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settled overhead, he studied the canopy of the universe, tracking the glimmering polestar as though he were a soothsayer searching the mystery for a clue, and knowing only that he was alone and making decisions now, traveling in life.

4
    Pappy won his first skipjack in a poker game. It wasn’t two weeks after he had gotten home from the war. Some eighty percent of his original squadron had been shot down over the Pacific, but he’d made it home with just a small sliver of anti-aircraft shrapnel lodged in his knee. The way he’d told it to Clay, it was mid-June when he got home, with the river warming but the jellyfish rare. In shorts and a T-shirt he would swim across the Tred Avon to the Dutch Inn Hunt Club, where he kept a locker. He’d change clothes, drink Jack Daniel’s, and play poker all night. He always took Gus, his Chesapeake Bay retriever, with him. The night he won the skipjack, he’d bet his veterans disability with a queen under and two showing. He was dealt a pair of deuces on top of the queens and beat three aces. Afterward he was too drunk to swim but went in the river anyway. He grabbed hold of Gus’s collar and Gus swam him clear across. The next morning, Sarah Rush found him unconscious, sprawled over the stone bulkhead that runs along the Strand, reeking of whiskey and muck and smeared with seaweed. She took him in and nursed him, and he took her heart for her trouble.
    Sarah was the daughter of Dr. Samuel Rush, and according to her, her fine Baltimore family’s trepidations at the announcement of her engagement were blown aside by the whirlwind that was Pappy, the son of a turkey farmer from off the Miles River who had made it through one year of college, flight school, a naval aviator’s commission at age nineteen, and war heroics fighting from Midway to the Battle of Leyte Gulf. With some help from Dr. Rush, but mostly through hard work, timing, and a willingness to risk, that one skipjack became a fleet of oyster dredgers and workboats and a small seafood wholesale and packing company.
    In the 1950s, Pappy took a chance on Fletcher Hanks’s newly designed clam dredger. He borrowed from the bank and put three of the pump-belt dredgers to work, refitting a part of his packing plant to handle the softer and more brittle shells. The river bottom was an unplowed cornucopia for Pappy and the other dredgers, and they reaped the harvest, changing the contours of the Bay’s bottom in the process. And during Pappy’s mad acquisition, after two miscarriages, Sarah gave birth on a raw Saint Patrick’s Day, 1951, at Easton Memorial Hospital, to Clayton Rush Wakeman. The birth was difficult, spanning a day and two nights, and Sarah was a long time recuperating. Afterward she was told that she should have no more children.
    Despite his alcohol and gambling binges, and despite his wildness, Sarah adored Pappy, even after he started buying refrigerator trucks and adding new docks to the wharf, and even after the clamming dried up, and the oyster beds were depleted, and the money became scarce. Sarah adored Pappy and lived to please him until the day he left her for Bertha Wilkes, the young actress who played Tennessee Williams’s Maggie in summer stock at the Cambridge Theater. That was the year Clay turned sixteen and pretty much the last year he saw his father until his mother’s funeral, and he saw him little after that. Sarah died of a massive heart attack, in her own car, having picked Clay up on the last day of his senioryear in high school, the last day of her life. Clay was in the car with her, there to hold her, feel her hand on his face and then gripping his arm, hear her gasping for breath, pleading with him to stay with her as the car swerved into a ditch. Clay believed he knew why she died and why he could never understand or forgive his father.
    It was midweek, midday, when Clay opened the front door to Bertha’s dress shop, on the sidewalk