Chesapeake (136 page)

‘Insane,’ Amos said.

‘Tomorrow morning you and me are goin’ in town, and I’m gonna rent me an office. Stay with me and in ten years we’ll both be millionaires.’

‘You’re crazy! Rich people with yachts buyin’ this marshy land?’ Amos Turlock was too canny to be lured into a sure money-loser like that.

The abortive adventure into aviation had produced a secondary impact on another young man from the Choptank, for when the trial flights ended, the pilot had told Isaac Paxmore, ‘You got yourself a great plane. Thing to do, sell it to the Navy.’

‘How do we do that?’ the cautious Quaker asked.

‘Send one of your boys to the Navy Department in Washington. Lobby the admirals.’

‘I don’t think my sons …’

‘That kid in the blue suit. He was real smart about seaplanes.’

‘My brother’s son.’ A happy idea broke. ‘He’s a lawyer. Solid young man. We could send him.’

It was in this way that Pusey Paxmore, Harvard Law 1938, reached Washington. His father’s excellent reputation for work done in Germany, and his own wide acquaintance among the young lawyers then flooding the administrative agencies, assured his success, and very quickly he discovered that whereas he could not sell his uncle’s seaplane, he could sell himself.

The first person to suspect that Hiram Cater was suffering from mastoiditis was the woman who served as midwife for Frog’s Neck. Full-fledged doctors, of course, were not really available to the blacks, primarily because the doctors were white and did not relish having blacks traipsing into their offices where white patients might see them, but also because the fees charged were so high.

‘This here boy got infection of the ear,’ the midwife said during the second day of the child’s howling.

‘Cain’t see no pus,’ Julia said when she returned from her work bobbing crabs.

‘It don’t show like a ordinary boil. Down deep.’

‘What do we do?’ Julia asked, moving her big body wearily about the kitchen after the long day at the crab cannery.

‘Mostly they uses hot oil,’ the midwife said, and the two women prepared an unction, but they could not judge a proper temperature, and when they poured it into Hiram’s ear, the baby screamed.

Jeb was attempting to sleep after his own long day at the crab lines, and the crying brought him angrily into the kitchen. ‘What you doin’ to that boy?’

‘We fixin’ his ear,’ his wife explained.

‘Sound like you’re tearin’ it off,’ Jeb said, taking the boy into his arms.

Either the hot oil was working, bringing pain before relief, or it had missed the deep infection altogether, but whatever the situation, Hiram’s screaming increased. Jeb, unable to bear it, and racked by his own pain at his son’s suffering, carried the boy out into the yard and held him gently against him as he walked up and down, but when the howling went on, unabated, he shouted, ‘I’m takin’ this boy to the hospital.’

Through the dusty paths of the Neck he carried his crying baby, and onto the paved streets of the white section. Three times blacks stopped him to ask what he was doing, and to each he said, ‘My boy’s dyin’ of pain. Goin’ to the hospital.’

Patamoke Hospital was a rambling two-story red-brick affair which had grown by increments through the decades to serve a fairly large
surrounding community. It was staffed by dedicated local doctors and nurses with a southern concern for the welfare of their neighbors, and although the medical system was not well prepared to care for blacks, when one was sick enough to require hospitalization, the system grudgingly moved into operation even if the patient was too poor to pay. The problem was: how did the black patient get into the hospital?

Jeb Cater, for example, carried his child through the imposing white columns of what was obviously the entrance, but there he was stopped by a nurse who said, ‘In back. In back.’

She did not explain where in back the colored entrance was, and the building was composed of so many ells and alleys that Jeb could not easily find it. A black drayman hauling away soiled linen directed him, but when he reached the small door where the garbage was collected, he found it locked. The drayman left his truck to help Jeb attract attention, and after a while the door was opened. As soon as he gained entrance, good and reassuring things began to happen.

‘This child has an ear infection,’ a white nurse said, holding Hiram as carefully as if he were her own son. ‘What treatment have you been giving?’

Jeb did not understand the question and hesitated; the nurse categorized him as another ignorant nigger and asked gently, ‘Have you given him any medicine?’

‘They puts in hot oil.’

She looked at the ear and said, ‘Probably didn’t do any damage. The doctor’s got to look at this.’

‘I wants the bes’ doctor,’ Jeb said, and a few questions satisfied the nurse that whereas this black father could pay something, he could certainly not pay a proper bill, so she made the necessary notes on the entrance card. Then she used the telephone to summon a young doctor, who used a tightly wrapped cotton swab to test the baby’s ear.

‘Mastoiditis,’ he said.

‘Is that bad?’ Jeb asked.

‘Could be. If we don’t tend it.’ And with care and understanding, the young doctor explained that Hiram was suffering from an inflammation and possibly an abscess of the inner ear. There were ways to reduce the infection short of surgery, provided it had not penetrated bone, but if it had, an operation might be necessary. His words were so simple and comforting that Jeb was filled with emotion and sought to thank him, but this the young man would not allow—‘We’re here to cure your boy. We’ll do everything possible.’ He said nothing about fees or modes of payment; he simply took the child in his arms and left the room.

It was what happened next that made this day inerasable. When the doctor left the reception room for blacks he did not, of course, walk up
the stairs to the second floor, where the expensive rooms were, or even to the ground floor, where white charity cases were handled. Instead he walked down a flight of stairs to the boiler room, and beyond it to a small, cramped section whose ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes and whose illumination came from one unshielded light bulb dangling from a wire. The place had no windows.

It was here that Hiram was placed in a crib. When the doctor left, assuring Jeb that nurses would be there soon to care for the child, the father sat by the crib and looked at the accommodations, and as he did so he became aware that along the wall small cots held blacks requiring serious medical attention, and the meanness of the room, the confined anger it contained possessed him, and the longer he waited, the deeper his anger became.

It was forty minutes before the nurse appeared, and each of those minutes impressed on him anew the wrongness of this place. He did not want a sunny room high in a tower for his son; he knew he lacked the money to pay for such accommodation; but he did want decency: All my life I work for whatever wages white man give me. He decide my pay. If’n I ain’t got money to pay for a good room, that his decision. This cellar ain’t right.

The furnace providing hot water to the hospital came on and a low rumble filled the room, and then a flood of unnecessary heat, which clung to the cots, since no ventilation carried it away. After a while a black nurse appeared—she wasn’t really a nurse, of course, because black girls were not allowed to enroll in local training courses—and she lifted Hiram gently, advising Jeb, ‘You stay here, you likes. We be back with good news real soon.’

So he remained in the ward, talking with the bedridden, and each sick man or woman was so grateful at being in the hospital that none complained. And after a long time the nurse returned with Hiram, informing Jeb, ‘We’s gonna keep him four, five days. He gonna be all right.’

Jeb wanted to thank someone, press someone’s hand in gratitude, but there was no one; he wandered aimlessly up the stairs, looked about the reception room and went home.

Four of the doctors who administered Patamoke Hospital were outraged by such treatment of black patients; they had been educated in America’s best medical facilities—Jefferson in Philadelphia, Massachusetts General—and they knew that what they were doing was barbarous, but they were impotent. When it was proposed that blacks be moved into the general wards, the whites of Patamoke raised such a fury that the orderly operation of the hospital was jeopardized.

‘Any sensible man knows,’ Amos Turlock raged at the store, ‘that nigger blood is contaminated. Infected with cholera and suchlike.’

The young doctor who had treated Hiram Cater with such affectionate attention once tried to explain that blood was blood, but Amos was too smart to be taken in by such spuriousness. ‘You put nigger blood with white, it coagulates.’

The young doctor asked how it was that throughout the history of the Eastern Shore white blood and white genes had infused successfully with black, as the most cursory glance at the variations in color within the black community at the Neck would prove—

‘Don’t come at me with arguments like that!’ Turlock bellowed. ‘What happens is, the white blood is destroyed. Cholera and all that.’

Amos Turlock was deathly afraid of cholera, and he and others like him did not propose having it introduced into Patamoke Hospital. ‘They handle it just right like it is. No need to change. Keep the niggers in the cellar. And sterilize everything three times before it comes back upstairs.’

It was December, but Hugo Pflaum was sweating with excitement. Deep in the basement of Patamoke Courthouse he fidgeted in his swivel chair and looked with pride and chagrin at the row of fifteen photographs hanging in black frames against his wall. ‘There they are,’ he muttered nervously, ‘fifteen guns they said could never be captured, and Father and I brought ’em all in.’

They formed a gallery of which any game warden could be proud, fifteen long guns that had terrorized the Choptank: ‘Cheseldine, we found it hiding beneath a pigsty back in 1922. Reverdy, my father ran up and wrestled its owner in 1924.’ At the next photograph Hugo paused with real affection, for it showed the first gun he had captured by himself. ‘Took it along the Little Choptank. Herman Cline, once owned by the famous slave-breaker.’

But then his face darkened, for he had come to the two empty spaces reserved for Gun Sixteen and Gun Seventeen, and he could hear the acid voices of the men at the store chiding him, and not in jest: ‘Hugo, you’re mighty enterprisin’ when it comes to confiscatin’ other people’s guns, but the men have begun to notice that you don’t touch the guns operated by your own fambly.’

‘Yes, Hugo, how come your brother-in-law Caveny, he’s allowed to keep his gun? And Brother-in-law Turlock feels free to fire The Twombly when he wants.’

Amos Turlock’s gun was always referred to in this way, as if the honorific
The
proclaimed its noble heritage, oldest long gun in Maryland. Hugo realized that his reputation for integrity depended upon his bringing in that gun, and he complained to his wife, ‘My own relatives are making me look like an ass, Becky, and it’s got to stop. You march over to your brother Amos and your sister Nora and warn them that I got to lift their guns.’

He had spoken with such wounded dignity that she had gone to Amos, who had dismissed her with a snarl. ‘He comes at me, Beck, he’s gonna be delivered at your doorstep on a slab, feet first, and that ain’t idle chatter.’ So she had warned Hugo, ‘Stay clear of Amos, he’s mean.’

She had better luck in arguing with her sister Nora Caveny. ‘You got to help us capture the big gun, Nora. The old days are gone, and it would be a dreadful thing if your boy Patrick was arrested.’ The warning had been effective, and now Hugo waited in his office for the information which had been secretly promised; within the week he would have the Caveny in his possession!

Here came his informant, Nora Caveny, his sister-in-law and mother of that fine lad who was studying at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia. She was trembling. ‘I slipped into the courthouse as if I was payin’ me taxes,’ she said, out of breath. ‘I would be mortified if anyone saw me.’

‘You’re doin’ the right thing, Nora. Not only is the gun confiscated by law, but you’ve seen yourself how it near blinded your husband and how one like it killed old Jake.’

‘It’s a monstrous weapon, Hugo, and has no place in the hands of a young man intended for the priesthood.’

‘How’s he doin’?’

‘Honors, and after Christmas vacation he enters St. Charles Borromeo.’

‘In Rome?’

‘Not likely. Philadelphia. But if he does well there, he might make it to Rome.’

‘You must be proud.’

‘All mothers should have such sons.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And I intend protectin’ mine.’

‘Where does he have the gun?’

‘I’m not allowed to know. Before my husband went to jail he took Patrick aside and showed him where the precious thing was hidden. You’d think it was gold. Some of the Turlock men upriver know where it is and I think they use it at times. But no women are told.’

‘You think Patrick’s planning to use it tonight?’

‘I’m sure of it, Hugo. I heard him talkin’ with Jimmy Turlock, and you know him. All he thinks about is trappin’ muskrats and huntin’ ducks.’

‘Where will they be goin’?’

‘That I don’t know. There’s no ice, and Jimmy owns no marshland.’

‘Wish I had a better clue than that.’

‘The only other thing I know …’ She hesitated, wondering if what she was about to say carried any significance. ‘I heard him tell Jimmy to leave his Chesapeake behind. They wouldn’t be in heavy water.’

‘That’s important,’ Hugo said. ‘Means they’re not headin’ for the bay. That cuts my responsibilities in half.’

‘One thing,’ Nora said as she studied the rogues’ gallery. ‘You promised there’d be no photograph in the paper.’

‘I did, Nora.’

‘Him intendin’ for the priesthood, it wouldn’t be proper.’

‘There’ll be a photograph, of course. Has to be, to show the others they can’t use that kind no more. But I’ll take it with just me and the gun. It’ll hang over there.’ When it was properly in place, there would be only one vacancy, reserved for The Twombly, and as Hugo prepared to slip home for a long nap prior to his night’s work, he felt gratified that a photograph of the Caveny would soon be in place, but he feared that the seventeenth spot might remain vacant for a long time.