The Salt-Tongue

The oysters in Apalachicola were larger than those of Arcachon, their shells rough and grey like pieces of old oak bark rather than the delicate white cups of her home. Claudine sat at the sorting table in the shade of the tin roof, her hands protected by heavy rubber gloves that had begun to rot from the salt. The bay was flat and grey, a sheet of lead under a sky that had been white for three days with the humidity of late August. A barge was unloading twenty bushels of wild oysters, their shells clashing against each other with the sound of dry shingles.

Her employer, a man who had lost his teeth to the river-fever and spoke in a dialect she could only half-understand, was washing the mud off the shells with a high-pressure hose. Claudine sorted them by size, her fingers recognizing the heavy, round shapes of the wild ones from the channel and the thin, sharp edges of the ones that grew in the shallow mud-flats. The scent was the same as in France—the ancient, metallic smell of the tide and the dead seaweed—but here there was a sweetness to the water, a taste of the pine woods that came down from Georgia.

In the evening, she walked along the wooden pier where the shrimp boats were docked, their black nets hanging from their outriggers like giant spider webs. She had come here to follow a man who had left her in Jacksonville after three weeks, but she had stayed because the salt here was cheaper and the work did not require her to speak to anyone. She took an oyster from her pocket, cracked it open with her pocketknife, and swallowed it whole, its cold, grey body tasting of the river and the sea, two waters that were always trying to drown each other in the bay.