TALES FROM THE COVE
When they made the first of their promised visits, after six long weeks at the cove, they were brown as Indians and it seemed to John Roger they had grown noticeably taller. God, were they growing! They were stronger too. He saw it in the sinews of their hands, in the new tightness of their coats across their shoulders when they dressed for dinner. He had thought much about them during their absence. About how near they were to full manhood and the ways in which they were already more capable than most men of his acquaintance. Their “Thank you, Father” had come to mind many times since. He regretted his mistakes with them. Regretted having kept himself a stranger to them for so long, no matter they had as much kept themselves strangers to him. As the father, he had the greater obligation to wisdom and fairness, and it was neither wise nor fair—quite the contrary— to defend one’s conduct toward one’s children on the basis of tit for tat. He could not recall ever having addressed them as “sons.”
That they had honored their agreement to make the visit was far less surprising to him than the size of his gladness to see them. Victoria Clara, too, was happy to have them home. In her six years at Buenaventura she had watched them grow from precocious and cocky identical children to handsome and cocky identical young men and had become very fond of them. She had lost her mother to a disease of the throat four years before, and a year later her father to a pulmonary infection. Her two brothers, who had inherited everything, were both much older than she and had always been strangers to her. She’d had no true sense of sisterhood until she came to know the twins, and it didn’t bother her at all that she couldn’t differentiate between them. John Roger never saw her so animated as at dinnertimes in their company. Neither, to his unspoken chagrin, did John Samuel.
The greatest surprise of that first visit was their unprecedented loquacity at the dinner table, the conversation shifting at whim between English and Spanish. John Roger grinned and Vicki Clara laughed at their amusing account of journeying to the cove with the six burros that on hearing a jaguar growl in the bush went so crazy with fright and thrashed so wildly it took the twins two hours to calm them and repack the scattered pack goods. And because the stable at the cove was too small for six burros and anyway too dilapidated to afford protection, the twins had tethered the animals on the verandah every evening.
On the verandah! Vicki Clara said. Like a little hotel for donkeys!
You including a couple who walk on their hind legs? a twin said with a wry grin, and Vicki laughed with them even as she protested that she did not mean any such thing.
They told about the work they had done on the house and on the sloop, and confessed that they had devoted themselves to the full repair of the boat before they even began to work on the house. “We just couldn’t wait to start sailing her,” one said. It did not escape John Roger’s notice that they still did not refer to the
Once the sloop was seaworthy they had spent the mornings working on the house and the afternoons teaching themselves to handle the boat out on the gulf—which dazzled them with its vastness. It gave them a strange feeling of being awful small and awful free at the same time.
John Roger said he knew what they meant. “I always had that same feeling out there.” Their zest for the open sea had made him recall his own youthful passion for sailing. But it shocked him to realize he had spoken in the past tense. That he had not been aboard a boat since before they were born. He had a moment’s banal curiosity about where the years had gone.
He mentioned the inlet’s tricky passage, and they said it was tricky, all right, but that was what made it so much fun, and they had gotten pretty good at zipping through it, if they did say so themselves. Because they did not want to seem braggarts, they did not tell him they had already become expert at navigating by the stars. Or that they were keeping track of the lunar cycle so they could at any time of day or night predict the turns of the tide within a quarter hour’s accuracy. It was their objective—and they would achieve it—to be able to negotiate the inlet even on a moonless night.
Vicki Clara asked what they planned on doing out there once they finished repairing the house, and they said there would never be a problem keeping busy, as the house and boat would always be in need of some kind of upkeep. When they weren’t busy working they’d go fishing or hunting, or catch up on their reading.
John Roger admired the shrewdness of their answer. It was the truth as far as it went but it was hardly the whole truth. They had some plan in mind, some enterprise. He had sensed it when they came to him those weeks ago and he was even more certain of it now. But whatever they intended to do—were perhaps already doing—it would remain their secret until they chose to reveal it, if ever.
Vicki said it sounded like a very simple life. But I think there is one problem with it, she said.
The twins smiled, knowing some tease was coming. And what is that? one said.
I do not believe you will meet very many girls out there.
The twins laughed with her. “Dang it!” one said. “I knew there was something we forgot to account for.” And the other said all they could do was hope to get lucky and meet a few mermaids.
John Roger smiled at the laughter of his daughter-in-law and twin sons. He could not remember the last loud mirth at the table. Not since Lizzie was there. He wanted to contribute to it, to add to the banter by saying . . . what? . . . that the trouble with mermaids was that they were such terrible dancers? But he feared his joke would seem a lame effort and any smiles they might show would be mere politeness. He recognized the silliness of this qualm, but now the moment for the quip had passed, and he refrained from making it for fear of seeming slow witted. Good Lord, he thought, I’m thinking like an old man. Then had the melancholy apprehension that a man of fifty-six
John Samuel did not join in the table conversation nor show the least interest in anything the twins had to say. He had avoided them since their arrival from the cove. They did not see each other until dinnertime, when they were all in the dining room and John Roger said to his eldest son, “Look who’s here.” John Samuel stared at them without word. The twins smiled at him, then looked at each other and made puckered faces of sourness and laughed and took their places at the table. They and John Samuel then ignored each other for the rest of the evening, as they would on all of the twins’ subsequent visits.
The disregard between his older and younger sons had become so familiar to John Roger, and to Vicki Clara too, that it hardly bore the notice of either of them anymore. Still, John Roger had hoped that when the twins grew to adolescence and the difference in age between them and John Samuel mattered less, they might all begin to appreciate the fact of their brotherhood and accord each other some degree of respect. But it hadn’t turned out that way, and it saddened him that their mutual dislike was more pointed than ever. He had several times in recent years thought to ask John Samuel directly why he and the twins could not get along. But he had each time held back, telling himself it was not the right moment to bring up the subject. And then one day he knew it was too late to discuss it at all. Knew that whatever the reason for the rancor between his sons it was past all possibility of being reconciled or even rationally explained.
John Samuel finished eating before everyone else and forwent dessert and coffee, excusing himself to his wife and father, saying he had work to do. After he’d gone, Vicki Clara asked the twins if they would like to go upstairs with her after dinner and see the boys, who as always had taken supper with the maids. You won’t believe how much they’ve grown since you saw them last, she said.
The twins had never indicated more than passing interest in their young nephews, and John Roger assumed they were only being polite to Vicki when they followed her upstairs. But later that evening, when she joined John Roger in the library, Vicki reported that the twins had greeted their nephews, five-year-old Juanito Sotero and soon-to-be-four Roger Samuel, with man-to-man handshakes, and not two minutes later were on all fours and letting the boys ride them like rodeo broncos, neighing and snorting and tossing their heads while the boys clutched tight to their uncles’ shirt collars with one hand and used their free arm to keep their balance, waving it about and as they had seen the bronc-breakers at the horse ranch do, whooping like them. When Roger Samuel lost his grip and tumbled off his uncle and knocked his head hard on the floor, Vicki jumped up from her chair in alarm but Rogerito quickly got up, laughing and rubbing his head, and said, “Don’t come in the corral, Mother, you might get kicked by that mean mustang.” He remounted his uncle’s back and got a firm grip on his collar and dug his heels into his ribs and ya-hooed as the uncle resumed bucking.
John Roger said it was hard for him to imagine the twins playing with children. Vicki laughed and said, I
