Chesapeake (30 page)

‘Must be quiet,’ Timothy would say like a miniature field marshal, but Stooby would merely point to where he had already located the wolf, and when they fired, it would be his gun that killed the predator.

‘Stooby stay woods,’ Turlock said. ‘Charley watch town.’

The boys could not fathom his scheme, but when his beady eyes narrowed to slits and his grin disclosed the blackened teeth, they knew that good ideas were brewing. ‘Charley, find where wolves bury.’

And then Charley understood! With a grin as malevolent as his father’s he said, ‘Night, I dig up paws … jowls.’ And when he said this, the three Turlocks chortled, for they knew they had uncovered a gateway to endless riches: Tim and Stooby would kill wolves and deliver the emblems for bounty, and as soon as they were buried, Charley would come at midnight to dig them up, and they could be handed to the officials over and over … once the earth was blown away from their previous burials. The Turlocks were going to acquire a lot of tobacco.

On one trip north the hunting was poor; not even Stooby could locate wolves, and so the pair went farther afield than ever, a development that did not worry them, because they lived off the land and slept wherever dusk found them: a few pine branches, a fire in a hollow, and in the morning a dash of cold water in the face. But at one awakening Stooby warned his father, ‘Beyond there, houses maybe.’ He spoke in a curious amalgam of Choptank, gestures and short English words, but he never had difficulty in making himself intelligible; the hunters who had labeled him stupid had confused reticence with ignorance.

When they had progressed several miles without finding wolves, they did come upon a group of houses built by Swedes twenty years earlier, when that nation was endeavoring to secure a foothold in the New World. The Turlocks, naturally suspicious, scouted the settlement for some hours and satisfied themselves that ordinary men and women appeared to be following ordinary tasks, so toward noon they broke out of the forest, crossed land which had been lately plowed, and started shouting hellos.

Numerous people ran from the houses, and soon the Turlocks were
surrounded by sturdy farmers and their wives talking a language Turlock had never heard before. Finally a lad was found who had sailed on an English ship, a blond boy about Stooby’s age with a quick tongue, and he was most eager to talk.

‘We’re Dutch. From New Netherlands. And we’ve just knocked hell out of the Swedes.’

‘What are Swedes?’

When this was interpreted the farmers chuckled, and one man pushed forward a strong-limbed young woman with the fairest blond hair Timothy had ever seen. ‘She’s a Swede,’ the boy said, and bearded, filthy Turlock grinned at her.

They stayed at the Dutch settlement for six days, wearing the boy interpreter out with their questions, and for some reason which young Stooby could not analyze, his father consistently reported the condition of Patamoke to be better than it was and his place much superior to the hut in which they actually lived, but when the time came for departure, the boy discovered what the plot had been. In the woods, awaiting them on the path back to the Choptank, stood Birgitta, the Swedish girl, and by expressive signs she indicated that whereas life for a servant girl in the Swedish settlement had been hard, under the Dutch it had been hell. As the trio disappeared in the woods, she turned for one last look at her prison, made an indecent gesture and delivered what Stooby took to be a chain of Swedish curses.

They moved fast lest the Dutch try to recover their property, and for two days they exhausted themselves, so that when night came they simply collapsed, but on the third day they judged themselves to be free from capture, and they moved in stately fashion, with Stooby scouting for wolves and his father not caring much whether he found any or not. That night Timothy suggested that Stooby build his own sleeping quarters, then, carefully waiting until the boy had done so, he chose a spot far removed for the pine-boughed lean-to in which he and Birgitta would sleep.

The distance was not great enough; through the night Stooby heard strange sounds and riotous laughter, and jumbled words in Choptank and Swedish, and when day broke, the trio dawdled through the woods. For the second time in his life Tim Turlock had won the affections of a woman without actually wooing her and without knowing a dozen words of her language. He was able to do this because he existed on a primitive level in a primitive society where actions were more significant than words; his animal capabilities manifested themselves in a score of unspoken signals, and two women had been willing to gamble their lives on his ability to survive.

On the trip south he and the Swedish girl became robust companions; they had great fun together, day and night, and despite the difference in
their ages, for she was not much older than his sons, it became apparent to Stooby that they intended staying together. He was not surprised, therefore, at what happened when they reached the marsh. His father went boldly to the hut, banged on the door, and shouted, ‘Tcib, get out.’

The tall Indian woman, neat and disciplined even in rags, came bewildered to the door, saw the fair Swedish girl, and understood. It took her less than ten minutes to gather her pitiful belongings, and with no discernible recrimination she departed. She was no longer needed; she no longer had a home.

Charley elected to go with her, and when she started to walk through the woods he cried, ‘No! That canoe is ours,’ and he threatened to beat his father’s brains out if any objection was made. Defiantly he paddled his mother down the creek to Patamoke, where she would shift from hunter to hunter.

Stooby never hesitated; he would stay with his father and hunt wolves, and on those increasingly frequent days when Turlock preferred to remain at home in dalliance with Birgitta, he hunted alone and did rather better than when his father impeded him. But now there was no Charley to dig up the emblems for resale, so Turlock himself had to go out at night and slink about the dumps, retrieving paws and jowls.

It is easy to reconstruct the history of Timothy Turlock during these years because his name appears with such troubled frequency in contemporary court records. The London judge’s opinion that Turlock was a ferret, scurrying about just beyond the vision of man, was validated in these years. The marsh-dweller was now in his fifties, small, quick, sly, dirty of dress and habit, a frequenter of swamps, an invader of proper locations. That he should so often have been charged with stealing minor objects was not surprising, for Turlock was incapable of passing a usable object without appropriating it, but that he should also have won the affection of Tciblento and Birgitta was a mystery. One might have thought that this repulsive little man with the missing teeth would be last in any process of amatory selection; perhaps his sly insistence accounted for the mystery, or the fact that he openly lusted after women and allowed them to see it. In any event, he was a rebuke to proper Christians and a constant thorn in the side of the court.

He was, as the records prove, frequently fined and often whipped, but the latter punishment was a heavier trial to the community than to Turlock, for at the moment he was led from jail toward the post he began to utter such lamentations and shrieks of pain as to make a most unsavory spectacle, and since the judges knew that the whipping would have no effect on him, they were reluctant to sentence the community to such travail.

‘We should have hanged him at the first session,’ one of the commissioners said, following a miserable trial in which he stood accused of shooting a townsman who had tracked a deer into his marsh. But others felt that his existence was justified because he did kill an extraordinary number of wolves—‘Like a carrion buzzard, he helps clear away the refuse of this town.’

So Turlock went his way, a curious little man who had already sired six bastards: two by Tciblento, one by Birgitta, and three by various indentured girls who had been publicly whipped for their transgressions. These six were the beginnings of that tremendous horde of Turlocks who would populate the Eastern Shore, each inheriting important characteristics from Timothy: they would love the land; they would want to live close to the water; they would develop companionship with birds and fish and animals; through the sixth generation none would be able to read or sign a name, and all would abhor such regularities as paying taxes and getting married.

And yet sometimes even that happened. Turlock had the brazen effrontery to go into Patamoke court and claim that he had purchased Birgitta’s indenture from the Dutch, and when both she and Stooby confirmed this, the magistrates had to issue papers proving that he owned her services for seven years, but when she became pregnant they decreed that ownership did not include bedroom services. He was fined five hundred pounds of tobacco—which he obtained by selling one wolf’s head five times—and Birgitta was publicly whipped.

She was not actually whipped; whimpering and sobbing, Turlock came into court volunteering to marry her if the lashes were forsworn, and reluctantly the judges allowed the wedding to take place. It was a strange affair: Charley and Stooby attended, as did their half sister Flora and the anomalous Tciblento, who sat through the ceremony looking at the floor.

She was living a strange life, sixty-eight years old, tall and dignified as ever, but obviously fallen upon evil days. No more the softly tanned deerskin dress or the edging of mink, no more the necklace of silvery white shells. She lived with strangers beyond the fringes of the harbor; her only consistent friend was Charley, a resentful, difficult boy who hated white men but strove to be like them. He was often in court.

One day when his mother was tending a shack for two hunters, he went into the forest for deer, and as he was returning, dressed in various rags such as dispossessed Choptanks wore, one of the very hunters with whom his mother lived shot at him, thinking him to be an Indian. The bullet went through his left shoulder but did not knock him down; stanching the blood with a dirty rag, he walked home, but fainted as he reached the shack. Tciblento tended him without tears. The hunter justified himself—‘He looked like an Indian,’ an excuse to which she made no response.

During these years she did not often see Stooby; he stayed with his father, probing the marshes and becoming the final authority on life along the water. He had already built himself one log canoe and was in the process of burning another; he spent more time on the river than on the shore, for although he had to live in the forest to shoot deer for food and wolves for profit, he lived on the water because he loved it. Sometimes he was absent for days, exploring the rivers running to the north, and if his father had been the first white man to appreciate the general wonder of this area, Stooby became the first, Indian or white, to know specific places, the marvelous points of land poking out like fingers into the gray water, the sleeping coves that hid behind them.

At twenty-three Stooby had committed himself to the river and the bay; they formed his empire, and on their broad bosoms he would always be at home. He lived by the tides, and the rising of the full moon, and the coming and going of water birds. He knew where oysters clung to sandy bars for protection and how crabs moved up and down the bay. In his mind he charted every spit, the convoluted entrance to every creek. He rigged his own sails and knew when to drop them in a storm, and he had such a sensitive feeling for boats that he could tell the instant one began to slip sideways or approach a hidden sandbar. He was a waterman, the first of his breed, a fish without gills, a marsh bird without pinfeathers.

An unusual man named James Lamb figured in many of Timothy Turlock’s arrests. Forty-one years old when he appeared on the deck of a ship out of Bristol, he had crossed England on foot to escape detention in London and had reached the New World as a free man who had voluntarily fled a comfortable home because of an enlightenment which had altered his life. He had heard an itinerant preacher, one George Fox, a Quaker, explain the simple characteristics of a new faith, and he had been persuaded.

He was a gentle man, and his wife Prudence was even less pretentious than he. At the wharf in Jamestown they had purchased the indenture of a serving girl named Nancy, a child who had given them endless trouble through her propensity for allowing likable young men, and some neither likable nor young, to creep into her bed. The girl was haled into court, humiliated, whipped at the public post and warned by the commissioners that she might even be jailed, but she persisted in her lusty ways. A normal mistress would have disowned her, but Prudence Lamb could not. ‘She is our charge,’ she told her husband, and no matter what the ebullient child did, Mrs. Lamb protected her, paid her fines so that she could escape whippings, and assured her husband that Nancy would one day come to her senses, but when the young lady admitted Timothy Turlock into her bedroom for the second time, the Lambs judged that enough was enough.

‘Thee cannot speak to him ever again,’ Mrs. Lamb warned, and Nancy blubbered, ‘There’s no one else to talk with,’ and the Lambs felt that it was their duty to find the girl some kind of companionship, and one day Mr. Lamb suggested Stooby Turlock as a proper companion, and Nancy whined, ‘All he’s interested in is turtles,’ and as if she were a prophet, not six days later Stooby appeared at the Lamb home with a delicious diamondback terrapin, a gift, he said, because the Lambs had not taken his father to court for stealing a handcart.

Birgitta, bound to Turlock by servitude and marriage, looked on these irregular matters with the amused detachment of some ancient Norse goddess perplexed by the curious behavior of refractory earthlings. Her husband was repulsive and nothing would change him, but she could hope that one of these days he would be shot accidentally or hanged on purpose; then she would be free to make her own way in this burgeoning New World. She was certainly happier along the Choptank than she had ever been as a prisoner of the Dutch, and was developing a positive love for her lively daughter and her strange stepson Stooby. She understood the boy, and encouraged him in his pursuit of marsh and river. Sensing this, he invited her one day to accompany him on one of his explorations to the north, and without hesitation she grabbed Flora and climbed into the log canoe, spending three days in those exquisite streams which branched out from the right bank of the river.