Chesapeake (141 page)

The three craft moved silently out into the Choptank, drifted westward for some time, the two skiffs oblivious of the trailing boat, which
kept at a safe distance. At about three in the morning, when the crescent moon had set, the skiffs rounded a point not far from Peace Cliff, where the Quaker boatbuilders lived, and there on the bosom of the river waited a raft of some thousand geese chatting quietly in the night. The skiffs separated, the one with the dog lagging behind to wait for the explosion.

The major skiff, the one with the gun, eased its way toward the raft, making more noise than old Jake Turlock would ever have made. Now the justification for this carelessness became evident: Amos Turlock flicked a switch and a huge headlight set in a triangular, mirrored box flashed on, illuminating the masses of geese and freezing them into position. The light came at them so suddenly and with such reflected force that they were powerless to move. Aiming the skiff right at the heart of the motionless geese, Amos took a deep breath, kept his body away from the recoil of his monstrous weapon and pulled the trigger.

Only when the two skiffs were loaded with the seventy-seven geese and Rusty was back aboard, did Hugo Pflaum reveal himself. He had them now. At night. Long gun. Light. Seventy-seven birds. Out of season. He could put these two in jail for life, but when he moved in to make the arrest he found his cousin Amos Turlock pointing a large shotgun right at his chest.

‘Hugo, you ain’t seen nothin’. You wasn’t out here tonight.’

With considerable courage Pflaum pointed his flashlight at the gun he was so determined to capture. There it was, resting insolently in its chock, its heavy butt jammed into the burlap bag of pine needles, the ancient slayer of waterfowl, the perpetrator of outrage. But protecting it was his brother-in-law Amos with a shotgun and a snarling Chesapeake.

‘Hugo, be a bright fellow and head home. Me and Ben won’t humiliate you. We won’t say a word at the store.’

Pflaum took a deep breath and rested on his oars, keeping his flashlight focused on The Twombly. He was almost close enough to touch it. Damnation, he did want to drag that gun into custody, to be photographed with it, to terminate its scandalous life on this river. But he heard Amos Turlock’s soft, persuasive voice: ‘Make believe you never seen it, Hugo. Go on home.’

With a regret that would burn for the rest of his life, the game warden dimmed his flashlight, cranked his outboard and started the noisy trip back to Patamoke.

The quality of any human life is determined by the differential experiences which impinge upon it. For example, J. Ruthven Turlock’s entire history past the age of twenty-seven had been altered by the accident of that seaplane ride; without it he might never have appreciated the grandeur
of his native land and gone wandering after something better; with it he found a key to life.

The same seaplane exerted a contrasting influence upon Pusey Paxmore. Without his subsequent involvement as a lobbyist in Washington he would probably have been satisfied with a moderate success in providing legal services to the Steeds and those wealthy newcomers lured into the area by J. Ruthven; with it he became a fixture in the nation’s capital, valued for his Harvard excellence, respected for his Quaker character.

In 1958, when Hiram Cater reached the age of nineteen, Will Nesbitt, leader of the band and always rich in propositions that might help his friends, brought an interesting one to the senior Caters: ‘Sign at the post office claims a Marine Corps recruiter gonna be visitin’ Salisbury armory Wednesday and Thursday.’

‘What that mean to us?’ Jeb asked.

‘It mean your son Hiram ought to haul hisse’f to the armory and enlist.’

‘What chance he got?’ Jeb asked in some bitterness. His son had graduated from high school in Salisbury and for two years had been bouncing from one pitiful job to another. ‘On’y steady job a colored boy can get, mowin’ lawns, May till September.’

‘My friend,’ the musician said expansively, ‘I was told for sure, they gonna take a handful of coloreds. Sposin’ they can find some well qualified.’

‘Ain’t none better qualified than Hiram,’ Julia said, and she was right. Her son was quiet, well behaved, quick to learn and trustworthy. She often told her neighbors, ‘If’n that boy be lucky enough to be born white, ain’t no job in town he couldn’t get. And maybe a scholarship to college as well.’ But when she pondered what the black college south of Salisbury had done to Luta Mae, she doubted the value of an education. ‘We send her there a fine, respectable girl. She come out a radical, livin’ somewheres up in New York, rantin’ about burnin’ down the world.’

Jeb ignored his wife’s lamentation and asked Nesbitt, ‘You feel sure Hiram can make it?’ He wanted neither his son nor his family to undergo unnecessary mortification, and if what he feared was true—that the invitation to blacks was merely a display of tolerance to be ignored if any promising young Negroes actually applied—he felt that his son should avoid such humiliation. ‘Jeb,’ Nesbitt said, ‘all I know, when we played for a dance in Salisbury, I met a young fellow that they accepted.’

‘You mean a colored?’

‘Black as you and Hiram.’

‘College boy, maybe?’

‘Salisbury High School.’

‘I doan’ believe it.’

‘Damn, man! I asked.’

This was Monday, and for two nights the Caters, none of them, could sleep. For Hiram to be a marine, with a uniform and self-respect and regular pay, was really too much to hope for, but the prospect was so dazzling that they had to hope. On Wednesday morning, when Will Nesbitt arrived to drive the boy to the recruiting office, Julia counseled him, ‘Be relaxed. Before you go in the door, say to yourself, “I got all A’s and B’s and I was star catcher.”’ Jeb wanted to give advice, but he was too excited to make sense, and when Nesbitt asked if he wanted to ride along, he cried, ‘Good Lord, no!’ And all that day he stayed in the shack, not actually praying, but thinking strong thoughts.

At seven that night he sensed what the result had been, for three blocks from the shack Will Nesbitt started blowing the horn and shouting, and when the three Caters ran to the fence, there sat Hiram looking straight ahead and trying not to betray his feelings. He was a marine.

‘God A’mighty!’ Nesbitt told the Neck, ‘they said they didn’t get anybody as good as Hiram once a month. I showed them the papers, told about his record and his respectable family—I didn’t mention Luta Mae—and they grabbed him like he was made of silver.’

In the days that followed, girls came by the shack to admire the hero, and when the time came for him to report in Baltimore for his uniform and passage money to boot camp, his departure became a matter for wide celebration. Reverend Douglass, older now and no longer hoping for an important pulpit in Wilmington, came to the house to advise Hiram against certain pitfalls. ‘You will be representing a whole community. You are more than just Hiram Cater. If you do well, other young boys may be able to follow in your steps.’

He did well. He had been in camp only a few days when the sergeants saw that in Hiram they had one of those powerful young men who were pliable not through weakness but because they relied upon a strong family inheritance. The young recruit absorbed abuse in drill, dismissed it, and reported next morning prepared for more. His long training in accepting orders from whites without surrendering his inner convictions made him an ideal marine, and no one in his class did better than he.

At a speed which bewildered him, he was sent to Korea, not with a formed unit but to a replacement depot, a repple depple he explained to his parents, and from there he was sent to a front-line company guarding a sector along the thirty-eighth parallel. There he discovered something that changed his life: in Asia the Koreans, he found, were much like blacks in America. They were second-class citizens, scorned by both the Chinese and the Japanese, who dismissed them as uncivilized, lacking in education and inclined toward criminal behavior. But the Koreans, as he saw them in action, bided their time, accepted insults, and in the end proved more reliable and clever than either the Chinese or the Japanese.

‘Least, they survived for two thousand years,’ he told black marines with whom he bunked. ‘Damn, they look like us!’

He was right. The big, square Korean face, especially if it lacked a pronounced Mongolian fold about the eye, resembled the light-faced black. In personality, too, the similarity was pronounced, for the Korean was patient, long-suffering, explosive at the final outrage and terribly durable.

Corporal Cater went to the camp library to seek books about the Koreans and was entranced by the resolute manner in which this small nation, crushed between two behemoths, had survived. He then sought everything the librarian could find that gave an adverse report on the Koreans, and as he read Japanese critics, or Chinese, he often chuckled:

And yet the Koreans had established and defended a tough little nation, beating back both the Chinese and the Japanese. In some centuries they had triumphed, in others they had gone under temporarily, but always they had struggled, and the condemnations cited against them were proofs of their durability.

‘Damn, I like these people!’ Hiram told his fellow marines, and he began catching rides into the village of Dok Sing, not to guzzle beer like the Army dogfaces, but to meet the people, and when a girl tending counter in a dry-goods store indicated that she might consider going to a base movie with him, he could hardly wait to walk her home for her parents’ consent.

‘This house is better than mine,’ he told the girl, and she translated for her parents. It was the beginning of a fine relationship; Nak Lee was much like Luta Mae, a proud girl who could speak of politics and religion and the threat from the north, and as they talked she consistently wanted to bring her parents into the conversation, translating rapidly in two languages and sometimes explaining a subtle point in Japanese.

The older Lees made it clear that their daughter would never be permitted to marry an American, and certainly not a Japanese, and when this point was discussed, Hiram discovered the intense pride these Koreans had in their race, their willingness to combat the world in defense of their land, and he thought how different they were from his own parents, who had devised only a strategy for mean survival.

Nak Lee was obviously fond of her black American; she saw that he was superior to the other black marines and to most of the white ones, too, and she enjoyed accompanying him to dances. When she kissed him the first time, he heard his parents’ thundering admonitions that he must never touch a white woman, or he might be slain, and damned if that very night a white Army man didn’t try to make trouble over the fact that a nigger was dating a Korean girl!

It might have come to blows had not Nak Lee said quietly, ‘Hey, Joe. Why you don’t go back to the Ku Klux Klan?’ The Army man was so startled that he stepped back, and the incident ended.

‘You were very brave,’ Hiram said as they kissed goodnight.

‘We learned that against the Japanese,’ Nak Lee said. And apparently she had been doing some reading too, for suddenly she took Hiram by two hands, and standing face to face, asked him, ‘When you niggers start to fight back?’

On the morning of June 11, 1958, young Christopher Pflaum, aged thirteen, was about to encounter a major experience, although he could scarcely have suspected it. He was on his way to school with a certain lightness of heart, for this was the final day of the year, with a lazy vacation looming ahead, and Miss Paxmore—there seemed always to be a Miss Paxmore teaching somewhere—had promised her children that on closing day they would have no formal studies, which meant that lively boys like Chris approached the classroom in a state of euphoria.

‘Hey, Chris!’ one of the Steed boys whispered. ‘Can you get your father’s boat?’ He thought he could, so three other boys wanted to know if they could join him on the Choptank for some rockfish. He thought this might be possible.

‘If I may interrupt your consultations,’ Miss Paxmore said, ‘what I have in mind for today is a special treat. All year I’ve been assigning famous poems to be memorized. “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note …” Some of you did well on that. “The breaking waves dashed high on a stern and rockbound coast.” How did you like that?’

The boys around Chris groaned, and Miss Paxmore said, ‘Years from now you’ll recall those poems and be glad you learned them.’ The boys groaned again, and Miss Paxmore smiled. ‘Today you lazy fellows can sit back and let the words I read flow over you, because you don’t have to memorize them. But if you listen carefully you may hear something important, for this poem is about the Choptank.’

Chris Pflaum sat up. ‘It’s not called the Choptank, of course,’ Miss Paxmore continued. He slumped back in his seat. ‘Nevertheless, it’s about our river, believe me.’ And she spoke with such conviction that even the boys who had been watching flies settle on the windowpanes
looked casually at her. She held a smallish book in her hands and leaned forward over the desk as she opened it. ‘Sidney Lanier was writing for us, but he named his poem after a part of the country he knew best—south of here, the marshes of Glynn.’

Chris Pflaum came to attention again; he loved marshes but had never imagined that anyone could write poetry about them. And then as Miss Paxmore read a poem she had loved ever since her days as a student at Earlham, he began to hear phrases which cut like sharp knives into the very heart of his existence: