Summer of Pearls Read online

  “And I just bought me one!” Kelso shoved the three fivers into Billy’s shirt pocket and reached for the pearl.

  Quick as he had opened the mussel, Billy slammed it shut in his left hand, the pearl clamped safely inside. With his right hand, he grabbed Kelso by the back of the collar. The speed and strength he moved with shocked me out of my anger and frustration. I saw Kelso fly headfirst from the pier into the water, but Billy did not let go of him. He held Kelso under, facedown. Kelso thrashed like a snared gator. That Kelso was a bundle of muscles and it took some power to hold him down. Billy did it with one hand. His left hand still clutched the pearl mussel.

  “What’s this about Pearl Cobb?” Billy asked, speaking as smoothly as if he were sitting in someone’s parlor. Kelso continued to claw at him ineffectually.

  “Her real name’s Carol Anne,” Esau answered. “She likes pearls, I guess. Does a man favors for ’em. That’s how she got her nickname.”

  Billy shoved Kelso deeper. The man’s face must have been in the mud. His feet came up and splashed muddy water everywhere with their flailing.

  “What does she do with them?”

  Esau reached for the flask again. “I don’t know. Keeps them in her room, I think. A fellow told me one time he took her a pearl and she had him put it in a tobacco tin with a bunch of other ones, then—” He looked toward us boys and decided against giving further details. “You gonna let him up for air?”

  “A man can hold his breath a long time when he has to. Isn’t that right, Ben?”

  I was speechless. I didn’t know who or what Billy was anymore. Was he a murderer who drowned his enemies? A hero who saved drowning men? Was he my friend, or my rival for Pearl’s attention? I didn’t stand a chance of impressing her with Billy waving pearls under her nose. Of course, I wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway, but I was fourteen and too infatuated to figure my chances realistically. All I knew was that I should have found that pearl. It was meant for me, and Billy had stolen it from me.

  It was funny, because I had known for some time who Pearl Cobb was and what she did. It didn’t bother me that she had had all those men who brought her pearls. I figured she was just generous. And if she could be generous with them, why not with me? But this Billy Treat was dangerous. I don’t know how I knew, but I sensed he might take all of Pearl’s generosity for himself.

  “He stopped kickin’, Billy,” Adam said, staring fearfully at Kelso’s legs.

  Billy pulled the man up. Kelso sucked in some mud and water with his first breath. He coughed and gasped with horrible sounds as Billy shoved him toward the shore. While Kelso caught his breath, Billy opened the mussel shell and removed the pearl. He pulled the mussel out, too, and threw it into our bait bucket.

  “Goddam you, son of a bitch!” Kelso wheezed, scooping mud away from his eyes.

  Billy took the three bills from his shirt pocket, wadded them up, and threw them at him. “Don’t cuss me, Kelso.”

  Kelso got up and staggered toward Esau’s saloon. “You better watch over your shoulder, Treat,” he said.

  When Kelso was out of the way, Adam asked, “Can I see the pearl, Billy?”

  Billy let him look at it as he stepped back up onto the pier. Adam handed it to Cecil to look at, then Cecil gave it to me. I wanted to rear up and throw that pearl back out into the lake, but I didn’t know if maybe Billy might hold me under, too. I just stood there, looking at it in my open palm, nudging it around a little with my finger. It was almost as beautiful as Carol Anne Cobb.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked Billy.

  He looked at me, those pale blue eyes drilling me like skewers. “What would you do with it if you were me?” he said.

  I swallowed and felt a red flood of anger and embarrassment engulf my face.

  Billy smirked at me. “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  “Is that what you’re going to do with it?”

  With a sudden upward flick of his palm, Billy tapped the back of my hand, propelling the pearl into the air. He snatched it right in front of my eyes, quick as a frog’s tongue. “Learn to mind your own business, Ben,” he said.

  He stared at me, knowing everything I was thinking. His eyes were inscrutable and mysterious, like sky-blue pearls, flecked with shafts of danger, bored with big dark holes. Oh, that Billy Treat could see your naked soul with those eyes.

  5

  PEARL LOCKED THE FRONT DOOR OF SNYDER’S STORE AND FOUND HER WAY by starlight to the stairs around back that led to her room. Her entire life consisted of the store by day and her room by night. She rarely went anywhere else. Not to church, for no congregation had embraced her. Nor to visit friends, for she had none—with the possible exception of old man Snyder and young Ben Crowell. Hattie Hayes, the constable’s wife, was civil to her, but she couldn’t really count her as a friend.

  She entertained an occasional guest.

  Where would she go when the town died and the store closed? She had nothing else. The job she did was the only thing she took pride in, though it paid little. She was not proud of her beauty. Her looks were a curse.

  She had a can of beef stew in her hand as she climbed the stairs. She would have the stew for supper, if she found an appetite. She opened the door and entered her dark room. She felt for the matches and lit the tallow candle. No need to light the lantern. It was better to save the coal oil.

  When the candlelight filled the room, her eyes went immediately to the tobacco tin on the shelf above her bed. The pearls lay within like pebbles of shame … her only links to the social fabric of the town.

  Carol Anne had come to Port Caddo years before with her mother, a notorious Creole quadroon from New Orleans, renowned for her beauty and wiles. Her father was a gambler named Cobb, whom she never met. When she was six, her mother became the mistress of a rich planter on the Louisiana side of Caddo Lake. For four years, she and her mother lived well in a white frame house at Mooringsport. Carol Anne dressed primly and went to school.

  Then the Civil War came on. Her mother’s keeper became a lieutenant and died in one of the first battles. When the money ran out, they drifted across to the Texas side of the lake and landed in Port Caddo. Carol Anne’s mother rented a small house on the edge of town where she established a practice among the riverboat men, sawmill hands, farm boys, and fishermen.

  Carol Anne didn’t go to school anymore. There was no public education system, and none of the girls’ academies would enroll the daughter of a known prostitute. No white girl of proper family was allowed to befriend her. She played some with the black girls whose mothers washed laundry on Gum Slough, but Negro society was as suspicious of her as whites were righteous above her.

  Malaria ruined her mother’s health and trade, and eventually left Carol Anne alone in the world. She was fifteen. Kindly old Jim Snyder gave her a job at his store in exchange for room and board. In a couple of years, she was running the store on her own, earning a salary, and giving Jim Snyder more time to look after other business concerns.

  She was getting prettier, and growing out of awkward girlishness into womanhood. She had contact with many townspeople through the store, and some of them began to let the memory of her mother fade. She might have had a respectable future in Port Caddo if not for the pearls.

  A few of the proper girls who came into the store wore freshwater pearls their beaux had found and given to them. They wore them around their necks on simple silken threads or on slender chains of gold. They flaunted them, rolling them between their fingers as they shopped for white silk. Some wore their pearls mounted in golden ring settings, or on the ends of silver hairpins. A pearl from Caddo Lake was a proposal for marriage when given to a girl. Carol Anne wished she could have one.

  A promising young man from a South Shore plantation came to Carol Anne’s door one night and asked if he might come in. He held her wrist and pressed a pearl into her palm. It was a fine teardrop of blue smoke and luster. He was in love with her, he said, but he co
uldn’t let anybody know. Their love had to remain a secret until he turned twenty-one. His family already had his bride chosen for him, and might deny him his trust fund if he married the wrong girl. He told her this, then kissed her and went away.

  She lay awake that night with the blue pearl in her hand and dreamed of wearing it someday—a pendant set in gold. She dreamed of the boy, too, and their plantation home, their children, her flower garden.

  He returned two nights later and kissed her as he came in the door. He said he had been thinking of nothing but her. He snuffed out the candle and led her to the bed. She found little reason to resist. She was ready.

  For weeks, they guarded their secret with care. Carol Anne would fondle the teardrop pearl after he left and dream of their wedding and their life together. Then he stopped coming. She read in the Port Caddo Steam Whistle that the boy had been accepted at West Point and had a promising military career ahead of him.

  It didn’t take long for Carol Anne to realize that before he left, he had boasted to his friends about how he had seduced her, the daughter of the dead town whore, with a worthless shell slug.

  Not long after that, someone else knocked on her door. She found a farm boy standing at the top of the stairs. He said he had found a pearl that he would give her if she would let him come in. She almost pushed him down the stairs, but then the farm boy opened his hand to show her, and in the candlelight, she saw the mystical glow of the yellow oval. In its pearlescence she saw the same kind of visions she had seen in the smoky-blue teardrop. She saw family, home, and happiness. The ghostly colors swam in darting schools around the gem.

  She let him in, took his pearl. He never came back.

  After that, she forgot their faces, but remembered their pearls. Each held for her its own fantasy images of hearth and kin. She pretended they were men they could never be. In her room at night, she lived multiple lives—perfect lives encrusted safely in nacre. She became a collector of pearls. She became Pearl.

  Pearl put her can of beef stew on the table and lay down on her bed. She arched the stiffness from her back and stretched her arms toward the ceiling. She reached the tobacco tin, lowered it to her stomach, and opened it. She probed the folds of the velvet cloth that cradled the pearls. With her fingers, she felt the keepers of her fantasy lives. She knew most of them by touch alone. She closed her eyes and let the visions swarm.

  She had almost fallen asleep when she heard footsteps on her stairs. It was probably Jim Snyder, the grandfatherly old man she loved. He came to talk to her occasionally on her stairs, but would never enter her room.

  When the knock came, she opened the door and found Billy Treat standing at the top of the stairs. He held his straw hat in his hand; he smelled faintly of kitchen smoke. She wished she had taken the time to look in the mirror and straighten her hair.

  “Are you Carol Anne Cobb?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’ve heard you collect pearls.”

  She felt confused, and maybe a little ashamed, though she had learned to hide her shame. Since the day she first saw him; she had dreamed of him climbing the stairs to her room. But in her dreams, he never spoke of pearls. “So what?” she said, rather defensively.

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to see them.”

  “What for?” she asked, suspiciously.

  He crumpled the hat brim in his hand. “You might say I used to collect pearls, too. Saltwater pearls, mostly. I’d like to see yours, if you don’t mind.”

  She looked in his eyes. It was like looking into a mirror. His stare couldn’t meet hers. He diverted his line of sight. He was trying to get by some shame of his own.

  “All right,” she said, stepping aside to let him in. “I wasn’t expecting anybody.” She put the can of beef stew behind the curtain on the windowsill, fluffed her hair a little, and pulled the bedspread tight where she had been lying on it.

  Billy stood uncomfortably in the candlelight. “Mind if I light the lantern? I can grade the pearls better in lantern light.”

  “Grade them?” she said, handing him the lantern from her bedside. “What do you mean by ‘grade’ them?”

  Billy held the burning candlewick under the globe and lit the lantern. “See how much they’re worth. I’m not up ori today’s prices, but I can give you an idea of what they’d sell for.”

  Pearl wrinkled her pretty nose. “Pearls from that old muddy lake aren’t worth anything.”

  “A pearl is a pearl, Miss Cobb. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a Caddo Lake mussel or a South Seas oyster. They’re all graded the same way.”

  She stared across the room at him. He was an unusual man to know so much about pearls. Who was he? What had he come here for?

  Billy shuffled nervously. “Well, where are they? If you don’t mind …”

  “They’re in here.” She picked up the tobacco tin from her bed.

  They sat across from each other at her table and he opened the container. He angled the box to catch the light, then reached in with his fingertips and nudged apart the square of velvet bundled around the pearls, to get a glimpse of them. “You’ve got a lot of them,” he said.

  Pearl shrank into her chair with shame, and Billy looked as if he regretted commenting on the extent of her acquisitions. Perhaps he hadn’t meant anything by it. He removed the piece of velvet from the tobacco tin and spread it across the tabletop, letting the light strike and dance upon the pearls.

  There were more than twenty pearls of many shapes and colors. About half of them were white. The others varied from blue to purple to pink to yellow to gold. Only a few were perfect spheres. Some were flat, others long and thin like spikes; still others were shaped like flower petals or angels’ wings. Then there were the smoky-blue teardrop and the yellow oval.

  “You like pearls?” he asked as he pushed them into groups, studying them.

  “All girls like pearls.” She looked at him blankly, coolly. “I like the white ones best.” She felt compelled to speak something she had never said to anyone else. “The colored ones are pretty, but the white ones look like the moon through a rainbow.”

  He glanced appreciatively into her eyes. “In the South Sea islands,” he said, turning back to the pearls, “there’s a legend of a god called Oro who rides to Earth on a rainbow.” He held a round white pearl up to the light. “And he leaves a little of that rainbow color on the pearls wherever he goes.”

  She felt her heartbeat quicken. “How do you know things like that?” she asked, fascinated by his manners and his talk.

  “Like I said, I used to collect pearls. And I’ve read everything ever written on them, I guess.” He spoke as if pacing his words while he herded the gems into piles, comparing them, moving them from group to group. “The Greeks thought they were caused by lightning striking the water. And the Romans … well, the Romans thought they were the tears of angels. Christopher Columbus theorized that they were caused by dewdrops falling into the water from mangrove plants … .”

  She felt as if she were in a dream. No one had ever spoken to her of such fanciful ideas. That was not bayou talk. “Whatever got you so interested in pearls?”

  He shrugged. “My father was a jeweler.”

  “So? My father was a gambler. You don’t hear me going on about cards and dice.”

  Billy glanced up at her and smiled. “Well, we had a summer home in the country in New Jersey. A stream nearby had mussels in it that my mother liked to fry. She’d send me out to collect them.”

  “And you found a pearl in one of them?”

  “Only after it was cooked and on my plate. The cooking had ruined it. My father said it would have been worth five hundred dollars. It was a big round one. Anyway, that’s what got me interested in pearls. I’m out of the business now, though. I had some bad luck with it.”

  She watched in silence for some time as Billy studied the pearls with a serious look on his face.

  “See,” she said, mistaking his expression for one
of disappointment. “I told you they weren’t worth anything.”

  He looked up at her and squinted his eyes. He smiled slightly. “This blue teardrop is your best one, by my judgment. It’ll fetch seven hundred. All together, Miss Cobb, I’d say you have between three and four thousand dollars’ worth of pearls here.”

  Pearl looked back and forth between Billy’s face and the collection of Caddo Lake pearls. This Billy Treat was out of his mind! “That doesn’t make sense. How come nobody ever sold them before?”

  “Probably because nobody knew they were worth anything. The South Sea islanders used to play marbles with theirs, until they found out they could sell them.”

  That was the third time he had mentioned the South Sea to her. “Have you been there? To the South Sea?”

  He looked away from her and nodded. “Yes. Years ago. Listen, Miss Cobb, I know a pearl-buyer who works out of New York City who would probably be interested in buying these from you. If you want me to, I’ll contact him for you and have him come take a look.”

  Pearl got up from her chair to stand beside the table. “I never wanted to sell them,” she said, wringing her hands.

  “Why not?”

  “They’re mine. I like them.”

  Billy sighed. “Look, Miss Cobb,” he said, “I know how you came by these pearls. I don’t understand why you’d want to keep them. But if you sell them, you can use the money to get out of this town. You can make a new start. You know how to run a business. You could buy one of your own.”

  Pearl’s anger flared. She put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. “Well, you’ve got gall to talk to me like that. Anyway, since you know how I came by these pearls, I guess you also know that if I sell them for money, it makes me a whore … an expensive one, to hear you talk.” She didn’t raise her voice, but charged it with deep indignation.

  “Whether you do it for pearls or for money,” he said, “it seems about the same to me. What I’m telling you is that you’ve got a chance to turn your adversity into something valuable. That’s how pearls are made.”