Roger, and Eric to taste something new she had been working on. She'd been invited to St. Louis last winter as one of the judges of a barbecue-sauce competition and while there had had a local specialty, toasted ravioli—ravioli rolled in bread crumbs and quickly deep fried. It was tasty, but she realized it could be even tastier with more interesting fillings and sauces, different bread crumbs, better oil. Since then she'd been trying all sorts of combinations. For tonight she had prepared some with chevre and red pepper and wanted to stuff the rest with these sweet whole clams, a hint of garlic, and fresh-tomato-and-basil coulis for dipping. This primo piatto was to be followed by grilled lobsters brushed with pastis and fennel butter. Pix was bringing new potatoes and salad ingredients from her garden. The thought of what awaited took Faith over the rocks, and she stepped off, firm of purpose, into the mud, ready to rake. She instantly sank down to her boot tops and couldn't move an inch. It was like quicksand, and she felt a might Hoover sucking her into the bowels of the earth. No clam was worth this.
“Pix!' she screamed. 'Save me!'
“Oh, Faith, you have to walk carefully. Now just turn your foot to the side to break the suction and pull.”
Faith turned and with a truly disgusting noise freed each captive leg.
“Okay, now we're ready.' Pix had barely paused. Faith was incredulous, but she didn't see how she could get much muddier even at Georgette Klinger's, so she assumed an attentive air and thought about a long soak in the cottage's giant lion-pawed bathtub.
“You see all these little holes on the surface? Each one is a clam breathing. You don't want to put the tines of your hoe into the holes or you'll break the shells. You dig in just above and turn over the mud, like this.' Pix swiftly uncovered a cache of clams, all busily taking their last breaths and squirting streams of water as they tried desperately to escape. She bent down quickly and put the larger ones into her basket. 'They have to be at least two inches. People don't seem to understand that if they strip away all the clams, there won't be any. They used to be so plentiful and so cheap. Now they're almost as much as lobster.' Pix was waving her clam hoe for emphasis, and Faith knew she would not hesitate to use it on anyone who dared to dig an undersized clam. She instantly resolved to pick only elderly-looking ones, even if the babies were sweeter.
“I'll start over here and you can keep working this stretch. It should be good, judging by the number of holes.' “
Faith could see the holes. They were opening and closing in the mud with a faint popping noise. Samantha had taken Ben out of the backpack, and the two of them were farther up near the high-tide mark playing in the sand. There was nothing to do except dig. Pix had given her a pair of Sam's work gloves, disdaining them for herself. They were too big, of course, and scratchy, but Faith did not intend to stick her fingers into the unknown, especially when it could well mean the loss of a nail. She put her hoe exactly as Pix had shown her and pulled. Nothing happened except for a slight soreness in her upper arms. She tried again. The clams might get scared and find another spot. The third time she succeeded in turning over two or three cupsful of the stuff with nary a clam in sight. A mosquito whined near her face. She was covered from head to boot toe with Cutter's, but she didn't relish the company. Her sun visor was making her forehead sweaty.
After an hour or so she had developed some expertise, been squirted in the face a surprising number of times by recalcitrant clams, and actually had what was going to have to be enough for dinner. Her arms, legs, and back ached, and she slid gingerly across the surface of the flat toward the tiny speck in the distance that was Pix. As she moved, she could see the overturned dark-gray mud, which looked as if someone had been able to move a backhoe in but actually marked Pix's progress. When Faith got closer, she could see Pix's basket was brimming. Maybe she would share.
“Pix, I think I'm going to call it a day.”
Pix looked up smiling. 'I just love clamming. All this delicious food, just waiting for us here.'
“You are truly amazing. I hardly think the backbreaking labor it takes means the food is exactly `waiting.' '
“We'll get mussels next. That really is easy, Faith. It's cleaning them that takes times.'
“Yes, I know, except I don't believe any of this gathering stuff is easy. But by the next time I'll forget how sore my shoulder blades are and go musseling or whatever else you have in mind.'
“How about berry picking? The cranberries should be ripe, and I know a secret spot on the Point where there are millions of them.”
The Point was a forty-acre finger extending in a curve from the end of the Millers' property. The far side faced east straight out to sea, and the views were magnificent. They often walked over at sunset. No one knew who owned it, not even Pix. Many records had been lost in a fire at the town hall in the early fifties, and people had come to regard the Point as community property, going to its long, sheltered sandy beach, a rarity on Sanpere, to picnic and swim. There were the remains of a large Indian shell heap at the tip, a reminder that the Abenakis were the first summer people.
“Berry picking I can do. Unless there is something peculiar to Maine berries so they cling to the branch and require brute force or anecdotes from `Bert and I' to get them off.'
“No, I promise you. Although I'd like to hear you imitate a Down East accent. I'll give you half my clams if you tell the one about the guy in the balloon asking the farmer for directions. “
For clams Faith would do anything, she discovered, andthe two of them became convulsed with laughter as they plodded off to the water's edge to rinse the clams. Samantha, watching them from the shore, couldn't figure out what they were doing to make them weave and pitch, but then she wasn't close enough to hear Faith say, 'You're up in a balloon, you darn fool.”
As they were walking back to the cottage, Faith asked Pix if she ought to invite Jill Merriwether.
“I know Eric and she are an item, yet I don't like to assume that couples go everywhere together.'
“Well, they do seem to be serious. Though I've been to lots of things where only one or the other has been invited. I'd say do what you want. She's very shy, but once you got to know her, I think you'd like her.'
“Then I'll invite her and make the `Crow's Nest' notes with our daring girl-boy-girl-boy-girl table.”
Later that evening, as Faith surveyed the group over the toasted ravioli, she realized she needn't have worried about an unbalanced table, because one of the girls might just as well have been a china doll. Jill didn't look like a china doll, except for her tiny size. They hadn't made bisque in quite that shade of deep tan, nor straight brown hair that fell to her shoulders after traveling in an unequivocal line across her brow. She was pleasant. She smiled. She sat down and ate. She just didn't talk.
Faith made a few attempts to draw her out, which yielded the information that Jill was native to the island but had lived most of her adult life off, returning only for visits to the grandparents who had raised her and managed to put her through college. She had come back four summers ago to start the store. In the winter she lived in Portland and did something in the schools. Probably a speech therapist, Faith reflected.
Eric and Roger were teasing Pix, one of their favorite pastimes, and after two glasses of a full, slightly tart Montrachet Pix was rising to the bait. At the moment it was Pix's penchant for sweeping generalizations that coincidentally served her purposes. 'Everyone knows that developers are going up and down the coast convincing families to sell their land for what seems like a fortune, and then they turn around and make millions while the poor family has to move the trailer they bought with the money, a trailer that falls apart instantly when the warranty expires, inland on a tiny piece of land nobody wants and they never even get to see the ocean hardly.'
“I suppose you mean it's common knowledge, Pix?' Roger smiled.
Roger was even taller than Eric. He looked like a basketball player of the Kevin McHale variety, big hands, long arms, and slightly pigeon breasted. But basketball players didn't have full beards and hair past their earlobes as Roger did. It was all very tidy and he was an attractive man, yet he didn't seem to generate the energy Eric did. He had gentle, large brown eyes the same color as his hair and beard. His face was tanned, and the whole effect resembled an underpainting waiting for the definitions of color. His voice matched—calm, slow, and, Faith was pretty sure, slightly stoned. Pix's voice, in contrast, was like a circus barker's, one who had made a stop at the Winsor School and Pembroke.
“Yes I do, and you and Eric know it as well as I do. Could you afford to buy anything on this island? I know Sam and I couldn't, at least not something with frontage.”
Eric broke in, playing devil's advocate. 'It hasn't been my impression that people on this island are easily talked into anything, Pix, let alone swindled out of their birthrights.”
He stopped suddenly at the thought in everyone's mind, then recovered gracefully. 'Case in point. Do you think it likely that Matilda Prescott could have been talked into leaving her house to the two of us, delightful as we are, if she hadn't wanted to? Forget for a minute what the whole island is saying.'
