mudflats every morning to watch Webster Pommeroy scour the mud. She would sit with Senator Simon Addams on the beach for hours at a time, watching. At the end of each day, the three would walk back to town together.
They made a strange threesome—the Senator and Ruth and Webster. Webster was a strange one in any company. Senator Simon Addams, an unusually large man, had a misshapen head; it looked as if it had been kicked in at one time and had healed poorly. He teased himself about his odd fat nose. (“I have nothing to do with the shape of my nose,” he liked to say. “It was a birthday present.”) And he frequently wrung his great doughy hands. He had a strong body but was subject to severe bouts of fear; he called himself a champion coward. He often looked as if he was afraid someone was about to come around the corner and smack him. This was quite the opposite of Ruth Thomas, who often looked as if she was about to smack the next person who came around the corner.
Sometimes, as Ruth sat on the beach, looking at huge Senator Simon and tiny Webster Pommeroy, she wondered how she had become involved with these two weak, weird men. How had they become her good friends? What would the girls back in Delaware think if they knew of this little gang? She was not embarrassed by the Senator and Webster, she assured herself. Whom would she be embarrassed around, all the way out there on Fort Niles Island? But those two were odd ones, and anyone from off the island who might have caught a glimpse of the threesome would have thought Ruth odd, too.
Still, she had to admit, it was fascinating to watch Webster crawl around in the mud, looking for a tusk. Ruth had not a shred of faith that Webster would find an elephant’s tusk, but it was entertaining to watch him work. It was really something to see.
“That’s dangerous, what Webster’s doing out there,” the Senator would say to Ruth as they watched Webster head deeper and deeper into the mud.
It was indeed dangerous, but the Senator had no intention of interfering, even as Webster sank into the loosest, most collapsing, most embracing mud, his arms submerged, feeling about for artifacts in the blind muck. The Senator was nervous and Ruth was nervous, but Webster moved stoically, without terror. Such moments, in fact, were the only times his twitchy body was ever still. He was calm in the mud. He was never afraid in the mud. Sometimes he too seemed to be sinking. He would pause in his search, and the Senator and Ruth Thomas would see him slowly descending. It was frightful. It did look at times as if they were about to lose him.
“Should we go after him?” the Senator would suggest, meekly.
“Not in that fucking deathtrap,” Ruth would say. “Not me.”
(Ruth had developed something of a mouth by the time she was eighteen years old. Her father often commented on it. “I don’t know where you got that goddamn mouth of yours,” he’d say, and she would reply, “Now there’s a goddamn mystery.”)
“Are you sure he’s all right?” the Senator would ask.
“No,” Ruth would say. “I think he may be going under. But I’m not going after him, and neither are you. Not in that fucking deathtrap.”
No, not her. Not out there, where forgotten lobsters and clams and mussels and sea worms grew to godless size, and where Christ only knew what else hovered about. When the Scottish settlers first came to Fort Niles, they had leaned over those very mudflats from huge rocks and had dug out, with gaffs, living lobsters as big as any man. They had written of this in their journals; descriptions of pulling out hideous five-foot monster lobsters, ancient as alligators and caked with mud, grown to repulsive extremes from centuries of unmolested hiding. Webster himself, sifting with his bare, blind hands, had found in this mud some petrified lobster claws the size of baseball mitts. He had dug out clams the size of melons, urchins, dogfish, dead fish. No way was Ruth Thomas going in there. No way.
So the Senator and Ruth would have to sit and watch Webster sink. What could they do? Nothing. They sat in tense silence. Sometimes a gull would fly overhead. Other times, there was no movement at all. They watched and waited, and occasionally felt panic simmering in