“Anyhow,” Manny was saying, “Cody thinks your daughter is the hottest thing around.”
Faye wasn’t surprised to hear this. He’d given Amande a miniature candy bar that said it was true.
“So does Nate. And Thad. They’re all hot for Amande.”
Faye wished she could wash out her ears. And her brain.
“I keep an eye out for her,” Manny said. “Been doing that for longer than you’ve known her.”
Faye was getting tired of being reminded how long Manny had known her daughter. Four words escaped her mouth before she could choke them back.
“Not jealous, are you?”
“Of the little frat boys? Not a bit. Not jealous of you, either, if that’s what you mean.”
Manny’s eyes left Amande’s hopeful suitors, riding away on a big boat that was receding into the distance, and they met Faye’s. Faye wasn’t sure she’d ever made sustained eye contact with the man and she found it disconcerting, because there was no denying how good-looking he was. And there was no denying that Manny was her husband’s age, so she couldn’t hide behind any claim that he was too young to be attractive to her.
In the sunlight, Manny’s eyes were a warm brown that matched the dyed tips of his hair. He was wearing it a little shorter than he had in Louisiana, sporting an up-to-the minute style with long-ish freestyle twists sprouting from the crown of his head and a close-dropped fade on the sides. It looked like an expensive style for a man who had just bought a struggling business and was working hard to get it back on its feet.
In Manny’s defense, the marina’s success or failure had always been directly tied to the charm of its owner. People had loved Liz for her long bottle-red hair and her willingness to say whatever was necessary as long as it was the truth. And everyone, even Faye, had loved the scalawag Wally for reasons that passed understanding, because he had possessed very few redeeming qualities.
The entire southern half of Micco County had grieved for Liz and Wally. If Manny was trying to craft a personal brand that said he was warm and hip and funny, he might well be headed for success. This seemed to be what his customers liked. Maybe that awesome hairdo would do it for him.
“I’m not after your daughter, you know,” he said. “I know you think I am, but I’m not.”
Faye didn’t know how to respond now that he had bluntly stated something that everyone close to her knew to be true.
Her mouth gaped while she floundered for something to say. Manny was a lifelong fisherman, so she knew she must look to him like a just-landed catfish gasping for air. Joe, too, was a lifelong fisherman, and she hoped he never saw her looking like that.
“Actually, I prefer older women, so I’m truthfully just a little jealous of Joe. There’s nothing like a pretty woman who’s smart and knows her own mind.”
Manny’s even white teeth flashed in his dark face, and Faye lost her train of thought. What had she been planning to say?
The only thought she could dredge up was an incoherent hope that he was being honest about his feelings for Amande, or lack thereof, because Manny’s charm was potent. Faye wouldn’t have been able to resist it at Amande’s age. Even at her age, she found that Manny was doing a very good job at chipping away at her defenses.
“If I were Joe, I’d spend less time fishing and hunting and more time with my gorgeous wife.”
Then he turned away, a move calculated to make a woman miss those mesmerizing eyes. Faye had been around long enough to see what he was doing, even as she felt its effects. A woman her daughter’s age wouldn’t have a chance of resisting Manny.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Amande loved her boat even more than she loved her car. It was just an old oyster skiff, not much different from the ancient oyster skiff that her mother had owned and loved since before Amande was born. Like her mother’s boat, Amande’s looked just awful but its motor sang like an angel, because Faye had taught her how to make it do that.
When that thought crossed Amande’s mind, she adjusted it to be more truthful and also to preserve her self-esteem. She reminded herself that she had been pretty handy with a wrench long before she came to live with her mom and dad, but she had to admit that Faye deserved some credit for helping her fine-tune her skills.
Amande loved that boat because it represented freedom, the same reason that most Americans worshiped their cars, but the difference between her and a run-of-the-mill teenage driver was that she’d gotten her first boat before she was twelve. Amande felt like she’d always been free. She loved her home and she loved her family, but she stayed with them because she wanted to be there, not because she wasn’t free to go. Her parents understood this, because they approached the world in the same way. This was the reason they hadn’t already killed each other.
No, that was too dark. They would never have killed each other, but Amande might well have left by now if she hadn’t believed there was a chance that her parents would eventually understand her. And if she didn’t believe that once they did understand her, they’d still love her for who she was.
It always made her happy to pilot that junky boat out into the wild blue somewhere. Weirdly, she couldn’t do that right now, because something was on her seat. She deftly snapped Michael into his life jacket and settled him in his usual spot on the deck beside her seat. Then she took a second to study the small box that was sitting where her butt should be.
The evening was late and the sun was low. Its rays struck the shiny object at a shallow angle, but they illuminated it well enough. A frilly white bow adorned the package’s cobalt-blue wrapping paper. Somebody had left her a present. Was it weird that she wasn’t even sure who it was from?
It could be from Nate, but he seemed to limit himself to trying to buy her drinks and dinner. She might have said yes to dinner, but he was altogether too focused on buying her liquor, as if buying a woman alcohol was the coolest thing you could do when she wasn’t old enough to buy it for herself.
Thad had flashed some concert tickets at her just a day before, when Nate wasn’t looking. And what if she’d said yes? How long would it take him to admit to his richer and cooler friend that he’d cut him out of a date with the girl he liked?
It peeved her that Thad was trying to get her to say yes to a date by showing her the tickets, but he was too cowardly to actually taking the risk of saying, “Will you go out with me?” Wrapping them up and leaving them for her to find—or for them to get lost in a howling thunderstorm—seemed to be about right for chicken-livered Thad.
No, she would not be going out with a man so afraid of rejection that he couldn’t spit out the words, “I like you. Want to spend some time together?”
Cody, whose light hair, blue eyes, and deeply tanned skin made him memorable, even compared to the good-looking Nate and Thad, was even less straightforward than they were. But maybe she should cut him some slack because he was the youngest of the three. She had a vague idea that Nate was maybe twenty-five or twenty-six, and Thad was a few years older than that. This meant that Thad was closer to Manny’s age than hers. (And maybe to her father’s. Ew.) And Nate wasn’t far behind.
This thought did nothing to jump-start her libido. Cody, though, wasn’t much over twenty. They could have known each other in high school, if they’d lived in the same state and if she had actually gone to a high school that wasn’t online.
She picked up the long, narrow package and sat down. Michael, who was pretty sure that her gift belonged to him, was easily staved off with the frilly bow and the bag of peanuts in her pocket. Sliding a finger under a meticulously applied piece of tape, she stopped to consider the gift’s wrapping. Heavy foil paper. Precise folds. Straight-edged seam. This thing, whatever it was, had been wrapped by a professional.
The paper fell away, revealing a white box embossed with the golden logo of a Tallahassee jewelry store. The sight of it put a lump in Amande’s thro
at, but not in the way that the giver probably hoped. There was nobody in her life that she would reasonably expect to buy her jewelry out of the blue. Her parents would never do that. Neither would Manny. If Sheriff Mike and Magda wanted to spend big money on her, they’d put it in her college fund. If Emma wanted her to have jewelry, she’d give her something meaningful from her own jewelry box. And nobody in her life would take the risk of leaving something valuable on a boat, unattended.
She opened the box and found a bracelet crafted of heavy gold links, closed by a clasp that was set with small rubies and shaped like a heart. Tucked into the box was a small card that said nothing but “Cody.” She knew how he wanted her to feel, but he had missed the mark because the only thing she felt was pissed off.
She was so mad that she started talking to herself while she maneuvered the boat out of the marina and into open water. “So you can’t talk to me. And you can’t even write down whatever it is you have to say. You’ve got nothing to say to me but your name, which is pretty freakin’ self-centered, if you ask me. And now what am I going to do with this? If I want to give it back, I have to talk to you. That’s more than you were willing to do for me. This is too expensive to throw away, but I’m damned if I’ll wear it.”
“That’s an ugly word, Sissy,” said Michael, his mouth still full of peanuts.
“I’m feeling pretty ugly right now, Bubba.”
She gunned the motor and headed to Joyeuse Island.
* * *
Amande was so tired when she came home that she said almost nothing, and Faye noticed. More and more, she spent a lot of time wondering what her daughter was thinking. This evening, she learned nothing about Amande’s thoughts as the young woman handed Michael over to Faye, ate the grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup that Joe had made for her, and then retreated to her bedroom.
Michael had gone to bed, so now Faye sat in her office, listening to her daughter’s feet on the stairs taking her up to her room. She could hear Amande’s jeans creak and the faint sigh of her breaths. These were the sounds she would miss when Amande went away to college.
A loose-leaf document lay on the desk in front of Faye. It was a photocopy of a mimeographed copy of an oral history collected in the 1930s. The story it told was one of Faye’s greatest treasures. These pages recorded the memories of Faye’s great-great-grandmother, Cally Stanton. Ever since she’d talked to Captain Eubank about the wreck of the Philomela, she’d been waiting for a chance to see if Cally might have had something to say about it.
Faye had read the pages so many times and so closely that she’d nearly memorized them. She was dead certain that the word “Philomela” never appeared in Cally’s memoirs, but she did remember something about a mysterious ship that visited Joyeuse Island and was never seen again. Cally may even have used the words “blockade runner,” though Faye wasn’t sure about that. Now she was wondering whether Cally’s mysterious ship might have led Captain Eubank to his death.
* * *
Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,
Recorded in 1935 and preserved as part of the WPA Slave Narratives.
Nobody that’s been hungry has ever forgot what it’s like. And I’ve been hungry. When I was a girl, my first master would make us all hungry on purpose. Maybe it was because he’d got a chance to sell every last kernel of corn we grew that year on Joyeuse Island, and at such a good price that he didn’t see any sense in holding back enough to feed to the folks that planted it, hoed it, and picked it. Or maybe it was because one of the field hands said something to the overseer about being tired and he decided to teach us all a lesson by cutting our rations. Sometimes, he didn’t even have a single excuse for starving us, not unless you want to call pure meanness an excuse.
After my first master died and went straight to hell, things got better. For one thing, the second master, Mister Courtney, freed everybody at the beginning of the war, right before he died. That made things a helluva lot better, if you’ll excuse my language. After that, it was just us on Joyeuse Island. We’d been farming it all our lives. Farming it for ourselves was better. And I was in charge, because Mister Courtney had left the whole place to me and to our daughter, Courtney.
When there was food, and there usually was, we ate. This island’s a big place, so there’s room to grow a lot of food. But then it takes a whole lot of food to keep a hundred people alive, don’t it? One time, it rained for a solid month and everything rotted in the ground. We planted again and the fields made enough to keep us alive, just barely, but everybody was naturally more skin and bones at the end of it all.
The worst year of all came toward the end of the war. The blight got the beans, and the cutworms got the corn. I don’t know what it was that ate all the collards, but I thought we’d surely all die. By that time, Mister Courtney was dead, everybody on the place was free, and I was running things, so every soul that died would’ve been on my head and on my heart. How could I let my people suffer?
And if you’re a-wondering why we didn’t just take a boat to someplace where we could get food, remember that there was a war on. Didn’t nobody on land have any extra food to sell, and I didn’t have any notion of reminding hungry folks about us living out here on Joyeuse Island. They would’ve been out here by nightfall to take what little we had to eat and I almost wouldn’t have blamed them. Almost.
I wished hard for a supply boat, but I might as well have been wishing for the moon. To tell you the truth, living on Joyeuse Island in those days was about like living on the moon. Months would pass when we saw nary a soul. Not a passing boat. Nobody. Well, except maybe a war ship now and again. We did our best to pray those away, and we must’ve been pretty good at praying.
And then the day came when I would’ve been glad to see even a war ship if it was carrying food. It was the day when I knew in my heart that everybody on the place was hungry, and everybody was going to stay hungry and probably die, if I didn’t fix it. Winter was out there a-waiting for us, and it was only going to get harder to put food on the table.
I’d run out of prayers. Hope, too, and it takes a lot to put me in a corner where I can’t see any way to get out. I always find a way. On that day, I couldn’t see how I was going to manage it.
I had sent everybody who could hold a pole out to fish. Every boat we had was on the water, full of people with shrimp nets, and the rest of us stood fishing from land. I even sent the little children out digging for worms and checking crab traps. Come dark, when the shrimpers rowed their boats in with their catch, I was gonna send ‘em right back out with lanterns and frog gigs. That was my plan. Like I said, it’s a lot of work to feed a hundred mouths.
I had high hopes for the frog-gigging. The tide was low. That meant you could count on the creeks along that swampy stretch of mainland just north of the island to be working alive with frogs. And the moon was new, so there wouldn’t be no light but the lanterns to make shadows that could scare the frogs. Fried frogs’ legs will put you right straight in heaven when you’re hungry. Even when you ain’t hungry, if you’re me.
Well, one little rowboat went out frog-gigging one night and come right straight back in. I run out onto the dock ready to shake my fist in some faces. They needed to be out there finding food.
Turned out that they’d spied a ship snugged up against the shore, a-hiding from something.
“Union?” I asked. “Or Confederate?”
I wasn’t sure it mattered. Soldiers in either color of jacket would be more’n happy to take the last of our food.
“Couldn’t tell. But it was a big ’un, a steamship all covered with iron and running with two side wheels.”
When I heard that, I hiked my skirts up past my knees, stepped into that boat, and told them to take me to that ship as fast as they could row. I thought there was a decent chance that this ship was carrying people who didn’t want our food. They wanted money. I didn’t
have any of that, either, but maybe I had something to trade.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Faye took a moment to absorb what she’d read. It was far from the first time that she’d read this story, but she’d always been focused on the near-starvation of a hundred people. Hunger held a horrible fascination for Faye. She had been poor. At times, she’d been really poor, but she’d never been truly hungry.
She picked up Cally’s oral history and carried it into Joe’s office. He knew this part of Cally’s story well. He liked her to read to him in the evenings, so she’d read the whole oral history out loud to him more than once, but he particularly liked this part. Joe loved to go frog-gigging along those same creeks Cally had described, so her story put him right into the past.
From a hunter’s point of view, frog-gigging was fun on a primitive level—no gun, no bow, just a long-handled fork for spearing prey. And what could be better than a nice evening on the water that ended with an all-fried-food midnight meal? Distracted by Cally’s gripping tale of hunger and by the frog-gigging, neither of them had ever given much thought to the steel-sided boat outfitted with two paddlewheels that Cally had seen.
With Joe sitting in a chair pulled up beside her, she pointed at Cally’s description of the ship and said, “During the war, there were a ton of reasons for a ship to lay low like that. Both navies had ships floating all along American coastlines.”
“Yep,” Joe said. “No matter who you were, half of those ships you saw—give or take—would have been happy to blast you out of the water.”
“Exactly. And if you were a blockade runner like, say, the Philomela, and if it was as late in the war as Cally described, then the people who wanted to blow you out of the water were the ones who were winning.”
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