The Watermen: Selections From Chesapeake by James A. Michener
There was no laughter, however, when the black crew began to unload huge quantities of oysters into the buy-boats. And the bay might have been outraged in the fall of 1897, but not really surprised, when Randy Turlock, a distant nephew of Captain Jake’s, showed up as a member of the Eden’s crew, which now consisted of five blacks and one white.
‘Why would a decent, God-fearin’ white man consent to serve with a nigger?’ the men at the store raged at the young waterman.
‘Because he knows how to find arsters,’ young Turlock said, and in the 1899 season Big Jimbo’s crew was four blacks and two whites, and thus it remained as the new century dawned.
In August 1906, when the two watermen were in their grizzled sixties, Caveny came running to the store with exciting news: ‘Jake, I think we got us a contract to haul watermelons from Greef Twombly’s place to Baltimore.’ This was important, for oystermen spent their summer months scrounging for commissions that would keep their skipjacks busy; the shallow-drafted boats carried too little freeboard to qualify them for entering the ocean, or they might have run lumber from the West Indies, as many schooners did. Also, the boom was so extended that in a good gale, when the starboard was underwater, the tip of the boom tended to cut into the waves, too, and that was disastrous.
So the watermen prayed for a cargo of farm produce to Baltimore and a load of fertilizer back, or coal to Norfolk, or pig iron from the blast furnaces north of Baltimore. Best of all was a load of watermelons from far up some river, for then, with a crew of three—Turlock, Caveny and a black cook—the skipjack could earn real money, passing back and forth across the oyster beds it had worked during the winter.
At the start of this unexpected bonanza Jake was in such a good mood that as the lines were about to be loosened, he impetuously called for his dog to come aboard, and when the Chesapeake leaped across the open water to scramble aboard, Caveny asked, ‘What goes?’ and Jake said, ‘I got a hankerin’ to take my dog along.’ Before the sentence was finished, Caveny had leaped ashore and was bellowing, ‘Nero! Come here!’ And his voice was so penetrating that almost at once his Labrador dashed up, prepared for whatever adventure was afoot.
It was a pleasant cruise. The skipjack sailed slowly up to the far end of the Choptank to Old Man Twombly’s farm, where they found Greef and the watermelons waiting. His first cry from the rickety wharf concerned the gun: ‘How’s the big one doin’?’ And before he threw a line, Jake yelled back, ‘We’re gettin’ about seventy-seven ducks a go,’ and Greef replied with some contempt, ‘You ain’t usin’ enough shot.’
While the loading took place, the skipjack’s black cook caught himself a mess of crabs from the stern and fried up some crisp crab cakes. Greef brought down some cold beer and sat on deck with the watermen and their dogs, remembering old storms. Greef made the men a proposition: ‘Five years ago I planted me a line of peach trees, just to see. They’re producin’ major-like, and I want to risk a hundred baskets stowed on deck. You sell ’em, you keep half the cash.’ But when the peaches were aboard and the skipjack was ready for sailing, the old man took Jake aside and whispered, ‘With that gun, you load her right, you tamp her right, you ought to catch ninety ducks on the average.’
The passage across the bay was aromatic with the smell of peaches, and when the cargo reached the Long Dock, the A-rabs were waiting with their pushcarts, pleased to receive fresh melons but positively delighted with the unexpected peaches.
With their windfall profits, the two watermen trekked to the Rennert for a duck dinner, then visited Otto Pflaum and his wife, loaded up with fertilizer and sailed for home. As they quit the harbor they chanced to find themselves at the center of a triangle formed by three luxurious bay steamers, now lighted with electricity, and they admired the scintillating elegance of these fine vessels as they set out to penetrate the rivers which fed the bay.
‘Look at ’em go!’ Jake cried as the vessels went their individual ways, their orchestras sending soft music over the water.
‘Classic ships,’ Caveny said, and for most of an hour the Choptank men regarded the ships almost enviously.
The oystermen could not have imagined that these large ships would one day disappear entirely from this bay, as the Paxmore schooners had vanished and the Paxmore clippers. The classic ship that night was not the gaudy steamer but the quiet little skipjack, the boat conceived on the Chesapeake, tailored to its demands and adapted in every part to its conditions. It would endure after everything on the bay that night had gone to rust, for it was generic, born of the salt flats and heavy dredging, while the brightly lighted steamers were commercial innovations useful for the moment but bearing little relation to the timeless bay.
‘They disappear mighty fast,’ Caveny said as the lights merged with the waves.
Now the watermen were alone on the bay, and before long the low profile of the Eastern Shore began to rise in the moonlight, a unique configuration of marshland and wandering estuaries. ‘We really have the land of pleasant livin’,’ Turlock mused as his skipjack drifted in the night airs, but when they approached Devon Island he fixed his gaze at the western end of the island, where a multitude of trees lay wallowing in the tide.
‘I never noticed that before,’ he said. ‘That island’s gonna wash clean away, one of these storms.’
The watermen inspected the erosion, and Caveny said, ‘I read in a book that all our land on the Eastern Shore is alluvial …’
‘What’s that?’ Turlock asked suspiciously.
‘Land thrown here by the Susquehanna, when it was fifty times as big. You know what I think, Jake? I think long after we’re dead there ain’t gonna be no Eastern Shore. The land we know will wash into the ocean.’
‘How soon?’ Jake asked.
‘Ten thousand years.’
Neither man spoke. They were sailing over oyster beds for which they had fought, beds whose icy catch had numbed their hands and cut their fingers, bringing blood to their frozen mittens. Beyond that spit, barely visible in the night, the Laura Turner had capsized, six men lost. Over there the Wilmer Dodge had foundered, six men gone. Around the next headland, where ducks rafted in winter, the Jessie T had driven off the invaders from Virginia.
Softly the skipjack entered the Choptank. Jake’s Chesapeake still patrolled the bow, ready to repel invaders, but Caveny’s Labrador lay prone on the deck, his head close to Tim’s ankle, his dark eyes staring up at the Irishman with boundless love.
The return of geese to the Eastern Shore brought two men into confrontation. Amos Turlock believed that the huge birds had come back to him personally, and since his ancestors had hunted geese on the Choptank for more than three hundred years, he proposed to continue. Furthermore, he intended using the long gun which had blazed across these waters since 1827, and when the geese began to invade his marsh, as they had in his grandfather’s day, he figured it was time to check on The Twombly, hidden like the infant Moses in rushes.
Hugo Pflaum, the game warden responsible for the Choptank, began receiving indications that his brother-in-law Amos might be on the prowl. One resident reported having heard a tremendous blast at midnight ‘like the echo of Confederate cannon at Chancellorsville,’ and another had seen mysterious lights toward two in the morning, moving slowly up and down the river. Backwoods families began having goose with greater regularity than their legal huntsmen could have provided, and there were telltale traces of fresh corn on fields which geese had picked clean two months before. Worst of all, whenever Amos appeared at the store, he was smiling.
The law prohibiting his behavior was explicit, and he was breaking it in seven respects: he was using a long gun absolutely outlawed since 1918; he was using a night light which blinded the geese, something no decent gunner had done in the past hundred years; he was shooting at night, strictly forbidden; he was baiting his marsh and the field back or his cabin with great quantities of ripened corn; he was hunting out of season; he had no license; and he was selling dead geese commercia
‘The average crook,’ Hugo reported to his superiors in Annapolis, ‘lurks furtively, leaves a blazing trail that anyone could follow, and makes a score of mistakes. I’ve captured all the great guns but Turlock’s. I’ve arrested twenty-three farmers baiting their fields, and I doubt if there are three night-lights operating in the entire area. But this damned Amos Turlock, he does everything, every night, and I cannot catch him.’
‘The stories coming out of Patamoke, Hugo, are damaging your reputation,’ the regional manager said. ‘You want extra men?’
‘That I could use.’
So two extra wardens were dispatched to Patamoke, dressed flashily like ordinary dudes out of Philadelphia, and they approached Amos with an interesting proposition that he act as their guide for some goose hunting.
‘It’s out of season!’ he snapped.
‘We know that. But in Chestertown they assured us—’
‘In Chestertown they don’t know a goose from a duck.’ He dismissed them, then ran to the store to warn his cronies. ‘Two new wardens in town.’
‘How’d you know?’
‘They walked like wardens.’
So he laid low, and after two weeks the strangers returned to Baltimore, assuring the head office that they had thrown the fear of God into Amos Turlock. That night with one mighty blow The Twombly slew sixty-nine geese, and Turlocks eight miles upriver feasted.
The explosion of the gun was clearly heard in several homes facing Devon Island. ‘Sounded like maybe an airplane busting apart in the sky. We ran out, but it was all dark. Then we saw this light in Broad Creek and my husband got his field glasses, but by then the light had vanished.’
When Hugo returned to his office in the basement of the courthouse he studied his maps and concluded that Amos had shifted his operations away from his own creek and out into the spacious reaches of the major rivers. ‘Well,’ he muttered to himself, ‘that means he’s got to travel some distance with his cannon. That gives me a chance.’
Early one morning he slipped downriver in his powerboat to inspect the setting in which he would lay his traps, but on the return trip he spotted something which disturbed him almost as much as the reemergence of The Twombly. On the sloping field leading down from the Turlock cabin hundreds upon hundreds of wild geese were feeding, their fat bodies moving in the wintry sun, their long black necks extending now and then to watch for any trespassers. They had apparently been there a long time and gave every indication that they intended remaining; Amos had certainly baited this field with shelled corn.
Cautiously Hugo beached his boat, climbed ashore and moved toward the field. As he did, the goose sentinels spotted him, satisfied themselves that he had no gun, and quietly herded the flock to another part of the field. They maintained a distance of about forty yards; if the warden stopped, they stopped. If he moved, they gave him space, and this allowed him to inspect the field.
Not a grain of corn was visible; the geese were eating grass. If the field had been baited, it had been done with such exquisite timing that by two hours after sunrise every grain was gone.
But just as he was about to leave in disgust, Hugo decided to move to where the geese now clustered, eating furiously, and as before, when he made a motion toward that area, the stately geese retreated just far enough to keep out of range. Again he found no corn, but he did find something almost as interesting: on a bramble in the middle of the area in which the geese had been feeding most avidly he spied two heavy threads used in weaving canvas.
‘Damn!’ he growled, his thick neck jammed down into his collar as he stared at the signals: At midnight he rolls a hunk of canvas out here, covers it with corn, attracts a thousand geese, then rolls it up before dawn and leaves no sign. Except these. Carefully he lifted the strands of cloth from the bramble and decided that each night for the next week he would inspect these fields for corn spread out on canvas, which left no telltale marks.
‘Hey!’ a harsh voice called as he placed the evidence in his wallet.
It was Amos Turlock, with two of his sons. ‘What you doin’ on my land?’
‘Inspecting the clever way you bait your geese.’
‘No baitin’ here.’
‘The canvas, Amos. That’s an old trick and it’ll put you in jail.’
‘What jury …’ He allowed the sentence to hang, and Pflaum backed off. What jury, indeed, would indict a Choptank Turlock on the evidence of two strands of canvas webbing? In fact, what jury of men from the store would indict him if he marched along the wharf with The Twombly and sixty dead geese? Half the jury would expect to get one of the geese when they delivered their verdict: ‘Innocent.’
Hugo realized that since Turlock had been alerted, it would make no sense to try to catch him at the baiting game, but if the wily fellow could be tricked into using his gun, then Pflaum could confiscate it on sight without the necessity of a jury trial. So he allowed Amos to think that his focus was on canvas baiting; indeed, he came out two nights in a row to let the Turlocks know he was watching their fields, but what he was really watching was the cabin for some sign of where the family kept their long gun. He detected not a single clue.
On St. Patrick’s Day, after drinking several beers with young Martin Caveny, and nodding to Hugo Pflaum as he prepared to drive his eighteen-year-old Ford back to the cabin, Amos Turlock took a long nap, from about seven in the evening till midnight. He then rose, looked for his son Ben and his Chesapeake Rusty and led them into the marsh. The dog had long since learned to make no sound as they approached the area where the gun was hidden, but when he saw it safely loaded into the skiff that Amos used, he leaped joyously for the sturdier skiff in which Ben would ride to pick up the dead geese. He was so intent on helping his masters on another hunt that he failed to notice the faint scent of a stranger, a man in a rowboat lurking off the end of the marsh.
The three craft moved silently out into the Choptank, drifted westward for some time, the two skiffs oblivious of the trailing boat, which kept at a safe distance. At about three in the morning, when the crescent moon had set, the skiffs rounded a point not far from Peace Cliff, where the Quaker boatbuilders lived, and there on the bosom of the river waited a raft of some thousand geese chatting quietly in the night. The skiffs separated, the one with the dog lagging behind to wait for the explosion.
The major skiff, the one with the gun, eased its way toward the raft, making more noise than old Jake Turlock would ever have made. Now the justification for this carelessness became evident: Amos Turlock flicked a switch and a huge headlight set in a triangular, mirrored box flashed on, illuminating the masses of geese and freezing them into position. The light came at them so suddenly and with such reflected force that they were powerless to move. Aiming the skiff right at the heart of the motionless geese, Amos took a deep breath, kept his body away from the recoil of his monstrous weapon and pulled the trigger.
Only when the two skiffs were loaded with the seventy-seven geese and Rusty was back aboard, did Hugo Pflaum reveal himself. He had them now. At night. Long gun. Light. Seventy-seven birds. Out of season. He could put these two in jail for life, but when he moved in to make the arrest he found Amos Turlock pointing a large shotgun right at his chest.
‘Hugo, you ain’t seen nothin.’ You wasn’t out here tonight.’
With considerable courage Pflaum pointed his flashlight at the gun he was so determined to capture. There it was, resting insolently in its chock, its heavy butt jammed into the burlap bag of pine needles, the ancient slayer of waterfowl, the perpetrator of outrage. But protecting it was his brother-in-law Amos with a shotgun and a snarling Chesapeake.
‘Hugo, be a bright fellow and head home. Me and Ben won’t humiliate you. We won’t say a word at the store.’
Pflaum took a deep breath and rested on his oars, keeping his flashlight focused on The Twombly. He was almost close enough to touch it
With a regret that would burn for the rest of his life, the game warden dimmed his flashlight, cranked his outboard and started the noisy trip back to Patamoke.
December 1976 was fearfully cold, and even men in their eighties could recall no similar season when every expanse of water, from the merest creek to the great bay itself, froze solid. Winds howled down out of Canada with such heavy burdens of freezing air that thermometers dropped to historic lows, and the weather station at the mouth of the Choptank announced that this was the coldest winter ever recorded. Not even the remembered freezes of the 1670s surpassed this brutal year.
It was a trying time for the Steeds; Owen had promised his wife respite from the thundering winters of Oklahoma—‘You’ll find the Eastern Shore a gentle place … a little frost now and then.’ This became their theme during the protracted freeze. Mrs. Steed would rise, see the unbroken snow, the creeks frozen so solid that trucks could cross them, and she would say, ‘A little frost now and then.’
The long weeks of subfreezing weather—the whole month of January with the thermometer rarely above thirty-two—did not inconvenience the Steeds insofar as their own comfort was concerned. Their new home was snug; the fireplaces worked; the Turlock boy who cut wood from the forest kept a comforting stack beside the door; and it was rather fun to test oneself against the bitter cold. They walked together, bundled in ski suits, to all corners of their estate, and found delight in picking their way across frozen streams or pushing through marsh grass that crackled when they touched it. It was a challenging winter but one warm in associations, and they discovered that what they had hoped for back in Oklahoma was happening: they were growing closer to each other. They talked more; they watched television less; and certainly they spent more time together both indoors and out.