The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay by Tim Junkin Page A

and wheezing.
    â€œThey tore up all the grass and seedbeds dredging, I suppose.” Clay spoke softly, patting the older man’s back. “The wild celery’s mostly gone. Eelgrass is scarce. Lack of food.”
    â€œIt’s just like Joe DiMaggio, selling Mr. Coffee machines on the TV. It’s shit,” Mason hacked out. “The man was a hero. Now he’s selling goddamn Mr. Coffee machines like who gives a good goddamn.”
    The boys looked at each other at that. “I see there’s a link there, Mase,” Byron finally said. He hiccuped at Clay. “Somewheres.”
    They all sat silent for a while and listened to the quiet stirring of the river and the rustling of the boats in their slips. And then Mason started talking again and gradually got around to talking about what he always talked about when he got that way, about being on the sea at night in the war against the Germans, and how the sea had a soul that wrapped the earth and contained all life, and that the men who were lost on the sea were contained in her soul, and how it felt to wait for the submarines to attack, to wait for death on the sea at night, in the silence, night after night, listening for the torpedoes that they knew would come. Byron listened and didn’t speak, but his face betrayed the images of his own war branded in him.
    Traveling back to Blackie’s, Mason fell asleep between them in the front seat. It had begun to drizzle and then the rain changed tosnow, a light April snow, just dusting the earth, muffling the night. On Oxford Road, Clay slowed and then came to a stop and turned off the engine and the car lights, and the two young men, with one of their fathers asleep between them, watched the translucent flakes float to the ground in the luminous spring snow in the soundless night.

8
    Outside the boat barn, a rusted conveyor belt lay disintegrating in a field of weeds and trumpet vines. In better times it had been used to unload the bountiful oysters. Clay walked past it and past a graveyard of beached dredgers, abandoned years before, most with their sides staved in. A field mouse scampered over a rotting timber, split from the belly of the
Tessie May,
the name still faintly readable across the gutted transom. A gray gull, perched on the broken masthead, surveyed the swollen river. Clay liked the stiff breeze and the sound of the sailboat halyards ringing.
    Like a branching oak tree, the wharf at Pecks Point sprawled into Plaindealing Creek and faced out into the Tred Avon River. South of the loading platform, a new dock of unweathered pine ran into the creek, where a few luxury slips had been built to handle pleasure yachts. The new wood seemed out of place among the older structures and the rusting husks from another time. For two hundred years the wharf had been home to boatbuilders and watermen. In colonial times, when the town of Oxford was competing with Baltimore to become the leading port of the upper Bay,the wharf was first an unloading station for shad and oyster and then served the herring trade and, still later, the crabbers. Built originally on hard-packed sediment, the wharf area had grown with the commercial dredging for oysters by sail-driven skipjacks, expanding into the creek on its accumulated oyster shell base, the refuse and legacy of generations of watermen, watermen’s wives, and the Negro women shuckers who used to fill the warehouse.
    Clay knew the history of this place. He had learned it from his father and read about it as well. But he had also come to know it just by being on the river, by learning the slow track of the muskrat in the eerie backwaters of the Dorchester marsh and learning when and where to set the traps, and what the traps did to the animals, and how to finish them. And by finding home through the spartina with the bow of his skiff laden with muskrat pelts and rounding Pecks Point and catching the thousand eyes of the sun on the Bay.
    That was before