The Oyster Cages We Floated Back Out

Booker

Booker is sixty-six. He has worked the creek his whole life, crabbing and running a few cages of his own up near the head.

He and Pop went to school together. He was a pallbearer at the funeral.

He brought the workboat right up off our beach, as close as he could get without grounding, and threw it out of gear, and stood there in the stern in his rubber boots looking at the sand.

He looked at the cages still on the beach. He looked at the tractor tracks. He looked up the creek at Clayton’s pier. Then he looked at me.

“You need the line held,” he said.

It was not a question. I nodded.

“Hand it here,” he said.

That was all he said about it. He never asked who did it. He did not need to.

He took the end of the longline from Kinsey’s skiff, made it fast on his stern cleat, and backed the workboat slowly out toward the buoys.

There were two men on his deck I had not seen at first. Old men in caps, sitting on the engine box with coffee in their hands.

One was Vance, who used to drive the school bus. The other ran the bait counter at the store for thirty years.

They were the men Clayton drank coffee with every morning.

The men he sat with at the back table at the store and told about the bottom that should have been his. They had been on Booker’s boat when he heard.

They did not come to help, exactly. They were too old for wading. They came to see.

And they sat on the engine box of Booker’s workboat for the next three hours, with the whole creek watching them watch.

The Noon Tide

The tide came full a little after noon. The water ran right up the beach to the foot of the rows, and we did not have to drag at all anymore.

We just tipped the cages off the sand into the creek and let them go.

Booker held the longline taut between the anchor buoys, with the workboat ticking along in gear against the current.

Kinsey towed the loose cages out to me in strings of four. And I clipped.

Every cage has a clip on each float bracket. You pull the cage up alongside the line, hook the clip over, and snap it shut.

Two clips a cage. Four hundred clips. My fingers went raw by the fortieth cage.

That is when Hazel came down into the water.

The Clips

I did not see her start. I was out on the line clipping, and I heard Kinsey say, “Grandma,” in a voice I had not heard from her since she was small, and I looked back at the beach.

Hazel had taken off her shoes. She had left them side by side on the crab pot, the way she leaves them by the back door, and she had walked down the sand in her lavender blouse and her straw hat and stepped into the creek.

She waded out to her knees and stopped. The water was green and warm around her legs.

She had a coffee can in her hands that she must have gotten from the shed, and the coffee can was full of spare clips.

She had not been in the creek since the day she found Pop. Two years and six months.

She had not so much as put a toe in it. She used to say she could not stand to.

“You’re going to run out,” she called to me. “You’ve got the box out there and it’s half empty. These are Pop’s extras. He kept them in the shed in this can.”

I waded in to her. When I got close I saw that her hands were shaking, but her face was not.

She held the can up to me, and I took a handful of clips, and our fingers touched over the top of it.

“Hazel,” I said, and I could not say anything else.

“Go on,” she said. “Go on and clip. I’ll stand right here. I’ll hand them to you as you need them.”

So that is how we did it. Kinsey towed. Booker held. I clipped.

And every time I ran low I waded in to the shallows and Hazel put clips in my palm, one handful at a time, and went back to humming.

She was humming the hymn they sang at Pop’s funeral. I do not think she knew she was doing it.

Kinsey knew. I saw her turn her face away in the skiff and wipe it with the back of her wrist.