“It’s wonderful to have you,” I tell him.
He explains how the VW body got into the hollow with the older cars. He points out every shrub he planted. He remembers where things are buried, where the old well was, the outhouse. It was he who brought plumbing to this olden place. Four kids he and Mary raised! “Oh Lord!” And he’s in tears again. Such a lovely man, so full of feeling. I want to pat him as his wife has done, but can’t quite do it. His shirt is nice, cotton, blue stripes. He’s not what I pictured from the evidence at all.
“I have some tools of yours,” I say.
“No!” he says. “No, no, no! They are yours, now. I left everything! I just packed and left, one carload of stuff and whatever the boys got into their cars and we left!”
Oh Lord, is right. We stand in the side yard and he just gazes around. Thirty-two years he lived here and raised four kids. We walk around front of the house. The minister, his new wife, is reading a heavy magazine in the front seat of their minivan. She’s in her forties, is my guess, plump and serious and pretty, a nice wife for him. At the front door he just stares. You can see in the window there, can see right through the stairwell-foyer and through the parlor and all the way back and through the bathroom windows into the yard.
“You’ve done some things,” he says.
I don’t have to say a word.
“Things I wanted to do. I’m so happy about that.”
“Come on in,” I say.
“Oh Lord!” he says. And he breaks down into barking, wailing cries, his hands on his knees. Now I do pat his back. Pat pat pat. I pat his back and he’s big as my father, who has started crying lately too.
“Oh Lord!” he wails.
His wife hears him and gets placidly out of the car and comes over placidly and takes over patting his back. “He never once cried in the sixteen years since,” she says.
He slowly subsides as we stand there the three of us under our big healthy elm tree, slowly stands straight. “Oh Lord,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting this,” he says.
“This man wasn’t either,” says his wife to me kindly.
“I’m fine,” I say, but I’m moved, too, I mean, tears in my eyes threatening to fall.
My lachrymose predecessor hugs me, and I hug him.
“Oh Lord!” he says, one more time, letting me go.
“You don’t want to go in?” says the new wife.
“Simply couldn’t,” he says, sobbing.
“Come back sometime,” I say.
“No,” he says. “We won’t.”
“Come to Stonecoast Village,” says his wife.
They get in their car and drive off, and I go back to the Johnson girls’ oak tree, resume my mortal task.
Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
“Hard work,” says Dicky Butts, and we haven’t even started yet.
“Get wet today,” says Truman Lock. He pulls his graying beard, squints out over the bay. The blast of an offshore wind (strong enough to blow the boat and its no-lights trailer halfway into the oncoming lane as we made the drive over) is piling whitecaps, spraying their tops, bowing the trees around us, knocking my hat off my head, giving even the wormers pause.
Dicky says, “No fun today.”
Walter—Truman’s father—lets a long minute go by, says, “We do get some weather, Downeast.” He seems to know he’s offering a cliche, works the rich inflections of his Maine twang extra hard: there’s an observer here, myself, and no one (including me) knows exactly what the observer wants.
The night’s rain has stopped and the cold front that caused it is finishing its push. The dirt parking area at the shore access on Ripley Neck is nearly empty—most of the wormers have decided to let this tide go—too much like March (here toward the last days of June)—too wild, too easy to stay in bed. “Not a climber in the lot,” Truey says, one of a constant stream of plain observations. It’ll take me fifty conversations with twenty wormdiggers before I figure out the obvious: a climber is a clammer. He means most of the usual guys aren’t here today—clammers, crabbers, inside lobstermen, wormers—not even anybody picking weed. Just two cars in the lot—mature Subarus, both of them—no boat trailers.
We watch the tide. It will be a big one, Truey guesses, with the offshore wind blowing the bay empty. He’s sitting at the wheel of his Chevy truck, Dicky at his side. Walter and I stand in the parking lot at their two windows. We all watch the bay. Low water is charted at 7:30 this morning. It’s six now. We watch, and watch more. That’s what we do, watch. No talking. Down on the mudflats a quarter-mile away a couple of men are bent low, visibly chopping at the mud with their worm hoes. “Bloods,” Truey says.
“Those boys are blood wormers,” Dicky says, deciding to pull me in a little, help me out here, whatever I’m up to. He’s a stocky, good-looking man with a naked lady tattooed on one arm, a faded bird in a flower on the other. At thirty-three, he’s the youngest of the team. He has a wide face and ought to look jolly, but he doesn’t. Jolly you need to smile. He’s taciturn and tough, burned and blown, his skin newly cooked over a deep spring tan, the creases of his neck white. He’s got mud smears on the bill of his no-team baseball cap. You think maybe he’s a little mean until he speaks and, yes, finally smiles, but it’s a warm smile, not jolly at all in the wide face, a good father’s smile, and you see how kindly he is, how helpful. This he wants to avoid showing. He pronounces the word wormers—names his profession—with softened r’s and extra vowels, points out the bent men, says, “Ten cents a worm.” Back to taciturn.
Ten chops, ten deep turns of the mud, a pause to pull a worm, ten more chops, drop a worm in the bucket. Ten chops bent over the heavy muck and those guys out there get a dime, a dime a worm, 100 weary chops to a dollar, 1000 chops for ten bucks, 10,000 chops to make the tide pay.
“Those fellows are Garneys,” Walter says. He knows every wormer in Washington County by sight, and probably most in the state. He’s been at this forever. He wants me to know that a Garney is any digger from Beal’s Island, which is just over the bridge from Jonesport, a few miles east. He wants me to know that the Beal’s Island boys are known for working in bad weather, and for working low tide all the way up to the beach, staying in the mud longer than maybe is good for the worm population. But then, every wormer wants you to know that every other wormer is a fuckhead. I’m thinking of a certain group of Midcoast boys who told me how dumb and lazy the Downeast boys are, including these very boys right here.
“Shitdiggers,” Dicky spits. It sounds like genuine animosity, but if I said it I’d probably get a blood rake through the brain.
Truey pulls the muddy brim of his cap, patiently fills me in: “Sandworms, see, are but six cents, but it’s faster getting. Those guys out there was here an hour before us. They’ll be here an hour longer for their money, and rip the mud right to the weed line.”
“It does takes a toll on your back,” Walter says dreamily, apropos of nothing in particular.
Oh, fuck. I’m here on a magazine assignment: get to know these guys, these peculiar wormers, these strugglers at the extreme end of our great economy, write a poignant piece about their miserable lives. But they don’t seem miserable. Not as miserable as I am, for example, doing a job I’m really anxious about, inside a nascent career I’m really anxious about, a shaky career that has me saying yes to assignments like this, so many cents a word, really not the kind of thing I’m good at. For one thing, I’m feeling horribly guilty, stealing these guys’ lives from them, worried sick what they’ll think of their portraits when the magazine hits the racks in town. No one likes his own picture.
But here we are, all of us doing our work in this beautiful, dramatic place. Which is their place, one they know intimately, a place they know themselves to belong. They are their own economy, efficient, dependable, always bears, always bulls. Get to know them? They aren’t going to let that happen unless I’m willing to work a couple of years alongside them, and probably not then. I’ve
found Truey after an unbelievably long series of phone conversations with mistrustful Yankees, Truey the one wormer in all of Downeast Maine who said, sure, sure, come along and worm.
“Bloodworms,” Truey sighs, not with malice, exactly, but with the supercilious pride of a specialist: these fellows dig sandworms, and even if maybe they are less hardy, less appealing to fish, less marketable and so less valuable, they’re easier to come by. He keeps looking me up and down. I smile too much, smile now.
This is not my first day worming. I had a day up Midcoast with a bunch of mean-spirited mo-fo’s. Shitdiggers, for sure. The Midcoast boys abused me, rightfully so: what comes to them for talking to me? But more about them soon. Right now I’m Downeast, anxious but hopeful. Months have passed since my Midcoast frolic without much progress on my story. My big break is slipping away. Truey and Dicky and Walter are my last chance. And a new strategy is in place: I haven’t told them specifically about Harper’s, only that I’m a professor at the University of Maine at Farmington, doing a kind of study of guys working, and that I’ll write about them. All true. They maybe expected a pipe, a tweed jacket, elbow patches, a vaguely British accent. Instead they got me: UMF sweatshirt, long hair, guy basically their age, a classic summer dink and a flatlander to boot.
Truey looks me over thoroughly, maybe trying to think what will interest me. He nods in the direction of one of the Subarus in the empty parking lot: “That’s Porky Bob. He’s a climber, most generally, but they just ain’t any steamers, not anymore. He’ll be digging bloods, today.”
I’m rumpled and desperately bleary, slept poorly maybe three hours in the Blueberry Motel, the only motel open this time of year anywhere near, lone customer, windy night.
“They would used to get ten bushels,” Walter says, “a whole pickup load on a tide. Now you’re lucky with a plateful for supper.” He looks pained and weary. “It’s the pollution. It’s the runoff from the blueberry highlands.”
This does interest me. I’m nodding my head earnestly.
“Some say sewerage,” Truey says.
“No,” Walter says. “That’s the lie. The clam, he likes the sewage. What he don’t like is the sewage treatment.”
“Many a wormer was once a climber,” Truey says.
The three men leave me out now, rapid shoptalk. I hear it the way I hear Spanish: pick out words here and there, get the drift. They’re speculating about the worm population at Pigeon Hill, which I know to be a beach up toward Hancock. They’re bad-mouthing some climber. They’re thinking the weather will clear. They’re speculating about the take today. They’re talking about urchins, near as I can tell, something spirited about sea urchins and the frukking Japanese. Walter would rather eat pussy than that stuff. But Jack Morrison made $2800 in a day diving for ’em. And Truey’s a certified diver. The rest sounds like daydreaming: all they need is scuba, an urchin boat (forty feet would do ’er), hot tanks for divers (the deep water in the Gulf of Maine is brutally cold in every season), some of that stuff is all, and you make $2800 a day.
Without a word of transition, without a word at all, Truey is pulling his truck around in the ominously empty parking lot, listening all the while to some story Dicky is telling, then backing the Cox trailer smoothly and straight as a new ashen oar down the steep ramp to the bay. Walter plods down behind, thinking of something else, chewing a thumbnail. I march down after him, flopping in my new worming boots (the Downeast salesman pronounced this women boots), anxious to be of use. But these aren’t vacationers nervous at the winch of their thousand-buck trailer, this is Truey and Dicky knocking a scarred plank of junkyard lumber out from under the motor (a muddy Mercury 200, no messing around, a good old machine much reworked by Truey, who’s a local stock-car racer, and Dicky, who’s his mechanic): knock the plank, unhook the cable, let the boat hit the water, no splash. Now three of us are at the gunwales (I imitate every gesture they make, trying to be useful), waiting for Truey to park his mostly orange truck and return.
Dicky grins at me. “Gonna get wet,” he says. He sees my thin sweatshirt and that I don’t have a raincoat and yells up to Truey to bring what they got. He’s so solicitous I stop worrying about the high wind. I stop thinking about the low-down, blood-worming, shit-digging Midcoast boys who laughed and left me stuck in the mud, laughed derisively and chopped across the mud away from me, giggling like middle-aged and tattooed twelve-year-olds, dunking worms in their buckets, dunking worms. I stop thinking about my deadline, two weeks past, stop worrying that my worming story is going to get killed. (In the end, okay, it did get killed, but me, I’ve got the experience of worming under my belt, my fat kill fee, and my own blood-worm rake, which will hang forevermore in the shed at my inland house.)
“This weather’ll clear by noon,” Walter says, watching the sky. He’s built small and strong, is always preoccupied, always has a subject in mind and an informed, unexpected opinion (“If them senators up in Washington was all women, we’d have our troubles solved.”). He’s not only a wormdigger but his wife’s partner as a minor worm dealer. His own dad (recently dead of diabetes, from which Walter also suffers) was a wormer, too, one of the originals up in Wiscasset with worming legends Bill and Artie Wanser and Frank Hammond—the first guys in the business back when the war was over and life was sweet and anybody could be Ernest Hemingway—go sportfishing in the ocean—anybody anywhere in the world: customers.
Truey returns with an armless orange sweatshirt for me and a torn yellow slicker. “All we have extra,” he says, with real concern. He’s got muscles and the same gruff demeanor as Dicky, and like Dicky he’s warm and helpful and kind, all that just hiding behind a stern self-possession that you might read as distrust. But he’s got a certain coldness to him, the bluff chill of the bad father. His cap says Mrs. Giant Jim’s Street Stock on it. Mrs. Giant Jim’s Pizza, up on Route 1, is one of his racing sponsors. In Mrs. Giant Jim’s they’ve got pictures of Truey in his lemon-yellow number five, holding the checkered flag after big wins at Bangor Speedway, never a smile for the camera.
I put the partial sweatshirt and ripped slicker on gratefully and the three wormers look at me a long time the way they’ve been looking at the tide: not much they can do about either, not much at all. We get in the boat, a twenty-one-foot aluminum camo-painted Quachita flat-bottom workboat full of worming stuff: four blood hoes, four sandworm hoes, three wormboxes, four buckets, several twisted blue gloves, one faded green one, three life preservers, first aid kit.
We’re off. Truey’s the helmsman, Dicky beside him, both of them standing. Walter and I are on the middle seat facing forward, taking the spray.
I examine my women boots. Last time out, with the japing Midcoast boys, I wore my fly-fishing hip boots, which have thick felt soles for traction on mossy river rocks. The deep tidal mud up by Bar Harbor sucked them off my feet over and over again till they were gone. So now I’ve got better boots, the real thing, according to Walter (who has explained that they’re “Number one in Maine”): tight-ankle LaCrosse hip waders. I’ve gotten them two sizes small to be sure of their snugness. I wonder if I should have tied strips of inner tube around the arches, as Walter also suggested, but I don’t want to look like a total fucking dork. I start to tie and button the interior calf straps (a collar of eyes inside the boot below the knee that you tighten like shoelaces before you pull the thighs up), aware that Walter is too preoccupied to notice what I’m up to.
Dicky is staring. He says, “I myself personally prefer not to use the calf straps.”
I say I don’t want to get stuck in the mud, tell him the Midcoast story.
He and Truey grin at the picture of me floundering as the Midcoast boys leave me behind, especially the part where my ass is in the mud and I have to let go of my notebook and pen, losing them, then losing the boots. Har har har, then my new friends fall back into their default faces—pretty grim—let me finish tying the calves of my boots.
Dicky says, “If we go in you need to get them boots off pr
etty fast ...“
“Ah,” Truey says, “We ain’t going in.”
Walter isn’t listening, is looking to where we are going. He points, says, “Some mud showing over there.”
Truey says, “Benson Williams.”
Dicky says, “Little Fred.”
Truey says, “That fellow from Jackman.”
These are people who have indeed “gone in.” The tone isn’t quite elegiac, but before I can ask for elaboration, Walter’s telling Truey to slow down. There’s a flotilla of lobster buoys, for one thing (which, to be sure, Truey has been missing expertly); for another, these waves will be big trouble if he gets the boat up planing. Truey nods with an irritated patience and you can see Walter has been giving him advice like this for a lifetime. Truey’s forty, now. His dad is fifty-seven. Truey’s name is actually Walter, too—Walter Lock III—but he was born on Harry Truman’s birthday.
We are in the estuarine bay of the Harrington River, heading for Foster Island below Ray Point. I’ve gotten these names off of maps, for in the manner of most people deeply familiar with their surroundings, Walter and Truey and Dicky can’t quite remember the names of the islands and spits and necks around us, only that good worming can be found on the flats that will appear here shortly. They venture several guesses, but can’t agree on the names. Finally Walter says if you were to boat around the island you’d end up at Milbridge, the next town up the coast (up being toward Portland, which is a hundred miles south and west).
We’re crashing over waves now. Truey and Dicky crouch a little, but stay on their feet in the stern. The old gas tank, less than a quarter full, bounces around back there. Walter kneels on the middle seat beside me. We all look resolutely forward. The spray is ice cold. I think of hackneyed Maine-coast paintings, proceed to compose one: five stripes of color—the gray plane of clouds, the green of the pines in the shore forest, the naked gray rocks, the brown rockweed exposed by the tide, water the gray of the sky but alive with whitecaps. We’re the sole boat today; the scene is dramatic, timeless, lacks color, a Wyeth, which generation of Wyeth I’m not sure.
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