“Credit card friendship, the easiest kind,” whispered a voice inside my head.
Preacher or pragmatist?
• • •
When I got back to the cottage, the Bynum house already had a closed-up look to it. His sons live further down the island, near the ‘fish house, and I guessed the wake was probably being held at the funeral home.
I’d barely stepped through the door when the phone began ringing. Yeah, it could’ve been a dozen different people—I would even have welcomed somebody selling aluminum siding—but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
Actually, it could have been one of the mouthier ones. Could have been Andrew or Herman or Will or Jack. Instead, it was only Seth, five brothers up from me, and the brother who always cut me the most slack.
“Hey, Seth,” I chirped. “You want me to bring you and Minnie some clams Friday?”
He didn’t even bother to answer that. “What’d you go and get mixed up in now, Deb’rah?” he asked sternly.
At one time or another, most of my brothers had used this cottage or gone fishing with Carl, so Seth had met Andy and he listened without fussing as I explained the situation and how I was only tangentially involved. “How’d you hear so quick, anyhow?”
“Some SBI agent down there recognized your name and told Terry and Terry told Dwight and Dwight called me.
“I swear, you’d think SBI agents and deputy sheriffs would have better things to talk about. I hope nobody’s worried Daddy with it.”
“Not yet,” Seth said. Concern was still in his voice. “You sure you haven’t stepped in the middle of something, shug?”
I promised him that it was sheer coincidence and he promised that he’d do what he could to keep Daddy from hearing; and yeah, long as I was coming back Friday, a mess of clams might be right nice.
• • •
There was still no sign of Guthrie when I carried a glass of tea out to sit on the porch and unwind, but Mark Lewis and Makely Lawrence, two more of the neighboring youths, were headed up the path from the water, each with a bucket of clams they’d dug.
“You wouldn’t want to sell me a half-dozen, would you?” I called.
Mark grinned. “No, but I’ll give you six if that’s all you want.”
“I only want to make a small chowder.”
“You give her three and I’ll give her three,” said Makely, not to be outdone by his cousin.
They set their buckets on the porch and each picked out their three biggest. The clams had been dug out of the mud, but they were the size of coffee saucers. As I should have suspected, the boys didn’t want money, so much as they wanted details about Andy Bynum’s death.
“Didn’t Guthrie tell you?” I asked.
“Yeah, well—” said Makely.
“How come everybody says that?”
Makely looked at Mark, who said, “He got into trouble for taking his granddaddy’s skiff out.”
“What? I thought it was his.”
“Ain’t,” Makely said tersely.
I let it pass and told them about going out with Guthrie, finding Andy lying dead, then Jay Hadley’s arrival, followed by the police boat.
“Who do you think could have shot him?” I asked, curious to know what their elders were saying.
Again the shrugs.
“Drugs,” Makely grunted. He was younger and almost as imaginative as Guthrie.
Mark was more thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Lots of people were mad at him ‘cause he was for making everybody buy a license to sell their fish. Like, if that happens, we wouldn’t be supposed to sell you a mess of crabs or anything unless we had a license.”
“Yeah,” said Makely. “Heard tell shrimpers wanted to burn his house down.”
“Just talk,” said Mark, dismissively.
Perhaps. But as I was scrubbing the clams later, I thought about the island’s reputation for settling its own scores. Even outsiders like me remembered the bitter anger and deep, deep hurt when Shackleford Banks was declared a wilderness area under the US Park Service.
Shackleford was the ancestral home of most islanders until the hurricanes of 1896 and 1899 forced them to relocate, and almost every island family maintained a rough fish camp over there. Unfortunately, few had clear deeds to the land. The two or three who did were given lifetime rights, but they fared no better than those with no deeds. When the untitled cabins were confiscated in 1985, some of the dispossessed went over and torched all the camps.
Had Andy Bynum angered some hot-tempered islander so thoroughly that a simple house-burning was not enough to settle the grudge?
• • •
The telephone rang as I finished gutting the clams and chopping them into small pieces. This time it was Carl, wanting to know if I found everything okay.
“Yeah, once Guthrie and I figured out your new water pump system.”
“Same system it’s always been,” said Carl.
I sighed. “That Guthrie’s got himself a reality problem, hasn’t he?”
Carl laughed. “He been stretching the truth on you, too?”
He was startled to hear about Andy and I had to go through all the details again.
“Say it was out at Hes Hadley’s leased bottom?”
There was a significant silence.
“What?” I asked.
It took some prodding, but eventually he repeated some gossip he’d heard from Mahlon Davis: “Said Hes warned Andy off his wife.”
“Andy?” I was astonished.
“Oh, heck, yeah. Andy Bynum liked the ladies almost as much as Mahlon does. He just wasn’t as crude about it.
He told me to be careful and not to go sticking my nose into anything that wasn’t my business, a piece of advice every man in my whole family feels free to give, then he put Sue on so I could get her to go over the recipe for Core Sound cornmeal dumplings. (“One part plain flour to four parts cornmeal.”)
“Did Andy ever make a pass at you?” I asked.
“Well, sure he did,” she drawled. “I’d have been insulted if he hadn’t, the way he used to flirt with every grown woman. Didn’t mean anything. It was just his way of being polite. Now if it’d been Mahlon Davis...”
There was no need to elaborate.
She told me there was a little piece of salt pork in the freezer if I wanted it for my chowder and rang off without giving me any advice at all. Yet, paradoxically, it was her words that left me disoriented. Nothing sends you straight back to childhood quicker than getting an unexpected insight into how things—relationships—really were when you lived in Eden, a child oblivious to the Serpent.
• • •
While the clams simmered on the stove’s lowest setting, I carried the shells and wastes down to dump at the water’s edge. The fresh shell of a loggerhead turtle floated in the wash. Somebody not far away was probably enjoying a hot turtle stew at the moment—hot in more than one sense, because loggerheads are a protected species.
Almost twilight, yet gulls still came shrieking over, pushing and shoving and elbowing each other aside to be first at whatever was going down.
A line of brown pelicans flew by on their way to roost, as indifferent to the gulls as the sandpipers further down the sand.
Like their human counterparts, each had their own agenda for the water. Netters, tongers, dredgers or trawlers—according to Barbara Jean, the Alliance Andy Bynum had started wasn’t so much a cooperative effort as a self-serving attempt to hang on to the particular niche each group considered a personal birthright.
Out in the channel, an expensive late-model sports boat headed for the Beaufort marina, and its running lights gleamed a rich red and green in the gathering dusk. A few moments later, its wake broke against the shore, scattering gulls and rocking the little homemade skiffs moored close in.