In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

80 “My Father Will Have Two Dozen on the Halfshell” ordering at Phil’s Oyster Bar in Baton Rouge Gulf oysters are milky, grown fat in braising seawater. The Gulf’s a warm pool, on chuffy oil burners, a crock pot of Guatemalan blood and Cajun spices. My father spoke of other beds, of blind tongs groping to a clean salt shoal: Virginia tidewater, him fresh from the seminary, before he’d failed, asea with a smiling deacon host in a small boat. Under their boat, I see an oyster crunch away from its drowned bed, snapping aloose like pliers a dentist clamped on my deadened tooth once, and bumped off with a careless elbow. Sometimes they just won’t open, he’d tell me, slumped against his forearms on the metal table. No matter how you jab at the hinge with that stubby knife. He’d eat them with me, at Phil’s, and say Obliged. But mainly he would see the open boat. The cold Atlantic bitterness. The favor. I’d see pearls, spilling from his mouth like a god’s. ...

Share