Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  The geese were slow this morning in going to their feeding stations. There was fractiousness among the younger birds, but the elders did not protest, for mating time was approaching and there were many second-year geese who had not yet selected their partners, so that confusion was inescapable. But toward six-thirty Onk-or and another old gander began making the moves that would get the flock started. Restlessness ceased and eighty-odd birds began moving into positions from which they could take to the air.

  Onk-or led the flight, and within moments the flock had formed into two loose Vs which wheeled and dipped in unison. They headed for the river south of the marsh, and Onk-or saw that some hunter was still trying vainly to lure geese into the old blind located there. The big birds landed well upstream, fed for a while on grasses, then took off for better forage. They flew to the pond, where there was futile gunfire, and then toward the cornfield, where Onk-or quickly spotted the lone gunner stationed there. He swung away from the corn, flew left, and saw some geese feeding in a stream lined by pine trees. Since the geese already down proved that the area was safe, he would land his flock there.

  The geese came in low, wings extended, feet ready for braking, but just as Onk-or prepared to land, he detected movement among the pine trees lining the shore, and with a brilliant twist to the north he swung out of range, uttering loud cries of warning as he did so. He escaped, and those immediately behind made their turns, too, but many of the trailing geese did not react in time; they flew directly into the waiting guns and furious blasts of fire knocked them down.

  Seven geese were killed, including two of Onk-or’s children. It was a disaster, and he had been responsible. It must not happen again.

  At the store Lafe basked in his victory. “To catch a honker you got to think like a honker,” he told his listeners, but his glory was short-lived, because for the rest of the season he got no geese from his own marshes, and only two when he led an expedition farther upstream.

  “I never seen honkers so cagey,” he snarled. “I’m goin’ to hire me them trolls from Amos Todkill.” So in January 1823 he sailed up to Patamoke to dicker with Todkill, who specialized in combing the marshes for wounded young geese, which he domesticated, using them as living lures to bring wild geese directly into the muzzles of waiting guns.

  Todkill said he’d allow Turlock to rent fifteen of his tame geese, three days for a dollar and a half. “Pretty steep,” Lafe complained.

  “But you know they’re foolproof. ‘Never-fails,’ we call ’em.”

  Turlock tied their legs, tossed them into his boat and sailed back to the marsh. “I want me fifteen or sixteen reliable guns,” he announced at the store. “I laid out real money for them damned trolls, and I expect some honkers in return.”

  He enlisted a veritable battery, whose members he stationed at strategic spots so that the crossfire from the muzzle-loaders would be impenetrable. He then spread four dozen of his most lifelike wooden decoys, after which he released Todkill’s fifteen live ones. “As pretty a sight as a honker ever seen, and as deadly,” he said approvingly when all was in position.

  Then he and the sixteen other hunters waited. Nothing happened. Occasional geese from the marshes flew past, ignoring the trolls, who cackled to lure them down. Once or twice substantial flocks, headed by the old gander, came tantalizingly close, then veered away as if in obedience to a signal, and the three days passed without one good shot at a honker.

  Onk-or from the first had spotted the bizarre assembly of wooden decoys and live trolls, and it was not long before he discerned the guns hiding among the rushes. He not only kept his own geese from the lethal area; he also alerted others, so that Lafe and his artillery could not possibly get themselves the geese he had promised.

  At the store one of the hunters said, “Them trolls fooled me, and they fooled Lafe, but they sure as hell didn’t fool that old gander.”

  “What they did,” Lafe said, “was waste my dollar-fifty. It was only through the help of prayer that I kept from stranglin’ them birds before I gave ’em back to Todkill.”

  The men laughed. The idea of Lafe Turlock’s hurting a goose, except to shoot it, was preposterous. He loved the big birds, fed them cracked corn when snow covered the ground, rescued cripples the end of the season and turned them over to Todkill. Once, after a big revival meeting, he said, “The life of man is divided into two seasons: ‘Geese is here. Geese ain’t here.’ ” So when the men joshed him over his costly failure, they were surprised that he did not fight back.

  He remained silent for a good reason: he was ready to shift into phase three of his grand design. Assembling his sons in early March, he told them, “Turlocks eat geese because we’re smarter’n geese. And a danged sight smarter’n them dummies at the store, because I know somethin’ that would rile ’em, if’n they had brains to understand.”

  His sons waited. He looked out the door at the March sky and confided, “I been trampin’ through the woods, and I think I found me the spot where they does their courtin’.” He was referring to those few geese who had either been wounded by ineffective gunfire or seduced by the clemency of the Choptank; they would not be flying north with the others, but would remain behind, raising their Maryland-born families in marshes to the south. And when they mated, they would be vulnerable, for as Lafe explained to his sons, “Geese is just like men. When their minds get fixed on ass, caution goes out the window, and come next week we’re gonna knock down enough careless geese to feed us through July.”

  It was in the deepest nature of a Turlock to be sanguine where hunting and fishing were concerned: the oysters were down there but they could be tonged; the crabs might be hiding but they could be caught. “How we gonna do it, Pop?”

  “Strategy,” Lafe said.

  Onk-or, too, was thinking strategy. He must get his flock through the frenzy of this season without loss, and to accomplish this he must keep them away from the mating grounds, for he had learned that when young geese gawked at their contemporaries in the mating dance, they grew inattentive, and their elders were no better, for they, too, stood about cackling and enjoying the proceedings, unmindful of lurking guns.

  So for both Lafe and Onk-or the last days of winter became critical, for the man had to find the mating ground, and the goose had to keep his family away from it. Nine days went by without a loss to the Turlock guns.

  “No fear,” Lafe assured his boys. “Honkers has got to mate, and when they do, we come into our own.”

  He had anticipated, almost better than the young geese, where those who did not fly north would conduct their courtships, and there, along a grassy field deep in the woods, he placed himself and his sons, each with three muskets. The young geese, responding to their own inner urgings, were drawn to this spot, and there they began their dances.

  Two males would focus upon one female, who would stand aside, shyly preening herself, as if she held a mirror. She would keep her eyes on the ground, pretending to ignore events which would determine how she would live for the remainder of her life.

  The males meanwhile grew more and more active, snapping at each other and hissing, advancing and retreating and putting on a great show of fury. Finally one would actually attack the other, flailing with wings extended six or seven feet, and crashing heavy blows upon the head and shoulders of the other. Now the fight became real, with each heavy bird attempting to grab the other’s head in its powerful beak.

  According to some intricate scoring system, it would become apparent to both contestants, to the rest of the flock and especially to the waiting female that one of the fighting birds had triumphed. The other would retreat, and then would come the most moving part of the dance.

  The victorious male would approach the waiting female with mincing steps, swaying from side to side, and as he drew near he would extend his neck to the fullest and gently wave it back and forth, close to the chosen one, and she would extend hers, and they would intertwine, rarely touching, and they would stand thus, weaving
and twisting their necks in one of the most delicate and graceful manifestations in nature.

  As the dance approached its climax, the young geese of Onk-or’s group started instinctively toward the mating ground, and although Onk-or and his mate moved frantically to intercept them, they bumbled their way into the open area.

  “Now!” Turlock signaled, and the guns blazed. Before the startled geese could take to the air, the six Turlocks dropped their guns, grabbed others and blazed away, dropped them and reached for their back-ups. Geese fell in startling numbers, and by the time Onk-or could get his flock into the air, enough lay dead to stock the icehouse.

  When they reassembled in the marsh Onk-or discovered that one of his sons was dead, and he was about to lament when he found to his terror that his wife was missing, too. He had seen geese falter and fall into the grass offshore, and he knew intuitively that the men would now be combing that margin to find the cripples.

  Without hesitation he left his flock and sped back to the mating ground. His arrival disconcerted the men who, as he had expected, were searching for wounded birds. Flying directly over their heads, he landed in the area at which he had seen the geese falling, and there he found his mate, sorely crippled in the left wing. It was impossible for her to fly, and within minutes the dogs and men would find her.

  Urging her with heavy pushes of his bill, he shoved her through ill-defined waterways, heading her always toward the safety of the deeper marshes. When she faltered, he pecked at her feathers, never allowing her to stop.

  They had progressed about two hundred yards when a mongrel yellow dog with an especially good nose came upon their scent and realized that he had a cripple somewhere in the bushes ahead. Silently he made his way ever closer to the wounded goose, until, with a final leap, he was upon her.

  What he did not anticipate was that she was accompanied by a full-grown gander determined to protect her. Suddenly, from the water near the cripple, Onk-or rose up, whipped his heavy beak about and slashed at the dog. The startled animal withdrew in shock, then perceived the situation and lunged at the gander.

  A deadly, splashing fight ensued, with the dog having every advantage. But Onk-or marshaled all his powers; he was fighting not only to protect himself but also to save his crippled mate, and deep in the tangled marsh he attacked the dog with a confusing flash of wing and thrust of beak. The dog retreated.

  “There’s a cripple in there!” Turlock shouted to his sons. “Tiger’s got hisse’f a cripple.”

  But the dog appeared with nothing except a bleeding cut on the head. “Hey! Tiger’s been hit by a honker. Get in there and find that cripple.”

  Three boys and their dogs splashed into the marsh, but by this time Onk-or had guided his damaged mate to safety. They hid among the rushes as the men splashed noisily, while the mongrels, not eager to encounter whatever had struck Tiger, made little attempt to find them.

  A week later, when the crippled wing had mended, Onk-or herded his geese together and they started their mandatory flight to the Arctic: Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maine, and then the frozen moorlands of Canada. One night as they flew over a small town in central New York they made a great honking, and citizens came out to follow their mysterious passage. Among them was a boy of eight. He stared at the shadowy forms and listened to their distant conversation. As a consequence of this one experience he would become attached to birds, would study all things about them, and in his adult life would paint them and write about them and take the first steps in providing sanctuaries for them, and all because on one moonlit night he heard the geese pass overhead.

  WIDOW’S WALK

  ROSALIND’S REVENGE DID NOT HAVE A TRUE WIDOW’S WALK. That agreeable architectural device had flourished mainly in New England, where the family of a sailing man was accustomed to erect on the roof of its home a square, fenced platform from which the wife could look down the bay to spot the arrival of her husband’s vessel, coming home after years of whaling in the South Pacific. The name widow’s walk derived from romantic tales of those loyal women who continued to keep watch for a ship that had long since gone to the bottom of some coral sea.

  But the big plantation house of the Steeds did have an improvised widow’s walk. In 1791, when Isham Steed followed the advice of his college mate Tom Jefferson and bought himself an Amsterdam telescope, he wanted to erect it in a place from which he could follow the stars, so he cut a hole through the roof and built there a platform, fencing it with low pickets and making it a pleasant spot from which to view not only the heavens but also the sailing ships moving up and down the bay.

  During one unseasonably warm day at the end of March in 1823 Susan Grimes Steed went up to this fenced area and fell languidly into the wicker chair she kept there. For nearly a quarter of an hour she stared at the bay, hoping to spot some tall ship coming home to Baltimore, but her attention was distracted when she heard a rustling in the air above her. Looking up, she saw that great numbers of geese were assembling in elongated Vs; from all the coves and corners of the Choptank they rose in preparation for their long flight to Canada.

  Knowing that this time the geese were truly leaving and would not be seen again till the cool days of autumn, she rose from her chair and pressed her hands against the picket fence. “Oh God! That I were flying with you!” She lifted her right hand and waved the distant birds on their way, watching them until they became invisible at the horizon.

  She sank back onto her chair and gazed blankly at the bay. No boats were discernible; no ships came in from Spain; only the vast expanse of water, unruffled clear to the western shore, stretched before her, and the ennui which had possessed her for some months increased.

  But then, at the southern extremity of the water visible from the roof, she saw what might be a ship—at least, it was a moving speck, and she kept her small telescope focused on it for a long half-hour.

  It could be a fishing boat, she mused, eager to find any mental exercise to occupy her mind. No, it’s a ship. It’s a ship with three masts. And at the word masts, the obsessive sexual fantasies returned.

  She interpreted the ship as a man coming up the bay to lie with her, to wrestle with her furiously, to tear her clothes away and chase her through the woods of Devon. As the images continued, her lips became dry, and when the homecoming ship stood opposite the island, its sails set for Baltimore, she rose from the chair and stood by the fence, her eyes fixed on the tall masts, her body aching with desire.

  I wish I were on that ship, she lamented, and as it drew away, its masts gray against the sun, she imagined herself in the captain’s cabin, and he naked and hungry for her.

  This is sickness! she thought, shaking her head violently. She drew her tossed curls across her eyes, as if to shut out the dreaded visions, but they still persisted, and she leaned heavily against the fence, allowing its points to jab her hands.

  She remained in this position until the ship vanished, taking with it her phallic imagery. Only then did she climb down the ladder and walk slowly to her bedroom, where she lay on the silken coverlet, staring at the two cannon-balls imbedded in the wall: If only they had come lower to strike him in his bed ...

  But she was horrified at the thought that she could wish her husband dead, and she threw her arms across her face and cried aloud, “What a wretched woman I have become.”

  “Did you call, ma’am?” Eden asked from the door. “No. Go away.’’ The black girl disappeared, and she was left with her fantasies.

  They stemmed from her savage disappointment in her husband. She now saw Paul Steed as a dilettante, a waster of himself and of everything with which he came into contact; always he stood in demeaning contrast to her, for she had inherited her Grandfather Simon’s highly organized directness of purpose. When she first appeared at Devon she may have seemed a giddy girl, but she had never intended remaining that way. She suspected that this alteration had surprised and in a sense disappointed her husband, for shortly after their marriage he had told her, “Wh
en we first met at the wharf you were a beautiful, innocent child. Let’s not allow the years to change us.” But she had changed, and he had not.

  And yet, she had to confess that in the early days of their marriage he had been almost exciting. He obviously loved her and had her pregnant almost immediately. Initially they had enjoyed their large bed, but quickly it had become a site for routine performances on his part, if not hers. Two other pregnancies had followed—how, she sometimes wondered—and by the end of the fifth year, the marriage was routine, and flat, and terribly dull.

  She had become aware of his moral weakness when he began spoiling the children through lack of force, and weakening the family’s business through lack of attention. She had tried to be a good mother, disciplining the children when he would not, but this led them to look exclusively to her for guidance: Paul should be talking with them. Damn it, we have three of the finest children in Maryland and he ignores them. There was a son six, a daughter four and a rambunctious son of two, and each seemed bright beyond expectations; already she had taught Mark, the oldest, to read and cipher, and the girl was aping him with surprising ease.

  “We ought to be a happy family,” she muttered one day. “The ingredients are in place.” But Paul engaged so small a portion of her interests and capacities that she felt unused, as if she were a reservoir of great potential but with no outlets. He was a silly man, and she often wondered what the professors at Princeton could have taught him, if they had bothered with him at all. His ideas were fragmentary: his goals wandering; his beliefs evanescent. He commanded little respect among the Steeds and had little chance of keeping the plantation system under control.

  She was nearing thirty, at what should have been the threshold of her mature life, and the prospect of living it with a man who wasted his talents terrified her. It was not that she found herself ill-at-ease away from London, as her mother had done. She liked Maryland, and on the eve of her departure from England, all members of her family had warned her that she must not follow in the footsteps of the unfortunate Jane Fithian Steed. Old Carstairs Fithian told her, “Your grandmother was my sister, and both Guy and I tried to prepare her for the colonies. Warned her that she must make the concessions, not her husband. She must not expect London and she must not expect her hard-working husband to be a Paris dandy. Your grandmother was a headstrong girl, fought America at every turn, and in the end surrendered control of her mind. If you marry young Steed, you must make adjustments to his standards.”