Chesapeake (158 page)

‘Could be,’ Turlock said briefly.

‘Then we must bring the Caters in, too.’ And she went to the end of the wharf, shouting and waving to the black people in their small boat, but they were determined to make it back to Patamoke; when they tried to enter the Choptank, however, great waves rolled toward them and it was futile to persist. Turning quickly, they scuttled back to the wharf, where Mrs. Paxmore helped them come ashore.

‘This will be a blower,’ Captain Absalom said, and he was right. Discharging no lightning or thunder, the clouds dropped so low they seemed to touch the waves they had created, and night fell a good hour earlier than normal, with enormous sheets of rain slanting down.

The five Paxmores, the two watermen and the four blacks gathered together in the front room at Peace Cliff, but it was so exposed to the fury of the storm that the large windows began to leak, and everyone had
to find refuge in the kitchen; this provided little reassurance, for the lights went out, and in darkness the huddling figures could hear the wind ripping away the shutters, sending them crashing through the night.

‘In the old days,’ Amanda said, ‘we’d have interpreted this as God’s anger over the death of a great man. Tonight all we can say is what Mr. Caveny just said, “This is one hell of a storm.”’

Through the bleak November night it continued, and toward four in the morning, when it reached a howling climax, one of the young wives, a Southern Baptist from Alabama, asked plaintively, ‘Would it be all right if I prayed?’ and Amanda said, ‘I’ve been praying for some time.’ This reminded the Baptist girl that Quakers prayed silently, and she asked, ‘I mean … a real prayer … out loud?’

‘Betsy,’ Amanda said, ‘we’ll all pray with thee,’ and she anticipated some tremendous religious statement, but the girl merely knelt beside her chair and in flickering candlelight said, ‘Dear God, protect the men caught on the bay.’

‘I’ll say Amen to that,’ Martin Caveny said, crossing himself.

‘And so will I,’ added one of the Paxmore boys.

At dawn the storm abated, and in full light they all went out to survey the wreckage and find what consolation they could: the barge thrown thirty feet into a field (but not smashed); the dock quite swept away (but the pilings still firmly in place); two of the large windows smashed (but they were insured); a substantial chunk of shoreline eaten away (but it could be rebuilt behind palisades); and many stately trees knocked so flat that no salvage was possible.

‘We’d best see what’s happened elsewhere,’ one of the boys suggested, so Amos Turlock loaded a truck with ropes, crowbars, shovels and field glasses and led an expedition to Caveny’s home, which had been roughed up but not destroyed. At the Turlock trailer he was aghast at the damage; of his twenty-one major statues, seven had been crushed by falling branches, but he found easement when he saw that the three dwarfs guarding the sunken gun remained at their post.

The truck could not enter Patamoke, trees barred the way, so they doubled back to Peace Cliff, where, from a height, they could survey the mouth of the Choptank and see the various boats driven inland by the storm. They were starting to inspect the opposite shore when Amos Turlock, using his binoculars, uttered a loud cry: ‘Look at Devon!’

Everyone turned toward the island that guarded the river, and Caveny said, ‘I don’t see anything wrong.’ He grabbed the glasses, stared westward and said in a low voice, ‘Jee—sus!’

One of the Paxmore wives also looked toward the ruins she had sketched only two days ago. Saying nothing, she passed the binoculars to her husband.

He looked for a moment, lowered the glasses to check with his naked eye and said, ‘It’s gone. It’s all gone.’

‘What’s gone?’ his brother asked. And then, without need of assistance, he studied the turbulent waters and stood transfixed by what the storm had done.

The island had vanished. Above the crashing waves, where splendid fields had once prospered, there was nothing. On the spot where the finest mansion on the Eastern Shore had offered its stately silhouette, nothing was visible. The final storm which overtakes all existence had struck; that relentless erosion which wears down even mountains had completed its work. Devon Island and all that pertained to it was gone.

Incessant waves which eleven thousand years ago had delivered detritus to this spot, causing an island to be born, had come back to retrieve their loan. The soil they took would be moved to some other spot along the Chesapeake, there to be utilized in some new fashion for perhaps a thousand years, after which the waves would borrow it again, using and reusing until that predictable day when the great world-ocean would sweep in to reclaim this entire peninsula, where for a few centuries life had been so pleasant.