Jacob Have I Loved Read Free

stink like a crab shanty.”
    I gritted my teeth, but the smile was still framing them. “Two dollars,” I said to my mother at thestove, “two dollars and forty-five cents.”
    She beamed at me and reached over the propane stove for the pickle crock, where we kept the money. “My,” she said, “that was a good morning. By the time you wash up, we’ll be ready to eat.”
    I liked the way she did that. She never suggested that I was dirty or that I stank. Just—“By the time you wash up—” She was a real lady, my mother.
    While we were eating, she asked me to go to Kellam’s afterward to get some cream and butter. I knew what that meant. It meant that I had made enough money that she could splurge and make she-crab soup for supper. She wasn’t an islander, but she could make the best she-crab soup on Rass. My grandmother always complained that no good Methodist would ever put spirits into food. But my mother was undaunted. Our soup always had a spoonful or two of her carefully hoarded sherry ladled into it. My grandmother complained, but she never left any in the bowl.
    I was sitting there, basking in the day, thinking how pleased my father would be to come home from crabbing and smell his favorite soup, bathing my sister and grandmother in kindly feelings that neither deserved, when Caroline said, “I haven’t gotanything to do but practice this summer, so I’ve decided to write a book about my life. Once you’re known,” she explained carefully as though some of us were dim-witted, “once you’re famous, information like that is very valuable. If I don’t get it down now, I may forget.” She said all this in that voice of hers that made me feel slightly nauseated, the one she used when she came home from spending all Saturday going to the mainland for her music lessons, where she’d been told for the billionth time how gifted she was.
    I excused myself from the table. The last thing I needed to hear that day was the story of my sister’s life, in which I, her twin, was allowed a very minor role.

2
    I f my father had not gone to France in 1918 and collected a hip full of German shrapnel, Caroline and I would never have been born. As it was, he did go to war, and when he returned, his childhood sweetheart had married someone else. He worked on other men’s boats as strenuously as his slowly healing body would let him, eking out a meager living for himself and his widowed mother. It was almost ten years before he was strong enough to buy a boat of his own and go after crabs and oysters like a true Rass waterman.
    One fall, before he had regained his full strength, a young woman came to teach in the island school (three classrooms plus a gymnasium of sorts), and, somehow, though I was never able to understand it fully, the elegant little schoolmistress fell in lovewith my large, red-faced, game-legged father, and they were married.
    What my father needed more than a wife was sons. On Rass, sons represented wealth and security. What my mother bore him was girls, twin girls. I was the elder by a few minutes. I always treasured the thought of those minutes. They represented the only time in my life when I was the center of everyone’s attention. From the moment Caroline was born, she snatched it all for herself.
    When my mother and grandmother told the story of our births, it was mostly of how Caroline had refused to breathe. How the midwife smacked and prayed and cajoled the tiny chest to move. How the cry of joy went up at the first weak wail—“no louder than a kitten’s mew.”
    â€œBut where was I?” I once asked. “When everyone was working over Caroline, where was I?”
    A cloud passed across my mother’s eyes, and I knew that she could not remember. “In the basket,” she said. “Grandma bathed you and dressed you and put you in the basket.”
    â€œDid you,