“Burl,” I repeated, “did you ever finish that skipjack?”
“Yes,” he said with a pleased smile, “rolled her out of the barn at the turn of the century. She’s docked beside the Tonsund. Come see her.” The Tonsund was a forty-foot sail boat named for Mansfield’s Sherpa who had guided him safely up some Tibetan mountain more than thirty years before. Not insignificantly, Mansfield had saved Ton-sund’s life on the way down by amputating his frozen toes with a pen knife. For a fellow with such formal bearing, Mansfield made the deepest and most lasting friendships.
“Sorry about your brother,” Mansfield said. “A good man. Knew the water.”
He stopped to light his pipe, stepping back to avoid a falling ash that just missed his tweed coat. It was a knarled old pipe, black around the bowl from countless flames and as natural as the bark of an oak tree. He had fondled the briar, leaving so much oil and sweat on the bowl that it looked almost soft, like fine leather.
“Too bad he got wrapped around that Resort,” Mansfield said as the flame from his match died out.
I picked up on that immediately, knowing nothing about any resort. “What Resort?”
“Oh, you haven’t heard about the big fight,” Mansfield said, almost with excitement. “They’re trying to build a hundred acre resort right here on the Jenkins. We call it the hijenks project,” Mansfield said. “Going to ruin the crabs. Pollute this whole Bay.”
“Are you involved, Burl?” I asked. “Environmentalists up in arms?”
“We’re doing what we can,” he said. “It’s the future of the Bay. No more skipjacks.”
Mansfield started building his skipjack when I was in high school, cutting the wood himself from white cedar he had plucked from the forests of Maine and carried to Maryland on the roof of his car. As a boy, I will never forget the sight of a small gray station wagon, with two six-inch square, twenty-foot long pieces of lumber strapped to the top so they hung over the windshield like licorice sticks. He drove all the way from Maine to Maryland with his wife hiding her face in shame beside him. The police stopped him twice but never gave him a ticket. Mansfield was a man’s man who had traveled the world, engaging himself in exploits which always seemed to end in a near death experience. And I did indeed intend to stop by his home for a visit, if only to ask if he had heard any strange stories about my brother. Now we had a Resort to discuss.
“Can I come by to see you, Burl?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Love to have you. Bring some wind and we’ll do a little sailing.”
I wanted to get back to Washington before dark, just to be home and sort out my thoughts. I hadn’t spent much time at the church with my brother’s wife and baby, but we had already shed so many tears together, I just walked away. I wanted to make a quick pass by the Bayfront Inn and take a look at my brother’s boat, anchored next to the garden dock. The Bayfront didn’t have any rooms, but did have a bar and restaurant beside seventeen slips for crab boats and charter fishing boats.
Somehow, when death stops the world for you, you expect it to stop for everyone. It doesn’t. On Sunday afternoon at the Bayfront, a deejay named Footloose played heavy metal music for bikers, girlfriends, and locals who filled the six picnic tables on the dock. I used to move easily in this world. But now, instead of recognizing the biker babe in the black jacket and tattoos as the mother of an old friend, I saw her as slightly threatening, someone I didn’t know and shouldn’t make eye contact with. The cycles were lined up in front of the building. My God, I exclaimed to myself as I realized the biker babe was Hank’s mom, about to get on a maroon Harley Davidson with highly polished chrome and a small bumper sticker that said “Save the Bay.” She had to be sixty. And the identical maroon Harley parked next to her must mean that Hank Sr. was still in the building. Hank Jr. was my best friend in high school because he wanted to be an accountant. We had a natural friendship, based on a mutual ambition to get out of Parkers. Actually, he had done well in life, becoming a dot com millionaire of some kind, and probably buying those motorcycles for his parents. As far as I knew, they were still running crab pots out of the West River. But obviously, their lives had assumed a new flair.
I began to fear that the psychological distance between Washington, where I had lived for more than ten years now, and Parkers is much greater than the geography suggests. When you drive to Parkers, the land begins to flatten out as you get closer to the Chesapeake Bay. There aren’t any housing developments torn into the side of the road with brick entrance markers, only wood frame homes of varying sizes, sometimes adorned with brick or stone, but always carrying that unmistakable design of the amateur owner architect who has added a room or two. They telescope down in size the closer you get to Parkers, and you realize this is a place nobody goes through. It’s not on the way to anywhere. You have to seek it out, or know someone who lives there or at least used to.
The combination gas station and liquor store is the first commercial landmark that welcomes you to town with a handmade sign that says, “ATM Inside.” There are a half dozen bank branches tucked away in the corner of roadside buildings constructed for real estate offices and insurance agencies. But the gas station and liquor store comprise the economic center of the community. There is no town center in a traditional sense with community square, grocery store, hardware store, stoplight and main street. There is no main street, unless you call the road along Jenkins Creek the main one, which might be reasonable to assume because the Bayfront Inn and nearby turkey shooting range are along that road. Behind the Inn is a string of houses facing twenty different directions, indicating the randomness of local zoning requirements.
The houses are tied to the Creek by boat slips that can be rented for nearly two hundred a month and represent the retirement nest egg for most of the families in residence. As long as the slips are filled, life is good in Parkers.
But there is a hard edge to Parkers. Many of the small homes along the road have discarded refrigerators and cloth covered recliners in the yard with rusted old cars that hadn’t passed an emission inspection test in years. Yards are filled with boats in every stage of repair, with peeling paint, and gray motors hanging precariously from the stern. They are most often parked beside a garage, which has long since lost its door and allows even a drive-by visitor to see the crab traps and lawn mowers stacked inside. The only new element in most of these yards is the hand painted sign for SARP, “Stop All Resorts Please,” a protest group of mostly waterfront landowners who want to keep the resorts and any other development out. The SARP message is to keep Parkers in its present state of natural beauty, a somewhat obscure concept to those who use refrigerators as doorstops. Yet they are the first to accept yard signs to save the environment.
The Bayfront was rocking but my mood was too blue for the music so I didn’t stop. The Martha Claire, my dad’s old bay-built crab boat, rolled gently at the pier behind the Inn, responding to the waves from small power boats on Jenkins Creek. Her seventeenth coat of white paint glistened with a red tint from the evening sun, and showed no evidence that my brother would not be returning to her helm on Monday morning. Jimmy had kept her in sparkling condition.
I drove on back to Washington with the top down so I could smell the hay fields between Parkers and the City. I noticed when I left the church there were several frowns aimed at my car. I knew exactly what that was all about; the worst aspect of my small town life: envy. I remember in high school we used to have cliques that were always judging