The Oyster Cages We Floated Back Out

The Sand

I called Kinsey first. She picked up on the fourth ring, still half asleep in her room over the garage.

“Get your waders,” I said. “Get your waders and get down to the beach. Bring every bucket in the shed.”

“Mom, what happened?”

“Your great-uncle happened,” I said. “Come look.”

Then I walked up and down the rows of cages and put my hand on them. The mesh was still damp.

The bags were still wet inside. The oysters were shut tight and cool to the touch. They had not been out long.

I did the arithmetic standing there. He must have towed the line in at first light, on the last of the falling tide, while there was just water enough to float the cages to the beach.

Then he dragged them up with the tractor at dead low.

Two hours out, maybe. That was nothing yet. But the radio said eighty-eight degrees by afternoon, and there was not a cloud anywhere.

By three o’clock that sand would be too hot to walk on barefoot.

Market oysters out of the water in that kind of sun are dead in a day, maybe two if they are lucky.

Most of them would not be lucky. And no phone call I could make was going to float a cage.

I want to say that plainly, because people have asked me since. Why not call somebody? Why not call the county or the state?

Who would they send at seven in the morning, and what would they do with two hundred cages?

The only thing that could fix it was water. The water would come back on its own at noon.

My job was to keep those oysters alive until it did, and then get them back out where they belonged.

The Buckets

Kinsey came down the path at a run with five buckets stacked in her arms and her waders on and her blond hair still in last night’s ponytail. She stopped at the bottom and stared.

“He did this?”

“He did this.”

“All of them?”

“All two hundred,” I said. “Count them if you want. I already did.”

She did not say anything for a minute. She is a quiet girl, like her father. Then she set the buckets down and looked at the water line, way out past the mud.

“High tide’s at noon,” she said. “Little after.”

“Twelve fifteen,” I said. “I looked.”

“That’s five hours.”

“Then we have five hours of work,” I said. “We wet them down and we keep them shaded and we wait. When the water comes up the beach, we start dragging.”

We started hauling creek water. You fill a bucket at the edge, walk it up, pour it slow over the bags, and go back.

The mud sucked at our boots every step. By the twentieth trip my shoulders were burning.

At eight I went up to the shed and got the old burlap sacks Pop kept for culling, and the two blue tarps from the woodpile.

We soaked the burlap in the creek and laid it over the cages to hold the wet in.

The tarps we rigged on oars and boat hooks jammed into the sand, to throw some shade on the rows that would catch the sun first.

It was not pretty. It looked like a tent revival with no preacher.

I kept thinking about Hazel up at the house. She would be up by now. She would be at the kitchen window with her tea.

I did not want her to see it, and I knew she was going to see it anyway.