CAUGHT IN THE NET

PETER MATTHIESSEN

One summer day Ted [Lester] informed the crew that they were going to make the Napeague Station set, although they had been doing well farther east. His son Stewart was with the crew that day, and as they were hauling Stewart suddenly stopped winching on his end, where he was working with Jimmy Reutershan.

"Ted starting hollering," Ralph Carpentier says, "and Stewart hollered back: a human body had turned up in the net! 'Well, take him out,' Ted yells, 'and keep that net coming!' But Stewart was really spooked and he yells at his father. 'You take it out!' "

"So Ted says, 'Come on, Ralph,' and goes running down there, and sure enough, there's this young guy in bathing trunks, covered with little black snails. He was all stiff with rigor mortis, hands pointing kind of funny at the wrists. Jimmy didn't mind him much, but Stewart was green, he just wouldn't go near him. I don't blame Stewart for being spooked, I was spooked myself."

"So Ted grabs one end and I take the other and we set him aside, and Stewart is yelling at his father, 'You made this set on purpose, you knew he was going to be here!" Because this guy had drowned two days before at the State Park, and Ted had known about it."

"So we go back down to our end to finish the haul, and I asked Ted if what Stewart said was true, and he admitted it. 'I knew he had to be along this stretch somewhere. There was no other way them people were ever goin' to get their son back.' "

Excerpted from "Men's Lives."