Chesapeake (123 page)

Jake had seen it, and had wondered what purpose it served; he could not have anticipated the insane proposal that Tim now made.

‘The trough fits in here, just below the powder entrances to the seven guns. We fill it with powder all the way acrost. At this end, we light it. Whoosh! It fires each of the seven guns in order, and we kill so many ducks we’re gonna need two extra skiffs.’

‘It’ll backfire and scorch you to death,’ Jake predicted.

‘It ain’t yet.’

‘You mean you fired this battery?’

‘Three times. And tonight we fire it at the biggest mess o’ ducks we can find.’

They paddled down the center of the Choptank, seeking a strong field of ice across which they could push their arsenal. North of Devon Island, where the rivers penetrating inland clustered, they found some, pulled their skiffs onto it and started the long, patient movement inland. Hey-You and Lucifer, each in his own skiff, made no noise, and when the hunters reached open water, everyone remained quiet for about half an hour, adjusting eyes to the darkness and allowing whatever birds lurked ahead to quieten.

Hey-You’s hackles rose, and Tim whispered, ‘It’s a congregation!’

‘We’ll move together,’ Jake proposed.

‘But I’m to shoot first,’ Tim said.

‘Damned right. I’ll be there to catch you when it blows you apart.’

The plan was for Tim to ignite his powder trough and, at the explosion of the first gun, for Jake to fire his monster. They calculated that Tim’s seven guns backed up by Jake’s would fire so nearly simultaneously that a curtain of lead would be thrown across the bay; few fowl would escape.

Each man eased himself into his skiff, instructed his dog where to sit, and started to work the small hand paddles. One could barely see the other, but an occasional hand signal indicated the preferred course, and slowly they approached the resting ducks. There were so many that Tim could not even estimate their number; all he knew was that they presented a worthy target.

As the time for lighting his powder train approached he muttered a
brief prayer: ‘Dearest God who protects watermen, don’t let nothin’ spook ’em.’

The ducks slept. The two skiffs moved silently into position. The dogs sat with every muscle tensed. And the men lay prone, their faces close to their guns. There was no moon, no snow.

Gently, but with his hands trembling, Tim Caveny spread the calculated amount of powder along his iron trough, checked it to be sure it nestled properly under the orifices of his seven guns, then lit the right-hand end. With a powerful flash, the powder leaped from gun to gun, and as the first one exploded, Jake Turlock fired his monster.

From the point of view of massacring ducks, the timing had been exquisite, for the powder had ignited three of Tim’s guns before Jake could fire his. This meant that at the first flash, hundreds of ducks had risen into the air, only to be knocked down by Jake’s great gun, then punished by the last four guns in Tim’s arsenal.

Never before had there been such carnage on the Chesapeake. In fact, the two dogs brought so many ducks to the skiffs that they showed signs of sinking; the watermen ferried dead birds to the ice shelf, stashed them and returned to fetch others. The dogs were exhausted.

Next morning, when the count was made, the partners had sixty-nine canvasbacks, thirty-two mallards, thirty blacks, twenty-nine teal and thirteen geese that they could ship to Baltimore. In addition, they had twenty-two pintails which they would sell for a few pennies each to the Negroes living in Frog’s Neck, and a score of mergansers, which no one would eat because they fed on fish. Tim’s imaginative arsenal, so dangerous to use, so lethal when used, had proved its merit, so the two watermen continued to fell trees by day and fire their cannon at night. Whatever money they obtained from Baltimore, they turned over to Paxmore.

As winter ended and the ducks flew north, Gerrit Paxmore finished building his first skipjack, and when it was launched he told the two watermen, ‘This boat will sail better than any in the bay.’ Turlock and Caveny were prepared to believe this, but they were taken aback when the Quaker added, ‘I’ve kept thy money in our office. I’m prepared to hand it back, because thee doesn’t have to take this boat … if thee doesn’t wish.’

‘Why wouldn’t we?’ Turlock asked angrily.

‘Because,’ Paxmore said quietly, ‘I’ve done something with the centerboard.’

The three men went aboard and climbed down into the hold where they could inspect the bottom of the boat, and there Turlock and Caveny saw the damnedest thing their eyes had ever met. Instead of placing the centerboard in the middle of the keel—cutting a slim hole fourteen feet long right through the heart of the oak, then building around it what boatmen called the trunk to keep out the water—Paxmore had left the
keel untouched, as the tradition of his family required, but had cut a hole parallel to it, thus offsetting the centerboard some eight inches to starboard.

‘You goddamned fool!’ Turlock shouted. ‘This boat’s off center. It’ll never …’

‘Friend,’ Paxmore said gently, ‘thee has no need to swear. Thy deposit is waiting.’

‘But goddamnit, I asked you plain and simple about the centerboard. And you told me in your own words … Didn’t he, Tim?’

‘He sure as hell did. Why, this damned thing—it’s a cripple.’

‘Please, gentlemen. Speak less roughly. Thy money—’

‘To hell with our money! We want our boat.’

‘Thee is not obligated …’

It was dark in the bowels of the skipjack and the three men seemed like angry ghosts. The centerboard was sadly awry; indeed, to call it a center anything was ridiculous. The whole balance of the boat was destroyed, and Caveny could visualize it sailing crabwise down the bay. Tears came into his eyes, and he showed Paxmore his hands, blistered for months. ‘We chopped every goddamned timber in this boat. And what do we get?’

‘A ——— washtub,’ Turlock said, using the foulest word he could conjure.

It was this ultimate obscenity that awakened Paxmore to the fact that he was in real trouble. He had assumed that by merely offering the men their money, he would be relieved of difficulties with his unusual craft; certainly he could peddle it to someone else, perhaps at a minor loss, and with the funds thus received, pay the two watermen for their work in felling trees.

‘No!’ Turlock said grimly. ‘We want our boat and we want it now. You take that goddamned centerboard out of there and you put it in here, where it belongs.’

‘That I will not do,’ Paxmore said, and as he spoke his right hand fell protectively upon the unblemished keel, and only then did Tim Caveny realize that this unpleasant Quaker loved the new craft as much as he and Jake did.

‘What we might do,’ Tim suggested, ‘is take her for a trial.’ Turlock did not want to do this, lest he like the results, but Paxmore encouraged the idea. However, Tim had an additional idea: ‘Suppose we do accept it, damaged though it is? How much reduction in cost?’

‘Not one penny,’ Paxmore said. ‘This is the finest boat on the bay, and if truth were told, thee should pay me an extra two hundred.’

‘You are a son-of-a-bitch,’ Turlock growled, and as he climbed out of the hold he said, ‘I want to be let off this boat. I want nothin’ to do with a goddamned washtub.’

‘Let’s give it a trial,’ Tim pleaded, and he began to haul the mainsail,
and every pulley, every rope worked so perfectly that he said, ‘They’re right. A sail like this does raise easier.’

They raised the jib, too, and then they swung the gigantic boom, two feet longer than the boat that supported it, and they could feel the power of the canvas overhead. There was a good breeze, and Caveny and Paxmore moved the skipjack into the middle of the Choptank—Turlock wouldn’t touch sail or wheel—and she began to lay over to starboard, and the water broke white, and seagulls followed the new craft, and after a long while Turlock muscled his way aft and shoved Caveny away from the wheel.

Paxmore sat on the hatch covering, saying nothing. He could feel his boat responding to the waves and could visualize just how she accommodated to the wind. When Turlock called from the wheel, ‘I think she needs more ballast forward,’ Paxmore said, ‘I think so, too.’

They christened her the
Jessie T,
after Jake’s mother, and before she took her first trip oystering, the conventions governing skipjacks were installed: ‘No color of blue ever to board this boat. No red brick ever to be used as ballast. No walnuts to be eaten. No hatch cover ever to be placed on deck upside down.’ And because of the extremely low railing and the massiveness of the boom, larger by far than that on any other type of vessel sailing the Chesapeake: ‘Above all, when you work on deck, mind the boom!’

The
Jessie T
was worked by a crew of six: Captain Jake Turlock, in command of the craft and responsible for her safety; First Mate Tim Caveny, who took care of the money; three Turlocks, who manned the dredges in which the oysters were caught; and the most important member, the cook. From the day the boat was planned to the moment when the three Turlocks were hired, there had been only one candidate for cook: a remarkable black man renowned along the Choptank.

He was Big Jimbo, an unusually tall Negro, son of the slaves Cudjo and Eden Cater. From his father he had learned to read and from his mother to carry himself with fierce pride. He was a gentle man, given to humor, and because of his rare ability with a ship’s stove he knew that he was as good as the captain and better than the crew.

He resolved one possible difficulty the instant he came aboard. On a skipjack the three crewmen slept forward in cramped quarters. The captain, cook and mate—in that order—divided the three good bunks aft among themselves, and it had become traditional for the captain to choose the extra-long bunk to the starboard, the cook to take the next best one to port, with the mate getting the somewhat less convenient bunk across the back of the cabin; but on the
Jessie T
things worked out a little differently: one of the Turlocks who should have slept forward
was a close cousin of Jake’s and he announced that he would sleep aft, because he was sure the nigger wouldn’t mind berthing in the smaller quarters.

So when Big Jimbo came aboard he found his bunk taken. Without even a second’s hesitation, he politely lifted the gear out, placed it on deck and said, ‘Cain’t no man cook if’n he sleeps forward.’

He had made a mistake, and a serious one. The gear he had thrown out of the aft cabin was not the intruder’s, but Tim Caveny’s, the co-owner of the skipjack. When the Turlock lad had decided to move aft, Tim had seen a chance to promote himself into a better bunk, so he had preempted the cook’s and had diverted Jake’s cousin into the shorter aft bunk. When Tim saw his gear being thrown on deck, he started to raise hell, but Big Jimbo said softly, ‘Mister Tim, if’n that’s yours, I do apologize,’ and he was more than polite in returning it to the cabin, where he placed it not in the bunk that Tim had chosen, but in the aft one.

‘I sort of thought I’d sleep here,’ the Irishman said tentatively, pointing to the cook’s longer bunk.

‘Cook sleeps here,’ Big Jimbo said, and he used his words so sweetly that even the displaced owner was charmed. And then, before any ill feeling could develop, Jimbo assembled the crew on deck and said, ‘I brung me some milk and some cream, so we gonna have the world’s best arster stew. You want she-stew or he-stew?’

‘You cain’t tell a she arster from a he,’ one of the Turlocks said.

‘I ain’t talkin’ about the arsters. I’se talkin’ about the eaters.’ He smiled benignly at the watermen and asked, ‘What’s it to be, she or he?’

‘What’s the difference,’ one of the men asked.

‘That ain’t for you to ask.’

‘We’ll take he.’

‘Best choice you ever made,’ Jimbo said, and he disappeared down the hatch leading to his wood stove.

A she-stew was the traditional one served throughout the Chesapeake: eight oysters per man, boiled ever so slightly in their own liquor, then in milk and thickened with flour, flavored with a bit of celery, salt and pepper. It was a great opening course but somewhat feeble for workingmen.

A he-stew was something quite different, and Big Jimbo mumbled to himself as he prepared his version, ‘First we takes a mess of bacon and fries it crisp.’ As he did this he smelled the aroma and satisfied himself that Steed’s had sold him the best. As it sizzled he chopped eight large onions and two hefty stalks of celery, holding them back till the bacon was done. Deftly he whisked the bacon out and put it aside, tossing the vegetables into the hot oil to sauté. Soon he withdrew them, too, placing them with the bacon. Then he tossed the forty-eight oysters into the pan,
browning them just a little to implant a flavor, then quickly he poured in the liquor from the oysters and allowed them to cook until their gills wrinkled.

Other ship’s cooks followed the recipe this far, but now Big Jimbo did the two things that made his he-stew unforgettable. From a precious package purchased from the McCormick Spice Company on the dock in Baltimore he produced first a canister of tapioca powder. ‘Best thing ever invented for cooks’ in his opinion. Taking a surprisingly small pinch of the whitish powder, he tossed it into the milk, which was about to simmer, and in a few minutes the moisture and the heat had expanded the finely ground tapioca powder into a very large translucent, gelatinous mass. When he was satisfied with the progress he poured the oysters into the milk, tossed in the vegetables, then crumbled the bacon between his fingers, throwing it on top.

The sturdy dish was almost ready, but not quite. From the McCormick package he brought out a packet of saffron, which he dusted over the stew, giving it a golden richness, augmented by the half-pound of butter he threw in at the last moment. This melted as he brought the concoction to the table, so that when the men dug in, they found before them one of the richest, tastiest stews a marine cook had ever devised.

‘Do we eat this good every day?’ Caveny asked, and Big Jimbo replied, ‘You brings me the materials, I brings you the dishes.’

Dredging oysters was hard work, as events during the winter of 1892 proved. The season was divided into two halves, October to Christmas, when the oysters were plentiful, and January to the end of March, when they were more difficult to find. Since the
Jessie T
had an all-Patamoke crew, it returned to that port each Saturday night, bringing huge catches of oysters for sale to the local packing plants, and because those who sailed the skipjack were devoutly religious—even the profane Turlocks—they did not sneak out of port late on Sunday afternoon, as some did, but waited till Monday morning, an act of devotion for which they expected God to lead them to the better beds.