Read Online Bloodsworth by Tim Junkin - Free Book Online Page B

comes right up across the road, sometimes four foot high. You could dip up soft crabs and buckrams right there in your own backyard, and have ‘em fried up for breakfast.”
    Kirk’s great-aunt Agnes lived to be 110, and he grew up listening to her tell stories of the old days. The extended Bloodsworth family gradually moved off the island in the 1930s to get to electricity, she told him, to find higher ground and a dryer way of life. The U.S. Navy bought the island from the family for fifty cents an acre in 1955 and used it for target practice. After they stopped shelling it, it became an egret sanctuary. Not many people venture onto it because it’s supposed to be full of unexploded bombs.
    For two hundred years the male descendants of Kirk’s family have been watermen—an Eastern Shore term for people who make a living off the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. His grandfather, John Noble Bloodsworth, was an oysterman, fisherman, crab scraper, and trapper. Kirk’s father, Curtis, was as well. Folks say Curtis was one of the best hand-tongers ever. He had a knack for finding the fattest oyster beds, and he could rake the shells up from the bottom, filling bushel after bushel, as fast as anyone. When the oysters got scarce, though, Curtis regretfully went into the seafood business, buying a refrigerator truck and driving the local produce up to New Jersey to sell. This happened when Kirk was about ten. But by then Kirk was a waterman in his own right.
    Since age five, he’d been hunting with his father in the duck blinds that dot the creeks and cuts around the Choptank River. When he was just six, he started helping his father tong for oysters. Kirk would serve as his father’s culler, knocking the spat off the shells. One November, during low tide, after a northeast wind sucked the water right out of the river, his father sailed their boat right up on an oyster bar and Curtis and Kirk just picked up the oysters by hand. They filled a whole flatbed pickup with oyster bushels thatday, and the family celebrated by inviting the relatives over for an oyster feast that night—oyster stew, oysters on the half shell, oysters Rockefeller, fried oysters, you name it.
    For Christmas, Curtis always gave Kirk muskrat traps. From January to March Kirk would get up every morning at four thirty, ride his bicycle out to the marsh to where he’d laid his traps, harvest his muskrats, reset his traps, and ride home. He used Connabear traps, named for Fred Connabear, the mountain man, and would mark their locations with red flags tied to gum poles cut from the gum thickets. The black pelts sold for ten dollars apiece back in the 1970s, and the browns would fetch seven or eight. Riding home on his bicycle, he looked like a miniature woolly mammoth, the musk-rats hanging all over him on strings. Several years running, Kirk won the Dorchester County junior trap-setting contest at the outdoor show. He won the oyster-shucking contest a couple of times, too.
    When the weather turned warm, Kirk and his friends would start fishing, crabbing, and frog-gigging. Kirk fished with a gum pole for a rod and half a spark plug for a sinker, and despite his primitive gear, as his father tells it, “He could really smoke ‘em.” He’d often come home with stringers of perch so long that he wasn’t tall enough to lift them off the ground, and they’d drag behind him. His grandma, Miss Vinnie B., was very fond of the perch roe, and when Kirk was fishing there was always plenty of roe for breakfast. Kirk used a four-prong spear on the nights he went bullfrogging in the marsh, and sometimes would fill several gander sacks full with the frogs. Pritchett’s General Store bought all the frogs he could catch. It bought his muskrat pelts too. Pritchett’s was real country in the country with creaky, old wooden floors, and selling turtle meat and cow’s tongue, tripe and marinated duck eggs. After