Death in the Polka Dot Shoes (2 page)

At Christ Church the watermen of Parkers all stood together and lamented the passing of their friend, Jimmy Shannon, taken by the sea as so many of their brothers and fathers had been. They saw no humor or irony in the tuna's action, only the terribly fine line between life and death that is drawn every day on the water. For them, Jimmy's death could just as easily have resulted from storm, or cold, or a fall from the rigging of a skipjack. I was appalled when the Old Bay Circular, Parkers' weekly newspaper, reported my brother's death with the headline, Fish Catches Man. But the watermen seemed to ignore it, as if the frivolity of a newspaper account had little value or consequence anyway.

There were a few new faces at the service, friends of my brother who had just discovered the chop of the Bay in their varnished sailboats, or had discovered the little two bedroom bungalows with the beautiful sunsets, houses that could be torn down in an afternoon and rebuilt as glass palaces. The marinas around Parkers were filling with sailboats, crowding out dock space for the crab boats. Watermen saw sailboats as vehicles for pleasure, not for work. And in nearby Annapolis in 2008 the city council evicted the last working crab boat from the city dock. The economy of the Bay was changing, and the population of Parkers was beginning to shift as well. I was in the eddy, not quite knowing what the future would hold in these swirling economic currents. Standing under the covering pines with the green shuttered church and the English boxwood along every walking path made me yearn again for the simplicity of my youth. It was so quiet at Christ Church, with an occasional gnatcatcher swooping through the trees, that I almost missed the young woman standing with the watermen, moving somewhat awkwardly with the group as they ambled around the church. I didn't pay much attention, but I think she was laughing, perhaps at a joke between them about my brother. I made a mental note to ask about her later.

Then I spotted three of my old friends from high school and a lump caught in my throat. My mind went to long afternoons of basketball on the town court, and shared conversations about life that are possible only in youth. I started to cry and the tears would not stop. I yanked a long white handkerchief from my pocket and covered my face. I wanted to speak to my dear friends, missed through the years, and now virtually unknown to me. I didn't even know where they lived, nearby I suppose, or they wouldn't have been at the funeral. And they probably came just to see me. But whenever I lowered my handkerchief I started to cry again. It was their youth. I looked in their faces and saw myself as a boy, and realized that I was crying for our lost youth. These were boys who respected my father, and knew my brother, and now they stood alone under the pines like trees without forests. I couldn't face them, so I walked away, hoping for the distraction of others, another group of mourners who could change my focus. I looked around for smiling faces.

My family's friends and neighbors had great senses of humor, laughing at the sea and its unruly manner, mimicking their friends, exaggerating each other's weaknesses and foibles, and sometimes a joke would lead to a fight. Humor and fighting were linked somehow in ways I never understood, but instinctively knew not to challenge. Perhaps because strength was the final measure of a waterman, fighting was common. Men in their fifties, who had been at sea for decades, could measure every catch by the strain in their arms, and they knew that in the end, it would be the weight of the oyster tongs, or a full pot of crabs, or a stumble while climbing into their boat, that would mark the end of their career. Similarly, the watermen could be incredibly sentimental, helping each other's families, sitting up with sick friends, or repairing each other's boats, because they also understood the capriciousness of their lives, and every soul had its own value. They needed each other.

The story is told in Parkers of “Gunnels” Newton, a first mate who never quite grew out of the position, and at age 52 was still signing on every morning with a new crab boat or oyster tonger, wherever he was needed. He liked to work the oysters because he liked to eat them. He was a relatively small man, with wiry frame, but a huge belly filled every night with beer and oysters. Locally, he was known as the champion oyster eater in Jenkins County. Soon, Gunnels was entering oyster eating contests all around the Bay.

The watermen of Parkers, meeting in solemn conclave one Sunday morning at the Bayfront bar, which was always full by eight o'clock in the morning, especially on Sunday, voted to take up a collection to send Gunnels to the Guinness Book of World Records oyster eating contest in London, England. Gunnels had a special technique in which he shucked oysters as fast as he could, then put them in a bottle of milk, threw back his head and let the whole concoction flow silently down his throat. By this method he could consume pounds of oysters in minutes. He won the Guinness contest, of course, coming home with enough prize money to keep him wet for months. But the strain of ready cash was too much for his heart. One Saturday afternoon, after the final round of the St. Michael's oyster eating contest, he was bent over the gunnels of his work boat dispensing with the excesses of his competition, when he died.

The boys at the Bayfront, realizing that Gunnels had no family or money, arranged to have him cremated. In a ceremony still honored in Parkers, they lined up their work boats, headed out to the Bay, and dumped Gunnels' ashes right in the middle of the Holland Point oyster bed. The final irony of his life was that in the end, the oysters got to eat him.

Gunnels is still honored at the Bayfront with a picture of him beside a stack of oyster shells. The picture comes down occasionally, when Mabel Fergus, who owns the place, becomes “tired of looking at his ugly face,” as she puts it. But after a few months, it always reappears in a different corner of the dining room.

This story flashed through my mind because I knew I had seen that girl with the watermen before, and I think it was at the Bayfront. She was very attractive and I wondered if she knew my bother, or just came to be with the boys. Either explanation was possible. I knew most of the crabbers because they were either just behind me in school, or were men my father had worked with. There seemed to be a missing group, my class at South County High, but I knew no reason for it. Other than there were a couple of really bad crabbing years in the early 1980s, and most fathers simply discouraged their sons from staying on the water. In my case, I didn't want to. I had a longing for fast cars, pretty girls, finely starched shirts, linen table cloths and long airplane trips to unknown places. Those dreams required getting out of Parkers.

The memorial service ended, and my brother's friends were standing around outside, smoking or talking. They started drifting back toward the church for a basement reception, which I was not looking forward to attending. That's where the old women in floral print dresses and heavy shoes want to bestow a big kiss and a hug on the bereaved relatives, in this case, me. They seem to think a bosomy hug somehow eases the pain, when in fact it squashes the cigars in my breast pocket and leaves strange smells around my neck. I could do without that.

I had smoked cigarettes in college in order to look cool, and once in the law firm, where the pressure to produce was palpable, my habit had grown to nearly three packs a day. I had ignored all the warnings, the television ads, the government studies, and the statistics on lung cancer. Growing up, everyone I knew smoked. Most of the watermen smoked, from long days of hard repetitive work on the water. So it seemed natural that I would pick up the habit. But one day my lungs started to ache, and worse, breathing actually made a noise. I could hear a low groan with every breath, and it scared me. It was impossible to ignore, or to rationalize away. Breathing should not make a noise. So I started the terrible process of trying to stop, cold turkey, then two cigarettes a day, then one cigar in the evening. The cigar seemed to work, although I knew of course that it was not good for me. Then I convinced myself that one cigar, no inhaling, was alright. And the noise in my lungs stopped. That's how I came to always have a cigar in my pocket, even at my brother's memorial service.

In addition, my favorite place to smoke was in the car. I didn't smoke at home because of the smell and dirty ash trays. But driving was like a personal smoking lounge, with the window cracked for fresh air and no passengers to offend. In this case, I knew it would be a long drive back to Washington from Parkers, and after the memorial service I would need the distraction of a good cigar.

Bucking the tide of people and stumbling down the hill toward me was my father's best friend and retired Field and Bay Magazine photographer, Mansfield Burlington, a strange but very proper duck who chose Parkers for a home some 40 years ago. He was tall, thin, constantly smoked a pipe, often wore a bow tie, and carried himself with a stiffness sometimes mistaken for aloofness. I once saw a picture of Mansfield in some magazine that showed him with his cameras slung around his neck in Venice, Italy while two pigeons tried to land on his head, apparently confusing him with a Michelangelo statue. There was no explanation for why Field and Bay had sent him to Italy. In fact, Mansfield was quite a warm fellow, a great listener and a craftsman. He could touch a piece of wood and turn it soft and brown, yielding the most beautiful flow of varnished grain imaginable. He could build things.

“Neddie,” he called, “I'm so sorry about your bother. Almost went out on his boat once. How are you?”

“Fine Burl,” I said, surprised at first that I even remembered the more familiar nickname, but then remembering that everyone called him Burl. Mansfield was far too formal for daily use, and it sounded so English. In fact, Mansfield Burlington was born in Minnesota, and was Scandinavian. After photographing the world for nearly twenty years, he had a minor fame of his own. Young photographers familiar with his pioneering use of color and a tenacious sense of purpose in getting the right picture, still dropped by his house for pointers. People said he liked the water so much because he descended from Viking warriors. Locals held him in reverence because he had the touch with wood, an almost mystical connection in which he could run his finger lovingly along a strip of walnut and it would become a table. When he started building a skipjack in his barn, people would drop by on Sunday afternoons just to see the progress, like viewing a sculptor in his studio.

“Burl,” I repeated, “did you ever finish that skipjack?”

“Yes,” he said with a pleased smile, “rolled her out of the barn at the turn of the century. She's docked beside the Tonsund. Come see her.” The Tonsund was a forty-foot sail boat named for Mansfield's Sherpa who had guided him safely up some Tibetan mountain more than thirty years before. Not insignificantly, Mansfield had saved Ton-sund's life on the way down by amputating his frozen toes with a pen knife. For a fellow with such formal bearing, Mansfield made the deepest and most lasting friendships.

“Sorry about your brother,” Mansfield said. “A good man. Knew the water.”

He stopped to light his pipe, stepping back to avoid a falling ash that just missed his tweed coat. It was a knarled old pipe, black around the bowl from countless flames and as natural as the bark of an oak tree. He had fondled the briar, leaving so much oil and sweat on the bowl that it looked almost soft, like fine leather.

“Too bad he got wrapped around that Resort,” Mansfield said as the flame from his match died out.

I picked up on that immediately, knowing nothing about any resort. “What Resort?”

“Oh, you haven't heard about the big fight,” Mansfield said, almost with excitement. “They're trying to build a hundred acre resort right here on the Jenkins. We call it the hijenks project,” Mansfield said. “Going to ruin the crabs. Pollute this whole Bay.”

“Are you involved, Burl?” I asked. “Environmentalists up in arms?”

“We're doing what we can,” he said. “It's the future of the Bay. No more skipjacks.”

Mansfield started building his skipjack when I was in high school, cutting the wood himself from white cedar he had plucked from the forests of Maine and carried to Maryland on the roof of his car. As a boy, I will never forget the sight of a small gray station wagon, with two six-inch square, twenty-foot long pieces of lumber strapped to the top so they hung over the windshield like licorice sticks. He drove all the way from Maine to Maryland with his wife hiding her face in shame beside him. The police stopped him twice but never gave him a ticket. Mansfield was a man's man who had traveled the world, engaging himself in exploits which always seemed to end in a near death experience. And I did indeed intend to stop by his home for a visit, if only to ask if he had heard any strange stories about my brother. Now we had a Resort to discuss.

“Can I come by to see you, Burl?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “Love to have you. Bring some wind and we'll do a little sailing.”

I wanted to get back to Washington before dark, just to be home and sort out my thoughts. I hadn't spent much time at the church with my brother's wife and baby, but we had already shed so many tears together, I just walked away. I wanted to make a quick pass by the Bayfront Inn and take a look at my brother's boat, anchored next to the garden dock. The Bayfront didn't have any rooms, but did have a bar and restaurant beside seventeen slips for crab boats and charter fishing boats.

Somehow, when death stops the world for you, you expect it to stop for everyone. It doesn't. On Sunday afternoon at the Bayfront, a deejay named Footloose played heavy metal music for bikers, girlfriends, and locals who filled the six picnic tables on the dock. I used to move easily in this world. But now, instead of recognizing the biker babe in the black jacket and tattoos as the mother of an old friend, I saw her as slightly threatening, someone I didn't know and shouldn't make eye contact with. The cycles were lined up in front of the building. My God, I exclaimed to myself as I realized the biker babe was Hank's mom, about to get on a maroon Harley Davidson with highly polished chrome and a small bumper sticker that said “Save the Bay.” She had to be sixty. And the identical maroon Harley parked next to her must mean that Hank Sr. was still in the building. Hank Jr. was my best friend in high school because he wanted to be an accountant. We had a natural friendship, based on a mutual ambition to get out of Parkers. Actually, he had done well in life, becoming a dot com millionaire of some kind, and probably buying those motorcycles for his parents. As far as I knew, they were still running crab pots out of the West River. But obviously, their lives had assumed a new flair.