Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  Amos enjoyed his monopoly for only one season, then others began to copy it; but it was the legislature that delivered the deathblow. To it came game wardens like the Pflaums, complaining that the Turlocks were destroying the balance of nature: “Give them three more years and we’ll have the old days back. Not a goose along the Choptank.” The lawmakers, most of them hunters, responded with a tough edict—you can read it in the Maryland Statutes, Turlock’s Law they call it: “No hunter may seduce male geese by means of electronic devices.” And the tape recorders were confiscated.

  But a Turlock never quits, and in September of 1977, just before hunting season began, Amos came up with the ultimate stratagem: he rented five cows.

  When he fenced them in right beside the creek where geese assembled, he attracted more birds into his field than anyone on the Choptank had ever done before, and Chris Pflaum asked his father, “What’s the old man up to?”

  “I don’t know,” Hugo said, “but we better find out.”

  Together they drove out to Turlock’s spread, and what they saw astounded them. There were the five cows. There were the geese. And on the ground lay more yellow grains of corn than the average outlaw would dare to scatter in four seasons. Whenever Turlock wanted a goose, two hundred would be waiting as they gorged on his illegal corn.

  But was it illegal? As Amos explained to the judge, “All I do is feed my cows extra generous.” By this he meant that he gorged them on whole corn sixteen, eighteen hours a day. His rented cows ate so much that a large percentage passed through their system untouched by stomach acids, and there it lay on the ground, an enticement to geese for miles around.

  “I can’t find this man guilty,” the judge said. “He didn’t scatter the corn. The cows did.” And when the season ended, with the Turlock iceboxes crammed, old Amos returned his rented cows.

  For some time it had been understood that Owen Steed intended luring Pusey Paxmore from his exile in the telescope house; the tactic would be a morning’s goose hunt over the cornfields at the Refuge, so on a brisk November morning, before the sun had even hinted that it would rise, he drove out to Peace Cliff and found Pusey and his wife waiting in the darkness.

  “He insists on taking Brutus,” Amanda said as she held a black Labrador by his collar.

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Steed said as he roughed the dog’s head. “In you go!” The dog leaped into the rear of the pickup, stiffened as Steed’s Chesapeake snarled, then relaxed in the companionship of a good hunt.

  The two men drove down the lane in darkness and back to the Refuge, where they parked the car and started walking in the faint haze of dawn. Soon they were in the middle of an extensive field, apparently barren but actually rich in stray kernels of corn skipped by the harvesting machines.

  They were headed for a strange construction, a giant-sized coffin of wood, let down into the earth in such a way that a large flat lid, camouflaged with branches, could be pulled shut after they and their dogs had climbed in. Once secure inside the coffin, and hidden by branches, the men could stand erect and look out through long narrow slits parallel to the earth. Here they would wait for sunrise and the flight of geese.

  It was a long wait. The area contained many geese, more than half a million if one considered all the estuaries and coves, but few were interested in the cornfield at the Refuge. Occasional groups of six or seven would veer in from the creek, stay far from the gunners, then fly on. Eight o’clock came, cold and windy, with never a goose. Ten o’clock and no geese. At eleven a bright sun burned off the haze, making what hunters called “a blue-bird day,” and any hope of bagging a goose during the middle hours was lost; the hunters climbed out of their casket, replaced the lid and tramped back to the pickup, with the dogs almost as disappointed as they.

  At the Refuge, Ethel Steed had two roasted ducks waiting, with beef bones for the dogs, and the midday hours passed almost somnolently. Ethel earnestly wanted to ask Pusey lingering questions about Watergate, but when she saw how relaxed he was she restrained herself, and the time was spent in the most casual conversation, each participant speaking gingerly, as if afraid to agitate painful nerve ends.

  “I would like to add one comment to the talks we’ve had,” Pusey volunteered as he dressed for the field. “Isn’t it clear that either Eisenhower or Kennedy would have cleaned up that mess in one afternoon? Go on television, manfully confess error, fire everyone involved and promise never again to allow such a lapse. The American people would have accepted that.”

  Ethel smiled mischievously and asked, “When you speak of Kennedy’s eagerness to make a clean breast of everything. I presume you’re referring to Teddy at Chappaquiddick?” When she saw that her frivolity startled Paxmore, she threw her arm about his shoulder and said jokingly, “You see, Pusey, Democrats can suffer paralysis of will as well as Republicans.”

  “Sky’s nicely overcast,” Owen interrupted, “and about three-thirty the geese will start coming in. Let’s go back for an hour.”

  But Pusey, who had enjoyed this day, said hopefully, “I’d like to stay two or three hours. They come flocking in at dusk.”

  “You’re right,” Owen said. “But remember, I have to meet the airplane at five. Clara’s flying in from Paris.”

  “How fortunate thee is!” Paxmore said with obvious enthusiasm. “Reuniting a family! Forget the geese. Take me home and be on thy way.”

  “No. Those hours in the box were great, and I want you to try the new blind we’ve built in the creek.” And he was so insistent that they try at least an hour over the water that Pusey went to the phone and called his wife. “Thee isn’t to worry, dear. We shot nothing this morning but we’re going to try the creek for an hour or so. Brutus won’t let me come home till we get something.” He was about to hang up, when he added rapidly, “Amanda, guess what! Clara Steed’s flying home this afternoon. From Paris.” After he replaced the phone he told the Steeds, “Amanda says how lucky thee is. We haven’t seen our boys in ages.” This comment on families encouraged him to make his final observation on Watergate: “In Georgia this afternoon many families must be boasting about their sons in Washington. Six years from now some of them may be in jail.”

  The two men took their dogs to a spot near the confluence of the creeks, a place where Pentaquod had hunted nearly four hundred years ago. Out in the water, pilings had been sunk to support the kind of rude river house so often depicted when the National Geographic dealt with Malaysia or Borneo. Approach was made by small boat, into which the dogs leaped with enthusiasm and from which they sprang into the house. The two men climbed up after them, and the hunt resumed.

  Steed had been right; with the sun blotted out, geese began to fly in search of one last meal, and before an hour had passed, one flight of nine came straight at the blind, and each man knocked one down. “Get ’em!” Steed called to the dogs, but the admonition was unnecessary, for at the first flutter of a downward wing, the animals sprang into the water, swimming with abandon toward the fallen birds, and each retrieved perfectly, splashing back into the blind with the geese.

  “We’d better call it a day,” Steed suggested, but Paxmore was so pleased with the hunting, and the performance of his dog, that he proposed they stay till dusk, and Steed had to remind him of the incoming plane.

  “How thoughtless!” Paxmore cried. “Of course thee must go. But I’d like to stay. Thee can pick me up when thee gets back.”

  “I’ll do better. I’ll walk to the house, leave the pickup here for you. Drive home when you like.”

  For the first time since his release from Scanderville Prison, Pusey Paxmore was alone, totally alone. Occasionally during the past months Amanda had driven into Patamoke without him, but because she knew how perilous his memories were, she had always notified someone that Pusey was by himself. Mysteriously, friends would drop by to talk of shipbuilding days, or Washburn Turlock would drive up the lane with clients who wanted to see a telescope house. He was never allowed to be alone.


  In many ways it was a relief to be there in the blind, without prying questions or consoling assurances. This was the Chesapeake, timeless source of Paxmore vitality. It was to this creek that the first boatbuilders had come, seeking their oaks and the twisted knees from which their craft were built. A flock of geese flew overhead, but he did not bother to point his gun. Brutus, seeing the birds pass unmolested, began to whimper and tug at his master’s sleeve.

  Pusey paid no attention because he was again mouthing the platitudes which had recently sustained him: In 1969 America was in peril ... Revolutionaries were burning our cities ... The money I collected was for a good cause.

  Even the sound of a flock of geese passing overhead did not break this rosary of shabby beads. The birds were too distant for a shot, but Brutus saw his master’s inattention and grew uneasy; when five headed straight for the blind without awakening a response, he barked.

  Paxmore did not hear, for he had reached a crisis in his self-examination: Perhaps I really was as pitiful as I appeared. When he attempted an excuse, he found himself trapped at the end of a long corridor from which there was no escape, so with cruel honesty he muttered the truth, “I began service at the White House possessing the staunchest American virtues, and I sacrificed every one to expediency. Woolman Paxmore and Aunt Emily provided me with the strongest moral armor. Piece by piece I tossed it aside. And to what exalted purpose?”

  The inescapable answer came harshly: To perpetuate in power men eager to destroy the bases of this nation.

  He could not avoid assessing himself: They judged me to be of such trivial value that they could find no reason to defend me. Was their horrible summary correct? That fucking Bible-spouting asshole. Oh, Jesus! What have I done?

  His disintegration was so complete that nothing could save him—not his faith, nor the love of his friends, nor even the cool waters of the Chesapeake. His horrible mistake had been to abandon the land which had nurtured him; men are not obligated to cling forever to the piece of land that bore them, but they had better pay attention to the principles they derived from it. To end one’s life as Pusey Paxmore was finishing his was to end on a garbage heap.

  End one’s life! Was this the ignoble end, here in a goose blind on a cold afternoon?

  There were reasons to think that an end to it all might be desirable: the shame that could not be erased; the jail sentence so justified in law; the rejection by those he had served; above all, the humiliation he had brought his family. These were punishments so terrible that mere death would be a release.

  But there were also good reasons to reject the idea: the unfaltering love of his wife ... He need enumerate no more. To his mind came the words of a hymn he had so often sung at Harvard:

  The shadow of a mighty rock

  Within a weary land.

  No description could more perfectly summarize the character of his wife; she had warned him against Washington, had notified him of the dangers he faced in a White House lacking moral fiber, and had never said I told you so: If I had listened to her, it wouldn’t have happened.

  But this very acknowledgment of her strength excused him from basing his decision on what its effects might be on her: She’ll survive. She isn’t the shadow of a rock. She is the rock. And he dismissed her from his calculations.

  It was the end of the day, the end of November, that tenuous and dangerous month. It was the end of a life spent in wrong directions and he could find no justification for its continuance.

  Lowering his shotgun from the edge of the blind, where geese flew past with impunity, he wedged its stock on the floor between his booted feet. Bringing the muzzle up under his chin, he reached down with his right forefinger, located the trigger—and with neither regret nor hesitation, pulled it.

  VOYAGE FOURTEEN: 1978

  THE WORST STORMS TO STRIKE THE CHESAPEAKE ARE THE hurricanes which generate in the Caribbean and seem to reach the bay about every twenty years. But there are also lesser storms which roar in from the Atlantic bearing vast quantities of water and winds of crushing power.

  Such storms appear yearly, sweeping ashore at Norfolk in huge waves that engulf inattentive watermen. Within a space of five minutes a wind of more than eighty miles an hour will blow in, capable of capsizing even the largest craft. In 1977 one such storm destroyed a skipjack—six men drowned; a crabber—four lost; a rowboat out of Patamoke—two dead.

  In November 1977 one of these storms roiled about the Atlantic for some days, hovering just south of Norfolk, and apprehensive watermen offered predictions as to whether it would ride high into Pennsylvania, inundating the valleys again, or remain low so that the Chesapeake would catch the brunt.

  “Looks to stay aloft,” said Martin Caveny, brother to the priest.

  “And if it does,” his friend Amos Turlock predicted, “the bay gets flushed out again.”

  “The bay recovers. Them crabs and arsters knows how to pertect themselves.”

  “Did Mrs. Paxmore want us to supervise everything? I mean the barge and all?”

  “She did,” Caveny said.

  “You think the storm’ll hold off till we get to Patamoke and back?”

  Before volunteering an answer that might later be used against him, Caveny studied the heavy black sky. Moving his position so that he could see the jagged remnants of Devon Island, he watched the manner in which forerunners of the impending storm teased at the ruins of Rosalind’s Revenge. “Won’t reach here before dusk.”

  “We’ll chance it,” Turlock said. “Boats was Pusey’s fambly business, and we wouldn’t be buryin’ him today if he’d stuck with ’em.”

  “She’ll insist on a boat,” Caveny said, “barrin’ a hurricane.”

  “And a hurricane is what we’ll be gettin’,” Turlock said. “Around midnight.” Hearing a noise, he turned to see the widow leave the telescope house. “Here she comes, stern as ever.”

  “Who has a better right? Television reviewing everything? Pictures of Scanderville and all that?”

  “She don’t give a damn about such stuff.”

  “Everybody gives a damn. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t of been in jail. Us Turlocks don’t never overreach our position.”

  “You think Pusey did?”

  “If he’d of stayed home,” Turlock said, “he wouldn’t of landed in jail.”

  Mrs. Paxmore came up to the watermen and studied the horizon. “Do we get a howler?”

  “We do,” Turlock said.

  “How soon?”

  “Not before sunset,” Amos said. “In his opinion, that is.”

  She turned to Caveny. “Can we make it to Patamoke? I’m not worried about getting back.”

  “I promise you we’ll get there,” Caveny said. “After the funeral we’ll discuss about makin’ it home.”

  “Sounds sensible. We’ll bring the coffin down at ten.”

  She was about to leave when Caveny stopped her. “Would you like us to wear black?”

  Thinking that she was helping them to avoid embarrassment in case they had no black clothes, she said, “I think not. A burial is an incident in living ...”

  “We have black suits, you know.”

  “Oh! I would like it so much if thee wore black. It would be”—she found no satisfactory adjective and ended—“appropriate.”

  At nine-thirty she called to the two men, now in their best, “We’ll bring the casket,” and they joined the two Paxmore boys, who had come home for the funeral. As they carried the casket to the barge the young men asked casually, “Catches been good this year?”

  “Never enough,” Turlock said.

  “Is the Kepone from Virginia ruining the bay?”

  “Ever’thing Virginia does ruins the bay,” Turlock said, reviving ancestral animosities.

  “All your folks buried at Patamoke?” Caveny asked.

  “They are.”

  “Shame about your father.”

  “It was. A damned shame, and nothing could ha
ve prevented it.”

  “You think Nixon threw him to the wolves?”

  “No, like all of us, we throw ourselves. But the wolves are waiting.”

  When the casket was secure in the bottom of the barge, folding canvas chairs were provided for Mrs. Paxmore and the wives of the two sons. Turlock started the engine, and the long last voyage to the Quaker burying ground was begun, but as the barge drew away from the dock, three others fell in behind, and in the last one Amanda saw four members of the Cater family: Captain Absalom, his wife, a daughter and, to everyone’s surprise, his cousin Hiram, dark and silent after his years in prison. The blacks said nothing, made no sign of recognition, simply clung to the cortege. It was an oral tradition in their family, revered like a passage from the Bible, that in hard times the Paxmores could be relied upon, and not even the fact that dead Pusey Paxmore had set the F.B.I. on Hiram’s trail was enough to keep that young man from the funeral. When the barge reached Patamoke, he and Absalom stepped forward to help carry the casket to the graveyard; they would allow no taxi or truck to do that work.

  Remarks at the grave would have been brief, in the Quaker manner, except that Father Patrick, an old man now, appeared unexpectedly to offer a short prayer which became a long one: “He was never a Catholic, but he proved himself a friend to all who were. One of his ancestors built this meeting house, but Pusey gave us the money to rebuild our church. Blood will tell, and many’s the time I was able to find help at his house when I could get but little among my own worshippers.” On and on he went, reviewing Pusey’s life and uttering those relevant truths which others had been afraid to speak because of the tragic nature of his suicide.

  “He was not only a generous man,” Father Caveny concluded, “but a gallant one. When the nation needed him, he served. When his commander required a cover, he provided it. Little good it did him, little help he got from those he supported. We bury our friend Pusey with love and remembrance. No man or woman standing by this grave was ever poorer for what he did. Let those who loved him be the ones to place him in his final resting place.”