Authors: Rita Mae Brown
I did as I was told. Leroy kept quiet, too. The biggest surprise was neither sister spoke to the other until we reached the restaurant, a weathered clapboard shack with the ubiquitous white sign, a big red crab on front of it, swinging from a yardarm. Wooden picnic tables were neatly lined up outside under awnings and most were filled, as was the crushed shell parking lot.
Once she parked, Louise got out of the car, opened the trunk, pulled out her smaller towel, neatly folded it, and put it on the driver's seat. She then retrieved a little carry bag.
“I'm going to change. You can order for me.” Louise started for the bathrooms.
“Okay. I'll change when you get back.”
“What about me?” I asked because I hated sitting around in my bathing suit even when it was mostly dry.
“Let us go first then you can fix up.”
When the rest of us were sitting down at a table in the back, under some nice trees, Mother picked up the rock on the table and handed us menus that had been underneath. Both Leroy and I could read a menu if it was simple. If it contained French words we were lost. This one, however, a mimeographed sheet run off daily, stuck to the basics: crab, sand dabs, clams, oysters, fried chicken or hotdogs for those who didn't like seafood, and cole slaw, fries, and hushpuppies.
“Little crabs eat one another. When they grow up they eat dead people,” I helpfully informed Leroy.
“Do not.”
“Pluck the eyes right out of their head, then they eat the nose and take big bites out of their cheeks. They just love dead people. So tasty.”
“Nickel.” Mother said simply.
“It's true.”
“Is it true, Aunt Julia, is it?”
“Well, I wouldn't emphasize
people
but yes, crabs and lobsters are the Bay's cleanup crew.”
“So they do eat dead people?” His voice was hushed.
“Now, Leroy, how many dead people do you think are in the Chesapeake Bay?” She hoped to lighten his mood.
Again, I proved helpful. “Thousands. Millions. We don't know how many Indians drowned in there before we came.”
“Nickel, will you shut up?” Mother rarely used “shut up.” She turned to Leroy. “Don't listen to her. Your cousin never heard a war story or a shipwreck tale she didn't like. She has a penchant for violence.” She cut her eyes and I understood that
if I continued on my wayward conversational path the violence would be directed against myself.
Louise appeared, all smart in her halter top and pressed white shorts. Her soft yellow espadrilles matched her halter and she'd tied a navy blue bandanna around her hair.
“My turn.” Mother left us.
“Has the waitress come yet?”
“No, Ma'am,” I answered. “It's pretty busy.”
“The best places always are.” Louise studied the mimeographed sheet, the ink a soft purple. “I'm having softshell crabs, fries, and the world's biggest Co-cola. What about you all?”
“Hotdog.” Leroy said quietly.
“That's it?”
“He's afraid to eat a crab,” I volunteered.
“Why, Leroy?”
“I am not. I don't like crabs.”
“He knows they eat dead people.”
“Not the ones you'll be eating,” she replied glibly.
“How can you tell?” Leroy truly was fretting over the image of a crab plucking out eyes.
“I just can,” came the not very specific reply.
“I want a hotdog with mustard and a Co-cola.”
“Leroy, the Chesapeake Bay is famous for soft-shell crabs. Won't get another chance to eat them until next summer. The season starts the first full moon in May and ends in September. It's almost September.”
“Aunt Wheezie, I want a hotdog. Really.” He closed his mouth, which became a straight line.
“Chicken,” I whispered, to further torment him.
He turned to me but stopped as Louise said, “Chicken? Don't tell me you don't want to eat softshell crabs either? What about oysters? Last year two and a half million oysters were hauled up out of the Bay. But this is another good year. Come on. Oysters? Softshell crabs?”
“Well. . . .”
“Chicken. Nickel just loves chicken.” Leroy smiled.
“All right.” She resigned herself to our perversity.
The waitress came and Louise ordered, adding cole slaw, fries, and some rolls.
Mother returned. “All right, kid, your turn. Go back to the car and get your clothes out of the trunk.”
How glad I was to peel off my bathing suit, which I hated, dry off, and pull a clean T-shirt over my head, put on shorts, wipe my feet, and slip my feet into cotton socks and my PF Flyers, which weren't as bright as Leroy's.
The food, spilling over paper plates, covered the trestle table when I returned. Crabhousesâoutdoor beach shacksâusually used paper plates and disposable utensils to save time for the help. Saved money, too. The only thing they had to
wash were pots and pans, and they would scrub down on the wooden tables with a heavy scrapper and boiling water.
Mother and Louise were pulling apart their softshell crabs: all those legs, somehow it seemed obscene. Those dead little eyes on their stalks gave me the creeps but I wasn't about to let Leroy know.
When we were finished, the owner, a young handsome man, came by, “How was it, folks?”
“Delicious.” Louise smiled up.
His hair was wavy, bleached in the sun, and his tanned face contrasted with his white teeth.
Mother opined, “Those were the best soft-shell crabs I ever ate.”
He lingered, flirting with Motherâmen always did that. Then he left.
“How come men always talk to you?” Leroy carefully folded his napkin, unaware that such a question might hurt Louise's feelings.
“Oh, I pretend I'm interested in everything
they say. That's the secret to men.” She took Leroy's plate and napkin. “Actually, that's the secret to people. Listen.”
“I'm not listening to Nickel. She gets me in trouble.” He looked earnestly from Mother to Louise. “She told me if I took my pants off a big bird would swoop down and grab my pecker.”
“Nickel?” Mother reached for my plate, too.
“It would.”
“Why?” Louise also tidied up.
“Because the bird would think Leroy's part was a juicy worm.”
Louise frowned, “I don't know what gets into your head but you shouldn't talk like that. It's not proper.”
“Yes, Ma'am.”
Leroy gloated.
Mother stood up but she hadn't yet folded up our plates, and I snatched one of the big claws off the softshell crab carcass. With stealth I moved it up to Leroy's eye.
“Plucked a dead man's eye right out of his head.”
Leroy screamed, knocked my hand up so the claw sailed upward then landed in the crushed shells of the parking lot. “Did not.”
“Mmm, yummy.”
“You leave me alone.”
The two sisters, accustomed to children bouncing from tears to laughter to rage, were unfazed, and the exchange instantly died down when they stared at us.
Since neither Mother nor Louise had seen the claw fall I picked it up when Leroy headed back to the car. I wiped it off, wrapped it in a napkin that had been sitting on another table, and secreted it in my shorts pocket.
Back in the car, Louise slid onto the folded towel and turned on the car. “Juts, let's go back just for a minute and see if our castle is still standing.”
“Sure. As long as we're home by seven.”
“Unless there's an accident, we should be.” Louise backed out.
Small clapboard houses, most of them set back off the road, decreased in number as we headed back to the Point. Painted shutters adorned each building, testimony to the storms that would roar off the Bay.
People had begun to leave the beach as the afternoon light lengthened.
“Leroy, before we drive home I want you to change out of those trunks, wash off, and put your shorts on. All right?”
“Yes, Ma'am. After we come back from the sand castle.”
The castle stood, not even a pennant removed.
“How about that?” Mother touched Leroy's hand.
“This is our best one.”
“You say that every year.” Mother slipped her arm through Louise's.
“Funny. I wonder how many sand castles
we've built since we were kids? It goes so fast, Juts, so fast.”
“I know.”
“Scares me.”
“Me, too.”
They stood there as Leroy knelt down to study the drawbridge.
“You can raise and lower it but you have to be careful. Have to use your hand because I didn't build a winch,” Mother told him.
I knelt down beside him as he slid his fingernails under the top of the drawbridge, which he then lowered.
Inside the castle, a small crab had dug in the sand. We hadn't noticed but then she wasn't advertising her presence. The lowered drawbridge roused her and she dashed sideways across it and right over Leroy's hand. He screamed and fell back and the small crab fell back with him darting into the wide leg of his bathing trunks.
“Oww,” Leroy hollered, tears in his eyes.
I paid him no mind figuring he was being a big baby because he had fallen. How can he hurt himself in the sand?
Then he really started to scream.
Mother and Louise came over to lift him up but he grabbed his trunks.
Mother knelt down, Leroy, what's wrong?”
“Oww.”
Louise, kneeling down now, too, pulled out his waistband. “Julia, the crab's latched onto him.”
The two quickly pulled off his trunks. Sure enough, the crab held his part in her claw, probably as upset as Leroy but not about to release her grip.
Mother grabbed the crab from behind, thumb on belly, forefinger on top of her yellowish shell with its blue edges. “Sis, see if you can pry open the claw.”
Louise reached for the claw but the crab waved its other one menacingly. “Nickel, grab a pennant off the sandcastle. Now!”
I did, handing her the popsicle stick with the colored paper on the end. She put it in front of the crab, who grabbed it.
“You want me to do it and you hold the crab?” Mother asked Louise.
“No, I think I can do it.”
Leroy cried and sobbed so hard he couldn't even scream anymore.
Louise put her fingers on both sides of the claw. “Damn. Nickel get another pennant.”
I did.
Perspiration gleamed on her forehead.
“Honey, be ready to put the popsicle stick into the claw the minute she gets it off,” Mother commanded.
Finally, Louise pried open the claw and before the crab could pinch her I stuck the popsicle stick into the claw. The little crustacean snapped at the stick just as Mother threw her on the sand, where she ran sideways with two popsicle sticks.
It would have been funny if Leroy hadn't been in so much pain.
“Honey, honey, move your hands.” Louise had gently tried to move his hand away from his penis the second the crab had been pulled off.
“No.”
“Leroy, do as you're told.” Louise's voice sharpened. “This isn't something to fool around with.”
He removed his hands, doubled up now.
Mother said, “Thank God she didn't cut through him, but she took a slice.”
“He'll swell up and that's going to hurt, too. Juts, let's carry him back to the car and we'll find some ice.”
“I can walk,” he cried, but he could hardly stand when they got him up. “Give me my trunks.”
“All right. All right.” Louise handed him his trunks and he fell over putting one leg in.
“I'll run to the shower and wet a towel. We can wipe him off,” I volunteered.
“Hurry.” Mother leaned down to lift Leroy up.
“I'll walk.”
He did, painfully, as Louise held his hand.
I was already at the pump when they drove up. Leroy was helped out of the car by Mother. She wiped off his part, then rewet the towel, wiping the sand off him very quickly.
Back in the car in no time, Louise found a filling station with an ice machine sitting outside. She bought a bag of ice, put it in her bucket, and raced back to the car.
“Nickel, get a small towel out of the trunk.”
I did, and the sisters put the towel under him, then wrapped ice cubes in another towel I handed them.
“You have to hold this on you even if the cold sort of makes you throb after a while,” Louise ordered him. “When the ice melts have Nickel put more in the towel. Do like I tell you and you'll be all right.”
He nodded as Mother handed him the towel. “Hold it right over where the crab grabbed you.”
Mother checked her watch as they drove away. “We won't get back in time to take him to the doctor.”
“I hope he doesn't need one but if it doesn't look good I'll ask Doc Ferguson to come over. You don't want to take chances with something like that.”
“Those claws are sharp. That damned little crab could have nipped a ball right off if she'd hit him right,” Mother stated offhandedly.
“Really?” The lurid image compelled me.
“Are you all right, Leroy?” Mother ignored me.
“It hurts.”
“It's going to hurt for a while.” Mother turned to Louise. “We could give him half an aspirin.”
“Mmm, not yet. I don't like giving stuff like that to kids.”
“We could give him children's aspirin.”
“I'd have to go all the way into Leonardtown and that would cost us an hour.” Louise's hands gripped the steering wheel at ten o'clock and four o'clock. “It's more important to get home.”
“You're right.” Mother uttered the magic words. A bit later she saidâvoice low but I was straining to listenâ“I don't think any veins are cut. There's some blood but I don't think a vein was hit. There'd be more blood.”
“Let's hope.”
“They get crooked after an injury.”
“I know. Marie said after Bill broke his pelvis, his part never straightened out. Now why is that? Why would breaking his pelvis affect his part?” Louise was recalling a conversation with one of her pals.