Second Skin (21 page)

“Now, what about this poor little Sweet Phyllis, Skipper? You going to make her wait all day?”

“In good time, Sonny,” I murmured. “She’ll wait, she’ll keep, don’t worry.”

The blackbird danced, the cows switched flies or picked off tom little leaves with their big teeth or tried to get everything started up again, the black spring continued to steep the roots of the tree and keep Oscar cool. We dozed. And Sonny sighed for Bertha, put his long skinny panther paw on Kate. “Hugging is all right, Kate,” I thought to say, “but nothing more, Kate, do you understand? You mustn’t hurt the baby.” Then I pulled little Sister Josie’s swaddled head down to rest on my broad steaming mahogany chest, gave her Uncle Billy’s crucifix to hold.

“No lady of the cloth ever had it this good, Josie,” I whispered—shoe-button eyes unmoving, mouth big with gold—and in my half-sleep I heard the animals and through a warm speckled film saw Kate kneeling and rinsing out Sonny’s drawers in the spring, then standing in shadow and turning, reaching, as I seemed to see the very shape of the earth-bound child, and hanging Sonny’s white drawers on a dead limb to dry. Shades beneath the calabash tree, soft sounds, leaf-eating dreams, grove of perpetuation. Silence. The tree was suddenly still, perfectly still, down to a bird. Love at last.

But we awoke together, and like Josie, Catalina Kate must have felt the need to speak, must have thought that it was her turn to speak to me, because she was leaning over Sonny and looking down at me, and I could see the shoulder, arm, small face, naked hair, and I heard what she was saying: “God snapping him fingers,” she said, and that sudden moment of waking
was just what she said, “God snapping him fingers,” though it was probably Edward breaking a twig or one of the birds bouncing a bright seed off the smooth green back of a resounding calabash.

And on my elbow, suddenly, and wide-awake in my old time out of time: “Yes, Kate,” I said. “Snapping for you!” She giggled. And had the hours passed? Days, years? I put down the thought because I was wide-awake and the sharp harmony was like a spear in the ribs.

“Now, Sonny,” I said, and already I was crouching at the lip of the spring, “let’s take care of Phyllis. What do you say?”

Black spring, black ferns, last remnant of ice the size of a dime, bright little glass bottle upright, gleaming, cool. The genie had wreaked havoc on Oscar, I thought, and I picked up the bottle—the bull in the bottle—and weighed its fragile cool weight in my palm.

“Come, now, Sonny,” I said briskly, “let’s be done with her. Where’s the tube?”

He whipped it out of the satchel then, that resilient tube, long amorous pipette, and I snapped the neck of the bottle, stuck an end in the bottle and caught the other end between my teeth and quickly sucked the few pure drops of Oscar into the pipette and dropped the empty bottle down the spring and popped my finger over the end of the tube to keep Oscar where I wanted him.

“Battle stations, everyone,” I said softly, but they were already moving, dancing, and the somehow suspicious cows were already composing themselves into a single group-attitude of affection, and the arms were raised, curved, quick and languid at the same time. Apparently some brief intelligence was stirred in Alma, Freddy, Edward, Beatrice, Gloria, because suddenly they had sense enough to keep out of our way, and drew back and hung their heads and watched us with big round glowing sylvan eyes.

Late afternoon under the calabash tree. Closing in on Phyllis. Speckled shadows. Trembling, smiling, soothing. A cow and her sisters. And it was a simple job for me, and nothing for her, merely a long hair rolled up lengthwise and lost in a hot muscular
blanket of questing tenderness, but nonetheless we smiled, closed in carefully and in our own sweet timeless time, expectant, bemused, considerate, with fingers and arms and in soft dalliance transplanting the bull and stopping the tide of the heifer.

Late afternoon and only faint sounds of breathing, brief shifting activity in the shadows, and Sonny was embracing the smooth alerted head while Catalina Kate and Josie were posted on her starboard side, were rubbing and soothing and curving against her starboard side and Bertha, Big Bertha, was tending the port. And I was opposite from Sonny and knew just what to do, just how to do it—reaching gently into the blind looking glass with my eye on the blackbird on Sonny’s cap—and at the very moment that the loaded pipette might have disappeared inside, might have slipped from sight forever, I leaned forward quickly and gave a little puff into the tube—it broke the spell, in a breath lodged Oscar firmly in the center of the windless unsuspecting cave that would grow to his presence like a new world and void him, one day, onto the underground waters of the mysterious grove—and pulled back quickly, slapped her rump, tossed the flexible spent pipette in the direction of the satchel and grinned as the whole tree burst into the melodious racket of the dense tribe of blackbirds cheering for our accomplished cow.

And wasn’t she an accomplished cow? And wasn’t it, this moment of conception, this instant of the long voyage, a time for bird song and smiling and applause? So she gave a sprightly kick then—one pretty kick from Sweet Phyllis but too late, much too late, because I had seen that pretty kick coming even before I took Oscar’s little bottle off the ice and was standing back well out of her way and smiling when she let fly so prettily in the face of her fate—and then, and only two years old, she gathered herself in sulky modesty and pushed through the screen of leaves and without much hurry but with clear purpose trotted off alone across the empty field. I waved, I watched her diminishing and rising and falling brown body until it turned into the heavy bush and was gone.

“Well, too bad, Phyllis,” I said to myself, “you won’t quite
catch up with Kate,” and I smiled and shook my head.

And then Sonny was pulling on his sun-bleached under-drawers and Bertha was hoisting up her pot and Josie was putting on her shoes and Kate was plaiting her long dark hair again and trying to arouse my heart, I thought, with sight of the child. Any time now, I knew, and the sun would die.

“Good-by to the dark-eyed cow,” I said. “And now Big Bertha and Catalina Kate and Sister Josie, I want the three of you to return to Plantation House together while Sonny and I go down to the south beach and have our bath. You lead the way, Bertha; be careful, Kate; remember what you do at sundown, Sister Josie.”

So I retrieved Uncle Billy’s crucifix from Sister Josie, and they started off.

And in darkness and in silence Sonny and I made our way to the south beach and naked except for our official caps sat together in the sand on the south beach, ground ourselves back and forth, back and forth in the abrasive white sand and scrubbed our calves, thighs, even fleshy Malay archipelagos with handfuls of the fine sand that set up a quick burning sensation in tender skin. By the time we waded out to our shoulders the moon was on the water and the little silver fish were sailing in to nibble at the archipelagos. My arms floated out straight on the warm dark tide, I rinsed my mouth with sea water and spit it back to the sea, I tasted the smooth taste of salt. When we rose up out of the slow-motion surf the conchs were glistening at us in the moonlight.

“I tell you what. Sonny,” I said, and dried the crucifix, pulled up my tattered white pants, “why don’t you look in on Josie or see what Bertha’s fixing us for chow? I just want to stop off a moment at the water wheel. OK?”

So I left him at the corner of the barn and whistled my way to the water wheel and found her waiting. I stood beside her, mere heavy shadow leaning back against dark broken stone and moonlit flowers, and I smelled the leaves of cinnamon. I put my arm around her and touched her then, and part of the dress— sweat-rotted dissolving fragment of faded calico—came off in
my hand. But it was no matter and I simply squeezed the cloth into a powder and dropped it and put out my hand again.

Her eyes were soft, luxurious, steady, in the darkness she reached out and tore off a flower—leaf, flower, taste of green vine—and looking at me put it between her teeth, began to chew.

“Saucy young Catalina Kate,” I whispered, “eight months pregnant and still saucy, Kate? Iguana going to get you again if you keep this up.”

She giggled. I felt the shadow then, the firm shadow of tiny head and neck, little upswept protecting arms. Felt, explored, caressed, and by the position of the moon and direction of the scent of spices I knew that the island was wandering again, floating on.

“Now tell me, Kate,” mouth close to her ear, hand holding her tight, “what’s it going to be? Little nigger boy, Kate, or little nigger girl?”

And spitting out the leaf and smiling, putting her hand on mine: “Whatever you say, sir,” she said, “please God.…”

Yesterday our pastoral, tomorrow the spawn. A mere four weeks and I will hold the child in my own two hands and break out the French wine, and after our visit to the cemetery, will come to my flourishing end at last. Four weeks for final memories, for a chance to return, so to speak, to the cold fading Atlantic island which is Cassandra’s resting place. And then no more, nothing, free, only a closed heart in this time of no time.

So on to the dead reckoning of my romance….

Red sun in the morning, sailor’s warning. I knew that much. And hadn’t I sworn off the sea? After my one thousand days and nights on the
Starfish
hadn’t I sworn off the sea forever? There was my mistrust of the nautical life, the suspicion of my tendency toward seasickness, the uneasiness I had come to feel in the presence of small boats whether in or out of the water. My sympathy for all the young sun-tanned and shrapnel-shredded sailors in deep southern seas would never die, but I was done with the water, the uncomfortable drift of a destructive ocean, done trying to make myself acceptable to the Old Man of the Sea. So what drew me to the
Peter Poor?
How to explain that dawn in March which was an eastern blood bath, in the first place, and full of wind? Why did I interrupt our Mah Jongg games or my friendly fights with the black Labradors? Having recovered from the indignities of that crippling December dance, and having spent three frozen months in the calm inside the gale—trying a little of the Old Grand-Dad myself now, not much, but just a little, and building the fires, drying the dishes, dragging Pixie down the cow paths on a miniature creaky sled with turned-up wooden runners—why, having watched the
snow at the window and having kept my mouth shut during all those Sunday dinners and having learned to sleep at last on those hard cold nights, why, suddenly, did I trot right down to the dock with Cassandra and submit myself to the
Peter Poor
which was a fishing boat and didn’t even have a head?

“Go on, Skip, don’t spoil the fun. It’s a good way to see the bland. And Skip,” clicking the needles, giving the log in the fireplace a shove with her bare toes, “it’s just what Candy needs. My God, Skip, how could you refuse?”

And toying with the East Wind, watching her: “What about you, Miranda?” I said, “it’s not like you to miss a good time?” 

And throwing back her head and twinkling the light in her glass and laughing, “No, no, I’ve already been out sailing with the boys. Besides, every girl deserves to be the only woman on the
Peter Poor
just once in her life.”

But Cassandra only looked at me and took my hand.

So it was on a red dawn in the month of March that I succumbed to the idea of Crooked Finger Rock and sunken ships and a nice rough ghostly cruise around the black island, succumbed and gave Cassandra the one chance in her life to be the only woman on the
Peter Poor.
And it was in the month of May that I raced down the beach for my life in Miranda’s hot rod, in May, the month of my daughter’s death. And in June that we got out of there, Pixie and I, June when I packed our flight bag and hurried out of that old white clapboard house and carried poor Pixie off to Gertrude’s cousin in New Jersey. Four months. Four short months. A brimming spring. And of course I know now that there was a chance for Cassandra up to the very moment she swung her foot gaily over the rail of the
Peter Poor
and stood with her hair blowing and her skirt blowing on the cluttered deck of that water-logged tub of Red’s. But there was no chance really for Cassandra after that. No chance at all. The second of the four seasons sucked her under, the sea was cruel. March, then May, then June, and the last fragments, the last high lights, last thoughts, the time of my life.

Red sun in morning, sailor’s warning. That’s it. And the dawn was lying out there on its side and bleeding to death while I fidgeted outside Cassandra’s door—accomplice, father,
friend, traveling companion, yes, old chaperon, but lover and destroyer too—and while Miranda waltzed around the dark kitchen in her kimono and tried to fix an early breakfast for Pixie. Dawn bleeding from half a dozen wounds in its side and the wind blowing and my old bird fighting its slow way across the sky.

“Hurry, up, Cassandra,” I called through the closed door, blowing on cold fingers, stuffing a fat brown paper sack—lunch for two—under my arm and watching the bird, “you’ll have to hurry a little, Cassandra, if the Captain is going to make the dawn tide.” Even upstairs in the cold dark house I could feel the tide rising, feel the flood tide reaching its time and turning, brimming, waiting to sweep everything away. But there was no need to hurry. I should have known. I should have known that Red had been waiting seven months already for this tide, this dawn, this day at sea, and that he would have waited forever as long as he had any hopes at all of hearing her heels clicking on the deck of the
Peter Poor
, that he would have let the
Peter Poor
list forever in the green mud for the mere sight of Cassandra coming down his weedy path at six o’clock in the morning, would have sailed the
Peter Poor
onto rocks, shoals, reefs, ledges, anywhere at all and under any conditions if he could once persuade Cassandra to climb aboard. No hurry. And yet perhaps I was aware of his bald-headed, wind-burned, down-East, inarticulate seagoing licentious patience after all, and fidgeted, marked the stages of the dawn out of the intuitive resources of my destructive sympathy. God knows. But she appeared to me then, unsmiling-unsmiling since the blustery high school dance when I had done my best to tell her everything, make her understand—and wearing a little pale blue silk kerchief tied under her chin.

“I thought you were going to wear slacks, Cassandra,” I said. “Slacks are more appropriate to a boat, you know. Much more appropriate than a full skirt, Cassandra. But of course it’s too late now anyway.”

We went downstairs together—shadows and little playful drafts on the stairs, and if it wasn’t a big prize bow for a high school dance then it was a big billowing rust-colored skirt for a
windy day—and in the kitchen she hugged Miranda and kissed Pixie’s forehead. Then hot coffee, standing up, and then another hug, another kiss, and then good-by.

“While we’re gone, Miranda,” I said, “don’t fool around with the nipples or do anything harmful to the child. OK, Miranda?”

“My God, Skip, you’ve got a sore memory, haven’t you? But everything’s forgiven, Skip. Don’t worry.”

The wind, the red sun, and I tried to take her arm under the chestnut tree, but she walked on ahead of me with the kerchief tilted back and her two small white hands pressed down flat against the tiny round abdomen of the orange skirt which lunged and kicked and whirled in woolen fury. The hard thin mature white legs were bare, I could see that, and I tried to come abreast of her again on the empty road.

“That skirt’s going to give you trouble, Cassandra,” I said, just as all at once she turned off the road and began to run lightly down the weedy path with the skirt whipping and fumbling about her legs and the tight kerchief changing color in the dawn light.

“Wait, Cassandra, wait for me,” I called. I wondered what figure of unhappiness it was that I could see plainly enough in the stiffness of the slender shoulders and forlorn abandonment of the little swathed head. Her feet were describing those sad uncomfortable circles of the young female who runs off with wet eyes or uncommunicative smile or tiny cry clutched, held, in the naked throat, and I wanted to stop her, wanted to walk awhile with my arm about her shoulder and her hand in my hand. But it was no use.

“Jomo, good morning,” I heard her say in her best voice, and I saw it all, Cassandra still lightly running and Jomo looking at her from where he was crouched at the gasoline pump and Red watching her from the bow of the
Peter Poor
and Bub buttoning his pants near the overturned skiff and grinning into the wind and watching her. So I put on the steam then and caught up with her.

And leaning over the tin can with the hose in the hole and peering up at me from under the bill of the baseball cap and
shielding his mouth with his hand: “How’s Papa?” Jomo said, and spit through his teeth.

“OK, Jomo,” I said, “I’m OK, thanks.” And softly and under my breath, “Viva la Salerno, Jomo,” I said to myself.

“A little winded, ain’t you?”

“Well, yes, Jomo, I’ve been running.”

But he was returning the nozzle to the pump, spitting between his teeth again, catching the wire handle of the tin can in his hook and lifting it, holding the tin can out to Bub: “Here, Bub, take this fuel to the Captain. On the double. Tide’s full.” 

I thought of offering Bub a hand and then thought better of it. So I stood on the end of Red’s jetty—mere crumbling slatted catwalk covered with mollusks and broken pots and splashes of old flaking paint—and watched Cassandra balance herself down the plank to the
Peter Poor
, watched Red take her hand, her elbow, brace one massive palm in the curve of the little sloping rib cage until she had swung her foot, boarded the boat, and I watched Bub lug the gasoline down the plank black with oil and tar and the dawn tide, and wished that he would slip, that he would take a plunge, tin and all. But Bub was steady that morning with chicken feathers sticking to the seat of his pants and the wind in his hair.

And helping her around the anchor and leading her aft: “Sea’s rough,” I heard Red say, “hope you like a rough sea.”

And Cassandra: “I’m a good sailor. Red—Captain Red—really.”

March wind, gulls putting the dawn curse on us, cold harsh shadows breaking apart and scattering and the jetty swaying and shaking and the
Peter Poor
yanking at the hawsers and now and again smashing into the side of the jetty and spray and chunks of black water and field mice cowering in the white-haired crab grass—it was a malevolent unpromising scene and it was all I could do to keep my feet. The strongest smell was of gasoline; the next strongest smell was of dead fish.

“You’re coming, ain’t you?” Jomo said. “We’re shoving off,” and he indicated with his hook that I was to start down the plank.

“You go first,” I said.

“Can’t,” Jomo said, “the lines.”

“Well,” I said, “no pushing,” and felt the plank bending under me and the black sea beginning to move and just as I found the gunwale with my toe and caught one of the rusted stays in my right hand, I heard the first hawser thundering past my ear and knew the plank was gone. Beneath the floor boards and somewhere toward the stem the engine sounded like an old Model-A with pitted cylinders and water in the exhaust. Rolling, pitching, moody little fishing boat, cold fiery dawn, we left the jetty with a puff of acrid smoke tangled up in the shrouds and the other hawser floating, dragging out behind us on the choppy sea.

“Say, Red,” I called, “is there a place for me to sit down back there?”

And from the black and oily cockpit, and holding a full fifth of whiskey in his right hand, easily, lightly, gesturing with it, and smiling at Cassandra and saying something to her under cover of the wind: “Why, sure,” he called, “we can make room for you. Sure we can.”

“Thanks,” I shouted, and managed to reach the cockpit hand over hand.

Lowering sun, wind that socked us counter to the black waves, cockpit full of salt spray, and Bub at the little iron wheel and Jomo crouching on the stem with the bill of his baseball cap level, unruffled, and his hook in the air, and Red, tall, heavy-set, bald, early morning reddish whiskers wet on his face, and his pale blue eyes hard and bright in the furnace of his desire, Red knee-deep in yellow oilskins in the unsteady dirty cockpit that revealed the old rotten ribs of the
Peter Poor.

“Going to be wet when we get out of the cove,” Red said. “Wet and rough.”

I hung on. I had burned my palm once already on a tin chimney, so I hung on to a convenient but slimy cleat and to a thin inexplicable rusted wire that came down from somewhere overhead. “See all the signs, do you,” I said, and let go for a brief moment to wipe my face.

“Yup,” he said. “I see the signs all right.”

The eye that looked at me then was like a pale translucent
grape in a wine-dark sea. Kind. Intelligent. Contemptuous. Then he looked away and the arms and fingers and hands kept moving.

Red among the oilskins. Red getting ready. He pulled on thick loose yellow pants, worked himself slowly into a thick loose shiny yellow coat, fastened a jet-black mountainous sou’wester on his sun-colored head. The captain, the tall stately bulk of the sea-wet man. And then he turned and helped Cassandra into One of the yellow coats—too big, charm of sleeves that covered the hands, all the charm of the perfect small woman’s body in the slick ocean-going coat too large—and on her small head and over the kerchief he tied another crinkled black sou’wester, so that she looked like a child, a smiling child, in a captain’s rig. She had a little face that should have been on a box of pilot biscuits. Great black protective helmet and soft wet cheeks and shiny eyes. No hands, no breasts, but wet white skin and plaintive eyes.

And then: “Here’s yours,” he said, and glanced to the wobbling top of the mast and tossed me a bundle, frowned.

“My second skin,” I said, because I had gone out once before in oilskins, and I laughed, ducked, took the flying crest of a wave full in the face. “Which way is up?” I laughed, wiped my eyes, held the thick yellow bundle of empty arms and legs in my own fat arms. “How about it, Red?”

“Oilskins,” he said clearly, patienly through the wind, the spray, the now billowing sun, “better put them on…going to be plenty rough out there.”

So I struggled with the monstrous crackling togs, turned them over, turned them around, lost my footing—shoulder smack up against the ironwood edge of the top of the dirty cabin, sudden quick pain in the shoulder—burned my fingers, finally, on the hard wet skins, felt my cheeks puffing out under the ear flaps of the little tight preposterous sou’wester, felt the chin strap digging in.

“It’s much too small,” I said, but Red was talking.

“That’s Crooked Finger Rock over to leeward,” he was saying, gripping Cassandra’s little shoulder where it was hidden inside the yellow oilskin, gripping her and pointing away with
one long red bony finger that was as steady and sure as the big needle of an enormous compass, “and that’s the Dog Head Light —she’s abandoned—over there to windward…

“I see,” I heard Cassandra say softly in her most interested voice, “I see,” as if they were studying an atlas together in Miranda’s parlor, and her eyes, I saw, were fixed on the stately wet red features of Captain Red’s squinting seagoing face.