Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  Could such a one come seriously to court my daughter? Rosalind thought, and she began the maneuvers which were intended to send this ungracious pair home empty-handed. “Do come in,” she said expansively. “This is my husband, Fitzhugh, and I’m sure you know from Fithians’ letters that this must be Evelyn.” She lavished praise upon the Claxtons, assuring them that their fame had circulated throughout the Eastern Shore. “You’re known as one of the really great families of Maryland, and we’re honored that you’ve come to visit us. Father Darnley told us of your piety, too.”

  Evelyn, of course, saw that her mother was teasing the Claxtons into fatuous reactions, and they complied. “We’re really not one of the principal families. The Dashiells own a much larger plantation.”

  Rosalind paid special attention to the young man, showering him with ironic flattery, against which he could not defend himself. At one point she said, “Father Darnley told us you’re an outstanding huntsman,” and he replied, “One day I shot three rabbits,” and she said, “Remarkable!”

  That first afternoon had been painful enough, but as the visit progressed, things deteriorated. Mrs. Claxton showed herself to be a ninny, and her son seemed determined to prove that he had inherited her salient qualities. Even Evelyn, once so hopeful that Regis might be the one to lead her to a new life across the bay, surrendered such dreams and confided to her mother, “He is really impossible.”

  But during supper on the evening before the wedding was to take place, Fitzhugh coughed impressively and said, “Mrs. Claxton, I think you and your son should prepare to drink a toast.”

  “To what?” the giddy visitor asked.

  “To tomorrow. When Father Darnley marries Regis and Evelyn.”

  This blunt announcement, which the Steed women had not been invited to discuss, caused a flurry, and Regis had the good grace to get up and move to Evelyn’s side, where he took her hand and kissed her awkwardly.

  Rosalind noticed that when this happened, the girl flinched, so that night in Evelyn’s room she said harshly, “You cannot allow this wrongful thing to proceed.”

  “I am powerless to stop it.”

  Rosalind shook her. “You are never entitled to use that excuse. Any human being with strong character can oppose wrong.”

  “I’m seventeen!” Evelyn wailed. “And Father worked hard to arrange this marriage.”

  Rosalind broke into ridiculing laughter. “Dearest child, age is nothing. Your father’s vanity is nothing. All that matters is that you build the best life possible. That you become the best human being possible. With Regis Claxton you’ll have no possibilities. The wastage will be appalling.”

  “But I might never marry. Here there are no Catholics.”

  “There were no Catholics for your father, either, and he took me. Believe me, Evelyn, you’re a special girl. You have a particular beauty. Men will seek you out, and there’s no law which says they have to be Catholics.”

  “He was the only one Fithians could find.”

  “Fithians! God damn Fithians.”

  The force with which Rosalind uttered these words startled the girl, and she turned to ask her mother directly, “Has it been so bad?”

  “Not as you think.” Rosalind replied. “Your father’s been most kind, Evelyn, as you’ve had opportunity to witness. But the system! This writing of letters of application to Fithians in London! This stupid arranging of lives according to external patterns ...” Rosalind began to stalk about the room, a towering figure of rebellion.

  “Is it Nelly Turlock?” Evelyn asked.

  Rosalind stopped abruptly and stood at some distance from the bed. her arms akimbo. She had never spoken of Nelly to her daughter, for she had not been sure that the girl knew of her father’s misbehavior, but now the subject had been broached. “Who bothers a moment about Nelly Turlock? Your father’s found a certain comfort in the marshes, and I’m unconcerned.” She paused. “Have you seen the children?”

  “They’re adorable. The loveliest white hair. I suppose you’ve heard what they’re saying about Nelly?”

  “I’ve heard all the dismal stories, Evelyn, and they impress me little. When you marry there’ll be the big house where you live with your husband, and there’ll be the little house where he lives with one of the slaves or one of the Turlocks and the two need never meet.”

  “I doubt that Regis would take one of the slaves.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with him,” Rosalind said. “In fact, everything’s wrong with him, and I plead with you not to marry him.”

  “He’s my best chance,” the girl cried in true anguish, stuffing her face into her pillow.

  Now Rosalind took the sobbing Evelyn into her arms. “We’re talking of a human life. Yours. You’ll live many more years, and they must account for something. You must be a woman of character.”

  It was clear that these words meant nothing to the bewildered girl, so Rosalind shook her, making her attend. “Two images flood my mind, and I want them to flood yours, too. The first concerns my sisters. Missy and Letty. They were lovely girls, much like you, and they had untold possibilities, but they scurried into meaningless marriages, with meaningless young men, and now they lead meaningless lives. I could weep with pity when I think of them. The other image involves a woman you know, Mrs. Paxmore.”

  “The old woman who rants about slavery?”

  “No. The old woman who has never feared to testify concerning life. As a consequence, she has a beautiful home, fine children and better grandchildren. And most important of all, a beautiful soul. Be like her, don’t be like my sisters.”

  At last Rosalind had said something that Evelyn could comprehend. “Are you trying to become like Mrs. Paxmore?” she asked.

  Rosalind considered this. Never before had she expressed her intentions openly, for she had known no one with whom she could talk sensibly, but now she recognized the relevance of Evelyn’s question. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I suppose I do want to be like her.” Then her voice became harsh. “And tomorrow you can judge whether I have succeeded.”

  When Evelyn tried to probe the meaning of this threat, Rosalind bent down and kissed her. “You are infinitely precious to me, and I cannot stand idle and watch you waste your talents on a dunderhead. Indeed, I cannot.”

  At breakfast next morning she warned her husband that this foolish marriage must not go forward, but he ignored her protests on the grounds that to halt things now would be embarrassing. She tried to point out that a moment’s trivial embarrassment was less significant than a lifetime of wastage, but he had already summoned the priest and the servants. The Claxtons came down late, hoping to make a grand entrance, but when Rosalind saw them she could not stifle her laughter. “Fitzhugh,” she whispered, “you can’t go ahead with this.”

  “Everyone’s here,” he said brightly, stepping forward to greet Mrs. Claxton.

  But when he led the two young people into position before Father Darnley, Rosalind cried in a loud voice, “Stop this farce!”

  “What ...” Mrs. Claxton made a strangling sound and looked as if she might faint.

  “Get them out of here!” Rosalind ordered. “Out, I said! All of you, out!”

  The slaves responded first, retreating through an open door. The white indentures followed, shoved along by Rosalind, who then faced the bewildered Claxtons. With her arms bent at the elbow, as if her fists were eager to strike, she said quietly, “The farce is ended. Take yourselves home across the bay.” And she did not let up until her visitors were on the porch with their bags beside them.

  “This is infamous!” Mrs. Claxton protested as Fitzhugh attempted to console her, but Rosalind would permit no conciliation.

  “You are to go home,” she said sternly. “This has been a dreadful mistake, and I have behaved poorly. But you must leave.” And she stood in the doorway as if guarding it lest they try to return to the house. Tall and resolute, she glowered at them like some clear-seeing goddess, and after a while they crept to t
heir sloop, whose bow headed toward Annapolis.

  Fitzhugh was outraged by his wife’s behavior and might have tried to chastise her, except that Father Darnley was watching, doing his best to appear dissociated from this scandal; but as the priest went to the sloop, which would take him, too, back to Annapolis, Rosalind involved him in her strategy. “Sweet Father, you know what happened. Now find us a bridegroom for this girl.” He affected not to hear, so she placed herself before him and said, “Tell the young men that I shall settle upon her a great share of my own dowry. But for the love of God, do something to save this soul.”

  When the sloops were gone and the Steeds were left to absorb the reverberating shocks Rosalind had generated, Fitzhugh started to fulminate, believing that to be his duty as man-of-the-house, but his attempts were so ludicrous that Rosalind ignored him. Clasping his daughter—really her daughter—she whispered, “On this day we did a good thing. Fifty years from now, gentle flower, you’ll look back and laugh, and bless me, for I have saved your life.”

  In February 1703, when annual storms swept the Chesapeake, a small boat put into Devon Creek bearing a solitary traveler, a young man, his hair tousled by wind and rain. Finding no one at the wharf, he pulled his homespun jacket about his damp shoulders and started toward the house.

  Belatedly an indentured servant spotted him and started shouting, “Stranger coming to our landing!” And down the servant came to warn the young man that this was Steed property.

  “I know,” the young fellow said, plowing straight ahead. “Father Darnley sent me.”

  From the doorway Rosalind Steed heard these words and rushed out into the rain to greet the stranger. “We are so glad to meet you,” she said in great excitement, clutching the young man’s arm and leading him to the porch. She watched admiringly as he stamped his feet and swung his arms to brush away the rain.

  “Name’s Thomas Yates, James River. Father Darnley told me you have a—”

  Rosalind interrupted, for she saw no need to mask her delight. “Evelyn!” she cried triumphantly. “A young man’s come to see you ... through the storm.”

  Now she was free to tend her garden. Her daughter was married. Her son was doing well at the college in France. And her husband had resumed his routine of some days on Devon, some in the marsh. Even the warehouse in Patamoke was flourishing.

  She made it clear to the workmen that she did not wish a formal garden in the English style, like the ones she had known along the Rappahannock. She respected geometrical patterns and understood why they were favored by ladies whose fingers never touched soil; through a change of seasons and alternating blooms such gardens could be attractive, but she loved to work the soil, and to see large results, and this produced her basic strategy: My principal flowers will be trees. Because when you plant trees, you’re entitled to believe you’ll live forever.

  So first she studied what trees were already in place, and fortunately, scattered in the space between the wharf and the house stood maples and elms of magnitude, and these she trimmed and cultivated to serve as cornerstones of her planting. Her pride was a white oak of majestic proportion: thirty feet at the base, nearly eighty feet tall and more than one hundred and forty feet in the spread of its mighty branches. It provided enough shade to protect an entire lawn; it had already been sovereign when Captain John Smith named the island, and to it the other trees related.

  The lawn contained no red maples, so her opening operation in the fall of 1703 was to transplant three such trees, two of which promptly died. “You can’t move trees of that size and expect them to live,” her husband warned her, but she moved three more, just as large, and these lived. In spring they were harbingers, in autumn the glory of the landing, visible from all parts of the creek as one approached by boat.

  Upon this solid foundation she composed the rest of her stupendous garden: dogwood for spring, mountain laurel for summer and huge plantings of pyracantha for autumn, at which time the dogwoods would reappear with clusters of red berries.

  “No tulips, no hollyhocks,” she said. “And for heaven’s sake, no box. I want nothing that has to be coddled.” She avoided also the peony, the tall magnolia, the phlox and hawthorn. But she was not averse to decoration, for when her large plantings were in position she said, “Now for the jewels,” and in two dozen practical places she planted holly trees—two male, twenty-two female—expecting bright berries of the latter to provide glow at sunset. And when the hollies were started—some to grow forty feet tall—she added her final touch, the extravagant gesture which would make this stretch of lawn her timeless portrait: in seven open areas where the sun could strike she planted clumps of daylilies, knowing that when they proliferated the areas would be laden with tawny-colored flowers of great vitality and brilliance. July at Devon Island would be unforgettable; the daylilies would see to that.

  In 1704 and 1705 her gigantic gardens were sprawling disappointments, for the transplanted maples were husbanding their strength and the daylilies had not begun to multiply—fifty would eventually result from one original—while the rudely transplanted dogwood seemed half dead. Small gardens with small flowers can be transformed in a matter of months; gardens focusing on trees require years. But by 1706 all parts seemed to merge: the oak dominated, its indented leaves bright in the sun, and the maples lent color. But it was the procession of the seasons that gratified: the shimmering white dogwoods of spring; the undisciplined daylilies of early summer; and in the autumn the exuberance of the pyracantha. that noblest of shrubs; and the turning colors of trees set against the permanent green of the enduring pines.

  Her garden was a triumph, as durable and generous as she, but sometimes she felt that it displayed its greatest glory in midwinter, when bitter winds swept in from the northwest and snow covered all, with only the pines showing color: now the dogwood slept, and the hidden roots of the daylilies, and the visible buds of the laurel. Even the oak was barren, but then as she walked among the bare limbs she would catch sight of the hollies, those fine and stubborn trees to which the birds of winter came, seeking red berries, and her heart would leap and she would cry: “When the last berries are gone, spring begins and all this starts again.” And she would run in the snow and visualize the beautiful gardens of summer, with the laurel as pale and lovely as any iris.

  The garden of her personal life was not flourishing. Her husband now offered no excuses for his frequent absences, and she had to suppose that he was spending them at the marsh. She had never seen Nelly, but chance comments from infrequent visitors kept reminding her that the girl was beautiful and lively—“She boasts an excellent figure, and why she isn’t married is a mystery.” The best explanation came from an acidulous woman whose husband managed the Steed offices in Patamoke: “She’s a Turlock, and they rarely wed.”

  Rosalind had made cautious inquiries as to Nelly’s children and learned that they were rollicking rascals, with their grandmother’s Swedish blond hair and blue eyes—“Which is a wonder, seeing that they’re mostly Turlock.”

  “What do you mean?” Rosalind asked.

  The conveyor of this information was a woman who envied the Steeds and now pondered how best to wound the mistress of the island. Biting her lower lip in study, she started to speak, then hesitated, then babbled on, “You know, of course, that Flora Turlock, that’s Nelly’s mother ... Have you ever seen her, Rosalind?”

  Mrs. Steed shook her head, and the woman said, “Of course not, how would you? You don’t go to the marsh.”

  Rosalind smiled, offered more tea and asked, “What were you trying to say?”

  “It’s rather ugly, but it’s true. Nelly’s mother was Flora. Her father was Charley.”

  “Charley who?”

  “Charley Turlock—Flora’s brother.” The woman held her teacup to her lips, then added, “Her brother. She had a baby by her brother.”

  Without considering what she was saying, Rosalind replied, “I read somewhere that the Pharaohs of Egypt married their sist
ers.”

  “Are you defending such behavior?”

  “Not at all. I’m merely saying ...” She left the sentence unfinished, for it occurred to her that no words would satisfy this woman, and that whatever was said would circulate viciously throughout the community.

  “You know, of course,” the woman continued, “that Flora was publicly whipped for her sin?”

  “There seems to be a great deal of women being whipped in Patamoke.”

  “But ...”

  “And I wonder if it does any good.”

  “Mrs. Steed ...”

  “And that damnable ducking stool. They reserve it for women, too, and I suppose that if I weren’t the wife of Fitzhugh, I’d be lashed to it and ducked in the Choptank.”

  This was heresy, and the visitor assessed it as such; by the shocked look on her face she betrayed her plan to report widely what Mrs. Steed had said, but Rosalind was not finished. “I really don’t care whether you repeat what I just said or not. The whipping of women and the ducking stool are the hideous acts of frightened men, and I am sick of them.”

  Four days later Fitzhugh returned from Patamoke, distraught. “In town the talk concerned your challenge to the authorities.”

  “You mean what I said in defense of Flora Turlock?” She paused, then added, “Nelly’s mother. Your Nelly’s mother.”

  This name had never before been spoken in Fitzhugh’s presence, and he was incensed at what he considered his wife’s lack of good breeding. “Wives don’t speak of such things. You be careful what you say about whippings ... and the ducking stool.”

  “Are you threatening me, Fitzhugh? You must know that’s idle.”