We shot ’em in the Spring. Gave them to the old ones, you know, the ones that couldn’t go out no more and take care for themselves.” The suspenders of his bib overralls are loose fitting, resting on his chest. Twinges of white hair straggle below his bill cap.
Beach Robin
By Bill Coolidge
Published: November, 2002
We shot ’em in the Spring. Gave them to the old ones, you know, the ones that couldn’t go out no more and take care for themselves.” The suspenders of his bib overralls are loose fitting, resting on his chest. Twinges of white hair straggle below his bill cap.
“Beach Robin,” he holds up a wooden bird. “Carved it out of heartwood, someone over on the island gave it to me. Look here, you can see the grain. I like the curves, didn’t want to varnish it. Can you see the difference between it and the red cedar?” He points to bright, shiny orangish-red wooden duck.
“Brought me to my knees, oh boy, thought I wouldn’t make it. Doctor told me it was just a small lump on my lungs, but that chemo stuff, poisonous, thought I was going to die.” His blue eyes stray off to the 50-foot white boat on blocks sitting in his front yard. “Can’t finish the cabin, ’cept my son came down from Virginia to help me, took a whole week from his vacation. Hell, I can barely climb that ladder. My hands shake, I don’t want to be fussing with that jig saw.”
I’ve been riding by this boat and the white double-wide house for nearly a year. Out front next to the mailbox is a cupboard with glass windows filled with elegant carved shorebirds. Finally, I rode my bike into the yard and yelled, “Captain, you up there?”
“Doc said he got it all. That was last April. Now lookeehere, it’s September 1st and my hands and feet are still numbing. Don’t know what to make of it.” He turns again and eyeballs the boat.
“You know that was going to be a shrimp boat, but no more. Just last week I bought hundred pounds of shrimp at a $1.29 a pound. Now I ask you, just how can a man make a living shrimping? Can’t. Tell you that right now. Imports to blame. No one ’round here will be wanting to go shrimping after this season. I’ll make her into an off-shore fishing boat. Everybody with money is buying one of these.
“These birds though. Got boxes of them in my house. I’m thinking I’ll enter them in that contest over on Harkers in the fall.” He pulls up the straps on his bib overalls, straightens his bill cap. Turns his head and gazes at his boat.
“Worked on the water all my life, grew up over there on Cedar Island. Worked the tugs in Virginia, like my son does now, that was good money. No jobs around here like that.”
He doesn’t say, “When I go back to Virginia.” Maybe he knows now there is no going back. He scuffles a little, stumbles as we walk over to the boat, live oak leaves already spilling onto the sandy ground.
“Don’t hardly know anybody making a living working on the water. Whenever I get this boat off of my front lawn, I think I will build me a little shed, put her right where that boat is and start acarving. Make money thataway.” The white boat seems mammoth to me. Without his son helping, I wonder just how he is going to finish his project.
“Oh, sorry, my name is Cooper Mason.” His large hand, long arms unfurl and my hand is held comfortably in his. “Moved over here to be near my grandchildren. But I remember going over to Shackleford in the fall and shooting loons. It was illegal then. And these here, Beach Robins we call them. Shot them, too. They were everywhere. Even now, I hear in the Carribean they are starving to death. Too many of them.”
“Back then, out on Cedar Island, each depended on the other. No government and rules, no foreign imports, no pollution. Crabs and oysters aplenty.”
“Grandpa, dinner’s ready.” A girl with a blue blouse and light brown hair yells out from the doorstep.
Cooper doesn’t move, as if he didn’t hear her. “Now this boat. I’ll put a couple coats of epoxy on her. She’ll be good in rough weather. I know that.” Cooper Mason holds onto my Beach Robin, made of heartwood pine. His eyes have that faraway gaze, out past Harker’s Island, to Cape Lookout, around the protected point into the ocean heading for Shackleford Banks. Birds and boats, the given life of a man brushed close by death’s whisper, unwilling to go inside, until these rough calloused dented fingers can let go of the curved gnarls, the heartwood of his destiny.
