Jacob Have I Loved Read Free Page B

praying to turn into a boy, I loved my father’s boat with such a passion. He had named it after my mother’s favorite character from Shakespeare to please her, but he had insisted on the Sue. My mother’s name is Susan. In all likelihood he was the only waterman on the Chesapeake Bay whose boat was named for a woman lawyer out of Shakespeare.
    My father was not educated in the sense that my mother was. He had dropped out of the island school at twelve to follow the water. I think he would have taken easily to books, but he came home at night too tired to read. I can remember my mother sometimes reading aloud to him. He would sit in his chair, his head back, his eyes closed, but he wasn’t asleep. As a child, I always suspected he was imagining. Perhaps he was.
    Although our house was one of the smaller of the forty or so houses on the island, for several years we owned the only piano. It came to us on the ferry after my mainland grandfather died. I think Caroline and I were about four when it arrived. Shesays she remembers meeting it at the dock and following while six men helped my father roll it on a dolly to our house, for there were no trucks or cars on the island.
    Caroline also says that she began at once to pick out tunes by ear and make up songs for herself. It may be true. I can hardly recall a time when Caroline was not playing the piano well enough to accompany herself while she sang.
    My mother not being an islander and the islanders not being acquainted with pianos, no one realized at the beginning the effect of damp salt air on the instrument. Within a few weeks it was lugubriously out of tune. My inventive mother solved this problem by going to the mainland and finding a Crisfield piano tuner who could also give lessons. He came by ferry once a month and taught a half-dozen island youngsters, including Caroline and me, on our piano. During the Depression he was glad to get the extra work. For food, a night’s lodging, and the use of our piano, he tuned it and gave Caroline and me free lessons. The rest, children of the island’s slightly more affluent, paid fifty cents a lesson. During the month each paid twenty cents a week to practice on our piano. In those days, anextra eighty cents a week was a princely sum.
    I was no better or worse than most. We all seemed to get as far as “Country Gardens” and stay there. Caroline, on the other hand, was playing Chopin by the time she was nine. Sometimes people would stand outside the house just to listen while she practiced. Whenever I am tempted to dismiss the poor or uneducated for their vulgar tastes, I see the face of old Auntie Braxton, as she stands stock still in front of our picket fence, lips parted to reveal her almost toothless gums, eyes shining, drinking in a polonaise as though it were heavenly nourishment.
    By the time we were ten, it became apparent, though, that Caroline’s true gift was her voice. She had always been able to sing clearly and in tune, but the older she grew, the lovelier the tune became. The mainland county schoolboard, which managed the island school more by neglect than anything else, suddenly, and without explanation, sent the school a piano the year Caroline and I were in the fifth grade, and the next year, by what could only have been the happiest of coincidences, the new teacher appointed as half of the high school staff was a young man who not only knew how to play a piano but had the talent and strength of will toorganize a chorus. Caroline was, of course, his inspiration and focal point. There was little to entertain the island youth, so we sang. And because we sang every day and Mr. Rice was a gifted teacher, we sang surprisingly well for children who had known little music in their lives.
    We went to a contest on the mainland the spring we were thirteen and might have won except that when the judges realized our chief soloist was not yet in high school, we were disqualified. Mr. Rice was