Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1)

by Hollyday, Thomas

  Jake’s face was taut, his mouth halfway between his usual smile and a new look that Frank had not seen. It was a look of cunning laced with intense hatred, like that of a cornered beast. Jake was at the same time trying to determine who did this to him and how he could punish that person. He must have been thinking that the culprit would be hard to find and that was making him all the more angry.

  “I guess that barge musta sprung a leak,” said the man with the ball point pens in his shirt pocket. “Happens to the old barges all the time. All that weight of the crane and the pile driving equipment.”

  He continued, “Over in Baltimore the crews always try to put off the worn out equipment for jobs down here in the country.” As the man spoke two large oil drums toppled off the raised side of the barge and rolled from the high point to the low corner, splashing their complement of diesel fuel all over the deck as they tumbled, finally jumping the small restraining barrier at the edge and falling into the Nanticoke River with a splash of dark water. The drums quickly righted and floated next to the half sunk barge in the weak current, diesel fuel and hydraulic oil colliding in a rainbow of water hues, the color patterns drifting out from the large letters spelling Terment across the rusty barge steel siding.

  The cable that had been hanging from the tip of the crane let go and roared out on the sprocket wheel, the tail of the steel cable whipping through the air towards the shoreline where Jake and the others were watching. The oncoming missile caused screams and several people put their arms up in defense as the cable hit the water surface, fortunately far short of the beach. Like a stone that a child skips at the seashore, the cable crashed against the water surface and sent a great spray of river water into the group drenching two or three persons closest to the river. After the cable had left the crane, the sprocket on the crane arm spun furiously for a few moments, then slowly creaked to a stop. Finally the noise was over and the afternoon river quiet returned. In a few minutes the buzzard came back and returned to its incessant circling.

  Frank scratched the back of his neck and pulled his hat forward.

  “Well, that was a real nice show, nice welcome, Jake,” said one of the guests. “How long you figure that’s going to hold things up?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, as he trudged back up to the party from the shoreline. “We’ll have to pump out the barge, steady up the crane. Not long I guess.”

  Spyder immediately went to the station wagon and made a call, the imperturbable grin still on his face as he talked. More guests were arriving. The lane from the road to the farmhouse was filled on one side with station wagons and pickup trucks. Cars, tilted crazily with the high round crown of the road, were left on the highway outside the gate, wheels perilously close to the ditches.

  From the road, Frank heard a new sound. The human butterflies had started chanting at the side of the road. The song interspersed with the murmur of the cocktail party. He could not see the butterflies but knew they were there, wings moving in rhythm, lined up along the road, the old woman cheering them on again from her perch behind the yard full of birdfeeders.

  The Pastor had mentioned to Frank that the African visitor was leaving River Sunday, was going back to London. His visit to River Sunday had been short and was spent only with Mrs. Pond. The Pastor said that his church elders had invited the butterfly expert to dinner thinking that because he was African he might be interested in some of the black issues of the town. The man declined the invitation saying to the elders only a quick ‘no’ and nothing else.

  As soon as Jake heard the human butterflies, he became very agitated and went to the station wagon to talk with Spyder. From what Frank could observe, Jake talked excitedly with the guards. Spyder shrugged his shoulders several times. Then, as Jake grabbed his arm and shook it, Spyder finally nodded. Right afterward Spyder and the guards, there were three of them at the gate checking in the visitors, walked off to their left and out of Frank’s sight.

  Jake stood at the gate, ignoring the incoming guests as he watched Spyder walk away. Then, rubbing his hands, Jake seemed to calm himself. Frank saw a change come over Jake, his smiling personality returned, as he began to talk and joke with his investor guests.

  A small cloud covered the sun for a moment and a whisper of cold swept across the site. Frank shivered and for a moment held his arms around his body. He was almost naked in his work shorts. He had not shaved and his face itched.

  More than a hundred came to the party. The guests followed a routine. They arrived, were served a drink, and walked over to look at the wrecked barge and pile driver. Some walked quickly by the excavation, most not even looking at it. Frank was sure they had been prompted by Jake’s staff to show no interest. Many simply stood in small groups, talking, drinking and partaking of the many refreshments which the Terment Company employees carried around on small shiny silver trays.

  Frank, standing at his barrier rope with Maggie, had seen many of these persons at the hotel the day he arrived. Some were white, some black. The talk that he overheard was generally about the new houses to be built. The black bartenders in their white coats moved among the groups, with small trays, serving drinks and food. The guests talked excitedly about the Terment Town project, the jobs it would create, and especially about who was going to win bids for the work of building houses. When someone did come over to the dig site, however, Frank tried to portray the facts of the wreck as he and Maggie had surmised them. One woman wanted to know if he had found any dinosaur bones. Others noticed the cannon and asked whether the wreck was a treasure ship. He told them that there had been a small gold pouch and he was keeping his eyes open. One offered to help look for treasure but he declined the person’s offer saying that the site was going to be closed up very soon and that there was no reason to think that any treasure was on board. Maggie said to him between answers that she would never have been able to be so patient.

  She said, “I don’t like the talking part anyway. I got in trouble the only time I tried it. I’ll just let my work talk for itself.”

  Jake Terment, from time to time would stand near, eavesdropping, eyes on the ground as he listened. Frank knew Jake was listening to what he was saying about the shipwreck. Frank was courteous. He knew he had to continue trying to maintain a professional standing with Jake. He still wasn’t completely convinced he couldn’t pull this off and satisfy both his boss and Jake as well as his new friends, Maggie and the Pastor. Somehow as a professional he still felt that Jake would be reasonable. It was a matter of convincing Jake with the right words, words he had not found yet. Frank was good at listening and keeping his mouth shut. The same tactics he used on the president of his university to get and hold his job, he thought he could use here. If he was courteous to these businessmen and then careful in his discussion of the wreck, he could work with Jake to get the job done right. That was the way he had always managed, survived. In turn, if he were successful with Jake, his job at the university would be secure.

  A black businessman wearing one of the ubiquitous light blue cotton suits that most of the men wore raised his hand and pointed at Frank. “You can tell me something.”

  “What’s that?” Frank answered him.

  “I hear that there was a graveyard up here, for black folks. What can you tell me about that?”

  “Well, we haven’t found anything yet that would show that for sure. We know there was a legend about a graveyard.”

  “Tell me what you have found.”

  Frank looked at Maggie and continued, “The ship was burned. Some men died on board, probably sailors. We don’t know why they died.” Frank scratched his neck, wondering if he had already said too much.

  Jake intervened, putting his arm around the man. “I hope you are getting the information you want about the site.”

  “Yes, I am,” said the visitor. “I understand this might be a slave graveyard here. That’d be quite an important find, wouldn’t it?”

  The Pastor came over. Jake continued, glarin
g at the Pastor. “We are going to do everything we can to analyze all this before we go further with the project. Let me assure you, we will leave nothing undiscovered that might help in local history. By the way, while you’re here I want to introduce you to one of the main contractors. Did you get a drink?” Jake steered him back into the crowd.

  The Pastor’s eyes followed as they moved away from the wreck site, his face showing disappointment. In his shame at the black businessman’s relationship with Jake, the Pastor did not return Frank’s glance.

  A half hour went by. Frank could hear most of the conversations at the party from his vantage point at the edge of the site. He listened as the Pastor talked with a small group of guests.

  “Things have changed since the garbage war, haven’t they, Pastor?” asked a man, about thirty, his shirt printed with the outline of a faucet, the symbol of a local plumbing company.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s different around River Sunday. Maybe it’s not.”

  “What’s this about a garbage war?” asked a woman, her hair pulled up against the heat, teetering on her stiletto heels, streaks on her pantsuit where she had already slipped on the tufts of grass.

  “It all happened maybe twenty years ago,” the speaker smiled, his arm on the Pastor’s suit covered shoulder.

  “We were younger in body,” said the Pastor, smiling.

  Maggie walked up. “What happened, Pastor?” she asked.

  The faucet man continued, “I was just a kid at the time. We kids thought it was funny. See,” he leaned forward, “What was going on was that in those days the town of River Sunday burned its garbage once a week. There wasn’t any clean recycling like there is today. In those days there was just a dump and it was pretty raw. We’d go out there to shoot the rats feeding on the rotten food. All the garbage from the whole town was collected into a great pile and then burned. The smoke smelled to high heaven.”

  He went on. “The problem was that the land where the dump was located was owned by Old Man Terment, Jake’s father. The town government, all white folks, managed the place, and Terment gave the orders. To get rid of it, the trash had to be burned. The garbage was burned when the wind suited the town government. Since they all lived in the big white houses down along the harbor side, the wind suited them when it wasn’t blowing out over their houses and wasn’t blowing out over Terment’s mansion on the island either. Unfortunately the only other way the wind ever blew in River Sunday was directly over what we used to call the colored section where all the black folks lived in those days.

  “It went on this way for years,” the man said, looking around at the faces to make sure he still had their attention.

  “All my childhood I just remember my parents saying that Jake’s father done said this or done said that. His way was the way things were going to be done. Whenever there was a new road or a new building or a new fire department or a chief of police, why, Terment was consulted. When the Governor came to visit River Sunday it was Terment had the State Police send some men on motorcycles to give an escort. Just about the only thing here he didn’t have much control over was when the Washington people came and give you that award, Pastor.”

  The Pastor smiled. “The Washington people got voted out of office pretty quick too, didn’t they?”

  The faucet man nodded and went on, “What some of us refer to as the garbage war took a while to come about. The first skirmish started one night when the wind was blowing over the white section of town. People were out sitting on their porches in the evening the way folks used to do in River Sunday. Garbage smoke started coming over them, making everyone very uncomfortable. People called up the fire department saying that there must be an uncontrolled fire at the garbage lot. It was like somebody had thrown a skunk into the middle of Strand Street.

  “Well, the fire department went to the dump, sent out all five trucks they had in those days, even the old pumper. All the guys were sitting around the fire station so they ran out all the trucks just for something to do. The trucks put the fire out and the chief of the fire department had to drive out to Peachblossom and tell Jake’s father what had happened. The old man was having guests. The whole party was ruined by the smell of the garbage. The fire chief had some explaining to do. He told Jake’s father that it was an accident even though apparently there was some suspicion about the fire’s origin. There was talk that the fire had been set but there was no indication as to who had done it.

  “So then the next week when the wind was blowing the same way again, the fire started up mysteriously again. The same people called the fire department and complained. We kids watched all the trucks go roaring out to the garbage lot again.

  “By this time the fire chief knew something was going on. He knew that these garbage lot fires were not no accident. He had been lambasted by Jake’s father. There were a lot of upset folks in town. Just believe it when I say the fire chief was suddenly not a very popular person.

  “He was told by Jake’s daddy, ‘All the money we pay you and you can’t keep that fire from breaking out.’

  “Of course nobody cared about the fire breaking out. They just cared that it broke out when the wind was wrong. You got to remember too in those days that the fire department members was white men, all ages, but all white.

  “In the next few weeks it got so whenever the wind was blowing over the town folks knew that the garbage was likely to start burning. Finally Jake’s daddy and some of the other businessmen had a bigger fence constructed. They put barbed wire on the top of the fence too. The idea was to keep out whoever was sneaking in there and setting off the fires.

  “After they got that new fence the fires stopped burning when the wind blew over the town. The fires were lit when the wind was blowing over the black folks just as before. Everything seemed back to normal.

  “The final garbage war battle took place a few weeks later. Folks black and white have always suspected that our friend, the Pastor here, organized the drivers. No one ever talked. You don’t want to admit to it, do you, Pastor?

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” the Pastor grinned.

  “Well, you do too.” The man flicked the lime rind out of his drink. “All the garbage truck drivers were black in those days. So what happened was that they came in late on purpose from their pickup routes. The dump was locked up already according to Terment’s orders. They left their trucks outside the fence with the rotten garbage still aboard. Then about midnight all of the men went back and got their trucks. They drove the trucks to Strand Street, stopped in front of the courthouse and dumped the loads right there. The trash covered everything. The boxwoods, the Confederate statue, the Revolutionary War statue, not the Vietnam monument because it wasn’t built yet. Trash was half up the doorway of the old courthouse building. Come the morning the people who worked in the courthouse could only get into their offices by entering the big side windows or the back entrance. No one dared open the front door for fear the garbage would spill inside. Most of the courthouse employees, the judges and the clerks, did not stay in their offices for long, the smell of all that garbage was so bad.

  “Terment came down there and the fire chief and the mayor and they walked around for about an hour discussing the situation, their eyes on the ground.” The faucet man bent over, demonstrating the position of the town leaders as they deliberated on the crisis. His audience laughed. “Might have done them more good if they had looked up to Heaven rather than down for an answer,” he said. “The citizens, meanwhile, white and black alike, were standing back and watching them to see what they were going to do. The smell got worse and worse as the sun come up.

  “Jake’s daddy never said anything himself. He let other folks do the talking. So bymby, the mayor went over to the crowd that had gathered. That mayor always had a talent for knowing how to solve situations, mainly by pleasing Terment. That’s why he was in office so long. He puffed up the way he did and he said to them people, “We’re burning the same day ea
ch week from now on, regardless of the way the wind blows.” That was the end of the excitement. Pretty soon the trash was cleaned up and some new paint was put on the front door of the courthouse.

  “In the end the town had to pay the garbage men overtime. No one else would do the cleanup. You see, the white people in town in those days thought that garbage collecting work was work only for the black folks. So the guys that made the mess also got paid for cleaning it up. Old man Terment was a smart man and he got the point that he wasn’t going to win against these odds. The garbage war got settled the way things were done in those days. Just a little push from the opposition.” The man winked at the Pastor.

  At that moment the sound of barking motorcycle exhausts interrupted the murmur of the party. A River Sunday policeman led a limousine among the parked cars. The guests turned their heads towards the noise. They cleared a path as the limousine pulled into the party area. The name of a famous film company was brightly printed across its side doors.

  Frank watched as guests began to crowd around the car and to scream at each other in excitement. The women looked at their men while the men in turn looked at their male friends with grins and victory signs of anticipation. They yelled, “It’s Jake’s wife, it’s Jake’s wife, the movie star. Did you see her poses in Playboy? Showed everything, man. Firm tits. She shaves off all the hair on her pussy. We’re getting visited by a movie star. Oh myyyy God, can you believe it.”

  Serena stepped out of the car, effortlessly, smoothly, like fluid. The men crowded around the movie star. She had two bodyguards who restrained the most aggressive men trying to push against the woman, to touch her, to be part of her body. Serena was dressed as though she had no clothes on at all. The color of her tanned flesh could be seen through every seam in the transparent fabric she wore. Her sexual perfume drifted out on the hot afternoon air. Even Frank, his mind rarely drifting these hours from concern for the project, was caught off guard by the fantasy she portrayed so expertly. A song came into Frank’s mind, a song from long ago that would not stop, its melody hammering in his brain.