The Oyster Cages We Floated Back Out

The Harvest

We started selling the oysters three weeks later, when the water cooled. The raw bars took every one we could bag.

We lost maybe a few hundred out of eighty thousand, which is less than we lose in an ordinary season.

Hazel kept the books like always. When the first check came, she put it on the kitchen table and looked at it and then went to the window and looked out at the line for a long time.

“Pop would have liked that you used his clips,” she said.

“He would have liked that you came in the water,” I said.

She thought about that. “I believe I’ll go out with you on Thursday,” she said. “When you flip them. I’d like to see them up close.”

So she did. She sat in the bow of the skiff in her straw hat with a cushion under her, and Kinsey ran the motor, and I flipped the cages, and Hazel watched every one go over like she was counting them.

She was. She told me later. Two hundred, she said. Every one.

Now

Clayton still lives on the next point. He still walks out his long gray pier in the afternoons.

He still takes his skiff out the creek, and he goes around the far side of our line now, where there was always plenty of water.

He sits at the little table by the window at the store.

Somebody told me that last week Vance carried his coffee over and sat with him for a while, and they talked about the old days on the water. I am glad of it. Nobody needs to be alone forever.

But he has not touched our line again. And nobody on that creek has said one word about the bottom that should have been his. Not at the store. Not anywhere.

Hazel goes down to the beach most afternoons now. She takes her shoes off and leaves them on the crab pot and wades in to her knees and stands there in the warm green water with her hat on, looking at the line.

She says it is the best part of her day. She says she should not have stayed out of the creek so long. She says Pop would have fussed at her for it.

The last time I went down with her, the sun was on the water and the cages were riding high and even, all two hundred of them, all the way down the lease.

“Look at them,” she said. “Still a row of ducks.”

She stayed there till the tide turned. Then she took my arm, and we walked up the beach together, and she left her wet footprints on the sand where the tractor tracks used to be.