PluckingthePearl

by Afton Locke

  She followed the other three to a white, sprawling building that backed to a small waterway coming off the river.

  A sign reading “Rockfield Oyster House” in black letters stood above the double front doors.

  Please let me be good at shucking oysters, Pearl thought as she made sure the pins in her hair were secure.

  Sadie plucked at her sleeve. “Don’t expect that dress to look so fancy after today.”

  Although Pearl had worn one of her plainest dresses, striped cotton, it still looked nicer than the baggy blouse and skirt Sadie wore. Having a friend here would be nice but the other girl was obviously too jealous of her to consider it.

  When they entered the building, the oatmeal shifted uncomfortably in Pearl’s stomach. They walked through a large room littered with piles of oysters and more in wire baskets.

  Leroy pointed to a set of open double doors. “That there’s the unloading dock.”

  When they entered an interior doorway, nothing prepared her for the sight laid out before her. A large room with a low ceiling and concrete floor bustled with more people than she could count. A row of wooden, waist-high stalls, open at the back, lined both sides of the room. People stood in them, bent over big concrete tables. Oyster shells were piled up around the stalls.

  “This here’s the main shucking room where we work,” Leroy explained.

  Pearl had never heard such a din in her life. Aside from so many voices and the clatter of knives and shells from shucking, men shoveled discarded shells into wheelbarrows and others dumped basket loads of whole ones onto the tables. An open door in the back revealed the same unloading dock, bringing in the hum of a boat engine and smell of fuel.

  She was least prepared for the smell. Oysters had never appealed to her. The scent of them here was so thick her eyes watered with nausea.

  I can’t do this!

  But she had to. That’s all there was to it. Breathing slowly and digging her nails into her palms, she tried to block everything out. Then she looked at her family for instructions.

  “Leroy,” Wilma said, “you take her to get a job. The rest of us gots to get started.”

  The only white person Pearl saw was a sour-faced man walking around stiffly and slowly with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “That’s the floor supervisor,” Leroy told her while adjusting his plaid cap. “You be sure to look sharp whenever he comes around. Now let’s get you a job.”

  Part of Pearl hoped there weren’t any jobs left.

  Within fifteen minutes of visiting a small office with a stony-faced white woman working behind a desk, Pearl had a knife, gloves, apron, pails and a job. Leroy found two open spots, led her to one and took the other.

  Gingerly, she stepped into her wooden stall. “Why does everyone stand in these?”

  “Keeps your feet off the wet floor and the shells from scratching your legs,” Leroy replied.

  Her hands shook as she laid her round-handled stabber knife and three metal pails on the table and put on the apron to protect her clothes. A square wooden stabbing block, slanted in thickness and scored with scratches, sat in front of her. Leroy directed her to put a full glove on her left hand and a fingerless one on the right.

  The man on the other side of her had a wiry build and a reddish cast to his medium-dark skin. His hands flew so quickly over his work they were almost a blur. Mesmerized, she watched him slide the knife into the oyster, pry it open, cut out the blob of meat and throw it into one of the three pails beside him. Before she knew it, he had another oyster on the block already open.

  She looked back to Leroy. “I can’t possibly do it that quickly.”

  Her cousin laughed. “Neither can most people. Jimmy Clark is the fastest shucker in the plant.”

  After Leroy introduced her, the man paused to give her a wide smile and shake her hand before resuming his work. As the woman in the office had explained, they got paid by the gallon, not by the hour.

  “Why does everyone have three buckets?” she asked Leroy.

  “For three different sizes of oysters,” he replied. “One for standards, which are the smallest, one for selects, which are bigger, and another for counts, which are the biggest.”

  Pearl gripped her aching forehead after he explained how to identify the sizes. “I’ll never remember all this.”

  “The round side of the oyster goes down first,” Leroy explained. “It fits the depression in the block, see?”

  Next, her cousin taught her how to stab the knife in what was called the bill of the oyster to cut the muscle so she could open it up. On her first try, the knife skittered across the table. On the next, she nearly sliced off her finger instead of the oyster.

  “Keep at it,” Leroy said as he watched what she was doing. “It just takes practice.”

  Fifteen minutes later, he looked into her pails and pulled out a remnant of oyster. “Oh, Pearl. You’re tearing most of these up. The oyster meat has got to come out as whole as you can get it. Otherwise, it won’t count.”

  Pearl set down her knife and wiped her perspiring forehead on the back of her forearm. Why had her life come to this? She was willing to work hard but she couldn’t seem to do this. All the practice in the world probably wouldn’t help either. Besides, Aunt Wilma wouldn’t allow her much time for practice. She needed her wages.

  It took most of the morning to fill her pails even halfway. She couldn’t even fill one bucket, let alone three. Leroy brought her to a window where a man weighed her oysters and wrote down the information in a book beside her name. By the time their lunch break came, Pearl’s fingers were so stiff, sore and cold she could hardly move them.

  Working with the slimy, unappetizing blobs of oyster meat all morning had shriveled her stomach into a ball. Even though they had washed their hands before the meal, the smell of oysters still clung to her. It seemed as if the endless slime did too.

  She only ate the stale cornbread and cheese Wilma grudgingly gave her for enough strength to get through the afternoon. She had never stood so long in one spot before and had found herself on the verge of fainting more than once.

  “How did she do?” Wilma asked Leroy as they sat at one of the long communal tables with wooden benches in the lunchroom.

  “Two gallons,” her cousin muttered, looking down at his food.

  “Two gallons?” Wilma exclaimed loud enough to drown out the neighboring conversations.

  Sadie sniffed. “Those fancy airs of yours aren’t much help here, are they?”

  “Girl, you got to do better than that,” Wilma added.

  Pearl gripped the edge of the table, wishing she could hide in the nearby cloakroom the rest of the day. She fought the urge to scream, cry or sass the sour, old woman. Couldn’t she see she was doing the best she could?

  Have dignity. Even if you have nothing else, nobody can take that from you.

  Mama’s words came back to her now, giving her strength. Even though this had to be the most miserable day of her life, she could choose dignity.

  She dusted the crumbs off her hands and stood as the break ended. “I’ll do better this afternoon.”

  But she didn’t do much better. Her exposed, right fingers became so scratched her entire hand was a throbbing ball of pain. The hours, visible from the large clock on the far wall, dragged by so slowly she wondered if time itself had stopped. Each one brought more humidity, making her clothes stick to her skin.

  The next oyster proved so hard to open it flew across the table. While trying to catch it, she knocked her half-full pail of large oysters on the floor. The oyster meat she’d picked scattered across the floor, dirty and ruined.

  “Oh, Pearl!” Leroy exclaimed when he saw the mess. “Try to be more careful.”

  Something inside her snapped and dignity vanished. Leaving the mess for her cousin to deal with, she threw down her knife, yanked off her gloves and ran outside to the unloading dock. On the way, she saw Wilma glare at her in open-mouthed disbelief but that didn’
t stop her.

  On the dock, she passed metal contraptions she couldn’t identify and clutched one of the rough wooden pilings, unable to go any farther without falling into the water. The smell of fuel was stronger here as boats unloaded oysters and men’s voices drifted around her.

  Her gaze drifted to the yellow-green cordgrass fringing the opposite bank, but tears filled her eyes so quickly she couldn’t see where they ended and the water she looked at began.

  Why, Mama? Why did you leave me? What will I do now? I sure can’t do this.

  She found a bench nearby and sank onto it. Her legs were so tired from standing they trembled. She bowed her head and covered her face with her hands, heedless of who saw her. Moments passed. Too many to count.

  When she heard a man clear his throat from very close range, she dropped her hands and looked up. Her gaze traveled slowly up the solid torso of the white man standing in front of her. Uneasiness clawed at her spine. This wasn’t the supervisor she’d seen earlier and although the suspenders, rolled up shirtsleeves and straw boater hat he wore were modest, he looked important.

  His trim moustache and hair were dark except for a few silver strands at his temples. His ruddy tan told her he spent a lot of time outdoors, and his eyes… She had never seen such pale eyes, white hot with a bit of blue around the edges.

  Looking at those eyes felt just as dangerous as staring at the sun but it was as if her body had turned into a block of wood. She couldn’t move and she couldn’t stop staring at the man. If there were people or boat engines nearby, she stopped hearing them.

  Finally she gathered enough wits to wipe her tears, mortified that a total stranger had witnessed her moment of weakness.

  “I must have gotten some dust in my eye,” she claimed.

  With his serious gaze still locked with hers, he pulled a hanky out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

  “My hands—” she began. She tried to explain they were dirty from shucking but her voice seemed to have fled.

  “Take it,” he ordered. “I have too much oyster juice in my veins to let a little dirt bother me.”

  The scent of him, obvious because he stood so close, was even more concentrated in the scrap of fabric she took from him. It reminded her of fresh sea breezes from the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis. Strong and powerful yet safe at the same time.

  She dabbed her nose and eyes, enjoying the simple luxuries of a clean handkerchief and a kind stranger. After her grueling experiences today, she would no longer take such things for granted.

  “You’re new,” he stated.

  She swallowed. “Yes, I’m related to the Johnsons. This is my first day.”

  He nodded. “What’s your name?”

  “Pearl Wilson.”

  A row of even teeth flashed beneath the moustache. To her horror, her cheeks grew hot when she wondered how that moustache would feel brushing across her face. She also wondered if the white fabric of his shirt felt as fine as the hanky did. He stood too close, close enough to reach out and touch. If she buried her face against his chest, would his fresh scent be strongest there?

  Heavens! Her mother would not approve of the thoughts going through her mind. Where on earth had they come from? Her heart beat too fast and she felt flushed despite the breeze from the water. No man had ever had this effect on her before, especially not a white man! When a strange heat flowered between her legs, Pearl crossed them tightly and concentrated on straightening the hem of her dress beneath the apron.

  “Pearl. That’s a lovely name and very fitting for an oyster house,” he said.

  He’d looked so solemn at first she’d expected him to have a deep, stern voice. Instead, it was warm and easy with the musical lilt of a southern Maryland waterman’s accent. She recognized it from visiting the Annapolis harbor where boat captains arrived from all over the state and even farther.

  “I’m Caleb Rockfield.”

  “Rockfield?” she repeated, looking at him again as the blood drained from her face.

  He winked at her. “Yeah, I own this place.”

  To her surprise, he shook her hand as if she were his equal instead of an employee.

  “I take it your first day is not going very well?” he asked.

  She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin, amazed at how quickly her dignity and strength had returned. Maybe Mr. Rockfield’s kindness had something to do with that.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Miss Wilson, I would like you to stay after work today.”

  Pearl’s heart flopped inside her chest as if it were a fish trapped in a net. It was bad enough Wilma was already displeased with her poor income potential. If she’d angered the owner of the company, they could all lose their jobs.

  “Have I done something wrong?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” he replied with the same easy voice. “I would just like to, uh…discuss your future here. My office is upstairs.”

  “But how will I get home? I live with the Johnsons and ride in their boat.”

  “I’ll make arrangements for you to get home.”

  Will we be alone? She didn’t dare ask but couldn’t help wondering if he planned to have his way with her. Why else would he want to see her if not to reprimand her for her poor shucking performance? The thought made the strange heat between her legs intensify.

  Mama would not approve of her being alone with a white man. She must refuse…gracefully.

  “I—”

  But before she could try to get out of it, he left.

  What had happened to her common sense? She was so entranced by the man’s effect on her she could hardly speak. Now she had no choice but to obey his order.

  Pearl stood, feeling as gangly as a newborn colt as she walked back inside. The owner of the company wanted to see her after work… What could that mean? Equal measures of fear and excitement tumbled inside her as she wondered.

  Wilma grabbed her arm with a wet, gloved hand as she walked back to her stall.

  “What were you doing out there?” the woman demanded. “What did he want with you?”

  Wilma’s face was covered with perspiration and Pearl noticed how tired she looked. She couldn’t be much older than her mother had been but she looked at least ten years older.

  Pearl shrugged. “He wants me to see him after work.”

  “What? Heaven help us all,” Wilma exclaimed. “I just knew you were nothing but trouble. Now we be going to lose our jobs because of you.”

  Feeling that familiar mantle of dignity around her again, Pearl told her everything would be all right in a calm voice and walked away. When she reached her stall, Leroy looked at her with tired, troubled eyes but didn’t say anything. The pail she’d dropped was clean and back in its place.

  Pearl’s hands resumed her work but her mind was still outside, looking into those impossibly pale eyes. Why wasn’t she afraid of their upcoming meeting? And why was he so different from the other white men she’d met during her life? Maybe it was because he was the first who’d looked at her as a real person, an equal.

  To her surprise, she did better at shucking. Before long, she had a full pail of relatively undamaged oysters to take to the window for processing. How could talking to a man have changed her so much in so little time? Maybe she’d been thinking too much this morning, trying so hard not to fail she couldn’t do anything but. The distraction from the unusual encounter must have done her some good.

  All she knew was that she couldn’t wait to see Mr. Rockfield again.

  Chapter Two

  Caleb had been sitting behind his desk in his upstairs office for a couple of hours but part of him was still down on the dock talking to that intriguing young woman. There was something different about her.

  He flipped through some delivery records but instead of reading the numbers, he saw her face on the pages. Her delicate cheekbones and expressive lips, which seemed to broadcast every emotion, were the best things he’d seen in a while.

  And her
eyes. So haunting yet strong. They were the color of that green water out there and pulled him in headfirst as if he’d fallen off the pier. The rest of her looked strong too despite her small stature.

  Where had she come from? He needed to know everything about her.

  Booted footsteps on the wooden floorboards of his office broke him out of his trance. Henry, his younger brother, handed him the tally sheet from his latest delivery of oysters.

  Caleb blinked at the quantity. “I didn’t expect so many bushels so soon.”

  Henry operated the company buy-boat, Easy Pickings, which he used to both dredge for oysters from Rockfield’s leased beds and buy oysters from other boats. He took off his cap, which was adorned with fish hooks, revealing wavy brown hair that was too long. As usual, his faded overalls were dirty with oyster mud and boat engine grease.

  “Yeah, it’s going to be a good harvest this year,” he replied. “Have you thought about my idea to expand the bulkhead and dock? We’re running out of room with all those discarded shells out there. On busy days the boats trip all over each other.”

  What does she taste like? Caleb wondered. How would that kissable mouth feel beneath his own? How would that tiny slip of a body feel in his arms? And did the skin on her shapely calves feel as soft as it looked? An erection swelled inside his pants with no warning. He scooted his chair closer to the desk to hide it.

  Henry waved a hand in front of his face. “Caleb? Are you there?”

  Caleb blinked until the image of Pearl disappeared. “Sorry. I’m not myself today.”

  His brother laughed. “Sometimes I wonder if all this is starting to bore you.”

  Caleb couldn’t help wondering the same thing. The plant expansions and big harvests had been so exciting at first. Why was he thinking about Pearl instead of the bulkhead?

  Henry nodded toward the door. “Looks like you’ve got a new employee down there. She looks young.”

  Caleb opened his mouth to comment but stopped himself. Henry didn’t need to know how taken he was with her.

  “Draw me up a plan of the bulkhead expansion and estimate the cost,” he said instead.