Cage's Bend Read online

  Mrs. Hennessey snapped, “Save your breath, young lady.”

  Margaret’s wailing carried fifty feet down a corridor through swinging doors to the waiting room. The Reverend Franklin Malone Rutledge tensed his mouth with each shriek. The loudest made his whole face wince. He sat alone, dressed for the eleven o’clock in a tan poplin suit, black shirt, and white clerical collar. For a heartbeat he did not believe Margaret had taken the Lord’s name in vain. The second time he smiled. She never ceased to amaze him. Her spirit. That temper. He stood up and paced, remembering when he had asked her father for her hand. “Every girl needs a bit of bulldog in her,” her father had said, smiling. “Margaret’s blessed with quite a bit.” As her screaming peaked, Franklin prayed aloud very softly, “Dear Lord, spare her pain, deliver them both safely into my arms. In Christ’s name I pray.” Her screaming stopped and Franklin stopped pacing. He squared his shoulders, stood up straight and tall, three inches over six feet, his posture perfected a decade before on a two-year tour at Fort Knox which had ended with an offer of a scholarship to West Point. He had possessed no hesitation declining, though it meant working his way through UT as a journalism major and then through seminary at Sewanee.

  “Morning, Morgan, Mary Lee.” Franklin’s smile was strained as Margaret’s parents arrived in the waiting room. “It’s going very slowly but she’s doing just fine. Mars has got true grit. That’s what the nurse says. She looks like she ought to know.”

  “Mrs. Hennessey knows her business.” His mother-in-law smiled and nodded.

  “Where’s Trout?” Morgan asked. “Looking for the hair of the dog that bit his hindquarters last night?”

  Look who’s talking, Franklin thought, though in all fairness Morgan Elijah Cage V had been dry for over a year. He turned his palms toward heaven. “The good doctor is AWOL.”

  “That old s.o.b. ought to be here by now.” Morgan reached inside his seersucker jacket for a cigar, stuck it in the corner of his mouth.

  “Now, Morgan,” said his wife soothingly. Dressed for church, Mary Lee Drake Cage perched on the edge of a chair with her handbag on her lap. She smiled, thinking, Whatever You in Your wisdom grant us will be a blessing. Oh, but there is nothing sweeter than a little girl.

  Out of the silence came Margaret’s crescendo of screams as if she were being set on fire.

  Mary Lee thought back to 1937, the year that Margaret was born. Soon after, she had come down with the fevers. She pictured the hospital room where she had wasted away for six months in Nashville. She remembered the day everyone thought she was dead. As her daughter screamed, Mary Lee recalled the scene vividly, how she looked down on a woman who was herself. She talked to Margaret silently: I never told anybody this because I didn’t think that they would believe me. I had been through so much. That whole period is a blur but one day I remember. I was hovering high over the doctors and your daddy and grandmother, looking down at them, looking down at myself with the most wonderful feeling of comfort and joy, just this marvelous feeling, and I kept thinking, This is so good and I’ll just go on, and I thought, No, I can’t leave that baby for Mother and for Morgan to take care of. That just wouldn’t be right. I can’t go on. I’ve got to stay here. I’ve got to go back.

  Wrenched over and over, her daughter wrestled the pain, tried to fight back at the pain. But the pain kept coming, relentless and vast as a thunderstorm.

  In the waiting room Morgan was chewing his cigar and staring out the window at the first pink hues of dawn, occasionally cursing Dr. Trout under his breath. Several times Mary Lee took off her white gloves, then put them right back on. Franklin stood erect, chest high, breathing in slowly as if he could inhale his wife’s agony.

  Daylight filtered in through venetian blinds. Mrs. Hennessey looked down and thought the girl’s eyes now resembled those of a doe dead on the highway. “Margaret.”

  With great effort Margaret nodded.

  Mrs. Hennessey wiped her forehead with a warm cloth. “Your cervix is open now. The worst’s over.”

  Margaret smiled weakly. She thought of a lecture on the suspension of disbelief in fiction and decided that this was somehow good advice for childbirth.

  “Your labor’s changin’ now, honey. Listen. Mark my words. When you feel the contractions coming, push. Push the baby out.” Mrs. Hennessey cupped Margaret’s chin, helped her sip some water.

  Margaret was bathed in sweat, dozy from Demerol, aware of the pain but no longer caring so much. She felt somehow remote from the sound of her own screams. For a few minutes she drifted pleasantly and without fear or anger in the eye of the storm, outside of time. She didn’t notice a second nurse come in the room. She closed her eyes and coasted down the long tunnel of oaks that led to the house where she was born to images of firelight flickering on cave walls, crude paintings of stick men chasing hairy elephants, then blackness, balmy and serene, a waking dream in which she thought she was floating in her own mother and felt somehow every moment of her past in the present. She thought of the opening of her mother’s womb, her grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ . . . and now her own. It was perhaps the only moment in her life when her womb would be wide open. She sank into herself and her deepest emotions, a sensation akin to those long, slow moments after making love to Franklin but deeper, dreamier.

  At six o’clock the hurricane hit and furious winds wrenched her body in a hundred directions, tumbled her through space. The whole of her womb contracted downward, and she felt a heavy rushing from her center out to her legs and pushed with the motion. Suddenly Mrs. Hennessey was saying something and holding a baby, smeared in white waxy vernix, with a head of thick sandy hair. A nurse she had never seen before was unfastening the hand restraints. The baby wasn’t crying. Its eyes were wide open, a vivid blue like Franklin’s, darting around alertly. “Would you look at him. He looks like he already knows where he is,” Mrs. Hennessey said. “Take him, Margaret.” Enraptured, Margaret took the baby and held it to her soaked gown.

  “Oh, he’s gorgeous,” the young nurse said. “He’s the prettiest baby I think I’ve ever seen.” The two women crowded in close.

  “A boy,” Margaret marveled. “A beautiful boy.”

  “What are you going to name him?” the young nurse asked.

  Margaret’s voice was strong and clear. “Call my husband.”

  “Not until we cut your cord,” Mrs. Hennessey said firmly.

  The baby seemed to look at the two nurses in turn.

  Then he smiled.

  “My Lord,” Mrs. Hennessey said. “I’ve never seen that. They ain’t supposed to smile for at least a month.”

  The baby looked at her, then back at his mother. He smiled again.

  “He’s something else,” the young nurse said.

  Striding down the corridor, Franklin felt hollow, remembering the first time he met his father. When Frank was eight, he came home from school and found a strange, glamorous man eating ice cream with his mother in their living room. The man offered him a bite off his cone. The wild son of a Memphis preacher, he had left Frank’s mother while she was pregnant. The boy never grew close to his father, but he loved his grandfather Rutledge, who came back to Memphis after retiring as the bishop of Panama. He was sad that the old bishop had not lived long enough to meet his great-grandson, though he believed in some broad interpretation of heaven most of the time.

  The sight of the baby bundled in a blanket in his wife’s arms dispelled the gloomy thoughts and he rushed to her side, saying, “What a beautiful Madonna and child.”

  “Oh, Frank.” She held out the baby and he took it awkwardly and said, “Aren’t you something.”

  “My goodness, he is gorgeous,” Mary Lee said, coming up to the bed. “Look at the way he studies everything. Surely he can’t see very far.”

  The baby smiled at her.

  “Why, I declare. I never.”

  “Where’s Poppy?” Margaret asked.

  “He went out for a stroll.” Her mother laughe
d. “Toward the end he couldn’t tolerate all your caterwauling.”

  Just then her father bustled into the room, stared at the baby, and pronounced, “He favors Frank.”

  “He does,” her mother said. “The hair and the eyes.”

  Frank thought he smelled bourbon on Morgan’s breath, and prayed silently, Dear Lord, help us keep his troubled soul sober.

  Margaret gazed out the window at the lush St. Augustine grass, a preternatural green after the long, wet winter. “I never remember a spring so green.”

  “Like the garden of Eden,” her mother said.

  “That’s it.” Margaret laughed. “All the promise of creation.”

  “Green will be his favorite color,” her mother said. “Have you settled on a name?”

  Margaret looked at Frank, then said, “Cage Malone Rutledge.”

  “Wayooyayaoah.” Cage moved one hand up and down, conducting an underwater symphony. “Oh . . . oooo.”

  “He’s the brightest little baby I’ve ever seen,” Mary Lee said.

  “He knows he’s got an audience.” Morgan laughed. “He’s trying to communicate. He’s much older than a baby.”

  Cage

  Twenty-nine years and two months old, and the clock is ticking. Every year, a year of our lives becomes a smaller fraction—one-twenty-ninth, one-thirtieth, one-thirty-first—and so time seems to accelerate as we grow older. We are racing toward oblivion. Or heaven. I watch the minute hand sweep forward on the cheap wristwatch that Grandfather Cage gave me as a joke on his deathbed. Poppy was a shell of himself, bald and thin, with sunken cheeks and the palest white skin. Pretending he was passing on a great heirloom, he said, I give this to you not so you will be ruled by time, but so you will not spend every moment trying to conquer it. The battle against time only reveals to man his folly and anguish, and victory is an illusion of fools.

  Ten o’clock. The Folgers are expecting me across the island with the rest of the lumber. “Let it slide, slide, slide,” I sing to myself. “Baby, let it slide.” I turn off the sander and step back to stare at all thirty-six feet of my 1957 Angelus ketch on blocks in the yard and decide to spend the rest of the morning sanding the hull so that I can prime it this evening. Finishing her by the end of the season is my number one priority now. I’ll have to rig up some lights so that I can work late at night. I’ve got three months to refit every inch. In mid-September I’ll sail down south. I’ll be a Caribbean charter skipper in the winter and a Nantucket boatbuilder in the summer. On my fortieth birthday I’ll single-hand around the world. One must have goals and the American dream is no longer a house and college education for your kids, a safe retirement. The new dream is freedom from drudgery, time to travel. I dream of sailing the seven seas. Rather than conquer time I will run with it. The name of my ketch will never let me forget who I am.

  Harper

  In mid-June, after I’ve been on the island about a month, I hear Cage is renting out rooms in the homes he’s supposed to be caretaking to kids landing on the island looking for jobs. I haven’t seen Cage for a week. I can never get him on the phone. I catch him only at night at the Chicken Shack. He’s always too distracted by some girl, usually a different one, to talk for long. One day I check the post office and find a card from Mom, who is with Dad at a conference at Canterbury, and a dozen envelopes addressed to Cage from the First Nantucket Bank which appear to be bounced checks. I just leave everything in the box and walk over to the Blakes’ house, where a bunch of guys from Amherst are smoking a joint and looking through the want ads. I tell ’em they ought to move out pronto before the owners arrive and throw them out, which could be any day now. Early the next morning before work I leave my attic room and ride fast through cold fog across the island to Cisco, where Cage is house-sitting a two-story clapboard Victorian with a wide front porch set in front of a grove of scrub oaks.

  Reaching the picket fence, I get off the bike and stand staring in the mist for a long time. The front yard has been transformed into a nautical graveyard. A dozen wooden boats lie wrecked on their sides, stranded on the grass carpet. There are sloops, ketches, yawls. I can’t remember the difference. A couple are almost skeletons, like the rib cages of whales displayed in natural history museums. A few of the hulls are more or less intact, with only a hole or two staved in the rotting sides. Two, sitting up on blocks, appear to be seaworthy. The hull of one has been recently primed and the deck stripped of varnish. On the stern, painted crudely, as if they’re being tried out, are the words Cage’s Bend.

  The front door swings open when I knock. The inside smells like a frat house, stale smoke and rancid beer, and the stereo is playing Bob Marley down low. Empty rum bottles, stained glasses, and ashtrays overloaded with cigarette butts clutter the tables. I walk over local newspapers, sandy footprints, boat magazines, granola bar wrappers, turn off the stereo, and open some windows to air out the room.

  The silence is broken by a girl’s cry from upstairs and I almost jump out of my skin. She moans on and on. After a minute I walk into the kitchen and fill the kettle and put it on a big gas stove and search for a clean coffee mug. The moans become wild shrieks of ecstasy. I hear Cage’s voice but I can’t make out what he’s saying. I load up a ceramic funnel with a filter and coffee and place it on the mug. Suddenly she stops and it is dead quiet, then the whistle of the kettle startles me again. I pour milk in my coffee to cool it down so I can drink it quickly. A few minutes later, when I hit the bottom of the cup, I walk back to the living room and yell, “Brother!”

  Cage appears at the top of the stairs, pulling on a sweatshirt; he has some kind of sarong tied around his waist. He grins. “Hey, youngblood. Want some coffee?”

  “I just had some. I arrived in time for the, uh, yodeling contest.”

  “Always put her pleasure first,” Cage says, laughing, bounding down the stairs. “That’s the golden rule.”

  I spread my arms out wide, encompassing the mess, my jaw hanging open in total disbelief. “Hurricane Cage?”

  “Just a party.” Cage stares back with the same expression. “I’m going to clean it up. Chill out.”

  “What’s with the boats?”

  “I’m renovating them.” He steps past me. “I’ll have a whole flotilla.”

  “Only a couple look like they’ll ever float. Where’d you get them?”

  “Beached by a really high tide. Where do you think?”

  “The dump?” I follow him into the kitchen, thinking of the girl he left behind upstairs.

  “Bingo. The sloop and the ketch I bought for a song.”

  “Have you been tripping every day? I think you’re starting to lose touch with reality.”

  “You don’t have the vision to see that I’m building a business.”

  “Yeah, Commodore Rutledge and his flotilla of ghost ships.”

  “Just wait till we sail to the Vineyard.” He puts the filter on the cup I used and pours in tepid water. “You won’t be so negative then.”

  “Listen, Cage, you’ve got to get those Amherst assholes out of the Blakes’ house.”

  “Why?” He sets the kettle on the stove and lights a roach on the gas burner. “I’m making a thousand a week between the Blakes’ house and the Treadwells’. How do you think I bought the boats?”

  “You rented out the Treadwells’ house, too?”

  “Yeah, some girls from Sarah Lawrence. One’s upstairs right now.” He holds out the joint.

  I shake my head. “It’s dishonest.”

  “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  “That’s not the point. They’re going to trash the houses. The owners could show up anytime. And even if they don’t see them, they’re going to find out. It’s a small island.”

  Cage smiles, putting his hand on my shoulder. “It’s all under control, little bro.”

  I shrug his hand off. “When do the owners get here?”

  “Not till next week.” He exhales a lungful of smoke and smiles. “Plenty of time.�
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  “I got to go to work. Let’s have dinner tonight. You gotta get a grip, okay?”

  “Sure, Harpo. I’ll come pick you up in ’Sconset at seven.” He sucks in a deep toke and raises his hand.

  At the front door I hear someone and turn around. A pretty, dark-haired girl in a sweatshirt and blue jeans is coming down the stairs barefoot. She smiles and says, “Good morning.”

  “Hey.” I turn and almost let the screen door slam behind me but catch it at the last instant.

  Cage

  I slide the old Bronco into the parking lot at Coffin’s Marine Supply and leap out the door. Power surging from every sinew, I feel like Attila the Hun come to sack imperial cities and raze ancient monuments. Turning the corner, I see Virginia Folger on the sidewalk, holding a sack in one arm and her five-year-old son by the hand. I’m about to backtrack when she sees me.

  “Cage.” Her voice is icy. “I waited all morning yesterday for you to show up.”

  “Mornin’, Ms. Folger. Hey there, Ben, little man. How y’all?” I amble up to them with the rolling stride of a seaman. I keep grinning until she smiles reluctantly. Ben rushes up to me and I lift him up and spin him giggling around and around. “I am sorry, Virginia, I’m just so busy, opening up all those houses. I’ll be out to finish the deck this afternoon. I promise. I’m going to pick up the lumber this very minute.”

  “You’ve broken three appointments this week.” She shifts the groceries to her other arm.

  I set the little boy down. “You have my word.”

  She mocks my accent. “I do believe you gave me your word the day before yesterday.”