HIGH UP AND OUT OVER THE SEA, A FEW CLOUD PUFFS with plenty of blue between them hung over the distant markers of lobster pots in their ragged lines in the barely swelling and receding water beyond the shore’s activity. The few hunting gulls had curled out from the shore and were cruising over the deep water, occasionally folding their wings and falling into the sea for shallow bait fish. There had been a factory boat far out, close to the end of sight, but a fog bank had rolled in, creating a false horizon beyond which the boat was probably still working, though totally obscured. It was still bright and sunny over the sand and surf, and the children were still playing. The Chief had taken his tennis shoes off, and his hanging feet were touched by a light breeze. He had laid his niblick on the cliff’s edge to his side, and his golf cap was cocked back on his head. He had heard the talk of three foursomes as they came up to the sixth tee to hit. He was only about fifteen feet from the tee, but the grass and brush were high and dense, and even when one of the men had lumbered into the bushes to take a leak, he had been unaware of the Chief’s presence.
There were no golfers on the tee now, and the Chief could hear the fluted songs of some purple finches in the thick growth behind him.
When they had discussed the relatively small issue of choosing a name for their organization, there had been a variety of views on the subject. The boys from around Niagara, the Iroquois advisers, had thought they needed something very direct and understandable, something the white man would remember because it was in his lingo and not too enigmatic. Frightening names had a strong lobby, mostly among the young fellows. They were very militant, and they wanted this to be apparent “out front,” as they said. His group was not a political group as such but had considerable sway in the matter, because they were the ones whose specific ancestors had lived here (it was their own names that appeared on the land claims). They had from the beginning an agreement of intention. They wanted a name that had specific historical import and at the same time was symbolic. Once he had been elected as chairman of the steering committee, a position which for all practical purposes meant that he was the man in charge, he had suggested the name Quahog People, and he had argued for its selection with good reasons.
Part of the strength of the white man’s tradition lay in the early economy of the Cape. Fishing was its backbone, and no small part of the industry was shellfishing. The oysters and clams of the Cape were famous in the Eastern United States, and whenever the locals evoked the power of their past, they would talk of the gone high quality of shellfish, saying it was even better in their grandfathers’ time. That would usually get them to speak of the hard life their ancestors had led, suggesting that their own backbones had been formed by these hardy fishermen. Now it was true that the fishermen who still worked the waters off the Cape worked very hard, and it was also true that those who had moved from a fishing tradition into other endeavors were hard workers also. But many of those in power had gotten their money and influence not from a tradition that had to do with hard sea work but from the tourist trade and the sale of land. When they did work, it was during the summertime, when the tourists came, and what work they did then wasn’t very hard work, though they often complained about it. In the winter the work consisted, for many of them, of a little light half-day labor and the counting of the money they had made during the summer.
That their ancestors’ toil gave them right of ownership of the land was also questionable, because though shellfishing was never associated with the Indians, it had been the Pamets who had lived on the Cape before the white man took over, who had started the shellfishing industry. Talk was always that the Pamets had lived in a kind of paradise here, had simply picked up the clams and oysters and eaten them. The truth was that they had harvested and cared for the shore waters in a very diligent manner. They had farmed the sea as they had farmed the land. They had used sea clams, spading the shells in with herring to fertilize their beanfields. Many of their implements were made from quahog shells: needles, hoes, pendants, even arrowheads. Shell heaps had been in evidence from the tip of the Cape to its foot. In this the historical light, if anyone could lay claim to the name Quahog People it was Frank Bumpus, a Pamet himself, and his organization. Quahog People was a good choice because it took a noun that the white man thought was part of his tradition and returned it to its proper place — and that was just what the Quahog People planned to do with the land upon which the golf course sat.
The symbolic implications of the name had been arrived at by Frank Bumpus himself, and when he spoke to his people about them, he spoke eloquently. He told them that, like the Indian, the quahog was always there. Each year the crop was ravaged, but each year it returned. The clams moved along the coast slightly, but they never moved too far from the integrity of their home ground. At times the red tide got to them, but enough of the seedlings always lived through so that a new crop was insured.
The white man harvested and ate them, they were passive in their acceptance of this, but their numbers were large and self-renewing. They were silent and enigmatic in their thoughts, but their power to survive was beyond question. He knew, when he told them these things, that he was stretching the truth beyond the symbolic implications a bit, and they knew it too. He would have liked their name to have the consistency of the allegories in the medieval illuminations he had studied, would have liked them to have the force and complexity he had marveled at in Shiva iconography. At the same time, he had argued that the name had a trickster quality to it. It was worthy of Hare and the African Anansi. Furthermore, its meaning would remain veiled to the white man: in this sense it would be a secret name, and that was important because it would symbolize their unity and closure, and thus their strength.
Frank Bumpus knew how much of this was politics, how much rabblerousing and magic, and how much pure bunk. Still, there were a lot of small chunks and pieces that came from the core philosophy, and these kept the rest of it in proper perspective. His enigmatic buffoon role on the links at Seaview was politics and a preparing of the false adversary as communications buffer once the occupation began. The Free the Skin Beach Coalition was bunk but of a fortuitous nature, in that it would serve well as a diversionary force. The kind of victory he hoped for was territorially minimal, and they would only need to hold the land for a short time for the tactical end to be accomplished. Visibility would grease the wheels; their lawyers would begin to handle it from there. The code post card had gone off, and he trusted that his relative, the tactician, was on his way, slowly and in an underground fashion. The government’s people had been watching them all for close to a year now, but Frank Bumpus was sure they had them properly confused. Soon enough Bob White would be here, and then they could begin the specifics in earnest.
THE CHIEF WAS LIFTED FROM HIS REVERIE BY THE SOUND of voices. He could hear the Chair yelling out as the foursome he was in reached the top of the hill that fronted the fifth green, and he pulled his feet back from the cliff’s edge, putting on and lacing up his left tennis shoe. He then took a large blue-and-white handkerchief from his pocket, tied it around his right ankle, and put his right shoe on as well. While they were over on the fifth green putting, he adjusted his cap, cleaned up his niblick by rubbing it against his leg, and stood up and dusted his clothing.
When Sammy, Chair, Eddie, and Wall were on their way over to the sixth tee, Chief Wingfoot stepped out of the bushes that bordered it. He was leaning heavily on the shaft of his niblick and limping. The handkerchief around his ankle flopped against his tennis shoe as he moved out to greet them.