Chesapeake (156 page)

Not only were Commissioner Adamson’s hesitant predictions depressing, but wherever the Steeds drove that afternoon they saw the necklace of empties littering the roadside to remind them that they were powerless to do anything about this relatively small contamination. Owen became so irritated that he could not sleep and thought of heading downstream to Peace Cliff to talk with Pusey Paxmore about the rise and fall of men’s fortunes, but he felt that this would be an imposition.

Till well past midnight he listened to Beethoven’s later quartets, and before dawn left the house to watch the geese feeding in the creek. As soon as the sun was up, he telephoned Chris Pflaum on the Little Choptank to ask if he could drop by. ‘Nothing of importance. Yesterday depressed the hell out of me, and I thought you might like to run down to the old ferry at Whitehaven, see how they lived in the old days.’ He was delighted when Pflaum said, ‘Great idea. I’d like to visit the marshes.’

Without waking Ethel, he left the house, counted the empty cans on the quarter-mile stretch he used as his barometer, and crossed to the southern shore of the Choptank. He drove slowly westward, pausing to pay his respects at the house in which Governor Hicks had lived prior to the Civil War: Remarkable man. Slaveowner. Slave supporter to the death. Goes to Annapolis and by force of his courage alone holds Maryland in the Union. Dies in disgrace. Along the Choptank they spat on his grave. A lot like Pusey. He shook his head and muttered, ‘That poor son-of-a-bitch,’ but whether he meant the governor who had left the Choptank to find disgrace in Annapolis or the Quaker who had found his in the White House he could not have said.

Nor would he have admitted why he wanted to visit Chris Pflaum’s residence; true, the Steeds had had some vague association with the old Herman Cline plantation now occupied by Pflaum, but no one was proud of it. And some interesting new houses were being built along the Little Choptank, but they held no fascination for a man who already owned his family plantation.

What Steed really wanted to see was how young Pflaum was living; he’d heard rumors and wished to satisfy himself as to their accuracy. He was rather relieved, therefore, to find that Chris was living alone in the rambling old house; his wife had left him—‘Said she could stand either the mosquitoes or the loneliness, but not both.’

‘You getting a divorce?’

‘She is. Says she wants nothing from me. Ten years on the Little Choptank gave her memories enough for a lifetime.’ The young naturalist spoke without rancor and suggested that Steed leave his Cadillac and travel in Pflaum’s pickup. ‘That’s the proper way to cross the ferry.’

Each man was delighted with the trip south; it took them along the banks of those lesser rivers which wound through vast marshes where the true values of the Eastern Shore were being preserved. They drifted down to Deal Island and invited Captain Boggs for a drink. He showed them a shortcut to Whitehaven, where the ferry across the Wicomico could be reached.

‘This is unbelievable,’ Steed said in spiritual relaxation as he slumped back to watch a rural scene which had changed little in two hundred years. ‘Only visible difference is those new chicken sheds producing birds for Frank Perdue.’ On the incredibly ancient roads one expected to meet oxen dragging timbers for Her Majesty’s ships—Elizabeth I, that is—and at the end of the road, where it dipped toward a small, muddy river, the ferry waited. It was on the wrong side, of course, but by pulling a rope the signal was raised, a grumpy black man moved aboard his rickety
craft, the sidewheels engaged a cable, and slowly the little ferry came to fetch the pickup.

It was a crossing into another century; upstream stood the gaunt and rusting remnants of what had once been the proudest tomato cannery in the Steed chain; how many black men and women, recently in bondage, had toiled here in the 1870s; how many promising Steed lads had worked here to learn the business. The crossing required only a few minutes, but it was so restful, so far removed from the problems of today, that Steed was drawn back into the lost centuries when the Steeds governed, and he was tempted into a most baronial action.

Grasping Chris by the arm, he said almost imploringly, ‘Don’t remarry until you meet my daughter.’

‘Sir?’

‘I mean it. Damnit all, Ethel and I have this enormous place. The Steeds have always had plantations like it. My son’s lost. Quite hopeless. But my daughter’s worth saving. Chris, don’t remarry till I get her home.’

‘Mr. Steed, I don’t even know her name.’

‘Son, we’re talking about the centuries, not a few lousy mixed-up years. Name’s Clara. Have you any idea what Pusey Paxmore’s gone through?’

The conversation was drowned out by a truck that began blowing its horn, not on the bank to which the ferry was heading but from the one it had left. ‘Damn,’ the black operator growled, ‘you’d think just once they could fit together.’ He looked ominously at Steed as if he had been at fault, and in some confusion the trip across the Wicomico ended, with Owen Steed staring at the ruined cannery and Chris Pflaum sadly bewildered.

‘Let me put it simply,’ Steed said as they headed back toward Herman Cline’s plantation. ‘My daughter Clara’s a little younger than you. For three years she’s been on one hell of a toboggan …’He fumbled, then said, ‘You haven’t done so damned well yourself. But the point is, Chris, you see land the way I do. You’re authentic. I want you to marry Clara and take over our place when I die.’

‘Mr. Steed, one day in the jungles of Vietnam, I discovered what was significant in my life. Marshes. Living with nature. And if I wouldn’t give up marshes for Vera, whom I loved very much, I sure as hell won’t give them up for a girl I’ve never met … and her fifty acres of mowed lawn.’

‘You don’t have to, damnit! You live in the marshes half the year, in a real house the other half.’

Chris drew back from the wheel, a husky young fellow who had already made the big decisions of his life, and as he studied the oilman he saw him as properly dressed, neatly trimmed and without a basic
commitment in his body. ‘You don’t understand, Mr. Steed. North of the Choptank is for millionaires; south is for men.’

‘That’s bloody arrogant.’

‘And true. I need the earth. I love the older ways down here. When I’m working in the marshes along the Little Choptank my soul expands. If I lived in a manicured place like yours, I’d die.’

He was stunned by Steed’s response. ‘Son, I want you to check with Washburn Turlock. Ask him about the time he showed me the Refuge from a boat. One minute he said, “It’s got about two hundred acres,” and within five seconds I said, “I’ll buy it.” I needed that land as much as you needed your marsh. Only difference between you and me is you’re more primitive. If you’re smart, you’ll be at Patamoke Airport when Clara flies home from Paris. I think she’s as hungry to get back to the land as either of us.’

Turlocks survived because they adjusted to their environment. From the moment Amos discovered what those newfangled tape recorders could do, he was satisfied that his goose problems were solved.

He had always been supreme with the goose call, luring birds when others failed, but even at his expert lips that stubby instrument was chancy, and on some days he accomplished nothing. So he drove across the bridge to De Soto Road in Baltimore, where radio shops proliferated, and there bought himself a pair of powerful loudspeakers and a rugged tape recorder built in Sweden.

When he reached home Midge bellowed from the kitchen, ‘What in hell you gonna do with that crap?’

His intention was to record the calls of female geese as they came in heat, then to broadcast the calls to hordes of males as they flew overhead. ‘We master this machine, Rafe, we’ll have enough geese to stock every Turlock kitchen along the Choptank.’

He mastered it so well that hunters from distant counties assembled to observe his miracle. As the wildlife reporter for the
Baltimore Sun
explained: ‘Forty minutes before sunrise Amos Turlock and his men move quietly to their blinds and hide themselves beneath pine branches. As dawn approaches and the big geese begin to fly, Amos turns on his Tandberg and through the sky float the sounds of a female goose signaling to the gentlemen aloft. The males, delighted to hear the mating call, wheel in the air and descend swiftly into the muzzles of the Turlock guns.’

Amos enjoyed his monopoly for only one season, then others began to copy it; but it was the legislature that delivered the deathblow. To it came game wardens like the Pflaums, complaining that the Turlocks were destroying the balance of nature: ‘Give them three more years and
we’ll have the old days back. Not a goose along the Choptank.’ The lawmakers, most of them hunters, responded with a tough edict—you can read it in the Maryland Statutes, Turlock’s Law they call it: ‘No hunter may seduce male geese by means of electronic devices.’ And the tape recorders were confiscated.

But a Turlock never quits, and in September of 1977, just before hunting season began, Amos came up with the ultimate stratagem: he rented five cows.

When he fenced them in right beside the creek where geese assembled, he attracted more birds into his field than anyone on the Choptank had ever done before, and Chris Pflaum asked his father, ‘What’s the old man up to?’

‘I don’t know,’ Hugo said, ‘but we better find out.’

Together they drove out to Turlock’s spread, and what they saw astounded them. There were the five cows. There were the geese. And on the ground lay more yellow grains of corn than the average outlaw would dare to scatter in four seasons. Whenever Turlock wanted a goose, two hundred would be waiting as they gorged on his illegal corn.

But was it illegal? As Amos explained to the judge, ‘All I do is feed my cows extra generous.’ By this he meant that he gorged them on whole corn sixteen, eighteen hours a day. His rented cows ate so much that a large percentage passed through their system untouched by stomach acids, and there it lay on the ground, an enticement to geese for miles around.

‘I can’t find this man guilty,’ the judge said. ‘He didn’t scatter the corn. The cows did.’ And when the season ended, with the Turlock iceboxes crammed, old Amos returned his rented cows.

For some time it had been understood that Owen Steed intended luring Pusey Paxmore from his exile in the telescope house; the tactic would be a morning’s goose hunt over the cornfields at the Refuge, so on a brisk November morning, before the sun had even hinted that it would rise, he drove out to Peace Cliff and found Pusey and his wife waiting in the darkness.

‘He insists on taking Brutus,’ Amanda said as she held a black Labrador by his collar.

‘Wouldn’t have it any other way,’ Steed said as he roughed the dog’s head. ‘In you go!’ The dog leaped into the rear of the pickup, stiffened as Steed’s Chesapeake snarled, then relaxed in the companionship of a good hunt.

The two men drove down the lane in darkness and back to the Refuge, where they parked the car and started walking in the faint haze of dawn. Soon they were in the middle of an extensive field, apparently barren but
actually rich in stray kernels of corn skipped by the harvesting machines.

They were headed for a strange construction, a giant-sized coffin of wood, let down into the earth in such a way that a large flat lid, camouflaged with branches, could be pulled shut after they and their dogs had climbed in. Once secure inside the coffin, and hidden by branches, the men could stand erect and look out through long narrow slits parallel to the earth. Here they would wait for sunrise and the flight of geese.

It was a long wait. The area contained many geese, more than half a million if one considered all the estuaries and coves, but few were interested in the cornfield at the Refuge. Occasional groups of six or seven would veer in from the creek, stay far from the gunners, then fly on. Eight o’clock came, cold and windy, with never a goose. Ten o’clock and no geese. At eleven a bright sun burned off the haze, making what hunters called ‘a blue-bird day,’ and any hope of bagging a goose during the middle hours was lost; the hunters climbed out of their casket, replaced the lid and tramped back to the pickup, with the dogs almost as disappointed as they.

At the Refuge, Ethel Steed had two roasted ducks waiting, with beef bones for the dogs, and the midday hours passed almost somnolently. Ethel earnestly wanted to ask Pusey lingering questions about Watergate, but when she saw how relaxed he was she restrained herself, and the time was spent in the most casual conversation, each participant speaking gingerly, as if afraid to agitate painful nerve ends.

‘I would like to add one comment to the talks we’ve had,’ Pusey volunteered as he dressed for the field. ‘Isn’t it clear that either Eisenhower or Kennedy would have cleaned up that mess in one afternoon? Go on television, manfully confess error, fire everyone involved and promise never again to allow such a lapse. The American people would have accepted that.’

Ethel smiled mischievously and asked, ‘When you speak of Kennedy’s eagerness to make a clean breast of everything, I presume you’re referring to Teddy at Chappaquiddick?’ When she saw that her frivolity startled Paxmore, she threw her arm about his shoulder and said jokingly, ‘You see, Pusey, Democrats can suffer paralysis of will as well as Republicans.’

‘Sky’s nicely overcast,’ Owen interrupted, ‘and about three-thirty the geese will start coming in. Let’s go back for an hour.’

But Pusey, who had enjoyed this day, said hopefully, ‘I’d like to stay two or three hours. They come flocking in at dusk.’

‘You’re right,’ Owen said. ‘But remember, I have to meet the airplane at five. Clara’s flying in from Paris.’

‘How fortunate thee is!’ Paxmore said with obvious enthusiasm. ‘Reuniting a family! Forget the geese. Take me home and be on thy way.’

‘No. Those hours in the box were great, and I want you to try the new
blind we’ve built in the creek.’ And he was so insistent that they try at least an hour over the water that Pusey went to the phone and called his wife. ‘Thee isn’t to worry, dear. We shot nothing this morning but we’re going to try the creek for an hour or so. Brutus won’t let me come home till we get something.’ He was about to hang up, when he added rapidly, ‘Amanda, guess what! Clara Steed’s flying home this afternoon. From Paris.’ After he replaced the phone he told the Steeds, ‘Amanda says how lucky thee is. We haven’t seen our boys in ages.’ This comment on families encouraged him to make his final observation on Watergate: ‘In Georgia this afternoon many families must be boasting about their sons in Washington. Six years from now some of them may be in jail.’