Daughter of Ashes

by Marcia Talley

  Ugh. Our ancestors were certainly much more sanguine about death than we are. Most of the epitaphs were along the lines of ‘Life was tough, now yay! Dead at last.’

  Behind the mound where the children lay, another larger headstone caught my eye.

  Nancy Hazlett

  1934–1952

  Beloved Daughter & Sister

  Nancy Hazlett had been only eighteen when she died. My thoughts drifted again to Baby Ella. The dates fitted. Was she yours, Nancy? If so, she should have been buried beside you.

  I decided to research the people who had once walked over the land Paul and I now owned, whose graves I could visit every day, if I chose. I knew that by the early 1950s, vital records in local Maryland courthouses had been moved to the new Archives in Annapolis, the shining accomplishment of Maryland’s first archivist, Morris Leon Radoff, who built the Hall of Records in Annapolis in 1935 and persuaded the counties to transfer their records there for safekeeping. In the days before the construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, this would mean researchers would have to travel long distances to Annapolis from the counties, some by ferry from the Eastern Shore, so the canny Radoff had partnered with the Church of the Latter Day Saints to microfilm the important records and leave copies in the care of the counties.

  Thinking about the moldering records that Kim Marquis had found in the courthouse basement, I wondered if they’d been missed in Radoff’s general roundup for the Mormons.

  I slipped my iPhone out of my pocket and took pictures of the tombstones, being careful to capture the dates on the inscriptions. The next time I visited the courthouse, I’d see what I could find out about them. I wanted to check out the county library, too.

  But first, we had work to do. Now that Kendall Barfield was dead, Kim feared that the rental on the office space wouldn’t be renewed. Before the lease expired, Fran and I needed to clear out the storage room so that the mold could be abated and the room thoroughly cleaned, ready to welcome back the records Kim had decided to keep to their forever home.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.’

  Abraham Lincoln, ‘Address to an Indiana Regiment,’ March 17, 1865

  When I arrived at the courthouse the following day, Fran was already at work wiping mildew off items with alcohol and storing them in clean boxes. After I suited up, I grabbed a rag and a bottle of alcohol and pitched in.

  Around nine-thirty a.m., Kim showed up in the storeroom, a man in tow. From my crouched position on the floor, he looked exceedingly tall. He wore a short-sleeved plaid seersucker shirt tucked into a pair of dark gray jeans held up by neon yellow suspenders.

  ‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ Kim said.

  Glad for any distraction from the box of shabby file folders I’d been packing, I wiped sweat off my brow with the back of my gloved hand and said, ‘Good news first.’

  ‘The county has agreed to thoroughly clean, repair and repaint this space.’

  From behind her mask, Fran beamed. ‘Great! So what’s the bad?’

  ‘It means we’ll need to clear everything out by the end of next week.’ Even in the relative dark of the storage room, I could see Kim’s frown.

  Looking at the chaos around me, I groaned.

  ‘Sorry, but to make up for it, I’ve brought Cap along to help.’

  I remembered that the first time I’d talked to Fran in the High Spot café, she’d mentioned a volunteer nicknamed ‘Cap.’

  ‘Welcome to hell,’ I said, handing Cap a face mask and the box of rubber gloves.

  ‘Kim said it was a mess, but I never dreamed it’d be this bad.’ Cap pulled on the gloves, snapping them over his wrists like a pro, then adjusted the face mask over his nose and mouth.

  I handed him a folder I’d wiped clean of mildew and showed him how to place it with the others in the bankers’ box. After we’d filled half a dozen boxes, I helped Cap carry them upstairs and load them onto a book truck. Once outside, we stripped off our protective gear and together we pushed the truck across the street to the office space the late Kendall Barfield had acquired. We rode the elevator up to the third floor and unloaded.

  After working without air-conditioning in the summer heat, sweat had soaked the underarms and gone through the back of my T-shirt. Cap’s shirt clung damply to his back, and his cafe-au-lait skin glistened with sweat. A case of bottled water sat on the floor near the office door. I handed a bottle to Cap, then took one for myself and unscrewed the lid.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Cap,’ I said after taking a few refreshing swigs of water. ‘Is the “Cap” short for something?’

  Cap paused in mid-sip, half standing, half sitting against the edge of one of the three metal desks in the room. ‘“Captain.” It’s a military thing.’

  ‘What did your momma call you when you were born?’ I asked, pulling up a chair.

  ‘Tommy,’ he replied. ‘Unless I was misbehaving, and then it was Thomas Edward Hazlett you cut that out right now!’

  ‘Hazlett! My gosh, are you related to the Josiah Hazlett who owned the old Hazlett Place? We’ve just moved into the cottage there.’

  ‘Hardly, ma’am. My ancestors were Hazlett’s slaves.’

  I felt my face flush. ‘I’m embarrassed. I should have figured that out.’

  Cap grinned. ‘We could be related, of course. No telling what mischief old Josiah was up to with the house slaves back then. But never had the time or the inclination to have one of those DNA tests done to find out for sure.’ He grinned. ‘Assuming, of course, that the white side of the Hazlett family was inclined to cooperate with the experiment.’

  ‘I took a walk around the property the other day,’ I told him. ‘There are a lot of Hazlett gravestones in a little cemetery near our place. I stupidly assumed they were descendants of Josiah Hazlett himself.’

  The corners of Cap’s eyes crinkled in amusement. ‘Not for over one hundred years. That land had been in my family ever since our great, great grandparents were freed by Samuel Hazlett’s will back in 1846.’

  ‘He sounds like a good man,’ I said, ‘especially for a plantation owner back then.’

  Cap snorted. ‘Depends on your point of view, I suppose.’

  ‘Are you the one who’s taking care of the graves?’ I asked.

  Cap nodded.

  ‘Did you hear about the baby we found in our chimney?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘Everybody did.’

  ‘After Dwight found the baby in the chimney, I did a little research …’ I began, picking my words carefully. ‘From the newspaper the child was wrapped in, they figure she was born around 1950 or 1951.’

  Cap’s dark eyes bore into mine. ‘And …?

  ‘Well, one of the tombstones was for a Nancy Hazlett who died in 1952, so naturally I wondered …’ I let the sentence die.

  ‘Nancy was my sister.’ The desolation on his face tore at my heart.

  ‘I was afraid of that,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, Cap.’

  ‘Nancy drowned in 1952, Mrs Ives. The police ruled it a suicide.’ He made quote marks in the air. ‘“While the balance of her mind was disturbed.” I’ve never gotten over it.’

  ‘Had she been depressed?’ I asked.

  ‘Honestly? I really don’t know. I enlisted in 1946 when Nancy was still in junior high. When I left for the army, she seemed like a happy kid to me.

  ‘While I was serving in Korea in 1950,’ he continued, ‘I received a telegram that Mom had died of cancer. Soon after that, Nancy lost the farm. I didn’t find that out until much later, of course. They told me it was because she didn’t pay the taxes.’ Cap began pacing from the desk to the window to the door and back again. ‘Dammit, Mrs Ives! She was just a kid! I should have been here for her, but that was impossible.’

  Remembering the dates inscribed on Nancy’s tombstone, I figured she was sixteen – still a minor – when her mother died. ‘You couldn’t get co
mpassionate leave?’

  ‘Leave?’ Cap laughed bitterly. ‘Early in the war, my plane was shot down. I punched out in time but spent the rest of the war as a guest of the Chinese in a POW camp near the Yalu River. We were completely isolated, had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world. And when they did give us news …’ He paused, snorted. ‘News. Hah! It was lies, all lies. We were losing the war, our government had abandoned us, our wives were sleeping with other guys …’

  I swore softly.

  ‘Yeah, well, I survived. Lucky, huh? Forty percent of the POWs didn’t.’

  Cap placed hands on both sides of his water bottle and crushed it like an accordion, then stared at the label for a long time. He was shutting down.

  There was a lot more to the story, I knew, but like other war heroes, Cap seemed reluctant to talk about it. Was it the poet, Robert Frost, who once said, ‘Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, the other half those who have nothing to say and keep on saying it?’

  In my experience, the vets who preened and strutted and boasted about the war were the guys who shot themselves in the foot at the motor pool. True heroes, like Cap, had experienced horrors and simply didn’t talk about it. Was that a good thing? I wasn’t so sure.

  Paul and I knew Navy pilots, POWs from the Vietnam era, some who’d been isolated, tortured, starved, held in captivity for five years or more. A few had seemed stable and happy after repatriation, and then later, sometimes decades later, woke up in a padded room at Bethesda Naval Hospital under round-the-clock observation.

  ‘What do you suppose happened?’ I asked. ‘With Nancy, I mean.’

  Cap took a deep, shuddering breath and lobbed his empty water bottle slam-dunk into a nearby trash can. ‘I always figured Nancy couldn’t live with herself for losing the family farm.’ He paused. ‘A baby? Damn. I didn’t know about the baby, of course. If she’d had the baby’s death to deal with, too …’ His voice trailed off.

  The baby had to have had a father, I thought, and if Nancy wasn’t married … well, the early 1950s wouldn’t have been an easy place for an unwed mother. She was a teenager on her own, with a dead mother and her only brother a POW in a country half the world away. Who could Nancy turn to? Maybe suicide had seemed like the only way out.

  A wave of sadness washed over me. ‘So you came home to no family and no farm.’

  ‘It wasn’t much of a homecoming,’ Cap agreed. ‘When I was repatriated in July of ’53, I was expecting Nancy to meet me at the airport.’ He swallowed hard. ‘Cliff Ames the Second showed up instead. Broke the news about Nancy. Took me to a bar. We got stinking drunk.’ He smiled at the memory. ‘Jobs were scarce after the war, especially for black vets like me. Cliff’s father was all into “Honor a Hero: Hire a Vet.” He looked out for me and two other homecoming vets, although we had to start at the bottom like everybody else, even Cliff junior.’

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Cliff got stuck in the office, filing papers, licking envelopes and making coffee.’

  I tried to imagine the Chicken à la King struggling with Maxwell House coffee in a can and an old-fashioned office percolator. ‘I would have paid good money to see that,’ I chuckled.

  ‘Me? I went to work for Clifton Farms as a chicken catcher,’ Cap continued. ‘It’s hot, dirty work. A bit like slavery, I imagine. Round up the chickens and stuff ’em in cages. Did that for a few years, then ended up working for Ames as a supervisor.

  ‘About ten years ago,’ Cap continued, ‘Ames junior outsourced the chicken catching to a labor contractor in North Carolina who brought his own people in, paying them half the rates he previously paid to Maryland workers.’

  ‘How much does a chicken catcher get paid?’ I asked, genuinely curious.

  ‘It’s piece work, Mrs Ives. We used to get paid five dollars and eighty cents per thousand.’

  ‘Per thousand?’ I tried to picture myself trying to round up even ten chickens – flapping in panic, squawking, talons digging into my arms – and failed.

  ‘They pay the contract workers two bucks thirty per thousand,’ Cap continued. ‘I figured that was God’s way of telling me it was time to retire.’

  Less God and more Clifton Ames, I mused, wondering if Cap felt betrayed by his old friend.

  I drained my water bottle and tossed it into the trash can after his. ‘So how do you spend your time now, Cap, other than helping out here?’

  ‘About twenty-five years ago my late wife and I bought a little farm that backs up onto the state park. The army was good to me, Mrs Ives. VA loans and other benefits kinda fell into the laps of POWs like me. The army gave us a dollar a day for every day we spent in captivity, plus twenty-six dollars a week for six months to help us get back on our feet. Since I had a job, I was able to save most of it.’

  ‘Do you have a picture of Nancy?’ I asked.

  Cap reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. From the credit card section, he selected an old black-and-white Polaroid. A petite, light-skinned girl wearing a Sunday go-to-meeting dress and carrying a bouquet of spring flowers beamed out at me from behind the plastic laminate. ‘Your sister was beautiful,’ I told him. I studied her face, trying to see a family resemblance to the man perched on the windowsill in front of me, the afternoon sun highlighting his tight salt-and-pepper curls.

  ‘You’re thinking she looks white,’ Cap said after a moment.

  I flushed. ‘Not really,’ I said, although I was. By the way his mouth quirked up in amusement, I didn’t think Cap was fooled by my denial.

  ‘Our daddy was white,’ Cap continued, ‘but he died in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He was a gunner being trained on the U.S.S. Utah when it was hit.’

  ‘December seventh, 1941. A day that will live in infamy,’ I said, quoting Franklin Delano Roosevelt. ‘But,’ I continued, trying to phrase my question carefully, ‘your mom was a Hazlett. Did she keep her maiden name when she married your dad, or was he a Hazlett, too?’

  Cap snorted. ‘They never married, Mrs Ives. Couldn’t.’

  ‘Couldn’t?’

  I felt five kinds of stupid when Cap explained, ‘Anti-miscegenation laws. Until 1967, it was illegal for blacks to marry whites in the state of Maryland or anywhere else in the south, for that matter.’

  ‘Ah.’ I paused to let the terrible significance of that fact sink in.

  ‘While my father was alive, he sent money home. After he died …’ Cap shrugged. ‘No marriage, no widow’s benefits. Nothing for us kids, either. Mom went to work cleaning houses.’

  The wrongness of his mother’s situation brought tears to my eyes.

  ‘That’s why I joined the army, actually. A steady paycheck, money to send home.’ He flashed a rueful grin. ‘An allotment of fifteen dollars a week went a lot further back then.’

  I handed Nancy’s photo back. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Cap.’

  Cap tucked the photograph of his sister back into his wallet. ‘Thanks. It’s OK, really. It was a long, long time ago.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘Lost Angel of a ruin’d Paradise! She knew not ‘twas her own; as with no stain She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain.’

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, 1821

  When the Tilghman All-County High School moved to a sprawling new campus a mile outside of Elizabethtown, the public library took over the 1940s-style brick school building not far from the courthouse and, after extensive renovation, moved their collection in. In recent years, the facility had expanded to include community meeting rooms, a small movie theater and a computer room that was always busy with patrons – mostly senior citizens – surfing the Internet.

  After signing up for a library card at the check-out desk, a helpful librarian wearing an I.D. badge that said ‘Kathy Harig – Reference’ escorted me to the glassed-in room which housed the library’s historical collection of newspapers and magazines, plus several glass-fronted shelves featuring books – both fiction an
d non-fiction – written by local authors.

  ‘The yearbooks are shelved over here,’ Kathy told me. ‘I’m pleased to say that we have them going back to the 1920s.’

  ‘I’m looking for Tilghman High School, late 1940s, early 1950s,’ I said, thinking back to Nancy’s teenage years.

  ‘Black or white?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Black or white? Schools were segregated in Maryland back then.’

  Because of our Navy father, I’d been educated largely on military bases. I’d always attended school with kids of other races, so school segregation was foreign territory to me. As I gaped at the librarian, whose tawny eyes were staring me down, waiting patiently for an answer, a fact floated up from the place in my brain where old high-school civics lessons were stored. ‘But wasn’t there a Supreme Court decision in the early 1950s that outlawed school segregation?’

  ‘Brown versus Board of Education, yes, in 1954. The ruling struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” and ordered the states to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.” Maryland, I’m afraid, had a rather loose interpretation of how speedy “deliberate” was. In this county, for example, it was practically glacial.’ She selected a key from the loop clipped to her belt and used it to open one of the glass-fronted cabinets. ‘After the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Maryland finally had to get its act together. Magnet schools, busing. Fortunately, we had no massive resistance like when Governor Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from enrolling in a Little Rock high school.’ She stood with her back to the open bookcase, hands folded in front of her. ‘Orval Faubus,’ Kathy said, drawling like a hillbilly in a television sitcom. ‘With a name like that, you gotta know the guy’s a moron.’

  ‘Dad was stationed in Norfolk back then,’ I said. ‘I remember that Prince Edward County in central Virginia chose to close all its public schools rather than integrate. The white kids were able to enroll in private schools that excluded blacks, but until the Supreme Court stepped in two years later, the black kids had nowhere to go.’