The Oyster Cages We Floated Back Out

The Last Cages

By one o’clock we had a hundred and forty cages on the line. By half past, a hundred and eighty.

The tide was starting to turn, and I could feel it pulling at my legs, the water starting to slide back toward the bay.

The last dozen were the ones at the top of the beach, the ones Clayton had dragged farthest.

Those we had to slide over dry sand again, and those were the ones I had worried about the most. They had gotten the most sun.

I cut a bag open from the very last cage before we put it in. I pried six oysters, one after another.

All six were wet inside, full and gray and alive. The burlap and the buckets had done it.

“How many?” Booker called across the water.

“Six for six,” I said.

He nodded once and looked back at his line. The two old men on the engine box looked at each other.

One of them said something I could not hear, and the other one shook his head slowly.

The two hundredth cage went on the line at eighteen minutes to two.

I know because Kinsey looked at her watch and said it out loud. “One forty-two,” she said. “That’s all of them, Mom. That’s every one.”

I snapped the last clip shut and put both hands on the float and leaned on it, and for a minute I just stood there in the water and let the cage hold me up.

The Splice

There was still the matter of the anchors. Booker could not sit out there holding six hundred feet of line forever.

I pulled up to the north buoy in Kinsey’s skiff and hauled the chain up hand over hand until I had the cut end of the old line.

I tied the new line to the chain with a bowline, the way Pop taught me, and backed it up with a half hitch and a wrap of tape.

Then we ran it down to the longline and spliced it in.

Booker eased the workboat around to the south end and handed me his end, and we did it again.

When it was done, he took the strain off slowly, and the line held, and the cages settled into their row and rode there in the sun.

From the beach they looked like a row of black dots running all the way down the lease.

Two hundred of them, swinging a little on the tide, like nothing had ever happened to them.

Hazel was still standing in the water. She had not gone back up. She was looking at the line with the empty coffee can in her hands.

“They look like a row of ducks,” she said. “Like a row of ducks following their mama.”