Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics) (40 page)

Mr Barbee returned the terrapin he had been holding to its stall, and she crawled off. He said that, just as in the wild state, captive cows begin laying eggs in the late spring, nesting in shallow holes which they dig with their hind claws in sand on the stall floors. A cow may lay twice in a season, depositing a total of twenty eggs. The eggs are about the size of pecans and are elastic; they do not crack under pressure. In the tidal marshes the eggs hatch in from two to three months; on the farm they are stolen from the nests and incubated. Just how this is done, Mr Barbee flatly declined to tell. ‘That’s the Barbee family secret,’ he said.

An old Negro came into the shed. ‘Looky, looky, here comes Cooky,’ he said. He was carrying a bucket. ‘Jesse Beach, my foreman,’ Mr Barbee said. ‘His bucket is full of crab legs and chopped-up oysters.’ The old man went down the catwalk, tossing a handful of food into each stall. I had noticed that the moment he entered the shed, the terrapin commenced crawling toward the front of their stalls. ‘They know Jesse,’ Mr Barbee said. The terrapin converged on the food, shouldering each other out of the way, just as puppies do. They ate greedily. ‘Diamondbacks make wonderful pets,’ Mr Barbee said. ‘I sell a lot of babies for that purpose. They are much more interesting than the dumb little turtles they sell in pet shops.’

We followed the old Negro out of the shed and Mr Barbee locked the door. ‘We’ll take a look at the fattening pen now,’ he said. We went to one of the shacks alongside the pavilion. It housed a crabmeat cannery, another of the thrifty Mr Barbee’s enterprises. Between the shack and the riverbank, half in the water and half in the shore mud, was a board corral. The shallow, muddy water in it seethed with forty-five hundred full-grown terrapin. ‘This is a terrapin heaven,’ Mr Barbee said. On one side of the corral was a cement walk, and when we stepped on it our shadows fell athwart the water and the terrapin sunning themselves on the surface promptly dived to the bottom. The tips of their inquisitive heads reappeared immediately and I could see hundreds of pairs of beady eyes staring up. ‘They’re fat and sassy,’ Mr Barbee said. ‘There’s a pipe leading from the shucking table in the crab cannery right into the pen, and the legs and discarded flesh from the shucked crabs drop right into the water. The terrapin hang around the spout of the pipe and gobble up everything that comes along. Sooner or later those terrapin down there will appear on the finest tables in the country. God knows they’re expensive, but that can’t be helped. I feed a terrapin nine years before I sell it, and when you think of all the crabmeat and good Georgia oysters those fellows have put away, you can understand why a little-bitty bowl of terrapin stew costs three dollars and a half’. While we stood there gazing down into a muddy pool containing more than $11,000 worth of sleek reptiles, the Negro foreman walked up toting an empty barrel and a basket of tree moss. After dousing some of the moss in the river, he made a bed with it on the bottom of the barrel. The barrel had air holes cut in it. Then he reached in the pool and grabbed six terrapin. He scrubbed them off with a stiff brush and placed them on the wet moss. Then he covered them with moss and placed six more on this layer, continuing the sandwiching process until the barrel contained three dozen. While he was putting the head on the barrel, Mrs Barbee came to a window of the pavilion and called, ‘Come to dinner.’

The table was laid on the back porch of the pavilion, overlooking the Skidaway, and there was a bottle of amontillado on it. Mr Barbee and I had a glass of it, and then Mrs Barbee brought out
three
bowls of terrapin stew, Southern style, so hot it was bubbling. The three of us sat down, and while we ate, Mrs Barbee gave me a list of the things in the stew. She said it contained the meat, hearts, and livers of two diamondbacks killed early that day, eight yolks of hard-boiled eggs that had been pounded up and passed through a sieve, a half pound of yellow country butter, two pints of thick cream, a little flour, a pinch of salt, a dash of nutmeg, and a glass and a half of amontillado. The meat came off the terrapins’ tiny bones with a touch of the spoon, and it tasted like delicate baby mushrooms. I had a second and a third helping. The day was clear and cool, and sitting there, drinking dry sherry and eating terrapin, I looked at the scarlet leaves on the sweet gums and swamp maples on the riverbank, and at the sandpipers running stiff-legged on the sand, and at the people sitting in the sun on the decks of the yachts anchored in the Skidaway, and I decided that I was about as happy as a human can be in this day and time. After the stew we had croquettes made of crabmeat and a salad of little Georgia shrimp. Then we had some Carolina whiting that had been pulled out of the Atlantic at the mouth of the Skidaway early that morning. With the sweet, tender whiting, we had butter beans and ears of late corn that were jerked off the stalk only a few minutes before they were dropped in the pot. We began eating at one o’clock; at four we had coffee.

Three afternoons later, back in Manhattan, I visited the terrapin market of New York, which is located in three ancient buildings near the corner of Beekman and Front streets, in Fulton Market. The largest of these is occupied by Moore & Co., an old black-bean, turtle-soup, and terrapin-stew firm now owned by a gourmet named Francesco Castelli. Each winter it sells around two thousand quarts of diamondback stew. In Mr Castelli’s establishment I saw the barrel of terrapin I had watched Mr Barbee’s foreman pack on the Isle of Hope. ‘I order a lot of Barbee’s stuff and I ordered it from his father before him,’ Mr Castelli said. ‘I also use terrapin from the Chesapeake Bay area, from the Cape Hatteras area of North Carolina, from New Jersey, and Long Island.’ Mr Castelli believes that turtle and terrapin meat is the most healthful in the world and likes to tell about a fox terrier which lived in his factory
and
ate nothing but turtle meat until he died in 1921, aged twenty-five. He uses all his terrapin in his stewpots and sells no live ones.

Live ones are sold by a rather sharp-spoken old Irishman on Front Street named D. R. Quinn, who has been in the business most of his life and has not developed a taste for the meat, and by Walter T. Smith, Inc., also on Front Street. Smith’s is sixty-two years old and is one of the largest turtle firms in the world; its cable address, Turtling, is known to many European chefs. It sells all kinds of edible turtles, including treacherous snappers and great 150-pound green turtles out of the Caribbean, from which most turtle soup is made. Snappers, prized for soup in Philadelphia, are not popular here. They can knock a man off his feet with their alligatorlike tails and have been known to snap off the fingers of fishermen; few New York chefs are hardy enough to handle them. I had a talk with Mr Kurt W. Freund, manager of the firm, and he took me up the sagging stairs to the room in which his tanks are kept and showed me diamondbacks from every state on the Eastern seaboard except Maine. A few were from sloughs on Long Island. He said that in the local trade all terrapin caught from Maryland north are called Long Islands. He said that in the North, terrapin hunting is a fisherman’s sideline and that few hunters north of Maryland catch more than a couple of dozen a year.

‘I imagine you’re under the impression that millionaires buy most of our terrapin,’ Mr Freund said. ‘If so, you’re mistaken. The terrapin business was hard hit by prohibition, and it never has got on its feet again, and for years the poor Chinese laundryman has been the backbone of our trade. I’d say that seventy per cent of the sixteen thousand live diamondbacks sold on this street last year were bought by old Chinese. Come look out this window and see my sign.’ Hanging from the second-floor window was a red-and-white wooden signboard smeared with Chinese characters. Mr Freund said the characters were pronounced ‘gim ten guoy’ and meant ‘diamondback terrapin.’ He said that each autumn he hires a Chinese to write form letters quoting terrapin prices, which are distributed by the hundred in Chinatown.

‘An old Chinese doesn’t run to the doctor or the drugstore when he feels bad,’ Mr Freund said. ‘He saves his pennies and buys
himself
a terrapin. He cooks it with medicinal herbs and rice whiskey. Usually he puts so much whiskey in it he has himself a spree as well as a tonic. In the autumn and in the spring crowds of old Chinese come in and bargain with me. They balance terrapin on their palms and stare at them and deliberate an hour sometimes before making a selection. They tell me that the turtle has been worshipped in China for centuries. It’s supposed to be a kind of holy reptile. Most of my steady Chinese customers are old laundrymen, and I know that some of them are practically penniless, but they think terrapin meat will do them more good than a month in the hospital, and they’re willing to pay the price.’

I told Mr Freund that Mr Barbee professed to believe that the consumption of terrapin meat is better than monkey glands for regaining youthfulness.

‘Seriously,’ I said, ‘do you think there’s anything to it?’

‘I’ve been around terrapin for years and years, and I eat the meat myself, and I’ve talked the matter over with dozens of old Chinese fellows,’ Mr Freund said, ‘and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.’

(1939)