Chesapeake (148 page)

‘That’s hardly what I had in mind,’ Steed replied.

‘You could lease them out and earn back your taxes.’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

‘What I mean, with the exposures you have, the geese are going to flock here. You could pick up six, seven thousand dollars a year for hunting permissions.’

Ethel Steed interrupted by wanting to know where she could find someone to drive four pilings into the creek bed, and her husband asked, ‘Whatever for?’ and she said cryptically, ‘You’d never believe what the men at the store told me,’ and when the pilings were driven she wanted to know where she could locate an ironworker to forge her some shallow steel baskets. This was too much, and Steed demanded to know what foolishness she was up to, and she teased, ‘Wait till spring comes, and you’ll see something striking … if the men at the store weren’t pulling my leg.’

It was a long wait. 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.

The difficult part of the winter came with the birds. One morning Ethel
Steed rose to look out her window at the familiar scene of snow and ice and saw to her horror that a whole congregation of ducks had gathered on the left fork of the creek, trying futilely to break the ice so that they could feed.

‘Owen! Look at this!’ He joined her and saw that these creatures were famished. For six weeks they had been cut off from grasses at the bottom of creeks and rivers; they had been able to dive for nothing; their feeding places were frozen solid.

The Steeds put in urgent phone calls to their neighbors, and the advice they got was concise and harsh: ‘Mr. Steed, thousands of birds are perishing. Worst place of all is the creeks around your home. What to do? Feed them, damnit. Buy all the corn you can afford and scatter it along the edges of the ice.’

Without waiting for breakfast, they jumped into their station wagon, maneuvered it carefully down frozen roads and hurried out into the country east of Patamoke. They stopped at a dozen different farms, begging for corn, and when they had purchased a load which tested the springs of their Buick, they directed other farmers to the Refuge, buying from them as much corn as they could deliver.

They hurried home with their cargo, broke open the bags and began scattering the corn broadcast along the ice, and before they were half through with their work, great flocks of ducks and geese moved in, sometimes to within six feet of where they worked, and it was clear that the birds were starving.

For three days the Steeds bought corn, spending more than a thousand dollars, but when they saw how desperately the fowl needed it, how hungrily they waited for the Steeds to appear, they felt more than rewarded. Never before had they seen waterfowl at such close quarters, and when a flock of seventeen white swans flew in, emaciated and near death, Mrs. Steed broke into tears.

Her husband halted this in a hurry. ‘Let’s get the axes and break a hole in the ice. Those birds are dying for water.’

So in their fashionable hunting togs they worked until heavy sweat poured from their bodies, trying to hack an open space in ice two feet thick, and then Owen had an idea: ‘I remember a Currier and Ives print in which they sawed the ice.’ He fetched a long saw, and after making a hole in the ice, widened it out to an opening about ten feet on the side. Before he was done, more than three hundred birds had flown in to compete for the water.

For two days the Steeds did little but stay at the hole, watching the splendid birds as they ate and bathed. ‘They’ll explode!’ Ethel Steed said, but the birds continued to gorge themselves. Then she began trying to identify them; with the aid of color plates she was able to spot the green-headed mallard and the copper-headed canvasback, but that was
about all. There were at least twelve other breeds which her husband could rattle off: ‘Black, gadwall, redhead, teal, scaup …’ Once he had hunted ducks with a powerful gun and good eye; now he was content to feed them.

It was while endeavoring to explain the difference between a buffle-head and a baldpate that he had his bright idea. Running to the house, he telephoned Annapolis and after some delay got Admiral Stainback. ‘Spunky, this is Owen Steed. Tulsa. Yes, good to hear you, too. Spunky, can you hire me a helicopter? I know you can’t get hold of a Navy one. But there must be …’

The admiral, a crisp Oklahoma man who had done much business with Steed’s company, wanted to know why his old friend should need a helicopter, and when Owen explained that it was a mission of mercy, saving a hundred thousand geese, he said, ‘Hell, that would justify one of our choppers!’ And he asked for specific landing instructions.

Within an hour a Navy helicopter landed at the Refuge, within fifteen feet of the barn, and was loaded with bags of corn. Admiral Stainback sat in back with Ethel, while Owen rode co-pilot to do the navigating. With graceful ease the chopper lifted into the air, tilted to starboard and swept at low altitude up one river after another, while the passengers in back ripped open bags of corn, scattering the golden kernels across the frozen rivers.

It was a trip that dazzled the Steeds: each pond of water, no matter how small, reflected from its icy surface the shimmering rays of the sun; each cove was a frozen diadem. Marvelously attractive were the thin strands of rivulets which in summer would go undetected; in frozen splendor they shone like veins of silver. The relationship of water to land was sharply defined; the mystery of the Eastern Shore lay revealed, this wedding of snow-covered land and bejeweled rivers.

Even when the bags were empty and their muscles tired, the Steeds did not want the flight to end, for they were seeing a wilderness of beauty that might never be repeated. Generations could pass before the shore would again be frozen as it was this day, so when Admiral Stainback asked on the intercom, ‘Shall we head back now?’ Owen said into his microphone, ‘I’d like to see how the Choptank develops,’ and Stainback said, ‘Said and done. Pilot, fly to the headwaters.’

With lovely, falling, sideways motion the helicopter dipped low toward the mouth of the frozen river, then turned east and flew slowly up the river that Steeds had occupied for so long. There was the mansion, half eaten away by summer storms, its widow’s walk collapsed. There was Peace Cliff and the red roofs of Sunset Acres, where the marsh had been. Here were the gaping, rusted girders of what had been the Paxmore Boatyard, and beyond it the new red-brick homes in Frog’s Neck, replacing
the burned-out wooden shacks. But it was east of Patamoke that the Choptank became most memorable, for here vast marshes spread along the shore, marked now and then by rotting piers to which the ancient steamboats had come, all white and silver and shot with romance; now the pilings were eaten to the waterline and silt filled the harbors where women in bombazine had once waited for their lovers returning from Baltimore. How noisy it had been then; how silent now.

There were the long stretches of river totally unoccupied, looking much as they had in 1700, and up toward the end the vast, rusting sheds at Denton where huge riverboats had once brought their cargos of guano from Peru. Beyond lay the flat fields of Delaware in which the river rose, and beyond them the vast Atlantic Ocean, whose waters salted the Chesapeake and all its estuaries.

As they flew at a few hundred feet above this frozen wonderland, Ethel saw from time to time some hole broken in the ice by mysterious forces; often the opening was no larger than a tennis court, but about it clustered thousands of birds, desperate for water, and often, at a distance from the opening, lay swans and geese and ducks whose feet had frozen to the ice, holding them prisoner till they died.

‘We can go home now,’ Owen said from his front seat, and like a homing pigeon the helicopter twirled, found its heading and crossed frozen fields to the Refuge.

There was one aspect of that fearful winter to which the Steeds would never refer; it was too painful.

One morning as Owen was shaving he heard the mournful cry of the heron—
‘Kraannk, kraannk!’
—and he looked out to see two gaunt birds, whose habits he had studied with loving attention, land on the ice and walk in long awkward steps to those spots at which they had so often fed, hoping to find them free of ice, that they might fish.

Desperately they pecked at the unyielding surface. Then, with mounting terror, for they were starving, they hammered at the ice with their feet, a kind of death-dance. Accomplishing nothing, they pecked again, their long necks driving sharp bills with a force which would have broken normal ice. But this was different, and the poor birds moved from spot to spot, frustrated.

‘Darling!’ Steed called to Ethel in the bedroom. ‘We’ve got to do something for the herons.’

‘Are they back?’

‘They were. Trying to find open water.’

‘Why don’t they eat the corn? Or go where the ducks are?’ The water at the big opening was too deep for them to fish; corn was a food they did not eat. What they required was some wading place in
which they could feed in their accustomed manner, and across the entire Eastern Shore there were no such places.

The Steeds would make one. All morning they sweated at the onerous job of breaking ice along the shore, and by noon they had laid open a considerable waterway. They were eating a late lunch when they heard the familiar and now-loved cry, and they ran to the window to watch their friends feed.

But in those few minutes ice had formed again and the birds found nothing. In panic they tested all their feeding places, and all were barren.

‘What will they do?’ Mrs. Steed cried, tears in her eyes.

Owen, studying the birds with his glasses, saw how emaciated they were, but had not the courage to inform his wife of their certain doom. The herons, stepping along like ballerinas grown old, tried one last time to penetrate the ice, looked down in bewilderment and flew off to their frozen roosts. They were seen no more.

During the first five months of residence at the Refuge, Owen Steed followed one invariable rule. Whenever he left the plantation in his car, he turned right, even though an excellent road ran to the left toward various places he would normally have wished to visit. But that road also led past the Paxmore place, and he was not yet ready for such an excursion. But in February he relaxed, and one morning told his wife, ‘I think it’s about time I saw Pusey,’ and she replied, ‘I was wondering how long you could delay.’

He dressed carefully, as if for hunting, heavy shoes, rough tweed jacket, canvaslike trousers, a hound’s-tooth cap. He wanted to appear casual, with no touch of the business administrator, but when he looked at himself in the hall mirror he felt disgusted: Totally fake. And he returned to his dressing room for khaki pants, plaid shirt and corduroy jacket: At least I look honest. He winced at the inappropriateness of this word.

He was not pleased with himself as he drove to the end of his drive, turned slowly left and headed for Peace Cliff. He had not seen Pusey Paxmore since that day in August 1972 when the prim Quaker had visited Tulsa. Who could forget that day—more than four years ago, almost five centuries away in moral significance? When he saw the plain entrance to the Paxmore lands, and the road leading up to the telescope house, he wanted to pass on, but realized that to do so would be craven; With no enthusiasm he turned into the lane, noticed favorably the crape myrtle trees which would be lovely in July, and parked by the front door.

After he knocked, it was some moments before anyone answered. Then he heard shuffling footsteps, a twisting of the old lock on the door and a creaking hinge. What happened next surprised him, for when the
door finally opened he found neither Pusey nor his wife. Instead, a slatternly woman who seemed quite out of place in the neat telescope house growled, ‘So you’ve come to take over?’ And before he could respond, she slipped past him, jumped into a ramshackle pickup and spun her tires in the gravel. ‘Who are you?’ Steed shouted.

‘Lily Turlock. You’ll find him upstairs.’ And she was gone.

When he turned back to the house he heard a fumbling at the door. ‘Who’s out there?’ a tremulous voice inquired. Then plaintively: ‘Oh, it’s you, Owen. I wondered when you’d come. Do step in.’

The door opened slowly, as if the man inside had no spare strength, and then Steed saw the trembling figure. He was aghast. In the old days Pusey Paxmore had been a proper Quaker, erect, bright of eye and modest of manner; his principal characteristic had been his reserve and the heightened intellectuality he brought to any discussion. But now, his hair completely white and his cheeks sunken, he seemed almost a derelict. To compare this wasted figure with its trim predecessor was most painful. Steed, realizing that some greeting had to be offered, said quickly, ‘How you doing, Pusey?’