Over beyond the honeysuckle hedge, the traffic on the bridge was running freely. The butterfly costumes had been neatly stacked on Mrs. Robin Pond’s porch and the actors had disappeared inside the house. Frank and the others had been at work in the pits for more than an hour when they saw Jake’s station wagon stop on the road outside the gate.
Frank watched Jake talk to the company guard for a few minutes, the two standing at the far side of the highway, an occasional car or truck rumbling by and hiding them for a moment. Jake’s face was animated. The guard in his green jacket held his head in a slight bow as he listened to Jake, sometimes talking but mostly listening. Then Jake walked away towards the site.
Jake slammed the old gate open and walked through, two birds flaring in the honeysuckle hedge as he did so. There was a mud smear on the bottom of his left trouser leg. It was the first dirt Frank had seen on the man’s immaculate white suit. Jake carried his white jacket in his left hand. His right hand was clenched in a fist which he held in front of him as he approached.
“We didn’t expect you until later, Jake,” said Frank, as he raised himself to a kneeling position, his back straight, his arms stretching upward.
“That stoplight was broken on purpose,” he said. “Pond thinks she can stop the bridge. She doesn’t realize who she’s up against.”
“I guess your company guard must have called you,” said Frank.
The Pastor said, “I bet Billy, our chief of police, called you right away with a report. Tell Frank how you know all the cops, Jake,” said the Pastor.
He turned to Frank. “What he’s not telling you is that this is a small town and we all grew up together, cops, preachers, and Terments. The same group of tough white boys that hung around together when Jake was a kid, they got to be the policemen we have here today.”
“She can’t do this to me,” Jake said, as he turned to look over the road. Jake’s expression was one of rage. “I went out of my way to get along with her. She’s still pissed off after all this time.”
“What did you do to her?” asked Frank.
Jake calmed down and began to smile again, the television smile. He glanced at the Pastor who was staring at him. “You’ll never get the true story from Jefferson.”
“Come on,” Jake said to Frank. They walked to the station wagon out on the road. Spyder stepped out of the driver’s seat and opened the back door for Frank, smiling as always.
The air conditioner was running inside the car and the air was cold to Frank’s bare arms and legs. Jake handed him a small silver flask.
“Drink it. Good whiskey.”
Frank declined. “I drink that, I’ll start tripping over Maggie’s grid lines,” he laughed.
Jake grinned. “That’s not such a bad idea.” He laughed to himself. Then he said, “My father gave me that flask when I was sixteen years old, the beginning of the fall dove shoot right here at this farm.”
He pointed at the cornfield. “That’s where we used to shoot them. Corn left standing and the doves would roost in there. The tenant farmer would scare them up for us and we’d sometimes get shots for the whole afternoon. My father said he gave me that flask to keep me busy until the birds decided to fly by again.”
He looked at Frank again, his eyes pleading, as if looking for a friend to confide in. “Let me tell you about Birdey.” He took a pull on the flask. “My father was buried from the church behind the Court House in the middle of River Sunday. My family built that church. The first church in River Sunday. One of the oldest in the whole country. We gave him a beautiful funeral until she ruined it. I spoke at my father’s funeral and so did several friends of my family. Birdey had asked to speak and we let her, never expecting what she would say.
“She’s a tall woman and she towered over the pulpit. After looking at me for a minute or two, she started talking about how my father had been so aware of the environment, how he was a tribute to his family, how he was like the Terments of old, farming men who had, of necessity, a great respect for the land and the animals.
“Then she started in about her last visit to my father at Peachblossom. On this visit she said that he told her how he had stopped hunting, how he had started taking photographs of the wildlife out on the island. He took her into a small room off his study where he had hung these framed photographs of ducks and butterflies, that kind of thing. He said she was the only person who had seen them, the only person he wanted to show them to. She told the assembly at the church that she thought the photography was very good, almost that of a genius and that if he had pursued this creative work early in his life he could have been one of the great nature photographers.
“Then she said that he told her to announce after his death that Peachblossom Manor and its adjoining acreage on Allingham Island had been willed to her with the condition that she create a nature preserve from the land.
“Frank, with that bit of news you could have heard a mouse squeak in that old church. Can you imagine that? Bringing up a man’s last will and testament at a holy gathering. She didn’t even wait for the poor man to be buried. Of course, it was all a filthy lie. In her lack of respect she even lied at his funeral. Frank, I can tell you that tore me up. She started a legal claim on the estate which, while we handled it, cost us a little bit of money to take care of, not to mention the aggravation and the public scrutiny of my father’s memory and his mental state. “
He looked outside the car for a moment. “I had to witness this desecration of my father’s funeral. I had to do this alone. I’ll never forget it. When we came out of the church, Birdey was standing there shaking hands with most of my family and friends. I went up to her and she smiled at me, pretending she had not done this terrible thing. I think she expected me to congratulate her on the kind words she had said about my father.
“‘I’m so sorry about your father, Jake,’ she said.
“‘I’m so sorry about you,’ I said back to her, watching for only a moment as her face angered. Then I got into my limousine for the ride to the grave.
“Well, at the grave site I stood on one side and she stood on the other. She glared at me the whole service. The minister, seeing us, was very embarrassed and made his talk very short. He said that my father had lived his life trying to make the Eastern Shore a better place for people and animals to live. When he said ‘animals’ he looked over at Birdey but she was too angry for that little bit of compromise. He looked at me and I wouldn’t even look at her or him. Far as I was concerned the minister was guilty of letting her up on that pulpit. Believe me, he knew right then he was fast losing his big yearly Terment church contributions. The preacher quickly added that my father’s work in real estate would be remembered by all of us, poor and rich alike. Then the man ended the ceremony and that was it.
“The next day Birdey and her lawyer came to Peachblossom to speak to me.
“She started in, ‘I never meant to embarrass you, Jake. I thought you would see this gift as a tribute to how great a man you father was,’ she said. We talked by her car in front of the house. I had no desire to have her inside. My father’s car was still there where he had left it the day he died, still parked with its front wheels a little bit into the grass like he always did.”
He looked at Frank. “If she and my father hadn’t been so old, I might have thought she had seduced him, slept with him at the house.”
He went on, “‘Birdey,’ I said, ‘I don’t care what you meant to do or did not mean to do. I just want you to leave this place and never come back here again.’
“‘I can’t do that, Jake. Your father gave me this place to use as a home for wildlife.’
“By then, Frank, I was getting upset. You’ve seen me in a lot of situations here in the last few days and that I have had to worry about more than my share of problems in trying to build a few houses here on the Island. I’m sure you’ll agree that I am a pretty calm fellow. This lady had overstepped. I mean, what would you do if someone came around the day after one of your
parents died and told you an absolute lie about what that parent had done?”
Frank said nothing.
Jake continued. “So I said to her, ‘Birdey, you’re a liar.’”
“That’s when the lawyer spoke up. I knew the man. He had brought his practice to River Sunday from Baltimore a few years before. He had taken many of the early civil rights cases when the old segregation rules were changing. He wasn’t a native, didn’t have much money and he sure did not understand anything about Peachblossom or Allingham Island, much less the Terments. I didn’t have anything against him. On the other hand, I didn’t have anything for him either.
“He stood there in the sunlight and tried to console me. ‘Jake,’ he said.”
Jake grinned. “You tell me, Frank, don’t you hate it when they use your name and they don’t even know you?”
Frank nodded.
“This fellow went on. He said, ‘Jake, my client says that there was a will written by your father and that she saw it written and put away in the safe up here at Peachblossom.’
“So I said, ‘There’s no will like that here. There’s my father’s only will that he had prepared when I was a child that gives me everything. The will is in the hands of my father’s attorney in River Sunday. I ‘m sure that you’ll find it in order. Another thing. I want you to get you client here to admit she lied about my father photographing all those animals. There is not a one of those photographs here in this old house and anyone wants to see, why they can just come and look.’
“The lawyer and Birdey traded glances. Then he said to her in his outsider’s twang, “Come on, let’s get out of here.” She didn’t say anything, just turned and walked away.
“Later that day I got a telephone call from my father’s attorney to come into his office. I drove into River Sunday. His office was in a large white building behind the Court House. I went in there and talked to him and he asked me if there was any other will that I had heard about. I said, ‘No, my father had only told me about one will, the one he had.’ I said that my father had explained to me that I was going to inherit Peachblossom Manor and the Terment Company stock that he held.
“So my lawyer said, ‘Well, Birdey sees it different. However, what you say, Jake, that’s good enough for me.’” Jake smiled at this point in his story. He took another swallow from the flask.
“A few days later Birdey drove out to the house again. This time she came alone. I was there working at my desk in the living room. I used to take work out to the island to finish it.”
He sighed. “Anyway, I looked up from a report I was working on, and there she was standing, looking at me, from the patio in back of the house. It’s a fine brick terrace where there are white iron chairs and tables. My father and I used to like to sit in the evening. We sat out there many a time and talked about Terment Company. I think that’s where he and I first talked about building houses on the island.
“So she stood there, her hands on her hips like she stands sometimes. I went out on the terrace to talk to her.
“She said, ‘Jake, what did you do with your father’s will?’
“I said, ‘Birdey, you ought to forget this lie. I don’t know where you got all this story. My father would never have let Peachblossom go out of the family. He loved this farm.’
“‘Jake,’ she said, ‘I was here when your father drafted the plan. We sat in his study one summer evening and worked on it together. He was going to finish it himself just the way he wanted it and then give it to his lawyer. That was a few months before he died. He was still in pretty good health. He asked me about what I thought would be the future of the Island. I said that if Jake did not develop it then a child of Jake’s in the future would. I told him that sooner or later someone would come along who wanted to make money off the sale of the island. He was very upset about all of this. Your father was a changed man from the way I had known him even a few years earlier. I guess he had learned that he was going to die. His liver was gone from the drinking. His lungs too from the smoking. He laughed about his lungs, said they were payback for the original family fortune made in growing tobacco.’
“She told me that they went for a walk about the property. The brick walk through the garden and down to the river was pretty at that time of evening. There was a small breeze blowing in from the Bay and so the mosquitoes were not bad. They walked all the way down to the water.
“The brick walk became a wide path. He told me that it was an old road that the Terments used in the colonial days. The slaves would roll the great tobacco hogsheads on this road down to the riverbank to load into the cargo ships for the convoys to England. By the river, she and his father looked at the old foundations where the warehouses had stood.
“‘Your father,’ she said, ‘told me that the Terments had to change the loading place for their tobacco. They had to build this great landing right on the Bay even though the waters were not as sheltered. I asked him why and he did not reply, just kept walking.’
“‘Then we walked down near the butterfly trees. They were large, old. The butterflies loved them. The Monarchs came to those trees every year. I told your father about the insects, how they live and fight and love and die, in a smaller version of our world. He was very interested in all this. I told him while the two of us stood there looking up at those trees, that the butterflies had been coming to this spot for hundreds of years on their flight south and that we had no real idea why they did this. He was very subdued, I remember, thinking, he said, about the effect that we humans had on this tiny creature’s existence. I think your father was impressed that he had the power to change the future for the better for that animal.’
“‘A butterfly flew up when we were there. Your father watched it until it flew away. Then he said that when you were a kid, you used to bring him bags full of mashed butterflies. It was a game you played every fall when they flew over the farm. He looked at me then and he said he knew that you had no interest, that you hated the creatures. I remember him saying that the colors of the Monarch were orange and black, the Maryland colors he told me, same as in the state flag.’
Jake sipped from the flask. “What she didn’t say, Frank, was that my daddy paid me for cleaning up the bugs. He didn’t like them dying all over the lawn.”
“Then she went on with the lies, ‘We walked back toward the manor house in the twilight. ‘Birdey,’ your father said, ‘I’m going to do something different this time, this generation.’
“‘What do you mean, Richard?’ she asked him.
“‘Jake,’ he said, ‘Jake only wants to develop this place for the money in it. He’s talked to me for hours about his plans. He wants to dig up the land, change it, build houses.’
“Well, Frank,” said Jake, “I told her right then and there. I said, ‘Birdey, that is not true, my father didn’t say all that to you. Why did he even talk to you? I find it all ridiculous. You’re not family, you’re not a Terment.’
“Frank, she looked at me and tried to claim, in her high pitched voice, ‘Well, Jake, he tried to talk to you about it but you just went on and on about your business plans, so he talked to me.’
“I said to her, ‘Birdey, I mean he used to try to figure out ways to aggravate you, to get you to leave him alone, all your talk about the animals and your criticizing him for the duck hunting he did up at Wilderness Swamp. He hated you.’
“Well, Frank, she goes on then, ‘He talked to me because he knew that I care about the land and the creatures and that I had always been this way, that I was honest and he knew he could rely on me.’
“So I said, ‘My father didn’t think you were honest, Birdey. He used to call you every name in the book and none of them were honest.’
“So then she went on, ‘He said that he would give you the Terment Company, his shares and that you would make a lot of money. He told me that you could “torment gold” Those were his exact words. He said that he didn’t want you to have Peachblossom because the land shoul
d go back to the animals. He said the Terments had taken it by force from the animals and from the Nanticokes. Peachblossom belonged to the animals above all.’”
“Frank, she was right about one thing. That was a favorite expression of my father. He always talked among family members about ‘tormenting gold.’ I don’t know where she heard him say that phrase. Probably heard it in the gossip from one of our servants.”
Jake smiled. “My father always respected me for making money.”
“‘Your father wanted to free you,’ Birdey continued telling me there on the terrace. ‘He told me that he never wanted a son, a new generation of Terments. When you came along he had tried to help you. He said that you would die young if you stayed on the land, if you owned Peachblossom. He said you didn’t have the strength that he did, that you didn’t have the ability to scare people away like he did. He said that returning the island to its original state where only animals lived there would mean a fresh start for you, for the whole family.’
Jake looked at Frank, “Why would he say a thing like that, about scaring people? He had respect for me. I tell you she was lying.”
“‘Birdey,’ I said to her, ‘This whole thing is a lie. I want you off the island.’”
“‘Jake,’ she said to me, ‘your father said that this place would kill you. He said it made him drink hard all his life but surviving was different during his lifetime. He knew life would be harder for you.’
“Then she left. I heard from her lawyer for a while but the case went nowhere. They didn’t have a will to disprove my ownership. From that day, however, she has tried to hurt me here in River Sunday. This butterfly costume gimmick of hers is a nasty way to try to hurt my project and my friends and me.”
“I heard you had a step-mother,” asked Frank. “What was she doing while Birdey was coming up on her visits. What happened to her?”
“I see Jefferson has been telling his lies. That woman never meant much to me or my father. She lived in one of the old cottages. She was a housekeeper, that’s all she was. She certainly wasn’t my mother in any way. My mother was a very beautiful woman.”
“I shouldn’t have asked.”
“That’s all right, Frank.” Jake smiled. “You and I, we have to get this cleaned up. I’ve got some of my business associates coming out here pretty soon. I told you about that.”
“We haven’t finished with the research yet, Jake. I don’t want to mislead you,” said Frank, opening the car door and climbing out into the heat. Jake followed him outside and they stood together beside the car.
Jake was suddenly impatient. “I guess you don’t understand anything I’ve told you.” He motioned towards the site. “Maybe these bones could have been planted here by someone who wants to hold up the construction.”
“That’s not likely, Jake. They are very old. We will excavate what we can and make our recommendations about the site. That’s all,” said Frank.
“This is not a very attractive display for my friends,” he said.
“Well, I can’t disregard all these, Jake. This is a very unusual find. Especially the giant man.”
“I don’t really care about what may or may not have happened in ancient history. I just want to get this place cleaned up.”
Jake motioned to Spyder who was standing by the gate. The two men followed Frank as he returned to the site. When they reached the excavations, Jake jumped down into the pit where the Pastor was working on the new skeletons. Before anyone could stop him, he had picked one of the skulls out of the soil and placed it up on the edge of the pit. As he reached for another, Frank jumped down into the pit beside the Pastor and put his hand on Jake’s arm.
Jake stopped and turned to Frank, smiling again. “What are you doing, Frank?”
“You can’t do that, Jake,” said the Pastor.
“What do you say, Frank?” Jake stood straight in the pit, looking directly at Frank. Spyder was towering over Frank at the edge of the pit, his highly polished shoes outstanding on the edge of the pit, while below him Frank’s feet were muck covered and bare.
“He’s cleaning up his place for the afternoon reception,” said Spyder, his words like bullets.
“You heard my friend,” said Jake.
Frank stared at him, dropping his hand from Jake’s arm.
“This is my land, my place, to do with as I wish,” said Jake.
“We should handle our disagreement professionally, Jake.” said Frank, motioning to the Pastor to stand back. Maggie had come over to the pit and was standing near Jake and Spyder.
“I think that’s a great idea,” said Jake. “I knew I could reason with you, Frank. You just continue to be an archaeologist.”
“I am being an archaeologist.”
The cat reappeared and perched on the edge of the pit near the Pastor, The Pastor picked him up and held him in his arms as he watched Jake bend over and pry at another of the bones in the floor of the pit.
“Past catching up to you, Jake? Worried about what we are finding?” the Pastor said.Then the Pastor let the cat drop. The cat landed near Jake with a snarl.
“God damn you,” shouted Jake as he jumped back from the cat which then hissed, leaped up on the edge of the pit and then ran away from the site into the hedge.
Jake tottered then lost his balance and dropped into a sitting position, ungracefully on his backside, his feet in front of him. He raised himself, his face furious. He brushed at the wet soil on his trouser seat.
Frank said, “We all have to be careful around the pits. The walls are so soft. Anyone can have a pretty bad fall, maybe hurt themselves.”
Jake ignored him. “What are you going to do next, Jefferson? You going to pull a razor on me?” Then, composing himself, Jake smiled at Frank and Maggie and said, “I hate cats.”
“He just jumped out of my arms,” said the Pastor.
“No, Jefferson, no, I’m not worried about what you folks find up here. I just want you out of here.”
“Then we see this as equals, Jake,” said the Pastor.
“What do you mean?”
“We both just want the truth,” said the Pastor.
“I want a bridge and I want to put a lot of your friends and mine to work building it,” said Jake.
“Those friends, are they all white?” asked the Pastor.
“There are many black people involved with the project,” said Jake.
“Who?”
Jake did not answer him. At this moment, three green station wagons, one after the other entered the small lane going to the farmhouse and moved up the road, bouncing with much noise as they did so.
“Caterers are here,” said Spyder.
“Frank, can I talk to you privately for a minute?” Maggie said, pulling at his arm. When they were a few feet away from Jake and Spyder, she looked at him. “You’re not going to compromise with him? This field is important. You can’t allow this to be wrecked. You are going to have a tough time explaining this to other archaeologists. You and I know people who would give anything to work on a field like this.”
“Maybe there is a solution,” said Frank, scratching the back of his neck.
“Jake,” Frank turned and walked toward him. Jake was handing some more of the bones to Spyder.
“What is it, Frank?”
“I have an idea.”
“Hurry up. I haven’t much time.”
“I think it will be a liability for your company to have folks walking around these open pits, with the possibility that they could trip on the surveyors twine. Maybe some of them might have a little too much to drink, you know what I mean.”
“What do you suggest, Frank?”
“Well, when we’ve had this before at other sites I have worked on, we just roped off the area. You don’t want people out seeing the bones anyway so that will solve your problem without your having to pick up all the skeletons. Besides, it would take a long time to find all of the bones especially the small ones. We’ll just cordon o
ff the area. I’ll personally stand by the rope and tell the folks what they want to know about the archaeology. You can say something about what we are doing too, how we hope to be finished soon. Your investors don’t have to see any of it.”
Jake looked at the rest of the bones at his feet. He looked at the soil on his hands and trousers. “All right. I want this pit covered up though. It looks like a massacre up here. That’s not good for business.”
Maggie turned to Frank as Jake walked off with Spyder to see the caterers.
He said, looking at her, “You think that I didn’t stand up to Jake, that I’m quitting on you and the Pastor. I’m not. I’m just trying to figure all this out, figure out what is best to do with the time we have left.”
“You should understand what is best to do. There’s a lot to be found and we have to find it. Our purpose here is being lost in all your figuring. That’s your problem. You think too much,” said Maggie, turning away from him and walking back to her dig, her bare feet leaving small puddles in the muck.
“You got to have it in your heart to do the right thing without thinking. There’s just not enough time to do it any other way,” she called back over her shoulder.
Chapter 14
Slave Graves Page 13
