Pickin' Crabs

The Atlantic Blue Crab is red after steaming, changing color like human blood when out of its element: blue under the skin but red in the air, loosed from its ocean of veins.

"Touch its eye," my niece says, and I do. The eye is hard and ovular, at the end of a short stalk. Everything about the crab is hard. I puncture my thumb on one of its "teeth," a succession of small triangular protrusions along its carapace, like the jagged edge of an ironwood leaf.

I twist off the walking and swimming legs at the first joint, flip the crab over, and place a knife-edge under the apron, a small hinge connecting the upper and lower shells that can be used to determine a crab's sex. If shaped like the Washington Monument, one website says, the crab is a male; if the apron looks like the capital building, it's a female.

My mother leans across the table and says, "There it is, Jill: the devil." Also known as the dead man's fingers, the crab's gills--a series of white and black, minnow-sized, bellows-like organs--taste bad and shouldn't be eaten. The warning given each year when we were little at the annual crab feast: Eating the devil will kill you.

I clear out the gills, along with the mustard--a yellowish glob of what has been removed by the crab's digestive system--which, my sister says, she likes to eat. "Don't tell them what the mustard is," she whispers, referring to her children, "or they won't want to try it." My sister also likes the roe, or crab eggs, but today she has bought male crabs, which have more meat. Finally, I get to it.

The meat, that is. I break in half the lower shell of the crab, revealing multiple chambers. Inside each is a small lump of meat, like a tuft of milk-weed fluff before it has been separated by the wind. It is white, light, and slightly sweet.

I don't know why it is there--the meat--inside this hard-bodied thing. The meat certainly does not give the crab structure or girth. It would be foolish, wrong, dangerous, even, to think the meat was there just for me to eat. But before a crab feast, the table is wrapped like a gift in brown paper. And around it, for as long as it takes to pick the crabs--it can take a dozen crabs to yield a pound of meat--sits my family, laughing and talking.