Behind the cottage was a thicket of yaupon bushes and, beyond those, Clarence Willis’s mobile home faced the road and helped buffer the cottage from weekend traffic to the Shell Point ferry in the summer. The Willises, father and son, were watermen and boat builders like Guthrie’s grandfather; but they were to be away all week, according to Carl.
Carl and Sue are my distant cousins. At least, Sue is. On my mother’s Stephenson side. Their daughters are my age and I used to come down with them several times a year all through childhood and adolescence.
Between my brothers and their wives and a bunch of aunts and uncles, I can’t turn around in Colleton County without somebody telling someone else; so when Carl heard through the family grapevine that I’d been assigned to fill in at the Carteret County courthouse for an ailing judge, he insisted that I stay at their place. “We haven’t been down since February,” he said, “so all the water’s still cut off, but that’s no problem.”
Well, no, not if you don’t mind groping around up under the edge of the house for a half-dozen cutoff valves before you even tackle the pump itself. The house sits on low brick pilings, no skirting, no foundation, open to every blast of winter storms. Every time an exposed pipe freezes and bursts, Carl installs a new spigot so the pipe can be drained at that point, never mind the obstacles.
Guthrie was sucking at a bleeding knuckle where he’d knocked the scab off.
“Floor joist got me,” he said sheepishly.
I saw the other scabbed knuckles on his fist, then noticed a half-healed cut on his round chin. And although it had faded to a pale blue shadow, I could make out the remains of a bruise on the cheekbone beneath his right eye.
“Must have been quite a fight,” I observed.
“Ah, naw. Fell in my boat,” he said, sounding enough like one of my nephews to make it clear he didn’t plan to talk about it.
Fine with me. As a district court judge, I have to listen to too many stories of who took the first swing after who said what to go looking for yet another.
“When’d you get a boat?” I asked.
“November, when I turned fourteen,” said Guthrie.
“Your granddaddy give it to you?” I smiled, thinking how island kids must look forward to a first boat the way I’d looked forward to my first car.
“Naw, I worked out the money fishing and clamming.”
I forget what it was that killed his mother when he was two or three. Ruptured appendix? Or was it pneumonia? I’m pretty sure it was something that didn’t have to be fatal if she’d gotten treatment in time; but her husband was off pulling a drunk or something, and she just lay there in that trailer parked on the backside of nowhere and died.
Mickey Mantle Davis was too wild and shiftless to make a home for any child, so he dumped Guthrie on his parents and, as far as I could see, if he contributed anything to the boy’s upbringing, it was more as an older brother might than as a real father should.
As the boy and I talked, we’d been walking past wind-sculpted live oaks, across the flat grassy stretch that lay between the cottage and a knee-high ridge of sand that rose from the water’s edge. A short path had been worn through the mini-dune and we stepped through it onto the beach. Not that there’s much of a beach here. Even at dead low tide, there’s only a few feet of clear sand and that’s usually littered with kelp, an occasional boot or stray sneaker, conch shells, plastic six-pack rings or torn fishing nets. Being on the sound side of Shackleford Banks, waves here are generally just wavelets, lazy and gentle with hardly any break at all unless there’s a storm kicking up.
East of us was a wildish stretch that fronted an empty field. To the west was Mahlon Davis’s narrow landing, then another field, this one overgrown with yucca, wax myrtle and sumac. Along Mahlon’s line, and spilling over in places on that side, were an abandoned truck, a hodgepodge of raised cockerel pens and enough trash and debris to fill several dumpsters. At least the Davises had quit piling it along Carl’s line.
Sand fleas skittered away from our feet, and the terns and sandpipers that had flown up as we approached now resumed their inspection of the water’s edge a safe distance away.
Early afternoon and the tide was still low, but coming in. There was a funky smell of wet seaweed, salt water, and clumps of drying eel grass. Otherwise, the air was so crystalline that the black-and-white diamond-patterned lighthouse stood out crisply, and the sun was so dazzling that it almost cancelled the distant light that gleamed and flashed every fifteen seconds. Out in the channel, speedboats zoomed past, trailing wakes that rocked some pelicans that were floating with a few sea gulls a hundred feet offshore. Where the shoreline curved, more gulls lifted from the carcass of a rusted-out car and flew over to see if we happened to have stale bread or were dumping any fish offal. They voiced their disappointment in raucous cries when no food appeared and settled onto several small boats that were moored in close.
For several long minutes I just breathed it all in, feeling what Julia Lee’s poodle must feel when it slips the leash and heads for the woods. A whole week ahead of me. Five full days in a place where no one who knew me would have the right to make cracks about the way I dressed or drove or drank.
Like Julia Lee’s CoCo, I don’t get too many chances to run wild these days. Not that I planned to emulate CoCo, who’s never been spayed—despite what my brothers think, I have learned a little judicious discretion. Still, if I did take a notion to run through the underbrush, it was nice to know that my nearest nosey brother was more than a hundred miles away.
“That your boat?” I asked Guthrie, pointing to a white skiff with a dark red bottom.
“Naw, that’s Mark’s,” he said, naming another neighboring teenager. “Yonder’s mine.” He gestured proudly.
Sporting a recent coat of fresh white paint, the skiff was flat-bottomed, with a flared bow, two board seats, and a black outboard motor.
“Your granddaddy build it?” I asked, remembering that Mahlon Davis had begun framing a skiff the last time I was down. Now a trawler was taking shape beyond the boat shelter beside their house.
Harkers Islanders are famous all up and down the Atlantic Coast as independent boat builders who use lore handed down from generation to generation. Most boat works are one-or two-man operations. A man needs a fishing boat, he doesn’t have to go buy it. He can build it. Houses may get thrown together, but little skiffs aren’t much challenge to men who can build anything that floats, from yachts to fishing schooners, with no plans or blueprints, just by “rack of the eye.”
“He helped me,” Guthrie said, “but I did most of the work.”
He waded out to the boat and fiddled with the propeller blades with that proprietary air men always seem to have about boats or trucks. Teetering on the verge of manhood now. Fourteen and a half. His preadolescent chubbiness was almost gone, his belly was flattening, his muscles tightening.
But when he splashed back to shore, he was still a diffident kid. “Want to see how she rides?”
Being banged around the sound in a flat-bottomed skiff was a far cry from skimming across the surface in a streamlined power cruiser. Still...
“Wouldn’t know where I could dig a few clams for supper, would you?” I asked.
“Other side of the channel, over near the banks is good.” Boyish eagerness to show off was suddenly tinged with crafty materialism. “Wouldn’t take more’n five dollars worth of gas.”
As I made a show of considering, he added, “Carl’s got two rakes. I’d help you dig ‘em.”
• • •
Ten minutes later, I’d changed into shorts, a windbreaker and a raggedy old pair of Sue’s sneakers and we were heading out to the channel, a five-gallon plastic bucket and two clam rakes stowed in the bow. Despite April sunshine, the air was nippy out on the water, but I left the jacket unzipped and the hood down. Wind streamed through my hair and salt spray misted my face. Guthrie sat in the stern with his hand on the tiller and the throttle wide open. If he was chilly in just a tee shirt, he didn’t show it.