Noise of the war grew louder. At last, it became impossible to ignore. Jude was two. His mother pressed his father’s new khaki suit and then Jude’s father’s absence filled the house with a kind of cool breeze. He was flying cargo planes in France. Jude thought of scaly creatures flapping great wings midair, his father angrily riding.
While Jude napped the first day they were alone in the house, his mother tossed all of the jars of dead snakes into the swamp and neatly beheaded the living ones with a hoe. She bobbed her hair with gardening shears. Within a week, she had moved them ninety miles to the beach. When she thought he was asleep on the first night in the new house, she went down to the water’s edge in the moonlight and screwed her feet into the sand. It seemed that the glossed edge of the ocean was chewing her up to her knees. Jude held his breath, anguished. One big wave rolled past her shoulders, and when it receded, she was whole again.
This was a new world, full of dolphins that slid up the coastline in shining arcs. Jude loved the wedges of pelicans ghosting overhead, the mad dig after periwinkles that disappeared deeper into the wet sand. He kept count in his head when they hunted for them, and when they came home, he told his mother that they had dug up 461. She looked at him unblinking behind her glasses and counted the creatures aloud.
When she finished, she washed her hands for a long time at the sink. “You like numbers,” she said at last, turning around.
“Yes,” he said. And she smiled and a kind of gentle shine came from her that startled him. He felt it seep into him, settle in his bones. She kissed him on the crown and put him to bed, and when he woke in the middle of the night to find her next to him, he tucked his hand under her chin where it stayed until morning.
He began to sense that the world worked in ways beyond him, that he was only grasping at threads of a far greater fabric. Jude’s mother started a bookstore. Because women couldn’t buy land in Florida for themselves, his uncle, a roly-poly little man who looked nothing like Jude’s father, bought the store with her money and signed the place over to her. His mother began wearing suits that showed her décolletage and taking her glasses off before boarding the streetcars, so that the eyes she turned to the public were soft and somewhat misty. Instead of singing Jude to sleep as she had in the snake house, she read to him. She read Shakespeare, Hopkins, Donne, Rilke, and he fell asleep with their cadences and the sea’s slow rhythm entwined in his head.
Jude loved the bookstore; it was a bright place that smelled of new paper. Lonely war brides came with their prams and left with an armful of Modern Library classics, sailors on leave wandered in only to exit, charmed, with sacks of books pressed to their chest. After hours, his mother would turn off the lights and open the back door to the black folks who waited patiently there, the dignified man in his watch cap who loved Galsworthy, the fat woman who worked as a maid and read a novel every day. “Your father would squeal. Well, foo on him,” his mother said to Jude, looking so fierce she erased the last traces in his mind of the tremulous woman she’d been.
One morning just before dawn, he was alone on the beach when he saw a vast metallic breaching a hundred yards offshore. The submarine looked at him with its single periscope eye and slipped silently under again. Jude told nobody. He kept this dangerous knowledge inside him where it tightened and squeezed, but where it couldn’t menace the greater world.
Jude’s mother brought in a black woman named Sandy to help her with housework and to watch Jude while she was at the store. Sandy and his mother became friends, and some nights he would awaken to laughter from the veranda and come out to find his mother and Sandy in the night breeze off the ocean. They drank sloe gin fizzes and ate lemon cake, which Sandy was careful to keep on hand, even though by then sugar was getting scarce. They let him have a slice, and he’d fall asleep on Sandy’s broad lap, sweetness souring on his tongue and in his ears the exhalation of the ocean, the sound of women’s voices.
At six, he discovered multiplication all by himself, crouched over an anthill in the hot sun. If twelve ants left the anthill per minute, he thought, that meant 720 departures per hour, an immensity of leaving, of return. He ran into the bookstore, wordless with happiness. When he buried his head in his mother’s lap, the women chatting with her at the counter mistook his sobbing for sadness. “I’m sure the boy misses his father,” one lady said, intending to be kind.
“No,” his mother said. She alone understood his bursting heart and scratched his scalp gently. But something shifted in Jude; and he thought with wonder of his father, of whom his mother had spoken so rarely in all these years that the man himself had faded. Jude could barely recall the rasp of scale on scale and the darkness of the cracker house in the swamp, curtains closed to keep out the hot, stinking sun.
But it was as if the well-meaning lady had summoned him, and Jude’s father came home. He sat, immense and rough-cheeked, in the middle of the sunroom. Jude’s mother sat nervously opposite him on the divan, angling her knees away from his. The boy played quietly with his wooden train on the floor. Sandy came in with fresh cookies, and when she went back into the kitchen, his father said something so softly Jude couldn’t catch it. His mother stared at his father for a long time, then got up and went to the kitchen, and the screen door slapped, and the boy never saw Sandy again.
While his mother was gone, Jude’s father said, “We’re going home.”
Jude couldn’t look at his father. The space in the air where he existed was too heavy and dark. He pushed his train around the ankle of a chair. “Come here,” his father said, and slowly the boy stood and went to his father’s knee.
A big hand flicked out, and Jude’s face burned from ear to mouth. He fell down but didn’t cry out. He sucked in blood from his nose and felt it pool behind his throat.
His mother ran in and picked him up. “What happened?” she shouted, and his father said in his cold voice, “Boy’s timid. Something’s wrong with him.”
“He keeps things in. He’s shy,” said his mother, and carried Jude away. He could feel her trembling as she washed the blood from his face. His father came into the bathroom and she said through her teeth, “Don’t you ever touch him again.”
He said, “I won’t have to.”
His mother lay beside Jude until he fell asleep, but he woke to the moon through the automobile’s windshield and his parents’ jagged profiles staring ahead into the tunnel of the dark road.
The house by the swamp filled with snakes again. The uncle who had helped his mother with the bookstore was no longer welcome, although he was the only family his father had. Jude’s mother cooked a steak and potatoes every night but wouldn’t eat. She became a bone, a blade. She sat in her housedress on the porch rocker, her hair slick with sweat. He stood near her and spoke the old sonnets into her ear. She pulled him to her side and put her face between his shoulder and neck and when she blinked, her wet eyelashes tickled him, and he knew not to move away.
His father had begun, on the side, selling snakes to zoos and universities. He vanished for two, three nights in a row, and returned with clothes full of smoke and sacks of rattlers and blacksnakes. He’d been gone for two nights when his mother packed her blue cardboard suitcase with Jude’s things on one side and hers on the other. She said nothing, but gave herself away with humming. They walked together over the dark roads and sat waiting for the train for a long time. The platform was empty; theirs was the last train before the weekend. She handed him caramels to suck, and he felt her whole body tremble through the thigh he pressed hard against hers.