Old Mr. Flood by Joseph Mitchell Read Free Book Online

only thing that’s got them beat in the shellfish line,” said Mr. Maggiani, “is bay scallops eaten out of the shell—the whole raw scallop, and not just that scallop muscle that they fry in restaurants.”
    Mr. Flood was pleased. “I tell you, Tommy,” he said, “it’s been my experience that just about any animal that lives in a shell and comes out of salty water is good eating. Back in 1940 the oyster beds in Great Peconic Bay became infested with millions of gastropod pests called quarterdecks, a kind of limpet, the
Crepidula fornicata
. These pests fixthemselves to oyster shells in great stacks and clusters, one on top of the other, and they smother the oysters to death. Around Christmas that winter I went out on the bay with a friend of mine, Drew Radel, whose family owns the Robbins Island beds. He fattens his stock in the North Race, a swift current of water between Great and Little Peconic, and they’re the biggest, finest oysters in the United States. They’re so big and fine that back before the war Drew used to ship hundreds of barrels by fast ocean liner to Paris, London, and Dublin, the chief oyster-eating cities of Europe. Drew took me to a ruined bed in the Race, a bed that had three thousand bushels of oysters in it, and thirteen thousand bushels of quarterdecks. It was enough to break your heart. I took a quarterdeck in my hand, an animal about an inch and a half long, and I thought to myself, ‘I wonder how you taste.’ I got my knife and I dug the meat out of one and I ate it, and Drew and the dredge-boat captain looked at me like I was an outcast from human society. I ate another, and I kept on eating, and I said to Drew, ‘Drew, my boy,’ I said, ‘it’s a sacrilegious thing to say, and I’m ashamed of myself, but the little buggers tastedamned near as good as oysters.’ He broke down and ate a few and he had to agree with me. Said they tasted to him like the tomalley of a lobster. I told him he should give them a French name and bribe the Waldorf-Astoria to put some on the menu at three dollars and a half a dozen. ‘Create a demand for them,’ I said, ‘and you got the problem solved.’ He said he wouldn’t deal in the damned things for any amount of money. Anyhow, next year they vanished, the most of them. They come and go in cycles, like a good many pests.”

    THE WIND OFF THE RIVER shook Maggiani’s windows. Mr. Flood went over to the stove, punched the fire, threw in a shovelful of coal, and returned to the clams. He was quiet for a while, brooding. Then he began to talk again. “I promised to tell you about Mr. Mooney’s queer habit, didn’t I?” he said to me.
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “This is something I got no business telling a young man,” Mr. Flood said, “but the pleasantest news to any human being over seventy-five is the news that some other human being around that agejust died. That’s provided the deceased ain’t related, and sometimes even if he is. You put on a long face, and you tell everybody how sad and sorrowful it makes you feel, but you think to yourself, ‘Well, I outlived him. Thank the Lord it was him and not me.’ You think to yourself, ‘One less. More room for me.’ I’ve made quite a study of the matter, and I’m yet to find an agy man or any agy woman that don’t feel the same deep down inside. It cheers you up somehow, God forgive me for saying so. I used to be ashamed of myself, but the way I figure, you can’t help yourself, it’s just nature. There’s about a dozen and a half old crocks around seventy-five to eighty-five up at the Hartford, and here a few months back, the way it happens sometimes, they all got blue at once. Everybody had been sour-faced for days and getting sourer by the minute; they were all talked out; they had got on each other’s nerves; a man would order a beer and go away down to the end of the bar by himself and drink it; you would say something to a man and he wouldn’t answer you. It had just