The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay (14 page)

“Do you think we'll get some?” Kate asked. Her face was rapt with fascination. “I mean, for real?”

“Slight chance,” Byron said. He winked at Laura-Dez.

“Seining is almost a lost art,” Clay said. “And if you want, I'll take you later to the boatyard. Rusted-out dredgers, clam conveyors. Even the picking house is antique.”

“Cool,” Matty said. “Right on.”

“And I got another one for you, Matty,” Clay added. He paused a moment. “The Chesapeake Bay log canoes are racing tomorrow
and Saturday. Saturday, Byron and I are crewing on a friend's boat, and you're invited too. Nice canoe. She's called
Misty
.”

“Sailing a canoe?”

“No camera though. These things go over right easy.”

“Matty, my sailor boy.” Kate's inflection was maternal.

“Depending on the course they set, Kate might get a chance to see us pass close to the ferry dock, and she could take a picture or two if you want.”

“I don't know that much about sailing, though.”

“Don't need much know-how,” Byron said pouring three fingers of gin into his glass. He made a motion with his arms, like throwing a potato sack. “Just how to heave those springboards, climb out on 'em, and hang on. Don't get your fingers pinched, and move quick when the skipper yells.”

“The springboards are just loose planks,” Clay said. “Like two-by-twelves. About fourteen feet long. You've seen 'em. At least in pictures. The boat carries too much sail, so as she heels over, we throw these long boards—three of them—out the windward side, and the crew climbs out on them to balance the boat. Two men can climb out on each board.”

Matty looked bemused.

“Don't worry. I'll explain it all to you. And Barker Cull, our captain, 'll give us a few practice runs before the race starts.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But we all best pace ourselves,” Clay said, looking at Byron. “We got a full weekend ahead. Crabs tomorrow night at Bertha's. Saturday night, the dance.”

After the soup, Laura-Dez brought out a hot apple pie, and Byron uncovered a bottle of brandy. Clay had changed his mind and began explaining about the wharf and the bank and Hugo Brigman. “Best get all the photos you can now,” he said to Matty. “They might be all we'll have left.”

Kate saw how Clay was feeling about this and hooked her arm
into his, scooting up against him. “What would it take to buy it back?” she asked.

Clay rubbed his eyes. “I don't know, exactly. Hundreds of thousands, for sure.”

“Is it a good investment? I mean, without tearing it down?”

“I believe it could make money,” he said. “Probably make more, though, as real estate.”

“I wonder if we could talk to your father, Matty,” said Kate.

Matty yawned. “My old man is impossible. You know that. It's bottom line. All he ever cares about. Cap rates and such.”

“Well, maybe we could talk to him about it?”

“Sure.”

“That's not necessary,” Clay interjected.

“Well, would you?” she pressed.

Matty forced an interest. “For Clay, of course.”

They finished off the pie, and then Matty rose and took a glass of brandy and moved to the hammock. Byron and Laura-Dez got up and walked down the lane toward the creek and disappeared into the shadow. Kate helped Clay take some dishes in, then they sat back down at the picnic table. As the night enveloped them, Kate made him tell her about his boat and the pots and how he knew where to put them. With the settling darkness, the fireflies had begun to flash and the cicadas in the trees filled the silence. Clay and Kate, and Matty in the hammock, were there together, not speaking, just listening and watching the fireflies flash their mating lights, flickering, flickering. The night air was awash with the smell of the honeysuckle that grew wild against the house's southern side. Just as Byron had said it would, the moon of the first summer slough, round and golden, crept up over the trees in the east.

After a while Matty called for Kate. She whispered to Clay to excuse her, and went and lay with Matty in the hammock. Clay sat and watched the moon rise until it was well clear of the treetops. Then he got up and finished taking the dishes inside.

In the morning, Clay woke up first, before dawn. He dressed and went to the kitchen to put water on the stove for coffee. As before, he had given Matty and Kate his room and slept on the couch. In the kitchen the only light was from the gas fire pitching out from under the kettle. He sensed a presence behind him, and before he could turn, a slender arm encircled his waist, and Kate was behind and up against him. Her soft body was against his back, and her breath upon his neck. He turned slowly. She looked up at him and put her hand on his cheek.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that I think what you're doing here is . . .” She paused as though searching for a word. “Is perfect.” She reached up on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek and on the corner of his lips. “I'll get Matty up,” she said, and she turned and walked out through the door.

The four of them headed out in Byron's pickup. At Mason's, Byron and Clay tried to be as quiet as possible as they retrieved the seine from the garage. They got it into the back of the pickup, and Byron went in the house and found some old beat-up tennis shoes of Blackie's for Kate to wear and some torn Top-Siders for Matty.

Clay suggested they try the bar off Bruff's Island, so they rode down the back roads through Tunis Mills to the Wye River. They parked the pickup near the Hooper farm, and the four walked across the flat fields of new corn.

Matty said he wanted to stay on the bar with his camera and take pictures, so he made himself a seat on an old oak stump, setting his tripod before him. Clay stepped into the cool water and helped Kate in and told her to stay close. He took one pole of the seine, and Byron the other, and they began backing away from each other, unraveling it as they went. The seine was about the size of a tennis net, with weights sewn along the bottom, cork sewn into the top, and each end attached to a pole. Once it was unraveled, Clay pointed to where he wanted to run the net, in three to four feet of water, along the edge of the bar. He and Kate swung
out into the river together, and she held the back waist of his jeans with both hands. As they walked, feeling the silty bottom, little eddies swirled around them. The water came up over Kate's stomach. Clay held one pole. Byron carried the other one. Once out where he wanted to be, Clay nodded to Byron and they began walking a parallel course, dragging the net along the bottom. It was easy at first, but the net got heavier as they dragged their catch with it. After they had worked it about forty paces, Clay swung his end in near to shore and worked the net up onto the shallows of the bar. Minnows flickered and danced along the net, and sunfish darted everywhere, escaping where the net went slack. In the bottom, though, Clay showed Kate the first softy, pushed over on its back trying to right itself, a medium-size female. He picked it up and handed it to Kate, careful not to let its claws flop, as they could tear.

She took it in her hand, touching it with her fingers. “It's so soft.”

Matty shouted, “Bravo!”

Clay pointed to another, a large male hidden under a clump of seaweed. He picked it up. Byron felt around in the matted grass and found another soft crab. He said, “Hard crabs'll outrun us, but the softies can't move well enough.”

Matty had been taking pictures the whole time and came over for close shots of the crab and net, snapping his camera's shutter. Clay pulled a small plastic garbage bag out of his pocket, and they carefully laid the soft crabs inside it and placed it on the sand.

“You ready to take the pole this time?” he said, handing it to Kate.

“Oh, I don't think so.”

“I'll be with you. Go on. Just let the net do the work.”

Together they held the pole and waded in for another drag. When the net got heavy Clay helped her more and they pulled it around to the shallows. They found two more softies. They ran the
seine upriver and in two drags got six more soft crabs. Each run offered up crabs.

“The slough is a fat one, ain't she,” Byron said. “Crabs'll be all over this river soon. And in our pots, I bet.”

“It does look rich,” Clay returned. “You want to try, Matty?” Clay asked.

He retreated to his tripod. “Oh, I think it's too early to get wet. I'm content here,” he answered. “Hell,
National Geographic
might put this on its cover.”

Clay took the pole from Byron, and he and Kate walked the shoreline south, working the bottom carefully and smoothly with the net. He had tied the bag of crabs to one of his belt loops, and it floated when he walked in the river. A white egret stood statue-still on a fallen tree and waited until they were almost on it before fanning out its wings and gliding away. They brought the net in twice more, and onshore he untied the bag from his belt. They had seventeen softies, enough for any breakfast feast, he concluded. “You stay there,” he said to Kate. He backed away from her, stretching the net taut, and then he slowly waded toward her, rolling the seine carefully around his pole, until he was upon her. Her hair was damp and ruby red against her flushed face, and her blouse soaked and transparent. She wore no bra. He looked at her, and she watched him, expressionless. Then she smoothed her blouse tight against her skin, looking down at how she had revealed herself. She looked back at him, tilting her head. “I guess I should have worn something underneath.”

Clay nodded.

“Sorry.”

“It's okay. I mean, I don't mind. Who would mind?”

She laughed. “I shouldn't go back like this.”

Clay took his shirt off. Then he helped her put it over her shoulders, and she buttoned it. She held his arm in hers as they walked upstream.

Back at the cottage they showered and changed while Laura-Dez sautéed the crabs whole, in butter. She had made pancakes and fried potatoes and they ate it all, wiping their plates clean.

Afterward Clay rode with Matty and Kate to the wharf. They walked in the high grass among the rusting hulks in the back field. Matty took photographs of the dredgers and machinery. An old skipjack with half a mast leaning crossways against the grain of the warehouse in the distance caught his fancy, and he went back to the car for his tripod and another lens. Clay watched him walk back. The summer grass was up to his thighs and blew in the morning breeze.

“Look,” Kate said as she grabbed Clay's arm and turned him around to face the river. “Is that a log canoe?”

Clay watched and saw
Flying Cloud
looking like a white bird tipping to leeward, with her kite raised, running the tide, her springboards fully manned.

They pointed for Matty, who watched with them as
Flying Cloud
sailed past the point and around into the cove and out of sight. Clay tried to explain the kind of balance and feel it took to hold a log canoe in the wind.

They spent a couple of hours at the wharf. For a while Clay and Kate tried to help Matty with his choice of photographs. He went from the boat graveyard to the picking shack, and then started shooting the soft crab molt tanks, full of peelers and sooks, and moved on to the workboats in their slips. After a while, Clay took Kate over and showed her his bateau. She wanted to go on board, so he helped her onto the rail, then took her by the waist and lifted her down into the cockpit. He showed her how the tiller was worked from the center cockpit, and opened the bait barrel for her to smell. She didn't make a face. She dipped her finger in the brine and held it up to her nose to smell and then touched her finger to her lips. Then she touched his nose with her finger, and then his lips with her finger.

“Strong,” he said.

“Yes. Salty. Like you.” She laughed.

“I smell like fish, huh?”

“No. Not fish.”

Clay looked at her. He shook his head.

“What?” she asked.

Clay wasn't sure how to respond.

She watched him for a few moments. Then she took his hand. “C'mon,” she said. “Let's find Matty and go on to that picnic that Byron invited us to. I'm getting hungry again. How can that be?”

“Must be the salt air.”

She cocked her head. “I suppose. Now, where was it? The picnic?”

“At the boathouse.”

“Yes.”

“The old Walker Boathouse.”

“Help me up?” And Clay took her hand as she stepped up on the rail and balanced herself. He pulled the bateau close to the dock, using the stern line, and she stepped off, and he followed.

They found Matty lying over one of the shed boxes, staring through his lens into the water, trying to capture a crab in the exhausting act of trying to disengage its limp, molluscan body from its hard outgrown shell. After some coaxing they finally got Matty to stop clicking his camera. They headed down to Bellevue and took the ferry across the Tred Avon to Oxford. Kate stood against the wooden rail, and Matty came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her. The river was a kaleidoscope, glistening like sapphire in the sun.

The regatta had begun earlier that morning, miles away across the Chesapeake, with a 10:00 gun starting the Annapolis-Oxford race. The starting line stretched across the mouth of the Severn River, adjacent to the Naval Academy. A hundred or so sloops would be racing. They would sail all day and finish in Oxford, between
the red spar off the yacht club and the yellow balloon the club had set out across the river. The leaders were probably somewhere off Poplar Island, Clay thought, still heading for Blackwalnut Point. He drove off the ferry, down Oxford Road, past Goose Neck, to a gatepost marking a dirt drive that led to the boathouse.

Clay got out of the car, and Matty and Kate followed him down toward the river's edge. They heard guitar music and singing as they walked through the trees and down the riverbank, and then saw the blankets and people, young women mostly, with a few children. They found Laura-Dez and joined her on a horse blanket. She pointed to the long dock that led out into the mouth of Island Creek fifty yards or so. At the end of the dock sat a two-story red boathouse supported by pilings, with a ladder that ran up its side to a slatted cedar-shake roof. Standing at the edge of the roof, the young men were lined up, high above the river. Shoulder to shoulder, they were all naked. The roof was a good forty feet above the surface of the river, a long way up, Clay thought. He saw Byron in the center of the group. There were at least ten in the line.