The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay (12 page)

Clay ran the tiller from midship. After a few minutes he angled further southward. Byron noted the change and ducked in the cabin, took a drink of whiskey, and lit a cigarette. He came out and sat on the starboard rail, slowly exhaling and looking around him and over the Dorchester marsh.

“Pretty, ain't she.”

Clay looked at him. He seemed better. “You ready to work?”

Byron tapped his forehead. “Born ready. You give up on heading for Hills Point Neck?”

Clay studied the water. For the past few days they had been discussing where to lay the pots first. Clay wanted to find some fresh ground that hadn't been claimed by another potter. Hills Point Neck would be lonely enough, they had agreed, and the bar had a nice slant, but it was below the Choptank and a far run.

“You know that little half-moon swash, runs just outside of Cook Point?” Clay said.

Byron thought. “Yeah. Kinda shallow, ain't it?”

“Well, the bar runs out a bit, that's true. But there used to be a nice, gradual drop, well before the channel. And there's no harbor close around it at all. I thought we might check it out and see if there are any pots around.”

Byron went in the cabin, found the chart, and brought it out.

“Chart says, though, that it drops quick from about four to twenty plus.”

“Chart was wrong last time I was here too. There was a sweet little
shelf, runs southeast about ten to twelve. If we're right, it should be perfect.”

Byron dragged on his cigarette, then exhaled. He threw the cigarette overboard, climbed onto the rail, and started untying the ropes that lashed some of the pots to the canopy.

Cook Point jutted northward off the Dorchester peninsula and extended to the place where the southern flood of the Choptank met the Bay. The land lay low and marshy, and as they cut across the channel, heading toward the southern shore and then around the point, Clay could see the spartina spreading south across the landscape, gleaming under the rising sun. He checked the depth gauge and watched as the numbers gave the distance between his keel, which sat about three feet under the surface, and the river bottom. As the numbers dropped from the twenties to fifteen to twelve, he slowed the
Miss Sarah
to a crawl. The numbers read ten feet, nine, and then ten again.

“We're on the slope now,” he barked to Byron. “Let me coast her length.”

Byron pulled a pot down from above and unwound the line that was wrapped around it and attached to the orange-and-yellow cork buoy. “Looks right lonesome,” he remarked.

Clay continued southeast, studying his depth. Satisfied, he reversed the engine for a moment and then put it into neutral. He looked around him, studying the near shore. He turned and took his bearings off Cook Point and then across the mouth of the wide Choptank, marking Blackwalnut Point.

“Okay then. Tide's running and should take us back up the shelf nice for a while. Let's work fast before the slack.”

Byron unwound the line of each pot, clearing any tangles, and handed the pot to Clay, who dipped into the barrel of alewives and stuffed the bait cylinder with the fish, thawing in salt. He closed the bait latch, made from a square of sheet metal he had cut, pulled tight by an elastic hook, and heaved the pot overboard,
watching the attached buoy angle off the tide, judging its depth from the slack, and noting the buoy's location in his head. With the drift of the boat, each pot was about thirty yards from the next. They worked silently together, and Clay was pleased with the feel of the bait in his hands and the smell of the alewives and the water, with the notion of the pots' being made and placed right, and with working the river together with Byron this way. He felt the wire of each pot he had made and saw the crabs it would catch and how it would look filled with fat jimmies, and imagined a boat full of bushel baskets stuffed with crabs. They worked slowly but hard and his sweat soaked his shirt. After a while Clay looked back at the string of buoys extending nearly parallel with the shoreline. About fifty pots were overboard, he figured, laid out true along the shoal, where the crabs would crawl up from the channel foraging for food. He threw another pot overboard and watched as the line played out.

“Getting too shallow,” he said. “Let's move.”

Clay started the engine, and they worked farther north, back toward the point, where they baited and dropped another fifty or so pots. After that they took a breather and Clay brought out the beef sandwiches. Byron was hungry and ate with Clay. Past noon, with the sun passing over to the western half of the Bay and a light breeze rippling the Choptank, they finished setting out the last of their pots, along the bar in the neck under Cook Point, in twelve feet of water, cool and emerald green under the slanting sun.

Clay gave Byron the tiller for the journey home and sat down on the cot with the chart and marked the areas of his first three lays. He looked behind him. Byron sat on the engine cover, guiding the tiller post with his foot, a cigarette in his hand, the bottle of whiskey nestled in the crook of his arm. Beyond him the river ran to the low shoreline, the marsh perfect in its solitude. Clay's father had loved the marsh. The salty spartina, half river, half land. Its isolation and emptiness had pleased him. Clay studied it and saw a
group of buffleheads flying above its surface. They flew low across the flats, nearly brushing the tips of the marsh spikes, the marsh a dance of light and shadow, rippling like music. He forced himself to turn back to the chart. As he studied it, thinking of the marsh and then of the crabs already moving toward his pots, the
Miss Sarah
traveled across the Choptank, steadily, with the breeze off her stern, into the Tred Avon, heading home.

Clay was dozing when Byron rounded the port channel buoy off Bellevue too fast, just as the
Miss Sarah
hit the wake of a large cabin cruiser. As the boat rocked with the wake, Clay opened his eyes. Byron slowed her, which caught the bateau in its own backwash, but it didn't really faze her. The wake passed. She was sturdy, Clay thought, and fast for a workboat. And then for some reason he thought of his mother, and that she would have been pleased. Pappy had always had one of his boats named for her. There was a dredger he had named the
Sarah W,
and before that, a fishing boat Pappy had christened
Sassy,
which he used to call her sometimes. Clay had thought it was because Sarah would now and then throw Pappy's sayings right back at him. “Nothing ever happens to a river man as long as he stays on the river, where he belongs,” she liked to echo him. To his mother it had been inconceivable that Pappy could love another woman, let alone betray himself and his family so. When he did leave her, the shock never left her face, never for a day until she died, never left her eyes, which grew more and more hollow, never left her heart, never left her lips. Only once did she speak to Clay about it, and then not in terms of herself so much, but rather to ensure that Clay knew a wrong had been done, but that the wrong had not been directed at him or in any way caused by him or because of him, as if she wanted to help Clay leave an open place in his heart for his father, a hope, though she herself had abandoned all hope. He had tried to turn her back to her old self, to love her enough,
but she hadn't let him find the way to do that. Later he had stopped thinking about it so much. It was no help thinking about it. But he was pleased with the bateau, and with her name on it. Pleased with everything about it. Pappy, when he first had this boat built, had named it
Seahatch.
Afterwards, he had always referred to it as the bateau because it was the smallest boat in his fleet. Some said it was bad luck to change a boat's name. But Clay didn't think so. Or didn't care. He was pleased that the first boat in the fleet he would build was named for his mother. Now he was ready to get on with catching crabs and building something from the river.

That night he was supposed to eat with Bertha at her house. She had called him a number of times, and finally he had promised. He was late and drove fast down Oxford Road.

Once in town, Clay slowed his station wagon to a crawl. His car window was down. Turning along the Strand, he drove very slowly and listened to the lapping of the river on the stone bulkhead and the beach. Looking across the Tred Avon toward Pecks Point, he could see the lights that fixed the end of the wharf. Out in the channel were the markers, the five-second red and, farther out, the three-second green, isolated colored beacons blinking. In front of Bertha's he pulled over to the side and stopped the car. He got out and approached the house. The brass handle on the door to the screened porch was cool to the touch. He opened the door and went inside the porch. He saw her shadow cross the light under the front door as she came to open it. He had a vague longing, almost like a pain, and wished he were somewhere else, wished he were about to see a woman for a different purpose.

He spent a quiet evening with her, trying not to think of his mother.

The next morning Clay was up early. He looked out the window in the dark of the morning to see if Byron's pickup was there. It had not been when Clay got home from Bertha's. The shadow of the pickup was visible, and next to it was another car, just a shape, really. Clay was relieved. He got dressed and went into the kitchen, where Byron was sitting, already dressed and drinking coffee with whiskey chasers. An ashtray with a dozen or so butts sat on the table in front of him.

“Hey, Cap,” Byron volunteered.

“Morning.”

“Didn't sleep much. Fact, not at all.” Byron tilted his head in the direction of the stairs, grinning. “Got Laura-Dez up there.”

Clay looked toward the stairs.

“Why aren't you up there with her?”

Byron smiled. “'Cause we got work to do, Cap. And we don't want to burn no daylight this mornin.'”

Clay didn't have to look at Byron. He knew Byron was riding a wave, and he knew he would have to crash sometime.

“C'mon,” Byron beckoned. “Let's have at it.”

They reached Pecks by five-thirty. By quarter to six they were on the river, which was like pitch in the moonless dark, and as they churned into the Choptank, they watched the first sluice of light invade the distant horizon. The breeze from the Bay was moderate. Sipping from the thermos of coffee and whiskey he had mixed, Byron worked the upright tiller post while Clay put on his oilskin apron, which had been Pappy's. Gradually the sky uncovered itself, and the silver water glimmered pastels. They changed places again, and Byron put on his smock and the thick rubber gloves he would use to cull the crabs. They reached their first buoy at about half past six, and when Clay got close enough, he grabbed the six-foot gaff off the washboard. In one motion he hooked the buoy and brought it over the hydraulic puller, setting the line in the brass wheels of the puller, which brought the pot up from the river bottom
and alongside, where he set it on the rail. The pot was streaming with eelgrass and mud and inside were at least eighteen or twenty medium- and large-size Chesapeake Bay blue crabs. Byron let out a whoop at their first catch, and they both took a moment to look at the crabs scrambling about in the upper section of the trap.

“Right fair, for spring,” Byron commented. “Right fair catch on the first try.”

Clay opened the top side of the trap, which was fastened by a stretched piece of surgical tubing with hooks at each end, and emptied the crabs into the crab box. He stuffed a handful of menhaden into the bait cylinder, sent the pot back overboard, and started toward the next buoy. Byron started culling the crabs. The large males, or jimmies, went into one basket, and the mediums into another. The females, or sooks, and the recently molted crabs that hadn't filled out their new, larger shells, known as liver-bellies, went into a third.

“Big crab, yessir,” Byron said, tossing a large yellow-bellied jimmie into the basket. “Fatter'n a rich man.” He had a cull stick to measure the males, point to point if necessary. The minimum size for a keeper was five and a half inches. Anything smaller was thrown back. There were only two small crabs in this first bunch. He finished just as Clay was guiding the next buoy line into the pulley. Seconds later the trap came up with even more crabs, and Clay said, “Damn!” and then Byron said, “Damn! I think they like your pots there, Clay.”

Clay swung the trap onto the rail. “You mean
our
pots.”

“Well, they do appear to fancy 'em.”

Clay grinned. “It's these sweet alewives that Barker saved for us, probably.”

“Whatever works.”

“Yeah, Buck.”

Clay emptied the crabs out, rebaited, and reset the pot, moving
down the line, as Byron culled. They worked their first lay and then the others, and by midday two full bushels of large, fat blue crabs, four and a half bushels of mediums, and several bushels of sooks sat in the sun. Clay looked at the crabs in the boat, then studied their line of pots running southeast in the swash along the extended spit of land. His hands were swollen and sore and his arms ached. He looked at Byron, who was wobbling a little.

“You ain't tired, now, are you?”

Byron spit over the rail. “I don't know nothin' about tired.”

He kicked the bushel baskets. “But I'm done cullin' and I got no whiskey left to celebrate.”

Clay took a jab. “Just suck on your own breath for a while.”

Byron snorted and, trying to take off his apron, nearly fell and had to grab the rail for support. Then he tottered his way to the cabin.

“Maybe I'll hit the cot for a few minutes while you take us home.”

“Don't miss the payout, now.”

“Just hold my share, partner,” Byron said as he ducked into the cabin. “And wake me when the party starts.”

At the dock, Jed Sparks eyed the crabs. “Right handy catch,” he commented as Clay lifted the bushels up on the loading dock. “Still paying high, though catches like these'll move the price.” He counted out six twenties and two one-dollar bills and handed the money down to Clay. “Prices'll probably drop after Memorial Day, anyway.”