Long Voyage Back Read Online Free Page B

the clear sunshine, enjoying the luxury of the calm water. They were working their last oyster bed, using the long wooden shafts of their rake-like metal tongs with practised ease. Both Captain 0lly, a small wizened old man, wrinkled and bald, and his twenty-year-old son, a thickset, husky youth, had huge forearms and biceps from their years of working the oyster beds. Their twenty-six foot fishing smack, the Lucy Mae, with only a small deckhouse forward and a huge area aft for depositing the oysters, was old and paint-chipped and heeled groggily as both men worked. The two men had been at the beds since one o'clock that afternoon, starting a couple of hours before the three P.M. low tide and planning to quit a couple of hours after the tide turned. In all that time their work proceeded in a casual persistent rhythm, 011y talking away occasionally in seemingly free-association monologues, Chris, quiet, steady, always puffing on a cigarette, now and then grunting a comment or asking a question. When 011y would lapse into silence or lean on his rake, Chris would continue his oystering, working the heavy long tongs until he could feel them full, then raising them to the surface and depositing the contents on to the aft deck. Most of the sorting would come later. 0lly's monologues and silences succeeded each other in a mood as relaxed as the becalmed bay. Chris would occasionally down a bottle of beer, his father a glass of water, sometimes 'coloured' with a dash of whisky. They never had to speak about their work; they knew their routine so thoroughly they could have oystered efficiently from dawn to dusk and not uttered a word. Smith Island, their home, lay to the east of them, Tangier Island to the south and Point Lookout and the wide mouth of the Potomac River to the west.
    As Captain Olly neared the end of his working day he was feeling depressed at how tired he felt. After less than four hours work his back ached, and if he didn't stop and lean on his rake handle every five minutes or so he got winded. It embarrassed him, and he knew that even if he tried to pretend to be so fascinated with his own monologues that he couldn't work, Chris could tell he was shirking.
    Ever since Ellen had run off to Florida two years ago with Cap'n Smithers, his life had been downhill. It was the first time since he was fourteen he hadn't had a woman reg'lar and he felt his health was deteriorating fast as a result. The main reason he went oystering with Chris most every day was so he wouldn't be stuck alone in his house watching the TV. A man could go nuts watching those game shows and soaps. Ì don't know, son,' he found himself saying in an effort to cheer himself up, 'seems to me some of these oysters must have meningitis. Seem sorta stunted. We may have to sell 'em to the circus as midgets.' He had deposited a load of oysters and muck on to the deck and was staring at it with exaggerated gloom. 'Though I s'pose midgets ain't in fashion any more even in the circus. People these days want things big: big money, big boats, big tits.
    '
    As he wiped the sweat from his bald top he squinted south at a couple of sailboats sitting like cement monuments in the bay. That'll teach 'em, he thought vaguely, the rich playboy good-for-nothings.
    `They even seem to want their wars bigger these days,' he went on, turning back to his work, `sittin' up there in Moscow and Washington calculatin' how they can build a real big elephant-like-war that'll flatten the earth like a pancake so the gods can use it as a frisbee . .
    As 011y lowered his tongs back into the water, Chris made an unaccustomed halt to his work.
    `There ain't gonna be a war, is there, Pop?' he asked.
    `Well now you know I never predict what the rake'll bring up,' 011y snapped back automatically, 'but I got to say that imagination ain't created the stupid terrible thing which man ain't fool enough to up and do.'
    `They ain't fightin' yet,' Chris commented, pausing to light a fresh