The trip back was more leisurely than I’d expected from her breakneck speed out. She leaned back in the blue vinyl seat with one hand on the wheel. The wind barely ruffled our hair. We might have been riding around Dobbs in a convertible.
More to make conversation than anything else, I asked, “When did they start renting out parcels of the sound?”
“You mean when did the great state of North Carolina realize fishermen need to earn a living off the water even though sportsmen and developers and so-called conservationists keep trying to put us out of business?” Her tone was dry, but not actively hostile at the moment.
“Is that what they’re doing?”
She shrugged. “We seem to get all the rules and regulations. Turtle excluders, bycatch limits, size limits, equipment limits, right-to-sell licenses—leased bottoms are ‘bout the only thing we’ve got back and now they’re even having second thoughts about that.”
“Can you just pick wherever you want? That used to be a pretty popular spot when I was a girl.”
“You might’ve gone digging back there when you were a girl,” she said, turning the wheel so that we were angling across the empty channel toward the cottage, “but that sandbar’s pretty near clammed out. For me and Hes to lease it, a Marine Fisheries biologist had to certify that it’s no longer a productive natural shellfish bed. That means it worn’t producing ten bushels a year.”
“So how do you farm it? Strew seed clams right into the sand?”
“We could. Some folks do. What me and Hes do’s more costly to start with, but gets us a higher return. We load mesh bags with eight to twelve hundred seed clams and stake them on the bottom. Takes about two years to grow them out at least an inch thick.”
As she warmed to her subject, the woman was downright chatty.
“Mesh bags? Like potato bags?”
“Onion bags’re what we use when we harvest them. We grow them in big nylon bags about five feet square.”
“Makes ‘em easy to pull up,” I guessed.
“Yeah, but mostly it’s to protect the clams from crabs and rays and conchs. They’ll wreck a regular shellfish bed.” Jay Hadley gazed back over her shoulder at the staked area of water receding behind us. “We expect to harvest a thousand clams a bag next year.”
I was never any good at mental math, but it didn’t take an Einstein to realize that with three acres of bags staked down out there and each clam selling for nine to twenty cents apiece depending on the season, it was like leaving bags of money lying around for the taking.
“Sounds like an easy way for other people to go home with a quick bucket of clams,” I mused.
“Tell me about it.”
“So that’s why you keep such a sharp eye on that spot.” And why she came out with a gun? “Had much poaching?”
“Not bad as some folk.”
If poaching was part of last month’s trouble, she wasn’t going to elaborate.
The yellow cottage loomed up ahead of us and the tide was now high enough that she could come in fairly close.
“Here okay?” she asked, wallowing in until the lifted propeller almost scraped bottom.
“Foine,” I told her.
• • •
The sun was just sinking below the live oak trees beyond Mahlon Davis’s boat shed at the water’s edge and several gray-haired men were standing over there talking to him as I squished up the path to the cottage. I nodded gravely. Equally grave, they returned my nod but didn’t speak or call over a question though they had to be curious about what had happened out there.
Guthrie’s skiff was moored to the end of Mahlon’s dilapidated dock, near where Jay Hadley dropped me off, but of Guthrie himself there was no sign. Carl’s two clam rakes were propped on the edge of the porch next to the bucket.
Empty, of course.
Just as well. I certainly didn’t feel like messing with clams at this point.
Instead, after changing into dry sneakers and a pair of jeans, I fixed myself a stiff bourbon and Diet Pepsi and dumped a can of Vienna sausages onto a paper plate. Saltines were in an airtight tin and I added them to the plate, then carried everything out to the porch and one of Sue’s slat-bottomed rocking chairs.
I might not be eating chowder and Andy Bynum would never again perch over there with a cold beer in his hand and regale us with tall tales of island living, but nothing was going to stop me from sitting here as the Cape Lookout light got brighter and brighter in the distance, remembering how things used to be.
The men with Mahlon dispersed and all was quiet for an hour or two.
• • •
Guthrie came over at first dark. He stopped out in the yard and said, “Grandpap brought home some oysters today and Granny says do you want some since you didn’t get clams?”
“Thank her for me, but I don’t think so.”
He started back.
