Chesapeake (142 page)

The poet, through Miss Paxmore’s dignified reading, was uttering thoughts and conjuring images which young Chris himself had often attempted to verbalize. From his father he had caught something of the mystery of the river and how, at arbitrary intervals, it and the shore became one in marshland that was neither river nor shore. With his Turlock cousins he had penetrated the deepest of the Choptank marshes and had begun, in his simple way, to codify their secrets. He knew where the deer slept and the turtle hid. He saw duck feathers betraying where the birds nested and the minute tracks of the vole as it picked its way through insect-laden grasses.

But now he was hearing his deepest feelings externalized by a poet who had written about a marsh Chris would never see; yet it was his marsh and the man was uttering the most secret thoughts of the boy. It was remarkable, and he bent forward with great intensity to catch other fleeting images. He was certainly not prepared for what happened, a veritable explosion of ideas so potent that they tore his little world apart, allowing him to catch a glimpse of a total universe so splendid that a lifetime of study would never exhaust it. He was shown nothing less than the soul of the marsh, and he would never again be the same; from this moment on he would share the world’s intricate grandeur:

The theological implications of the poem escaped him, and he did not dedicate his life to either God or His greatness; he had before him the hell-raising years of education, and his initiation into the rough waterman’s world of Amos Turlock and Martin Caveny, but he did learn, once and for all time, that a marsh, or a creek, or a river, or a great bay was a handiwork of nature so magnificent that it must not ever be abused.

Miss Paxmore’s reading produced one aftermath that would have startled her. When Chris Pflaum reached home that afternoon he found his father cleaning his gun prior to patrolling the back streams to keep hunters obedient to the law, and he surprised the bull-necked warden by going to him impulsively and stammering, ‘Pop … I like what you do.’

‘What do I do?’

Chris would never be able to blurt out, ‘Protect the marshes as God created them.’ Instead he mumbled, ‘Huntin’ … and all that.’

In 1959 the Steed family was still divided into two branches: the Devon Steeds, who lived on what was left of the island; and the Refuge Steeds, who occupied a much more congenial series of estates on the mainland. The original strain had grown quite thin; after Judge Hathaway and Congressman Jefferson the Devon connection was quite barren, and after Lyman Steed the Refuge line was almost as bad. The family as a unit still owned the stores; their land was leaping ahead in value; and if the tomato canneries had proved a dead loss, the cornfields were replacing them. The prosaic condition of the once-dominant family could be summarized in one significant fact: no one was angry at them.

The Paxmores were equally quiescent. Woolman, their last luminary, was dead, and a set of routine artisans managed the boatyard from which daring schooners and swift skipjacks had once come; it was building motorboats from plans drafted in Boston. The moral fights in which these Quakers had once participated were settled now, and there was little vitality in their religion as they espoused it.

The Turlocks survived. During the Depression entire families of the clan had suffered years with no employment, but they had eaten off the land, and as long as the men could lay their hands on shotgun shells,
theirs or other people’s, they got their share of deer and ducks. The old hatreds against authority, and the Steeds, and the blacks had pretty well subsided, and through constant intermarriage with the Cavenys, even their bias against Catholics had diminished. A dozen Turlock men would experience three dozen different jobs over a four-year period, and some even became police officers, for brief periods. Their family genius was to produce beautiful girls now and then who married into new families like the Pflaums and a constant supply of thin, mean men who could fire a rifle with precision.

The Cavenys had become the backbone of the river towns. They were the policemen, the sheriffs, the minor court attendants, the wholesale merchants just below the Steeds, and the schoolteachers. With Father Patrick Caveny as titular head of the family, they prospered, both spiritually and socially. Real Catholics like the Steeds found this clarinet-playing priest a little hard to take, but he was so energetic and so easily wounded by defections from the faith that they supported him generously. It could be said with some accuracy that the Catholic church was one institution in Patamoke that was prospering, and as it grew, its acceptance among Protestants increased, mainly because of Father Patrick’s common sense.

But it was the Caters who had made the most significant advances. Indeed, they were now almost a part of the establishment, for Julia Cater held three good jobs and sang in the choir of the A.M.E. Church; Jeb Cater had four jobs; and their daughter Helen had three. True, their second daughter, Luta Mae, was again in jail, in Boston, because of the street demonstration she had led of Harvard, Wellesley and M.I.T. undergraduates, but son Hiram had been made a sergeant in the Marines and was sending money home. The house carried no mortgage. The family had a Ford ten years old, which Jeb kept in good condition, and from time to time Will Nesbitt dropped by to play the banjo and ask how Hiram was doing.

Only one ominous note disturbed the Choptank as the 1950s drew to a close. Three families had produced children of extraordinary merit, and each of the three young people had felt it necessary to build their lives outside the local area; in the old days they would have made their contributions at home.

Owen Steed was the last of the Devon line, and he had really never lived on the Choptank after the age of twelve. He had then gone off to Lawrenceville, an excellent school that prepared for Princeton, and after graduation from college had gone west to become an officer in an oil company in Tulsa. Had he returned to Devon he might have led the family enterprises into bold new fields, for he proved to be a good administrator, rising to the presidency of his company in Oklahoma.

Pusey Paxmore had come home at first, but involvement with the
family seaplane diverted him to Washington, and once he experienced the enticements of that city, he either could not or would not leave it. He had now held four different jobs of some distinction, and at each swearing-in the
Bugle
had run photographs showing him with either President Eisenhower or Vice-President Nixon. He always looked the same: the Harvard Law School graduate in the vested three-button dark suit. Had he stayed at home he might have taken the place of Woolman Paxmore as spiritual leader of the Quakers, for he had a strong theological predisposition, but now his life was cast in another mold and any possibility of preacherhood within the Quaker religion was lost. President Eisenhower once called him ‘The conscience of the White House,’ and he certainly looked the part, the cautious lawyer who hewed to the straight line which Paxmores had always followed when they laid down their keels.

Luta Mae Cater had also fled Patamoke to find her destiny, but her departure was somewhat more frenetic than that of her older male neighbors. One summer’s day she had marched into the Blue and Gold Ice Cream Parlor, ordered her loganberry cone, and sat boldly down at one of the iron tables to consume it.

‘You can’t eat there, miss,’ the proprietor said.

‘And why not?’ she demanded belligerently.

‘Because we don’t serve colored in here.’

‘You just sold me this cone.’

‘That’s for buyin’, not for eatin’.’

‘Starting today, it’s for eating, too.’

‘Miss, I will give you fifteen seconds to leave that table.’

Insolently, a large dark girl with rumpled hair who sought a fight, she remained at the table, slowly nibbling away at the cone. The owner kept an eye on his watch, and when the fifteen seconds was up, grabbed a whistle that he had bought for just such a day and blew it madly. It made a hellish sound, and within two minutes a pair of white officers, who had also been briefed on how to handle such criminal acts, came quietly into the ice cream parlor and said respectfully, ‘Miss, you can’t eat in here.’

‘Why not?’ she snarled, as if daring them to strike her.

‘Custom,’ one of the officers said.

‘Not no more,’ Luta Mae said in her street language. ‘We ain’t gonna give this honky our money and eat outside.’

‘Miss,’ the officer said with quiet persuasion, ‘we don’t want trouble, do we?’

‘I sure as hell do,’ Luta Mae said, and this was used against her at the trial, where it was proved that she had resisted arrest, used harsh language against the proprietor and tried to bite the hand of the second officer who tugged at her arms.

‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ the judge asked, ‘to bring dishonor upon your
fine father and mother, who this town respects as if they were white?’

Remorse was not what Luta Mae proposed to show that day, and when she abused the judge he dropped his attempts to conciliate her and gave her thirty days in jail. The charge was interesting: ‘She did willfully disturb the peace.’ The judge pointed out that over the centuries certain accepted rules had been fashioned for the happy relations between whites and blacks; these were understood, and when they were observed, the two races existed side by side in harmony.

‘Ain’t gonna be no more harmony,’ she said as the two sheriffs dragged her away.

Jeb and Julia had been profoundly disturbed by this incident. As members of the black establishment, respected even more by whites than by fellow blacks, they deplored their daughter’s behavior. They knew what a rash thing she had done, the terrible risk she had taken that her actions might stir the sleeping Turlocks and Cavenys. Her deportment before the judge merited a jail sentence, and they felt no resentment against the court.

But they were terribly against the judge’s stated doctrine that ancient rules devised to keep blacks in a subservient position had somehow acquired moral sanction, forever preventing their amendment. They knew that Luta Mae was right, that it was no longer acceptable to give a white merchant money and accept fifth-class treatment in return. They knew that the old rules of Patamoke were about to be broken. But they did not want to get involved.

‘Bes’ thing can happen,’ Jeb told Julia when they reached their cabin, ‘Luta Mae serve her term and get out of here.’

‘I think so too,’ Julia said. ‘Change gonna come, but doan’ let it be on her shoulders.’

‘Hiram, if’n he was here, he would of calmed her. Ain’t nothin’ I can do with that girl. She headstrong.’

‘She’s right,’ Julia said stubbornly. ‘But change ain’t gonna happen as fast as she want. Like you say, Jeb. Bes’ she get out of here.’

Luta Mae felt the same way, and when the judge released her ten days early, she kissed her mother goodbye and headed north.

When this disturbing element left town, Patamoke settled down to one of the finest years it had known since the peaceful 1890s. People had jobs. The oyster catch was far above average and crabs were plentiful, even the valuable soft shells. In October the geese returned in such numbers that any farmer who had waterfront to rent made a small fortune, and Christmas along the Choptank was like the gentlest week in September. In this way the somnolent 1950s drew to a close.

There was one man in Patamoke who rejoiced when the new bridge spanning the Chesapeake was opened. J. Ruthven Turlock had long
realized that hordes of people from Baltimore and Washington, not to mention Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, would flood into the Eastern Shore on sightseeing expeditions—‘And we will have the opportunity of catching our share of them as clients.’ He enlarged his offices and ordered seven more signs for the highway.

But his genius manifested itself in a gesture which astounded the people of Patamoke. He conceived this plan one morning when visiting the Turlock cabin to pick up two geese his brother Amos had shot the night before; for such gifts Ruthven took care of Amos’ paper work and whatever legal matters might arise. He was about to depart with the plucked geese hidden behind the spare tire in his trunk, when he chanced to see in a very favorable light the three hundred and ninety-eight acres of the Turlock marsh, and it occurred to him that he could convert this useless land to a constructive purpose that would make Amos and the family rich.

‘What we could do,’ he explained as he stood with the Turlocks at the door of their cabin, ‘is palisade that whole front edge, throw some earth along the flanks and then announce that we’re running a sanitary fill.’

‘What would that accomplish?’ Amos asked.

‘Why, dump trucks from miles around would wheel in here, fill in the land behind the palisades, and before you could say Bob’s-your-uncle, we have us four hundred acres of choice waterfront land. We call it Patamoke Gardens and we sell it to rich dudes from Chicago and Cleveland for so much money you’d never believe it.’

‘Could we do that?’ Amos asked.

‘We sure could.’

‘But won’t it cost money to palisade?’

‘I know ways of getting money,’ Ruthven said, so a deal was arranged whereby he would fill in the marsh, subdivide it into two hundred lots and create the attractive new town of Patamoke Gardens. The beauty of his plan was that it was totally practical. He knew where to borrow the money at four percent; he knew builders eager to participate in such a gamble; and he knew scores of well-to-do doctors and dentists who were interested in either waterfront homes or real estate investments. Before the town planners of Patamoke could say Bob’s-your-uncle, the plan was unleashed, the marsh was palisaded, and the waving grass in which deer and ducks and red-winged blackbirds had luxuriated was buried in waste so that new homesites could be formed.