Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  But when he suggested it to the Caters, Julia said, “We’s proud,” and then, unable to bear the thought of begging, she went on, “Maybe they get me some sewing, and Jeb could fix barns. Or the girls could help at the cannery.” And still Jeb said nothing.

  Finally Reverend Douglass said, “I’ll go to the Steeds and ask for help.”

  “Better the Paxmores,” Julia said, and it required rigid self-discipline to prevent tears.

  Reverend Douglass left the Neck and drove out to Peace Cliff to talk with Woolman Paxmore, just home from Berlin, where he had helped save twenty-five thousand Jews, and the kindly Quaker said, “John, I simply have no money left.”

  “Mr. Paxmore, this worthy family is in deep trouble.”

  “John, I’m powerless.”

  “But the woman’s about to have another baby. We can’t let her go hungry.” Reverend Douglass, realizing that no white family could comprehend the perpetual crisis in which blacks lived, cried with heartbreaking force, “These good people are starving!”

  Woolman Paxmore pressed his hands against his eyes, and because he was a minister, snatches of biblical phrases tumbled through his head. He thought of Jesus aiding the poor and admonishing his followers to care for the downtrodden, and it grieved him that whereas he had been able to help the Jews in Berlin, he could not do the same for the blacks here in Patamoke. Painfully he dropped his hands and looked at Reverend Douglass, whom he accepted as a messenger from God. “Obviously, we must do something,” he said quietly. “But what?”

  And then he remembered a canning jar in which his wife stored small coins against some day of great need, and he left the room to find that jar, but as he rummaged about, his wife heard him and asked, “What is it, Woolman?” and he said, “The Caters. Those good, dear people.” And she said nothing as he took her coins.

  The meeting at which the two ministers rescued the Caters occurred on Friday. Next day the Patamoke Bugle carried the latest in its series of hilarious make-believe anecdotes from the black community:

  Reverend Rastus Smiley of the Riptank A.M.E. Church appeared in the law offices of Judge Buford seeking aid. “Jedge, I’se got to have yore help. I’se been accused unjustly, and if’n you doan’ pertecks me, I’se gine ter jail.”

  “What are you accused of, Rastus?”

  “White folks claims I done stole two hogs, three turkeys, and four chickens.”

  “And you’re willing to swear you’re innocent?”

  “On de Bible, Jedge Buford.”

  “I always feel obliged to defend a gentleman of the cloth, but Rastus, you never have any money. What are you prepared to give me for my services?”

  “One hog, one turkey and two chickens.”

  Amos Turlock was in a bitter mood. Rocking back and forth in his shack north of the marsh, he brooded upon the sad condition into which his life had fallen. He was only twenty-nine, a tall, lanky waterman who shaved only on Sundays; one of his incisors had recently broken and other front teeth threatened to follow. Sucking on the empty space, he gazed dispassionately at his weatherbeaten wife as she plodded about the kitchen, preparing his greasy breakfast. “I jes’ cain’t believe it,” he said more to himself than to her. “Goddamnit, he’s my own brother-in-law and he hadn’t oughta behave thisaway.”

  “Ain’t he more your cousin?” his wife snarled. “Din’ his pappy marry your aunt?”

  “Point I’m tryin’ to make, if a body would listen, Hugo Pflaum ain’t got no right atall.”

  He rocked on, contemplating the inequities of life, and he had many to protest. For one brief spell at the turn of the century his branch of the Turlocks had been smiled upon—“We had the brick house in town. Gran’daddy Jake had his own skipjack.”

  “Yesterday you claimed Sam Turlock was your gran’daddy.”

  “He was, goddamnit, on my mother’s side ...” He stopped in disgust. It was impossible to conduct a serious conversation with this woman, one of the Turlocks from upriver, but after a dull silence he resumed his litany. “Yep, we had our own skipjack, and you know what, Cass, I think that son-of-a-bitch Caveny stoled it from us. Yes, sir, you ask me, he flashed some papers in court, but I think he forged ’em, and the judge let it slip by.”

  He rocked in silence, shaking his head over paradises lost: the brick house had been sheriffed out at a forced sale; the skipjack was now operated by Cavenys alone; his children could barely read; and were it not for the marsh and the game it provided, the family would barely be able to exist, even with public charity. And now the final indignity! His own cousin, Hugo Pflaum, had announced in the Patamoke Bugle that he intended to confiscate every long gun on the Choptank, and at the store had specifically boasted, “If I don’t do nothin’ else, I’m gonna get my hands on The Twombly.”

  “Goddamnit!” Amos cried, rising from his chair. “We been warned. Cass, get the children in here. I want to talk with ever’body, serious.”

  Whenever he stood up and spoke in that tone, she knew he meant it, so she stopped frying the eggs and shouted from the door, “Kipper, Betsy, Ben, fetch Nellie and come in here.” Four separate protests greeted this cry, and she yelled, “I meant what I said. Your pop wants to talk to you.”

  Four bedraggled children came in from the muddy yard, and if old Captain Jake could have seen them—he the master of his own skipjack and dominant waterman of the Choptank—he would have been appalled at how swiftly his family had descended, and he would have been perplexed as to the reasons. For one thing, he had married his full cousin, so that each inherent weakness in the Turlock strain had been magnified. And he had scoffed when Miss Paxmore warned him that his children were not learning to read. Furthermore, while Tim Caveny had hoarded every penny, like the penurious Papist he was, Jake had squandered his on family ventures of no merit. He had not lived to watch the sad transfer of the skipjack to sly Timothy, but in his last days he had often suspected that this might happen.

  Why did a family rise and fall and sometimes rise again? Luck played an enormous part. For example, if Jake Turlock had lived as long as Tim Caveny, he might have held his sprawling family together, and saved both the brick house and the boat, but he had drowned one bitter night when a super blast from the long gun caused him to lose his balance and capsize his skiff.

  But a family rises or falls primarily because of the way it marshals its genetic inheritance and puts it to constructive use. No family along the Choptank had a more vigorous life force than the Turlocks; they were not handsome like the Steeds, nor clever like the Cavenys, nor powerfully built like the two generations of Pflaums, nor intellectually solid like the Paxmores, but they possessed a wonderful capacity for survival. They were lean, spare, simple and clean of mind, with strong eyes and teeth, had they cared for them. And all members of the family possessed an animal cunning that protected them. With their genetic gifts they should have owned the river, and Turlocks like Captain Matt of the slave trade and Captain Jake of the oyster dredging had done so.

  Amos could have owned it, too, for he had inherited every innate capacity his forebears had possessed, but fatal inbreeding had encouraged family weaknesses to multiply, while its virtues receded. He had wanted to repurchase the house in town when the price was reasonable, but he never got around to it, and now they wanted eleven hundred dollars. He had intended to buy back his family’s share in the skipjack, and he could have done so, for Caveny offered it, but now a skipjack was selling for six thousand and there was no possibility of repurchase. He had also talked of sending his children seriously to school, but at their first protests had allowed them to swarm in the marsh.

  Now they stood before him, four marsh rats as disorganized and hopeless as he. “Serious business, and I want you to listen. None of you, and this includes you too, Cass, is ever to mention The Twombly. You don’t know nothin’ about it. You don’t know where I keep it. You don’t even know whether I still have it or not. And goddamnit, you are never to let anyone know that I use it.” He stared b
alefully at each of his children, then at his wife. “Because if you blab, even once, Hugo Pflaum is gonna come here and take The Twombly away, and that means you and me ain’t gonna eat no more duck.”

  In 1918 the government of Maryland had outlawed possession of long guns, for it could be proved that these lethal weapons were slaughtering ducks at a rate which prevented replacement. A census had been conducted, and the location of every gun specified; they were known by name—Cheseldine, Reverdy, Old Blaster, Morgan—usually referring to the family which first owned them, for no matter how many hands a gun passed through, it was always referred respectfully back to its original owner.

  The 1918 census had shown seventeen long guns on the Choptank, and diligent pressures from Maryland’s game wardens, primarily Hugo Pflaum, had reduced the number to four. The Herman Cline, once owned by the slave-breaker on the Little Choptank, had been confiscated, and the Bell, a beauty from Denton. The Cripton family had gone to great lengths to protect their monstrous gun, Cripton, even threatening to murder Pflaum if he persisted in his attempts to impound it, but in the end he had tracked it down to a corncrib.

  Amos Turlock ominously remembered the photograph which the Bugle had displayed of the capture. There was Hugo Pflaum, a stubby man with broad shoulders and no neck, holding in his right hand Cripton, twelve feet tall, with its barrel reflecting sunlight. His left hand grasped Abel Cripton, hat pulled down over his face to avoid the shame of having lost a gun which had been in his family for over a hundred years.

  Turlock had cut the picture from the paper and tacked it to the kitchen wall, where it still hung in tatters; when he was drunk he liked to spit at it, for Hugo Pflaum, with his bull neck, was his enemy, and The Twombly was in peril so long as he operated.

  The Twombly, oldest and best of the Choptank arsenal, had taken its name, of course, from old Greef Twombly upriver, whose ancestors had imported it from England in 1827. Its barrel was still as clean as when it left its London foundry; its oak stock had been replaced four times but was still as thick as a man’s thigh. Hugo Pflaum, studying his census of the guns he was supposed to capture, said of The Twombly, “It’s been used on this river for a hundred and eleven years. I figure it’s been fired on an average of three times a week, twenty-five weeks a year. That’s over eight thousand shots. Now, if they kill even fifty ducks with each shot, and that’s low, why, it means that this gun has removed about four hundred thousand ducks from circulation, and it’s got to stop.”

  Hugo’s estimates were conservative; when a voracious old man like Greef Twombly owned a gun as good as this one, he didn’t restrict its use to three nights a week, and when it passed into the hands of a confirmed waterman like Jake Turlock, he didn’t average a mere fifty birds a shot. A more accurate count would be that this famous old gun had slaughtered nearly two million ducks and geese, and this helped explain why the bird population had declined so severely in recent decades.

  “Hell,” Amos complained at the store, “last year me and Abel Cripton, we sat in our goose blind at the marsh for two straight weeks—and how many geese you suppose flew over? Not twenty.”

  He was right. Where the Choptank region had once entertained more than a million geese each year, now fewer than twenty thousand appeared, and these kept to the marshes south of the river. The depopulation was incredible, and many gentlemen who had paid substantial sums for their English and Austrian shotguns rarely found an excuse to use them for anything but doves. The geese were gone; the ducks were going, and it was Hugo Pflaum’s job to see that reasonable hunting procedures encouraged their return.

  This was the meaning of Amos Turlock’s lecture to his family: “I don’t give a damn for them fancy foreigners who come in here to steal our ducks with their expensive guns. They miss, they ain’t gonna starve. But if we don’t get our ducks regular, you and me, we ain’t gonna eat.”

  The oldest boy, Ben, knew where the gun was hidden, but even before Warden Pflaum began to apply pressure, he had deduced, with shrewd Turlock wisdom, that the day must come when someone would try to take The Twombly away, and he had never spoken of it to anyone. What was more remarkable, he had begun marking Pflaum’s movements. He and the other children knew the warden as Uncle Hugo and often stopped by his farm, where Mrs. Pflaum, their Aunt Becky, could be counted upon to provide them with German cookies. They enjoyed listening to Hugo tell tales of Germany, where his father had lived in the country before running away to sea.

  “In Germany,” Uncle Hugo explained, “they keep the forests as clean as the park before the courthouse. My father said a custodian would be shot if his woods looked like the ones around here. A park, that’s what a German woods is. And when you grow up you should make the woods in back of your place a park.”

  Ben said, “We like it the way it is. So do the deer.”

  “You must tell your father he can’t shoot those deer any more.”

  Ben said nothing, but intuitively he knew that this husky, amiable man with no neck was his family’s enemy, and he watched how and where he went.

  One night in October 1938 Ben whispered to his father, “Hugo’s up to Denton, lookin’ for the gun that’s supposed to be there.”

  “Good,” Amos said, and when night fell he and Ben hurried along a footpath that led into the heart of the marsh, then ducked off to one side, doubled back, moved along a path that was barely discernible and came finally upon a wooden structure not two feet high and absolutely invisible from any distance. It rested on poles, to keep salt water away, and had a lid, which Amos lifted quietly. Inside, in a nest of greased burlap, lay The Twombly, its barrel wiped clean, its heavy stock solid and new. Almost reverently Amos hefted it, carried it in his arms and headed for the waiting skiffs, but as he climbed easily into his, placing the gun in position, he heard a noise, grew tense, then laughed.

  “Come on, Rusty,” he said, and his red Chesapeake leaped into the boy’s skiff and they were off.

  On January 1, 1939, Julia Cater gave birth to a boy, who was taken to the A.M.E. Church in Frog’s Neck and christened Hiram, a biblical name meaning “most noble,” and on the way home from church Jeb Cater was stopped by the captain of a successful skipjack. “Jeb, we goin’ out and we stayin’ out. You want to cook?”

  It had happened just as he predicted: “Things is gonna be tough for the rest of this year, Julia, but come 1939 they gonna fall in place.”

  He was not happy about leaving home for a protracted absence right after the birth of his son, and his apprehensions were doubled when Julia took a job shucking oysters—“Don’t you think you oughta stay with the boy?” His wife ridiculed this—“We got a chance to earn some money, we takin’ it.” She would work the midnight shift, hurry home and supervise the girls as they dressed for school, then tend the baby and have him ready for Helen to watch over while she slept.

  The girls, of course, attended the black school held in a crumbling building at the far end of the Neck. It contained twenty-two desks for forty-seven students, so the teacher had to exercise some ingenuity in keeping her pupils juggled between sitting and standing classroom periods. She taught seven grades, and when a black child left her care that child usually had all the education it would get. There was one broken blackboard, but months would pass with no chalk. There was no ink, but ingenious boys collected berries from which a pale stain was extracted. Pencils were precious and some students would spend whole weeks without one, but what most irritated little Luta Mae was the fact that she was now in Grade Three without ever having had a book. The school had books, outmoded editions handed down from white schools in the neighborhood, but they were so few that only certain students could obtain one, and so far the luck of the draw had worked against her.

  “Harry he gets one and Norma Ellen she gets one,” she complained to her mother, “but I never gets one.”

  “Maybe next year, in Grade Four, you’ll be lucky,” Julia said. She refused to believe that the teacher was discriminating against her daughter
, and when Luta Mae said harsh things, Julia reprimanded her, “You wait till your daddy gets home in March ...”

  At the end of the oyster season Jeb Cater came home, tired from his hard work but well nourished because he had been the cook. His broad face beamed with pleasure as he gave Julia his wages, but any thought of disciplining Luta Mae vanished when he saw his son. “That boy growin’ like a weed! He gonna be the best.”

  For hours at a time he played with Hiram, not throwing him in the air as some fathers did, for the boy was too precious for such rough treatment, but talking to him as if he understood. “Hiram, you gonna go to school. You gonna learn to go out into the world. Come time you gonna enlist in the army. Who knows, you might be a general in France.”

  There were no aspirations too lofty for this child, and Jeb’s heart expanded with hope when he saw how well formed the child’s body was, how bright his eyes, but after his exultation he found that a son altered his life in disturbing ways.

  During the years when he had only daughters he could ignore the handicaps under which all blacks existed, but with a son he was constantly reminded of the discriminations, for whereas he had been required from birth to adjust to them and had grown inured to injustice, it galled him to realize that his son was doomed to an endless repetition of such unfairness. These were the specifics he began to list, not commenting upon them even to his wife, but marking them in his mind: