Across the Fruited Plain | Page 9

stayed with Sally, and Rose-Ellen and Jimmie peeked.
They were startled when a big hand dropped on each of their heads.
"You kids skedaddle," ordered a big man. "If you want to see things,
come back at four."
By four o'clock the grown folks were home, tired and smelling of fish;
Dick and Rose-Ellen were prancing on tiptoe to go, and even Jimmie
was ready.
"This is what he is like," said Rose-Ellen, "the man who said we
could." She stuck in her chin and threw out her chest and tried to stride.
"That's the Big Boss, all right," Daddy said, laughing. "Guess it's O.K.
But mind your p's and q's."
"And stick together. Specially in a strange place." Grandma wearily
picked up the baby.
The Big Boss saw them as soon as they tiptoed into the oyster-house.
"Ez," he called, "here's some nice kids. Show 'em around, will you?"
Ez was opening clams with a penknife, and spilling them into his
mouth. "Want some?" he asked.

The children shook their heads vigorously.
He closed his knife and dropped it into his pocket.
"Well, now first you want to see the dredges come in from the bay." He
took them through the open front of the shed to the docks outside. The
boats had gone out at three o'clock in the morning, he said, in the deep
dark. They were coming in now heavily, loaded high with horny
oysters, and Ez pointed out the rake-set iron nets with which the
shellfish were dragged from their beds. "Got 'em out of bed good and
early!"
"I'd hate to have to eat 'em all," Jimmie said suddenly in his husky little
voice.
Everyone laughed, for the big rough shells were traveling into the
oyster-house by thousands, on moving belts. Some shells looked as if
they were carrying sponges in their mouths, but Ez said it was a kind of
moss that grew there. Already the pile of unopened oysters in the shed
was higher than a man. The shuckers needed a million to work on next
day, Ez said.
[Illustration: Watching the dredges]
When the children had watched awhile, and the boatmen had asked
their names, and how old they were and where they came from, Ez took
them inside the shed to show them the handling of the newly shucked
oysters. First the oysters were dumped into something that looked like
Mrs. Albi's electric washer, and washed and washed. Then they were
emptied into a flume, a narrow trough along which they were swept
into bright cans that held almost a gallon each. The cans were stored in
ice-packed barrels, and early next morning would go out in trains and
trucks to all parts of the country.
"How many pearls have they found in all these oysters?" Dick
demanded in a businesslike voice. "Not any!" Ez said.
"Why can't you eat oysters in months that don't have R in them?" asked

Rose-Ellen.
"You could, if there wasn't a law against selling them. It's only a notion,
like not turning your dress if you put it on wrong side out. Summer's
when oysters lay eggs. You don't stop eating hens because they lay
eggs, do you? But now scram, kids. I got work to do."
They left, skipping past the mountains of empty shells outside.
Next day the children went to church school alone. The grown folks
were too tired. And on Monday Dick and Rose-Ellen went up the road
to the school in the little village.
It was strange to be in school again, and with new schoolmates and
teachers and even new books, since this was a different state.
Rose-Ellen's grade, the fifth, had got farther in long division than her
class at home, and she couldn't understand what they were doing. Dick
had trouble, too, for the seventh grade was well started on United States
history, and he couldn't catch up. But that was not the worst of it. The
two children could not seem to fit in with their schoolmates. The
village girls gathered in groups by themselves and acted as if the
oyster-shuckers' children were not there at all; and the boys did not give
Dick even a chance to show what a good pitcher he was. Both
Rose-Ellen and Dick had been leaders in the city school, and now they
felt so lonesome that Rose-Ellen often cried when she got home.
It was too long a walk for Jimmie, who begged not to go anyway.
Besides, he was needed at home to mind Sally.
Of course the grown folks wanted to earn all they could. The pay was
thirty cents a gallon; and just as it took a lot of cranberries to make a
peck, it took a lot of these middle-sized oysters to make a gallon. To