Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert Page B

there,” the Senator would say to Ruth as they watched Webster head deeper and deeper into the mud.
    It was indeed dangerous, but the Senator had no intention of interfering, even as Webster sank into the loosest, most collapsing, most embracing mud, his arms submerged, feeling about for artifacts in the blind muck. The Senator was nervous and Ruth was nervous, but Webster moved stoically, without terror. Such moments, in fact, were the only times his twitchy body was ever still. He was calm in the mud. He was never afraid in the mud. Sometimes he too seemed to be sinking. He would pause in his search, and the Senator and Ruth Thomas would see him slowly descending. It was frightful. It did look at times as if they were about to lose him.
    “Should we go after him?” the Senator would suggest, meekly.
    “Not in that fucking deathtrap,” Ruth would say. “Not me.”
    (Ruth had developed something of a mouth by the time she was eighteen years old. Her father often commented on it. “I don’t know where you got that goddamn mouth of yours,” he’d say, and she would reply, “Now there’s a goddamn mystery.”)
    “Are you sure he’s all right?” the Senator would ask.
    “No,” Ruth would say. “I think he may be going under. But I’m not going after him, and neither are you. Not in that fucking deathtrap.”
    No, not her. Not out there, where forgotten lobsters and clams and mussels and sea worms grew to godless size, and where Christ only knew what else hovered about. When the Scottish settlers first came to Fort Niles, they had leaned over those very mudflats from huge rocks and had dug out, with gaffs, living lobsters as big as any man. They had written of this in their journals; descriptions of pulling out hideous five-foot monster lobsters, ancient as alligators and caked with mud, grown to repulsive extremes from centuries of unmolested hiding. Webster himself, sifting with his bare, blind hands, had found in this mud some petrified lobster claws the size of baseball mitts. He had dug out clams the size of melons, urchins, dogfish, dead fish. No way was Ruth Thomas going in there. No way.
    So the Senator and Ruth would have to sit and watch Webster sink. What could they do? Nothing. They sat in tense silence. Sometimes a gull would fly overhead. Other times, there was no movement at all. They watched and waited, and occasionally felt panic simmering in their hearts. But Webster himself never panicked in the mud. He would stand, sunk past his hips, and wait. He seemed to be waiting for something unknown that, after a long period, he would find. Or perhaps it would find him. Webster would begin to move through the sinking mud.
    It was not clear to Ruth how he did this. From the beach, it looked as though a rail had risen from below to reach Webster’s bare feet, and he was now standing safely on this rail, which was taking him, slowly and smoothly, away from a dangerous spot. It looked, from the beach, like a clean, gliding rescue.
    Why was he never stuck? Why was he never cut by clams, glass, lobsters, mollusks, iron, stone? All the hidden dangers in the mud seemed to shift politely aside to let Webster Pommeroy pass. Of course, he wasn’t always in danger. Sometimes he would dawdle around in the shallow, ankle-deep mud near the shore, staring down, expressionless. That could get boring. And when it got too boring, Senator Simon and Ruth, sitting on the rocks, would talk to each other. For the most part, they talked about maps and explorations and shipwrecks and hidden treasure, the Senator’s favorite topics of conversation. Especially shipwrecks.
    One afternoon, Ruth told the Senator that she might try to find work on a lobster boat. This wasn’t entirely true, although it was exactly what Ruth had written to her mother in a long letter the day before. Ruth wanted to want to work on a lobster boat, but the actual desire was not there. She mentioned the idea to the Senator only because she liked the