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It had been one of our longer conversations. Yet once again I was a member of a good team. We were averaging ten bushels of oysters a day. If it kept up, we’d have a record year. We did not compare ourselves to the skipjacks, the large sailboats with five or six crew members, that raked dredges across the bottom to harvest a heavy load of muck and trash and bottom spat along with oysters each time the mechanical winch cranked up a dredge. We tongers stood perched on the washboards of our tiny boats, and, just as our fathers and grandfathers had before us, used our fir-wood tongs, three or four times taller than our own bodies, to reach down gently to the oyster bed, feel the bottom until we came to a patch of market-sized oysters, and then closing the rakes over the catch, bringing it up to the culling board. Of course, we could not help but bring up some spat, as every oyster clings to its bed until the culling hammer forces a separation, but compared to the dredge, we left the precious bottom virtually undisturbed to provide a bed for the oysters that would be harvested by our children’s children.
At first, I was only a culler, but if we found a rich bed, I’d tong as well, and then when the culling board was loaded, I’d bring in my last tong full hand over hand, dump it on the board, and cull until I’d caught up with my father.
Oysters are not the mysterious creatures that blue crabs are. You can learn about them more quickly. In a few hours, I could measure a three-inch shell with my eyes. Below three inches they have to go back. A live oyster, a good one, when it hits the culling board has a tightly closed shell. You throw away the open ones. They’re dead already. I was a good oyster in those days. Not even the presence at Christmastime of a radiant, grown-up Caroline could get under my shell.
The water began to freeze in late February. I could see my culling like a trail behind us on the quickly forming ice patches. “Them slabs will grow together blessed quick,” my father said. And without further discussion, he turned the boat. We stopped only long enough to sell our scanty harvest to a buy boat along the way and then headed straight for Rass. The temperature was dropping fast. By morning we were frozen in tight.
There followed two weeks of impossible weather. My father made no attempt to take the Portia Sue out. The first day or so I was content simply to sleep away some of the accumulated exhaustion of the winter. But the day soon came when my mother, handing me a ten o’clock cup of coffee, was suggesting mildly that I might want to take in a few days of school since the bad weather was likely to hold out for some time.
Her kindly intended words lay on me like a wet sail. I tried to appear calm, but I was caught and suffocated by the idea of returning to school. Didn’t she realize that I was by now a hundred years older than anyone there, including Miss Hazel? I put my coffee down, sloshing it over the saucer onto the table. Coffee was rationed then and to waste it, inexcusable. I jumped up mumbling an apology to get a rag, but she was quicker and began sponging the brown liquid off the oilcloth before I could move, so I sat down again and let her do it.
“I worry about you, Louise,” she said, mopping carefully and not looking at me. “Your father and I are grateful, indeed. I hardly know what we’d have done without you. But—” She trailed off, reluctant, I suppose, to predict what might become of me if I went on in my present manner of life. I didn’t know whether to seem touched or annoyed. I was certainly irritated. If they were willing to accept the fruits of my life, they should at least spare me the burden of their guilt.
“I don’t want to go back to school,” I said evenly.
“But—”
“You can teach me here. You’re a teacher.”
“But you’re so lonely.”
“I’d be lonelier there. I’ve never belonged at that school.” I was becoming, much to my own displeasure, a bit heated as I spoke. “I hate them and they hate me.” There. I had overstated my case.
They had never cared enough about me one way or the other to hate me. I might have from time to time served as the butt of their laughter, but I had never achieved enough status to earn their hatred.
She straightened up, sighing, and went over to the sink to wash the coffee from her cloth. “I suppose I could,” she said finally. “Teach you, I mean, if Miss Hazel would lend me the books. Captain Wallace might be willing to do the math.”
“Can’t you do that?” Although I was no longer in love with the Captain, I did not wish to be thrown in such close company with him again—just the two of us. There was a residue of pain there.
“No,” she said. “If you want to be taught at home, I’d have to ask someone else to do the math. There is no one else with the—with the time.” She was always very careful not to seem to sneer at the rest of the islanders for their lack of education.
I’m not sure how my mother persuaded Miss Hazel to go along with the arrangement. The woman was very jealous of her position as the one high school teacher on Rass. Perhaps my mother argued that my irregular attendance would be disruptive, I don’t know, but she came home with the books, and we began our kitchen-table school.
As for my lessons with the Captain, my mother, sensitive to the least hint of inappropriate behavior, always went with me. She would sit and knit while we had our very proper lesson, no more poker or jokes, and afterward, she and the Captain would chat across my head. He was always eager for news of Caroline, who was prospering in Baltimore as the Prophet Jeremiah claimed only the wicked do. Her letters were few and hurried but filled with details of her conquests. In turn, the Captain would share news from Call, from whom he heard nearly as often as we heard from Caroline. Between letters there was a lot of “Did I remember to tell you…?” or “Did I read the part about…?” Censorship kept Call from revealing very much about where he was or what was going on, but in what he didn’t say there was enough to make my flesh crawl. The Captain, having been through naval battles before
, seemed to regard the whole thing with more interest than fear.
There were only a few more days of oystering left that winter of ’44. During the end of March and most of April, my father caught and salted alewives for crab bait, overhauled the motor on the Portia Sue, and converted it once more for crabbing. After he had caught and salted his crab bait, he did a little fishing to pass the days and even some house repairs. I crammed in as much schooling at home as possible, because once the crabs were moving, I’d be back on duty at the floats and in the crab house.
My mother heard the report of D day on our ancient radio and walked up to the crab house to tell me. She seemed more excited than I, to whom it signified only more war and killing. Besides, it was not the European war that concerned me.
16
Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in the fall of 1944 without the help of Rass, which went solidly Republican as usual. And yet, when he died the following April, we shared the shock of the nation. As I heard the news, I remembered instantly the day the war had begun, Caroline and I standing hand in hand before the radio. The chill that went through me was the same coldness of that winter day in 1941 when Caroline and I had begun to grow up.
Some days after Roosevelt’s death, I received the only letter I had ever gotten from Call. I was surprised to see how my hands trembled opening it, so much that I was obliged to turn my back on my mother and grandmother in the living room and go to the kitchen. It was very brief.
Dear Wheeze,
What do you think St. Peter said to Franklin D. Roosevelt? Get it?
Call
I got it, but as was usually the case with Call’s jokes, I didn’t find it the least bit funny.
On April 30, the day that Hitler committed suicide, I was permitted to take the exams for graduation. I passed, much to my satisfaction, with the highest grades recorded from Rass. Not that Miss Hazel told my mother this. It was the mainland school supervisor who had graded the exams who took time to write me a note of congratulations.
When the war in Europe ended eight days later, it was overshadowed by the news from Baltimore that Caroline had been accepted by the Juilliard School of Music in New York on a full scholarship.
