Keeper

by Kathi Appelt

  He is too excited to sleep.

  The streets were quiet this late at night. There was a tavern owner sweeping the steps of his bar after the last customer had left and the baker locking his door for the night. The church bells struck eleven. Henri Beauchamp looked toward the bell tower and then at the courtyard.

  There, in a circle of light made by a small lantern, stood Jack. He stood in front of the fountain, facing out. In his hand was a pocketful of coins that he tossed over his shoulder and waited to hear them splash. Plink, plink, plink. They made a cheerful sound, as if they were hitting the keys of a toy piano.

  Henri had never seen anyone like him, never seen a face as beautiful as his.

  Henri caught his breath. He felt bedazzled.

  Bedazzled.

  What a wonderful word.

  And all around, the night-blooming cyrus opened their enormous flowers and filled the air with scent, an aroma so thick, it made the two boys dizzy.

  Night after night, the two of them met at the fountain, late, after all the merchants and other townsfolk locked up their stalls and slipped into their cottages, after everyone else was sound asleep, except perhaps for the baker, who was too busy to notice two boys out late at night.

  There by the sparkling fountain they talked for hours and hours. What did they talk about? Everything! About ponies and circuses and night-blooming flowers and the whole wide world and… and… and one night, after they ran out of talk, Jack reached in his pocket, drew out a handful of coins, and threw them into the fountain, just as he had on that first night that Henri saw him.

  “What are you doing?” asked Henri.

  “Making a wish,” he replied.

  With that, Henri reached over and took Jack’s hand. Jack wrapped his own fingers between Henri’s.

  One wish, granted.

  The next morning, just as the sun arose, just before they had to part, a cat darted out from behind the fountain and ran betwixt and between their legs, making a tangle of feet and elbows and knees.

  As suddenly as it had appeared, the cat vanished behind the fountain, and a moment later a large, stout woman carrying a basket of too-ripe fish in her hand trundled up. She marched directly toward the two boys. She forced her way between them and stopped.

  Henri looked right into her face. She had a million lines carved into her skin. He had never seen anyone so old. From her basket, he could smell the rancid odor wafting up from the dead fish. He wrinkled his nose. She looked hard at him. Then she turned her gaze to Jack. Jack stepped back and covered his face with his arm. “Ma’aama,” he stammered.

  Henri couldn’t figure out what was happening, only that Jack seemed to know this old woman. Was she his mother? He pushed himself off the ground and reached for Jack.

  “Stop!” said the old sea wife, brushing his arm aside. Then she held her hand out to Jack. “Do you not have somethin’ for your old Ma’aama?” she asked.

  Jack blushed, then he felt in his pockets for a coin or a kerchief, anything he could offer to her, but his pockets were bare.

  She started laughing, but it wasn’t a nice laugh. “You got your wish, yes?” nodding toward Henri. Then she added, “But you got nothin’ more for your Ma’aama?” Jack’s face turned pale in the thin light of the night. Then the woman turned and looked again at Henri. Her gaze made him feel as though he were shrinking. Then she crossed her arms and told him, “He’d not be your kind, mon.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” cried Jack. “She’s just an old fisherwoman.”

  When Henri glanced over the old woman’s shoulder and into Jack’s face, his heart pounded against his chest. All he could see were Jack’s blue eyes and his expression of fear. Did he know this old crone? he wondered again. He’d called her “Ma’aama.”

  “He’d not be your kind,” she said again to Henri.

  “Pay no heed to her,” Jack insisted.

  Henri was confused. The old woman stared at him. Finally, he found his words. “Be gone with you, fair mother,” he said, in the same gentle voice he used with his ponies.

  She shrugged. “I be going, that’s for sure.” Then she glanced back at Jack, his hands in his pockets. He was looking down at his feet, not at her. “Nothin’ here for this old woman,” she said. She rubbed her enormous round belly and started to laugh again.

  “Fair enough,” said Henri. The old woman stopped laughing and licked her lips, then she grabbed her basket of fish in both hands and trundled off. He watched as she disappeared at the end of the plaza. Then he saw that the black-and-white tom, huge among cats, was back. The cat’s tail twitched from side to side.

  Henri brushed aside what the old woman had said: “He’d not be your kind.”

  “Pay no mind,” he started to say, but when he looked away from the cat, Jack was gone. Vanished.

  Something else he couldn’t see in the pale light of morning: the cat had only one eye.

  Now, all these years later, Mr. Beauchamp, his face as wrinkled as that long-ago fisherwoman’s, sat on his porch and stirred in his sleep, far, far from that fountain in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. He stroked Sinbad. “We’ve been here for an awfully long time, haven’t we?” Sinbad blinked his single eye and purred.

  Yes, thought the cat, an awfully long time.

  59

  Just as Keeper was beginning to think it was taking an awfully long time for the boat to reach the channel of the Cut, all at once, it was only fifty feet in front of her. She gulped. From where she sat, the opening looked majorly small. Was the Cut too narrow for The Scamper to slip through? A quick thread of panic slipped through her. What if she got stuck? Would the boat fill up with water and sink? What then? Would it block the tides from coming and going? How would she get unstuck if, in fact, she got stuck?

  Her mind raced through a whole litany of what-ifs, and all the while, the boat slipped closer and closer to the mouth of the ditch.

  “Cripes!” she said, which was another word she was not actually allowed to say out loud. “Cripes!” she repeated.

  But then she remembered… the manatee!

  For Keeper, the world unto itself was filled with signs. The clouds were signs of weather. The jellyfish, with their stinging tails, were signs of warning. A pink ribbon was a sign too, Keeper knew that, a sign that Signe loved her.

  Still, none of those signs had anything to do with mermaids, did they? But how else could she explain the manatee? Mr. Beauchamp himself had told her that in the lore of the mer, manatees often accompany mermaids. Even Christopher Columbus, in his travels to the Caribbean, suggested that manatees and mermaids swam together. Spot one, and the other should be close behind.

  “Manatees are huge,” she said to BD, still curled at her feet. “Like baby elephants,” she added.

  How, then, she had asked Mr. Beauchamp, had the manatee, the one she had seen in the Cut only a few days ago, gotten in there, gotten through the tight ditch of the Cut?

  “Some things,” Mr. Beauchamp had told her, “can’t be explained.”

  Keeper took a deep breath. Even at high tide, the water in the pond was shallow, probably no more than four or five feet at its deepest point. If she stepped out of the boat, she would likely feel the bottom, even if she had to point her toes, without going under. And the water that flowed through the ditch was even shallower.

  It was far too shallow for a manatee.

  But shallow or not, a manatee was what she saw. She had been standing on her porch, slurping a lemon Popsicle and watching the drips from it slide down the back of her hand and finally land on the oyster shells below. BD leaned against her, his tongue dripping like the Popsicle. Quicker than a sand flea, he reached up and gave her Popsicle a stealth kiss.

  “Grrrr… ,” Keeper said. Then she added, “You might be the only dog in all of creation who loves lemon Popsicles.” BD wagged his tail in agreement. She let him have another lick. The summer air was as still as a stone.

  That’s when she heard the splash coming from the direc
tion of the pond. If there had been even a tiny breeze, a wisp of a breeze, she might not have heard the splash at all. Wind has a way of erasing sounds.

  But on that windless day she heard it. Splash! She looked up from her Popsicle just in time to see a huge creature, one she had never seen before, roll up onto the top of the water and then disappear again. She squinted in the midday sun. The glare off the water was blinding.

  Sploosh! There it was again. Huge and grayish brown. Enormous. A whale but not a whale. A walrus but not a walrus. But before she could move, before she even could run down the steps to the side of the pond, before she could call out to Signe, the gigantic creature vanished. Still, she knew what she had seen.

  “A manatee,” she told BD.

  It was a sign.

  For the rest of the day she sat on the end of the pier with BD, looking out at the rising and falling water of the Cut, but the manatee did not reemerge.

  Later, when she told Signe what she had seen, Signe just said, “Maybe… it’s a possibility.” Then she added, “But it’s not likely, Keeper. Manatees live in Florida and the West Indies. They hardly ever wander this far west.”

  But Keeper knew differently.

  Now, as she drifted closer to the channel, she thought of the manatee. If she’d seen a manatee, there should be a mermaid.

  “They travel together,” Mr. Beauchamp had said.

  So there it was. Another sign. She was sure of it.

  A manatee couldn’t get through the narrow Cut. But it had.

  60

  Inside his orange and yellow house, Dogie felt Too’s cold, wet nose on his cheek, but he didn’t open his eyes. Instead, he patted the little dog on his head and rolled over. The day had been too long, and all he wanted to do was sleep. He pulled the sheet up to his chin. Maybe he would sleep for the rest of the summer, for the rest of the year, for the rest of his life.

  The turmoil of the day just done washed over him. It had started with so much promise.

  There he’d been, already on the beach before the sun rose. As he stood at the water’s edge, the grass from the marsh behind him rustled in the morning breeze.

  Then he threw his circular net out over the waves and watched it sink, leaving a checkered pattern on the water’s surface. He waited a moment, then he slowly began dragging it in to shore. Behind him, Too sat in the sand and watched. Too did not like to get wet. Just like BD, he was not a sea dog. So he sat well back near the dunes in order to keep the occasional rogue wave from catching him off guard.

  Dogie tugged at the heavy net. He knew there were crabs caught in its webbing. He felt them scuttling about, trying to escape. Not today. He had promised Signe that he would catch crabs for her gumbo.

  Blue moon gumbo, on a blue moon night!

  “P-p-perfect!” he told Too. He had been waiting for this night, the night to sing his two-word song for Signe. And now, with the gumbo, it’d be even better. He thought he’d been waiting his entire life for this one night, such an important night. A smile spread across his face, a smile as big as the sea.

  Signe. He hummed his song. Would she say yes? He hummed a little louder. Yes, he thought, say yes.

  Yes, yes, yes.

  As he pulled the seine closer to his feet, he could see the crabs’ pinchers snapping at the tough ropes. The blue crabs that roamed this part of the coast were feisty. Anyone who has ever spent any time swimming in the Gulf of Mexico has probably felt the snip of a blue crab on their toe or ankle.

  As he dragged the net in, he counted. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

  Exactly ten.

  Exactly perfect.

  Exactly the way he felt.

  Yes.

  When the seine was completely out of the water, he flipped it over, and one by one, he reached underneath each snapping crab from behind and dropped it into the large aluminum tub, filled a quarter of the way up with salt water. Too walked toward the tub to inspect.

  “W-w-watch out!” Dogie warned. Snip! Too barely missed a pinch on the nose. Then, angry that the crab had tried to attack him, he ran around and around the tub in circles. “Yep, yep, yep!”

  Dogie laughed. “L-l-let’s go, Too.” The water in the tub sloshed from side to side. Dogie took a moment to steady it.

  “B-b-big day, b-b-buddy,” he said.

  As if to say he knew that, Too barked again, “Yep, yep, yep!”

  Dogie laughed, and then in Too’s own language, he agreed, “Yep!”

  Too loved it when Dogie spoke his language, even though there was only one word in that language, “yep.” It was an all-purpose word and generally promoted health and well-being. Too said it over and over and over, all the way to the haint blue house, where Signe was already awake, stirring the brown roux that would make the base for her famous gumbo. Famous, that is, to the residents of Oyster Ridge Road, the world unto itself.

  All summer Dogie had waited for this day and this night. He had practiced his two-word song for weeks. Two words. “Marry me.” That was all. A simple song.

  Why Dogie had never said these two words to Signe was hard to say. He had tried before. But every time Dogie had gotten close to asking, he had swallowed the words. They simply would not come out. And just when it seemed like they might, like he might blurt them out, his tongue got all tangled up inside his mouth. Signe would blush and turn away.

  Finally, it was Keeper who looked at him one day, and out of the clear blue she said, “If you ever have something important to say, you should sing it!”

  Of course! He never stuttered when he sang. All he needed to do was sing two words. “Marry me.” He would sing them over and over.

  But now?

  Everything had come undone. There had been no gumbo and no two-word song. Only a long, hard day filled with disappointment and sorrow.

  Now, in his bed, Dogie rolled onto his back. He felt Too press his wet nose against his neck. He opened his eyes and glanced out the window. The sky was clear. If there was a storm, it was still far in the distance.

  Dogie closed his eyes and let the night call up its sleeping air. Let it curl up on his chest just as Too curled up on his pillow. “M-m-maybe tomorrow, T-T-Too,” he whispered.

  Maybe.

  61

  Keeper’s pulse was racing. At last, at last, at last, it felt like The Scamper was gaining speed. It was gunning for the channel, just like that big surfboard called the “gun.” Keeper leaned forward, as if she could urge the boat to move faster. “Come on,” she coaxed.

  Then she made a quick decision. She had just enough time to make another wish. She scrambled for the shoe box and found another of the miniature figures. It was the Meerfrau.

  She loved the little Meerfrau. Her apron covered her ample chest and waist, hiding her fishy tail.

  Before Keeper could change her mind and put the figurine back in the box, she pulled her hand back, and with all her might, she tossed it into the water. “Here you go, Big Mama!” she called.

  Almost in the same split second that Keeper heard the carving plink into the water, a large bead of regret landed on her shoulders. The Meerfrau wasn’t a creature of the sea at all, but a freshwater being, like from a lake in the middle of the old forests of Germany. Had it been mean to throw a freshwater Meerfrau into the salty old ocean, even if the Cut wasn’t exactly the ocean, but it was still salty? Keeper hoped not. She wrapped her arms around her waist and grabbed her elbows.

  At her feet, BD was hunkered under his pup-tent life vest. Captain leaned against him, his feathers in disarray.

  Suddenly, the wind rose up and bumped against the boat’s side, making it rock. BD whined, Please, please, please! Let’s go back! He sat up and gave her knee a stealth kiss. The boat rocked from side to side. Keeper grabbed on to him to help steady herself, and then, like that, the wind sat down again.

  Keeper scanned the surface of the water, but she didn’t see anything except the waves. Was something under there?

  “Don�
��t be mad at me, Yemaya,” Keeper pleaded. The last thing she needed was yet another person to be mad at her, especially someone as powerful as Yemaya.

  Mr. Beauchamp had told her that if Yemaya was mad, she could conjure up a storm just like that. And he’d snapped his fingers to make the point.

  Keeper tugged on her life vest. She tugged on BD’s too. Could Yemaya blow them right out of the boat? What would happen then?

  Keeper knew how to swim. In fact, she was a pretty darned good swimmer. Every summer Signe had taken her into town to the Tater Municipal Swimming Pool and signed her up for lessons. But swimming in the pool, with its clear, chlorinated water, was a far cry from swimming in the Cut, with its to-and-fro stingrays, or especially in the sea, with its riptides and sinkholes, its stinging jellyfish and toothy sharks.

  Even though Keeper splashed along the gulf’s green edge almost every day, even though she loved to jump over the shallow waves and race them in to shore, and even though she couldn’t wait to learn how to surf, she hardly ever threw herself all the way in and swam in the gulf. A girl who grows up watching the surf curl itself forward and pull itself back knows all too well the hidden dangers beneath its murky surface.

  And besides, Signe was not all that keen on Keeper going into the water; plus, there was that promise that Keeper had made.

  As if the waves on the other side of the dunes needed to remind Keeper of all this, they lifted their voices like lions and roared. Suddenly, she couldn’t help it—a great big wad of fear took hold. She clutched the oars again and winced at the blisters on her hands. Ouch!

  And then—she was sure of it—she heard her name again: Keeper. Keeper.

  Her mother?

  Who else could it be, coming from the sea? She grabbed the charm, as cold as a Popsicle, colder. But there was no comfort in the icy disk.