“We’ll see,” the Professor said. He didn’t seem to be listening to Jeff. “We’ll give it some time and then we’ll see. Don’t you worry, Jeff.” Jeff left his father alone to think it out. His father needed time to think things out.
They also went to visit Dr. Baker, who did a complete physical; then listened as the Professor recounted what Jeff had done. Jeff listened too, as if they were talking about somebody else.
“It sounds as if some counseling is in order,” Dr. Baker said. He smiled at Jeff as he spoke. Jeff didn’t say anything.
I’d like to give it some time,” the Professor said. “I’m not ruling the possibility out, but — I don’t believe anyone can understand as well as I can what effect his mother could have had on him.”
The doctor laced his fingers together and said to the Professor, “It’s not only his mother. He hasn’t been primarily in her care, has he?”
The Professor didn’t answer that right away. “I understand,” he said at last. “I see what you must think — and you’re correct, I understand that. I guess I’d like a little time, myself. Circumstances permit a little more freedom this year.” He looked at Jeff. “I would like to keep him out of school and have him repeat eighth grade next year. Somewhere else.”
“Jeff?” Dr. Baker asked. Jeff looked up at him. He had been thinking about the beach again and how the pelicans swooped low over the water, scooping up their prey with buckety beaks. “What do you think?”
“It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
Dr. Baker studied him for a long time. Jeff kept his face expressionless and looked right back.
“I don’t know, Dr. Greene. I can testify to his being run down, and it certainly doesn’t sound as if he should go back to school — especially not if the year is already shot. I have to say that I think counseling is strongly indicated. But not urgent. Not at this point. But I’d have to have your word to get in touch with me if . . . I don’t know, if there was any smallest sign of trouble. Or even lack of improvement.”
“You have my word. Thank you,” the Professor said. “I hope I’ve learned; I think I’m learning. We have a family friend who’s much quicker than I am — Brother Thomas,” he said to Jeff’s raised face. “You have my word,” he said to Dr. Baker.
The Professor didn’t speak to Jeff again until they had arrived back home and Jeff was about to go up to his room to play the guitar. “I can’t change, not really,” the Professor said.
“That’s OK,” Jeff told him. He already knew that, and he liked that in his father.
“But even if we can’t change me, I’ve been thinking, we might change this.” The Professor waved his hand around, indicating the hallway. Jeff didn’t understand. “Would you mind moving?” the Professor asked him.
“No.”
So they became acquainted with a real estate agent, who carried a large zip case with her wherever she went, wrote everything down with a quick, nervous hand, and talked constantly, called the Professor, “Dr. Greene.” She drove them around to show them houses, in the city, in the suburbs. She advised them not to fix their house up. “I thought about that, Dr. Greene, and while it would cost you thousands just to have it painted inside and out, you wouldn’t ever realize what you’d spent in the sales price. I think we should sell it as a bargain.” She drove them around in her big white car and walked them through other people’s houses. She even showed them a mansion out in the western suburbs, built out of white stucco with a tall fence enclosing a garden and green hills rolling behind it.
“We can’t afford it,” he said to his father.
“Hardly. A pity, except if you think about trying to keep the lawns mowed,” the Professor said.
“Yeah,” Jeff agreed. What he really liked about the property was the garden and the hillsides around.
It was at that point, in April, that they started looking farther afield. They drove out to the north, but that was being developed too rapidly; to the south, but Annapolis was too much like a city; and over the long Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore. As soon as he saw the flat landscape, the sky stretched out flat like a blanket overhead, the water appearing at unexpected places, Jeff breathed easier. The Professor had no Friday classes, so they spent weekends driving around, going farther south each time, to find something they could afford that still suited them. They spent nights in motels, where Jeff played his guitar and the Professor made notes on pages of books or wrote lecture notes. They spent days with real estate agents or just driving around towns. They saw houses they liked on land they didn’t; land they liked with a house neither of them wanted to live in. It seemed that if they liked a town they could find nothing for sale in it, and if there were a lot of houses available they didn’t like the town.
Until, deep in the western corner, an agent drove them down a dirt road to a little cabin that sat on high land — high for that part of the country. A one-room, red-shingled cabin that faced across a broad creek to marshes, that sat right on a point where the creek emptied into the Chesapeake Bay. The cabin was just one room, with a bathroom tacked onto the back; the whole front wall was plate glass doors that looked out over to where the creek flowed by, hurrying into the bay, and where the level tops of marsh grasses were all you could see, except for a line of low trees at the distance. Mice and roaches scurried away as they entered the room. Spiders had made complex webs at the places where bare roof beams came together at the peak. A bunk bed, a stove and refrigerator, a chipped sink, a table, three chairs, two rollaway beds, a woodburning stove made out of thin tin and rusting through in many places, stacks of newspapers — the room was crowded. The walls were bare plywood, the floor plywood laid down in sheets. The air was damp and musty.
Jeff stood by the window, looking out, not listening. He went outside, leaving the two men inside, looking around and talking. He made his way down to the creek, down a five-foot muddy bank to a band of sand too narrow to lie down on. He had to force his way through honeysuckle vines and the branches of low wild cherry trees, so his approach was clumsy, noisy. As he slid to his feet, a great blue heron croaked loudly just off to his left and at the same time rose out and flew away — complaining — to land on the far side of the creek. From there, the bird stared at Jeff. Jeff stared back, not moving, except for the smile on his mouth. The bird decided Jeff was harmless and paced slowly upstream, its attention on the shallow water where prey might be found. The long stilty legs, the long curved neck, the awkward perfect body moved inland, away from Jeff. He watched it. He watched it not find anything to eat, watched it come to a rest and blend into the stillness of a dead tree that had fallen out into the creek.
The two men were still inside when Jeff rejoined them. The Professor looked at his face and said, “You like it.”
Jeff nodded. “I saw a blue heron.”
“They’re common around here,” the agent said. “You-all birdwatchers?”
But the Professor remembered and understood what Jeff meant. “You take that as a sign from the gods?” Jeff nodded. “Well, I like it myself. Let’s take a walk around and see. If you’ll excuse us?” he said to the agent. The agent dusted off a wooden chair and sat down, ready to be patient.
Behind the cabin grew loblollies, wild cherries, holly, swamp oaks. The small area of lawn that circled the cabin was sparse and untended. Jeff and the Professor walked to the bank and looked down the creek to the bay. “There’ll be mosquitoes,” the Professor said. “There are only these three high acres in the property, it’ll never be worth anything for development.”
“Good,” Jeff said.
“It’s awfully isolated; you’ll be alone a lot.”
“That’s all right.” Jeff waited for his father to finish thinking out the major objections. That was the way the Professor did things.
“But I agree with you, it’s like an island, isn’t it?”
Jeff hadn’t thought of that, he’d thought only of the quiet water noises, the sense of space and peace. “I guess it i
s. I really like it, Professor.”
“Not at all what I imagine Charleston looks like.”
“Not a bit,” Jeff agreed. “Except — it’s like that island, just like you said.”
“You didn’t see alligators?” The Professor sounded alarmed.
“No, Professor, I didn’t. Alligators need a warmer climate. Just the heron.”
“Then we’d better make a bid on it, don’t you think? It doesn’t do to disregard a sign from the gods. Back to the office. We’ll have to add on some rooms — redo the bathroom entirely — finish off that room for year-round living — maybe gravel the driveway so it won’t wash away in bad weather. I guess the septic system’s all right; he says it’s only two years old. And a dock, we’ll need a dock.”
“What for?”
“For your boat. Let’s go get the business over.”
“I thought so,” the agent said with satisfaction, “I thought you were the right people for this, soon as I saw you.”
“You appear to have been correct,” the Professor said. “What’s the nearest town, and how far are we from it?”
“Crisfield,” the agent said. “You’re about eight miles out, as the crow flies. Maybe ten or a little more by road.”
“But what about you, Professor?” Jeff had a picture of the map of Maryland in his mind. He remembered where Crisfield was and where Baltimore was in relation to that. “How will you get to work?”
“I can arrange my schedule so that it’s only a couple of nights a week I’d need to be away. I can stay at the Faculty Club or with Brother Thomas. As long as you can take the solitude, it shouldn’t be hard to arrange.”
“I can take it,” Jeff said. “You know that.” He thought his father might be teasing him.
The Professor bought the property, as he called it, and sold their little house in Baltimore. Before they moved, they had a lot of work done on the cabin. They added hallways and two bedrooms going off opposite sides of the kitchen. They ripped out the old bathrooms and had an entirely new one put in. They had the cabin insulated, its walls finished. New double-paned glass doors replaced the old ones in the kitchen. They both wanted to leave the ceiling unfinished, so they did. They had the long driveway graded and covered with oyster shells. They put a short dock out into the creek and steps down the steep bank leading to it. They drove down frequently to check on the progress and watched the swarming workmen; carpenters, glaziers, roofers, painters, and listened to the sounds of saws and the pile driver.
Brother Thomas seemed to find unflagging humor in everything about the new house. “How big is this piece of wilderness?” he asked, and “How’s Jeff going to get to school — dogsled?” and “You putting in any crops, Farmer Greene?”
The Professor answered him mildly. “When it’s done, you’ll come down to visit. On the property.”
Jeff didn’t call it that. To himself, he called it a safe place, and when they were finally settled in at the end of July, living in the three-room house where windows gave out over the water and woods and sky, he knew he had been right. When they had bought a little skiff, an eleven-foot wooden boat, painted white, with a seven and a half horsepower outboard motor and he took his father exploring up the creek, winding among the branches of fallen trees, staring up at the backs of little cabins or waterfront homes, or meandering across the marshes on one of the canals that ran into the creek — the water so shallow they had to raise the motor and pole the boat — he knew he had been righter than he’d thought. The Professor didn’t seem to mind the inconveniences: the distance from the grocery store and libraries, the mosquitoes that rose up like mist on windless evenings, the necessity of keeping Coleman lanterns available for power failures when thunderstorms moved up the bay. Sometimes the Professor would even suggest himself that Jeff take him out in the boat. “I need to get away from myself for a while. Want to go up the bay shore a ways?” They didn’t talk much on such trips, but looked about them. The Professor wore a floppy white spinnaker hat to protect his face from the sun and looked out over the water where a fish would often reward his vigil by leaping up out of the water. Jeff wore only shorts, or trunks, and studied the shoreline. He was learning the names of birds and trees, learning also how to scan the water’s edge for where a great blue might be standing in camouflage, looking like a branch of one of the fallen trees or blending into the grass. The blues roosted, he had learned, on the high branches of trees. If he wandered outside at night and let the door slam behind him, he could hear them taking off — squawking — from their roosts. They never traveled together, they never shared fishing territory; he liked to think that they squawked their displeasure with one another and him and the state of the world. Great Cranky Birds the Indians had named them.
He told the Professor this as they sat in the boat at the mouth of the creek, rocking gently as the tide carried them out onto the bay. “I don’t know why they’re so jumpy,” Jeff said. “There isn’t anything that preys on them, is there? What spooks them?”
“Women with big hats,” the Professor said.
Jeff looked at the back of his father’s head. His neck was getting tan, Jeff noticed. Jeff always ran the boat because the Professor couldn’t seem to learn how to handle it. He tried to figure out what his father meant. A fish jumped off to starboard. An egret, snowy white, fished along the muddy shallows, its path crossing with two of its fellows. Egrets shared their fishing territory with one another. “C’mon, Professor,” Jeff said. “I was serious.”
“Oh, so was I.” The Professor turned around to look earnestly at Jeff. “When women wore those picture hats, with hat pins — one of the prized adornments was heron feathers.”
Jeff thought about that and thought about his father’s response to his question. He started to laugh, a small bubbling of humor in his stomach. “But that’s funny, what you said.”
“I have my moments,” the Professor answered, and turned back to the water. But he was pleased, Jeff knew that.
In the evenings, the Professor studied or wrote or read a mystery. Jeff played his guitar. They had decided against a television, had bought a stereo, instead, and a radio, so they could hear the news and weather. Sometimes the Professor joined Jeff in the kitchen, which they had turned into what magazines called a family kitchen, with sofa and chairs near the Franklin stove the Professor had insisted on having. Sometimes he worked in his room. “Are you writing another book?” Jeff asked his father, one night, watching him wander to the window to look out over the water, which ran red under the last light of the setting sun.
“Hmmm?” The Professor turned, but didn’t focus his eyes on Jeff. “I think maybe,” he said.
Jeff began playing on his guitar again, softly. The Professor didn’t mind, he’d given Jeff only a fraction of his attention, Jeff knew, because he was thinking something out. Jeff worked out a background for one of the songs he’d heard in Charleston. It needed, he thought, a kind of jingle to it, almost like a tambourine, as if the guitar were one of those cigar box banjos. He thought the Martin could make that kind of sound, if he could figure out how to get it out of his fingers. “Oh Lord, you know, I have no friend like you,” he sang. He almost had it, but not quite. “And I cain’t feel at home in this world, any more.”
The Professor drifted back to his room. “This world is not my home, I’m only passing through,” Jeff sang. He was getting closer to the sound he wanted.
They registered Jeff in school and got him a ten-speed bicycle, for days when he didn’t want to take the bus. The guidance counsellor didn’t even ask him why he was repeating the eighth grade. The Professor didn’t ask whether Jeff was strong enough to bike the miles to the school, but he did suggest that Jeff might want to build up his muscles. So Jeff packed sandwiches and took long rides on the empty roads, roads that went along for miles between intersections. He learned every turn of the flat road into Crisfield, became familiar with the farms set back behind fields, their barns bright tin or bright red, with the littl
e houses set up close to the road, with the clusters of trailer homes, the rectangular fields framed by loblollies. He learned the names on the mailboxes along the road to school, most of them standing opposite trim driveways, as erect as soldiers. Only one mailbox was neglected, tilted over, its door always hanging open, its paint chipped, its name faded away to llerma. He became familiar with the stores in the shopping center, a mile before the sehool — the large antiseptic supermarket that carried medicines as well as school supplies and even some clothing — and with the less modern stores down at the town center, the hardware, the restaurant, the small grocery whose windows were streaked with grime.
On good days, Jeff took the boat out. He learned to dangle chicken necks at the end of pieces of string to catch crabs. He could, he knew, set pots out in a line, then run the boat along the line, pulling up the pots to see what he’d caught. That would have been more efficient. But he preferred the quiet of the boat anchored in the middle of the creek, he preferred the lazier pace. He’d bait five or six strings and dangle them over the side of the boat. He left them undisturbed until he saw, by the movement of a string on the gunwales, that a crab was feeding on the bait. Then he would take the string in his fingers and pull it gently in, feeling the crab at the other end, knowing it had one claw firmly fixed on the chicken neck while the other ripped off pieces of flesh to eat greedily. Gently, smoothly, so the crab wouldn’t sense anything unnatural, Jeff pulled the string in, until he could see the crab, now a few inches beneath the water’s surface. He held the bait steady by stepping on the string and picked up his net. He scooped the crab up in the net, dumped it into the bushel basket, and tossed out the string again, feeding out line until the bait came to rest on the creek bottom. They often had steamed crabs for dinner, eating them with cornbread made from a mix, or biscuits, and glasses of beer or wine or iced tea.
Jeff tried to teach the Professor how to catch crabs, but his father’s hands were clumsy. Somehow, his crabs always swam off from the bait before the Professor could net them. Jeff, watching, admired the crab’s sideways retreat. The crab slipped away, angling into darker, deeper water. “I don’t know how you do it,” the Professor said to Jeff.