Yesterday, Frank’s wife told me, “You’re a brave soul to be sailing!” and “You’re a brave soul to be with all of those men!” She asked me if they actually let me do any of the sailing.
“It’s a struggle,” I said. “They don’t really want to—”
“I figured that you’d just be doing the cooking and cleaning.”
“No way!” I said. “That’s Cody’s job!”
It isn’t really Cody’s job. We’re all supposed to take turns, although Brian usually gets out of it, and Cody does like doing it more than the rest of us. When Frank and his wife visited us on The Wanderer and saw Cody doing dishes and mopping the floor, Frank said, “You’ll make a great wife,” and he kept calling Cody “Mr. Mom.”
Cody didn’t seem bothered. He made a joke out of it. “Mr. Mom at your service!” he said, bringing them some cheese and crackers, and “Watch it—Mr. Mom needs to mop under your feet!”
I wish I had Cody’s natural sense of humor in times like that. I get really antsy when people seem surprised that I can use a power tool or go up a mast or use fiberglass or when they expect me to be the cook. I usually say something snotty and rude back, but I ought to be more like Cody. If you just laugh about it, people drop it.
Yesterday, after we went clamming, Frank turned to me and said, “You’ve got a lot of frying to do!”
I said, “No, I don’t! I’m not the only person on board who can cook, you know.”
“Oh,” he said.
I think I hurt his feelings by snapping like that, and I felt bad because he’s been so nice to us. I ought to learn to keep my mouth shut sometimes.
I’m going to talk about clamming now. I hope I’m not being too boring with all this, but I want to write it down and remember it all. You could forget things, forget so many details of your life, and then if someone ever wanted to know what you’d thought or what you’d felt, you might not remember, or maybe you’d be sick or gone or something and you couldn’t tell them and they’d never know. It would be as if those tiny nibbling sea fleas had eaten up all the substance of your life.
I once asked how Bompie remembered all his stories, and my mother said, “It’s like a picture in his head.”
“But what if the picture got erased?” I said.
“Now, how’s that going to happen?” she said.
At low tide, we all went clamming with Frank’s seventy-nine-year-old father. We looked for air bubbles in the sand and then started digging, but there was so much seaweed covering the holes, and lots of water, so we couldn’t see in the hole once we’d started digging. And the land is mostly rocks and the clams live deep, so the digging wasn’t easy.
It’s an odd thing, seeing those air bubbles and realizing that something is alive down there, under the sand. I felt peculiar, as if I’d rake up not a clam, but a person.
Brian and Uncle Stew decided that clam digging was no fun after the first twenty minutes. They complained about their jeans getting muddy, and they didn’t like to bend over. “All this digging for one measly clam?” Uncle Stew said.
Frank’s father chattered as he worked. “I was born on this island, just like my parents before me, and I’ve lived here my whole life, with my twelve brothers and sisters, and all our kids. I clam nearly every day, and I like to putz in the garden, too, and I hunt deer when I get the chance. Life is good. Real good.”
And I could see how it would be good, how you could stay with your whole big family and everyone would know each other and take care of each other.
I feel as if I can’t get enough of life on Grand Manan, and in the midst of learning about Grand Manan, I’ve learned some things about my uncles, too. It’s amazing what you pick up while you’re standing around clamming or hauling lobster pots.
I discovered that ever since they were kids, Mo, Dock, and Stew wanted to sail across the ocean. They talked about it and planned it and dreamed about it.
“Did you ever think you’d really do it?” I asked.
“Nope,” Uncle Mo said.
“What are you talking about?” Uncle Stew said. “Of course you thought we’d do it. We all thought we’d do it.”
“I didn’t,” Mo said.
“But you said—you kept saying—you made us think up all those names for the boat and you kept showing us that atlas, and—”
“It was just a game,” Mo said. “Wasn’t it?”
“A game? A game?” Stew spluttered.
“I thought we’d do it,” Uncle Dock said quietly. “I knew we’d do it.”
I asked them if my mother was part of their plans when they were young. “Did she want to go, too?”
“Who?” Uncle Stew said. “Claire? Is that who you’re talking about?”
“Of course it’s Claire she’s talking about,” Uncle Dock said. “She wants to know what Claire was like when she was young.”
“Oh,” Uncle Stew said. “No, Claire didn’t want anything to do with us. She thought we were snotty and disgusting.”
“Speak for yourself,” Uncle Dock said. “Claire and I always got along just fine.”
I also found out that Uncle Mo’s name is short for Moses, but that he got beat up too much when he was a kid (“Think about it,” he said. “Would you like to be called Moses?”) and so he shortened it to Mo, which sounded “more butch,” and he’s stuck with it ever since.
And Uncle Dock’s real name is Jonah!
“So how’d you go from Jonah to Dock?” I asked him.
“Ever since I was a kid,” he said, “I loved boats, but one day an old sailor told me that Jonah was not a good name for a sailor to have, because the Jonah in the Bible was bad luck for his companions at sea. You know that story, right? About how Jonah made God mad, so God sent this huge storm—”
“And that’s when Jonah got swallowed by the whale,” Brian added.
“Yep, yep, yep. So that old sailor said Jonah wasn’t a good name for me, and he started calling me Dock because I hung around the docks all day.”
Brian leaned over and said to me, “But he’s still really a Jonah, so do you think that means bad luck for us?”
“Brian,” I said, “sometimes you can keep your thoughts in your own head.”
Then I got to worrying that one of us might make God mad and he’d send a storm, and that really seemed to worry me, way out of all proportion, so I started thinking about names instead. I wondered whether you had to be what your name suggested, and how different names suggest different things—like how Brian seems like a Brian, and Cody seems like a Cody, and I wondered if I seemed like a Sophie, and what exactly was a Sophie anyway?
And then I started thinking about Bompie and although I know Bompie is only a nickname, I realized I have no idea what his real name is. I’m going to go ask someone right now.