The Uncertain Season

by Ann Howard Creel

  The girl smirked, as if to say to Madu that it was no matter, but in truth she was concerned. The young rich woman had spotted her, and instantly her interest had been piqued; the girl could feel it in the way the other woman’s eyes landed on her heavily, and she could see it in her changed stance, which became more upright and alert.

  Avoidance became the girl’s plan, although the rich lady was everywhere now, walking the alleys, talking with the people of the neighborhood. The girl ducked away as soon as she caught sight of her, but she had trouble evading her. She came quietly, peered curiously, and many times the girl wasn’t fast enough, letting the young woman get too clear and too long of a glimpse.

  Gazing at Madu, she lifted her palms upward with an inquisitive expression on her face. He said, “I don’t know who she be. Some church lady or something. People say she nice. She some kinda artist or something. She give a drawing or two to some people.”

  The girl frowned. An artist?

  “Maybe she want to paint you and your red hair.”

  She shook her head fiercely.

  “I knows. You best be staying clear of her. Either she’s wanting to take you away somewheres or paint you so everybody knows who you is, and ain’t neither one of them things good.”

  After she nodded, Madu worked his way back indoors. She slipped away again, then combed the marsh for scallops and flounder, always on the lookout for rattlers. A flock of brown pelicans—there must have been fifty of them floating on the flat waters—entertained her for a while, and then she ended up on the beach near Fort Crockett for the sunset, admiring the changing colors as the polished copper light took leave.

  Again that nagging question: What was to become of her? How long before the authorities took interest again and someone caught her? The young white woman was fraying the girl’s nerves. The girl had no answers yet, but she knew for sure that she could never leave this island; it held her best memories, and in the early days after the storm the girl had found things from her house all over, scattered from one shore to the next. Stuck in the mud way over on the high side, a scrap of fabric that looked like their old kitchen curtains; later a shoe that might have been her mother’s. And once she found a painted shell she recognized from her father’s shop.

  Now she picked up a stick and started absentmindedly drawing in the sand. Small scratches that made no sense. She stared at them in confusion. Then she smoothed the patch of sand in front of her until it was flat and unmarked, and she drew a wave. Then another wave and another wave. Layers of waves. She sat back and studied her work. Not bad. When she was in school, she had been told that she drew well.

  Above the waves, she drew a big sun and then some clouds. She sat back on her heels and thought hard. Maybe she would become an artist. You didn’t need to speak to be an artist. You just had to see things and then re-create them on a flat surface while making them look anything but flat.

  As the last rays of the sun finally beamed away and the darkness lifted out of the ground, she began to like her idea even more. Once she was too old for the authorities to bother her anymore, she could make drawings or paintings down by the sea and sell them to tourists. Her father had sold some local artwork out of his souvenir shack.

  It was a good idea, one that meant she could take care of herself in the future. Though the girl had to steer clear of the young white woman, the lady had given the girl a fine idea.

  Chapter Thirteen

  GRACE

  It took me more than a week to find out that the girl slept in a dilapidated shed on the old voodoo man’s property, right where I’d seen her the first time. The boy who told me as much would not even tell me her name, however, but would only point out the sorry place where she lay at night. He was reluctant to do even that.

  One day, when I could hear the voodoo man snoring again, I let myself into his weedy overgrown yard and then ducked my head into the shed where the girl stayed, a dusty little windowless hovel with junk pushed against the walls. Inside were some old army blankets, a washtub she must have used for bathing, and a slop jar. I managed to stave off repulsion and crept in, and I was ever so happy I’d done so, because farther inside I made the most incredible discovery.

  On the packed dirt floor of the shed were numerous scraps of paper, and in the handwriting I assumed was hers were snippets of poetry, and I recognized many of the lines. The verse of Emily Brontë. She wasn’t an imbecile, nothing even close to it. Not only was the girl no idiot, she was literate. Elation flooded me, and then a sense of relief, and then something even larger.

  Later that day, as we were distributing goods and food, I told Ira what I had seen.

  “You entered her dwelling?” he asked with concern on his face. He stopped and turned to face me. “While she was gone?”

  I deflated. “Y-yes.”

  At first, he said nothing.

  “You think it was not a good thing to do.”

  His soft eyes held concern rather than incrimination. “I think we have to respect people’s privacy.”

  “But she’s still a child.”

  “She doesn’t live like one, does she? She takes care of herself somehow.”

  His words were like soft nudges. Ira seemed to be giving me time to reconsider my ways. And then my regret was huge. I was as lost here as I sometimes felt alone at night. Down here a code of ethics still prevailed, and I had just broken it.

  “I’m sorry, Ira.”

  He nodded, and we continued walking, doing our work.

  He said, “I had a feeling she was not ignorant or afflicted.”

  “I’ll be more careful. I promise.”

  During our stroll and food delivery, Ira sometimes prayed with people who requested it, but I never once heard him use sententious language or make moralizing comments, which one might have expected of a minister. He listened to everything, from stories and jokes to concerns and dire problems, with the same rapt attention, transfixed by one and all, but he didn’t give advice unless it was asked of him.

  Once he offered me his arm, and I heard a quick intake of breath when I touched him. Was he a tiny bit enamored of me? Often I was aware of him watching me, and once I glanced back to see his face, inquiring, contemplating, and maybe a little entranced. Perhaps he had never spent so much time working near a young lady.

  I enjoyed all of my duties with Ira Price, particularly the work with the children. My favorite things were taking them to play in the ocean, leading them in games, and teaching them songs. This in turn gave me fresh memories of when my father was alive. Though memory before age five is a dim and fleeting thing, I recalled a day when he was stretched out flat on the grass beside me, and together we had studied a nearby colony of ants. We had watched them build a hill, and it was fascinating, all those tiny creatures carrying grains of sand, making something substantial together. Another memory returned to me, too, of my father and myself studying the back of a leaf, until my mother suddenly appeared and snatched our leaf away.

  We worked daily among the adults, families, outcasts, and sick people. Ira and I had to ignore some gambling, cockfighting, and drinking, and most of the time we didn’t try to “move mountains,” as he put it. We did stop a phony druggist from selling morphine, but for the most part we took things “one act at a time,” as Ira would say. We escorted a man who suffered from apoplexies to the hospital. We attended funerals and burials at Potter’s Field. At the burial of one older man, an emptiness came over me. I longed to be able to visit my father’s final resting place. My mother had never held a funeral service for my father, saying that he didn’t believe in them. She told me he’d been buried in New Orleans, but we’d never visited the grave, as Mother had disliked that city from the moment of his death onward; in fact, she despised the entire state of Louisiana.

  Ira wore his occupation as easily as he wore his simple clothing and gleaming glasses. His white shirt was neither perfectly white nor well pressed, but it was well matched with his comfortable demeanor and ai
r of wisdom. Despite his rumpled hair and the frequent sunburn flaming raw on his cheeks, his presence was powerful but gentle. He wasn’t a man of the streets, but he fit anyway—a small but essential piece of a complex puzzle.

  In this hard part of the city, I helped load crates and even did some lifting, despite Ira’s frequent objections. One time I ran for a doctor for a young woman giving birth. The labor was taking much too long. I waited outside during the labor and birth and became filled with the most profound sense of loneliness as I listened to the screaming and sounds of pain I would never forget, wrapped up in my own musings until I finally heard the words “Mother and baby are well,” and in those moments of unfolding life, that old empty place was suddenly filled with all that was raw yet hopeful. A flash of memory—my father carrying me up the stairs, tripping a bit and then laughing, but I had felt no fear. He had held me, just as this community held its arms tightly around itself.

  I would never forget the face of the baby his mother named Emmanuel, meaning “God is with us.” I saw myself not as the center of my own life, but just one person in a teeming world of humanity. Around me were men who laughed with abandon, women who were not ashamed of their flesh, and children who created adventures, just as Jonathan and I once had.

  I found myself searching for my place to fit in and also trying to solve the riddle that was Ira Price. He was a mystery to me, even though he was as open and bright as a spread of untouched sand on a sun-filled beach. I had begun to welcome his solid warmth beside me as we worked, the way he leaned forward ever so slightly when I spoke, the way he unconsciously nodded and smiled as he looked over donations.

  The people of my social circle had no notion of the activities in the shacks and shanties and hovels and rookeries behind them. In the alleys, despite some miserable existences, what surprised me most was how much laughter and music I heard during my days. The alley behind Trinity Episcopal Church, attended by many people I knew in my social circle, was a most lively place. Alley dwellers changed residences a great deal, shared houses, washed clothes, peddled charcoal, played fiddles, made whiskey, picked figs, fried fish, gave birth, died. I would never have known all this had I not been sent here by my mother.

  Several people became dear to me—the boy named Joseph, who was afraid of the water, and an old woman named Daisy, who had some malady of the neck that kept her face always turned to one side, but still she cooked for every single funeral, whether she knew the deceased well or not. Charles, with his sense of humor, and his grandson Isiah were favorites, too. Then there was a spry old man named Jules, who could play everything on the violin from concertos to jigs.

  “He can also play spoons,” Ira told me once.

  “How does one play spoons?”

  A smile crossed his face. He seemed to take genuine pleasure in my company, and I was ever so relieved that I hadn’t become a burden to him.

  He said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard someone play the spoons before. Why, we’ll just have to ask him to play a tune for you. Perhaps something special for a special young lady.”

  I had never expected anything close to a compliment from Ira, and at this I looked away.

  Eventually the music man, as we began to call him, did play the spoons for me. He and I became friends and often talked of concertos and symphonies and art in general. I never asked how he came to know so much. It was a conundrum, but he could converse on the arts as well as anyone I’d ever known. I gave him some of my sketches, which pleased him.

  But most of all my interest fell on the girl who possessed animal-like fear and hid from us, who knew poetry but didn’t speak. Her isolation set her apart, and my attention was hooked.

  I walked the beach almost every day before going home. And every day I stopped, faced the sea, and closed my eyes. What an opportunity I had been given. I could’ve so easily never known this, never recognized this. Had Etta not come, had I not betrayed her confidence, had my mother not “punished” me by sending me to work with Ira, I would have missed the experience of a lifetime. I might never have really seen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ETTA

  There were so many places to go, people to meet, and things to do. Etta attended a performance of the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, hosted by the Galveston Quartette Society. She was invited to a Japanese bridge party, where the guests wore kimonos bought overseas (Etta donned her aunt’s) and the prizes were a silver compote, a crystal puff box, and other intricate and expensive trinkets.

  She viewed art collections and an antique Persian rug recently purchased by one of her aunt’s friends. She attended a wedding held in the private home of her aunt’s dear friend Olive Dougherty, whose niece married another island boy in the garden on a Sunday afternoon, and then afterward a private supper was served in the dining room over thick crimson carpets, with only a few select friends present, though Etta barely knew the newlyweds.

  She had been accepted into an inner circle, a group of young people who owned Gramophones and Brownie cameras and read Harper’s Weekly and had been to Atlantic City, New York, Paris, and London so many times they mentioned their last trips in passing.

  She celebrated the graduation of a rather boorish young man who smoked a pipe and played with his hair while he stumbled among the guests at the party hosted by his parents, and she tried to look cheerful. Etta thought him to be uninterested in the party and its guests. Those who had so much as always failed to appreciate it.

  Under high ceilings lit with chamber-sized chandeliers and to the music of a full orchestra, its musicians dressed in black tuxedos with white roses on their lapels, Etta danced with almost every young man at that graduation party. Her prospects were lining up. And now that she wore gowns with designs overseen by her aunt, now that she had allowed her aunt to take her under her wing, advising her on everything from jewelry to hair accessories and perfumes, even her suitors’ parents approved.

  She danced with a young man who was studying in the School of Medicine of the University of Texas. He was a gentleman but much too nervous in her close proximity, and when he started talking about a paper he was to give on hookworm disease, and then about the need for pasteurization of milk and cream in the Southern states as a public health matter, she allowed another young man to cut in.

  The next dance partner was the son of the owner of Cohen’s Clothing Store, among other established businesses. He was an excellent dancer, but he perspired too much. After she took her turn with him on the floor, Etta’s hand was damp, even though she wore lacy gloves. Another man, an executive on the Short Line, talked too much, as if he was far more interested in his own version of everything than in learning more about her.

  None of them affected her the way Philo had. She missed it, that feeling she’d exploded with for a brief period of time. She wanted to feel that overwhelming thrill again, that instantaneous attraction, a pull so magnetic it had almost made her ill.

  She preferred the days spent with her aunt. They took shopping excursions, sat for coffees and teas, and visited the Galveston Athletic Club.

  Dressmakers came by in the afternoon to offer fabric choices for Bernadette’s new winter dresses, although her wardrobe was already filled with lovely suits and gowns and the most elegant and tasteful of accompaniments. Bernadette chose carefully but without regard to cost. She devised a menu for every dinner and wrote notes to the cooks suggesting means of preparation and presentation. Even in her everyday life she demanded only the best. Nothing less than pricey perfection would suit.

  With her aunt, Etta was the curious one. Once she asked a question that could’ve come out of Grace’s mouth. Or would it have been Jonathan’s, or Wallace’s? “Do you prefer beach side or bay side?”

  Bernadette had been sitting, poised and reflective, in her private parlor. “Perhaps I’m odd in my fancy,” she answered, “but I prefer the quiet of the bay. I find it more soothing.”

  Etta would continue, asking questions such as “Which i
s your favorite store?” “Your favorite place for dining?,” always trying to find her way in.

  Once she asked her aunt, “Who is your closest friend?”

  “Why, my dear, I don’t believe in ranking them,” Bernadette answered. “That’s not a courteous or a grateful thing to do.”

  Etta glanced down and tried to appear contrite. “But surely you have a preference.”

  “If I do,” said her aunt a bit more harshly than Etta had expected, “then it’s one I’ll keep to myself.”

  Etta was sure her face reflected hurt. With her aunt she found herself less guarded.

  Aunt Bernadette unstiffened. “My dear, it’s simply the sort of thing one learns over the years. The trick, my sweet, is to make each and every one of your acquaintances a dear friend, and then you shall always be surrounded by favorites.”

  Etta looked up then and nodded, listening with all her might.

  “Each person possesses his or her own unique gifts. Some adore music and the arts; others are experts on literature and museums. Simply make sure you call upon those whose gifts are best for certain occasions. Show no preferences, and in the end you shall always be preferred.”

  Of course. Etta was already doing just that, wasn’t she? Hadn’t she come to nearly the same conclusion on her own? Remaining friendly but reserved; choosing when and how to be around whom and under what circumstances. Discerning. Hearing it from her aunt was a powerful substantiation. It occurred to her that she and her aunt were more like mother and daughter. Etta was much more Bernadette’s daughter than Grace could ever hope to be. And Etta was learning, picking up little tidbits of information, taking verbal and unspoken cues, becoming more of what she’d always longed to be but simply hadn’t known before. She longed to become a woman like Bernadette, wealthy but generous, powerful and astute but also kind. Galvestonians not only respected Bernadette, they esteemed her.