Then I spotted three of my old friends from high school and a lump caught in my throat. My mind went to long afternoons of basketball on the town court, and shared conversations about life that are possible only in youth. I started to cry and the tears would not stop. I yanked a long white handkerchief from my pocket and covered my face. I wanted to speak to my dear friends, missed through the years, and now virtually unknown to me. I didn’t even know where they lived, nearby I suppose, or they wouldn’t have been at the funeral. And they probably came just to see me. But whenever I lowered my handkerchief I started to cry again. It was their youth. I looked in their faces and saw myself as a boy, and realized that I was crying for our lost youth. These were boys who respected my father, and knew my brother, and now they stood alone under the pines like trees without forests. I couldn’t face them, so I walked away, hoping for the distraction of others, another group of mourners who could change my focus. I looked around for smiling faces.
My family’s friends and neighbors had great senses of humor, laughing at the sea and its unruly manner, mimicking their friends, exaggerating each other’s weaknesses and foibles, and sometimes a joke would lead to a fight. Humor and fighting were linked somehow in ways I never understood, but instinctively knew not to challenge. Perhaps because strength was the final measure of a waterman, fighting was common. Men in their fifties, who had been at sea for decades, could measure every catch by the strain in their arms, and they knew that in the end, it would be the weight of the oyster tongs, or a full pot of crabs, or a stumble while climbing into their boat, that would mark the end of their career. Similarly, the watermen could be incredibly sentimental, helping each other’s families, sitting up with sick friends, or repairing each other’s boats, because they also understood the capriciousness of their lives, and every soul had its own value. They needed each other.
The story is told in Parkers of “Gunnels” Newton, a first mate who never quite grew out of the position, and at age 52 was still signing on every morning with a new crab boat or oyster tonger, wherever he was needed. He liked to work the oysters because he liked to eat them. He was a relatively small man, with wiry frame, but a huge belly filled every night with beer and oysters. Locally, he was known as the champion oyster eater in Jenkins County. Soon, Gunnels was entering oyster eating contests all around the Bay.
The watermen of Parkers, meeting in solemn conclave one Sunday morning at the Bayfront bar, which was always full by eight o’clock in the morning, especially on Sunday, voted to take up a collection to send Gunnels to the Guinness Book of World Records oyster eating contest in London, England. Gunnels had a special technique in which he shucked oysters as fast as he could, then put them in a bottle of milk, threw back his head and let the whole concoction flow silently down his throat. By this method he could consume pounds of oysters in minutes. He won the Guinness contest, of course, coming home with enough prize money to keep him wet for months. But the strain of ready cash was too much for his heart. One Saturday afternoon, after the final round of the St. Michael’s oyster eating contest, he was bent over the gunnels of his work boat dispensing with the excesses of his competition, when he died.
The boys at the Bayfront, realizing that Gunnels had no family or money, arranged to have him cremated. In a ceremony still honored in Parkers, they lined up their work boats, headed out to the Bay, and dumped Gunnels’ ashes right in the middle of the Holland Point oyster bed. The final irony of his life was that in the end, the oysters got to eat him.
Gunnels is still honored at the Bayfront with a picture of him beside a stack of oyster shells. The picture comes down occasionally, when Mabel Fergus, who owns the place, becomes “tired of looking at his ugly face,” as she puts it. But after a few months, it always reappears in a different corner of the dining room.
This story flashed through my mind because I knew I had seen that girl with the watermen before, and I think it was at the Bayfront. She was very attractive and I wondered if she knew my bother, or just came to be with the boys. Either explanation was possible. I knew most of the crabbers because they were either just behind me in school, or were men my father had worked with. There seemed to be a missing group, my class at South County High, but I knew no reason for it. Other than there were a couple of really bad crabbing years in the early 1980s, and most fathers simply discouraged their sons from staying on the water. In my case, I didn’t want to. I had a longing for fast cars, pretty girls, finely starched shirts, linen table cloths and long airplane trips to unknown places. Those dreams required getting out of Parkers.
The memorial service ended, and my brother’s friends were standing around outside, smoking or talking. They started drifting back toward the church for a basement reception, which I was not looking forward to attending. That’s where the old women in floral print dresses and heavy shoes want to bestow a big kiss and a hug on the bereaved relatives, in this case, me. They seem to think a bosomy hug somehow eases the pain, when in fact it squashes the cigars in my breast pocket and leaves strange smells around my neck. I could do without that.
I had smoked cigarettes in college in order to look cool, and once in the law firm, where the pressure to produce was palpable, my habit had grown to nearly three packs a day. I had ignored all the warnings, the television ads, the government studies, and the statistics on lung cancer. Growing up, everyone I knew smoked. Most of the watermen smoked, from long days of hard repetitive work on the water. So it seemed natural that I would pick up the habit. But one day my lungs started to ache, and worse, breathing actually made a noise. I could hear a low groan with every breath, and it scared me. It was impossible to ignore, or to rationalize away. Breathing should not make a noise. So I started the terrible process of trying to stop, cold turkey, then two cigarettes a day, then one cigar in the evening. The cigar seemed to work, although I knew of course that it was not good for me. Then I convinced myself that one cigar, no inhaling, was alright. And the noise in my lungs stopped. That’s how I came to always have a cigar in my pocket, even at my brother’s memorial service.
In addition, my favorite place to smoke was in the car. I didn’t smoke at home because of the smell and dirty ash trays. But driving was like a personal smoking lounge, with the window cracked for fresh air and no passengers to offend. In this case, I knew it would be a long drive back to Washington from Parkers, and after the memorial service I would need the distraction of a good cigar.
Bucking the tide of people and stumbling down the hill toward me was my father’s best friend and retired Field and Bay Magazine photographer, Mansfield Burlington, a strange but very proper duck who chose Parkers for a home some 40 years ago. He was tall, thin, constantly smoked a pipe, often wore a bow tie, and carried himself with a stiffness sometimes mistaken for aloofness. I once saw a picture of Mansfield in some magazine that showed him with his cameras slung around his neck in Venice, Italy while two pigeons tried to land on his head, apparently confusing him with a Michelangelo statue. There was no explanation for why Field and Bay had sent him to Italy. In fact, Mansfield was quite a warm fellow, a great listener and a craftsman. He could touch a piece of wood and turn it soft and brown, yielding the most beautiful flow of varnished grain imaginable. He could build things.
“Neddie,” he called, “I’m so sorry about your bother. Almost went out on his boat once. How are you?”
“Fine