Blown Away! Read online

  Sharkey lifted my sister into the saddle, and she beamed, although she was still wiping a few tears from her cheeks.

  “It doesn’t take much to be nice, Jake. Sharkey, Jewel, and Rudy are nicer to your sister than you are,” Mara said, glaring at me. “Someday you’ll regret all the mean things you say to Star.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said meekly.

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry. Tell your sister.”

  Sharkey led Jewel around the house and down to the shore, with Rudy pacing along in front of them. Jewel walked slowly and gently, as if she knew to be careful with Star. I could hear Sharkey talking to Star. “Deep in the sand under there, baby turtles are waiting to hatch. Pretty soon they’ll be digging their way out and heading to sea.”

  When the ride was over, I was the one who lifted Star off Jewel. “Did you have a nice ride?”

  Star nodded but eyed me cautiously.

  “Thank you, Sharkey,” Mara said, ignoring me. “The reason we came by was to tell you that there’s news about a hurricane heading this way. The veterans were talking about it at the post office this morning.”

  “I had heard something about a hurricane too,” Sharkey said. “August is a bad time for storms, all right. But I also heard it’s not likely to hit here.”

  “Let’s hope not. We just thought we’d tell you, in case you needed to get prepared.” Mara took Star’s hand and headed up the path.

  “Bye-bye, Rudy. Bye, Jewel. Bye, Jake.” Star blew kisses to Sharkey. “Thank you for the ride, Sharkey!”

  “Hey, Mara!” I called, trying to make amends. “Would you like to go fishing again this afternoon?”

  Mara kept on walking and didn’t answer.

  16

  MOM’S GENUINE AMERICAN ORIENTAL RUG

  The next morning Star was sick with a fever.

  She was drowsy and hardly said a word.

  “What’s wrong with Star?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I was up all night with her.” Mom sat on the bed and placed a wet towel on Star’s forehead. “Where do you hurt, honey?”

  “My head aches,” Star answered. Her eyes were puffy and glassy.

  Mom motioned for me to follow her out of the room. “I’m going to need you to help today, Jake.” Mom looked tired, with dark shadows under her eyes. “We’ve got to get Star’s fever down.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Bring up the pitcher of cold tea in the fridge downstairs. Tea is good for most everything. While you’re down there, set up the sign at the counter.”

  Downstairs I put up the sign we used when Mom couldn’t serve breakfast or lunch. SORRY, THE LUNCH COUNTER is CLOSED TODAY. Then I took the pitcher of ice tea to the upstairs kitchen and poured a glass for Star.

  “Does Mara know that Star’s sick?” I called to Mom.

  “No. After you bring in the tea, please run over and tell Mara about Star,” Mom answered from Star’s room.

  “Okay,” I said eagerly. I wanted to see Mara and make things right with her. She’d been so mad at me the day before, I was afraid I’d lost her friendship.

  As I hurried toward Star’s room, I tripped on Mom’s rug. Crash! Down I fell. The glass flew out of my hands and shattered as it hit the floor. The tea spread into a large dark spot on Mom’s genuine American Oriental rug.

  Mom came rushing out of the bedroom and looked at the mess in horror. “Oh, no! Not my rug! How could this happen!” She pulled a towel from the cupboard and began sopping up the tea.

  “Let me sweep it first,” I said, “before you cut your hand.”

  But it was too late. Mom’s hand was already bleeding. She sat on the floor and burst into tears.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom.” I ran to the kitchen and fumbled in the drawers. “I’ll get a bandage.”

  “Don’t bother!” Mom wailed. “It’s ruined. The one special, beautiful thing I own from my home in Georgia … and it’s ruined!” Mom just sat there and cried like a child, her hands over her face, the blood from her cuts dripping down her arm. I tried to put my arms around her.

  “It was an accident, Mom! I’m sorry. I know how you love that rug!” I was in tears myself seeing my mother’s distress. I had never seen Mom cry so hard over anything. “I’ll clean it up, Mom. I’ll do such a good job you won’t even notice. I promise.”

  “Just leave me alone and let me cry.”

  I picked up the pieces of glass, then soaked up the tea in the towel. After that I washed the spot in water and wiped the rug again.

  Mom dabbed at her nose with her apron. “See? The stain is still there.”

  “That’s because it’s wet. When it dries, it won’t show.”

  Star came out of her room. “What’s wrong, Mommy? Why are you crying?”

  “It’s my rug. It’s ruined.”

  “Can’t you see how sorry I am?” I yelled as I ran down the stairs and out the door.

  I was startled to see Mara coming up onto the porch. “I came for Star,” she said.

  I pushed by her. “Star’s sick in bed.”

  “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  “I don’t know—to the beach.” I ran toward the path to the ocean, not wanting Mara to see that I had been crying.

  Mom would never forgive me. That rug stood for all the things she left behind when she married Dad and moved to the Keys from Georgia: her family and friends, a house with indoor plumbing and electricity. I had ruined the one thing that reminded her of her old home. I couldn’t stop the tears that now streamed down my face.

  I ran all the way down to the waterfront and sat on the trunk of a palm tree that had been bent in a hurricane years ago. The ocean was calm and a greenish gray. The clouds overhead hung low, and I wondered briefly about the hurricane that was out there somewhere.

  I gazed along the shore and saw someone walking toward me on the beach. It was Mara. I reached down and threw seawater on my face, hoping she wouldn’t be able to tell I’d been crying.

  “Hi, Jake,” she said as she came closer. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” I told her about the accident with the rug. “Mom will never forgive me. She cried and said I ruined the one special thing she owns. I feel awful.”

  “She’ll forgive you.” Mara sat next to me on the tree trunk, and we were both quiet for a long time.

  Then I said, “It was my fault. I was clumsy and stupid. I’ll never forget how she cried.”

  “Let it all blow away, Jake. That’s what I have to do when I think of my father … and my mother. I’ve learned to let those sad feelings float up and disappear. Otherwise angry words and hurt feelings become storm clouds that follow you everywhere.”

  “You’re not mad at me anymore? For the way I spoke to Star?” I asked. “I was afraid I’d lost my best friend.” I felt my face flush.

  “I thought Sharkey was your best friend,” Mara looked at me sideways with a teasing smile.

  “Is there a law that says you can only have one best friend?” I asked.

  “I guess not,” Mara said.

  “Besides, good things come in pairs,” I said. “I’m sorry I said mean things to Star yesterday, but I’m not always that way, Mara. I do nice things for her too.” I could feel my eyes filling up again. “I play with her, and I taught her how to swim, and I read to her, and I take her for walks …”

  “Lullaby memories.”

  “What? I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mara.”

  She laughed. “Lullaby memories are my happiest memories. When I’m sad I let them come out of my head and they soothe me—like lullabies.”

  “I hear you whistling a certain tune sometimes. Is it a lullaby?”

  Mara laughed. “I didn’t realize I did that until Aunt Edith said, ‘A whistling woman and a crowing hen always come to some bad end.’ I only half remember the tune. But I do remember that someone sang it to me when I was very young, and I recall a pretty, smiling face over my crib.”

  “Your mother?”
<
br />   “Yes.” Mara took off her shoes and put her feet in the water. Neither of us spoke for a while. I could hear the sound of the palm fronds clicking in the breeze.

  “Did your mother die when you were little?”

  “No. She just went away—when I was about Star’s age. We don’t know where or why, although Daddy said she hated the coal mines. One day she was gone, and there was just Daddy and me left.” Mara splashed her feet. “Sometimes I wonder if she ever really existed or if she was just a dream. But I do have those lullaby memories. I remember her rocking me. I remember her kissing me. I remember her face over my crib. So I know I had a mother once. She’s not just a dream.” She looked at me uncertainly. “I wrote a poem about saying good-bye to her. I let some of my feelings out, and it made me feel better to write it.”

  “I’d like to hear it,” I said, and then added, “I might not understand it, though.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Jake.” She frowned a little. “I think I know it by heart.”

  She began to recite:

  I’ve said good-bye and closed the door.

  I’ve “shut out the morning.

  I’ve emptied the colors into little pools of tears

  And let them be gone.

  I’ve let winter come, I’ve let the flowers die,

  And though sunbeams of memory

  become smaller with time,

  I hear the lullaby still.

  I couldn’t speak, because there was nothing to say. Mara had no one, except for her old aunt, Edith—and her lullaby memories.

  “I will write a poem about Daddy some day,” Mara said after a while. “I know I’ll feel better when I do, but right now it’s too hard for me. His death is so fresh in my memory, and it hurts too much.”

  “I want Star to remember the good things—not the mean words I’ve said to her.”

  Mara took my hand. “She will.”

  I squeezed Mara’s hand and got up. “I’d better go home now. I’m hoping the storm with Mom is over.”

  After I said good-bye to Mara, I headed home to Mom and her genuine American Oriental rug. At least I knew that even if Mom was still angry, she’d be there waiting for me, as she always was. Mara would probably give anything to have a family like mine. Now I understood why she cared so much for Star, and why she tried to set me straight about Star and Mom.

  I tiptoed up the stairs when I got home so I wouldn’t wake Star if she was sleeping. I didn’t want to make Mom mad about anything else. Mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She looked up when she saw me, and I saw that her eyes were swollen from crying, She motioned for me to come to her and I did.

  Mom put her arms around me. “I’m sorry I was so hysterical, Jake. I’m overtired from not sleeping, and I’ve treasured that rug …”

  “Mom, I would never intentionally hurt it in a million years.”

  “I know that.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll get over it, Jake. Besides,” she said more cheerfully, “you did a good job cleaning it up. The stain may not show that much.”

  “How is Star?” I asked.

  “She’s been sleeping off and on. She asked for you.”

  “I’ll go in and see her.”

  Star was lying on her bed with just the sheet over her. I could feel the heat from her body when I entered the small room. “Hi, Jake,” she whispered.

  “Hi, twinkle star,” I said. I dipped the towel in the pan of water Mom had left near the bed and patted her face and arms with it. Then I began to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  “Sing it the nice way,” Star mumbled.

  As I held her hand and sang her song the nice way, Star closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  17

  A BAD FEELING

  Usually as Labor Day approached everyone in town prepared for a big barbecue picnic with local families. But this year, with Labor Day weekend only a few days away, the picnic was forgotten. Folks were preparing instead for the hurricane, in case it should veer our way. At the moment ships were reporting it would head toward Key West or even farther south, but everyone who lived on the Keys knew hurricanes only too well, and we understood how unpredictable and dangerous they could be. The only hurricane I remembered in my lifetime was when I was seven, and the eye of the storm missed us and went up to Lake Okeechobee. Still, I’d heard the stories of hurricanes past from the conchs who lived through them, and I grew to respect the howling wind and wild seas that had been known to bring ships onto the reefs. To live on the Keys one had to acknowledge the power of storms.

  With the possibility of a hurricane looming, Dad and I checked the barometer regularly, pulled hurricane shutters over the windows, and carried our outside display of fishing poles and paddles into the storeroom.

  In the workers’ camps, the Bonus Marcher veterans were uncertain whether they should take the train and leave the Keys or stay and face the storm. They waited for the government to give them orders, but so far none had come. “A hurricane couldn’t be too bad,” they reasoned, “or Uncle Sam would have ordered us from our shanties and taken us to the mainland for safety.” I heard them talking at the store lunch counter about “how scared the locals are of a little wind.”

  “If there was a hurricane coming, the government would warn us,” Milt Barclay told Dad. “But no one seems to be worried.”

  “That’s right,” Harry Webber agreed. “They’ll get us off the Keys if there’s danger.”

  “It’ll be too late if the storm catches you inside those little huts and tents,” Dad told them.

  “I’ve never been in a hurricane,” another vet said. “But hey, we need a little excitement around here.”

  Dad and Mom looked at each other with raised eyebrows. “Trust me, you don’t want that kind of excitement,” Mom said. “You have no idea—”

  Harry interrupted her. “We survived the war and the trenches in France. Surely we can survive a little windstorm!”

  “Besides, the weather forecasters predict that it will hit Havana, Cuba. Why waste time getting ready for a storm that will never come?” Milt scoffed.

  Other veterans who were gathered at our lunch counter started chatting. Some of them were excited about the storm and seemed to actually hope the storm would strike our island.

  Dad ignored them and continued with our preparations. We had extra kerosene lanterns cleaned and filled, and we put candles at the counter and on the tables because it was dark in the store with the windows covered. Dad filled up gas cans for the generator.

  Star was still feverish, and Mom tried calling Dr. Whiteside, the nearest doctor, but there was no answer. “Maybe he’s gone up to the mainland,” Mom said worriedly.

  Later that day Rudy showed up, scratching and barking at the store door. “What do you want, boy?” I asked. Rudy ran out into the road, circled, and came back, barking.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. Rudy circled again, and this time when he came back he took hold of my shirt in his teeth. Something is wrong.

  Rudy raced down the road, then stopped and barked, as if to say, Come on! Hurry up, Jake!

  I followed the dog up the road and then down the path to Sharkey’s place. “Sharkey?” I yelled when I came close to his house. “Sharkey!”

  Suddenly I saw him lying on the ground near the corral. Jewel stood solemnly nearby like a sentry keeping watch. She put her head down to Sharkey and nudged him with her nose. I ran to him. “Sharkey!”

  “It’s my leg. It gave out on me and …” He tried to pull himself up, but he couldn’t. “Blasted Jerry who caught me with his bullet.” He grimaced in pain and cursed several times.

  I helped him to a sitting position, with his back against the fence post for support. “Why are you so mad?”

  “Because it hurts!”

  “Maybe you need a doctor. Mom tried to reach Dr. Whiteside for Star, but there’s no answer.”

  “I’ll be all right now that I’m up. I just need to sit here for a while.” He reached out and patt
ed Rudy, who had hunkered down next to him.

  “Rudy brought me here,” I told him.

  “Good boy,” he whispered to Rudy, whose tail thumped a few times. “How did I manage without you and Jewel?”

  “Can I get you anything, Sharkey?”

  “I’ve got crutches hanging on the wall inside the hut.”

  “I’ll get them.” I ran to the boxcar and pulled up the screening that Sharkey had rigged to hang over the open doors. This was the first time I’d ever been inside Sharkey’s place, and I expected it to be a sloppy mess. However, the place was in perfect order. One section was set aside for a kitchen area, with a small kerosene stove and a sink that connected to the cistern outside. A fork, spoon, and knife were set on the table ready for the next meal. A feeling of sadness swept over me for some reason I couldn’t explain.

  “Jake!” Sharkey yelled from outside. “What are you doing in there? The crutches are right by the door.”

  I turned around, and there were the crutches, just as he said. I grabbed them off the hook and carried them out to Sharkey, who was struggling to stand up. He placed them under his armpits and sighed. “Guess I’ll be using these for a while.”

  “Take it easy for a few days, Sharkey,” I said.

  Sharkey headed painfully to his boxcar with Rudy at his heels. “I can’t take it easy. There’s a storm coming. I was trying to batten down the hatches when I twisted my leg.”

  I followed him in and helped him get settled on the couch. We propped up his swollen leg with a cushion, and then I gave him some pills that he pointed out on the sink.

  “Last time I saw Doc he gave me these to use if I have a lot of pain. I try not to use them except in an emergency.”

  “I’d say this is an emergency, Sharkey,” I said, handing him a glass of water.

  “And then there’s the hurricane. I thought it might miss us, but the air is heavy, and, well, now I’m thinking we will get the storm full force.”

  “Dad and I will help you close up.” I peered out the door toward the bay. It was calm, reflecting the trees along the shore. Big puffy clouds sailed serenely across the sky. No sign of a storm. “Don’t worry, Sharkey. It’s supposed to go below the Keys—near Cuba, anyway. It’ll probably miss us.”