by Kent Wascom
Two
He was the youngest by six years and fell gamely into the slipstream of the Patterson boys. Within a week of their return Isaac could be seen trailing them close, just as twelve-year-old Ben went in the steps of the older David, playing understudy to their nested roles with an outsized eagerness that bled over into everything he did, just gulping up the world. They rowed with Isaac at the bow of their skiff, where he jostled happily for a place beside the dog, Lu, leaning against her thick furred ribs as they went through the calm waters of the sound and into the marshes for solitary bull redfish near troughs and at the feet of oysterbeds.
Not to say his coming to the family was without difficulty. Isaac suffered from bouts of fear at random and for the first few days wouldn’t leave Mrs. Patterson’s side, so she slept on a trundle cot beside his bed until he could be persuaded to share a room with Ben. He ate late and in secret, balled up fistfuls of white bread to chew alone in his room, which troubled her much less than what she saw as his almost frightening need for affection and, worse, his willingness to accept it from any and everyone who would give it. He had none of the reticence typical of little boys. Set him on a bench with a woman he’d been introduced to ten seconds prior, a friend of hers in town perhaps, or at the Florida Water–scented counter of the dress shop, and you would find him soon enough with some cooing lady running fingers through his hair. And seeing how utterly pleased he was and how he crowded happily into the chests of women, she knew that he would be trouble later in life and was not surprised when, at fourteen, he was compromised by the much-older sister of a classmate. Which escapade earned him a good-sized scar on his back from when the girl’s outraged mother discovered them behind a garden shed and pitched a flowerpot at him. He was never a rake, never unkind, and she was glad for this but he was so eager for everything he could get in terms of affection that Mrs. Patterson worried that it would be his downfall. With time Isaac’s fear would lessen, but the habit of eating and the mania for affection would stay with him all his life. But at least, she thought, he did not flinch or fear being beaten, which spoke well for the Baptists, though for a while he was concerned that the rest of the Pattersons were going to Hell and that he would be left alone again and this time forever.
In the winter Mrs. Patterson herded Isaac and Ben into what had once been a barn, now swept of hay and converted into a studio and patrolled by a scabby Manx called Wildman. There she intended for her youngest boys, sufficiently tired, to cultivate themselves (and if this happened to grant her time alone with her husband around midday, then all the better). All around were scattered the detritus of David’s fleeting interests. A table of leatherwork and chisels set beside a potter’s kickwheel, long dry; above it were shelves of jarred chemicals and specimens of David’s taxidermy, which he’d pursued after learning that it had been Theodore Roosevelt’s hobby as a youth, just as he’d taken up football and would later enlist in the army for the war in Cuba. So Isaac learned how to lay ropes of clay and shape a bowl, how to skin birds and carve wood. Mrs. Patterson watched, delighted at this reignited childhood.
More than anything Isaac was mad for drawing, for colors. Even at some other task, his hand would wander to a pencil and a scrap of paper and he was drawing everything. Mrs. Patterson would keep this especially in her heart, that she’d been the one who gave him the passion of his life, loving this in the way the love of the openhearted is really a mirror for the joy of those around them. How he took to the pens and paints and crayons, and soon the studio was filled with bolts of canvas (much too good for a child) and the wood for frames. They found him a stool and he would perch there for hours, hunched over a table or craning over the corner of a pad, filling space with what he’d seen throughout the day and many things he never had. Darting fish and crouched cats mingled among elephants and winged horses, all of which she’d add to her menagerie of treasures made by the other children.
But most of all she loved to wash his hands in the white enamel basin in the yard, working the pump and watching him dance for the chill of the gushing water. Loved the feel of his small fingers as they lost their smears of paint and charcoal. Sunsets and storms of colors, swirling, fading in the flow.
When spring came and it was warm enough the brothers taught Isaac to swim. It was painstaking work. First they sheltered him in a span of water no wider than their shoulders, corralled by their arms as he paddled, kicked, and spat. Then they made him travel back and forth between them, giving him a little more distance each day. He had to learn to stop looking up, searching bleary-eyed for them; to trust that they wouldn’t go away. All of this was overseen by Lu, who, as a younger dog, had been known to dive in and retrieve the brothers with the gentle mouth of a mother, and now in the last year of her life could only sit and stare. And if Mrs. Patterson was ever worried that bringing Isaac into their lives was unkind to her natural children (a phrase she hated), she could look out from the porch and see David wading chest-deep, Ben up to his freckled collar bone, both slapping the sunlit water and urging Isaac on. But there was also a part of her that knew she was witnessing their lives in microcosm, the brothers drifting further apart each day, and Isaac, when you could see him at all, so focused on his own struggle that he might have been alone. At such times she had to stop herself from bolting up and hollering for them to stay close by, as she did one blustery day in June, seeing storm clouds gathering in the west. She found herself standing at the edge of the porch, fear like a stranger in her voice. Ben and David turning, waving to her, but Isaac churning on, oblivious, until David snagged him and held him up to her like a trophy. Isaac grinned, dripping, waved, and called out for her to watch, watch, watch, as he flipped from David’s arms into the water.
There were no great storms that summer. The coast of Mississippi, a marshy toe extended out into the Gulf from the bloated body of the state, went unharmed. Biloxi did catch fire one night, and the Pattersons watched from their back porch as the sparks rose and the city on the western shore of the sound glowed like a coal. But the fire was contained, no lives lost. The days passed and the boys spread wider apart. By September Isaac could swim without pause the quarter mile across the narrow sound between their shore and Deer Island.
Three
Farther out lay the islands formed by glacial melts and sustained by sediments which in those days still flowed unimpeded from the river deltas. A few, the largest, were inhabited year-round by lighthouse keepers or small garrisons of bored soldiers, but most were no larger than suburban backyards, rising and falling with the tides. And there were reports, from the Choctaw and the Pascagoula before them, of an island that rose once every ninety years, remaining above the surface long enough to show faintly in the charts of a few early European expeditions and in the memories of grandparents. In the years to come a New Orleans speculator would build a casino on one of these capricious strands, betting not only against time and tide but that the precarious nature of the place itself was an attraction. (The casino Isle of Caprice would sink, along with one bartender and several members of a jazz band, in a storm at the end of 1928.) But back toward the shore, in the Mississippi Sound, Deer Island sat facing the mainland it had once been a part of, pared by storms in the previous century, and retained a few oaks and a stand of pines along its back. The island was owned in total by a New Orleans family called the Woolsacks, whose money was said to be in shipping, and it was occupied many summers by the wife and her two young children, a puny boy with blood-red hair and a girl you might politely call sturdy, whose own hair was somewhere between sunset and gold. There was another, older son who came with his father sometimes, but you might not see either for years. Those who did see them, father and son in cream-colored suits, would remark that they were alike in build (tending to lankness and not much height) and in the jut of their noses and chins, in the storm-green glares they shot from under the brims of their hats, in everything but name (the father’s was Joseph and the oldest son’s Angel) and age and most of all in voic
e: the father’s French-tinged but bottoming out in a gravelly drawl while the son’s had a lightness some guessed must’ve come from his mother and which worried certain men in a way they struggled to explain. Regardless, whatever these two said to your casual greeting or ill-chosen platitude, you knew they were not, as it were, nice people. The wife and mother was not much better regarded, though she had, in the year before Isaac came, invited a few locals to their newly completed home on the island. It was a grand house, high ceilings beamed with cedar, tall doors open to the beach fronted with yucca, which others called Spanish bayonet. The afternoon was, by all accounts, disastrous, though this didn’t seem to bother Mrs. Woolsack, who introduced herself as Marina. She was taller and fairer-haired than the others and owned an un-American coldness. When they were shown in, the guests noted that she hadn’t bothered to move her many piles of books. Her husband’s people, she said, were from New Orleans, but she’d come from Cuba. And when one visitor, a judge, spoke brightly of Cuba’s future as an American possession, she clicked her tongue and said something that made him blush. She sat with her guests on the veranda drinking chilled Ojen and never so much as winced at the havoc of her youngest children, a pair of terrors, a girl called Kemper and a boy named George but called Red. When they were home again, Mr. Patterson joked that the boy must’ve been named for the poet’s line, “red in tooth and claw.” The joke becoming far less funny when, a few weeks later, Mr. Patterson, talking to a friend who still lived in New Orleans, learned a bit more about the father, Joseph Woolsack, and his business, which details Mr. Patterson kept to himself except to say they weren’t good.
For a long time that visit was the last of all but the most cursory dealings anyone had with the people on Deer Island. From the shore you could see the lights in the high windows, and passing fishermen notched sightings of the lady on the veranda, facing the sea with a book in her lap, face veiled by her hair, while her children squabbled in the surf.
When Isaac was able to swim to the eastern end of the island, the two youngest Woolsack children would sometimes lie in wait in the tall patches of bay cedar and then leap out and pelt him with shells until David or Ben chased them back. It was all near enough for Mrs. Patterson to see clearly: the red-haired boy streaking over the dunes, fists pumping; the girl, Kemper, a bright clot of danger stark against the sand, standing firm until the Patterson boys had gone back into the water. On his rare visits, the husband would prowl the island with a pistol and, together with his eldest son, hunt whatever they could find, delighting in the sounds of gunfire for their own sake, the youngest boy weaving between them like an ill-trained birddog.
So for a few weeks each year the Woolsacks existed parallel to the world, betraying no interest in their neighbors. To Mrs. Patterson, the wife was an object of pity, for her solitude and coldness, her absence from her husband. More than anything Mrs. Patterson felt that love was something you spent freely, and in all directions that you could, and that if everyone did so the world would be a finer place. She guessed, somewhat correctly, that for this woman and her family love was an entangled thing, tight as briars. Guessed also, edging closer to the truth, that the Woolsacks were better suited to the world as it was not the world of feelings. And yet there were times when she’d think of the woman as a kind of friend, a ghost haunting no one but herself.
In July of ’98, when David was killed in the fighting at Daiquirí, Marina Woolsack sent her a short letter of condolence, quoting Shakespeare. Mrs. Patterson was so amazed by this and stunned already in her grief that she wrote back the very next day, thanking her. She never received a reply.
Four
Now it must be said who the Woolsacks were. They were the kind of people whom much can be said of, but little for. And if anything could be said in their favor, to make them graspable to those who consider themselves good people, the Woolsacks were honest, if only among themselves. The gnarled nature of their line and what sustained their lives was always kept in plain sight of the whole family, kept by the father and mother who’d perpetuated it, by the sons whose lives it would maul, and by the daughter, Kemper, who for all her life would struggle to understand them all. Families are machines of perpetual motion, forever fueled by one thing or another. (Myth. Pride. Expectation. Hope.) And even as a child Kemper knew the Woolsacks were a machine that ran on misery.
The foundation of their wealth, the girl knew, had been laid at the turn of the nineteenth century when her paternal grandfather, the first Angel Woolsack, a laypreacher, shifted his commerce from souls to the vessels that held them. Namely black bodies. He played no direct role, this ancestor she’d never known, owned no pens or auction-houses (though he did own several human beings) but became in short order a commodity speculator. Before that he’d supplemented his itinerant preaching with a series of failed ventures—stores, farms, revolutions—playing a small enough part in the United States acquisition of Louisiana and West Florida to loiter just at the margins of what we call history. But in the family his legacy was much discussed, one of those things they kept out in the light. A light the first Angel Woolsack had set himself, for this grandfather had left a written account of his brutal youth and rise before blowing out his brains on the day New Orleans fell to Union troops in 1862. The stained and fragile manuscript, titled Blood of Heaven, was a wonder to Red, who read it avidly from the moment his father allowed it out of his locked desk. He pored over its pages and, growing up, would make games of the events in the book, and Kemper would play her part, as sisters must. When she read it, Kemper found no thrill in the actions of this terrifying being. Her grandfather had (as many do) returned to his fierce brand of religion just before his decline, and so the book had a mad jeremiadic tone, and even if you managed to drive this from your mind there was the fleshed prophecy of suicide waiting there for you, looming in the offing of heredity. Still, the book remained an object of reverence for father and sons. In this and many other ways, her mother’s past and people were diminished. They were not beings of prophecy, a people with a Book.
Her mother had been orphaned as a girl in the wreck of a blockade-runner from Havana to New Orleans, and had charmed the commanding general of the very American forces that had driven her parents’ ship into the storm. She had been given a book of Shakespeare by the same commanding general’s wife shortly after her rescue at sea. A twelve-year-old girl escorted via gunboat to the rebel mainland. A twelve-year-old girl, who was then abandoned by her last surviving relative, an uncle in New Orleans, to the care of his mistress, a free woman of color and neighbor of the Woolsacks. A girl who had survived in a place that didn’t want her, with a people not her own, and, Kemper thought, after so much surviving had given up and married the boy at whose side she’d spent her every waking moment from the age of twelve.
Her mother was even more circumspect about her ancestors, Prussians who had come to oversee the construction of the Camagüey rail line, a people who’d chosen to remain in an alien country and then to forfeit their lives by leaving it. Kemper gathered what pieces she could of her mother’s past those summers on Deer Island, and at other times. And, in one of those paradoxes that knot the hearts of daughters, she believed both that her mother’s life was extraordinary as any hellfire preacher’s and that her mother’s resulting silence, her willingness to let her life be knocked aside by the crazed onward movement of the Woolsacks’ grisly history, was cowardice or worse. Something like a suicide itself. So she grew to envy her oldest brother, who could leave them all on his journeys to Central America, where he oversaw the family’s business in shipping and especially fruit—a sweetness that required no end of bloodshed—and she fought with her father, her mother, her brother, Red, her family, which meant of course that she was fighting herself.
Five
Mrs. Patterson kept Isaac home the fall after David’s death, close to her and to Ben, who’d only just begun to gain his footing as the eldest at home when the news came. The officer’s curt letter was followed one w
eek later by the body of her firstborn, which they buried in the back beneath the big magnolia and a fine granite headstone. But in the spring, at her husband’s urging, she surrendered the boy to school.
The schoolteacher was a young woman from Clinton, come to replace the last one, who’d died that December of diphtheria. New to the town and to teaching, on the first day she had her students write what she called their autobiographies. Little essays, only a page. The new teacher had a large, soft mouth, the habit of wringing her wrists, and believed children should only be beaten when absolutely necessary. At the end of the schoolday, she sat at her desk and read the essays, marking penmanship and spelling, learning what she’d have to teach.
She came to Isaac’s formbook, the margins of his first pages already filled with drawings. After a few glazed moments noting the obvious (poor handwriting, middling spelling) her pencil stopped and she had to make herself read again what he’d written:
My first mother they said totchered me. She hurt me with her ways. We didnt have a house. We were barefoot on the road. We got chased. We had to live out in the woods and drank water from a dich. It was murke.
The young schoolteacher from Clinton, who’d seen and known some hardship, felt a small, soft pressure in her chest growing more urgent as she came to the end:
Now I have a real mother and a father and two brothers. One is dead. His name was David and he taut me how to swim. We live together in one place and I can have my favorite things. Im happy now and I will be happy for the rest of my life.
Which was true, the hope of it. And of all the times of his life, save maybe the first years of his marriage, his boyhood on the coast was the happiest.
