The Oyster Cages We Floated Back Out

Clayton

Clayton Twiford is seventy-four. He is Pop’s older brother, and he had a lease of his own once, on the bottom off his point.

In the 1980s the oyster diseases came up the bay and killed almost everything.

His bottom died. So did a lot of men’s. He gave his lease up and went to work at the shipyard for twenty years, and he never forgave the water for it, or his brother for doing fine later on.

When Pop started the cages, Clayton laughed at him. Plastic boxes, he called them. Toy farming. Then the cages started making money and Clayton stopped laughing and started saying other things.

He said the bottom on our side should have come to him, being the oldest.

He said it at the store, over coffee, to anybody who would listen. He said Pop got lucky and Hazel was riding on luck.

Since Pop died, he had said it louder. He complained that the longline was in the way of his skiff when he went out the creek, though there was a hundred feet of good water on the far side of it.

I had heard every bit of it. I had let it go, because he was family, and because Hazel asked me to.

She said Clayton was an old man with a sore place, and you do not pick at a sore place.

So I let it go. And that September morning he took his tractor down the ramp at low water and dragged a widow’s living up onto the sand and went home to his breakfast.