The Great Gilly Hopkins (16 page)

“Trotter—”

“And there is lots of good things, baby. Like you coming to be with us here this fall. That was a mighty good thing for me and William Ernest. But you just fool yourself if you expect good things all the time. They ain't what's regular—don't nobody owe 'em to you.”

“If life is so bad, how come you're so happy?”

“Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?”

“Trotter, stop preaching at me. I want to come home.”

“You're home, baby. Your grandma is home.”

“I want to be with you and William Ernest and Mr. Randolph.”

“And leave her all alone? Could you do that?”

“Dammit, Trotter. Don't try to make a stinking Christian out of me.”

“I wouldn't try to make nothing out of you.” There was a quiet at the other end of the line. “Me and William Ernest and Mr. Randolph kinda like you the way you are.”

“Go to hell, Trotter,” Gilly said softly.

A sigh. “Well, I don't know about that. I had planned on settling permanently somewheres else.”

“Trotter”—She couldn't push the word hard enough to keep the squeak out—“I love you.”

“I know, baby. I love you, too.”

She put the phone gently on the hook and went back into the bathroom. There she blew her nose on toilet tissue and washed her face.

By the time she got back to an impatient Courtney and a stricken Nonnie, she had herself well under control.

“Sorry to make you wait,” Gilly said. “I'm ready to go home now.” No clouds of glory, perhaps, but Trotter would be proud.

Turn the page for a look at

Katherine Paterson's beloved

and Newbery Medal–winning novel

Jacob Have I Loved

D
uring the summer of 1941, every weekday morning at the top of the tide, McCall Purnell and I would board my skiff and go progging for crab. Call and I were right smart crabbers, and we could always come home with a little money as well as plenty of crab for supper. Call was a year older than I and would never have gone crabbing with a girl except that his father was dead, so he had no man to take him on board a regular crab boat. He was, as well, a boy who had matured slowly, and being fat and nearsighted, he was dismissed by most of the island boys.

Call and I made quite a pair. At thirteen I was tall and large boned, with delusions of beauty and romance. He, at fourteen, was pudgy, bespectacled, and totally unsentimental.

“Call,” I would say, watching dawn break crimson over the Chesapeake Bay, “I hope I have a sky like this the day I get married.”

“Who would marry you?” Call would ask, not meanly, just facing facts.

“Oh,” I said one day, “I haven't met him yet.”

“Then you ain't likely to. This is a right small island.”

“It won't be an islander.”

“Mr. Rice has him a girl friend in Baltimore.”

I sighed. All the girls on Rass Island were half in love with Mr. Rice, one of our two high school teachers. He was the only relatively unattached man most of us had ever known. But Mr. Rice had let it get around that his heart was given to a lady from Baltimore.

“Do you suppose,” I asked, as I poled the skiff, the focus of my romantic musings shifting from my own wedding day to Mr. Rice's, “do you suppose her parents oppose the marriage?”

“Why should they care?” Call, standing on the port washboard, had sighted the head of what seemed to be a large sea terrapin and was fixing on it a fierce concentration.

I shifted the pole to starboard. We could get a pretty little price for a terrapin of that size. The terrapin sensed the change in our direction and dove straight through the eelgrass into the bottom mud, but Call had the net waiting, so that when the old bull hit his hiding place, he was yanked to the surface and deposited into a waiting pail. Call grunted with satisfaction. We might make as much as fifty cents on that one catch, ten times the price of a soft blue crab.

“Maybe she's got some mysterious illness and doesn't want to be a burden to him.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Rice's finance.” I had picked up the word, but not the pronunciation from my reading. It was not in the spoken vocabulary of most islanders.

“His
what
?”

“The woman he's engaged to marry, stupid.”

“How come you think she's sick?”

“Something is delaying the consumption of their union.”

Call jerked his head around to give me one of his looks, but the washboards of a skiff are a precarious perch at best, so he didn't stare long enough to waste time or risk a dunking. He left me to what he presumed to be my looniness and gave his attention to the eelgrass. We were a good team on the water. I could pole a skiff quickly and quietly, and nearsighted as he was he could spy a crab by just a tip of the claw through grass and muck. He rarely missed one, and he knew I wouldn't jerk or swerve at the wrong moment. I'm sure that's why he stuck with me. I stuck with him not only because we could work well together, but because our teamwork was so automatic that I was free to indulge my romantic fantasies at the same time. That this part of my nature was wasted on Call didn't matter. He didn't have any friends but me, so he wasn't likely to repeat what I said to someone who might snicker. Call himself never laughed.

I thought of it as a defect in his character that I must try to correct, so I told him jokes. “Do you know why radio announcers have tiny hands?”

“Huh?”

“Wee paws for station identification,” I would whoop.

“Yeah?”

“Don't you get it, Call? Wee paws.
Wee Paws.
” I let go the pole to shake my right hand at him. “You know, little hands—paws.”

“You ain't never seen one.”

“One what?”

“One radio announcer.”

“No.”

“Then how do you know how big their hands are?”

“I don't. It's a joke, Call.”

“I don't see how it can be a joke if you don't even know if they have big hands or little hands. Suppose they really have big hands. Then you ain't even telling the truth. Then what happens to your joke?”

“It's just a joke, Call. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.”

“It matters to me. Why should a person think a lie's funny?”

“Never mind, Call. It doesn't matter.”

But he went on, mumbling like a little old preacher about the importance of truth and how you couldn't trust radio announcers anymore.

You'd think I'd give up, but I didn't.

“Call, did you hear about the lawyer, the dentist, and the p-sychiatrist who died and went to heaven?”

“Was it a airplane crash?”

“No, Call. It's a joke.”

“Oh, a joke.”

“Yeah. You see, this lawyer and this dentist and this p-sychiatrist all die. And first the lawyer gets there. And Peter says—”

“Peter who?”

“Peter in the Bible. The Apostle Peter.”

“He's dead.”

“I know he's dead—”

“But you just said—”

“Just shut up and listen to the joke, Call. This lawyer comes to Peter, and he wants to get into heaven.”

“A minute ago you said he was already in heaven.”

“Well, he wasn't. He was just at the pearly gates, okay? Anyhow, he says he wants to get into heaven, and Peter says he's sorry but he's looked at the book and the lawyer was wicked and evil and cheated people. So he's got to go to hell.”

“Does your mother know you use words like that?”

“Call, even the preacher talks about hell. Anyhow, this lawyer has to give up and go to hell. Then this dentist comes up and he wants to get into heaven, and Peter looks at his book and sees that this guy pulled people's teeth out just to get their money even when their teeth were perfectly good and he knew it.”

“He did
what
?”

“Call, it doesn't matter.”

“It don't matter that a dentist pulls out perfectly good teeth just to make money? That's awful. He ought to go to jail.”

“Well, he went to hell for it.”

“Pulling out perfectly good teeth—” he mumbled, pinching his own with the fingers of his left hand.

“Then the p-sychiatrist—”

“The what?”

I was an avid reader of
Time
magazine, which, besides the day-old Baltimore
Sun
, was our porthole on the world in those days, so although psychiatry was not yet a popular pastime, I was quite aware of the word, if not the fact that the p was silent.
Time
was probably the source of the joke I was laboring to recount.

“A p-sychiatrist is a doctor that works with people who are crazy.”

“Why would you try to do anything with people who're crazy?”

“To get them well. To make their minds better. Good heavens.” We paused to net a huge male crab, a true number one Jimmy, swimming doubled over a she-crab. He was taking her to the thick eelgrass, where she would shed for the last time and become a grown-up lady crab—a sook. When she was soft, there would be a proper crab wedding, of course, with the groom staying around to watch out for his bride until her shell was hard once more, and she could protect herself and her load of eggs on her own.

“Sorry, Mr. Jimmy,” I said, “no wedding bells for you.”

Now this old Jimmy didn't much like being deprived of his sweetheart, but Call pinched him from behind and threw each of them in a separate bucket. She was a rank peeler—that is, it wouldn't be more than a couple of hours before she shed. Our bucket for rank peelers was almost full. It was a good day on the water.

“Well, like I was saying, this p-sychiatrist comes up to Peter, and Peter looks him up in the book of judgment and finds out he's been mean to his wife and kids and tells him to go to hell.”

“What?”

I ignored him. Otherwise I'd never get the story finished. “So the p-sychiatrist starts to leave, and then Peter says all of a sudden: ‘Hey! Did you say you were a p-sychiatrist?' And the guy says, ‘Yes, I did.'” I was talking so fast now, I was almost out of breath. “And Peter says, ‘I think we can use you around here after all. You see, we got this problem. God thinks he's Franklin D. Roosevelt.'”

“God
what
?”

“You know when people are crazy they think they're somebody important—like Napoleon or something.”

“But, Wheeze, God
is
important.”

“It's a joke, Call.”

“How can it be a joke? There ain't neither funny about it.” He had broken into a waterman's emphatic negative.

“Call, it's funny because Franklin D. Roosevelt has got too big for his britches. Like he's better than God or something.”

“But that's not what you said. You said—”

“I know what I said. But you gotta understand politics.”

“Well, what kinda joke is that? Fiddle.” Call's cuss words were taught to him by his sainted grandmother and tended to be as quaint as the clothes she made for him.

When the sun was high and our stomachs empty, Call stepped off the washboards into the boat. I shipped the pole and moved up with him to the forward thwart, where we put the oars into the locks and rowed the boat out of the eelgrass into deeper water and around to the harbor.

Captain Billy's son Otis ran the crab shipping part of his father's business, while his father and two brothers ran the ferry. We sold our soft crabs, peelers, and the terrapin to Otis, then split the money and the hard crabs. Call ran home to dinner, and I rowed back around the island as far as the South Gut, where I traded oars for the pole and poled the rest of the way home. The South Gut was a little ditch of water, one of many that crisscrossed Rass, and a natural garbage dump. The summer before, Call and I had cleaned it out (it had been clogged with rusting cans and crab pots, even old mattress springs) so I could pole the skiff through it all the way to my own backyard. Rass might be short on trees, but there was a loblolly pine sapling and a fig tree that my mother had planted on our side of the gut, as well as an orphan cedar on the other. I hitched my skiff to the pine and started at a trot for the back porch, a bucket of hard crabs in one hand and a fistful of money in the other.

My grandmother caught me before I got to the door. “Louise Bradshaw! Don't you go coming in the house dirty like that. Oh, my blessed, what a mess! Susan,” she called back in to my mother, “she's full ruined every scrap of clothes she owns.”

Rather than argue, I put my crab bucket and money on the edge of the porch and stepped out of my overalls. Underneath I had on my oldest cotton dress.

“Hang them overalls on the back line, now.”

I obeyed, pinning the straps securely to the clothesline. Immediately, the breeze took them straight out, as though Peter Pan had donned them to fly across our yard toward never-never land across the Bay.