I can never think of one but I think of the other. As sure as my Uncle Quentin conies into my mind, quahaugs come, too. Whenever, to this day, I roll out the living, trembling, tawny mollusk from his pearly shell, splashed with purple dabs and edged with tiny crenulations, and lip back my head to take the tender creature down, my stout Uncle Quentin comes rolling back across the years, plump and tawny as ever he was in my boyhood. My uncle was shaped, as well as colored, like the quahaug. The quahaug was his first and only real love. He lived on the shellfish mainly, when I knew him. I believe they had much to do with his colors and his contours.
Maybe I ought to explain the quahaug before I explain my Uncle Quentin. Only I and a few surviving Indians know how to spell the word. I once won a spelling match on it in upstate New York, when I was hard-pressed and my wife fed me a word that she knew no one else had ever heard of.
Quahaug is the old Abenaki Indian name for the F.F.V.'s among all the mollusks. Clams to you, but you are wrong. The quahaug is the round, fat bivalve, spiraled about with concentric grooves, that beds and woos and lives and dies an early death in the outer, softer tidal mud of the eastern Atlantic. He is hunted at low tide with an iron hoe with curving tines, and you wear sneakers and little else. His hole is a small one, unlike the hole of the true clam that beds higher up in the mud and shoots jets of diamonds to let you know where he is. It takes a sleuth and an artist to find the quahaug. Sometimes he gives himself away by a faint stir of water, thinking you are the flood tide returning, but usually he keeps so quiet that he can be located only by instinct. He is found generally with another, and I suspect he is monogamous and very faithful to his wife. In all my experience I have never found a triangular setup in the housekeeping of quahaugs.
New Yorkers and Rhode Islanders call the quahaug, quite improperly, by his oval cousin's name, the clam, and Rhode Islanders and New Yorkers cook the quahaug up for chowders. Chopped up and cooked in a chowder, the quahaug becomes sorry shreds of meal about as hard as hard rubber, all his taste leaves him, and he becomes as inedible as barbed wire. No wonder the New York Staters and southern New Englanders put a lot of vegetables in with the ruins of their quahaugs—to cover up the murder that has been done. They need to put a lot of vegetables in, for there is nothing left of the shellfish. Rhode Island clam chowder is a pure vegetable soup. But in the interests of semantics and humanity, they ought by rights to strain the pieces of quahaugs out and throw them away, to give their vegetables more flavor room.
Quahaugs are to be eaten raw or cooked in the manner and at the lightning speed that my Uncle Quentin was master of. A well-cooked quahaug is a plain calamity.
City gourmets know and love the quahaug as the littleneck clam or the cherrystone, and they eat him as they would an oyster, in his own juice, on the halfshell. The only catch is that the quahaug in the city loses his flavor in a geometrical progression each minute he is away from the sea. By the time he comes to the city table, he may be days or weeks old and worn down by homesickness to a pale ghost of himself. The quahaug's notorious and tough ability to keep alive in his thick shell plays right into the hands of his loss of flavor in captivity.
No, Uncle Quentin ate the quahaug properly. Free—by the open sea. He sat on his broadside under the snowing gulls by the broad Atlantic, at utter case, and opened the shell-on which amateurs use dynamite of scalding steam—delicately, with the merest flick and turn of his jackknife blade. He scooped out the astounded creature, tossed him quivering under the awning of his wide red moustache, and swallowed him down alive, tipping the delectable juice of him out of the lower shell down his throat. His moustache quivered twice with ecstasy, his blue eyes turned a deeper blue, and Uncle Quentin sighed and reached for another plump mate to the quahaug that had mellowed him so.
Uncle Quentin reached for many, many mates to that first quahaug. He sat with a basket of the dripping shellfish before him. He shelled them out steadily under the sun of summer, and the lovely, pearl-lined butterflies of empty shells rose up around him till the whole shore shone with them, till the twin-hinged shells rose to my Uncle Quentin's knees, till the Atlantic rose to his broad base on the rockweed ledge he sat on and gradually cooled my Uncle Quentin's ecstasy.
A peck of quahaugs was the absolute minimum of my Uncle Quentin when I went quahauging with him in his sixteen-stone-ten-pound prime. I was always commanded to dig two pecks, as a margin of safety and as reserves.
Uncle Quentin gave me the commands from his ledge of rockweed. He bellowed out against the gale, and his massy Masonic watch charm trembled and twinkled with excitement in the sun on the bulge of bis rotund vest. He told me just where to dig. It was always at dead-low tide, and I was barefooted. I went with my quahaug hook and basket just where Uncle Quentin knew his quarry sojourned. In his younger, slimmer days my uncle had learned the quahaugs' habits. They bedded in the deep ooze, exposed only for a few minutes at the ebb tide's lowest edge. They had square holes above them in the mud, but only the inexpert looked for these; the experts knew the proper, slightly gravelly oases by intuition and by the soles of their feet. Uncle Quentin checked on my success by the seat of my breeches. If I was seat up most of the time, he knew I was getting them. One swoop, and the obese black beauty was tail up, and I basketed him. I saved only the medium-sized quahaugs—the width of my boy's fist was the gauge. The ones the size of Uncle Quentin's fist were too old and tough for his delicate taste. Those could go to Rhode Island for the massacre called clam chowder. When Uncle Quentin was hot on the scent, under his bellows I could get my two peck baskets full in about twenty minutes. The coming tide was often slapping my muddied seat as I heaped my baskets. Then I rocked the quahaugs clean as blue slate in the flooding tide and came ashore to my uncle.
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.
Yes, Uncle Quentin had the secret of locating and shelling out quahaugs. That was his share of the business. It was right that spry nephews with supple posteriors should lake orders from him about digging and carrying the shellfish home. Uncle Quentin had the thin, expert blade to his jackknife that made his fast work at shelling possible. That was another secret.
Uncle Quentin had more. He had greater secrets. He had the two sole recipes for cooking quahaugs without letting on to them that they were being cooked at all. Lightning, again. For his two kinds of cooking were matters of a few blue seconds only.
First, there were his doughnutted quahaugs. He shelled the bivalves for my mother. Under his sharp blue eye she drained them bone-dry and rolled them in com meal with an egg-yolk batter. Then Uncle Quentin took a fork to the quahaugs, one by one, and dipped each into a skillet of seething bacon fat. Just one slow dip and no more, then out and onto a paper mat to blot out the fat, smoking, translated, transfigured, never given a chance to be surprised at being seared to his core while still alive, to harden his heart and his tenderness at being cooked. It was cooking by chain lightning, and nothing less.
But the other recipe of my Uncle Quentin is even more monumental and tricky. I hope and believe I have remembered it correctly. I hope to feel the sting of my uncle's Red River quirt on my rear if the quahaugs do not come out as his did. They are the best headstone my Uncle Quentin could have. Here goes:
Quahaug Cakes
You shelled the quahaugs. drained them for an hour, took out the green livers so as not to offend the eyes of the fastidious (my Uncle Quentin never permitted such a sacrifice of tongue to eye!), and chopped them up finely with an equal amount of stale crackers. You mixed in the yolks of five or six eggs—for a family the size of ours—and the peck of shelled quahaugs you were making up in this one batch. The egg yolks provided the means for making the mass adhere properly. You patted the mess into flat, oval patties and you put them into a cool place, say, down-cellar, to age overnight.
Then when you were ready to cook the cakes, you got a griddle so hot it smoked, rubbed on a slab of fat pork, and turned the smoke azure. You dropped on the patties of chopped quahaugs and let them stay only while you counted to twenty, slowly, flipped each one over, and gave the port side twenty more counts. Then off and onto the table where hungry people sal and burned their mouths with them, and blessed you as their mouths burned.
Notice that here is no salt, no pepper, no bay or any other herb. A quahaug, my Uncle Quentin used to say, is all the spices and the garnishes himself, and he needs nothing to cook in. He is the whole sea and the summer sky.
These are the two sole ways the uncookable quahaug will endure cooking and yet retain his incredible and indelible flavor. Chowder is a murder.
Oysters? The best of them, even the ephemeral little South Carolina ones that must be eaten ten feet from their home, are flat and savorless beside the sweet, strong, variegated, persistent, seductive taste and texture of the Maine quahaug. The chill of the North Atlantic is in him, the spice of sunlit and iodized brine. He is the bayberry of the sea. The twentieth, the fortieth, raw quahaug tastes as full and savory as the first—as the ninetieth, when it was my Uncle Quentin doing the eating!
I have a belief in some sort of immortality. For I do not see how any being that had lived life in Maine would ever give up the chance of returning there as an astral body. If that be the case, and if I had the eyes to see him, I would know where to look for my stout Uncle Quentin. He would be where the astral Abenaki warriors squatted on their shell heaps. He would be there, right in the middle. And I would know him at once, not only by his red hair and red moustache, but better by the mountain of dripping quahaug shells shining all around him. Where the shells rose the thickest, there my Uncle Quentin would be. And there would be twenty small Indian boys, my counterparts, bringing him new quahaugs by the basketful, just as I used to sweat to do in my boyhood long ago.