Jacob Have I Loved Read Free Page A

Grandma?”
    â€œHow should I know?” she snapped. “It was a long time ago.”
    I felt cold all over, as though I was the newborn infant a second time, cast aside and forgotten.
    Ten days after our birth, despite the winter wind and a threat of being iced in, my mother took Caroline on the ferry to the hospital in Crisfield. My father had no money for doctors and hospitals, but my mother was determined. Caroline was so tiny, so fragile, she must be given every chance of life. My mother’s father was alive in those days. He may have paid the bill. I’ve never known. What I do know is that my mother went eight or ten times each day to the hospital to nurse Caroline, believing that the milk of a loving mother would supply a healing power that even doctors could not.
    But what of me? “Who took care of me while you were gone?” The story always left the other twin, the stronger twin, washed and dressed and lying in a basket. Clean and cold and motherless.
    Again the vague look and smile. “Your father was here and your grandmother.”
    â€œWas I a good baby, Grandma?”
    â€œNo worse than most, I reckon.”
    â€œWhat did I do, Grandma? Tell me about when I was a baby.”
    â€œHow can I remember? It’s been a long time.”
    My mother, seeing my distress, said, “You were a good baby, Louise. You never gave us a minute’s worry.” She meant it to comfort me, but it only distressed me further. Shouldn’t I have been at least a minute’s worry? Wasn’t it all the months of worry that had made Caroline’s life so dear to them all?
    When Caroline and I were two months old, my mother brought her back to the island. By then I had grown fat on tinned milk formula. Caroline continued at my mother’s breast for another twelve months. There is a rare snapshot of the two of us sitting on the front stoop the summer we were a year and a half old. Caroline is tiny and exquisite, her blonde curls framing a face that is glowing with laughter, her arms outstretched to whoever is taking the picture. I am hunched there like a fat dark shadow, my eyes cut sideways toward Caroline, thumb in mouth, the pudgy hand covering most of my face.
    The next winter we both had whooping cough. My mother thinks that I was sick enough to have a croup tent set up. But everyone remembers that Captain Billy got the ferry out at 2:00 A.M . to rush Caroline and my mother to the hospital.
    We went that way through all the old childhooddiseases except for chicken pox. We both had a heavy case of that, but only I still sport the scars. That mark on the bridge of my nose is a chicken pox scar. It was more noticeable when I was thirteen than it is now. Once my father referred to me teasingly as “Old Scarface” and looked perfectly bewildered when I burst into tears.
    I suppose my father was used to treating me with a certain roughness, not quite as he would have treated a son, but certainly differently from the way he treated Caroline. My father, like nearly every man on our island, was a waterman. This meant that six days a week, long before dawn he was in his boat. From November to March, he was tonging for oysters, and from late April into the fall, he was crabbing. There are few jobs in this world more physically demanding than the work of those men who choose to follow the water. For one slightly lame man alone on a boat, the work was more than doubled. He needed a son and I would have given anything to be that son, but on Rass in those days, men’s work and women’s work were sharply divided, and a waterman’s boat was not the place for a girl.
    When I was six my father taught me how to pole a skiff so I could net crabs in the eelgrass near theshore. That was my consolation for not being allowed to go aboard the Portia Sue as his hand. As pleased as I was to have my own little skiff, it didn’t make up for his refusal to take me on his boat. I kept