There was a married daughter living on the western edge of Harkers Island and a baby grandson named for Barbara Jean’s grandfather, the one who’d started the factory. Between all my older brothers and most of my friends, I’ve looked at an awful lot of baby pictures over the years. This one was still in the tadpole stage, but when Barbara Jean and Chet both brought out their wallets, I made appropriate cooing noises.
The restaurant was light and airy, pale pink cloths and nosegays of sea oats graced the tables, white paddle ceiling fans circulated the air overhead. The few suits and ties in the room were worn by lawyer types. Everyone else seemed to have on canvas deckshoes, white duck or khaki pants, and pullovers or silky windbreakers that featured broad bands of turquoise or coral. Surely they couldn’t all be sailing yachts back to Newport or Martha’s Vineyard?
Several tables over were a handsome fortyish couple that could’ve stepped out of a Docksider ad. Between them, with her back to me, sat what looked like their daughter. Next to the woman, a little boy of two or three sat in a booster chair. All four had thick, straight blond hair. The man’s was clipped short, as was the boy’s; the woman’s blunt cut brushed the shoulder pads of her white sweater, while the girl’s long ponytail ended halfway down her back. Amusingly, the girl had brought along a hand puppet that was her twin in miniature: same long blonde ponytail, same coral-and-white nylon jumpsuit.
“Isn’t she just precious?” agreed Barbara Jean, who’d followed my gaze. She bit into a crispy hushpuppy and said, “What’d you think of Jay Hadley?”
I cocked a cynical eye at Chet. “So now I’ll ask her how she knows Jay Hadley and she’ll tell me everybody down here knows Jay Hadley, right?”
“Well, most everybody who fishes for their livelihood.” He gathered up the menus the waitress had handed us and said to her, “We’re in sort of a hurry, darlin’, so why don’t you bring us each a nice bowl of your she-crab soup, then a big plate of fried oysters and side dishes of slaw all around. That okay with you, Deborah? Honey?”
Barbara Jean and I agreed it sounded delicious to us.
Her roots go way back to Beaufort’s beginnings, while Chet’s people were carpetbaggers who came south after the Civil War. Even though Chet teases her that she married down, both are still more boardroom and resort town than leased bottoms and clam rakes, and it surprised me that she’d know Jay Hadley.
“Jay’s real active in the Independent Fishers Alliance that Andy Bynum helped start. I’m a member, too.”
“See, what’s been happening down here,” said Chet, “is that tempers have been getting more and more frayed these last few years.”
“And with good cause,” Barbara Jean chimed in.
“Everybody wants a slice of the resources and everybody thinks his wants are more justified than anyone else’s.”
“Well, some are!” Barbara Jean said hotly.
Chet grinned at me. “See? And she’s one of the reasonable ones. Eat your soup, honey,” he said as the waitress distributed wonderfully fragrant bowls of hot ambrosia.
She-crab soup is something like New England clam chowder, only made with the yellow roe and luscious back fins of female crabs.
Barbara Jean obediently savored a spoonful before diving back into a recitation of the area’s conflicts.
“See, Deborah, for years the water here belonged to the people who worked it. We took out what we wanted, when we wanted, and as much as we wanted because fish and shellfish were plentiful and there weren’t many rules or limits. Fishing was the backbone of Carteret County’s economy. In fact, Beaufort was even called Fishtowne at one point. Then they started in with all the rules and regulations—”
“Because the water’s overfished and varieties are declining,” said Chet.
“For which we get all the blame. Never mind all the sportsmen coming down taking whatever they want, or developers destroying natural habitats, or the pier owners and the jet ski rentals and the tackle shop owners who don’t want any nets or big boats in the sound because they say we’re driving away the tourists. They particularly don’t want any trawlers. You won’t believe the propaganda they put out about us!”
I’d never seen her this vehement back in Raleigh.
“They’re going to kill our menhaden industry. Thank God Chet’s got a head for investments or we’d be out in the street. And what’s going to happen to the men we employ? Twenty-three black families and—”
“And she’s one of the reasonable ones?” I asked Chet.
“Maybe not as reasonable as Andy Bynum,” he conceded as he reached for another hushpuppy.
“The government calls it protection and management of the resources,” said Barbara Jean, “when it’s nothing in the world but meddling and restrictive and economic murder.”
“All the same,” said Chet, “when the state started Marine Fisheries—”
“Marine Fisheries Commission,” I murmured knowingly.
“—Andy made sure he was one of the commercial fishermen who got a seat on it. He was realistic enough to know that times really were a-changing. ‘Regulations are coming,’ he’d say, ‘whether you want ‘em or not.’ And he figured he’d rather be on the inside helping to shape those regulations than on the outside watching commercial interests get swamped. Some of the watermen thought he was a traitor to their cause.”
Barbara Jean nodded. “I was one of them at first. But some of what he had to say made sense. So many other interests are pulling at Core Sound now—developers, pier owners, the motels that cater to sportsmen, all those upstate surf fishers who say that trawling and netting interfere with their fun and then those Dare County millionaires with their pet legislators’ve got into it...” She shook her head in exasperation. “But Andy can—could—see all sides and most people on all sides would at least listen to him. I don’t know who’s going to take his place.”
“Jay Hadley?” I asked.
Barbara Jean snorted. “A woman? Honey, you’re talking the last bastion of male supremacy here. My daddy’s been dead twelve years but they still call my company Wash Neville’s plant.”
I savored a final spoonful of soup. “The Hadley woman seemed pretty much in control when she came roaring out there yesterday with a .22 to see who was messing ‘round their leased bottom. And what about that Alliance you mentioned?”
“Independent Fishers Alliance. That was Andy’s idea. Most watermen work alone or in one-or two-man operations unless it’s an established family business. I guess you’d call us a bit independent down here.”
“Independent?” Chet shook his head as he began to divvy up the huge plate of oysters the waitress had set down in front of him. “Prickly as sea urchins and suspicious as hermit crabs.”
“But Andy got us all together and gave us a coastal version of Abraham Lincoln,” said Barbara Jean. “A boat divided against itself could not saiclass="underline" united we might float, divided we’d surely drown. Jay Hadley did a lot of the secretarial work when it was getting started a few years back; and I think she still goes in a few times a week to pick up the slack when Andy’s away. She’s bright, Jay is. If she could’ve gone to college, no telling where she’d be now. Her husband started out like a lot of the old-timer proggers—”
“Proggers?” I’d occasionally heard the word over the years but never given it much thought.
“That’s another of those Elizabethan remnants of speech,” said Chet. “Means folks who forage around the water’s edge, poking, or ‘progging’ at things.”
Barbara Jean nodded. “That was Jay’s husband all right—a traditional independent fisherman who thought he’d fish the cycle like his daddy and his granddaddy before him. It’s taken her five years to convince Heston Hadley that leased bottoms could work, but she finally talked him into selling his big boat two years ago and putting the money into seed clams and mesh bags. They’re going to make twice the money with half the effort if things keep going the way they have.”