Sister Sheba arrived with her consumptive husband at the end of the second year—cadaver, flecked lightly on the lips with blood, seventy-three years old. They said he was forty-nine—sickness made him look old. He was a tall man, six feet three, with long straight mustaches, waxen and emaciated as a mandarin. He painted pictures—impressionist blobs—sheep on a gorsey hill, fishboats at the piers, with a warm red jumble of brick buildings in the background.
Old Gloucester Town, Marblehead, Cape Cod Folks, Captains Courageous—the rich salty names came reeking up with a smell of tarred rope, dry codheads rotting in the sun, rocking dories knee— deep in gutted fish, the strong loin-smell of the sea in harbors, and the quiet brooding vacancy of a seaman’s face, sign of his marriage with ocean. How look the seas at dawn in Spring? The cold gulls sleep upon the wind. But rose the skies.
They saw the waxen mandarin walk shakily three times up and down the road. It was Spring, there was a south wind high in the big trees. He wavered along on a stick, planted before him with a blue phthisic hand. His eyes were blue and pale as if he had been drowned.
He had begotten two children by Sheba—girls. They were exotic tender blossoms, all black and milky white, as strange and lovely as Spring. The boys groped curiously.
“He must be a better man than he looks yet,” said Tom Davis. “The little’un’s only two or three years old.”
“He’s not as old as he looks,” said Eugene. “He looks old because he’s been sick. He’s only forty-nine.”
“How do you know?” said Tom Davis.
“Miss Amy says so,” said Eugene innocently.
“Pap” Rheinhart cocked his head on Eugene and carried his quid deftly on the end of his tongue to the other cheek.
“Forty-nine!” he said, “you’d better see a doctor, boy. He’s as old as God.”
“That’s what she said,” Eugene insisted doggedly.
“Why, of course she said it!” “Pap” Rheinhart replied. “You don’t think they’re going to let it out, do you? When they’re running a school here.”
