Chesapeake (122 page)

Night after night Jake and Tim lurked at the edge of the ice, waiting for the ducks to raft up so that the gun could be fired, and as the barrels filled with canvasbacks and mallards, so their pockets filled with dollars, and they began to think seriously about acquiring a real boat in which they could branch out.

‘There’s a man on Deal Island, got hisse’f a new kind of boat,’ Turlock said one morning as they were packing their ducks.

‘What’s special?’

‘Claims it’s the best type ever built for the Chesapeake. Made especially for drudgin’.’

Time out of mind, watermen of the Chesapeake had used two words with unique pronunciation. There was no such thing as an oyster, never had been. It was an arster, and to call it anything else was profanation. And a man did not dredge for arsters, he drudged them. Jake and Tim proposed to become arster drudgers, and the boat they had in mind was ideal for their purpose.

It put in to Patamoke one day, and Turlock ran to the Paxmore Boatyard and asked Gerrit Paxmore to join him in inspecting it. ‘This is quite remarkable,’ the Quaker said. And he began to analyze what the Deal Island men had done.

‘Very shallow draft, so it can go anywhere on the flats. Single mast far forward, but look how it’s raked! Gives them a triangular sail. More room on deck. Also allows the tip of the mast to hang over the hold, so that they can drop a line and haul cargo out. Enormous boom to give them drudging power. Very low freeboard, so they won’t have to hoist the arsters too far, and it looks like it could sleep six.’

But then his practiced eye saw something he definitely did not like. ‘She has no protruding keel, which accounts for her shallow draft, but she does have a retractable centerboard. I don’t like that, not at all.’

‘She has to have,’ Turlock said. ‘To counterbalance the sail.’

‘I know, but to insert a centerboard, you’ve got to penetrate the keel.’

‘What’s the fault in that?’

‘At Paxmore’s we never touch the keel.’ He looked at an old boat tied to the wharf, its backbone hogged. ‘Our boats don’t do that.’

He would not discuss the new craft any further, but returned to his yard; Turlock, however, asked the captain if he could serve on the next oystering, and the Deal Island man said, ‘Come aboard,’ so Jake dredged for six days, and when he came ashore he told Caveny, ‘That’s the finest boat’s ever been built. It helps you work.’

So they went back to Paxmore, and Tim listened as his partner extolled the new craft. ‘Mr. Paxmore, that boat helps you drudge. You can feel that huge boom bendin’ to the job.’

But Paxmore was adamant. ‘I would never feel comfortable, building a boat whose keel had been half-severed.’

‘Suppose you don’t feel comfortable? How about us? We’re buyin’ the boat.’

‘I build by my own principles,’ Paxmore said. ‘If someone else can use my boat when she’s built, good. If not, I’m ready to wait till the proper buyer comes along.’

Jake stepped back, looked at the self-satisfied Quaker and said, ‘You’ll go out of business in six months.’

‘We’re in our third century,’ Paxmore said, and he would not discuss boatbuilding any further.

As a matter of fact, the question almost became academic one wintry February night when the two watermen had crept out to a spacious lagoon in the ice; there must have been three thousand ducks rafted there beneath a frozen late-rising moon. Caveny became aware of how cold it was when Lucifer left his spot on the gunwale and huddled in the bottom of the skiff. Hey-You turned twice to look at his cowardly companion, then moved to the middle of the bow as if obliged to do the work of two.

Jake, seeing this tremendous target before him—more ducks in one spot than they had ever found before—decided that he would use not a pound and a half of shot but almost twice that much. ‘I’ll rip a tunnel through the universe of ducks.’ But to propel such a heavy load he required an extra-heavy charge, so into the monstrous gun he poured more than a pound of black powder. He also rammed home a double wadding. ‘This is gonna be a shot to remember. Rennert’s will owe us enough money to pay for our boat.’

Cautiously he moved his lethal skiff into position, waited, took a deep breath and pulled the trigger.

‘Whoooom!’
The gun produced a flash that could have been seen for miles and a bang that reverberated across the bay. The tremendous load of shot slaughtered more than a hundred and ten ducks and seven geese. It also burst out the back of Jake’s skiff, knocked him unconscious and threw him a good twenty yards aft into the dark and icy waters.

The next minutes were a nightmare. Caveny, having seen his partner fly through the air during the brief flash of the explosion, started immediately to paddle in the direction of where the body might fall, but the two dogs, trained during their entire lives to retrieve fallen birds, found themselves involved with the greatest fall of ducks they had ever encountered, and they refused to bother with a missing man.

‘Goddamnit!’ Caveny yelled. ‘Leave them ducks alone and find Jake.’

But the dogs knew better. Back and forth they swam on their joyous mission, gathering ducks at a rate they had never imagined in their twitching dreams.

‘Jake! Where in hell are you?’

In the icy darkness he could find no way of locating the drowning man; all he knew was the general direction of Jake’s flight, and now, in some desperation, he began sweeping the area—with almost no chance of finding his mate.

But then Lucifer swam noisily to the skiff, almost reprimanding Tim for having moved it away from the fallen ducks, and after he had thrown two ducks into the skiff, he swam casually a few yards, grabbed the
unconscious and sinking Turlock by an arm, hauled him to the skiff, and returned quickly to the remaining ducks.

When Tim finally succeeded in dragging Jake aboard, he could think of nothing better to do than to slap the unconscious man’s face with his icy glove, and after a few minutes Jake revived. Bleary-eyed, he tried to determine where he was, and when at last he perceived that he was in Caveny’s skiff and not his own, he bellowed, ‘What have you done with the gun?’

‘I been savin’ you!’ Tim yelled back, distraught by this whole affair and by the mangled ducks that kept piling into his skiff. ‘To hell with me. Save the gun!’

So now the two watermen began paddling furiously and with no plan, trying to locate the other skiff, and after much fruitless effort Jake had the brains to shout, ‘Hey-You! Where are you?’

And from a direction they could not have anticipated, a dog barked, and when they paddled there they found a sorely damaged skiff almost sinking from the weight of its big gun and the many ducks Hey-You had fetched.

On the doleful yet triumphant return to Patamoke, Tim Caveny could not help pointing out that it had been his Labrador who had saved Turlock’s life, but Jake growled through the ice festooning his chin, ‘Granted, but it was Hey-You that saved the gun, and that’s what’s important.’

The partners now had enough money for a serious down payment on an oyster dredger, but before they made a contract with any boatbuilder, Jake wanted Tim to sail aboard one of the Deal Island innovations, so they shipped with a mean-spirited gentleman from that island, and Tim came home convinced that no boat but one of that type would satisfy him.

But he had also learned that the best boats on the bay were those built by Paxmore’s, always had been, and he was not willing to settle for second-best. He therefore launched a campaign to convince his partner that they must do business with the Quaker, no matter what his idiosyncrasies. ‘Let him build the boat however he wants. He’ll do it right.’

Jake was obdurate. ‘The three boats I seen are just what we want. I won’t have no details sacrificed to any square-headed Quaker thinks he can improve the breed.’

For a week the two watermen could not even agree to take their big gun out for ducks, and no barrels were shipped to the Rennert. Then Tim counted their savings, concluded that it was safe to go ahead, and reluctantly agreed that since Paxmore refused to make what they wanted, they must give their commission to some other builder. Tim was not happy with this decision but was prepared to go ahead with it. And then one
morning, as they argued as to which of the alternative builders they would employ, a boy came with news that Mr. Paxmore wanted to see them.

It was a strange but very Choptank trio that convened. Gerrit Paxmore was the youngest of the three—stiff, wearing black shoes, heavy black trousers and waistcoat. He suffered from a forbidding countenance that rarely broke into a smile, and he spoke precisely, as if recording every word against some possible future challenge, at which time he would be prepared not only to explain it but to fulfill it. Patrons soon discovered that to do business with Paxmore was not easy, but it was reassuring.

Jake Turlock had his family’s leanness, height and sour visage. He wore run-over shoes, baggy trousers, torn shirt and smashed hat, items which he rarely changed. He could read and write, having been well taught by the first Caveny from Ireland, but he posed as an illiterate. He hated Negroes and Catholics but found himself consistently thrown in with them, and much to his surprise, liked the individuals with whom he worked. He was, for example, convinced that Tim Caveny, as a Papist, was an insidious type, but he had never discovered any other man with whom it was so comforting to work. Tim had forced him to save money; had saved his life when the big gun blew out the back of the skiff; and up to now had proved reliable in emergencies. But Jake felt certain that when a real crunch came, Caveny would be found wanting.

Tim was much like his father, old Michael, the schoolteacher of indomitable optimism. He was inclined to be pudgy, lazy and preposterous. He loved his church and his family; but he loved even more the concept of sticking everlastingly to the job at hand. He was, in his own way, as much a puritan as Gerrit Paxmore, which was why these two men understood each other. Tim was invariably willing to bet his money that
his
nigger would outfight the other, that
his
dog would retrieve more doves, that
his
boat would outsail any other on the bay. He existed in a world of perpetual challenge, in which he constantly faced men who were bigger than he or had more money. But since he was Irish, a reliable margin of good luck hung over him like an aura. He strove for the best, and the best sometimes happened.

It was he who opened the conversation that morning. ‘Mr. Paxmore, we’ve decided—’

‘We’ve decided nothin’, Turlock interrupted.

‘Perhaps I can assist thee,’ Paxmore said gently. ‘I’ve consulted with my men, and we want to try our hands at one of these new boats. What does thee call them?’

‘Skipjack,’ Turlock said.

‘After the fish that skips over the water,’ Tim interposed. ‘And it does, Mr. Paxmore. This boat skims.’

‘So we’ve decided, here at Paxmore’s …’ He coughed, placed his
hands on the desk as if confessing all, and said, ‘We’ll build thy boat.’

‘Centerboard in position?’ Turlock asked. ‘Of course.’

‘How much?’ Caveny asked.

‘We think we can do it …’ With almost a visible shudder he looked at the two supplicants, who could not possibly have the money required, then said in a whisper, ‘We could do it for twelve hundred dollars.’

As soon as the words were uttered, Tim Caveny slapped down a bundle of bills. ‘We can pay five hundred and forty dollars on deposit.’

This was more than twice what Paxmore had expected, and with an astonishment he could not control he asked, ‘Where did thee acquire so much?’ and Caveny said, like a fellow industrialist, ‘We’ve been savin’ it.’

Jake Turlock hated to surrender cash. ‘Would it be cheaper, Mr. Paxmore, if me and Tim was to provide you with your timber?’

‘It would indeed!’

‘How much cheaper?’

‘Thee would include keel, mast, boom?’

‘You give us the length. We have the trees.’

Paxmore studied a paper which betrayed the fact that he wanted to build this boat no matter what the profit: he had a complete sketch of an improved skipjack, waiting to be transformed into a sleek bay craft. ‘Mast, at least sixty-five feet tall, two feet in diameter at the thirty-foot mark, to allow for trimming.’

‘I have my eye on just the tree,’ Jake said.

‘Boom fifty-three feet.’

‘That’s awful long for a boom. Longer than the boat itself.’

‘That’s the design. Bowsprit a good twenty-two feet.’

‘She’s gonna be very top-heavy, with those dimensions,’ Turlock said.

‘She’ll be ballasted,’ Paxmore assured him, but he had not yet said how much reduction he would allow if Turlock cut the timber from the woods behind his marsh.

‘The savin’s?’ Jake asked.

‘Thee will save three hundred and fifty dollars.’

‘Tim,’ the waterman said, ‘get us some axes.’

The work the two men did in the ensuing weeks was awesome, for not only did they chop down oaks and loblollies during the day; they also took their long gun out each night, because only by constantly supplying the Rennert with barrels of ducks could they discharge the remaining debt on the skipjack. In addition to all this, Tim Caveny, in any spare moments, was constructing something that was about to shock the bay.

He worked in secret with his oldest boy, hammering at pipes, spending hours at a forge in town. The only indication Jake caught that his partner was up to something came one dawn when he helped lift mallards and
canvasbacks from Tim’s skiff. ‘What you doin’ with them extra struts?’

‘I got me an idea,’ the Irishman said, but he confided nothing.

And then one night as the watermen went down to their skiffs, Caveny revealed his masterpiece. From the front of his boat protruded not one but seven guns, each with a barrel two inches in diameter. They fanned out like the tail of a turkey gobbler, coming together where the triggers would normally be. There were no triggers. ‘That’s my invention. What we do is load the seven guns—powder, pellets and tampin’, all in order.’

‘How you gonna fire ’em? Jake asked.

‘Ah ha! See this little iron trough?’