Chesapeake Requiem by Earl Swift

Author:Earl Swift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

A well-stocked aisle at Daley & Son. (EARL SWIFT)

Fourteen

HIS SKIFF’S OUTBOARD “AIN’T GOT A REVERSE OR A NEUTRAL,” so Cameron Evans has to cut the engine thirty feet from Ooker’s crab shanty and let the boat coast the rest of the way in. He’s earning pocket money by bustering up the mayor’s peelers this dark Saturday morning, and he’ll deserve every penny: Tangier is gripped by a blustery chill. Its water tower is all but invisible behind a caul of misty rain.

The skiff glides alongside Ooker’s dock and thumps against a piling, which Cameron hugs to bring us to a stop. Shielded from the elements in a slicker and waterproof pants, he scrambles onto the deck and strides past the cats to the shedding tanks. In one, Ooker’s placed a flounder, olive gray and a foot long, that blundered into a pot. It spreads pancake-flat and motionless on the bottom, laying low among a gang of crouching peelers. Cameron plucks several crabs from the water and moves them to other tanks, then eyes the busters in the tank closest to the shanty. He scoops out two soft crabs with a hand net and carries them to the cooler, but opts to leave a third for his next visit; it just seconds ago pulled free from its shell and is too soft, too frail, to pick up and move.

He makes this judgment without touching the crab. At sixteen, Cameron has already developed a waterman’s almost extrasensory ability to appraise crabs with a fleeting glance. Few other Tangier teenagers can boast his level of skill. But then, few others share his interest in the island’s chief industry—or, for that matter, his passion for much of the life that his father and grandfathers enjoyed as boys.

While some other island youngsters sit indoors, entranced by TV and video games, Cameron is almost always outside, using a compound bow to hunt stingrays down off the spit with his classmate Isaiah McCready, or roaming the island with his camera, or casting for rockfish off the docks. Hunkering down in duck blinds in the cold and dark of winter. Digging for clams in the mudflats. This kid’s a true Tangierman. Has mud between his toes, as islanders say. Lives for the place.

Two busters have hung up and died while shedding. He separates them from their old shells. A quick examination determines they’re recently deceased, so he carries them into the shanty, wraps them in plastic, and places them in an enormous chest freezer almost brimming with similarly wrapped softshells—hundreds on hundreds of crabs that Ooker will provide to his buyers over the winter, when live animals can’t be had.

I ask Cameron what he plans to do once he graduates with the class of 2018. “I really don’t know anything as of yet,” he says. He pours dry cat food into small mounds on the floor. Sam Alito, John Roberts, and Ann Coulter are blurs crossing the room. “I’m keeping my mind open.”

“Do you think you’ll go to college?”

“Yeah, I think I want to go,” he replies.

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