âDid you hear the one about the Australian who wanted to buy a new boomerang but he couldnât get rid of his old one?â
âNo. What about him?â
âGet it? A boomerang. He wanted to buy a new boomerang, but he kept getting the old one back every time he threw it away.â
âWhy should he even want a new one? The old oneâs still perfectly good, isnât it?â
âCall. Just forget it.â
He shook his head, the picture of patient disbelief, and I forgot I was pretending not to care about crabs and devoted my full attention to the pesky varmints. I like to recall that we netted two full baskets of rank peelers that day.
No one had told me to turn over all the money Imade crabbing. I just always had. When I started, I guess, it hadnât occurred to me that it was mine to keep. We always lived so close to the edge of being poor. It made me feel proud to be able to present the family with a little something extra to hold on to. While my parents never carried on much over it, I was always thanked. When my grandmother would criticize me, I could remember, even if the laws of respect kept me silent, that I was a contributing member of the household in which she and Caroline were little more than parasites. It was a private comfort.
But no one ever said I had to turn over every penny I made to the stoneware pickle crock in which the household money was kept.
Why then did I feel so guilty? Wasnât it my right to keep some of my hard-won earnings? But what if Otis should say something to my father about all the crabs he was buying from us? What if Callâs mother should brag to my mother about how much money Call was bringing home these days? I divided my share exactly down the middle. If there was a penny in doubt, the penny went into the crock. I was contributing almost as much as I had during the previous summer, but I wasnât taking the moneyproudly to Momma for her to count out and put into the crock. I was slipping it in myself and then saying later, âOh, by the way, I left a little in the crock.â And my mother would thank me quietly, just as she always had. I never said I was putting everything in. I never lied. But then no one ever asked.
If only there were some other way to make money. Callâs total lack of enthusiasm for my poem had had a dampening effect. I knew perfectly well that he was as qualified to judge poetry as he was to judge jokes, which was not at all, but still, he was the only human being I could risk reading it aloud to. If only he could have said something like, âI donât know anything about poetry, but it sounds fine to me.â That would have been gracious, almost honest, and would have given me a real boost when I needed it.
As it was, I waited a week or so, then pulled myself together enough to copy the poem out on clean notebook paper and mail it to Lyrics Unlimited. Even before it could have been delivered to the P.O. Box in New York, I began haunting the docks when the ferry (which also served as the mail boat) came in. I didnât have the nerve to ask CaptainBilly directly if there was any mail for me, but I hoped that if I just happened to be standing there, heâd see me and let me know. I didnât know that he never opened the sack before he took it to Mrs. Kellam, who served as postmistress. But I did know that Mrs. Kellam was a noisy gossip. I dreaded the thought of her asking my grandmother about a mysterious letter arriving from New York addressed to me.
It was about that time that our day-old Baltimore Sun carried huge headlines about the eight German saboteurs. They had been landed by submarine on Long Island and Florida and almost immediately caught. I knew, of course I knew, that the Captain was not a spy, but as I read, it felt as though I were swallowing an icicle. Suppose he had been. Suppose Call and I had caught him and become heroes? It seemed such a near miss that suddenly it was
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