Oyster Days and Off-Season Ways

My mother's family came over from Jamaica in nineteen fifty-something, and I've told that story so many times I could do it in my sleep. But Chet had asked me twice already that November, so I told him again while we stacked folding chairs in the warehouse after closing.

"So your people just got on a boat and picked the coldest place in Canada," he said. He was twenty-eight and always acted surprised by history.

"Basically, yes. Granddad worked the steel plant in Ramona for thirty years. It was that or the Bahamas, and somebody told him Nova Scotia had better fish." I folded another chair. "Now I'm here, three generations later, running a flea market out of a dead fish-packing warehouse in late November, which brings me to our actual problem."

Chet grinned. Here it came, the speech.

"We are eleven thousand dollars behind on the winter lease. The roof needs four thousand in repairs by spring or Beatrice's inspection committee shuts us down. Vendor count is down from forty to twenty-six because half these people can't survive the off-season. And the association vote on the parking lot is Thursday."

"The parking lot fixes all of that," Chet said. "More parking, more foot traffic, more vendors."

"That's the theory. If it passes."

It didn't pass Thursday. Or I should say it didn't get voted on, because Andreas Kemp stood up in the middle of the meeting and turned the whole thing into a circus.

I knew who he was before he said his name. Everybody knows the Kemp brothers. He was the one who shucked oysters at The Salty Pearl, the one with the sun-weathered face that never seemed to lose its color even in February. He was thirty-three and he wore rubber boots to a neighborhood association meeting like that was a normal thing to do.

He stood up when Beatrice Leland called for discussion, and he held up a jar of murky water.

"This is from the tidal slough off the east channel," he said. "The parking lot drains straight into it. You pave that ground, you bury the oyster beds my family has worked since before this association existed."

Beatrice, who is forty-two and has chaired this association her whole adult life because her father founded it, rapped her gavel twice.

"Mr. Kemp, the proposal is for a gravel lot, not a drain field."

"Gravel lot, drain field, same rain falls on it." He set the jar down on the folding table like evidence at a trial. "I harvest four hundred dozen a year out of that slough. That's not sentiment, that's income."

Somebody in the back said oysters grossed him out anyway, and a woman next to him shushed him, and then three people started talking at once about drainage and property values and whether The Salty Pearl even counted as a real business, and Beatrice banged the gavel three times.

"Recess," she announced. "Ten minutes. Coffee is in the kitchen, and Mr. Kemp, we will hear from you in proper order after the break."

I went out to the hallway to get away from it, and Andreas followed me.

"You're the one pushing this," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm the manager of a market that's dying, yes."

"Sylvia Naeole." He said my name as if checking it off a list. "I know. You put the notice in the newsletter."

"And you're the man with the jar of dirty water."

"That's slough water. There's a difference." He looked out the window at the grey bay. "Look, I'm not against your market. I ate a grilled cheese there in October. I'm against concrete going where my oysters live."

"It's gravel, and it's a hundred yards from the channel. You're being dramatic."

"I'm being accurate." He turned back to me. "Here's my problem with you, Sylvia. You came to this island at twenty-two for a summer job and you never learned what the bay does for this town, because you've never needed it to. You see empty mud and think parking."

That stung, mostly because he wasn't entirely wrong about the mud part.

"So what," I said, "you want me to prove I respect the bay? Fine. Challenge me to something. Isn't that what you water people do?"

He actually thought about it. I watched him decide I was serious.

"Shuck-off," he said. "One day. I teach you or you fail in public. You shuck three dozen clean against my three dozen, and if you can even hold a knife without looking like a tourist, maybe I'll believe you understand what's out there."

"And if I'm terrible?"

"Then you pull the proposal yourself."

I stuck out my hand before I could think better of it.

"Deal. But I get a counter-challenge. You sell something at my market."

He frowned. "Sell what?"

"I don't know yet. Something of yours. Something you'd have to price for regular people instead of restaurant men. If commerce is so easy to dismiss, you can stand at a stall for one Saturday and learn what it's worth."

"That's not much of a punishment."

"It will be," I said. "I'll pick the item."

He shook my hand, and his grip was warm and rough and it lasted about a second longer than a business handshake should.

"Saturday, then. Low tide's at ten. Bring gloves you don't like."

* * *

He picked me up at the dock at nine in a rusted blue pickup that smelled like diesel and salt, and I regretted the gloves comment immediately because he handed me a pair of cut-resistant gloves anyway, like he'd already planned for my hands.

"First lesson," he said, handing me a knife with a short, stubby blade. "The hinge. You find the hinge and you go in there, not the front. Everybody goes for the front."

"Like cracking a safe."

"Worse. Oysters hold grudges." He put one flat side up in his left hand and showed me the angle. "You feel for the give, then you twist. Twist, not pry. Pry it and you shatter the shell and get grit in the meat, and then you've killed it for nothing."

My first one took four minutes and resembled a crime scene. His took nine seconds and looked like a photograph.

"Again," he said, and his voice held something not mocking exactly, more like patience he was surprised to be using.

By the second dozen my wrist ached and I'd figured out the twist, sort of. He counted my presentables out loud. Seven clean. Nine clean. Eleven.

"You learn fast for someone who thinks the bay is mud," he said.

"You're a decent teacher for someone who brought a jar of dirty water to a public meeting."

"That jar did its job." He crouched next to me and pointed out at the flat grey water, all the way out to where the boats sat at anchor. "See that line of darker water? That's the channel. Everything on this side of it, that's my beds. My grandfather opened them up in nineteen sixty-one. Four hundred dozen a year off this slough, and every one of them filters that water."

"So it's not just income."

"It's never just income out here. It's the whole reason there's a town." He glanced at me sideways. "Why'd you stay, anyway? Twenty-two, summer job, that's thirteen years ago. People don't stay by accident."

I worked the hinge of number thirty-one while I thought about it.

"Nobody ever asked me to leave, I guess. And I liked that everything here closes at six. Where I grew up, everything was loud all the time. Here it goes quiet in November and you can hear yourself think."

"That's not quiet," he said. "That's just slower noise."

Number thirty-one opened clean, and he actually clapped once, a single flat clap.

"That's a dozen presentable in this round. You might survive Saturday after all."

"Saturday is your funeral, not mine. I still get to pick what you sell."

He handed me oyster number thirty-two.

"I've been thinking about that," he said. "I have a chess set at home. Carved it myself. Missing a pawn."

"A chess set?"

"Carved the pieces from birch. My grandfather's pattern. Never found a buyer, mostly because I never tried to find one." He looked embarrassed for a second, which I hadn't expected from a man in rubber boots. "You can sell that, if you want. At your market."

I put the knife down.

"Wait. You carved a chess set and you've never tried to sell it, but you're giving it to me to sell?"

"You said I had to sell something at your stall. That's the something. I'm doing it right now. Challenge met." He shrugged. "The pawn's missing anyway. Nobody pays full price for an incomplete set."

"An incomplete handmade chess set," I said slowly, "carved by you. Andreas, that's worth real money if we price it right. That's not a punishment, that's a featured item."

He looked at me like he'd handed me a dead seagull and I'd called it a bouquet.

"It's missing a pawn."

"Chet sells vintage board games. Incomplete games are half his business. Collectors buy incomplete sets all the time, or we list the pieces separately." I was already doing the math in my head. "Andreas, you just handed me my best vendor item of the season."

He picked up the oyster knife and went back to shucking, but I could see him fighting a smile.

"I still think your parking lot is a bad idea," he said.

"And I still think your slough can survive a gravel lot a hundred yards off. But I'll tell you what. If your chess set sells well Saturday, I'll ask Beatrice for a joint session before the vote. You and me, both proposals on the table, and we work out drainage together."

"You'd do that?"

"I'd consider it. If the chess set sells."

He laughed then, a real laugh, and the sound carried out over the flat grey water, and I went back to oyster number thirty-two with a much better attitude than I'd come with.

It was, looking back, the moment the whole thing stopped being a fight. Neither of us knew it yet, but I think he knew it before I did.

We set the shuck-off for the following Saturday, which gave me a week to either improve or embarrass myself, and Andreas, being the kind of man he was, offered to fix both problems at once.

"Come by the Pearl Tuesday after close," he said, while we were loading my knives back into his truck. "I'll teach you the beds I harvest. Not the ones I shuck for tourists. The real ones."

"The real ones being?"

"The ones where a bad shuck actually costs me money."

So Tuesday night, after the restaurant emptied out, I sat on a crate in the back of The Salty Pearl with a bucket of oysters the size of my forearm and a knife that fit my hand better than the one I'd been using. Andreas closed the hatch behind the bar so the kitchen crew wouldn't gawk, and then he stood behind me and put his hands over mine.

"You're gripping like you're mad at it. Loosen up. The knife does the work, you just tell it where."

I want to tell you I stayed professional and focused on bivalves the whole time. I did not. The man was thirty-three years old and he had forearms like dock rope, and when he reached around me to correct my angle, his chest was warm against my back and I lost the thread of whatever he was saying about hinges. I felt a flash of something that took me a second to name, and it was gratitude, of all things. Not for the lesson. For the fact that he had bothered. He had every reason to let me fail Saturday and win by default, and instead he was spending his Tuesday night teaching me to beat him.

"Third hinge is looser on these," he said. "Feel that?"