The Great Snapping Turtle Adventure Page 5

  “Ok, but first we explore the island,” said Charles.

  “Right,” said Fred.

  Back to the main road they pitched and swayed around one pothole and then another, crushing over oyster shell patches and leaving a plume of dust behind.

  “Hey, look over there!” yelled Charles suddenly. “There’s another street and it looks like it might curve back to another part of the island. Can we try it?”

  “Sure!” said Fred, making a right-hand turn at a picket fence, saggy and weathered gray.

  The small road was barely wide enough to fit two passing cars. It wove under short pines and around postage-stamp yards, where tiny cottages or rusty trailer homes seemed to sink into the sand and weeds. At each home, a sagging clothesline swayed with the weight of many t-shirts and worn blue jeans. Bushel baskets and stacks of crab pots stood business-like by each back shed. Pulled up in most driveways was a rusting truck or car and in a few, they could see beautifully kept, gleaming wooden boats resting in their steel cradles and waiting to be towed back to the water.

  The road finally became a parking lot. Beyond the lot was a pier where many bobbing boats were tied. The air was filled with the smell of bait and motor fuel and rotting crabs. On several of the boats, men were busy with mops and buckets, scrubbing away a day’s worth of bait slime, sea lettuce, mud and sand from the white decks.

  Fred and the boys stayed in the truck. They didn’t want to disturb the watermen. “A waterman has to be a good housekeeper—rather, boat keeper,” Fred said. “They scour their decks, every nook and cranny, making their boats as clean as your mother’s kitchen counters.”

  “And I was beginning to think I wanted to be a waterman,” joked Max.

  “It’s a hard life,” said Fred. “Some watermen are up and out on the water as early as 3:30 a.m., searching for a prime crab area by some kind of sixth sense…”

  “Crab sense,” said Charles.

  “Or magic. Anyway, after they have picked their spot, they begin laying out yards and yards of trot line or they put down their crab pots. All this is done before the crabs have wobbled out from their beds, stretching their back fins and yawning the sleep out of their crusty bodies.”

  “I can’t imagine having to get up that early just to serve some crabs their breakfast in bed,” said Max.

  “Well, a waterman knows that the only way to catch a crab is to be one step ahead of him. And to gather up the most crabs, it helps to try and beat out the other crabbers to the hot spots,” said Fred. “But, of course, a waterman has a lot of respect for another waterman’s favorite haunt. They know how to give each other lots of space.”

  “It sounds like a really hard life,” said Charles.

  “Yes, it is a hard life, but being outside all the time, close to nature, makes it a very special sort of life. The long hours out on the water, that’s the good part. The small catches and the ups and downs of the price on the seafood market, that’s the hard part. There are good years when the Bay is filled with ‘beautiful swimmers,’ as William Warner called them in his wonderful book by the same title. And there are years when the crabs seem to be too smart and nobody is able to catch enough. Hot sun in the summer, and in the winter—when they go after the oyster—cold, snowy days. A hard life, but a worthy one.”

  “Not a cushy job for someone who wants real job security and lots of money, huh?” asked Max.

  “No. Just look at those driveways we passed. No fancy cars. Mostly trucks that have been around a long time. No limos here. But look at the water glistening like silver. Listen to the sounds of the waterfowl: the geese so loud in winter they wake you every morning, just at light, when they all fly away for breakfast. Smell the air: salty and rich, no smell of downtown here. No exhaust fumes to breathe. No noise of car horns or police sirens, just the ring of the buoy bells and sometimes the low, haunting hum of a fog horn.”

  “But the smell of rotting crab and yucky bait,” said Charles, wrinkling up his freshly sunburned nose.

  “Sure, there’s that, too, but the good smells are what you find the most of,” sighed Fred. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “No, it’s not a life for those who love lots of fancy store-bought things, but it’s a life rich with natural beauty.”

  “You like it down here, huh?” asked Max.

  “Yep, and someday, it’s where I want to live.”

  “Me, too,” said Max thoughtfully, after a moment’s pause to consider the idea.

  “Someday,” said Fred as he slowly switched on the engine of the truck. “Should we go back to town now?”

  “Ok, but let’s try just one more little road. Over there, that one,” said Max.

  “I don’t know,” said Fred. “It looks like it might be someone’s driveway to me.”

  “Still, let’s try it anyway. If it’s someone’s drive, we can always turn around and go back out,” said Max.

  “If they don’t shoot us first,” said Charles.

  “Oh, you watch too much tv!” said Max.

  “And look who’s talking! The sitcom junkie!” quipped Charles.

  Down the little road they slowly crept. Suddenly, a small sign appeared. It was nailed to a huge pine tree at nearly ground level and almost completely hidden behind a large mountain of oyster shells. The sign was made of wood, shaped like an arrow and painted white. “Button Factory” was carefully stenciled on it in faded red letters. The arrow pointed straight up the small road.

  “A button factory?” exclaimed Fred. “Here at the End of the World, and what do we find, a button factory?”

  “Let’s go and see it,” said Max.

  “Yes, I’ve never been to a button factory before,” said Charles.

  “Can’t say that I’ve ever been to one either,” said Fred. He turned the wheel of the truck as the road made a sharp bend and slowed as it became a driveway.

  The drive was covered with pine needles, pine cones and something pearly white. At the end, Fred and the boys could see a long, narrow gray building. Fred eased the truck to a stop.

  “This sure doesn’t have the look of a booming, prosperous business,” said Fred.

  “Let’s go see what it’s like,” yelled Max, climbing out of the truck.

  Charles was already out on the ground, bent over and examining the driveway. “Hey Fred, check it out!” shouted Charles.

  “What?”

  “Buttons. Buttons everywhere. The whole driveway is covered in little pieces of button,” said Charles.

  “You’re right,” said Max, stooping over to look and picking up a few. “Incredible.”

  Many of the buttons were broken, some in half, some into little pieces, but there were some beautiful whole ones with two or four holes drilled through them.

  “Already, I’m seeing things I never saw even in my wildest imagination,” said Fred. “Let’s go in.”

  Together the three crabbers-turned-explorers walked up the drive.

  “I wonder if they’re still open. I don’t see any cars,” said Max, juggling a handful of button bits in his hand.

  “I can hear a buzzing sound coming from the building,” said Fred. “It sounds like some kind of machinery.”

  “I can hear it, too. A whir and a buzz,” said Max. “Must be someone in there.”

  “Unless it’s the ghost of buttons past,” chirped Charles.

  “The Eastern Shore is filled with ghosts, but I never heard tell of one who haunts a button factory,” said Fred.

  The building was the same color as the bits of button, a bleached, dusty white. Dust was the key word. On the door sill, the windows, even on the cobwebs, which hung under the eaves of the roof. A fine powder glistened everywhere.

  The boys and Fred approached.

  “Now what?” asked Max.

  They stood in front of the closed door.

  “Shall we knock or just walk in?”

  “On the Shore, the same as at home, no matter how hospitable the place may appear, you always knock,” sa
id Fred, putting his fist up to the door.

  But before Fred’s knuckles could touch the gray wood even once, the door slowly squeaked open. There stood a thin, short man whose clothes, hair, face and hands were the same gray white as everything else.

  “Can I help you?” creaked his dusty voice.

  “Well, we saw the sign, out by the road, and since the boys and I have never been to a button factory before, we thought we’d stop by,” said Fred awkwardly.

  “Sure. Come on in. Excuse the mess, but button-making, the way we do it, the right way, is messy.” The man stepped aside and held the door open for them.

  Slowly, Max, Charles and Fred entered the wonder world of a button factory.

  Inside the old building, dust was everywhere. Each step they took sent little puffs up through the room. Everywhere they looked were buttons. All the same size. Little white, black, and brown buttons.

  Dust, buttons, and huge, hulking machines.

  The room was divided into two long halls that went the full length of the building. On both outside walls and right down the middle were long work tables. Some held mysterious machines, others were wooden troughs filled with some type of water-like fluid and hundreds of little buttons.

  “Never been to a button factory before?” the man asked.

  “Never,” admitted Fred. The boys nodded.

  “Well, this here ain’t like the majority of modern ones. Here we only make one kind of button. We make ’em natural from shells.” He reached under one table and pulled a fan-shaped shell out from a wooden basket. It was pearly white and as big as a large dinner platter.

  “This here is a mother-of-pearl shell. My son collects them for me down in the ocean off the coast of Bermuda. He dives down wearing all his fancy scuba gear and comes up with them. Dangerous ’cause some of the creatures down there could take a man’s whole leg in their mouth and never let go. Giant mollusks.”

  “Wow,” murmured the boys.

  “My son brings ’em to me and after nature has cleaned ’em up a bit, I use them to make buttons.” He handed the shell to Max.

  “How does nature clean them?” asked Charles, touching the shell.

  “Well, let’s put it this way. All the living tissue that died when we brought it up from the ocean makes a nice feast for other little crawly critters.”

  “Oh,” said Charles, understanding.

  “After the shells are cleaned up and ready, we bring ’em in and start making buttons.” The button man moved over to a huge machine. There were several shiny, drill-like tubes hanging down from its center. “This here machine does the first step—it bores out the buttons from the big shell.” He held the shell up under the cutting tubes and flipped a switch. There was a whir as they slowly descended. Circling and circling, they cut into the shell. In a moment, 15 or 20 perfectly round little buttons fell onto a pad below.

  “Here ya go,” said the button man, switching off the machine and handing the shell back to Max.

  “It looks like a fat, hard piece of lace,” said Max. The shell was filled with holes. It did, indeed, look like lace.

  “Or a fan-shaped snowflake,” said Charles, bending over to peer through the holes.

  “You can keep it if you want,” said the man. He reached under the drills and scraped the little pile of buttons into his palm.

  “Look!” said Max. “There are more buttons than holes.”

  “That’s true,” said the button man.

  “How can that happen?” asked Charles, looking at all the little circular pieces of shell that had come from just a few holes.

  “Well, the shell is in layers. When we drill it, the blanks break into several slices. Blanks are what we call buttons before they get their thread holes.”

  “So they are kind of like when your Mom makes buttermilk biscuits from those rolls of dough she buys,” said Fred.

  “Oh yeah, the dough’s in flaky layers. It’s real hard to decide how fat to make the biscuit,” said Charles. His stomach told him he’d love to be eating a biscuit.

  “Well, it’s about the same thing, I guess,” said the button man. “Only thing is, the shell is a lot harder than raw dough. The blanks flake off when the drill hits them. Some are a good thickness for buttons, some are too thin, others are too fat. We can take the fat ones and give ’em a tap like this.” He put down all the blanks except for one fat one. The fat blank he placed on its side, holding it between his thumb and index finger. With his other hand he picked up a small chisel and gently gave the blank a tap. It broke into two blanks. Then he took each of the two and tapped them again with the chisel, ending up with four more little blanks.

  “Tedious work,” commented Fred.

  “Yeah, can’t do too much of it at one time. You begin to get careless and end up with sore fingers,” said the button man, laying down the chisel.

  “Look, this layer is so thin I can see through it—almost,” said Charles, holding up one of the blanks.

  “You can have that, too,” said the button man. “It’s too thin for me to put holes in.”

  “Thanks,” said Charles, carefully holding the fish-scale thin piece of pearly white shell.

  “Next step,” said the button man as he moved a couple of feet down to another machine. “Here’s where we add the holes.” He threw the handful of blanks into a funnel at the top of the machine. From a box of blanks that rested on the dusty floor, beneath the machine, he took another handful of blanks to add to the batch in the funnel.

  Again, when the machine was switched on, there was a soft humming sound. Four drills came down and quickly cut four holes into a blank. Now, it was a real button. In about a minute’s time, all the blanks had fed through the funnel and were buttons. The man flipped off the machine.

  “Wow, that was fast,” said Max.

  “One of the fastest machines I have,” said the button man.

  “So, now we have buttons ready for market,” said Charles.

  “Nope, not yet. Some folks want white buttons. Some want black. Some want brown. We make all three. For black buttons, the kind some gentlemen wear on their fancy tuxedo shirts, we have to put them in a bath of chemicals. Over this way.” He walked a few more steps until he reached a long trough filled with hundreds of little black buttons. “Don’t put your fingers in there. It will burn you,” he warned.

  “Do they have to stay in there long?” asked Charles.

  “Couple of days. We make brown ones by taking them out quicker. But I’m not doing any brown ones these days. The market for them is just not as good as for white or black.”

  “Then are they done?” asked Max.

  “Nope.” The button man moved to still another machine. “They need to get rims on ’em and they need to be polished up, so nice and shiny you can almost see yourself in ’em. Some don’t get rims. That’s a matter of fashion, I guess. But all need to be rubbed bright. No one wants dull buttons. Guess that’s a matter of fashion, too.”

  It was hard to imagine someone like the button man talking about tuxedos and fashion. Dressed as he was, in dusty, dirty clothes, Charles thought he looked more like the miller who ground the wheat into flour for the Little Red Hen. “You keep up with fashions?” he blurted out.

  “Got to. In my business, you have to know what buttons people want. ’Course, some folks these days are settling for plastic buttons. That’s bad news for me. They come in many colors that I can’t make and are a lot cheaper to produce. But places of high fashion, say up in New York City, still need my buttons for their really fine clothes. Those folks don’t use plastic. They use my mother-of-pearl buttons in white, black, or brown. They tell me the size. They tell me the color. I do the rest for them, and they are pleased.”

  The button man showed Fred and the boys the machine for making rims and the one that rubbed the little shell buttons until they shone as bright as clean glass.

  By this time, they had arrived back to the front door, having seen thousands of buttons and having stepp
ed on thousands more that littered the floor with their small imperfections.

  “Well, that’s about it,” said the button man. “Each of you can take one of those ‘holy’ shells home as a souvenir, but only one. We put them back in the oyster beds. They help nature make a place for the little spats, or young oysters, to grow up on.” He smiled and rubbed his calloused hand across his two-day-old beard. “If I knowed I was going to have company, I’d ’ave shaved this morning.”

  “Thanks for showing us the factory,” said Fred. “It really is amazing.”

  “Well, come back sometime. Maybe I’ll have figured out how to make red buttons by then. Get yourself a couple buttons here,” he said, holding out a little tin box filled with hundreds of beautiful, perfect buttons. “Maybe your momma can sew ’em onto tuxedo shirts for you boys. Then when you go to your high school prom, you can remember the day you came visiting my button factory.”

  “And we’ll remember you, too,” said Max with a smile.

  “Thanks lots,” said Charles, thinking a prom was something too far in the future to even worry about.

  “Thanks,” said Fred, waving.

  “Bye,” they all called to the button man.

  “You take good care now,” he said.

  Fred and the boys slowly walked back up the little drive, stepping on thousands of broken buttons.

  “Quite an adventure,” said Fred when they were back in the truck.

  “Yeah, a real nice guy, too,” said Max.

  “And we never even found out what his name was,” added Charles.

  “You’re right,” said Fred. “We don’t even know the official name of the factory,” he added as they drove past the little wooden arrow.

  “Strange!” said Max, looking back at the gray building.

  “Quite a mystery. One never knows what one will find when traveling down some of these back roads,” said Fred.

  “Yeah, I wonder what we’ll see next,” said Charles thoughtfully.

  “At the Vienna Inn,” finished Fred.

  “I don’t care where, as long as we eat dinner soon. I’m starved!” sighed Charles.