My commander had his jackknife open at the blade that was worn thin as a moonbeam, slim as death, from opening thousands of quahaugs. My Uncle Quentin caught up the first one, turned him butt up on his left palm, the golden lip of the shell toward him. He laid his jackknife blade lightly along the shell's lip and pressed in, oh so gently, with his four left fingers side by side. As the blade slid in, Uncle Quentin seized the knife's handle with his right hand and gave a lightninglike slash at the lower hinge, at the upper hinge. The shell sprang open, and there Dan John Quahaug lay blinking in the sun, naked as Adam surprised in his innocence. My uncle slashed him out of his bottom shell with two strokes and tossed him aloft; the moustache curved up and apart, and Dan John was gone. Uncle Quentin hoed in then for more. He gave me every fifth smaller fellow that passed through the twin lightnings of his hands. Little fellows, he said, were for the little fellows like me. The speed of my uncle at shelling was amazing. He kept the azure summer day full of empty shells flying.
Some of my friends use a screw driver and a hammer or a flatiron on quahaugs, and they bite ground shell for their pains. Others attack the shellfish with an adz or a croquet mallet. And most of my friends end up by plunging the adhesive quahaugs into boiling water and so ruining every bit of their flavor. For quahaugs, in the clumsy hands of the novice at shelling, become like seamless pavements, like sheer cobblestones, like hard and unadultered pure rock. Quahaugs, when startled or vexed, cannot be opened with anything lighter than a maul.
Uncle Quentin never allowed me to irritate or frighten his quahaugs and so to put the least blemish on their well-being and flavor. I had to gentle them in digging, in putting them into the basket, in washing them, and I had to gentle them in my baskets up to where my Uncle Quentin sat, waiting. Then my uncle opened them as another and duller man might have shelled so many tender new green peas.
The extra peck Uncle Quentin ate as hors-d'oeuvre to his supper. Indoors, out of the spice of the hot summer sun, Uncle Quentin let fall on each open quahaug two drops squeezed from a very ripe lemon. Or if lemons were not available, he used three drops of old cider vinegar. Ketchup, chili sauce, salt, pepper, pepper sauce, or any other sauce he damned to the lowest, icy circle of hell. But there is one homegrown topping and finish to a raw quahaug—and Uncle Quentin would never forgive me for telling it. It is a shred or two of wild horseradish. Uncle Quentin sent me to pull it for him out behind our barn. He braised it in a little vinegar and then applied it to the quahaug. It did something essentially miraculous to that quahaug's being. He blossomed.
This uncle of mine, like most of my uncles, had been in the Civil War. He had helped save Arkansas and Texas for the Union. He had a permanent crick in his back from sleeping at night on clumps of prickly pear in Texas. So he could not bend over to pick up the shellfish the Abenaki sannups had loved beter than their squaws. That was where I came in. I was supple. I was the back for the back Uncle Quentin had prickled over with Texas cactus.
Uncle Quentin had eaten the heart of the palmetto, he had drunk the juices of the Gulf turtle, savored rattlesnake steaks, eaten of the pompano and the Gulf's red snapper. But Uncle Quentin swore on his Masonic emblem that there was no flavor, no fish, no flesh on land, on sea, or in the air, that could hold a candle to a Maine quahaug ten minutes or less out of a flooding tide, in the months of April, May June, July, August, September, October, or November.
For the other four months of the year, when ice locked up the cupboard of the Atlantic, Uncle Quentin grudgingly depended on my father's barreled quahaugs in our cellar. For my father had the ancient secret—gone from the world turned now into taste-killing refrigerators—of laying down these shellfish alive, in a cornmeal matrix, keeping them alive and happy out of water in a dark cellar, and so having them to eat when the snow drifted the spruces man deep with winter.
Many of the Maine Coast islands are white around their edges. It is not the granite often found there. It is the thousands of years of quahaug shells the Indians heaped up around them as they sat through twenty generations and ate the shellfish coming to them dripping in the baskets of their busy women and howled and howled for more. No other aborigines have so holy or so delectable a monument. No Pharaoh has such a pyramid as these pyramids made of the tastiest raw mollusk along the evergreen Maine islands. No Caesar knows such an arch of triumph.
There is no Maine pasture ledge, on island or mainland, but has the fringe of white lace which is the memorial to centuries of quahaugs dropped by the gulls and crows on these ledges to open them for their feastings.
Uncle Quentin let me carry the quahaugs he could not eat on the terrain at one sitting homeward ahead of him, me with my legs bowing under their dripping weight, and my Uncle Quentin bumbling along behind me, hairy as a bumblebee, his red hair and moustache bristling, accelerating me, when I stopped to rest too often, with a smart smack across the fuller sector of my corduroys with the quirt of Texas longhorn's hide he had not used on a horse since he rode along the Red River as a thin cavalryman in blue but had carried ever since in the open for just such goad to lazy nephews carrying home his quahaugs.
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