The Oyster Cages We Floated Back Out

The Store

I did not go to the store the next morning. I had no reason to.

But Vance’s wife, Thelma, called Hazel at about nine and told her what happened, and Hazel told me over the fence.

Clayton came in at his usual time, a little after seven, and got his coffee at the counter the way he had every morning for about thirty years.

Then he walked back to the table where the old men sit.

There are six chairs at that table. Every morning, for as long as anybody can remember, somebody slides over and makes room for whoever comes in last. That is just how it is done.

That morning nobody slid over.

Thelma said they did not say a word to him. Nobody was rude. Nobody told him to leave.

They just went on talking about the weather and the price of diesel and the football game, and nobody moved their chair.

He stood there with his coffee for about a minute, she said.

Then he went and sat by himself at the little table by the window, the one where people sit when they are waiting on a sandwich.

He sat there the next morning too. And the morning after that.

Clayton’s Reason

People have asked me if I felt sorry for him. I will tell you the truth. Part of me did.

I am not made of stone, and he is my husband’s uncle, and I have known him since I was twenty-two.

I know what the eighties did to that creek. I have heard the old men talk about it. Whole families lost their living in two or three seasons.

Clayton was one of them. He watched his bottom die, and he had to go to the shipyard and punch a clock.

Then his little brother made a go of it with plastic boxes, and the whole creek said what a fine idea that was.

I can see how that would sit in a man’s chest for thirty years and go sour.

But none of that puts a widow’s oysters on the sand in September sun. None of it.

He knew exactly what that sun would do. He worked the water once. He knew better than anybody on that creek.

He did not do it to make room for his skiff.

He did it because his brother was dead and could not stop him, and he thought Hazel was too old and I was too soft to do anything about it.

He was wrong about both of us.

Sunday

My husband came home off the boat that Saturday. I had told him all of it on the phone, and he had been quiet a long time, and then he said he was proud of us. He said it twice.

He wanted to go over to Clayton’s. I asked him not to.

I said everything that needed saying had already been said, out on the water, by people who did not have to say a word.

He thought about it, and he did not go. He went out to the lease instead with Kinsey and checked every clip on the line himself, which is how the men in that family say they love you.

On Sunday we went to church, all four of us. Hazel sat where she always sits, on the aisle, third pew from the front.

Clayton sat where he always sits, on the other side, near the back.

When the service was over and people were filing out, he was ahead of us in the aisle. He stopped at the door and turned around. He looked at Hazel.

“Hazel,” he said.

“Clayton,” she said.

That was all. He went out ahead of us into the sun.

But he had said her name, and he had looked at her when he said it, which he had not done in two years.