehorses or the riding horses the local landowners kept. The ponies were short, stubby, compact animals, much like the fishermen he knew, that avoided people unless there was food at stake; the little sods loved apples. When he was five, he'd been having a picnic with the lighthouse keeper's daughters when a pony had come out of the woods and taken the apple right from his hand. It had terrified him then, and he still stayed well away from the horses, but he loved watching them.

The wind shifted, and a sorrel raised its head, scenting him. The way they moved reminded him of deer in a way, more alert and timid than tame horses. They made breathy sounds to each other, stamped their feet impatiently, and he stood back up and moved on. No sense in riling them needlessly.

The ground firmed and then grew sandy, and the trees thickened and then thinned until he was out among the dunes. He stopped for a moment to fall back onto the sand and enjoy the sea breeze, then sat up and began looking for eggs. The nests, shallow depressions in the sand like tea saucers, usually held four eggs, and out of respect for the birds and hope for future dinners he always left two behind. They blended well with the sand and the sparse shining grasses, as did the small birds, but he had practice and rarely missed a nest. The eggs themselves were pale and speckled brown, and felt warm and smooth in his palm.

Jackie loved eggs. He loved them boiled, he loved them fried, he loved them deviled or scrambled with brains or baked into cakes or puddings or pickled and put away for winter. He loved the richness of them, like meat without bones, or fresh butter, and the soft custard-like texture when they were cooked just right. Even if he were rich, he thought, he would eat eggs every day, as many ways as possible. The eggs their chickens laid were good on winter days, but the plover eggs, which he could collect by the basketful, were better if only for their quantity.

As he searched he wondered about his sister. Alice was not an easy person to get along with, and the part of him that hoped that they would move to Chincoteague dreaded sharing space with her once again. Nevertheless, she was his sister, and if
Uncle Leo was worried he supposed he should be too. Alice had a raging temper, and it was not natural for her to be quiet. As he thought about it, he realized that she had been quiet on her last visit back to the village, as well. He had been fuming at the news that the church was to be sold, and so hadn't taken as much notice as he might have. He doubted that it was a young man, as his uncle thought. If it had been, she would have been crowing and showing off and planning the wedding and making Mama crazy. Alice was only quiet when something was wrong.

He sometimes wondered what home would be like if his father was still alive. To hear other boys talk, their fathers were the bosses of their homes, but Jackie had learned early that he was at the mercy of the moods of the women he lived with. The best thing he could do was to tiptoe around his sister's tempers and cheer up his mother when the gloom settled down on her. Alice, he had been told, had inherited every spark of their father's temperament, and he couldn't imagine a moment's peace with two people as moody as her in the house. He liked to think that when he grew up he would be just like the father his mother told him about, and wouldn't stand for fuss or tantrums from anyone, but he suspected, especially when Alice was home for a visit, that he'd gotten too deep into the habit of placating women to do any different. The older boys spoke loftily about taking a firm hand with women, the way you took a firm hand with horses, but he couldn't imagine anyone taking a firm hand with Alice and getting anything out of it besides a kick in the pants.

When his basket was full, Jackie stripped naked and ran into the water, diving below the breakers to pop back to the surface like a cork and float, belly-up, in the shallows. The bottom of the channel was thick with muck, and the edges sharp with
oysters, so he only swam in the ocean, though other boys he knew didn't mind the slower-moving water. His mother swore by scalding hot baths, and forced him into one every Saturday night, but nothing made Jackie feel as clean as the cold salt of the Atlantic, even if it found every cut and scrape on his body.

The walk back to the village dried him gently, and the thought of the eggs he had gathered made him feel hollow from the inside out. Smoke wafting from their chimney showed that his mother had returned and put on the obligatory pot for evening tea, and he readied his face before going inside. He had a very honest face, people told him, which meant he had a face that wasn't very good at lying. He still wasn't sure if he would take his uncle's offer, but he wasn't about to squeal to his mother and ruin everything.

The next day Jackie skiffed over to Chincoteague at first light, though he figured he should have been fishing, clamming, oystering, patching the roof, fixing the fence, weeding the bean patch, or doing any number of things at home. A promise was a promise, after all, and if it meant putting off work, well, the work would still be there when he got back. The town was busy for a Wednesday, and he darted around people and jumped mud puddles in the rutted dirt road between the dock and his uncle's store. He knew most of the town people, but not well enough to talk to, so he got by with a nod.

As he turned onto Maddox Boulevard he caught sight of a familiar pair of shoulders retreating down an alley. Without giving it much thought, he followed after. Alice wasn't the kind of sister you ran up to and hugged hello, even if you hadn't seen
her in a few weeks, but he still felt an odd closeness to her, a curiosity to see what she was up to without necessarily being seen himself. He tailed her quietly down the alley, around the corner of Thompson's Rooming House, and along the outside of their back fence to the wash house. She had been helping Mrs. Thompson recently so there was nothing odd in this, but the hunched way in which she held her shoulders, the quickness of her step, made him wonder if this errand was part of that “helping.” She looked around before going inside the small wooden outbuilding, and he ducked down behind the fence before she could see him.

The wash house was roughly built, the boards knotted and warped, and it took him only a few seconds of looking to find a crack that gave him a decent view of the copper kettle, his sister standing behind it, and the young man of middling height who had her firmly by both arms. They kept their voices low, and strain as he might Jackie couldn't make out a word they said, but he could tell from long experience that his sister was on the edge of crying. The man was well dressed, sporting a carefully waxed mustache that Jackie figured he was just barely capable of growing, and looked both regal and nervous. He did most of the talking, looking down at her, and Jackie realized that, though she wasn't a tall woman, he'd never seen a man looking down at her; normally they were cringing away and asking if she wouldn't mind not making a scene in front of everyone. Alice was looking down also, appearing not to notice how tight his hands were on her arms; Jackie could see the worn cloth creasing where his fingers pressed. Her lips were pressed together even tighter, except for when she spoke in short, quick bursts. The man took a hand off her arm, touched her neck,
fished out a string, and held something up on the end of it in front of her, and it sparkled in the dim light of the wash house. It was a ring. That seemed to be too much for Alice. She shook her head and began to cry, without making a noise but with lots of tears, which Jackie had never seen before. Shaken, he pulled away from the peephole and scurried back out to the main road.

He turned the moment over in his mind as he made his way to his uncle's store. It was unfathomable to him, his sister's distress, the man's firm and yet unsure response, the way in which the two appeared somehow connected. He realized as he walked that, though he had spent a lot of time with old married couples like the Meers, who owned the next house over, and old people on their own like his mother and Uncle Leo, and young people like the lighthouse keepers' daughters and his friends from school, he had never spent much time around young men and women together. Perhaps that was just how they acted, and when he got to be of an age to grow a mustache the girls who threw apples at him and said that he smelled would look up at him in the way that the island ponies did. It was a curious thought, and he didn't know if he liked it.

Uncle Leo was at the counter with a handful of farmers when he got to the store, so he perched on one of the half-barrels by the cold wood stove and waited to be noticed. He liked spending time in the store, listening to the farmers and fishermen talk about past storms and fires and seeing who could tell the tallest tale. They'd offered to take him snipe hunting, when he got bigger, but so far they'd only gone mistletoe hunting. Uncle Leo had skiffed over to the island in the early light two Decembers before, a flask of Kentucky bourbon in his pocket and a shotgun on his lap. Mama had made them a large jug of
sweet, hot tea, and he'd emptied the flask into it when her back was turned, then told Jackie and his cousins—who Jackie never spent much time with and didn't trust as far as he could throw because they were town boys—to drink up in order to keep warm. Then they'd set out into the thickest part of the woods, heads craned back, looking for the heavy clumps of green mistletoe at the tops of the winter-bare trees. Every sighting was announced by a shout, at which point Uncle Leo, who had consumed a fair amount of the tea, would gather them behind him like a mother quail before sighting along the gun and firing. He usually missed the first shot, but the second felled great clumps of the parasitic plant, which they gathered up and dragged back with them to decorate for the holiday.