Chesapeake (150 page)

‘Do you feel abandoned by the President?’ Ethel Steed asked.

‘We were all abandoned,’ Pusey said, and suddenly the terrible weight of those years descended upon him, and it was more than he could bear. His shoulders sagged, his chin trembled and he became a very old man, although he was only sixty-four. He must have been aware of the dramatic alteration, for he apologized. ‘I grow tired so quickly. Thee must excuse me.’

He started to leave the room, then turned to tell his guests, ‘We lads from the Eastern Shore, we do poorly when we venture into the world. Much better we stay in our retreats and listen to the echoes coming across the bay.’

Because the good citizens of Patamoke, black and white, were determined that the burning of Frog’s Neck not be used as an excuse for hardening racial animosities, and because Father Patrick was able to defuse his Turlock and Caveny relatives, life along the Choptank returned to normal much more rapidly than pessimists might have predicted. The National Guard was on duty for a few weeks, and some crosses were burned, but everyone was so tired of fire that passions subsided.

Hiram Cater was tracked down by the F.B.I. and sentenced to jail, but citizens from varied backgrounds petitioned the judge for leniency, so his sentence was not excessive. A new road was built around Frog’s Neck and immediately dubbed the Congo Bypass, but black boys started playing on the football teams of Patamoke High, and after victories blacks and whites congregated in the Blue and Gold Ice Cream Parlor for celebrations.

But the tensions were not formally relaxed until early March of 1977, when the rowdy skipjack captains from Deal Island rolled into town with a proclamation that struck at the honor of the Choptank; blacks and whites rallied to defend their river, and old animosities were forgotten.

What the Deal Island men said was that they were the champions of the Eastern Shore and ready to prove it in a grand challenge race. To
insult the Patamokes they added, ‘Since you need every advantage to keep up with us, we’ll hold the race in your backyard, Choptank River, first week in October.’

The Patamokes pledged themselves to enter seven skipjacks, five with white captains, two with black, but with the crews mixed three and three. The old craft were cleaned up and sailors began practicing the maneuvers required for victory, but the people organizing the race were unhappy over one deficiency.

‘It would look better … by that we mean that the papers and television … Hell, you got to have the
Eden
in there. Oldest surviving skipjack, and all that.’

The Patamoke captains agreed that it would be a fine idea to have the side-assed skipjack participate in the race, but she had not sailed for some years and it was generally assumed that her days were done. When the experts went out to survey her, tied up behind the ruins of the Paxmore Boatyard, they confessed that she was not much.

But when Owen Steed heard of the problem, he said abruptly, ‘I’ll provide the funds to restore her. That is, if you can get Pusey Paxmore to supervise repairs.’ The committee hastened to Peace Cliff, where Pusey told them firmly that he was too old and no longer knew enough, but he did direct them to a nephew who had once built a skipjack, and this Paxmore joined the effort.

When the refurbished boat stood on blocks beside the harbor, her mast raked and glistening in new spar finish, the question arose as to her crew. She was the property of the Cater family; a stoop-shouldered man named Absalom held title and he owned a fine reputation at oystering, bold in defending his location against competition.

But when Steed and the committee went to Absalom they found him a testy man, steeped in bitterness over the jailing of Hiram Cater. ‘Ain’t takin’ her out.’

‘But Captain Boggs at Deal Island …’

‘To hell with him.’ Absalom Cater was the rugged new-type black who would tolerate no affront to his personal dignity. ‘Mr. Cater, we’d really like to have you—’

‘Name’s Absalom.’

‘Goddamnit!’ Steed snapped in oil-field anger. ‘I spent thirty years in Oklahoma disciplining myself to call you sons-of-bitches Mister. Now you snarl at me for doing so. What do you want to be called? Negro, black, colored—you name it.’

Absalom laughed. ‘My problem is to discipline myself to stop callin’ you white-asses Mister. Now what in hell do you want, Steed?’

‘I want you to assemble a crew that will win this race. We’re providing you with a damned good boat.’

‘There’s a boy shucks arsters at Tilghman Island. He knows how to
sail with me. And Curtis from Honga. That’s three blacks. You pick three whites.’

This was an insolent challenge, and it excited the imagination of the white watermen. ‘Turlocks used to own the
Eden,
so we’ll ask Amos.’

‘He’s almost seventy.’

‘He can cook. And in a fight he’s very mean.’

‘Cavenys always worked this skipjack, so we’ll invite Martin. And the Pflaum family. Hugo’s stupendous in water.’

It was a menacing crew that assembled to give the
Eden
her trials, and a Baltimore reporter wrote: ‘They resemble pirates about to loot a burning plantation.’ Lanky Amos Turlock had only a few teeth; Martin Caveny, round and sly, looked like some henchman guarding a castle keep; and Hugo Pflaum, past seventy, still had the thick, squashed neck of his Rhineland ancestors. The three blacks at least looked like sailors: Captain Absalom big and dangerous, his two helpers lean and ready for a brawl.

With such a crew the
Eden
caught the fancy of newspaper and television people; incidents in her history were resurrected: built in 1891; captained by that Jake Turlock who defeated the Virginians in the Battle of the Bay; captured single-handed by Otto Pflaum from five armed watermen; the boat of Big Jimbo Cater, first and best of the black captains. ‘Besides which,’ wrote the proud reporter from the
Bugle,
‘she is the only side-assed skipjack in history, but she is given slight chance in the race because she cannot perform well on the starboard tack.’

The reporter had it backward. Every ship, every boat that moves under sail goes better on one tack than the other. Some mysterious combination of forces resulting from the interrelationship of mast, boom, keel and curvature makes one boat perform best on the starboard tack while another of almost identical design excels on the port. Like twins who share identities but who develop differentiated skills, the skipjacks varied, and Captain Absalom knew that his advantage lay when the wind blew from the starboard side, for then the offset centerboard cooperated with the tilted keel to produce maximum speed.

‘I think we got her tuned just right,’ he assured Mr. Steed.

Once when the black-white crew was practicing on the Chesapeake, Amos Turlock, coming up from the galley, spotted a chance to pick up some easy money. An expensive yacht had gone aground on the unmarked mud flats that rested just under the surface of the water where the western end of Devon Island had once stood. It was a perilous spot, which had not yet been properly buoyed, and the yacht’s crew could be forgiven for going aground there.

‘Halloo!’ Turlock shouted. ‘You need help?’

‘We need a tow,’ came the cry.

‘We haven’t the power to get you off’n there.’

‘Could you get us a tugboat? We’ve radioed the Coast Guard, but they have nothing.’

‘I can get you off,’ Turlock called as the
Eden
closed. ‘Watch out!’ the yacht captain cried. ‘You’ll ground.’

‘We draw two feet, centerboard up.’

‘That’s a hell of an advantage.’

‘In these waters, yes. Mister, I can get you off without scarrin’ the paint. Fifty dollars.’

‘Jump to it.’

‘It’s a deal?’ Turlock asked suspiciously. When the yachtsman assented, Amos yelled, ‘Caveny, break out the lines. You know what to do.’

The yacht had gone aground because its construction required a massive keel reaching eight feet below water line, and it was this bulbous steel projection which had imbedded itself in mud. No possible tow from the
Eden
would break this loose, and the people on the yacht could not imagine what the motley crew on the skipjack had in mind.

It was simple. Caveny climbed into the
Eden’s
rowboat, brought one end of a long rope with him, pulled himself onto the deck of the yacht, where he immediately clawed his way as high up the mast as he could go. There he fastened the rope securely to the spreader and signaled to Turlock back on the
Eden
that all was ready.

Slowly the skipjack moved away from the yacht, and as it did so, the line tightened, but there was no possibility that the frail craft could break the heavy yacht free, and the grounded sailors shouted, ‘Careful! You’ll part the line!’

It was never Turlock’s intention to exert much pulling power; what he wanted to do was maintain pressure until the line high on the mast pulled the yacht over on its port side. ‘Watch out, stupid!’ one of the yachtsmen shouted as the boat began to list. ‘You’ll capsize us!’

But Turlock maintained his gentle pulling, and slowly the yacht came down until its mast was almost parallel to the water; then the miracle on which he relied began to eventuate. What had been a massive yacht with an eight-foot keel was being converted into a bizarre craft with less than three inches of wood below the water line, and the huge bulbous keel stuck at an angle in the mud. The buoyancy of the new boat was so great that it began to suck the keel loose.

‘Keep that line fast!’ Turlock called, and everyone watched as the mast came down to touch the water, but as soon as it did, the yacht broke free, and with only a modest wind in her sails, the skipjack was able to pull the heavier craft out into deep water. Quickly she righted herself, and the yachtsmen cheered.

When it came time for the captain to hand over the fifty dollars, one
of his crew complained, ‘A lot of money for six minutes’ work, and Turlock said, ‘Five dollars for doin’, forty-five for knowin’.’

Manifestations of nature along the Choptank exerted a therapeutic effect upon those humans who participated in them, and no example could be more typical than what occurred in late March 1977 after the prolonged winter. For while the Steeds were mourning the loss of their herons, an even more congenial bird was preparing to visit them.

If, as many assume, the last glacier to extend southward into regions drained by the Susquehanna collected its ice about seventy thousand years ago and finally dissolved some eleven thousand years back, the basic character of the Chesapeake must have taken form around 9000
B.C.

As soon as forests and fish appeared, osprey began to inhabit the area, and each year in the last days of winter they returned to the Choptank—that is, the males arrived. Large fishing hawks with white underpainting and jet-black joints in the sharply recurved wings, these handsome males were notable for their ability to hover, spot fish at great distances and dive for them with claws extended.

But each year on the day of their arrival after a long flight from the Amazon, the males were so exhausted that they did not fish, no matter how hungry, for a driving instinct compelled them to search for nesting sites, which they explored like any house-hunting husband. In 1977 those travel-weary males who elected the streams at the Refuge found much of their work done for them, because Martin Caveny, under the direction of Ethel Steed, had constructed four basketlike platforms from braided steel and had set them on tall pilings well out into the water.

‘Watch what happens on St. Patrick’s Day,’ Caveny said with confidence. ‘On that day, year after year, ospreys come back to this neck.’

‘Preposterous!’

‘The patron birds of Ireland,’ he said reverently. ‘St. Paddy’s Day, they’ll be here.’

In the week before the males arrived he instructed Ethel in how to spread on her lawn bits of cloth and dead branches from which the males would construct their nests, then said, ‘You may not believe this, Mrs. Steed, but twelve days later, on March 29, the females will come flying in to inspect the nests.’

‘Birds don’t live by the calendar,’ she protested.

‘Other parts of the Choptank, they arrive at other times. But on your land, St. Patrick’s Day.’ And on the evening of March 16, when they surveyed the preparations, he assured her, ‘If I was an osprey, here’s where I’d come.’

She told her husband that night, ‘I think Martin Caveny’s teasing me,’
but even so, next morning she was up early, just in case, and before the sun approached its zenith she heard from the sky a series of
cherk-cherks,
a whispery communication coming across the water, and she looked in its direction, to see lofty hawks hovering, darting, sweeping down with claws extended in a braking position, and within a few minutes of the birds’ arrival, a handsome male was inspecting the first of her constructions, and before long three others had come to the creek; by nightfall much of the signaling cloth had disappeared from the shore.

Various attributes made Ethel Steed’s braided platforms attractive to the opsrey: they were solidly constructed, set in water that promised to provide fish, and far enough from land to ensure protection from predators. And in recent years they had an added merit: farmers in the area were forbidden to use DDT, a splendid insecticide which unfortunately prevented birds who ingested it from depositing enough calcium in their eggshells to permit their young to hatch. In 1965 it had seemed that this noble bird must vanish from the earth; in 1977, thanks to concerned people like Ethel Steed, the birds seemed likely to survive.

‘Do you believe me?’ Caveny asked on the evening of the twenty-eighth, when the males had completed their nests in good form. ‘Tomorrow morning the ladies arrive, and then we’ll see something.’

This time she trusted the enthusiastic Irishman, and on the morning of the twenty-ninth, as they had for some ten thousand years, the female ospreys came back to the Refuge, and then began one of the spectacular sights of nature, for the males rose to meet them, and as they paired off they swept and darted and pirouetted through the sky, wing tip to wing tip, crying and reveling in the sun and the assurance of a summer’s home, where the new generation would be born.