The Oyster Stakes at Shivering Reach

There is a stretch of tidal marsh on the eastern shore that the charts call Shiverton Reach and everyone within twenty miles calls Shivering Reach, and the difference between those two names is the whole of what I am going to tell you.

It is a mile and a half of salt marsh and mudflat between the mainland and a barrier of low pine hummocks. Twice a day the tide goes out and uncovers a hundred-odd wooden stakes standing in the mud in a long irregular line, black with age, crusted to the waterline with old oyster shell. Watermen set them to mark leased bottom, generations of them, and the stakes are replaced as they rot, and the line has been more or less where it is since the 1880s.

There should be one hundred and four.

Anyone who works that water can tell you the number without thinking, the way you know the number of stairs in your own house. Ninety-six from the Dowdy line, eight from the old Teague lease that nobody has worked since the war. One hundred and four. And the reason they can all tell you is that four or five times in a generation, somebody goes out at dead low water and counts one hundred and five.

I grew up eight miles inland and married into it, which is a specific and permanent status on that shore; you can be from away for fifty years there. My wife's grandmother, Nan Dowdy, was the one who explained the stakes to me, in 1988, on a folding chair on a dock, with the particular patience of a woman who has explained many things to many outsiders and expects to be believed by none of them.

"Extra stake means somebody's coming up," she said. "Marsh is giving something back. You go and you look and you bring it in and you do it right, and that's the end of it."

"Bring what in?"

"Whatever's at the foot of the stake," said Nan Dowdy, and lit a cigarette.

Here is the history, as far as anyone has bothered to write it down, which is not far.

In September of 1878 a schooner called the Amity Rose went down in the mouth of the sound in a storm that also took most of the roofs in the county. She had twenty-two aboard: crew, a family relocating to Norfolk, and — this is the detail that matters — eleven passengers who were never named in any newspaper, because they were being carried north in the hold, and because the men carrying them had no intention of filing a passenger list with anyone.

The county recovered nine bodies in the week after the storm and buried them in the churchyard at Mount Airy with a stone that reads TO THOSE THE SEA GAVE BACK. Thirteen were never recovered. The eleven in the hold were never counted at all, which is to say that the official number of dead from the wreck of the Amity Rose is eleven, and the actual number is twenty-two, and the difference has been standing out in that marsh for a hundred and forty years.

The first extra stake appeared in the spring of 1879.

The Dowdy who found it — Nan's great-grandfather Ezekiel, who could not read and who dictated a statement to a Methodist minister that still exists in a church archive — went out at low water and found a stake he had not set, freshly driven, standing in mud that had not been walked on. At the foot of it, worked half out of the mud the way the marsh works everything half out eventually, was a human forearm, and a scrap of cloth, and a brass buckle.

He did the thing that has been done ever since. He got a sheet and a shovel and a bushel basket. He brought up what the marsh had offered, all of it, carefully, and did not stop when he had enough to be sure of what it was. He carried it to the church. And the minister, who deserves more credit than history has given him, did a full burial service — name unknown, in the ground, with the words said over it, in the churchyard with the others.

The stake was gone at the next low water. Ezekiel counted one hundred and four.

It has happened, by Nan's reckoning and the church's, forty-one times since 1879. Forty-one extra stakes; forty-one recoveries; forty-one graves in a long row at the back of the Mount Airy churchyard, unnamed, each with a fieldstone. The stone that says TO THOSE THE SEA GAVE BACK is at the head of the row, and it is worth noting that at some point in the 1930s somebody chiselled the word SEA out and cut MARSH above it, and somebody else chiselled that out too, and the stone now has a shallow scar in the middle of its one sentence, which is the most honest thing on that shore.

Forty-one recoveries and twenty-two dead on the Amity Rose. The arithmetic does not work, and everyone knows the arithmetic does not work, and nobody on that water will discuss it with you for longer than about ninety seconds.

"The marsh gives everything back," Nan said, when I pushed her on it. "That's the trouble with it. That's the entire trouble with it. It doesn't just hold the Rose. It holds the whole shore, everybody who ever went in it, and it has got no sense of time whatsoever. You'll get a Confederate button one year and a Nike shoe the next and a bone that the state man says is three hundred years old the year after. It gives them back one at a time and it puts up a marker so you'll know where to look, and if you look and you bring them in and you say the words, it stops. That's the arrangement. That's not superstition, that's just being a neighbor."

I asked what happens if you don't.

She told me about 1954.

In 1954 the Teague lease was worked by a man named Purvis Teague, who was, by every account I have ever heard, a genuinely mean-spirited man in a community that graded generously on that curve. In October he counted one hundred and five, and he went out and looked, and he found what he found, and he decided that a bushel basket of somebody's grandmother was not going to interrupt a good season.

He knocked the stake down and went back to work.

The stake was standing at the next low water. He knocked it down again. It was standing the tide after. He pulled it and threw it in his boat and carried it home and burned it in his yard, and his neighbors watched him do it and said nothing, because he was that kind of man and it was that kind of shore.

The morning after he burned it there were two extra stakes.

By the end of that week there were nine. By the end of the month, according to a count taken by three separate men who did not much like each other and had no reason to agree, there were forty-six extra stakes in the marsh off the Teague lease, standing in mud with no footprints around them, in a pattern that was not a line at all but a rough closed curve, and inside the curve the mud had gone soft in a way that mud does not go.

Purvis Teague was found on the eleventh of November, upright, at dead low water, in the middle of that curve, in mud to the middle of his chest. He had been out there some hours. He was not dead. He was taken to Salisbury and he lived another twenty-three years and did not speak again, not once, not to a doctor or a priest or his own sister, and this is documented, and you may look it up.

The community did the work he wouldn't. Nan's father and six other men spent four days out there at low water with sheets and baskets, and they brought in what the forty-six stakes were marking, and the minister at Mount Airy said the words forty-six times, and there are forty-six fieldstones from that November in the back row, which is why the arithmetic does not work, and why nobody discusses the arithmetic.

The next spring there were one hundred and four stakes.

The Teague lease has not been worked since. Its eight stakes are maintained — this is important, and it took me years to understand it — by the Dowdys, who replace them when they rot, out of their own pocket, on water they do not lease and cannot profit from, because the count has to be right.

I have seen one extra stake in thirty-eight years of marrying into that shore. February of 2003, a hard low tide with ice in the guts of the marsh. My wife's brother counted first and said nothing to me, just started loading the skiff with a bedsheet and a shovel and a bushel basket, and I understood that I was being included in something and that asking questions would be the wrong response.

It was a child's ribcage and part of a shoe, and the shoe had a rubber sole, and the state medical examiner's office looked at the whole business for four months and returned it to the county with a determination of unidentified remains, indeterminate interval, and no case number that has ever gone anywhere.

The minister at Mount Airy is a woman now, and she is the fourth generation of that pulpit to keep a list. She said the words over a bushel basket in a February churchyard with eleven of us standing there in coats, and she did not make it brief, and afterward she shook my hand and said, "Thank you for going out."

The stake was gone at the next low water. I counted a hundred and four myself, twice, from the end of the Dowdy dock with binoculars, because I needed to.

People ask me whether I think there is something in the marsh, and I never know how to answer, because the question assumes a thing with intentions and a face, and what I have come to believe is both smaller and much larger than that.

I think a landscape can keep a habit. I think a shore full of drowned people, held in mud that preserves and moves and preserves again, developed over two centuries the equivalent of a habit — an insistence, patient and mechanical as a tide, that what it holds should be counted and named and put in the ground with words said over it. And I think forty-one times in a hundred and forty years a line of families in a poor county have gone out into cold mud with a bedsheet and honored that insistence, not out of fear, though there is fear in it, but because it is the arrangement and because it is decent.

If you drive out there — and it is public road nearly to the water, and the sunset over those flats is the most beautiful thing on the eastern shore — take the binoculars from the glove box and wait for low tide and count.

You will get one hundred and four. Almost certainly you will get one hundred and four.

And if you don't, do not go out to look, because you are from away and you would not know how to do it right. Drive back up the road to the white church at Mount Airy, and knock, and tell whoever answers the door the number you counted.

They will know what to do. They have always known what to do. That is the whole of what the shore has to teach anybody, and it took me thirty-eight years to learn it: the dead do not ask for very much, and what they ask for is almost always a witness.