Slave Graves

by Thomas Hollyday

Soldado had been gone for several hours. It was getting darker and the mosquitoes were incessant. Frank’s skin itched with the dirt and sweat. He was tired. His exhausted mind kept thinking that one more scrape with his trowel, one more uncovered micro sphere of earth, one more spoonful of dark soil might provide the next clue to this ship’s past.

  “Hey, there are more bones here,” said the Pastor working a few feet away. Frank crawled quickly over to the Pastor’s grid. Maggie was not far behind.

  “Good Lord, you have found more skeletons,” he said, surprised. “I had a feeling we’d find something but I didn’t expect more bones.” He looked closely at the first skull that the Pastor had uncovered. “It’s a Caucasian. The nose area is definitely the same as the soldier. Keep in mind, Pastor, you’ll be looking for African skulls if there are slaves buried here.”

  “There’re three skulls,” said Maggie. “All Caucasian. Over there’s a big hand around what looks like the grip of a sword.”

  “A cutlass. A pirate’s weapon. See the jeweled decoration coming through the encrusting. The way the man is gripping the hilt shows he was using it as a hammer, not as a weapon,” observed Frank.

  “These skulls, they are all adult skulls but the one, it’s huge, like a giant. Try to work down to the center of the grid pit. Maybe we can find the legs or arms of one of them,” said Maggie.

  “Did you notice how the skulls are in the same direction, like they are looking at something?” asked the Pastor. “That ought to be a clue. You’d think the skulls might be a little bit more in disarray in a fire.”

  “Yes. What do you think, Maggie?”

  “The giant fascinates me.”

  “There might be something in the records about a man this size being in the Chesapeake,” said Frank.

  “Anyway, there are the same burn fractures in the skulls but then see how the skulls are almost tortured in their position,” said Maggie.

  “Like they were hit by something, a falling beam perhaps,” said the Pastor.

  “Or restrained. They might have been locked into a compartment in the ship. They might have been trying to escape. They were pushed up against a door. I’ve seen similar body positions in fires where the bodies were trying to get out a closed exit door,” observed Maggie. “That would explain using the sword as a hammer. Maybe these people were trying to escape from the fire and that’s why they are looking in the same direction.”

  “If they were crew, and that’s a possibility, they would have had to have been restrained in some way. If they were crew and were not restrained they would have escaped the fire,” added Frank.

  “Why would anyone burn the crew?” asked the Pastor.

  “Witnesses to something?” suggested Maggie.

  Frank ran his fingers over the soil strata marks at the edge of the pit. “There’s not much evidence of this part of the ship having any more damage than the rest. I mean an explosion, like of the ship’s gunpowder stores.”

  “These skulls might rule out the plague theory,” observed Maggie.

  “Yes, a restrained crew doesn’t fit that theory. Dead and dying sick people perhaps, but not men pushing against restraints. I think we have ruled out plague,” said Frank. He continued, “So what do we have? A burned out wreck that was never salvaged. A dead crew and a giant with a jeweled sword. I’ve worked on many shipwreck sites, some of the best ones in this hemisphere. Usually an archaeologist has a mystery or two to figure out. The mystery might be something like what kind of wine was in the old bottle that was unearthed or what town in Europe manufactured a ceramic shard. Nothing to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about. However, I worry about this.”

  They decided to stop for the night and sat on the porch of the farmhouse in the dark. Bugs were scratching and crashing against the worn screen of the porch to get to the light that was on inside in the old kitchen. Frank munched on one of the sandwiches that the Pastor’s church group had prepared.

  “These are good. Maybe we can contribute something to the church,” said Frank.

  “You two are doing enough. The people want you to have this food. The church elders committee sent it up here with me special.”

  It was still very hot and the soil stuck to their skin. They were dirty and tired. It had been a long day. The three of them looked alike, human shapes covered and stinking with the muck. Maggie joked that they had fooled the mosquitoes and the bugs were swarming around them instead of the marsh.

  “I wonder,” Frank asked, “if anyone saw this ship burn. Maggie, your initial research would have turned up any written records so we know there’s no documentation. I wonder though if anyone could have seen it burn. It must have been a spectacular fire.” He took off his hat. His hair fell over his face and he pushed it back, creating black smears of dirt on his forehead.

  “Sure. Native Americans might have seen it,” said Maggie. “From what I’ve read about the Chesapeake Bay and especially this Eastern Shore area, there were not many Europeans here in those days. Not many Native Americans either. The big tobacco farms were managed by overseers who worked for European absentee owners. There are even some legends that report pirates careened and scraped their ship hulls in these rivers.”

  “The Terments were here,” the Pastor reminded them.

  Maggie was thoughtful. “There should have been stories about it that came down in the local history books. How could the Terments or anyone else have missed seeing a ship on fire? It must have been visible for many miles, even across the Bay.”

  “Maybe because it was quick,” suggested Frank. “If it happened in daylight and the ship was fairly dry it would have been fast, over in a short time. I think judging from the depth of the remains that the hull was probably in pretty shallow water anyway. I think she burned fast at low tide. When the high tide came back in there would not have been much ship left. The water would have covered up the bits of frame that were not burned. Anyone coming here to investigate a fire would have seen nothing but water.”

  “I think that the tide came in faster than she burned. I think there was something here to see. That’s why more soil was added to fill in the cove so the wreck would not show at low tide,” said Maggie. “That additional soil intrigues me. I think there was something that happened that someone wanted to cover up.”

  “There’s one thing you two keep forgetting,” said the Pastor.

  “What?”

  “This fire happened on Terment property.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Maggie.

  “The Pastor is making the point that the Terments like to burn things,” said Frank.

  “The point is the skulls don’t seem to indicate an accident. Those imprisoned men suggest that the fire was set, probably to do them harm.”

  “Tell me though, why would a Terment burn this ship?” asked Maggie.

  “I don’t know,” said Frank. The single light bulb hanging from the kitchen ceiling inside the door behind Frank made his shadow stretch out into the grassy yard till it joined the blackness of the summer night. “We owe it to those people out there in the wreck to find out what happened,” he said.

  “I feel the same way,” said Maggie, emotion tearing her eyes. “Burning to death is an awful way to die.”

  “I’ve been thinking about Soldado since this afternoon,” said Frank. “His threats against Jake. Shouldn’t we warn Jake?”

  “How serious is he?” said the Pastor. “He has been saying that about Jake for years. People mostly disregard it. I almost took aim one time at Jake myself.”

  “I didn’t think that preachers could want to kill a person,” said Frank.

  “Couldn’t do it. I had to calm myself a lot though before I got through it.”

  The Pastor leaned back against the post of the porch. “I was out in my boat fishing. Just a little fourteen footer that I keep down in River Sunday to row out around the river some evenings when the water is quiet.”

  “I was directly in front of Pe
achblossom Manor. It was getting late, but there was still some of the sunset left in the west of the Bay, some red, some light. The fish weren’t biting or they didn’t like the clam snouts that I was using for bait.

  “Then a light went on up at the manor house. The glimmer came down over the lawn and out on the water. It was a lamp in the big open room that is on the first floor of the mansion. Jake was illuminated, sitting in a chair, reading some papers. He was a pretty good way off but I knew it was Jake from the way he was sitting, all sprawled over the chair, careless.

  “This compulsion came over me, a feeling of intense hatred of Jake, something difficult for me to suppress even though I had spent my life learning to love my fellow man. I remember looking at my rifle on its brackets in the front of the rowboat. I knew at that moment I could get even for what Jake and his father had done to me and my people at the General Store fire. I could probably get away with the murder. My mind worked fast. I knew the police would suspect that the shot came from the water, would trace the rifle. My rifle was not a rare gun but there were only a few like it in River Sunday.”

  He stopped, watching Frank’s face. “That night my whole existence as a minister was in jeopardy, Frank. I knew that my only chance to shoot the man and to get away with it would be an alibi from my congregation. People would have to lie to protect me like they had done for my great-grandfather after he killed that Union soldier.

  “I’m telling you I reached for that rifle. I pulled it up on my shoulder. I saw his head just at the tip of the rifle sight.” He paused. “My father’s voice came into my mind teaching me how to hunt when I was a kid. I heard his voice telling me how to aim the weapon, how to breathe, how to squeeze gently the trigger, how to carefully launch the death sentence.

  “I held the rifle there for a long time, repeating Jake’s name over and over. Then my love of the Lord Jesus took over. I put the gun down. I could not pull that trigger. I stowed the rifle and picked up the anchor and rowed home.”

  The Pastor looked at Maggie.

  “If I had pulled that trigger, if I had killed Jake Terment, he would have beaten me more in death than he ever had in life. You see, I set myself out as an example in my church. I say that I am a better man. My church folks look up to me. If they shoot each other they come to me for forgiveness. How could they do that if I was a murderer too? How could they have any excellence to look up to if I were as weak as they were?”

  The cat came into the light beaming out from the farmhouse kitchen, stopped on the top step to the porch and looked at them. Her fur seemed more orange in the glare. Maggie took some tuna from her sandwich and put it on the porch near the cat. The animal sniffed the food and then devoured it.

  “I’ll bring out some cat food tomorrow,” said the Pastor.

  The cat tensed, her head bent forward at the darkness. She sniffed the air, made a gruff meow and then bounded into the night towards the river. Their words slipped out into the darkness at the porch and were lost, one by one, in the night. “The commitment of your congregation, I admire that,” remarked Frank.

  “You said you were committed to the children of Vietnam,” observed the Pastor.

  “Yes, I had this idea that the communists were destroying the minds of the kids. My father talked about when he was a child in Europe, how his friends in school were taught to hate. I listened to him. He convinced me it was the same with these children in South Viet Nam, that they had no chance to choose their future, to learn how to love, to care for others.”

  “You could have found a way to stay out of the war.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t try. In those days I wanted to fight back about things which bothered me.”

  “What happened?” asked Maggie.

  “When I got home, the survival instinct was all I knew any more.”

  The Pastor smiled. “Tell that to these modern Confederates shooting off that cannon in River Sunday.”

  Frank looked at the Pastor and then continued. “I’ll tell you how I began to lose my enthusiasm for the kids of Vietnam. I remember we had been in country only a few weeks. We were in Saigon on leave one night. The city lights sparkled and there was the smell of fish everywhere, always fish. The five of us soldiers sat there on a terrace at the big French hotel in Saigon.

  “There was a little boy there, shorts, tee shirt with the faces of the Beatles printed on it. He wore flip flop sandals, and had a big grin. He was pushing his bicycle. In the front of the bicycle was a wicker basket suspended from the handlebars and in the basket was a large glass jar filled with clear water in which there were multicolored fish swimming around.

  “The Pastor remembers. It was like a carnival, Maggie. There were so many children and they were selling everything from Coca Cola to the bodies of their older sisters. We were drinking the Vietnamese “Thirty-Three” beer on the terrace, having a good time. That night all our thoughts about the country were the virginal ideas of young men who had not yet seen death up close.

  “This little boy wasn’t more than twelve years old. He looked so happy. One of us motioned to him to come show us his fish. It may have been me; it may have been my buddy across from me at the table. The kid came over, pushing his bicycle through the crowded terrace. There were Vietnamese and French couples there having drinks. We were the only Americans. When I looked at the kid, I forgot that the child’s brother probably sold his mother for sex in the biggest room in his small shack, while the rest of his Vietnamese family huddled in a smaller side room waiting to count the money when the American soldier was finished. I forgot that the shack was covered with American tin pressed from beer and soda cans. I forgot that this kid knew that most Americans and Vietnamese hated each other. I thought in that moment that he was simply a merchant’s son helping his father in the family business. I thought he was like an American child. In some fantasy in my mind, he was just like a kid at home in Massachusetts selling lemonade out on a summer evening. I thought he was just like me and I could relate to him. He was like me at that age out with his bike collecting deposit bottles to return them to a general store somewhere so that he could buy bubble gum and baseball cards, his bicycle no different than my shiny Schwinn.

  “I leaned back in my wicker chair to reach into my pants pocket to get some Vietnamese money to give to him. At that moment the bicycle blew up. Just blew to bits. I saw the metal table top wheeling off like a flying saucer into the air above the terrace. There were arms and heads and legs moving almost drifting by my eyes in the haze of flame and noise. I found myself with my body and face painfully pressed into the edge of the terrace against a stucco white washed wall. There was warm blood everywhere, but my body was intact. The explosion was absorbed by the unfortunate bodies of my buddies and by the frame of the table. There beside my face almost out of focus it was so close was the hand of the little boy still holding the plastic handlebar grip. The hand was upright, like it was ready to continue guiding the bike, but only a stump of the boy’s arm was still attached.

  “As I sat up dazed, the dust and smoke settling around me, the tile walls covered with splotches of blood and flesh and clothing, I heard different screams, each coming toward me from a great distance. Around me there were distorted bodies of my friends and the locals. A few feet away a naked Vietnamese woman, her eyeless face a mass of blood, pulled with blind fingers at tiny threads of her shredded dress. Then the sirens began and helpful people pulled at me, making me stand up and stagger out of the flames.

  “There were few other survivors of the blast. The little boy died, of course, and all my friends and many of the others on the terrace that night. I found out later from Vietnamese intelligence that the boy was known to them. The boy had been a soldier, a twelve year old soldier, giving his infant life in equal measure to his own brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and father and mother fighting elsewhere that night in the Viet Cong . He got his American soldier that night.

  “That night in my quarters I pulled bits of flesh out of t
he lacings of my jungle boots, those cloth boots with the long laces. I remember that I thought about whose flesh it was I was looking at, touching, and I couldn’t identify it because flesh has no race below the skin line and there was no skin to inspect.”

  An owl hooted in the black night.

  “That must have been pretty rough on you,” said the Pastor.

  “Yes, and confusing,” Frank said, “This job is making me remember these things. It’s strange. In a way it’s like the war. Most of my jobs have been simple. No emotion. The developer wants the archaeologist to get off his land. The archaeologist wants to finish his research. The two of them sit down and think it out, talk about it, compromise. Here it’s not like that. Like the war, there’s more to it, more that seems to force me to take a side, to join one side against another side, although I am not even sure what the sides are yet.”

  The Pastor answered, “I’m telling you, though, you’re here and you’ll have to choose.”

  “It’s just that I don’t think this shipwreck or anything we find here is going to change the world or anything here in River Sunday,” said Frank. “It’s not going to get the island back for Mrs. Robin Pond and her environmentalists. It’s not going to help restart your General Store. It’s not going to end Soldado’s hatred. It’s not going to create a new economy for this town.”

  “I’m not sure about any of that, Frank,” said the Pastor. “If you let Jake Terment get his way, if we overlook something important, I think it will hurt all of us. It will hurt you too.”

  Maggie said then from her seat on the steps, “People have the right to understand their history. They have a right to know the truth of this wreck.”

  “Just do your job, Frank,” said the Pastor.

  “Truth or not, Frank,” said Maggie, “if an expert like you says the site is worthless, believe me, it will be considered worthless no matter what the rest of us might think.”

  “That puts a lot on my shoulders, doesn’t it?” said Frank, looking at the porch floor, scratching his neck.

  The Pastor stood. “I have to get back to my church. I’ll be back early in the morning. At least we get one more day to try up here.”

  Frank and Maggie watched him walk to his Cadillac, start its engine and drive out the lane, the headlights flashing off the loblollies as the car bounced on the ruts.

  Chapter 9