Between the clay banks of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and the brackish waters of the Chesapeake Bay there is a beach a thousand miles long. The sand is fine enough, but it is sharp with oyster shells and rough with stones the color of ox-blood and ginger. There's always a tangled line of seaweed running the length of the last high tide. Except for this narrow divider, the rolled farmland and mirrored water meet so seamlessly that on hazy days the big mansions, their pecans and copper beeches like sails, seem to be making their way, somewhere, on the shimmer of the Bay.

On one spot of this beach along the Chester River, there is a boy sitting on the polished curve of a washed-up loblolly pine. His eyes are now dry, but the dirt on his cheeks is streaked and there is salt on his lips. He is holding a crab net and an empty bushel basket, and his broad-brimmed straw hat floats in the water at his feet. Behind him, across a stand of corn beginning to brown in the early August heat, he can hear the steady hum of tractors plowing up an old hay field. Distant on the water he can see seine haulers, waist-deep on the sandbar, setting out the huge net on a necklace of yellow floats. Beyond them the crab boats are painfully bright in the sun, a flash of crystal at the water's edge.

The boy's name is Cecil Mayberry; he is 12, white, and he knows something. He knows what his mother is going to make for supper, pot roast and green Jell-O salad; he knows that the Russians have put a Sputnik in the sky. But these are not the items that are just now on Cecil's mind. He is thinking about a man, a waterman, lying face down in a tidal pool 200 yards from where he sits. Cecil knows the man's name, Grayson "Tommie" Tubman, and he knows that two 22-caliber