We took the hot lobsters, tossed them from hand to hand to keep them from scalding us, and broke them in two. We ate the hot green tomalley right out of the back-shells. We broke off the large claws, put the broken end to our mouths, tipped back our heads, worked the jaws of the claws like scissors, and let the scalding hot juice spurt down our throats. I did not have to show the Old Blue of Oxford how to do it. He knew how. He had eaten Maine lobsters before. His Oxonian chin dripped just as much in the firelight as the lobsterman's and mine did.
We fractured the thick claws in our teeth and got the sweet red meat out whole. We put the flanged tailpieces between our two palms, clasped our hands as if at prayer, cracked inward, cracked outward, laid the flanges wide, broken open clean as a whistle, lifted out a column of meat as large as a tholepin, stripped off the top strip, and took out the dark thread of the colon. Then we shoved the whole delectable business into our mouths. Tears came into our eyes from the heat and taste of the lobsters. But we chewed and swallowed through our tears. We knew just how to eat the crustaceans. We were old hands at eating them, all three of us. We regaled ourselves on meat as hot as a spruce bonfire and sweet as a boy's first love.
My Oregonian-Oxonian friend is a poet, I say. He knows a poem when he sees one. He knows a poem when he is sitting in the middle of one. He knew he was right smack in the midst of a fine poem this night with the lobsterman. He hoed in. He got a lobster ahead of me. He got half a lobster ahead of the lobsterman. And that, let me tell you, is lobster-eating!
Before we knew it, we had run out of lobsters. The fisherman went back to the boat for another pailful. He breezed up our fire, and he set the new lobsters on. They boiled over in about ten minutes' time. The fragrance of hot lobsters spiced the whole night. Qwoks went over duskily like ghosts and cried at the sight of our fire, and at being kept from their feeding grounds and the small fish crowding the edge of the rising tide where we were sitting. We ate some more lobster claws, rested, and talked. We didn't talk much. We were too happy to find much to say. But we felt a lot. We dozed off, watched the stars, ate another claw, thought long, long thoughts. We dozed off, singly, then together. We woke together, stirred the fire, and basked in happiness again. We heard small waves lapping somewhere. The tide was getting well up.
Suddenly our boat loomed huge right beside us, on a level with our firelight. There was a hiss. The edge of high tide was licking our embers. But it did not put them out. It just kissed the outer coals. Our lobsterman had known to an inch where this particular September high tide would come when he kicked up his fire.
We lost all track of time. The spell of the lobsters was upon us deep. We thought and dozed, dozed and thought. We threw on more fragrant spruce brush. The night was turning colder. The fire licked our faces and made them feel good. Little waves lapped about our toes. Our boat leaned on us and on our fire. All three of us got to feeling how this night and the stars of this night and we were brothers. We got to feeling as the ancient Indians, the Abenaki, must have felt in this same little cove here on some September night like this a thousand years ago, and for thousands of years together in this cove, as they ate their lobsters over their sprucewood coals just the way we had eaten the same Maine lobsters now. The three of us merged with the tide and the soft sounds of life it made around us along the shore.
The morning star was burning big on the horizon when we pushed off our boat. The lobstering man rowed us home through the cool and widening dawn.
It was a night like a night of marriage. I shall remember it all my days. I hope I shall remember it, too, beyond even those.
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