The oysters had arrived in sizzling perfection—crisp on the outside, plump and meltingly tender on the inside—and the next few minutes were devoted to a proper appreciation of Core Sound’s continuing bounty.
“They’re growing oysters on leased bottoms, too,” Barbara Jean said between mouthfuls. “On ladders.”
She was prepared to go into more details, but I didn’t want to hear. “Will your Alliance continue without Bynum?”
She considered. “Who knows? Short-term? Maybe. Long-term? Till somebody’s oars don’t reach the water and Andy’s not here to lift the ocean for them. Till all commercial fishing gets pushed slam out of the sound and off the banks, or the trawlers hear that they have to keep using turtle excluders and shrimpers don’t. Jay can do the paperwork and maybe keep up with all the rules and regulations that keep rolling in till they can find some man to sit in Andy’s chair, but finding someone that everybody trusts—”
Barbara Jean’s words trailed off as her attention was diverted. I turned to see a stocky male stride through the crowded restaurant, jostling tables and diners and nearly causing a waitress to drop her tray. It was the same man who’d almost barreled me over at the Clerk of Court’s office and he seemed even angrier now than he had earlier as he made his way over to a table halfway across the room from us.
It was occupied by a lone woman, another blonde (ash, this time), very petite, with oversized pale blue glasses that covered much of her face. Her hair fell in a loose pageboy along her chin line as she tilted her head toward the man, but her slender hand held its place in the papers she had been reading when he interrupted. No smile on her thin lips; no encouraging or conciliatory body language either. She sat absolutely motionless until he began to run out of steam, then turned back to her papers, clearly dismissing him.
He glared at her, thick hands on his hips, and anger deepened his voice. Everyone quit eating and flat-out stared.
“By God, I’ll sue you for criminal fraud!” he shouted. “You knew I was going to turn it into a party boat.”
She turned those pale blue glasses on him again. “You bought the Lucky Linville as is,” she said calmly. “What you planned to do with her was not my concern.”
She never raised her voice and if the room hadn’t gone so silent, I wouldn’t have been able to hear her. The manager and two hefty busboys surrounded the stocky man who by now was nearly apoplectic with rage.
As they hustled him out, the rest of us pretended we hadn’t been staring. The woman returned to her reading completely unruffled. After an eternity, the usual flow of conversation ebbed back into the room with the tinkle of ice in tall glasses and the clink of utensils against china.
“She sold Zeke Myers the Lucky Linville?” Barbara Jean asked Chet just as I asked, “What was all that about?”
Chet shrugged, but suddenly I was remembering last night’s phone call. “Is that Linville Pope by any chance?”
“You know her?”
“Not really. She invited me for cocktails tomorrow night. Said she was a friend of Judge Mercer’s.”
“I do hope you thought to pack a bulletproof vest,” Barbara Jean said sweetly.
4
Will your anchor hold in the storms of life,
When the clouds unfold their wings of strife?
When the strong tides lift and the cables strain,
Will your anchor drift, or firm remain?
—Priscilla J. Owens
With daylight saving now in effect, the sun was still high as I left the courthouse that afternoon and drove toward Harkers Island through a countryside less green than in other years. Only last month, a late-winter storm had left whole stretches of coastal pines, yaupon, azaleas, and live oaks so coated with salt spray that their needles and leaves had turned brown on the seaward side. Branches had shattered off and in more than one yard women were piling brush and men were still busy with chainsaws on trees uprooted by the storm.
Occasionally as I drove eastward, I spotted boarded-up windows, trailers that had shifted on their footings, and sheets of plastic tacked over gaping holes in the side of a house or roof.
For the first time, it belatedly registered just how much damage the coast had sustained. I remembered hearing radio bulletins that the “storm of the century” was headed our way, but then it had skipped over Dobbs and Raleigh so gently that I’d almost immediately quit paying attention.
True, Dwight Bryant, Colleton County’s deputy sheriff, had done a lot of mouthing about the snows up in western Virginia (his ex-wife and young son lived in Shaysville and had been snowed in for several days), but late snows aren’t uncommon in the Blue Ridge. If Channel 11’s “Eyewitness” weatherman ever called it a hurricane—hurricanes in March?—I’m sure I’d have noticed; yet listening to Chet and Barbara Jean Winberry describe how the bottom seemed to have dropped out of their barometer, the ninety-miles-per-hour winds, gusting to over a hundred, what else could it have been?
At the courthouse, during our afternoon break, I heard of a nine-year-old killed when high winds snapped a pine over in Newport and sent it crashing into his family’s mobile home. Roofs were ripped from houses, siding peeled from stores, sheets of tin had kited down the center of Morehead City.
“Lord, yes!” said one of the lawyers standing around the coffee urn. “Boats tore loose from moorings, the docks all along Taylors Creek were awash, and power lines?” He snapped his fingers. “Like two-pound test hit by marlins.”
Much of the area was without electricity for more than a week, they told me, while power crews brought in from all over worked around the clock with local linesmen.
Somehow, it embarrassed me that I hadn’t been aware of their ordeal, just as it bothered me that I hadn’t known doodly about the issues that now inflamed Barbara Jean and others who earned their living from the ocean sounds and estuaries.
“You label the women of Harkers Island standoffish and aloof,” lectured my internal preacher, “yet when have you made more than self-serving perfunctory overtures?”
Shamed, I thought about how I must look from their viewpoint. First as a child, then as a teenager, I’d come down with my cousins, played in the water, then gone juking and cruising around the Circle at Atlantic Beach. I treated their living space like a playground created for my personal pleasure. As an adult, I swam, water-skied, loafed, helped Carl and my younger cousin Scotty set gill nets out in front of the house so I could take home a couple of coolers of fresh seafood for my brothers and their families, then headed back inland to my comfortable life with less consideration than if those women were costumed characters in a theme park.
“Oh, give it a rest,” fumed the cynical pragmatist, who usually starts jeering whenever I get any noble thoughts. “You think anybody down here really feels deprived because one more upstater didn’t try to be their best friend?”
Okay, okay. Even so, just past Otway, I pulled in at a florist that was still open. The young woman behind the counter said she’d heard that Andy Bynum’s body had been released to a funeral home on the island and that the funeral was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. I ordered a basket of silk flowers to be sent: Dutch irises, buttercups, red poppies and lilies of the valley.