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RASS ISLAND
As soon as the snow melts, I will go to Rass and fetch my mother. At Crisfield I’ll board the ferry, climbing down into the cabin where the women always ride, but after forty minutes of sitting on the hard cabin bench, I’ll stand up to peer out of the high forward windows, straining for the first sight of my island.
The ferry will be almost there before I can see Rass, lying low as a terrapin back on the faded olive water of the Chesapeake. Suddenly, though, the steeple of the Methodist Church will leap from the Bay, dragging up a cluster of white board houses. And then, almost at once, we will be in the harbor, tying up beside Captain Billy’s unpainted two-story ferry house, which leans wearily against a long, low shed used for the captain’s crab shipping business. Next door, but standing primly aloof in a coat of fierce green paint, is Kellam’s General Store with the post office inside, and behind them, on a narrow spine of fast land, the houses and white picket fences of the village. There are only a few spindly trees. It is the excess of snowball bushes that lends a semblance of green to every yard.
The dock onto which I’ll step is part of a maze of docks. My eye could travel down the planking of any one of them and find at the end a shack erected by a waterman for storage and crab packing. If I arrive in late spring, the crab houses will be surrounded by slat floats that hold and protect peeler crabs in the water of the Bay until they have shed. Then the newly soft crabs will be packed in eelgrass and the boxes taken to Captain Billy’s for shipping to the mainland.
More important than the crab houses, however, are the boats, tied along the docks. Though each has a personality as distinctive as the waterman who owns it, they look deceptively alike—a small cabin toward the bow, washboards wide enough for a man to stand on running from the point of the bow to the stern. In the belly of the hull, fore and aft of the engine are a dozen or so barrels waiting for the next day’s catch, a spare crab pot or two, looking like a box made of chicken wire, and a few empty bait baskets. Near the winch that pulls the line of pots up from the floor of the Chesapeake is a large washtub. Into it each crab pot will be emptied and from it the legal-sized crabs—hard, peeler, and soft—will be culled from their smaller kin as well as from the blowfish, sea nettles, seaweed, shells, and garbage, all such unwelcome harvest as the Bay seems ever generous to offer up. On the stern, each boat bears its name. They are nearly all women’s names, usually the name of the waterman’s mother or grandmother, depending on how long the boat has been in the family.
The village, in which we Bradshaws lived for more than two hundred years, covers barely a third of our island’s length. The rest is salt water marsh. As a child I secretly welcomed the first warm day of spring by yanking off my shoes and standing waist deep in the cordgrass to feel the cool mud squish up between my toes. I chose the spot with care, for cordgrass alone is rough enough to rip the skin, and ours often concealed a bit of curling tin or shards of glass or crockery or jagged shells not yet worn smooth by the tides. In my nostrils, the faint hay smell of the grass mingled with that of the brackish water of the Bay, while the spring wind chilled the tips of my ears and raised goosebumps along my arms. Then I would shade my eyes from the sun and search far across the water hoping to see my father’s boat coming home.
I love Rass Island, although for much of my life, I did not think I did, and it is a pure sorrow to me that, once my mother leaves, there will be no one left there with the name of Bradshaw. But there were only the two of us, my sister, Caroline, and me, and neither of us could stay.
1
During the summer of 1941, every weekday morning at the top of the tide, McCall Purnell and I would board my skiff and go progging for crab. Call and I were right smart crabbers, and we could always come home with a little money as well as plenty of crab for supper. Call was a year older than I and would never have gone crabbing with a girl except that his father was dead, so he had no man to take him on board a regular crab boat. He was, as well, a boy who had matured slowly, and being fat and nearsighted, he was dismissed by most of the island boys.
Call and I made quite a pair. At thirteen I was tall and large boned, with delusions of beauty and romance. He, at fourteen, was pudgy, bespectacled, and totally unsentimental.
“Call,” I would say, watching dawn break crimson over the Chesapeake Bay, “I hope I have a sky like this the day I get married.”
“Who would marry you?” Call would ask, not meanly, just facing facts.
“Oh,” I said one day, “I haven’t met him yet.”
“Then you ain’t likely to. This is a right small island.”
“It won’t be an islander.”
“Mr. Rice has him a girl friend in Baltimore.”
I sighed. All the girls on Rass Island were half in love with Mr. Rice, one of our two high school teachers. He was the only relatively unattached man most of us had ever known. But Mr. Rice had let it get around that his heart was given to a lady from Baltimore.
“Do you suppose,” I asked, as I poled the skiff, the focus of my romantic musings shifting from my own wedding day to Mr. Rice’s, “do you suppose her parents oppose the marriage?”
“Why should they care?” Call, standing on the port washboard, had sighted the head of what seemed to be a large sea terrapin and was fixing on it a fierce concentration.
I shifted the pole to starboard. We could get a pretty little price for a terrapin of that size. The terrapin sensed the change in our direction and dove straight through the eelgrass into the bottom mud, but Call had the net waiting, so that wh
en the old bull hit his hiding place, he was yanked to the surface and deposited into a waiting pail. Call grunted with satisfaction. We might make as much as fifty cents on that one catch, ten times the price of a soft blue crab.
“Maybe she’s got some mysterious illness and doesn’t want to be a burden to him.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Rice’s finance.” I had picked up the word, but not the pronunciation from my reading. It was not in the spoken vocabulary of most islanders.
“His what?”
“The woman he’s engaged to marry, stupid.”
“How come you think she’s sick?”
“Something is delaying the consumption of their union.”
Call jerked his head around to give me one of his looks, but the washboards of a skiff are a precarious perch at best, so he didn’t stare long enough to waste time or risk a dunking. He left me to what he presumed to be my looniness and gave his attention to the eelgrass. We were a good team on the water. I could pole a skiff quickly and quietly, and nearsighted as he was he could spy a crab by just a tip of the claw through grass and muck. He rarely missed one, and he knew I wouldn’t jerk or swerve at the wrong moment. I’m sure that’s why he stuck with me. I stuck with him not only because we could work well together, but because our teamwork was so automatic that I was free to indulge my romantic fantasies at the same time. That this part of my nature was wasted on Call didn’t matter. He didn’t have any friends but me, so he wasn’t likely to repeat what I said to someone who might snicker. Call himself never laughed.
I thought of it as a defect in his character that I must try to correct, so I told him jokes. “Do you know why radio announcers have tiny hands?”
“Huh?”
“Wee paws for station identification,” I would whoop.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t you get it, Call? Wee paws. Wee Paws.” I let go the pole to shake my right hand at him. “You know, little hands—paws.”
