The Pier
That is when Clayton came out.
His screen door banged across the water. You can hear everything on a creek in the middle of the afternoon. Every head turned. Booker’s, the two old men’s, Kinsey’s in the skiff, mine.
He came down his yard slowly. He is not a fast man anymore.
He walked out his long gray pier in his work pants and his undershirt, the way he would have walked out any afternoon to check his skiff, and he got to the end and stopped.
He saw the line first. I watched him see it. He saw two hundred cages floating where he had left two hundred cages lying on the sand.
He looked down at the beach, where there was nothing now but tire tracks and a few wet burlap sacks.
Then he saw Booker’s workboat. Then he saw who was sitting on the engine box.
Vance raised his coffee cup about an inch. That was all. He did not wave. He did not call out.
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He just lifted the cup, the way you would to somebody across a room, and set it back down on his knee.
Clayton stood there for a long time. I will give him that. He did not run.
He looked at all of it, the line and the boat and the men and his brother’s widow standing knee-deep in the creek in her straw hat.
I did not say a word to him. I did not wave or shout or do anything at all.
I had told Hazel I was not going over there, and I meant it. I just stood with my hand on the last cage and looked back at him.
Hazel did not look at him. She looked at her oysters.
After a while Clayton turned around and walked back up his pier and up his yard and went in the house.
The screen door shut behind him. It did not bang this time. He closed it easy.
Booker Again
Booker eased the workboat in close to where Hazel was standing in the water. He took his cap off. He does not do that much.
“Miss Hazel,” he said, “you need anything else today?”
“No, Booker,” she said. “Thank you. You go on home.”
“Pop would’ve been out here himself,” he said.
“I know he would,” Hazel said. “He was, I think. A little bit.”
Booker looked at her a second longer, then put his cap back on and put the workboat in gear and went back down the creek, slow, with the two old men still sitting on the engine box like they were watching a parade go by.
Kinsey brought the skiff in and tied it off at the dock. I helped Hazel up out of the water.
Her legs were stiff and her blouse was wet to the waist where she had leaned to hand me clips. She did not seem to mind.
We walked up the beach together, the three of us, and sat on the crab pot and the overturned buckets and looked at the line.
Nobody said anything for a while. The gulls had all gone somewhere else.