right thin to folks raised on the Manhattan or New England varieties, but my mouth watered as I wondered if there was any cornmeal back at the house for dumplings. Not that it mattered since I’d probably have to run up to Cab’s store anyhow and buy a piece of salt pork to season the chowder with.
We cut across the wake of a hotshot cigarette and the flat bottom of the skiff smacked the waves as hard as if we were riding on dirt roads rutted like a washboard. My face tingled with the unmistakable combination of wind, salt and sun, and my hair tangled in my sunglasses as it whipped about my head, but I didn’t care. Even jouncing along in a homemade, no-frills skiff, it was exhilarating to be out on a broad expanse of water again, to know that if we headed due east from the lighthouse, the next land we’d hit would be the coast of North Africa.
Not that I’m all that comfortable when I’m totally out of the sight of land. In some ways the empty inland deserts of North Africa would be no more incomprehensible to me than these coastal waters once I get too far offshore to pick out landmarks. Desert nomads, Arctic Eskimos and Core Sounders have been firmly linked in my mind ever since I heard that nomads can read dust clouds and Eskimos can differentiate between more than forty separate types of snow.
More than once when I was a girl, my cousins and their little brother and I would be lolling out in the warm shallows, the air hot and still, the sky above as cloudless as an empty blue bowl, too enervated by the still air to do more than keep our sunburned skin under water and out of the reach of stinging dogflies.
Suddenly we’d see a half-dozen men come striding down to their boats with quick urgency, splashing past us in boots and waders to hoist themselves up over the sides.
“What’s happening?” we’d call.
“She’s a-turning,” Mahlon Davis would grunt as he lifted anchor and lowered his motor to head out to his favorite set. “Don’t you feel her turning?”
We’d look at each other blankly while the little boats roared out to the channel, leaving us tossed in their wake. A few minutes later, we would feel a tentative stirring, nothing more than a promise of breeze. Then would come that gradual but steady push as the wind freshened and turned and blew straight in off the water.
“How did they know?” we asked ourselves in wonder.
• • •
As we left the channel and angled over into the shallows, Guthrie throttled back on the Evinrude and the boat lay flatter in the water till I could feel the gentle surge of slow waves. Within minutes, we were coasting across undulating grasses only inches below the surface as we drifted in toward Shackleford. I sighted a familiar-looking sandbar that I seemed to remember from an earlier trip although I didn’t recall those stakes sticking up above high-water level.
“What’s that?” I called back to Guthrie.
“Leased bottom.”
“Huh? You can rent the sea bottom?”
“Got enough money, you can do anything you dang well feel like.”
We circled closer and I saw now that the stakes defined about three acres of the sandbar and were posted with signs from one of the state’s governmental divisions stating that this was a shellfish bottom leased by a Heston Hadley for the cultivation of clams. I seemed to remember now some mention of this new practice in the
Guthrie had. “Danged old Marine Fisheries,” he huffed. “You can rent you a square mile off ‘em if you got the money. Then you can keep everybody else off even if they’ve been clamming or oystering in that spot their whole lives.”
He spat overboard in disgust. “Gonna be so proggers can’t take a fish or clam anywhere in the sound. Whole dang place’ll be leased out.”
Clearly, Guthrie didn’t approve of leased bottoms. Didn’t sound fair to me either, for that matter.
Several hundred feet away, at the far side of the stakes, we saw another skiff bobbing at its anchor line. Its motor had been raised to keep the propeller from dragging on the bottom.
To my eye, it could have been the twin of the skiff we were in, but Guthrie took one look and said, “Andy Bynum’s.”
I brightened. Andy Bynum was a semi-retired fisherman who lived across the road from the cottage and often walked through Carl’s yard to get to his boats when any were moored out front. In fact, Carl had bought the cottage with the deeded stipulation that Bynums yet unborn would have access to the water in perpetuity.
Out of courtesy, when Carl and Sue were down, he often dropped off a bucket of crabs or a bushel of oysters —whatever was in season; and he would perch on the edge of their porch if offered a beer and tell wonderful stories about life on and around the water. My cousins and I never knew if he was stretching the truth or not, but we’d be laughing so hard it wouldn’t matter.
I was grinning now, hoping he’d come back for his skiff before Guthrie and I finished clamming, wondering if I could tempt him to sit a spell on his way past the cottage. He was of that older generation that sometimes thinks it’s improper to visit with an unchaperoned woman. Then I glanced at Guthrie’s face and my grin faded at his scowl.
“What’s Andy up to out here?” he asked. “Andy wouldn’t take clams off’n Hes Hadley’s lease.”
Was he implying that we would?
Not that the whole sandbar was staked off. There was still an unmarked wedge of grassy bottom beyond the stakes, over where Bynum’s skiff was rocking in the gentle surges.
Water barely covered the propeller blades as Guthrie poled us over to the empty skiff. Something about the set of his body and wary eyes made me start to tense up even though I didn’t see any cause. On the other hand, I don’t always understand island etiquette. Was clamming around the edges of a man’s leased bottom anything like poaching crabs from someone else’s pots or tearing through someone’s set nets? In the years I’d been coming down to this seemingly peaceful area, I’d seen short tempers flare over the dumbest things. Some had even ended in fist fights, warning shots and outright feuds that persisted for two or three generations.
We rounded the skiff and Guthrie cut his motor. Into the sudden silence came the ever-present sound of lapping
