Chesapeake (41 page)

‘You use our land.’

‘No, we need someone to watch it constantly. Timothy, this would be so much easier than hunting wolves.’

‘We like hunting.’ He appealed to Stooby, who nodded.

‘Stooby,’ Steed pleaded. ‘Can’t you explain to your father that he’s getting old. He can’t go into the woods—’

‘Better’n me,’ Stooby said, sitting on his haunches as if that ended the conversation.

So Steed turned reluctantly to Nancy, asking her to convince the Turlocks that they should man the salt works, and she understood. In a semi-literate jargon she argued with them, explaining how easy the work would be and how rewarding the results. She made no headway with Timothy, but she did force Stooby to listen, and after a while he began to appreciate the possibilities.

‘What?’ he asked stolidly, implying by this single word his willingness to listen to the plan.

Steed, delighted that he had at last penetrated the indifference of this clan, took them all to the shore, where he sketched, in conformance to his instructions from London, a salt bed, in which water would be led from the Choptank onto a flat area for preliminary evaporation, then into successive beds for concentration, the last one being covered by a shed, beneath which the boiling would occur.

‘Who pays?’ Timothy wanted to know.

‘I’ll build the shed,’ Steed said, so during the latter half of 1669 the Turlocks went into the salt business.

It was an aggravating affair. Water at the Turlock marsh contained
only fourteen parts of salt per thousand, whereas at the mouth of the bay it contained twenty-nine, which meant that trying to make salt at the marsh was more than twice as difficult as it would have been in southern Virginia. The marsh also got more than its share of rain, so that constant additions of fresh water were diluting the process; and the raininess meant fewer hours of strong sunlight. And when in the last flat, under the shed, a pitiful amount of salt was finally made, it was not of a good coarse grain but was filled with sand.

‘Hell with salt,’ Turlock growled, and it was now that the trouble with Stooby began; it concerned Nancy.

When she fled from the Lambs she could, of course, have been apprehended by the court, and a magistrate wanted to do this, but Prudence Lamb said compassionately, ‘It is better that she work out her own destiny.’

‘With Timothy Turlock? She’s been whipped twice for lying with him.’

‘We have been able to do little for her,’ Prudence said.

‘But she owes you—what is it?—three years.’

‘She owes us little.’

‘You sign no warrant?’

‘None. Perhaps God intended her for the marsh.’

But if Nancy had enjoyed some months of freedom in the cluttered hut, they had not been without conflict. Her original target had been Timothy; he was the only human being with whom she had ever felt much identification. When she was with him they laughed a lot, and once, when wolf hunting was good, he had even paid a fine to prevent her from being whipped.

But what she did not know was that Timothy already had a wife of sorts, the big Swedish girl whom he had indentured legally, and it was she who had title to the hut. Her child Flora was there, too, and things might have become difficult had Birgitta not been of ample heart. She saw no reason why Nancy should not move in, and if Turlock wanted to lie with her now and then, it was all right with Birgitta, for she had never intended staying permanently with this odious little man. She had been his mate for eight years but had always looked for a practical way of escaping; the presence of this gangling girl was of little consequence.

The trouble came from Stooby. He had always liked Birgitta; she had never treated him as an idiot and had sometimes tried to tell him of Sweden and the early days at the colony where they found her. He could not understand the nature of foreign countries but knew that the Dutch had been harsh masters and that Birgitta had fled them with enthusiasm. He was therefore irritated that his father should now be treating Birgitta unjustly, taking this new woman into the hut, and after watching the affair in silence for some time, his resentment rose until at last he confronted his father.

‘You send her!’

‘Nance?’

‘Birgitta unhappy.’

‘Who cares?’

‘Unfair.’

‘You shut!’

‘Birgitta—’

‘You shut!’ The toothless old man grabbed for his musket and began clubbing Stooby with it, but the noise alarmed the women, who began shouting.

‘Fool,’ was all Timothy would say; his son said nothing, but that afternoon he disappeared.

He was walking disconsolately in the forest when Griscom and Bonfleur came upon him, and the Englishman cried with some excitement, ‘It’s the idiot!’ And they took him to their ship, where they needed someone to clear away the mess created by Paxmore’s black carpenters.

Stooby worked for the strangers during the time his father was trying fitfully to make salt, and the more he saw of the ship, the more suspicious he became of these men. From his long years in the woods he had learned to note and evaluate everything: the way moss grew, the color of toads, the inclination of pine trees, the roots of the larch. It was this skill that he now applied to the visiting ship, and at the end of a month he knew so much about the strangers that they would have been appalled. ‘The idiot,’ they called him, not realizing that in Stooby Turlock they had brought a natural genius into the heart of their project.

These were the small things he saw: flecks of dried blood where someone had been wounded; stains on the bulwark suggesting that large stores of powder had been kept there; nail holes where structures had once been attached; marks on the bottom deck where barrels had stood; shreds of rope where hammocks had been suspended, many of them; numerous repairs prior to the ones being made by Paxmore, indicating that the ship had suffered, at one time or another, much destruction; and the frequent utterance of one word he could not understand: Marigot.

But it was not the ship or the strangers that agitated him. It was his recollection of Nancy, and one afternoon when the strangers were not present he set forth in his canoe and returned to the marsh. Tying the canoe carefully to the rickety wharf, against the chance that he might have to escape in a hurry, he walked purposefully to the hut, kicked the door open and announced that he had come for Nancy.

She was seated in a corner, half dressed, playing a string game with Flora, and she looked up without concern. ‘Hello, Stoob,’ she said. He ignored her and walked to where his father lay on the floor, watching two bugs as they wrestled with a dead fly.

‘Nancy is mine,’ Stooby said.

‘Go away.’

‘You listen. Nancy is—’

Like a coiled snake, Timothy sprang from the floor, grabbed the musket with which he had once before repulsed his son and began smashing him about the head.

‘No!’ Stooby cried in a powerful, throaty bellow. ‘No more!’

With violent blows he crashed his father back onto the floor, but Timothy had been in many fights, and using the musket to pull himself erect, he came at his son with every intention of killing him.

No more words were uttered, only suppressed grunts. The musket flashed out, catching Stooby in the jaw and drawing blood. Then the boy lunged at his father, caught him by the rag used as a shirt and drew him backward. As Timothy struggled to maintain his footing, his son brought his two hands up sharply, caught the gun and jammed it up against his father’s chin, collapsing the old man’s face.

But Timothy was not finished. Summoning his considerable strength, he swung the musket in a wild circle, hit nothing, bounced it off a broken wall and brought it to rest with a mighty bang against his own ankle. Suddenly he began to wail, as he had always done when being whipped, and his lamentations became torrential. Screaming and shouting, he lunged at his son, who calmly knocked away the musket and struck the old man on the chin with such force that he fell backward over a chair, banging his head on the floor and knocking himself unconscious.

Ignoring the inert body, Stooby went to the corner where Nancy sat and took her by the hand. ‘You’re mine,’ he said, but as they were leaving the hut Birgitta said, ‘No need to leave,’ and with a sweep of her hand she indicated that they could have one of the curtained corners, and there they went while little Flora peeked to watch their love-making.

These long days when Edward Paxmore was finishing his corrections on the
Martha Keene
and repairing the mysterious vessel brought to his yards by Griscom and Bonfleur were difficult ones for his wife. Ruth Brinton, left alone at Peace Cliff, felt driven of God to do what almost no white person in the colonies had so far done: determine what kind of relationship ought to exist between the master and the slave. With all her suasion she had tried to get her husband to grant full freedom to the slaves he had inherited by accident, but he had kept insisting that they were his property, lawfully obtained, and that so long as he treated them humanely, as the Bible directed, he could not be at fault. Always he told his wife, ‘I was a servant, I obeyed my master, and from him learned an infinite amount.’

‘But thee was not a slave,’ she argued. ‘Thy term was definite.’ He could not see where this made much difference because, as he pointed out, ‘I would have been happy to prolong my indenture.’

‘But always with the chance of terminating it, at thy request.’

‘What difference?’ he asked.

At Patamoke Meeting she encountered the same defeats. On four successive First Days she had ranted, and one member had warned Edward, ‘Let not thy wife become a common scold.’ She was infuriated, that was the only word, that the Quakers, who were so attentive to miscarriage of right, should be so obtuse on this great moral issue.

As for the other churches, what could one expect of them? They served the masters and preached whatever doctrine the plantations required. Even that noble soul Father Steed, who had done so much good in Maryland, was blind on this fatal topic. ‘God appoints each man to his proper level,’ he said piously, ‘and like the slave, mine has been a lowly one, ministering to the wilderness. Mrs. Paxmore, I have gone months upon months without accomplishing one good thing. My life …’ Often, for no apparent reason, he broke into tears, and she was not surprised when his younger brother came rushing to the cliff one day with the news that Ralph was near death.

‘He says he would prefer more than anything else to talk with you.’

‘I will come,’ she said, thinking: If I were dying, he would surely come to me.

They had sailed to Devon, but when they reached the creek the wind was against them, so Paul ordered his slaves to row, and as they did, the great black muscles of their arms gleaming beneath the sweat, she could not see them straining; she could see only the three black women who worked for her and an anguish almost unbearable beset her, for she realized that she knew no more of her women than she did of these four strangers. Oh, she knew their names—Mary, Obdie, Sara—and roughly their ages; she was thirty-six and supposed that each of them was younger. Vaguely she knew that Mary was married to one of the men who worked for her husband, but she did not know which, and both Obdie and Sara had children, but under what arrangements she could not guess.

Dearest God, she thought as she sat in the bow of the sloop looking aft, we bring human beings to live amongst us and know nothing of them. Never once had she heard a Steed or any other owner say of his slaves, ‘I told Amy and Obadiah to fetch it.’ Always they said, ‘I sent my slaves to fetch it,’ as if they existed without names or personalities. Now, as Henry Steed hurried from the plantation house to help dock the boat, she looked not at him but into the faces of the four men who had rowed, and they were visages in a dream, without skeletal bones to lend reality, or blood to keep them warm, or any other substantial quality other than their age and their ability to work. These men are prime, she thought as she gazed into their faces, and that is all we care to know about them, but they are also human beings, and if we allow them to
live among us without acknowledging that fact, we are breeding tragedy.

‘Ralph is in sad condition,’ Henry said, tears showing in his eyes. ‘Be not too argumentative.’

‘It is for argument that he summoned me,’ she said. Primly, her neck clothed in gray, a Quaker bonnet on her head, her skirts lifted to escape the dust, she walked from the wharf to the house and up the stairs to the added room in which the priest lay. ‘They tell me thee is poorly,’ she said.

‘I’m a small boat headed for the slip,’ he said.

They talked for more than an hour, speaking of every contentious difference that lay between them, and at last she said, ‘I am sorry, Father Ralph, that no Catholic prelate is available to talk with thee.’

He tried to blow his nose but was too weak. ‘May I borrow your speech?’ he asked, and when she nodded, he said, ‘Thee is a priest.’

‘I am a poor woman so tortured with sin that I fear I may not survive the night,’ she said.

‘Of what?’

‘Of slavery. I am torn to shreds.’

‘No need,’ he whispered. ‘No need. God saves the sparrow. He tends the slave.’

‘I cannot leave it to God,’ she said, her stern face dissolving in tears. ‘Dear Priest, shrive my soul.’

‘We’ve shared a river …’ His voice trailed off. ‘My brothers … call them …’

She hurried to summon the Steeds, and soon the small room was filled with brothers and wives and great-nieces. When he saw them—the offspring of Edmund Steed, the faithful Catholic—he wanted to console them but could not form the words. Now Fitzhugh, ever more striking with his golden hair, moved to the bedside and grasped the old man’s hand. ‘Don’t die,’ he pleaded while his elders expressed their shock at his forwardness.

‘Come back, Fitz!’ Henry ordered, but the priest held the child’s hand, and with this expression of love for his distinguished family, died.

For Ruth Brinton the next days were both a torment and a consolation. She turned to the cliff and began the task of discovering who these blacks were that shared the land with her. To her surprise she learned that Mary was thirty-nine, five years older than she had supposed. ‘How does thee keep so young?’