Webster Pommeroy, who was twenty-three that summer, had nothing else to do anyway. Every day, the Senator and Webster would head down to Potter Beach, where Webster would look for the elephant’s tusks. It was a perfect task for Webster Pommeroy, because Webster Pommeroy was not capable of doing anything else. His meekness and seasickness prevented his becoming a lobsterman or a sternman, but his problems went deeper than that. Something was wrong with Webster Pommeroy. Everyone saw it. Something had happened to Webster the day he saw his father’s corpse—eyeless and puffy—sprawled out on the Fort Niles dock. Webster Pommeroy, at that moment, broke; fell to bits. He stopped growing, stopped developing, nearly stopped speaking. He turned into a twitchy and nervous and deeply troubled local tragedy. At twenty-three, he was as slim and small as he’d been at fourteen. He seemed to be forever cast in a boy’s frame. He seemed to be forever trapped in that moment of recognizing his dead father.
Senator Simon Addams had a sincere concern for Webster Pommeroy. He wanted to help the boy. The boy broke the Senator’s heart. He felt the boy needed a vocation. It took the Senator several years to discover Webster’s worth, though, because it was not immediately clear what, if anything, Webster Pommeroy could do. The Senator’s only idea was to enlist the young man in his project for the Museum of Natural History.
The Senator initially sent Webster to the homes of neighbors on Fort Niles, requesting that they donate to the museum any interesting artifacts or antiques, but Webster was a shy and miserable failure at the task. He would knock on a door, but when the neighbor opened it, he was likely to stand there, mute, nervously tapping his feet. Every local housewife was disturbed by his behavior. Webster Pommeroy, standing on the doorstep, looking as if he was about to cry, was not a born solicitor.
The Senator next tried to enlist Webster in building a holding shed in the Addamses’ back yard to house the Senator’s growing collection of items suitable for the museum. But Webster, while conscientious, was not a natural carpenter. He was neither strong nor handy. His tremors made him useless in the construction work. Worse than useless, indeed. He was a danger to himself and others, because he was always dropping saws and drills, always hammering his fingers. So the Senator took Webster off the building detail.
Other tasks the Senator created were similarly unsuitable for Webster. It was beginning to look as though Webster could do nothing. It took nearly nine years for the Senator to discover what Webster was good at.
It was mud.
Down at Potter Beach was a veritable pasture of mud, revealed fully only at low tide. During the lowest tides, it was more than ten acres of mud, wide and flat and smelling of rancid blood. Men had periodically dug clams in this mud, and they frequently turned up hidden treasures—ancient boat parts, wooden buoys, lost boots, odd bones, bronze spoons, and extinct iron tools. The muddy cove apparently was a natural magnet for lost objects, and so it was that the Senator conceived the idea of searching the flats for the elephant’s tusks. Why would they not be there? Where else would they be?
He asked Webster whether he was interested in wading through the mud, like a clam digger, seeking artifacts in a systematic manner. Could Webster examine the shallower areas of the Potter Beach mudflats, perhaps, wearing high boots? Would that distress Webster too greatly? Webster Pommeroy shrugged. He didn’t seem distressed. And so it was that Webster Pommeroy began his career of searching the mudflats. And he was brilliant at it.
As it turned out, Webster Pommeroy could move through any mud. He could negotiate mud that was nearly up to his chest. Webster Pommeroy could move through mud like a vessel made for the task, and he found marvelous treasures—a wristwatch, a shark’s tooth, a whale’s skull, a complete wheelbarrow. Day after day, the Senator would sit on the dirty rocks by the shore and watch Webster’s progress. He watched Webster search through the mud every day of the summer of 1975.
And when Ruth Thomas came home from boarding school in late May of 1976, the Senator and Webster were at it again. With nothing else to do, with no work and no friends of her age, Ruth Thomas developed the hobby of walking down to the Potter Beach