The House at Royal Oak (4 page)

Paint
Landscape
Cleaning
Some carpentry?

• • •

An off-the-map village of about a dozen nineteenth-century houses, a couple of shops offering used furniture and antiques, a gone-out-of-business church and parsonage, and a modern brick post office, all huddled together at the head of Oak Creek. That's the village of Royal Oak itself. Newer development dots the road on either side and spreads down innumerable fingers of land surrounded by water. The occasional unimposing gravel lane leads to a grand old plantation house at the water's edge. Something like this village might be found almost anywhere a confluence of geography and tradition has slowed the advance of mainstream development and culture. This particular village, two hundred miles south of New York City and ninety miles east of Washington, D.C., lies on Maryland's Eastern Shore, that is, not on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean but on the Chesapeake Bay, sixty miles to the west of the Atlantic beaches. It's clear if you've been there; clear as mud if not.

Royal Oak first attracted visitors about a hundred years ago to its inn, the Pasadena, which became a popular summer escape for residents of Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. The new railroad and steamship service made it an easy trip. Then in the 1920s Gary Cooper and the entire film cast stayed at the Pasadena while making
The First Kiss,
one of his first starring roles, with Fay Wray. It was among the last of the lavish silent films, costing $200,000. Cooper played an oyster dredger who becomes a pirate to put his brothers through school and along the way falls in love with a wealthy tourist. The area's whole oyster dredging fleet—twenty-five skipjacks and bugeyes—was put under contract for the filming, which lasted six weeks. Another inn
had refused to put up the film stars, fearing immorality, but at the Pasadena the stars earned respect for their hard work and quiet ways. For years afterward, young women came as summer visitors to the Pasadena, hoping to sleep in Gary Cooper's bed. According to one account, the wily innkeepers assured visitors that whatever bed happened to be available was the very one Cooper had slept in.

The village also began to enjoy a reputation for some of the best fried chicken around, and people were drawn by the aroma, it was said, from half a mile and more away.

Before all that came Indians, then trappers, followed by white land speculators and settlers. On vast plantations tobacco—sotweed—was grown and later, corn, wheat, and other grains. Slaves and indentured servants worked the land. Here, isolated from the mainland by water, insular ways thrived and persisted, for better, in the tightly knit communities of hardworking people, and for worse, in harsh racial divides. The fight for civil rights was especially bitter.

Although the international legal trade of slaves ended at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Maryland, along with Virginia, continued slave trading until the Civil War. As would be expected in a border state, Maryland harbored strong sentiments both for and against Emancipation. When the first Northern troops to respond to the call to arms arrived in Baltimore on the way to Washington, riots broke out. The governor of Maryland wired President Abraham Lincoln, saying, “The excitement is fearful . . . send no more troops here.” Authorities then burned the railroad bridges linking Baltimore to the Northern cities.

The Eastern Shore was also home to two great abolitionists. Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass spent his childhood in Talbot County and started his work life as a slave at an estate near the town of St. Michaels. Judged to have an arrogant attitude, he was sent to the infamous “slave breaker,” Edward Covey. Bearing permanent scars from whippings, Douglass escaped to the North to continue his lifelong pursuit of racial equality.

Harriet Tubman, born in the next county south, led many slaves north on foot, on the Underground Railroad, which passed through the region's woods, swamps, creeks, and rivers. After her own escape, Tubman returned at least nineteen times to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom, including her aged parents. Harriet Tubman was considered a saint by blacks and a devil by white slaveholders. The bounty placed on her head was $40,000. She was never caught, and as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, she said she “never lost a single passenger.”

In and around the ports of the Chesapeake Bay, black ships' pilots helped fugitives and white boat captains also smuggled slaves north, sometimes for a bribe. Fleeing slaves traveled the bay so often it became known as Chesapeake Station.

After the war ended, animosity between pro- and antislavery factions of the Methodist Church continued. The Southern Methodists, who during the war were said to climb out the windows of a local church rather than walk under the American flag hanging over the doorway, were offended by the antislavery stance of the mother church. The Northern Methodists, equally critical of the Southern Methodists (citing as just one example the bishop who had refused to relinquish
his wife's slaves), determined to establish a greater presence on the Eastern Shore, including an outpost in Royal Oak. In 1883 they constructed an imposing three-story parsonage, painted white with red sashes and green shutters, for a circuit-riding minister. The foundation was built of brick and solid oak timbers.

A few years later a fine white country church, complete with a graceful steeple and Gothic windows of pearlescent stained glass, was built close by. But the project did not flourish. The parsonage was sold off during the Depression and ten years later the church was abandoned.

By 2000 the church, painted ochre with turquoise trim, was home to an occasional business in used furniture. The roofleaked, siding had fallen away from the steeple, and some of the stained glass was cracked or missing. The parsonage, anchoring the other side of the village a quarter-mile away, retained shreds of white paint but was otherwise in similar dilapidated condition. Partly rented out and partly boarded up, this house that Hugo happened on, for sale by owner, had been on the market for seven years.

The owner returned our third phone call. He reminisced about happy childhood times spent at his grandmother's house, picking apples, hunting for arrowheads in the fields, and sliding down the steep, frontstairs banister while trying to hold a chamber pot upright. He refused to let the house fall into the wrong hands. Others had made offers, and he had turned them all down. He might sell it to us if we promised to restore it. It was a good house, he said, and a good location.

The tenants offered a different view of its location when we drove out to see the house together for the first time one Friday afternoon. “It's a real sweet house,” the young woman who met us at the door said. “Of course, some people might be bothered by what goes on around here . . . smuggling, motorcycle gangs, too.”

I glanced past her out to the yard and the garage. She followed my eyes. “They'll use the garage, nothing we can do about it. They just show up here late at night, fifty, sixty at a time . . .”

“I guess it gets pretty dark around here,” I managed.

As she showed me around the first floor, I asked if she had any idea where these smugglers came from.

“Smugglers? They come in the Tred Avon River and they're up and down this road all night long. You know it's them because of how fast they drive. Sometimes they'll miss the curve and land in the ditch or they'll slam straight into the fence. That's how it got all dinged up.”

At night she heard weird sounds coming from the padlocked and supposedly uninhabited second floor. “I don't know what could be going on up there.” She gathered up her baby from the crib, held him close, and looked upward.

It was quite a performance, aimed at scaring us off, and more than once as she showed us around, Hugo and I exchanged knowing this-won't-work-after-all glances. Out in the yard the woman kicked at plastic sandwich bags, squished in the mud, which, she said, were a sure sign of drug use on the property.

Walking back through the house I saw an extensive computer setup next to the crib and a table covered with empty
beer bottles and packages of sandwich bags. In the garage Hugo reported seeing bales of pink packing peanuts.

Whatever else, she was right about the house itself. Tucked away on a little-known byway, it was a sweet one or at least it had once been sweet. Set on high ground, its faded dignity was still evident in the churchlike windows and the formal, wrought-iron fence that ran across the front of the property. It felt like a place where we could reinvent ourselves.

It didn't look like a dangerous area, what with the country road, the small, neat houses, wide fields, and woods. Besides we were determined, Hugo and I.

Gossip about the neighborhood couldn't stop us. The house itself was clearly an authentic touchstone to history and, almost miraculously, the village retained an engaging aura of a bygone time. With a little more work than Hugo initially estimated on his napkin, we thought it could be a bed-and-breakfast.

Maybe more important, it was the only house to turn up in two years of hunting that we could almost afford. If we didn't act soon, the impetus for change, for remaking our lives, was going to drift away.

So the tenant could not put us off. Neither could the lawyer Hugo hired to make the deal happen. As we walked up the boxwood-lined brick path to his imposing office in Easton, the county seat, he had this to say:

“Royal Oak?”

Yes, I confirmed.

“The—boys are over there, you know.”

He let the words linger. I did not know and it was going to be necessary to admit as much if I wanted more information.

“Really?”

“They're bad news,” he confided. “Drunk, naked, firing shotguns at the moon, that type of thing.”

We shook hands and I dismissed his remark just as I had dismissed what the tenant said. You can't believe everything you hear . . .

Or can you? The question would haunt me a hundred times in the next year, especially at night when I walked from room to room in this house, straining to see out windows, into dark corners, and up the unlit attic stairs, trying to discover the reason for a sudden clang or a window-rattling thump.

The owner, Robbie, had neglected the place for decades, but still regretted selling off his grandmother's house. So when our lowball offer insulted his family heritage, it took weeks of faxed apologies, many more promises that our intentions for the house were honorable, and, of course, more money to win his forgiveness. After that he dragged out negotiations for eleven months and put off two dates to close the deal.

On a return visit to Royal Oak, while we waited for him to set a third date, we found the tenants gone, but as we walked around looking the place up and down, a visitor arrived by bicycle.

Flying a red bandanna from his back pocket, Mr. Louis Scott Kilmon, in neat khakis, flannel shirt, and straw hat, dismounted inside the rusted iron fence, introduced himself, and offered words of welcome. He had heard we were buying the place. I said how much we liked the village.

He responded that he hoped it would stay that way.

He rested his hand on the fence. “A few years back, the feds came around here with big plans to widen the road.” He waved at the narrow road following the creek that winds between our house and his, three doors down.

“Of course they didn't mention that right off. Tried to bribe us with promises of—” He paused and leaned into the words. “A
bike
path. So we told them we didn't want any fool bike path around here and we didn't want the road widened either. If they widened the road, then we'd really have traffic and there's too much already.”

He shot an appraising look at Hugo and me.

One of my first thoughts about the area was that a bike or walking path would be a big improvement because the road has a three-foot drainage ditch on either side and no shoulders. But I decided not to say so right then. Obviously, there were other perspectives to be considered.

While I was thinking things over, Hugo spoke up. “I see what you mean.”

“We don't want any bike paths around here,” Mr. Kilmon repeated.

I decided our position on the spot. “We wouldn't want a bike path either.”

Sensing our willingness to fit in, and undoubtedly wanting to keep a close eye on the newcomers, Mr. Kilmon would come by often once we took over the place some months later. Taking note of even tiny signs of progress, he always offered an encouraging word, which we lapped up like starving dogs. When the true extent of what we had to do to fix up the house before even starting a business began to dawn on us, and with it the constantly nagging thought that we were
hopeless romantic fools, I looked to Scott's encouragement as validation of the project and the idea that it wasn't doomed.

He came to know as much about the project as we did.

“I see you're replacing those old cinderblock steps with mahogany,” he might call out from his front porch as I walked by on my way to the post office.

“Yes, a gift from my brother,” I called back on that occasion. He waved me over to his porch, from where he could conveniently observe all the comings and goings at the post office. It was the first invitation to sit on his porch so I quickly accepted, not suspecting what he had in mind.

I didn't want to overstay or seem impolite by leaving too soon and hoped half an hour was the proper amount of time for a first visit, country style. It was long enough for Scott Kilmon to extract most of my family history. His technique centered on the apparently casual, cunningly well-placed question. By asking if my parents were local, he got straight to the knowledge of my Maryland-born grandmother, which drew an approving nod, and the fact that my great-greatgrandfather had preached to Union families at Antietam before the battle, which drew no comment.

After that, when walls and doors were down and renovation of the future bed-and-breakfast was in full swing, it was Scott who kept a close eye on the place.