Chapter 9 - The Salt in the Seam
The skiff was sixteen feet of marine plywood and fiberglass, built in my father’s shed in 1974. It was painted the dead-grass green of the autumn marshes, and it had the smell that every good coastal boat carries—two-stroke oil, wet marsh mud, rusted iron anchors, and thirty years of dried fish scales ground into the grain of the floorboards.
The tide was running out hard through the Hamlin Sound when we dropped the boat off the trailer at the Isle of Palms marina at 5:45 on Saturday morning.
The stars were still out—hard, cold chips of ice scattered across a sky that was turning from ink to navy over the barrier islands. The air was twenty-eight degrees, cold enough that the salt spray froze into a thin, white glaze on the gunwales the moment we cleared the harbor jetties.
Michael sat on the middle thwart, his knees tucked into the ribs of the boat. He was wearing an old wool watch cap and a pair of my rubber boots that were half a size too big for him, his feet padded with two pairs of wool socks.
He hadn't spoken since we left the kitchen, where Ellen had packed six cold sausage biscuits into a greasy paper bag and filled a green Stanley thermos with coffee black enough to float a lead sinker.
I killed the six-horsepower Johnson motor half a mile short of the shell banks.
The sound of the engine died, replaced instantly by the massive, sucking silence of the Carolina lowcountry at low water—the hiss of millions of small fiddler crabs scurrying across the mud, the dry rattle of the spartina stalks rubbing together in the north wind, and the far-off, hollow roar of the Atlantic surf breaking against the shoals of Dewees Island.
"Take the oars, Mike," I said.
He didn't ask questions. He leaned forward, slipped the ash oars into the brass rowlocks, and feathered the blades through the black water.
He was awkward at first. The left blade dug too deep, throwing a plume of cold mud over his sleeve, but he adjusted. By the third stroke, he had found the seam—the quiet channel of deeper water that ran along the edge of the oyster reef where the big red drum lay in the potholes, waiting for the shrimp to wash off the flats.
I stood on the aft deck, tying an eight-ought bronze hook onto thirty-pound monofilament with cold, stiff fingers.
"Dad?" he said, his back to me as he pulled on the oars.
"Keep your eyes on the bank, Michael. You're drifting into the oysters."
He corrected with his right blade. The ash creaked in the brass.
"Mr. Hayes called me into his office yesterday afternoon," Michael said, his breath pluming over his shoulders in rhythmic white clouds.
"Did he?"
"He offered to move me back to the commercial team in January. If I signed an agreement to drop the personal property counter-claim Lauren’s lawyer filed."
I set the lead sinker on the line and crimped it with my pliers. "What did you tell him?"
"I told him I was leaving the firm on the first of the month."
The oars didn't stop. They rose, dipped, and feathered with a steady, mechanical stroke that kept the skiff’s nose thirty inches off the mud bank.
I looked at the back of his neck—the skin raw from the salt spray, the wool cap pulled low over his ears.
"What are you going to do for bread, Michael?"
"Captain Garris down at the container terminal needs a second-shift dispatcher," he said. "The one who handles the rail logistics between the cranes and the CSX line. It pays eighteen dollars an hour to start. Twelve-hour shifts. Four on, four off."
"It's night work," I said. "It's cold in the winter and the mosquitoes off the marsh will eat you alive in August."
"I know," he said.
"Your mother's friends from the church won't see you at the garden club luncheons."
Michael let out a short, quiet breath that sounded like a laugh that had been cleaned with salt water.
"Good," he said.
A red drum hit the line two minutes later.
It wasn't a schoolie. It was a twenty-eight-inch bull, thick-shouldered and copper-colored, that took the bait and ran straight for the deep water of the cut, making the old Pflueger reel scream like an angry gull.
"Oars in," I said.
Michael shipped the oars with a single, clean motion, picked up the long-handled landing net from the bottom of the boat, and moved to the gunwale.
He didn't get in my way. He didn't yell. When the big fish came to the surface beside the hull, its broad tail beating the green water into white foam, Michael slipped the hoop beneath the head, lifted with his legs, and swung fourteen pounds of living bronze into the bottom of the skiff.
The drum drummed against the floorboards—a deep, resonant thump-thump-thump that sounded like an old heart beating inside the wood.
We looked down at it together.
The fish was perfect—its scales like beaten copper pennies, the single black spot near its tail clean as an ink drop on linen.
"Take the hook out, Mike," I said.
He knelt in the bottom of the boat, his bare hands uncaring of the slime or the sharp dorsal spines. He worked the bronze barb out of the gristle of the lip with his thumb, picked the heavy fish up by the belly and the tail, and held it over the side in the cold water.
He didn't drop it. He held it upright against the current, moving it forward and back so the water would run through the red gills, waiting until he felt the muscle come back into the flank.
Then the tail gave a single, hard slap against his fingers, and the copper shadow disappeared into the black mud of the sound.
Michael stood up. He washed his hands in the cold harbor water, wiped them on the thighs of his jeans, and picked up the oars again.
"Sun’s up, Dad," he said.
I looked east.
May you like
Across the low dunes of the barrier islands, the Atlantic was turning from iron to silver under a red, winter sun. The light hit the marsh grass, turning the brown stalks to gold, and far off toward the city, the stay cables of the Ravenel Bridge were shining like white piano wire against the sky.
"Head for the point, son," I said, sitting down by the tiller. "Your mother will have the biscuits cold if we aren't through the creek by eight."
