Chesapeake by James A. Michener
But the Eden was not powerless. As soon as Absalom regained the wheel, he shipped his skipjack onto a course that would allow its bowsprit to rake the stern of the enemy, and when his tactic became evident the Deal Islanders cursed and threw more beer cans, but Absalom hunkered down, swung his wheel and watched with satisfaction as his long bowsprit swept the Nelly Benson, cutting a halyard and forcing the crew to quit their bombardment and try to put together a jury rig that would enable them to finish the race. They did this with such promptness that they entered the final tack only a few yards behind the Eden and well ahead of the others.
Captain Boggs now showed why his men called him the Black Bastard. Raising his sails to maximum height, keeping his keel as close to the wind as possible, he started to overtake the Eden, and when it appeared that he would succeed, he swung his bow sharply so that the bowsprit could sweep the stern of the Patamoke boat.
“Fend off, back there!” Captain Absalom shouted, but it was too late. The Nelly Benson crunched on, her bowsprit raking the Eden, and by some hellish luck it banged into a gasoline can carried in accordance with the rule that each boat must be in working dress. The can bumped along the deck, emptying some of its contents before it bounced overboard. The volatile liquid spread rapidly, with one long finger rushing into the galley where Amos Turlock was cleaning up.
A great flame filled the galley and flashed along the deck. Amos, finding himself ablaze, had the presence of mind to run topside and leap into the river. Hugo Pflaum, suspecting that his ancient enemy could not swim, as most watermen could not, grabbed a rope and jumped in after him, and so spontaneous was Pflaum’s action that he was able to reach the struggling cook and hold him fast as men on deck pulled the heavy pair back to the Eden.
All hands turned to fighting fire, except Captain Absalom, who kept to the wheel, hoping that the starboard tack would allow his boat to pull ahead, but when confusion was its greatest, the boy aft began to shout, “Mud!” and Absalom bellowed, “Man the centerboard,” but there was none to hear, so he indicated that the boy should quit his post and try to haul up the dragging board.
A centerboard is a huge affair, often made of oak and a task for two grown men, so the boy accomplished nothing. “Take the wheel!” Absalom shouted and the boy ran aft to steer the skipjack, while his father ran to the rope attached to the aft end of the centerboard and tugged on it mightily. It rose a few inches and the dragging ceased.
With the fire under control, the Patamoke crew turned to the job of bringing their damaged boat to the finish line. They had lost their lead, but they kept in mind that this was a starboard tack. With burned hands and sooty faces they began to cheer and throw beer cans and trim their sails, but they were impeded by a situation which had never before developed in a skipjack race: the intense heat of the gasoline fire had melted some of the dacron lines into blobs of expensive goo. But Patamoke men were ingenious, and the crew found ways to improvise substitutes and to pass their shortened lines through sheaves and thus keep their boat moving.
It was to be a photo finish, with the Nelly Benson slightly ahead, the Eden closing vigorously. Crews of the trailing skipjacks began to cheer and big Hugo Pflaum with two of the black crewmen stood forward to repel any new assaults.
“We can make it!” Amos Turlock bellowed, throwing beer cans like mad at Captain Boggs. But the Deal Island men knew how to handle their boat, and while the Eden crew was working on their sails they heard the cannon. The race was over and they were forty seconds from the line. The cup, the money, the honor—all were lost. The deck was scarred with flame, their fingers burned with gasoline.
“Damn,” Absalom growled as the Eden crossed.
“We almost made it,” his son said.
“Ain’t nothin’ in the world pays off on near-’ems ’ceptin horseshoes.”
“It was fun,” the boy said.
“Fun!” his father exploded. “Goddamnit, we lost!”
That night, when the crews assembled to celebrate and collect their awards, Absalom had the graciousness to approach Captain Boggs, shake his hand and admit, “You won fair and square.” Those standing nearby cheered and the Deal Islander said modestly, “God was on our side. Ninety-nine times out of a hunnerd we wouldn’t of hit that gasoline can.” And Absalom conceded, “That’s how the dice rolls.”
Mr. Steed, elated by the showing of the Eden and pleased to have been accepted into Choptank life so quickly, delivered the final judgment on the race: “All things considered, we gained a moral victory.”
The Steeds had hoped that when Pusey Paxmore served as commodore the excitement would lure him out of the exile to which he had condemned himself. “He came from this peninsula,” Owen told his wife, “and returning to it should cure him.” When she replied that this was a curious doctrine, he said, “It wasn’t chance that the sovereign remedy, penicillin, was found in the earth. The Antaeus factor. When you’re in trouble, scramble back to earth. Why do you think I scurried here when I was fired?”
Paxmore would not allow the cure to work for him. He believed that his humiliation in Washington barred him from normal life, and he continued to isolate himself, brooding over the misadventures which had brought him to this low estate.
This was regrettable, for he was now sixty-four and should have been entering that congenial stage of life when the orderly routine of the seasons, acting like a magnet, pulled him along from one anticipation to the next, whether his intellectual interests did so or not. In September on the Eastern Shore a man should be cleaning his guns and putting his dogs through performance trials. In October he should be out hunting doves, convening with friends, also retired, and comparing his Labrador to their Chesapeakes. Before November he hauls his boat out of the water, drains her fuel system and covers her with canvas. In the middle of that month he turns to the serious business of hunting geese. In late December he may ignore Christmas but not the ducks coming onto his property. In January he tends his loblollies, or marks his holly trees for pruning, and in March he spends a lot of time preparing his boat for the water, going to Annapolis for marine hardware and mending his crab pots. In June, when the first crabs come along, he ices his beer and sits on his screened porch, cracking the boiled claws and waiting for the perch to fry on the brazier. In July he runs his power mower, pushing his lawn back year by year until the day he shouts to his wife, “We’re going to sell this damned place and move into an apartment. Too much lawn to mow.” But in August, when the sun blazes down and a southwest breeze comes up the bay, cooling those on the eastern shores of the creeks but not on the western, he tells her, “Best thing we ever did was find this southwest exposure. The Lathams over there on the wrong side are broiling.”
Thus the force of the earth, revolving in its passage through space, ought to carry an older man along, from year to year, making such honors as he may have earned seem even more delectable because of his reunion with primal agencies. Pusey Paxmore missed this experience; he remained oblivious of those changing faces of nature which had been the preoccupation of his family since their arrival on the cliff in 1664: the behavior of the Chesapeake, the altering salinity of the Choptank, the arrival and departure of the geese and, especially, the constant search for straight loblollies and oak knees. It was shameful to think that this man, whose blood ran with the tides, should have become so indifferent to his universe.
The Steeds, afraid that his rejection of his native earth might destroy him, did what they could to tempt him out of his closet, but the most they accomplished was a chain of October afternoons at Peace Cliff which he attended in a shabby sweater and frayed slippers. As he talked, certain themes began to unfold:
PAXMORE: Those of us who fought against the dissolution of this nation in the late 1960s did the right thing. We were in real peril, and enemies who abuse Nixon forget this.
STEED: I was thinking the other day about the-songs of that period. The ones my children played incessantly. Did you ever listen to those songs, Pusey? The
PAXMORE: I keep thinking about the White House. Some very bright people there realized what was happening and they did their best to stem the rot. But their efforts were preempted by the so-called realists who were preoccupied with the 1972 election. The profoundest motives were perverted for the basest goals.
STEED: Would you concede that there had been a conspiracy?
PAXMORE: To do what?
STEED: To take over the government. What I mean, to subvert our form of government and ensure not only the election of Nixon but of Agnew in 1976 and then Haldeman in 1984. Was there such a conspiracy?
PAXMORE: No. What happened was, a group of California adventurers without political apprenticeship saw a chance to bend things their way. When they saw how easy it was to manipulate the system ... Look, Owen, thee gave me two hundred thousand without even asking what it was for. It didn’t come out at the hearings or the trial, but I myself collected over eight million dollars, and not one donor ever asked me what I intended doing with it. “Honest Pusey Paxmore, the Maryland Quaker.” It was so easy, Owen, that the California mob slowly awakened to the fact that they had a stupefying opportunity. Plan? No. Opportunity? Yes.
STEED: How do you explain the corruption, the near-treason?
PAXMORE: Men without character slip from one position to the next. And never comprehend the awful downward course they’re on.
STEED: Couldn’t Nixon have stopped it?
PAXMORE: Woodrow Wilson could have. Or Teddy Roosevelt. And does thee know why? Because they had accumulated through years of apprenticeship a theory of government. A theory of democracy, if thee will. And they would have detected the rot the minute it started.
STEED: Why didn’t the Californians?
PAXMORE: For a simple reason. They were deficient in education. They’d gone to those chrome-and-mirror schools where procedures are taught, not principles. I doubt if any one of them had ever contemplated a real moral problem, in the abstract where character is formed.
STEED: You did?
PAXMORE: Yes, and when the revelations began to unwind, long before John Dean, I knew what was wrong, and how very wrong it was.
STEED: Why didn’t you quit, then?
PAXMORE: Because I stood so close to power, to the greatest power in the world, the presidency. It obliterated judgments. I knew, but I was powerless to react because I was poisoned by power.
STEED: What did you know?
PAXMORE: I knew that men like thee, across this country, had given our collectors more than seventy million dollars of unaccounted funds to keep the ball game going along lines thee preferred. I knew that this money was being laundered in Mexico, using channels established years before by Las Vegas gamblers. I knew that White House staffers were using Internal Revenue and the F.B.I, to punish leaders of the Democratic party. We’ll teach those bastards to keep their noses clean, was the way they expressed it. I knew that high officials were ordering the bugging of their assistants’ private phone calls. And I knew that everyone was lying to everyone else, in order to win an election, and to keep on winning them till the end of this century.
STEED: You don’t call that a conspiracy?
PAXMORE: No, because it was not planned in advance from any intellectual base. We all just slipped downward, from one greasy step to the next. It was opportunism, Owen, a failure of moral intelligence.
STEED: Did Nixon know?
PAXMORE: Let me answer that most carefully. Of my own cognizance I never saw Richard Nixon do a single wrong thing. I was very close to him, in money matters, and I can avow that he never knew how the seventy million was collected, or how it was laundered, or how it was spent. He never once told me, “Pusey, drop by Owen Steed’s office. He owes us some favors.” So far as I know, he was clean. So when he went on television that night with the stack of transcripts and looked the American people in the eye, assuring them he was innocent, I believed him.
STEED: Did you begin to doubt when you read the transcripts?
PAXMORE: I was shocked by the sloppiness of thought in the world’s most powerful office. They were incapable of keeping an idea in focus for three minutes. Instead of intelligence, we had rambling associations. The obscene language that bothered so many? I brushed it off as would-be manliness until I reached that dreadful description of me ...
STEED: How did you react to the final disclosures? When he admitted his involvement?
PAXMORE: The only thing I could think of was his earlier performances, when he stared right at the television cameras and denied the existence of such evidence, and I wondered how any man could have the brazenness to do that—to stand there, knowing that the tapes were downstairs and that at least eight other persons knew what was on them. I’ve never been able to get that in focus.
STEED: Did you realize then that you would go to jail?
PAXMORE: Certainly. My world had collapsed, and not one of the men who had given me orders would extend a hand to help. So I braced myself and told Amanda, “I’ll take my share of the blame and say no more about it.”
STEED: You weren’t tempted to drag men like me down with you? You could have, you know.
PAXMORE: Quite a few. A man doesn’t collect eight million illegal dollars without knowing who gave them, and how.
STEED: Why didn’t you?
PAXMORE: Because, having done everything possible to disgrace my family, I was determined that the least I could do was take my punishment and not whimper.
STEED: You ever waver?
PAXMORE: Yes. When the tapes were played at my trial, and I was forced to listen again to what the inner circle really thought of me: “Tell that fucking Bible-spouting asshole to get the money and shut up.” These were words, Owen, that no Paxmore had ever dared use, even to his most inept workmen ... Three centuries of Paxmores never used such words. But the leaders of the country felt free to use them against me. And why? Because I dared to raise questions of propriety.
STEED: You did?
PAXMORE: Of course! A dozen times I warned against lawbreaking.
STEED: Why didn’t you quit? Throw the job in their faces?
PAXMORE: Because I refused to believe that criminal behavior could emanate from the White House. And vanity. I enjoyed being close to sources of power and wanted to remain there.
(At this point, one cold afternoon, he fell silent; obviously he was reconstructing the painful steps of his descent into Avernus, and Steed asked no more questions. Instead he launched upon his own reflective monologue.)
STEED: You could say the same about me. I was flattered that day a high official came to Tulsa and whispered, “Steed, if you want to be a high-roller in the next administration ... I mean, if you want real clout ... say, our protection against the biggies in your business, you better give evidence of your support. You better give it early and you better give it big.” He took me by the arm, exactly the way the football captain had handled me during my freshman year at the university when he wanted me to join his fraternity, and he said, “Steed, the committee—and these are people who’re going to run this nation for the rest of this century—we put you down for three hundred thousand.” I told him I didn’t begin to have that much, and he said in an even lower voice, “But you can put your hands on it,” and when I said, “But that would be corporate money,” he put his hand over my mouth and whispered, “I’m going to assume you never said that. How you get the money is your affair, but I will tell you this. Whoever we select for Attorney General will be in our pocket, and you’ll get no flap from him.” So, as you know, I devised a way to channel not the full three hundred thousand, but two hundred, and do you know why? Because I wanted to be a high
(Steed paused to watch the return of geese from a foraging expedition, and as they wheeled over the Choptank he told Paxmore, “You and me, we’re going to get our share of those fellows.” He was disappointed when his withdrawn friend showed no excitement, and after a while he resumed.)
STEED: When Watergate broke I accepted it as minor, third-class, and assumed that no one would have bothered with the Democratic offices unless those goons were up to something illegal, which they usually are. When the President disclaimed any knowledge of the affair, I dropped it. Never occurred to me that my two hundred thousand could be involved, because I had never once thought of it as illegal. I was merely striving to save the good life of my nation and to keep its direction in proper hands. I listened to some of the Dean testimony, and when he couldn’t even recall what hotel he’d been in, I classed him as a phony and dismissed his yarn as a concoction. And when the President came on television to proclaim his innocence, I thought that ended the affair. It should have, but the American press hates anyone who’s successful. Reporters who didn’t belong to fraternities in college or play football can’t understand how a man with guts and brains can make thirty million dollars. They’re inherent anarchists, and that’s as clear as a bolt of lightning in August. They were out to destroy Nixon, and they did. But I was like you.
PAXMORE: How?
STEED: I could not believe it when the tapes proved that Nixon had been lying. It was inconceivable that a man could stand before those cameras, knowing that he had a time bomb ticking away at his heart, and utter the lies he did.
PAXMORE: What kept me believing was a silly article I read. Written by his older daughter, exculpating him from everything. It seemed so fresh and honest. So sincere.