Seth Schindler

Digging Clams with No Hands

Fog lifting at dawn over Frenchman Bay, the misty silence fractured by the familiar chorus of loons laughing at me—back again, digging clams with one hand. 

Brandishing my clam rake high above my head, I muttered “Zol er krenken un gedenken,” the curse I’d heard my mother scream in her sleep at the refugee camp. 

The memory of it haunted me as a child and for many years echoed in my dreams, a recurrent nightmare, until I myself began to repeat it, but softly and reverently, transforming the curse into a blessing for the tormented, a prayer for the dead and those still living whose screams in the middle of the night go unheard. Invoked over and over, it became my mantra reminding me to live only in the moment, like the loons.

If only it were that simple. If only I were a loon. 

I watched them dive into the dark sea and disappear, then slogged through the muck of the tidal pool. At the water’s edge, Joe sat in the stern of his leaky lapstrake dinghy, a Bud in one hand, a Camel dangling out of the corner of his mouth. He took a long drag, then flicked the butt overboard. As I stepped into the boat, he passed me the six-pack at his feet. 

“Mornin’ Ben,” Joe said, scratching the gray stubble on his chin. “Better drink a couple now, and quick. The water’s cold as my ass in the Great Blizzard of ’52, and this bitchin’ tide’s a shorty.”

I gripped a can between my knees, pulled off the tab, took a sip, and forced it down. “How can you drink this shit at the crack of dawn?”

Joe grinned, tapping my stump with his rake. “How can you make a livin’ clammin’ with only one hand?”

I could’ve told him that making a living wasn’t the point. I just loved the musty smell of primeval mud and briny sea at low tide. The salty spray in the wind whipping my face. The waves caressing the rocks along the shore. The comforting clang of bell buoys in the fog and the sight of weathered lobster boats in the channel, heading home at sunset. Especially the memory of Lori kissing me the first time as we stood in the mud in the feathery glow of the flower moon. 

I could’ve told him that the first time I dug clams, I fell in love, and knew I’d finally come home. The glorious muddy mess where it all began.

But I never told Joe any of that. We talked about the weather, the tide chart, the crappy wholesale price of clams, and the ’67 World Series last October—his beloved Red Sox losing again.   

Two beers later, we trudged across the mud flat to the tidal island called Loon Rock, his favorite clamming spot. Mine too, where Lori and I first made love, racing against the spring tide rushing in, sinking deep in the mud in our thigh-high rubber boots. I wrote a poem about it—“Love in the Mud”—and sent it to her, worrying the words in its refrain were all wrong, much too strong, a raging hurricane.

Under a flower moon she leapt into my molten heart and hers melted too 
Both ablaze in the mud in the blinding light of love
Two hearts now one?    

Would she prefer the lilting whispers of a gentle rain? Did she want to be the muse of a poet stuck in the muck of his own mind?

“Bet today’s your lucky day,” Joe said. “Look at all them wicked good breathin’ holes!”

I stomped on one. Water squirted out. “I could use some luck for a change.”

Joe coughed, spitting into the mud. “Sure can. A bushel a tide at ten bucks a bushel won’t cut it.”

“Don’t know how you dig so fast, three bushels a tide.”

“Been doin’ it since I was a kid, just like Lori. And we both got two hands.”

Picturing Lori’s strong hands on my hips, pulling me close, I plunged the short-handled rake into the breathing hole, turned the mud over, unearthed a clam. Dropping the rake, I picked up the clam. 

“Figures,” I muttered, seeing it was too small to sell. I tossed it and turned to Joe. “Is she coming home for Thanksgiving?”

Joe lit another Camel, started digging. “Hope so,” he said, then paused, shrugging his shoulders. “But hard tellin’ not knowin’. She’s right straight out, I suppose. Don’t write me no more.”

Lori didn’t write me anymore, either. Ever since I mailed her that poem, the memory of my skin tingling, our lips locking and tongues probing, leaping off the page, then her silence stinging. 

**

The first time I dug clams with Lori, I fell in love when she told me she sometimes wished she were a loon.

“Why?” I asked, looking up through the light rain into her jade-green eyes. Lori was half a foot taller than me, and wiry strong like her dad. She dug clams effortlessly. Gracefully. And she was beautiful. The sea goddess Amphitrite in a faded yellow slicker.  

Lori ran her long, slender fingers slowly through her wet auburn hair. “Sometimes I just want to disappear in the sea like they do.”

“And do what?”

“Hide.”

“It’s cold and lonely down there.”

“No colder and lonelier than on terra firma. My home anyway.”

“Your dad seems nice enough.”

“He is, I suppose. Means well, but doesn’t understand me at all. No one does around here. My mom wanted to, tried hard. Maybe she would’ve by now if—" Lori looked away.

“If what?”

She sighed. “I can’t wait to get out of here come September.”

“College?”

“First in my family … to even graduate high school.”

“Where?”

“Radcliffe, on a scholarship.”

“That’s impressive!”

“You mean, for poor white trash?”

“No, for anyone.”

Lori kicked the wooden clam hod at her side. “I’m sick of clammin’ if you really want to know. Only do it to please my dad and help put food on the table.”

“I did the same for my mother. Went to college to please her but never had my heart in it.”

In the distance, thunder boomed. I jumped back, dropping my rake in the mud.

“Relax,” Lori said. “It’s just a passing thunderstorm, a sun shower.” She turned to the east. “Look!”

A double rainbow arched over the bay. “Magnificent,” I said. “I’ve never seen a double one before.”

“I’ve read they symbolize good luck. Hope, I suppose. For hopeless dreamers anyway.”  

“To Buddhists, they symbolize the last step before enlightenment.”

“Does that mean one of us is getting close?”

“Maybe you, but not me.”

“Let’s set our hods and rakes over there,” she said, indicating Loon Rock. “Go for a walk.” 

We walked along its craggy shore. At the south end, we stopped for a moment to watch a hedge of blue herons wading in the shallow water. We crossed to the north side, sat on a gray granite slab, and gazed out at the sea. Another loud crack pierced the silence. I flinched, sensing this was a gunshot, not thunder, and now hearing a different but familiar gunshot and seeing the contorted face of the man I knew I’d never be.

I glanced at Lori, who’d turned her head. I followed her eyes up to a boulder where two teenage boys sat, rifles in their hands. Their laughter wafted down, and it seemed to calm me, the echoes of that other gunshot and the image of the face fading away. 

“What are they shooting at?” I said.   

“Seabirds. Probably those herons we saw. The boys around here love to shoot their heads off. Target practice.”

“They’re laughing.”

“Right. Their idea of fun. At our Sunday family dinners, my cousin Billy brags about how many he’s killed.”

“That’s sad … no, sick. But at least your family talks. My mother hardly said a word at dinner, except to kvetch about the goyim and what they did to us.”

“Who are they and what’d they do to you?”

I swatted a mosquito on my forehead. “A long story. I’d rather talk about your home. You’re lucky to live here so close to nature. To wake up each day to the beauty and peaceful—"

“You’re dreaming. Flatlanders think this is paradise. But life here’s primitive. Brutal.”

“I don’t see it that way.” 

“You don’t see what really goes on behind the doors. Cousin Billy’s nothing compared to the drunken, illiterate savages I have to live with every day. Now, do you understand why I want to get the hell away from here as fast as I can?”

“You may be disappointed.” 

“Why?” 

“It’s no better in the city, or anywhere else today.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Trust me, only the weapons and their targets are different.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Napalm, the Klu Klux Klan, our police. Harmless farmers bombed in the rice paddies. Negroes lynched in the dead of night. Protesters shot in broad daylight. The sordid history of mankind. War, greed, hate, and now the silent spring. The destruction of nature and the divinity in us and all living things. Civilization is the bane of human existence.”

Lori stood and threw her arms up. “Whoa! I didn’t see that coming from you, despite your long hair. You remind me of that crazy Yippie guy I saw on TV, Abbie something-or-other.”

“Hoffman.”

“Except for your walrus mustache, you even look a bit like him. The same black curly hair and olive skin.”

“That’s as far as it goes. He’s old, real old, in his thirties. And I’m not as crazy.”

Lori sat, her right knee touching my left. I moved mine slightly away, but she pressed hers against it. “I hope not,” she said. “And anyway, you’re more … cunnin’.”

“I doubt it, if you mean shrewd.”

Lori’s thin lips pulled back slightly. “No, here it means cute. I also think you’re gentler, more philosopher than fighter.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I hear a touch of Thoreau or Emerson in you. An idealist, a dreamer.” She sighed. “Easy to dream and think profound thoughts when your belly’s full and have the time and energy to do it.” 

“Can’t argue about that.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if every single one of those transcendentalists had a trust fund. Like the hippies, from away, living in the commune on Mount Desert Island. Going back to the land, they call it. Going back to the bank every week for their allowance is more like it.” 

I stroked my mustache. “Can you blame them for wanting out of this sinking world of hollow men?”

“Hollow men? Sounds familiar. And you’re dreaming again. I know what I see when I go clammin’ there. Lazy phonies. Stoned, dancing naked on the shore. They make me sick. So do the filthy rich summer people I sometimes work for, cleaning their damn mansions—cottages those snobs call them—that their greedy ancestors built. The robber barons and slave traders you probably also hate.”

“I get the feeling that’s not the only thing we’ve in common.” 

“Perhaps there’s more, Mr. Hoffman,” she said, then smiled for the first time, revealing a couple of crooked front teeth that made me think I might have a chance with her. 

I nudged her knee with mine. “Maybe the two of us should start a clam diggers union. Better yet, organize all the workers here and bring the revolution to Hancock Point.”

Lori kicked my foot. “Liar. You are as crazy as him.”

“Let’s burn down those summer cottages. Take back the land. Workers of the world unite!” 

“You’re joking, of course, Mr. Marx.”

“I am. It’s just that I’ve never been any good at it.”

“You need practice, that’s all. As do the workers here if you expect them to revolt. They’d much rather watch football on TV and drink beer, then beat their wives. More of those hollow men of yours and T.S. Eliot’s. Only these are real.”

“History tells us they would if they had the right leader to follow.”

“Who do you have in mind?”

I smiled. “Someone charismatic … who sometimes wishes she were a loon.”

Lori picked up a rock and faked tossing it at me. “You’re joshing again.”

“Now I’m not, I swear.”

“Cha … ris … ma … tic. I like how it sounds. No one’s ever called me that, and it sure beats some of the things I have been called behind my back. Strange and a freak, to name a couple.” 

“I know where you’re coming from.”

“Except you don’t know what it also means to be a girl … a woman. No one’s ever gonna listen to and follow us, charismatic or not.” Lori dropped the rock. “Anyway, I’ve other plans.”

“Yes, you’re leaving soon.” Much too soon.

Lori sat up straight and looked me straight in the eye. “Do you have a trust fund?”

“I’m just rich with lots of ancient baggage of a different sort.”

“Different is right! I’ve never met anyone like you … unfortunately.”

I winced, feeling a familiar stinging jab.  

“You’re gritting your teeth. In pain?”

I nodded, rubbing my stump.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. The pain comes out of nowhere. Phantom limb pain, the doctors call it. But it’s as real as my baggage. Luckily, unlike that, this pain disappears quickly … and it’s gone now.” 

“I’m glad. Let’s walk some more. I’ll show you my favorite spot here.” 

We strolled slowly and silently along the narrow neck of Loon Rock that jutted out into the bay. Lori stopped to pick up a little brown and white banded shell.

“The striped periwinkle, my favorite shell,” she said, holding it up. “Perfect, isn’t it?”

“It is. Lovely. Being one with nature is what we’ve lost, our so-called progress an illusion.”

“Not these shells. When I was a kid, I’d collect them. I believed in God then—that other illusion—and went to church every Sunday. Thought only a God could create such beautiful things. Hadn’t heard yet about the Holocaust. Why don’t you take the shell home as a souvenir?” 

“Of what?”

“Your time in Maine.”

I looked past Lori at a broken lobster trap wedged between two boulders. Entangled in its tattered net was a lobster claw, a Coke bottle, and a G.I. Joe toy. “What are you saying?”

“That this is only a temporary stop on your journey, probably not the first and certainly not the last.”

I stroked my mustache.

Lori passed me the shell, her knuckles brushing against my stump. She pulled her hand back. “You’re bleeding Ben!” 

“Must’ve scratched the scar earlier with my rake. Do that a lot. It doesn’t have much feeling.” 

“When you get home, you should put Mercurochrome on it.”

“My mother would rub honey and garlic on it. A remedy Sylvia brought with her from the old country. The sweet and the bitter, like life itself, she’d say.”

“She sure got that right. Which country?”

I glanced down at my boots covered with seaweed. “It doesn’t exist anymore. And sweetness didn’t exist in her life either. Only misery. Tsuris.”

“I love the sound of that word, all your words. Want to hear more. But the tide’s coming in quick now. Let’s sit higher up and talk.”

I followed Lori, her legs loping long across the mud fields of my dreams. 

She led me up a rocky slope above the high tide line. We sat side by side and leaned back against the gnarly trunk of a stunted scrub pine. 

“As much as I hate my life here, I’ll miss this view,” she said. “Cadillac Mountain on Mount Desert Island. Can’t see it clearly now—with the clouds—but after gathering shells I’d come here just to gaze at it, dreaming about what was beyond the horizon. Even then I knew I wanted more, a different life.”

“You’ll have it soon.” And I might never see you again. “What are you going to study?”

“Don’t know yet, can’t decide. I was thinking of majoring in literature, love to read.”

“Me too. If you’d been at Radcliffe a few years ago, we might’ve been in the same classes. At Harvard, I majored in philosophy but took a lot of lit classes … before I dropped out.”

“I’ll probably study something more practical. Maybe marine biology.”

“You’re much smarter than me, bound to do something actually useful. What my mother wanted me to do, to be.”

“Which was?” 

“Anything but, God forbid, a philosopher. Only a schlemiel, she’d remind me constantly, thinks he’ll make a living as a philosopher. Her dream was for me to be a doctor. A surgeon,  like … like—” 

“What’s wrong? You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“That gunshot we heard. I’ve always hated guns. They make me nervous.”

Lori put her hand on my knee and squeezed it. “You’re the first man I’ve ever heard say that around here.” 

“A man doesn’t need a gun to prove he’s one.”

Lori removed her hand. “What does he need?”

“Just to be a mensch.”

“What’s that?”

“A good person. Someone who does good for others. Though my mother would say he just needs a good job, and a wife who makes good matzoh ball soup.” 

“I love your accent, Ben. It’s sexy.” 

I kicked the pebbles at my feet. “Sexy? Hardly.”

“Well, exotic then. Brooklyn?”

I nodded. “Walt Whitman’s hometown.”

“And Ginsburg’s.”

“You’ve read him … too?”  

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical—"

“‘Howl.’”

“I say it’s overrated.”

“I do too.”

“I’d take Dickinson's ‘I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -’ any day over it.”

“Not bad, if too dark for me. I’d take Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.’”

“Too sentimental for me. I read ‘Howl’ mainly because I was curious why it’d once been banned. Just as I’m curious about you … your accent. Never heard it before actually spoken, only imagined how it sounds from other books I’ve read, like Last Exit to Brooklyn.” 

“You seem to like banned books. That one’s too violent.”

Lori picked up a pine cone at her side, studied it for a moment, then dropped it in her lap. “Maybe, but realistic I think, why I like it. And I think you’re Jewish.”

I smiled. “How can you tell? My horns?” 

Lori laughed. “There’s something very unusual about you. What I see in … behind … your dark eyes. Always thinking intensely. Or is it dreaming?”

“You’re on to me.”

“Not that I’ve ever known, even met, a Jew before, except from books they’ve written. Marx, Freud, Kafka, Roth, and Betty Friedan. All troublemakers. Are you one too? I think so. Portnoy’s one of my favorite characters.” Lori wiggled her eyebrows. “But I hope you’re not like him in one respect.”

“I wouldn’t worry. I’ve always hated liver. Though I had the same kind of mother, a real piece of work. Intent on making me suffer like her, and to enjoy it.”

Lori punched my leg playfully. “Do you? I sense you do. And that you’re a writer, a poet’s my guess.” 

“Good guess.”

“And a romantic. A dangerous combination. If you’re not careful, you’ll die young like Dylan Thomas. Broke. Drunk. Alone in some seedy hotel room.” 

“At least he didn’t live a life of quiet desperation.”

“Thoreau. Can’t say I’m surprised you’re quoting him. And I wouldn’t be surprised if his mother cooked and did his laundry for him. Who’s your favorite poet? A doomed romantic?”

“Try this, a clue. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower—" 

“Drives my green age. Try this. Do you rage, rage against the dying of the light while writing A Child’s Hanukkah in Brooklyn?”

“Clever.” I scratched my stump. “But I stopped writing.”

“Writer’s block?”

Out in the bay, gulls mewed, circling above a lobsterman hauling a trap onto his boat. “Decided to just live now, and to the full.”

“Like Rimbaud, and be a gunrunner instead? No, I forgot you hate them. Salinger, then. Become a hermit and do yoga?”

I laughed. “Getting close. Go on, I’m enjoying this.”

Lori picked up the pine cone in her lap and tossed it at me. “So am I, more than you can imagine. You could, of course, copy Kerouac and do both at the same time. Write, if poorly, while chasing experience. Or Hemingway, a much better storyteller. And, if you were to believe him, a real man who lived life to the full. Dressed like a girl as a kid, dumped four wives as an adult, and in the end, put a shotgun to his head. A life to emulate?”   

“Is there anything you haven’t read? Anything you don’t know?”

Lori’s eyes narrowed. “There is. Why you’re here. Not that I’m complaining. Just the opposite. I don’t have anyone like you to listen to me. To talk to about books, ideas. Life. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“What is … life?”

“That I’d given up on this place. Excited to finally leave.” Lori put her hand on top of mine. “And now you show up.”

“But that should make you happy.”

Lori breathed in deeply and lifted her hand off mine. “The wind’s shifting, now blowing in from the sea. Don’t you just love that scent?”

“I do.”

“Another thing I’ll miss. And the purple lupine swaying in the breeze in the meadow behind my house.”

“I want to listen to you, Lori, be the one you want … to talk to. To love. There’s nothing ironic about that. Maybe it’s fate that brought us together. That rainbow speaking.”

Lori stretched out her long legs and leaned her shoulder into mine. “You are a romantic, just as I thought.”

“And you are amazing. Not just brilliant and wise beyond your years, but so perceptive. You have a gift.”

Lori pulled her knees to her chest and hugged herself. “At times, it seems more like a curse, seeing and feeling too much. More than what’s good for me. For anyone. Maybe I got that from my mom. Maybe that’s what made her drink too much … and kill herself.” 

I turned and looked at Lori, wanting to put my arm around her. “Sorry about that,” I said, patting her knee instead.

“Don’t be. It happened when I was six. I’m long over it now.”

“Still, that had to be traumatic. My father also died when I was young. But too young for me to know him at all.”

“You must know something. Your mother must’ve told you about him.”

I tugged on the end of my mustache. “Sylvia told me very little other than his name, Sam … Samuel … and that he was a surgeon. A famous one in Munich.” 

“How’d he die?”

I picked up a rock and threw it into the surf. “Murdered … at Dachau. Where I was born.” 

Lori’s mouth opened wide. “Born there? Incredible! Now, that’s something you should write about. Talk about traumatic.”

“I have no memory of it. I’m lucky compared to you, or my mother, who knew … the horror.” 

“You’re clenching your fist. Your eyes look sad. There’s more, I sense, something you’re not saying.”  

I closed my eyes. “There is one … one memory I can’t seem to shake. The horrific stench. Tell her. And … and—"

“And what? Tell me.”

“What still haunts me … hurts the most, returns whenever I hear a gunshot … or think, talk about the death camp. Like now.”

“Okay, I’ll shut up.”

“I … I saw my father shot to death. Saw the terrified look on his face. See it now.”

Lori scooted closer and gently stroked my face. “I can tell that hurts. Hurts real bad. But can I say just one more thing? Then no more, I promise.”

I nodded, her touch seemingly making the image and pain disappear.  

She stroked my hair, her mouth so close to mine that when she spoke I could taste her warm, sweet breath. “I just know that one day you’ll be able to face your fear, and that’ll free you.”

The murky sea approached, the surf now just a few feet away, crashing on the rocks below. “I suppose I’m no different from Sylvia, who could never talk of the death camp. Both of us afraid to—”

“You don’t have to talk about it anymore.” 

“Afraid to face the truth, and feel the terror again.”

“Understandable.”

“But I have known that other feeling you mentioned, wanting to hide, luckily not much anymore. With me it’s feeling embarrassed. Ashamed.”

Lori reached out to touch my stump, but stopped. “I don’t have such a good excuse. Just being poor.”

I took her hand in mine. “That’s not your fault.”  

She squeezed my hand. “You’re sweet, Ben, I really like you. It seems a shame to give up writing when you’ve hardly begun.”

“I’ll write again when I’ve truly lived. Have something worthwhile to say. Finally, know who I am.”

“But what do you do if you never find that out? Never write again? That’d be a great loss. We’d never know what you’d experienced along the way.”

I looked past Lori at Mount Desert Island, sunbeams breaking through the clouds, lighting up the face of Cadillac Mountain. “A loss? I suppose so … but only if I had talent.”

“Just hearing you speak, knowing what you’ve already been through, sensing what’s in your heart, tells me you do.” She touched my stump. “What happened?”  

I leaned in to Lori, my stump pressed against her side. “A dumb thing I did when I was a kid. So childish, such a cliché, I’m embarrassed to talk about it.”

She stroked my stump. “I want to know.” 

“Tony Razzeri, a hood from school, had it in for me ever since he’d caught me kissing his ex-girlfriend Connie Favioli. I should’ve seen it coming. Because the truth is I encouraged him all along. A couple of months later, he challenged me to a fight. Not exactly a fair one. He pulled a hatchet from under his jacket and hacked off my arm at the elbow.”

Lori’s head jerked back. “Shit … that’s awful! Gruesome.”

“It was my fault anyway. I could’ve just walked away. But I was looking for a fight. Trying to prove something, be someone I wasn’t.”

“Which is exactly what you’re doing now, isn’t it? Trying to be a clam digger when you must know you’re not—never will be—one. What are you trying to prove?”

I dropped my head, muttering “Zol er krenken un gedenken.” 

“What’s that?”

“Something I say to myself. Sometimes when I’m confused … and need help.”

Lori put her arm around me and pulled me close, the tip of my nose grazing her damp cheek, the scent of her, the sea and mud making me dizzy.

She whispered in my ear. “Why dig clams with one hand when you can write beautiful poetry with it. Flowing straight from your heart, with all your heart. Like digging clams with no hands.”

A former pretzel peddler in Brooklyn, clam digger in Frenchman Bay, and toad licker in the Sonoran Desert—as well as Curator at the Arizona State Museum, NEH Fellow at the University of Arizona, and Weatherhead Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research—Seth Schindler lives in Tucson where he practices Zen archery and writes fiction and nonfiction. His short stories have been published in several literary magazines including Rosebud and the Arlington Literary Journal. His story “Licking the Sacred Toad” was a finalist for the 2021 Gival Press Short Story Award, and his book about the plight of the food insecure in America today, Sowing the Seeds of Change, was recently published by the University of Arizona Press.