Low Tide

JEANNETTE THOMAS DIKE LOW TIDE

The man at the shell shop wore brown loafers and a bright green tie. His sleeves were rolled up at the elbows – as well they should have been in this heat – mother would later say. Rita stooped over a bucket of bleach water fishing out sand dollars the size of quarters. Every time she righted herself she’d either be watching his brown hands picking through her postcard rack or my sand-caked feet dragging in the whole outside.

He didn’t belong here. The oystermen had all left and the colored had their own beach, their own stores, probably their own shell shop. I wasn’t supposed to be here either. Momma sent me to the grocers for aloe and ice cream.

The chill of Momma’s Neapolitan felt good against the crook of my arm but my knees ached from the saltwater and the scraping. And that’s why girls have no business sliding, Martha Jo, Momma would say. Better a story about baseball than letting on I’d been crawling around underneath the stilted beach houses again, shelling in the pitch-black before-morning with Daddy’s flashlight and a bread bag.

“Mister, you need something?” Rita called, holding two flesh-colored conchs at her shoulders like weights and eyeing him as if he might ask for more than he deserved.

“Yes’m,” the man said brightly, “All these cards a nickel?” A short they is was all she could manage before turning her back and setting the conchs on a high shelf behind her.

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“Hmm,” The man nodded, putting the card carefully back in place. A good thing because Rita got all bent out of shape when the oranges ended up on top of the flag of Florida or when you couldn’t see the seahorses because someone’d left the fishing boat square on top of them.

“Can I help you Martha Jo?”

“Just looking,” I answered and took myself over to the row of co-cola crates along the wall. I shifted the damp paper bag in my arms.

If I could do it all day I would – stand over those rows of co-cola crates that was keeping what Daddy called “them beach baubles” from mixing together – piles of olives, conch, dried seahorses, alphabet shells. I’d already found most of everything – but then nothing of some things. Kept what I did find in mason jars along my bedroom windowsill. I dreamed of the others…held my breath every time I turned over a piece of driftwood or fished through the jellied tangles of crud and kelp that came after a storm.

This morning I’d come close. My heart pounded as I sunk to my ankles and scolded myself for not taking the harder shoreline – it had spikes along its side like a rooster’s comb that faded from red to rust at its tips. It waited patiently for me as the ocean spilled all around it and only rolled back and forth on itself as the stronger waves tried to suck it free. I could almost touch it when the water got hold of us both, knocking me over and dragging it under. And that was the end of that.

“Them ain’t from around here you know. Them shells.” The man’s eyes peeked at me through the spaces the postcards weren’t. Rita shook her head at him the way mommas do when daddies give you ice cream too

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late at night. Tourists are still strangers, Martha Jo, even if they don’t have the good sense to act like it when they ain’t at home, I heard Momma say and I went back to my looking.

“How ‘bout this one? This good?” the man called a bit louder and offered the postcard over to me. It was of a red-shorted boy digging sand castles. Bright orange letters, F-L-O-R-I-D-A, leaned across the blue sky. He slipped the boy into his shirt pocket. “Told her I’d get down here some day, my granddaughter, but she didn’t believe me.” Rita had her hands at her hips. “Just cause I’ve never been south of Detroit!”

I followed the corner of his smile up to his eyes – yellowed around their edges like the pages of an old book. “Now don’t you go spending too much time looking for all of these,” he began again, picking up a chalky green turban, “you’d have to swim all the way from here to Indian Ocean for this one!”

He put the shell in my hand and walked to the counter. I watched him lay nickels out alongside the stack of postcards he’d chosen like seeds he’d been saving for just the right weather. Rita sorted through the coins quickly and pushed one back to him. “You gave me too much,” she said stiffly.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, taking it and tucking his cards away. “There a card you’d like miss?” he asked, turning to me and offering the coin. I shook my head. Scanning the shells, they seemed cheap to me now, and I felt like I lost much more in that moment than I had ever found.

“Next time then,” he said with a smile.

He was outside now in the bright setting sun, and the smell of the sand and tar brought the old man

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images long tucked away. His daddy, back from the bay, sitting beside him on the bed with a bag of shells and a shoe full of sand. Another week and he’d be gone again by morning…that’s how it was to be the child of an oysterman and the son of a sailor.

His daddy had sent him shells from around the world. When he was young he knew all their names, dreamt of all the places they’d come from, waited eagerly for the next battered package to arrive. Only the next one that came was what was left of his father and the wonder was over.

As he grew up he’d fought the demons those without daddies did (and there were many among him). But he’d finally found the peace and freedom that time and age allow. He felt driven to trace back his days on Earth and relive the moments that defined his life’s journey.

“Girl, I got something to show you,” he said, stepping into the door frame. “You too,” he called to Rita who only came out in case he was up to no good.

“You bothered ‘cause I said them shells inside ain’t special?” he asked me. Momma said even a blind man could tell when I was brooding. He bent at his knees and scooped at the ground. “They ain’t the prettiest” he laughed as he held up a handful of crushed oyster shell and emptied the other in his pants pocket. “But they is the strongest. Did you know that?”

There were so many oysters in the bay, mounds and mounds along the side of the shore. Made perfect sense to the men working the roads back then to lay them down like they did. But that’s all they were to me until then. Just ground.

“First thing daddy brought back to me from his

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workin.’ Its insides were so shiny. Angels made it in heaven, he said. I kept that thing in my pocket all summer; sure I had treasure not no one else had ever seen.” The old man smiled the way remembering good things can make a person do. “Can’t recall exactly when I found out they really ain’t treasure. Not that kind, anyhow. Was let down, too,” he said to me gently.

Rita left, reminding me Momma’s ice cream was melting and she had no time to talk about the road we all trampled. He and I stayed on though, talking ‘bout his daddy and how his last letter came the day after they buried that box.

“Said he and some fellas found a fort built out of nothing but oyster shells – asked me if I still had my first one.” So strong they kept out the cannonballs his daddy told him. “Cannonballs!” The old man said again. Be strong, his daddy wrote. But young men don’t get strong until after they get good and mad first, the old man told me. “Threw all them cheap oysters out with the trash.”

He had a bus to get back to and Momma’s Neapolitan surely couldn’t wait either. Told me to be careful getting home and not to stop trying to find what I was looking for. No matter what a foolish old man like him said.

I don’t look much for shells anymore. I mostly just walk. And think. About how sometimes you let the water reach across your toes and other times, if you ain’t looking, it might knock you clean over. And how we’re all really just what’s left after life’s storms – the bits and the baubles, the kelp and the crud. And if you can’t find something to treasure in all that, you aren’t looking hard enough. Or maybe you just have a ways further to go.

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