by Robert Ward
“Grace, I’ll be frank. I’d love you to meet with some of my friends in the movement. There’s a good group of people in town who are really starting to get the ball rolling. You know Baltimore isn’t as bad as Alabama or Mississippi, but there’s a lot that needs to be done. There’s even a small part of the movement happening at your church.”
Aha, I thought. This is it … and why not? Who else would the Negroes turn to at First Methodist? Annette Swain or Pastor Milquetoast? Given all I had learned tonight, I felt an intense pride that they had come to my grandmother. They were asking her to be a small part of history, and I was sure Grace would rise to the occasion.
But instead, her voice dropped and she fidgeted in her chair. She looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“Yes, it has,” she said, but with little enthusiasm in her voice or manner.
“That’s right,” the Reverend Gibson said, “and we wish to lend any support we can to the brothers and sisters at First Methodist. Without upsetting the Reverend Brooks too much. ‘Cause we think that essentially he’s a decent man. That’s just one of the things we wanted to talk with you about.”
Grace nodded, but there was no enthusiasm in it. She looked tired, even afraid.
‘I’ll be honest with you,” she said. “I’m very busy right now. I’m about to take on new responsibilities at church, and I’ve got this young man here to see to, at least for the time being. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to do.”
“Gracie,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m fine, and if you want to—”
But Dr. Gibson interrupted me.
“Anything you could contribute would be appreciated,” he said. “And I think you’d really like the people in the circle. There’re university professors, and doctors, lawyers, and a few local reporters … a very eclectic and sophisticated crowd.”
My grandmother hesitated again, then shook her head.
“I’ll have to think about it,” she said. “I have many commitments. But thank you for asking me. I’m honored.”
For a second the Reverend Gibson looked confused, then managed a polite nod. It was obvious to me that he was a man who wasn’t used to being turned down. And that this visit had not gone at all the way he had expected.
“We’re going to have a meeting in ten days at Lovely Lane Methodist Church. Wednesday night at seven o’clock. I hope you can make it.”
“I’ll give it serious consideration,” my grandmother said. “That’s fine,” the minister said. He turned to me.
“There’s room for you, too, young man,” he said. “If you’d like to come.”
“Really?”
“Really. We have many young brave and idealistic people in the movement. You might find this an educational experience that will be a little more interesting than Silas Marner.’ He smiled, and we shook hands.
Then he turned and nodded in a rather formal way to my grandmother, and was gone.
After he left, the living room seemed diminished, as the air itself does at the end of a summer thunderstorm. I felt elated but also worn out … and disturbed. Why didn’t Grace jump at the chance to get involved? It was obvious to me that she had so much to give. I thought of her “spell” the other night. Could that have something to do with it?
She walked into the kitchen, and I followed behind her.
“He was great, wasn’t he?” I said. “That was fascinating.”
“Yes,” she said. “It was quite an evening.”
“Well!” I said eagerly. “What are you going to do? Do you think you’re going to go?”
She looked at me with tired eyes.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure.”
“But why?”
She sighed deeply.
“It’s just as I said. I have a lot of commitments. At the church and with various organizations I’m already in. I’m not twenty-five years old, Bobby. I can’t spread myself too thin.”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess not…. It’s just that I thought this is such a great movement, that you’d want to be part …”
“It is a great movement,” she said. “But it’s not my movement. It’s their movement. The Negroes are doing well. They need money, and they need laws changed. Which means they need powerful people on their side. I’m neither rich nor powerful.”
“Yeah, but Dr. Gibson came here especially to see you. That must mean he thinks you have something special.”
She smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
“No, he makes a lot of these visits. What it really means is I have a grandson who has a very oversized picture of his grandmother.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I’m goofy and I’ve got a lot of things wrong … God, I found out a whole boatload of things I didn’t understand just tonight … I’ll admit that. But I know you’re not like everyone else. You’re better. I know it.”
But even as I said it, I doubted it was so.
My grandmother hugged me.
“It’s been a very instructive evening,’ she said. “Now get to bed. You’ve got school tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hooray.”
I smiled at her, she kissed my forehead, and I went off to bed. But I lay there again for a long time, wondering what was going on in Grace’s heart. There was something stopping her, but I didn’t know what. I replayed in my mind what she’d told the Reverend Gibson. She’d said she had “expanded duties at church.” Was that just a line? She hadn’t mentioned anything of that kind to me.
What could stop her from helping the movement? It made no sense to me. Finally, exhausted from worry, I fell into a troubled sleep.
Robert “Cap” ward
D uring the next week I had three tests in school, so I vowed to study and somehow put all my other worries on the back burner.
During the day I worked hard at school, and in the afternoon I concentrated on history dates, Nathaniel Hawthorne (yes, The Scarlet Letter, a book I hated then as much as Silas Marner, but which I completely failed to understand and now love), alluvial plains, and hogbacks. At night my grandmother worked on her sewing and read from the Bible or Anna Karenina. I remember her comforting shape sitting under the old reading lamp as I came out from the dining room where my studies were spread out before me. Sometimes we would talk for a few minutes before getting back to our own reading, but often we would merely smile at each other, and I would feel something close to the old glow of happiness again. Then I would go back to my schoolwork, redoubling my efforts after being inspired by my grandmother, who often said to me, “One of the greatest, persistent joys in life is being a perennial student.”
Life went on in this simple, uncluttered way for a week. It was the kind of week I had hoped for when I first came to Grace’s, and I was grateful.
And yet there was something that marred our happiness.
Though I didn’t want to admit it, didn’t even want to think about it, I was bothered by the feeling that my grandmother was hiding out, pretending to be this kind, old biddy happy to live in her old age through her books and her Bible … that the whole thing was some kind of sham and that neither one of us was really fooled.
I tried not to think of it. After all, it was her right to do whatever she wanted. But she had always insisted on trying to do one’s best in all things. She had endorsed Gandhi as the greatest man on earth, and I had often heard her say that Dr. King was “our own Gandhi.” I knew she felt that the Negro movement was the most important moral force in our country “since the Civil War.”
No matter how I turned it, I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t get involved, but I didn’t want to bother her. I had too much respect for her to nag her about it.
And there was, too, a matter of my own survival. If I bugged her about her “moral shortcomings,” she might send me home, and I feared that more than anything.
So I shut my mouth, studied, and told myself to mind my own business.
In this less-than-perfect but st
ill fairly satisfactory way, things quietly progressed for about two weeks. I got an A on the Scarlet Letter paper and Bs in geography and history, so I was back in the saddle again in school.
Life was fine, and I’d almost managed to put the larger questions out of my mind. Then my grandfather came home from sea.
I remember him wobbling up the front steps, his seabag thrown over his shoulder, his short sea legs almost comically bowed, his grizzled, sun-weathered face coiled in a frown. There was a scar over his left eye, a scar whitened by endless days on the bridge of freighters squinting into the sun. It was about an inch long, and it made him look fierce; it was easy to imagine him as a pirate or a smuggler. Now, though, he looked beaten, tired. He squinted at me as I read an anthology of ghost stories called Beyond the Wall of Sleep on the front porch, and I decided he also looked drunk. He nodded slightly, then gave me a lopsided smile.
“Hey, boy, how are you?”
“Hi, Cap,” I said. Looking at his huge wrists and short but powerful arms, I felt small, insubstantial.
“Come over and give your old granddad a hug,” he said. That surprised me. It had been years since I’d hugged him.
I lay down my book and walked over to him, feeling awkward and self-conscious. Cap dropped his seabag and gave me a squeeze. I half-expected him to crush me. Instead, I was surprised and moved by the gentleness of his touch.
What wasn’t surprising was his breath, which reeked of cheap liquor. I remembered the stories of his drunken violence with my father, the fear in my dad’s voice when he talked about his own boyhood, and I was a little afraid of him myself. And yet there was that tender, loving hug, the compassionate look in his eyes.
“Your grandmother in?” he said.
“No, she’s up at the church. A meeting of some kind.”
“Well, hell, of course she is,” my grandfather said. “Last we spoke she told me you’re living here with us for a while.”
“That’s right,” I said. I dreaded that he would ask about my parents’ problems and that I would have to tell him. I was ashamed, embarrassed, and frightened about what was going on at home. For most of the past two or three weeks I had successfully put them out of my mind, but one question from my grandfather would stir up my fears and worries about what recent damage my parents might have done to each other.
“You been watching after Gracie?” he said, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“More like she’s been watching after me,” I said shyly.
“Yeah, well, she will do that,” he said. “Like a hawk.”
He smiled and rolled his eyes a little, then hoisted up his bag and went inside. I knew his pattern. He’d go upstairs, fall into bed, and sleep twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch. On board ship he barely slept at all, standing endless hours on deck watching the water, charting navigations. Once home, he collapsed, sometimes for two or three days. It wasn’t at all unusual for me to come over for a weekend and still never see him.
But this day I followed him in. Suddenly, I had a great desire to talk with him. He started up the steps.
“Hey,” I said. “You want some lunch?”
He turned his head and smiled down at me in his grizzled way, his seabag hanging over his shoulder.
“You the chef around here now?”
“Yeah, well, I was going to make myself a hamburger, and it’s just as easy to make two.” He nodded.
“It is at that. Make it a cheeseburger, and I’ll be down in a few minutes. Gotta get some of this sea grime offa me.”
“Sure,” I said.
I felt an inexplicable happiness. I was going to eat with my grandfather, just the two of us. What was strange about it was that up until that very moment I had no idea that I even wanted to know him at all. I liked him, admired him from afar, but the truth was, he intimidated me. He was like a man from another era, quiet, powerful … and the work he did seemed mysterious, romantic, like something out of a movie. Nobody else I knew had a grandfather who was a sea captain. Then I thought of the furtive look in my father’s face whenever he mentioned “Cap.” A furtiveness and something else, as well … longing, heartbreak. They’d never gotten to know each other very well.
As I flipped the burgers, a strange and lonely thought crossed my mind. For all his talk of the strain in their relations, my father missed his father … he needed to see his father, to talk with him. Just as I needed to talk with my dad. And none of us were getting anywhere. It was a thought that pierced me, stung me. I quickly shut it down. It was too disturbing a notion.
And there was something else as well. Maybe my grandfather knew something about my grandmother, something that would explain the mystery of her complex heart.
Cap came down twenty minutes later, his gray hair neatly brushed. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and his baggy blue navy reg pants. His black shoes were, as always, shined until you could see your reflection in them.
I poured him iced tea and gave him his cheeseburger, complete with toasted bun.
“There’s condiments, too, if you want ‘em,” I said, pointing at the lettuce and tomato.
“Nope, like it plain. Let’s just see if this young man can cook.”
He smiled and took a bite of the burger. Chewed and swallowed, then nodded at me.
“Ain’t half bad. Maybe I’ll sign you on to serve in the galley next time I ship out.”
“Hey, I could do it,” I said. “You haven’t ever tasted my spaghetti and my pea soup.”
“Like pea soup fairly well,” he said. “Grace makes it fine.”
“Which is where I learned how to make it,” I said. “And I’d love to ship out with you sometime.” He smiled.
“Nah, no kinda life for you. You got book smarts from what I hear. You should go to college and get a good job.”
“You don’t like your work?” I said.
“Okay for me,” he said. “I don’t know anything else.”
He took another bite, then picked up a piece of tomato with his fork and laid it on his plate like a salad.
“When did you first ship out?” I asked.
“Oh, well, my dad … he took me out from down Mayo in a skipjack back when I was only about six. By the time I was ten I was sailing all around the bay. Me and my boyhood friends.”
“Wow” was about all I could say. I tried to imagine myself sailing anywhere, and it seemed impossible.
“Was a good life down on the bay,” he said. “Oyster pirating with my pals, and setting up Indian forts in the woods. Everything was fine till my daddy had his accident.”
“What happened?” I wasn’t eating anymore. My heart was thumping.
I had never expected to get into a serious talk with my grandfather. And yet, suddenly, here we were.
“Well, my daddy, his name was Robert, too, he was a great sailor, and a fine fisherman. He made money clamming, and he worked the oyster beds, and he used to bring home the finest oysters. So big you had to double-clutch ‘em just to get ‘em down. Anyway, he also took people out to the Chesapeake Bay on pleasure trips sometimes. Rich folks would come down to Annapolis and want to see the sights, and my daddy would take them out all around Gibson Island, places like that. One time, though, he went out there in the bay with this woman from Washington, D.C., some politician’s wife, who had brought, of all things, her dog on board. That was against the rules, too, but she had a big yacht, and she said the dog could handle it. My daddy figured it would be okay. After all, the animal could swim.
“They went out in the morning, and they stayed all afternoon. Then the sky got dark, and it begun to rain. My daddy shoulda come back in, but something kept him out there. Maybe the woman, maybe his own pride … he always figured he could sail through any kind of weather…. Or maybe he figured it would just be a short blow and he could get back later. Anyway, they were having a rough enough time, the woman got sick and was scared to death, and then the dog got loose and jumped overboard. Guess he panicked, ‘cause the woman said later he was drow
ning.
“My damn fool daddy jumped into the water to save that animal. The woman said she could see him wrestling with the dog, these huge waves maybe ten foot high towering over them…. They went floating up and down in the waves, the dog and my daddy, lightning crackling over their heads, the rain making them almost invisible in the dark water. Then she saw him again—he’d got his hands about the animal’s waist, and using all his strength, he picked him up over his head and threw him toward the boat. Then, nobody knows what happened … a heart attack, another wave … something, because my daddy went under.
“The woman grabbed the dog and somehow managed to get him aboard. The two of them made it down the hatch to the galley and got in bed together. She said later she prayed that death would come soon and wouldn’t be too painful for her damned animal. Come the next morning, the Coast Guard found her and that dog half-drowned, from where the boat had taken on water. Got ‘em back to land and they were just fine. Said she was so happy she bought her dog a steak. They found my daddy two days later, washed up on Gibson Island right in the middle of some young people’s beach party. And that was all she wrote.”
“God,” I said. “That’s terrible. How old were you?”
“Ten years old,” he said.
He looked at me and gave me a little smile that was more heartbreaking than any tears he might have shed. “How did you feel?” I said. He blinked at me as though he was shocked. “What?”
“I mean you must have been heartbroken,” I said. Then I felt self-conscious and wimpy for using a word like “heartbroken” around my grandfather.
But he got a funny twisted look on his face and nodded in agreement.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess. Had to go to work doing the things my daddy did, though. Didn’t have a lot of time to think about it.”
He smiled again, and I impulsively reached over and touched his shoulder. My grandfather jerked back as though I had zapped him with a live electric wire. But I managed to pat him anyway.
“You’re doing good in school?” he said, as I pulled my hand back.
“So far, so good,” I said.
