Author’s note: This excerpt contains the first few sections of the title story. It introduces Clayton Royster, the protagonist who appears in every story that follows.
“The Waterman”
Sand Point, June 1955
Clayton Royster eased his boat along the brackish channel that led from the bay to the dock behind the seafood market. The market was located along the one road into Sand Point, Virginia, a small town at the head of a peninsula jutting between the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the broad saltmarsh bay to the west. Clayton tied off to the dock cleats, unloaded two baskets brimming with blue crabs and carried them around front. Walter’s Market was a moss-stained, whitewashed cinderblock building with a broad-planked entrance porch and a raw sheet metal roof. The building housed the store in front and living quarters in back. The day was early yet, the ‘Closed’ sign still posted on the door, so he wet down the crabs from the outside spigot and slipped a nickel into the red vending machine on the porch and sat on the step drinking his soda and picking under his fingernails with his pocketknife. The hands, the split nails, cracked knuckles, and calluses fanning across his palms, were the hands of a man older than Clayton’s twenty-three years. But he was proud of them, of what they represented, the seasons crabbing in the bay and fishing in the open sea, more seasons in his few years than most spend in a lifetime. If his hands did not give him away, his deeply tanned face, his brown hair tinted auburn by the elements, the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, and his slight but perpetual squint from the sun’s glare surely would—he was a waterman.
Soon came a ruckus from inside and Walter’s bulk filled the doorway, white T-shirt straining across his gut, dungarees held up by suspenders. He glanced at Clayton and then turned and hollered toward the back room, “Wish I could get them eggs done right just once.”
Clayton stood. “Got your crabs here.” Walter turned his scowl back on Clayton and then noticed the baskets.
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“Let’s take a look.” He stepped from the door and lifted the burlap bag covering the crabs. As he assessed the catch, Clayton looked past him to Loretta, who had come barefoot onto the porch in a sleeveless shift, her strawberry hair pulled into a ponytail. She crossed her arms at her chest and stared openly at him, her pale eyes full of trials.
Walter straightened and scratched at a patch of belly exposed at his beltline. “I’ll be honest with you, son. That is a right scrawny lot. I can go maybe seven-fifty a bushel.”
They both knew within a narrow range what price they would settle on, but the haggle was an expected part of doing business.
“You’re probably right,” Clayton said. “I should dump them back into the bay to grow up.”
“I might see my way to eight,” Walter said. “Not a penny more.” Clayton nodded.
When Walter walked inside to retrieve payment, Clayton stepped toward Loretta. “Can you get free for a bit?”
“Maybe. He’s talking about going to Pungo to see about getting sweet corn for the weekend.”
Clayton bent to retie his boot and allowed the back of his hand to brush her calf just to feel the electricity rush through him. He rose and backed away at the sound of Walter returning.
Mid-day, Clayton watched from a stand of pin oaks as Walter climbed into his truck and pulled away, raising a plume of white dust from the crushed shell roadbed. Inside the market, he idled beside a shelf displaying an assortment of carvings from local craftsmen—decoys, sand pipers, gulls—and scanned the dry good isles to ensure the store was free of customers. Satisfied, he walked toward the back and found Loretta behind the checkout counter, sipping from a glass of lemonade, a small rotating fan stirring her hair. He embraced her, tasted the tartness on her lips, her tongue, and he ran his hand down the smooth curve of her back, and bent to kiss the welt showing on her arm. “He do this to you?”
She took his hand and pulled him toward the ice room. “Hurry. He won’t be gone long.”
At First Sight, May 1950
Clayton first laid eyes on Loretta five years earlier, in May of 1950. He was walking the beach with his fishing gear when from the south wended the black dot of a pickup on the hard pack. The truck eventually pulled close and a man who looked to be Clayton’s father’s age, but with loose jowls, raised a finger to the bill of his cap as they passed, but did not stop. A black-and-tan hound occupied the passenger seat, its long face hanging from the window. In the bed of the pickup, an aged lady sat in a rocking chair and beside her a girl shared space with two mattresses and a few wooden crates. Clayton noticed the girl immediately, fifteen or sixteen he guessed, and slender as a surf rod. He willed her to glance his way, but she ignored him, looking out to sea instead. Clayton watched the truck until it disappeared between two dunes toward the blacktop that led into town.
People talked about the newcomers. The man, Walter Pine, had purchased the old Henley market, and quickly gained notice for being fawning with customers, contentious with suppliers, and disengaged with most everyone else.
“A bit standoffish,” some said of the Pine family, who by and large kept to themselves. “The elderly lady is sickly, I hear.”
“The Waterman”
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“His mother?”
“So I’m told. The girl tends to her.”
“His daughter?”
“Wife.”
“The girl?”
“Loretta Pine. His wife.”
“There has to be a tale behind that match.”
Indeed, there was. The most repeated version had her daddy involved in some construction accident that left him alive, but feeble-minded. The family needed help getting by, children by the score, and it seemed Walter came up with the solution.
Clayton began selling crabs to Walter during that first summer. He found reasons to hang around the store just to catch sight of Loretta. They began visiting whenever Walter was away, innocently at first, just two young people passing the time. He’d talk of his dream—a commercial boat: a thirty-footer, mahogany hull, Cummings diesel, something that would allow him to earn a living on the water full-time. Loretta told of her family, the pride she took in being able to help provide for them through Walter and the market. Clayton admired her sense of obligation. He’d left his family at sixteen when his father decided to take an insurance job in Richmond. Clayton declined to move and instead went to work at Sonny Ferrell’s ESSO station after school and lived in a spare room that Sonny and his wife were never able to fill with a child of their own.
When Walter’s mother died at the beginning of their second summer season in Sand Point, Walter reluctantly left Loretta in charge of the store while he carted his mother back south for burial. During his absence, one thing led to another between Loretta and Clayton.
Even during an interminable two-year stint drafted into the Army, Clayton ferried back to Sand Point on every furlough from Fort Eustis, and he and Loretta continued to sneak into the ice room for quick, urgent couplings, and snatches of conversation. But that was the whole of it. Once returned and back on the water, Clayton worried about his life spinning in circles, impatient to get on with things but unable to let go of Loretta, and she unwilling to let go of Walter’s money. They’d nearly been caught a half-dozen times but always their luck held.
Sand Point, ice room, June 1955
Until it didn’t.
From the ice room, a sound out front startled them. Clayton tucked to a corner as Loretta ladled a bucket of ice chips and carried it to the display counter. Clayton caught sight of Walter leaning against the counter, red-faced, heaving like a bellows.
“Mr. Pine,” Loretta said. “I thought you were headed to Pungo.”
“Goddamned truck quit on me a mile out. Had to walk back in this goddamned heat.”
“Let me get you some water.”
“Goddamned Zed Phelps passed me right by and didn’t slow a tick. I’ll remember that son-of-a-bitch.”
“Maybe some lemonade?”
“Bring me a beer.”
“I don’t think there is any beer.”
“There’s beer. Find it.”
“I can’t find what’s not there.”
“Watch that mouth.” Walter jabbed a finger towards Loretta’s face. The bucket she held slipped from her grasp, sending ice chips skating across the floor.
“There you go,” Walter said, and clapped her on the ear with the flat of his hand. Loretta staggered but Walter grabbed her by the arm and raised his hand again, but before he could bring it down, Clayton came up from behind and swung a wooden duck decoy to the back of Walter’s head with such force the bird’s head snapped from its body. Walter toppled in slow motion. On the way down, his forehead struck the corner of the countertop and blood began pooling from both wounds as soon as he settled to the floor. Clayton stood over him, still holding the duck head.
“Lord Jesus, what have you done?” Loretta said.
“Is he dead?”
“Go. Hurry.”
“Come with me.”
“Just go.”
Gary Schanbacher was born in the Midwest, raised in the southeast, came west for graduate school, and never left. He is the author of “Crossing Purgatory” (2013), winner of a SPUR Award from the Western Writers of America, and the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction, and “Migration Patterns: Stories” (2007), a PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award Runner-up, and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the High Plains First Book Award. He and his wife live in Littleton, Colorado.
