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“Well, he went to hell for it.”
“Pulling out perfectly good teeth—” he mumbled, pinching his own with the fingers of his left hand.
“Then the p-sychiatrist—”
“The what?”
I was an avid reader of Time magazine, which, besides the day-old Baltimore Sun, was our porthole on the world in those days, so although psychiatry was not yet a popular pastime, I was quite aware of the word, if not the fact that the p was silent. Time was probably the source of the joke I was laboring to recount.
“A p-sychiatrist is a doctor that works with people who are crazy.”
“Why would you try to do anything with people who’re crazy?”
“To get them well. To make their minds better. Good heavens.” We paused to net a huge male crab, a true number one Jimmy, swimming doubled over a she-crab. He was taking her to the thick eelgrass, where she would shed for the last time and become a grown-up lady crab—a sook. When she was soft, there would be a proper crab wedding, of course, with the groom staying around to watch out for his bride until her shell was hard once more, and she could protect herself and her load of eggs on her own.
“Sorry, Mr. Jimmy,” I said, “no wedding bells for you.”
Now this old Jimmy didn’t much like being deprived of his sweetheart, but Call pinched him from behind and threw each of them in a separate bucket. She was a rank peeler—that is, it wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours before she shed. Our bucket for rank peelers was almost full. It was a good day on the water.
“Well, like I was saying, this p-sychiatrist comes up to Peter, and Peter looks him up in the book of judgment and finds out he’s been mean to his wife and kids and tells him to go to hell.”
“What?”
I ignored him. Otherwise I’d never get the story finished. “So the p-sychiatrist starts to leave, and then Peter says all of a sudden: ‘Hey! Did you say you were a p-sychiatrist?’ And the guy says, ‘Yes, I did.’” I was talking so fast now, I was almost out of breath. “And Peter says, ‘I think we can use you around here after all. You see, we got this problem. God thinks he’s Franklin D. Roosevelt.’”
“God what?”
“You know when people are crazy they think they’re somebody important—like Napoleon or something.”
“But, Wheeze, God is important.”
“It’s a joke, Call.”
“How can it be a joke? There ain’t neither funny about it.” He had broken into a waterman’s emphatic negative.
“Call, it’s funny because Franklin D. Roosevelt has got too big for his britches. Like he’s better than God or something.”
“But that’s not what you said. You said—”
“I know what I said. But you gotta understand politics.”
“Well, what kinda joke is that? Fiddle.” Call’s cuss words were taught to him by his sainted grandmother and tended to be as quaint as the clothes she made for him.
When the sun was high and our stomachs empty, Call stepped off the washboards into the boat. I shipped the pole and moved up with him to the forward thwart, where we put the oars into the locks and rowed the boat out of the eelgrass into deeper water and around to the harbor.
Captain Billy’s son Otis ran the crab shipping part of his father’s business, while his father and two brothers ran the ferry. We sold our soft crabs, peelers, and the terrapin to Otis, then split the money and the hard crabs. Call ran home to dinner, and I rowed back around the island as far as the South Gut, where I traded oars for the pole and poled the rest of the way home. The South Gut w
as a little ditch of water, one of many that crisscrossed Rass, and a natural garbage dump. The summer before, Call and I had cleaned it out (it had been clogged with rusting cans and crab pots, even old mattress springs) so I could pole the skiff through it all the way to my own backyard. Rass might be short on trees, but there was a loblolly pine sapling and a fig tree that my mother had planted on our side of the gut, as well as an orphan cedar on the other. I hitched my skiff to the pine and started at a trot for the back porch, a bucket of hard crabs in one hand and a fistful of money in the other.
My grandmother caught me before I got to the door. “Louise Bradshaw! Don’t you go coming in the house dirty like that. Oh, my blessed, what a mess! Susan,” she called back in to my mother, “she’s full ruined every scrap of clothes she owns.”
Rather than argue, I put my crab bucket and money on the edge of the porch and stepped out of my overalls. Underneath I had on my oldest cotton dress.
“Hang them overalls on the back line, now.”
I obeyed, pinning the straps securely to the clothesline. Immediately, the breeze took them straight out, as though Peter Pan had donned them to fly across our yard toward never-never land across the Bay.
I was humming with goodwill, “Come, Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace…” My grandmother was not going to get me today. I’d had a right smart haul.
