The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay (20 page)

Inside the Washington Street Pub the next evening, Clay sat drinking beer with Barker, Byron, and Mason. They sat and watched the old-time watermen passing by, who just shook their heads. “Never heard or seen anything like it” was the common refrain. “Gonna have to go beggin' to the government for help,” Clay overheard. “This here killed the watermen,” said another. “Kilt us all.” Clay knew the answer to his question, about the crabs, before he asked it. And the answer was in Barker's face if Clay needed proof.

“You hearin' anything on the radio?” Byron asked his father after a while. “We've been in the muck since daybreak.”

“News ain't good,” Mason reported. “Terrible, really. Experts're all sayin' Bay's goin' into shock.”

“Don't need no radio to know that,” Barker interrupted. “Don't need no experts neither.”

“More freshwater and pollution than she can handle, they're sayin'. Killed the salinity. And with all the runoff—the fertilizers and pesticides. Shit. I feel bad for you boys.” He raised his beer and took a drink. “But you're young. Good thing.”

“Bay's resilient,” Clay answered. “Always has been. It's early yet to tell, anyway.”

“Years.” Mason eyed him squinting. “That's what they said today on the TV. Maybe several.”

No one spoke for a while. They sat and drank and listened to similar talk coming from other booths in the pub.

“That's why I quit,” Mason finally said. “State Roads pays me regular. It ain't the water, but it's regular.” He finished his beer and raised his hand in the air until Missy, their waitress, saw him and waved for him to put it down.

“Your daddy was a crabber,” Barker said. “Just like mine. Like Clay's.”

“An oysterman too,” Mason added. “And fisherman.” He seemed to reflect for a moment. “Hell, he used to talk about the shad runs,” Mason went on. “More fish than you could ever imagine, Daddy said. Claimed you could walk on 'em, they were so thick in the water. Walk on 'em.” He chuckled. “Now, when's the last time you even heard of any shad being caught up here. Not in any quantity, noways.”

He looked around for effect.

“He did some ocean trawlin' too. Off the Labrador coast.” Mason paused, studying first Clay and then Byron. “Crabbin's done for this year, son. Crabs'll either die or migrate. They need the salt and cleaner water. Salt mix's changed for this year. That's what they're sayin' on the news. I'm sorry to say it to you. I know it's true, though. I figure you know it too.” He crossed his arms in front of him. No one spoke for a while. Then he continued. “It's
the waterman's way. My daddy, he'd come home and tell me over and over. It was one thing or another. This calamity or that. ‘Get away,' he'd say. ‘You get away, young Mase. Far from the shore. Get yerself somewheres else and get the salt outta your veins and give yerself a chance. Go where no sea runs,' he'd say.” Mason shook his head. “‘Where no sea runs and a chance for a decent life.' Course he never meant a lick of it. He was as salty as they come.”

Missy came over with a round of beers, which she set on the table. She picked up the empties. “I'm sorry, boys,” she said. “Damn shame, it is. Damn shame.” Barker patted her arm as she left.

“And then I ended up on the ocean,” Mason finished. “In the war. On the ocean in the night.”

Byron raised his glass to toast, trying to change the subject. “To all our daddies,” he offered.

They all nodded approval and clinked their bottles together and then drank together.

“I can't imagine,” Barker said then, quietly staring at the table.

“What?”

“Livin' landlocked. Not knowin' the water.” He looked up. “Can you, Clay?”

Clay sat silent for a while. “What are you going to do?” He answered Barker with a question.

Barker drummed his fingers on the table. “I'll try and sell my alewives in Virginia. Or maybe North Carolina. I suspect the lower Bay may be all right. Up here, though . . .” He shook his head. “But then, I don't know. Maybe I'll ask Mase here for work.”

“We like to hire vets,” Mason stated. He looked at Byron.

Byron reached in his pocket and found a cigarette. He lit it slowly and carefully. “Aw, Mase,” he said exhaling. “Me and Clay got to figure this one out first.” He took another drag. “Don't we, Clay?”

Clay took a breath. “We lost half of what we built already.” He
looked around at the faces in the bar, faces chiseled dry and hard by the salt and wind. Most looked old for their age. He saw Byron watching him, trying to read his thoughts. Thoughts of a roiling Bay. Of torn, drifting pots below. Of sunken treasure ships. Clay's thoughts whirled with these and other images of the days past and ahead, but one thought remained constant: he had no intention of giving up. That was the thought he figured Byron was looking for and would see on his face and in his eyes.

Over the following days the swollen rivers crested their banks and the Bay water was opaque with mud and debris and reportedly unsafe for boaters as far south as the Virginia line. Marine wreckage was everywhere. Clay and Byron checked on the bateau every day, and every day she rode her lines steady. They recharged the battery and tested the engine, which started after a prime. The rest of the time they spent working at Pecks, helping out with the cleanup and salvage. Jed Sparks promised them good wages once insurance payments started coming in, but Clay figured he'd have been there anyway. He was needed there, and there was nowhere else to go. He knew he had lost half his pots, but he still wanted to go look for them. “But what good are pots,” Byron kept reminding him. “What good are pots, when there ain't gonna be no crabs? Not this year, anyway.”

During this time, Clay neither saw nor heard from Brigman. The
Mood Indigo,
seemingly unattended, road smartly up the cove, swinging on its borrowed mooring.

A week later, Clay ventured out into the Tred Avon and from the Tred Avon to the Choptank. The water was still high and the color of compost. Uprooted trees, sides of houses, wooden trailer frames, and creosote-covered pilings all floated in the muck trailing along the river surface. Large, dark areas of reddish foam stretched along the current. A wooden mast floated by, its torn sail tangled around it like a shroud. He rode slowly out in the direction
of Cook Point, watching for underwater debris. The marsh grass to the south had disappeared underwater. Familiar landmarks were hidden under the tide. There was no sight of any of his crab pots. The sky was stained brown. The reports were coming in. The crabs were gone.

D
awn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea.

—D
YLAN
T
HOMAS

It was Jed Sparks who reinforced the idea. The thought had been planted in the Washington Street Pub that night after the hurricane. During the weeks that followed, Clay had been turning it over in his mind. He had discussed it with Barker and then with Byron. Tentatively, carefully. To salvage some of the season, to try to save what he had left—what other choice was there, except to give up? It made sense. Go south. To Virginia. Work the southern flute of the Bay, the mouth of the Rappahannock or lower. South, farther below the salt line, where the salinity was said to be still potent enough and the water, filtered by the Atlantic's tides, still clean and alive with crabs. Ocean crabs were never as sweet, but the prices would be high. Work the crabs through the season, till October, maybe, and build his stash of pots back up. Then come north for the oyster. If the oyster had survived.

Money was the biggest problem. Or the lack of it. The insurance payments that the bank had been expecting had been delayed, so it had paid only minimum wage for the salvage work. And there were also concerns about intruding on the territory of the Virginia
crabbers, though the Bay was wide down there. And then where exactly to go. How to start. And during this time, Clay found himself undecided, afflicted with hesitation, unlike himself, ignoring the obvious way to begin, until Byron called him into the kitchen one morning and handed him the phone. It was Matty. Byron had called to tell Matty that he and Clay needed to come down and check things out. Matty was insistent. Of course they should come, he told Clay. Immediately. He and Kate wanted to see him. They had just one guest bedroom, but one of them could sleep on the couch. “Plus . . .” Matty hesitated, his voice faltering. “It's a secret. You'll have to keep this quiet until graduation next spring . . .”

“What?” Clay asked.

“We got engaged. Kate and I.” Matty halted. Clay could hear him breathing. Or was it his own breath, or his own pulse, that seemed to mark the space and silence between them? “Last weekend,” Matty finally continued. “Her parents can't know until we finish school. After that, we'll announce it. We'll have a big party.”

Clay reached out for a chair and sat, looking away from Byron. He knew his own face was a betrayal.

“It was kind of sudden,” Matty went on. “We'd fought. We were both feeling—I don't know—like we needed to. Like it was time. We went to Williamsburg. I bought her a ring. It was a good way to make up.”

Clay sat and listened as Matty described more of the details. Matty's tone became more natural and animated as he went on. Byron whispered, “What? What is it?” Clay struggled for composure. He made the necessary effort to talk, to ask Matty the right questions, to congratulate him. He managed to get these questions out and repeated his congratulations several times before finally handing the phone back to Byron, who knew what had happened from hearing Clay but received the news as though with surprise, congratulating Matty in his turn. Byron finished the call by making the arrangements for their visit. Clay heard him confirm and
then promise that they would drive the truck down the next week for a look.

Later, as the news settled in, as Byron shared his whiskey, a vague sense of relief seeped into Clay's mind. He decided, that night, to raise a few extra glasses. For his friends, he told himself. He closed the pub down. Byron, for a change, had to help him get home.

It was the following Wednesday when Clay and Byron climbed into the truck. Clay had been anxious about the trip, raising objections, but Byron was set and unrelenting. Only after finding the highway, with the wind whirring through the open windows, did Clay begin to relax. Byron started telling navy jokes and Clay appreciated his friend beside him. He also appreciated having a direction, the delusion of travel as progress.

They started after lunch and drove Route 50 down the Eastern Shore, across the Choptank River and through Cambridge, slanting down the coast across the Nanticoke. At the Highway Inn, where Byron had once been in a fight, they stopped and Byron bought a six-pack of malt liquor. They slid around Salisbury, touching the Wicomico, down Route 13, through Princess Anne, over the Pocomoke River and through Pocomoke City, and down into the narrow marshy neck of Virginia's eastern peninsula. Clay studied the flat, unending fields and glittering marsh beyond and took in the vistas of the flatlands around him, land that you could see about you and believe in, and this too steadied him. As they passed these places, he found himself reciting the names that had been given to the land and the waters: Hooper Neck, Hurlock, Galestown, Shad Point, Bivalve, Onancock, Wachapreague, Honga River, Terrapin Sand Spit, Assawoman Inlet, Hog Island Bay, and on and on, down toward Cape Charles and the mouth of the Chesapeake. It was a fine summer afternoon, the water sparkling, and it was still light when they crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge
Tunnel, some seventeen miles long. As they glided along the narrow ramp, to their right, northward, lay the great Bay, the basin for hundreds of rivers, inlets, and tributaries, cutting through four states, mixing the seas with the continental freshwater flows. To the south, to their left, lay the Atlantic, running a tide from the shores of Africa, Europe, the Arctic, carrying its store of life and history. Crossing here, over this mix of the world's currents, Clay felt a flush of gratitude, almost as though he were on the water again.

They got lost in Hampton because Byron wanted more beer, and Clay decided to find and inspect the old crab docks at the end of King Street, where the winter dredgers laid up. Winding through a maze of urban sprawl, they passed a series of commercial shipbuilding yards, the gantry cranes standing like giant sentinels above the clamor of iron and industry. Clay had Byron drive over the James River Bridge and back so he could look at the freighters and cargo ships lined up in the mouth of the harbor. Towering smokestacks billowed black smoke over Portsmouth and Newport News; tankers, pulled and pushed by tugs, worked in close to the loading docks; horns blasted the air; blocks of dilapidated housing, water towers, and gray storage tanks ran away in the distance. Following their instincts, the two of them wound their way east until they eventually found Queen Street and then the old district in Hampton, and slowly cruised along King Street to its end and the city dock, studying the ocean crab dredgers, some sixty feet or more in length, although they appeared small and anachronistic in their surroundings. Byron stopped and turned off the engine.

“That's what they use for winter dredging,” Clay remarked.

“Uh-huh. They're taking all sooks.”

Clay spat out the window.

“Cocksuckers.”

“I'd heard they were big workboats.”

“Livin' in all this shit these watermen musta lost their bearings.”

“There's a dredger on the dock.” Clay motioned at a contraption
that looked like a steel plow with teeth and a chain net, sitting on the wharf. “Scoops them right out of the mud.”

“Damn Orientals are buying all the sooks. They eat the eggs.”