“Forgot to warn y’all about them. Gulls round here is mighty bold,” he said, watching the bird pass over the chocolate waters of the Sound. “It’s what comes from the abusin’ of my gift, so the preacher told me. See you boys in a spell.”

“That was a pretty strange thing to say,” Eliot remarked, after Talmadge was gone.

Will shrugged and opined that Snead’s Landing looked like a pretty strange place. “No niggers, strong drink, or cussing allowed—yes, shipmates, we are in the deep Baptist South, all right.” Eliot said he had heard staid Bostonians express similar sentiments, only in more elegant language.

An hour and one more cut finger—Eliot’s—later, the tub was full. Looking at the slimy mess, Nathaniel observed that the first human being to eat an oyster must have been very hungry or very brave. He and Will lugged the tub to the tiny cook shack out behind Talmadge’s shanty, in a grove of long-leaved pine and moss-bearded oaks. A blond girl, tall and fat, opened the cookhouse door. She had large blue eyes that would have been pretty if they’d had any expression in them. Their blank stare fell immediately on Will and stayed on him, and they gave off a glint like cat’s eyes in a darkened room when she stepped outside into a shaft of sunlight piercing the moss overhead. Without a word, she picked up the tub as easily as if it were a flower basket and dragged it over to the pump. Cranking the handle with one hefty arm, she bent over, displaying beneath her coarse, homespun dress the haunches of a mare, and stirred the oysters with the other arm as she washed them. Then she took the tub into the cook shack.

“His wife?”—Nathaniel, thinking aloud.

“He said his wife’s sick and that girl is anything but sick,” Will noted. “Besides, she can’t be more than fourteen, fifteen. Must be his daughter. Did you see the way she looked at me? Gave me the creeps. Like being looked at by a stuffed head that happens to be alive.”

14

AT SUPPER, Will presented their host with a three-month-old issue of Scribner’s and Nathaniel donated a Tip Top Weekly, read and reread so many times it was almost falling apart. Talmadge thanked them with a gratitude almost pitiful. Pitiful too was the tenderness with which he smoothed the creased pages, the hunger with which he looked at the covers, as though he would sooner fill his famished mind with the words inside than his concave belly with the oyster stew cooked by the big, blond-haired girl.