“Sure. We’ll be there,” Nathaniel said. “Is there a boatyard around here? We lost a foresail, and a fore boom and gaff in that blow, and we’re gonna need to replace them.”

The oysterman thought a moment.

“There’s Jeb Kincaid, what’s got the sawmill and a carpenter works for him, Ray Sykes by name. Fixes up our boats when they need it. But we got no sailmakers here. Reckon y’all got to go to Beaufort for that.”

“We’re near Beaufort?”

“Twenty mile.”

“Our mother was born in Beaufort.”

“So y’all ain’t a hundred-percent Yankee? Might stand you with folks around here, but still, you best have a pocket full o’ money you go to Beaufort.”

Nathaniel, not pleased to hear that, asked if Talmadge had any idea what Mr. Kincaid would charge.

“Don’t know, but he’s a right reasonable man. I’ll need you gentlemen to come by early, say four, four-thirty.”

And was there anything they could bring?

“Your own selves and a appetite.” He paused, pushing his tongue into a cheek. “And if y’all got any magazines you’re done with. Educated man is hard put to find readin’ material in Snead’s Landin’. Got to go all the way to Beaufort for a newspaper.”

Will said that he had a bottle of Bermudian dark rum in his seabag and offered to bring it, along with some Coca-Cola.

“Sodee’s fine. But y’all leave that rum behind. Three things ain’t allowed here is niggers, strong drink, and cuss words, though we make exception, now and again, for cussin’.”

He had asked them to come early to shuck the oysters they were to have for dinner. He said, apologetically, that he or his wife would have done the work, but his wife was sick with a fever and he had business to attend to that afternoon. Did they know how to shuck? They did not. Wasn’t nothin’ to it. What you do is take this here—he laid a heavy-bladed knife, hooked at the tip, on the fish-cleaning table at the end of his dock—work it between the lips of the oyster and cut the muscle in back with the hooked part; then you give the blade a twist or two and pry the shell open. A child could do it. In fact, children did do it, he informed them, in the oyster-packing plant in Beaufort, where they shucked hundreds of bushels a day for just pennies.

Nathaniel took one of the shellfish from the tub and gave it a try, succeeding only in cutting a finger. Talmadge then offered to demonstrate. With dextrous movements, he produced an oyster on the half shell in about two seconds flat. No sooner was he was done than a big ring-billed gull swooped down, snatched the meat, and flew off.