…hauling up another wire trap with his bare hands, his shirt plastered to his chest and his white hair dripping under a cap that had once been red. Through the binoculars, I could see every detail. The rope cut into his fingers. The trap was heavy with crabs, and the waves slapped the side of the boat hard enough to knock him sideways. My father, seventy six years old and carrying a pacemaker, had been out there since before dawn. I lowered the binoculars and turned to the old man at the bait shop. “Sir,” I said, “how much to borrow a boat?”
His name was Mr. Landry, and he put his grandson in a little skiff with an outboard motor and sent us out through the chop. It took twenty minutes. The water was gray green, and the wind tore at my hair. When we pulled alongside the boat of Wade, the engine idling, my brother in law lowered his beer and squinted at me over the rail. “Court?” he said. “What in the world are you doing out here?” I did not answer. I scrambled over the gunwale, grabbed the nearest bucket of ice water and ran to my father, who was still hauling, and threw it over his shoulders. He jerked upright. “Daddy,” I said, “you are done.”
Wade climbed out of the shade at last, smiling the lazy smile that I have never trusted. He is fifty, a man with a sunburned neck and a gold chain, and he has always treated the family of my sister like a clubhouse. “Court, relax,” he said. “Your daddy volunteered. He loves it out here. I only have him pull the traps. I handle the heavy stuff.” I looked at the stack of crab traps on the deck, thirty of them, then at the cooler of beer, then at the sunburn on the forearms of my father. “Wade, how many trips has he made with you this summer?” I asked. Wade scratched his chin. “Forty something,” he said.
A wire crab pot left on a harbor dock gave one daughter the weekend to bring her father back to the fishing pier in Biloxi.
I gave my terms in the pitching boat, with one hand on the rail. My father was going back to shore with me immediately, and he would never again be asked to pull a trap, bait a hook or haul a rope for Wade. For every trip, Wade would pay him one hundred fifty dollars, which for forty two trips came to six thousand, three hundred dollars, in cash or check. Wade would hire a deckhand, a proper one, with a life vest. And he would apologize, to my father and to my sister, in front of both of us, on dry land, with his hat off.
Wade started to argue. He said that the crab business ran on family, that nobody got rich, that I did not understand the sea. Then my father spoke, in a quiet, tired voice, and Wade shut his mouth. “Wade, I helped you because you asked me,” Daddy said. “And because I thought you were lonely. But I have a pacemaker, son. Dr. Patel told me to stay out of the sun, and I never told you. I was proud, and I was a fool.” He put his hands on his knees. “Please do not ever let me do this again. I would like to see my granddaughter graduate.”
Wade stared at him. The sneer slid off his face, and what was left was a scared, sunburned man who suddenly looked a great deal older. “Mr. Alvin, I did not know,” he said. “I swear I did not know about the pacemaker.” I told him he had never asked. He nodded. He took off his cap, looked at the water and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I thought I was doing a good thing,” he said. “Giving you something to do.” My father put one hand on his shoulder. “Wade, a man can be given too much to do,” he said. “And too little. The trick is finding the middle.”
We took Daddy to the emergency room at Biloxi Regional, where the nurses wrapped him in blankets and put drops of fluid in his arm. The doctor checked his pacemaker and found it working fine, though his blood pressure was high and he was badly dehydrated. He had to stay overnight. I sat in the vinyl chair beside his bed and listened to the beeping of the machines, and around midnight he woke and looked at me. “Court, you came for me,” he said. “I was not sure anybody would.” I held his hand until the sun came up through the window.
The money consequences came without argument. Wade wrote the check for six thousand, three hundred dollars, and my sister, Jolene, delivered it herself with tears running down her face. Wade hired a young man from Gulfport as a deckhand, and he bought a new canvas shade for the console. He also posted a sign at the harbor that said, No Volunteers. Pay Your Crew. It was crooked and badly spelled, and it made half the dock laugh. But Mr. Landry shook his hand over it, and Wade stood a little taller after that.
In the name of my mother, Marguerite, who passed nine years ago and who sold shrimp from a wooden cart on the Biloxi pier, I started the Marguerite Shade Fund. It pays for shade canopies, life vests, medical checkups and fair wages for older relatives and old friends who help on small fishing boats along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In the first year, we outfitted thirty one boats. A deckhand of seventy two, a retired shrimper with a long white beard, sat in the new shade of a canvas awning and said, “Madam, I did not know this was allowed.”
On a clear Sunday in September, I took my father to the end of the pier with two folding chairs, a cooler and a big red umbrella. He baited his own hook, slowly, with the patience of a man who had done it ten thousand times. Wade stood a few feet away holding a bucket, ready to be told what to carry. My father cast his line far out into the green water and settled back with a sigh. “Daddy, is this the right amount of work?” I asked. He looked at the bobber for a while. “Baby girl,” he said, “this is exactly the right amount.”
