The Oyster Cages We Floated Back Out

Hazel

She came down at half past eight. I heard the screen door, and then I saw her at the top of the path in her wide straw hat and her lavender blouse, one hand on the rail Pop built.

She stood there a long time. Then she came down the steps one at a time, the way she does now, and walked across the sand to the first row and put her hand flat on top of a cage.

“Are they alive?” she asked.

“They’re alive,” I said. “They’re shut up tight. They’ve been out maybe three hours. We’re keeping them wet till the tide comes.”

She looked at the tractor tracks. She did not need to ask whose they were.

She looked up the creek toward the next point, where Clayton’s long gray pier ran out into the water and his skiff sat at the end of it.

“He’s been saying it for two years,” she said quietly. “I didn’t think he’d ever do a thing about it.”

“I know.”

“Pop would have gone over there.”

“I know he would,” I said. “I’m not going over there. I’m going to put these back in the water. That’s all I’m going to do.”

She looked at me for a long moment under the brim of that hat.

Then she nodded, like she was satisfied with something, and went to sit on the overturned crab pot at the top of the beach where she could watch.

She did not cry. Hazel does not cry where anybody can see.

But she sat with her hands folded in her lap, and I saw her lips moving, and I knew she was praying, because that is what she does instead.

The Waiting

The thing nobody tells you about a tide is how slow it comes when you need it.

You watch the edge of the water and it does not move. You look away and look back and it has come a foot.

By nine the water was back over the mud and lapping at the bottom of the sand.

By ten it had come another twenty yards. We kept pouring. Kinsey kept count of the cages out loud to keep us both honest.

At ten I went down the rows with my pocketknife and cut open one bag from each end and checked them.

I pried a few oysters. Every one I opened was wet and full and alive. They were tough. Pop always said they were tougher than people.

At half past ten Kinsey went for the skiff. It is a sixteen-foot aluminum boat with a thirty horse on the back, and Pop bought it used the year the cages started.

She brought it around from the dock and nosed it into the beach.

We had worked out a way. The first rows were close to the water now.

One of us would drag a cage down the wet sand to where it would float, then push it out waist deep, and Kinsey would take a line and tow a few at a time out toward the lease.

A full cage out of the water weighs better than a hundred pounds. On wet sand, with two people, you can slide it.

On dry sand you cannot, not without a tractor, which is why Clayton used one.

So we waited for the water. That was the whole plan.

We let the creek come to us, a few feet at a time, and every time it came, we took what it gave.