One preachment of his mother exerted a profound influence: “You brush your teeth, you ain’t gonna lose ’em the way I done los’ mine.” Cleaning his teeth twice a day became a solemn ritual which he observed through choice and not because his mother forced him. As a result, he noticed that his teeth were whiter than those of his playmates and much brighter than those of white children, who were allowed unlimited quantities of candy.
He was allowed almost nothing. His sister Luta Mae saved their pennies and on festive days would lead him to the Blue and Gold Ice Cream Parlor, where they would agonize over which of nine flavors to choose for their cones; he thought of these days as the best in his life and felt none of his sister’s resentment that when the cones were bought they could not be eaten at the lacy iron tables. He wanted to be out on the street, where the cool touch of the cream on his lips contrasted with the hot breeze from the river.
When Luta Mae was twelve, a big bright girl with energies and imaginings far surpassing those of her older sister, she told Hiram extraordinary stories—of how she flew one day with Charles Lindbergh all through the sky, and of how she had once owned a Chevrolet and driven it over the oyster-shell roads, and of how she had met this older boy Charley and of their going through the countryside and doing everything they damned well pleased. One’s mind was dusted out when one talked long with Luta Mae, for her enthusiasms flourished and carried her to perimeters far beyond the Choptank.
When she was thirteen she confided to Hiram that she would refuse to end her education when the black school terminated at the end of the seventh grade. “I am going to Salisbury. I am going to the black high school and get all A’s. And then I am going to college.” She had fallen under the spell of a Miss Canby, who taught in the Patamoke black school, and from her had learned to speak white man’s English, with no contractions or gutter slang. She affected ladylike pronunciations, too: skoo-well for school and Feb-ru-ar-y, with all letters vocalized in a manner few college professors could equal. She was reading Langsten Hughes and the life of Frederick Douglass, who had grown up nearby. And always she seemed to be dragging Hiram along behind her, as if it was his education that mattered; but when their mother heard of this, she became agitated.
“Doan’ you listen to Luta Mae,” Julia warned. “She got special problems.”
And then, suddenly, the Eastern Shore was gripped by an excitement that preempted even Julia’s cautionary preachments. World War II had come and gone, scarcely touching the Shore; no munitions plants sprouted, nor any big military installations. Life hardly changed in spite of the convolutions at Berlin and Hiroshima; the only excitement came when a U-boat crept close to the Virginia Capes and sank some freighters. It was believed that the real mission of the submarine was the bombardment of Patamoke and the destruction of the Paxmore Boatyard, and when cynics said, “Not likely they’d bother,” older men reminded them, “That’s what they said before the British bombed us in the War of 1812.”
The war had passed without invasion of the Choptank, and things were back in their somnolent grooves when the Maryland legislature, composed principally of men from the western shore, passed a bill authorizing the construction of a mighty bridge right across Chesapeake Bay. Imaginations were inflamed by the possibilities: “Is it feasible for man to construct a bridge five miles long across a major arm of the Atlantic Ocean? It is and we shall do it.”
The announced justification of the bridge was that it would provide an alternate route between Washington and New York, but the real purpose was to enable Monday-to-Friday bureaucrats in Washington and Baltimore to get more speedily to their summer resorts along the Atlantic Ocean, and this meant that the sleepy fields of the Eastern Shore, so long protected from outside influences, would be converted into snarling highways for pleasure seekers. Where gracious living had prevailed, gas stations and quick-food counters would clutter the landscape.
Almost unanimously the Eastern Shore opposed this bridge, and heated meetings were held at which local patriots explained that the bridge would really be paid for by watermen who did not want it and by farmers whose ancient holdings would be contaminated by it. Screamed the Bugle:
This is confiscation of the most brutal sort. Against our permission and with our own funds, our way of life is being despoiled. Where we once had a few-score automobiles on our lovely back roads, we will now have thousands. Our most precious corners will be invaded by any boob from Baltimore who has a second-hand car. Noise, contamination, rowdyism and the influx of strangers who do not comprehend our values will be the consequence. No greater disaster than this damnable bridge has ever faced our land of peaceful living, and we oppose it with all our energy.
The timeless proposal that the Eastern Shore detach itself from Maryland to form a new state was revived, and agitated meetings were held in Delaware and Virginia to speed the plan, but as always, it came to naught; Maryland did not want the Eastern Shore, did not understand it or care to pay for its upkeep, but it was determined that it not become part of any other state. So a bridge was authorized that nobody on the Eastern Shore desired in order to destroy a way of life that everyone wished to preserve; and rich northerners who had bought estates along the rivers bewailed its arrival the way rich southerners had once lamented the departure of slavery.
One group of people along the eastern rivers was delighted with the prospect of a bridge, but they kept their counsel and waited. They were the blacks who saw in the building of the bridge a chance for employment that had otherwise eluded them—“Now we gonna get jobs. They gonna need a lot of men to build that bridge.” Will Nesbitt quietly told his band members that night clubs would be needed to entertain the workmen, and he proposed playing in them. Reverend Douglass looked into the possibility of finding jobs for most of his unemployed parishioners and came back from engineering headquarters in Baltimore excited about the prospects.
“Jeb,” he told Cater, “I’ll give you a recommendation as one of the best workmen in this area. You’re older and more responsible, and I’m sure you’ll land a good job.”
So Jeb surrendered his position on the skipjack, informed his family that from now on he was a bridge builder, and rode with Will Nesbitt to the construction center at the eastern end of the bridge. While the band leader negotiated for a possible location in which to play, he reported to the hiring office, where lines of men waited for employment, and he saw with growing reassurance that many were being hired. The chalked sign said that drivers, dozers, office help and field bosses were needed, plus other specialties which he could not decipher, like sandhogs.
A lot of jobs were being distributed, but not to blacks. When he reached the office a brisk young man asked, “You work on a bridge before?” When he said no, the young man said, “Sorry, nothing.”
At that moment of his rejection, two buses drew up, one from Boston, one from New York, and Jeb saw that the construction company was importing white men from distant cities rather than employing blacks who lived near the site. And the men had come not just for specialized jobs he could not perform; he lingered and heard them given the precise kind of work that he could have done: drivers, shovel men, watchmen, tool cleaners.
Will Nesbitt had no better luck. Roadhouses were being opened, but they were importing white talent, and when the two black men drove back home they carried a bitterness which was hard to mask. Nesbitt said, “I seen them buses bringin’ in the white men. Seems like from birth they just doan’ want us. They doan’ let us go to school, then they tells us, ‘You ain’t been to school.’ ”
Jeb restrained his anger, as he had disciplined himself to do, but the more Will talked of the discriminations they faced in all acts of life, the sadder he became, because he saw this perpetual unfairness saddled onto his son and then onto his son’s son, through the generations. He did not, however, report the incident of the buses to his family, but Will Nesbitt spoke of it throughout the Neck, and on Thursday night Luta Mae came storming home, slamming herself about a
s she did when suffering outrage.
“I was informed,” she said with schoolmarm prissiness, “that no blacks were being employed at the bridge.”
Jeb said nothing, but Luta Mae persisted. “Was I informed correctly?”
“Well ...”
“Goddamnit!” the girl cried.
“Luta Mae! Doan’ you ever blaspheme in this house.” It was Julia speaking.
“Mother,” Luta Mae cried, whipping about and pushing Julia back, “you keep your Bible-mouthing to yourself. We’re talking about vileness.” And Julia watched, amazed, as her daughter argued with her father like some embittered man.
“Tell me the truth, Father. Did they send buses to bring in ordinary workmen?”
“Yes, yes. That’s what they done.”
“And those white men took jobs that you could have filled?”
“That’s what they done.”
“Goddamnit!” the girl cried with a savagery her parents had never seen before. “That bridge should be burned to the ground.”
“It ain’t built yet,” her father protested, but she brushed him aside and was seen no more that night, nor on Friday or Saturday. On Monday the papers carried a story that the hiring offices at the eastern end of the bridge had been consumed by fire. Officials believed that it must have been started by a cigarette thrown carelessly into a wastebasket.
When Jeb and Julia heard of the fire, and saw Luta Mae returning home with smugness etched beneath her dark eyes, they could guess what had happened but were afraid to voice their fears, for what their daughter had done led to prison. But Will Nesbitt stopped by the shack and said knowingly, “Damned hiring office burned. A good thing.” He waited for Jeb to respond, but Jeb was too smart to say anything.
When the bandleader left, Jeb fell onto his knees, bent his head and began to pray, and before he had started his supplication Julia was beside him, praying that their family might safely negotiate the threatening years.
The return of geese to the Eastern Shore brought two men into confrontation. Amos Turlock believed that the huge birds had come back to him personally, and since his ancestors had hunted geese on the Choptank for more than three hundred years, he proposed to continue. Furthermore, he intended using the long gun which had blazed across these waters since 1827, and when the geese began to invade his marsh, as they had in his grandfather’s day, he figured it was time to check on The Twombly, hidden like the infant Moses in rushes.
Hugo Pflaum, the game warden responsible for the Choptank, began receiving indications that his brother-in-law Amos might be on the prowl. One resident reported having heard a tremendous blast at midnight “like the echo of Confederate cannon at Chancellorsville,” and another had seen mysterious lights toward two in the morning, moving slowly up and down the river. Backwoods families began having goose with greater regularity than their legal huntsmen could have provided, and there were telltale traces of fresh corn on fields which geese had picked clean two months before. Worst of all, whenever Amos appeared at the store, he was smiling.
The law prohibiting his behavior was explicit, and he was breaking it in seven respects: he was using a long gun absolutely outlawed since 1918; he was using a night light which blinded the geese, something no decent gunner had done in the past hundred years; he was shooting at night, strictly forbidden; he was baiting his marsh and the field back of his cabin with great quantities of ripened corn; he was hunting out of season; he had no license; and he was selling dead geese commercially. But he committed all these crimes with such innocent deception that Pflaum could never catch him.
“The average crook,” Hugo reported to his superiors in Annapolis, “lurks furtively, leaves a blazing trail that anyone could follow, and makes a score of mistakes. I’ve captured all the great guns but Turlock’s. I’ve arrested twenty-three farmers baiting their fields, and I doubt if there are three night-lights operating in the entire area. But this damned Amos Turlock, he does everything, every night, and I cannot catch him.”
“The stories coming out of Patamoke, Hugo, are damaging your reputation,” the regional manager said. “You want extra men?”
“That I could use.”
So two extra wardens were dispatched to Patamoke, dressed flashily like ordinary dudes out of Philadelphia, and they approached Amos with an interesting proposition that he act as their guide for some goose hunting.
“It’s out of season!” he snapped.
“We know that. But in Chestertown they assured us—”
“In Chestertown they don’t know a goose from a duck.” He dismissed them, then ran to the store to warn his cronies. “Two new wardens in town.”
“How’d you know?”
“They walked like wardens.”
So he laid low, and after two weeks the strangers returned to Baltimore, assuring the head office that they had thrown the fear of God into Amos Turlock. That night with one mighty blow The Twombly slew sixty-nine geese, and Turlocks eight miles upriver feasted.
The explosion of the gun was clearly heard in several homes facing Devon Island. “Sounded like maybe an airplane busting apart in the sky. We ran out, but it was all dark. Then we saw this light in Broad Creek and my husband got his field glasses, but by then the light had vanished.”
When Hugo returned to his office in the basement of the courthouse he studied his maps and concluded that Amos had shifted his operations away from his own creek and out into the spacious reaches of the major rivers. “Well,” he muttered to himself, “that means he’s got to travel some distance with his cannon. That gives me a chance.”
Early one morning he slipped downriver in his powerboat to inspect the setting in which he would lay his traps, but on the return trip he spotted something which disturbed him almost as much as the reemergence of The Twombly. On the sloping field leading down from the Turlock cabin hundreds upon hundreds of wild geese were feeding, their fat bodies moving in the wintry sun, their long black necks extending now and then to watch for any trespassers. They had apparently been there a long time and gave every indication that they intended remaining; Amos had certainly baited this field with shelled corn.
Cautiously Hugo beached his boat, climbed ashore and moved toward the field. As he did, the goose sentinels spotted him, satisfied themselves that he had no gun, and quietly herded the flock to another part of the field. They maintained a distance of about forty yards; if the warden stopped, they stopped. If he moved, they gave him space, and this allowed him to inspect the field.
Not a grain of corn was visible; the geese were eating grass. If the field had been baited, it had been done with such exquisite timing that by two hours after sunrise every grain was gone.
But just as he was about to leave in disgust, Hugo decided to move to where the geese now clustered, eating furiously, and as before, when he made a motion toward that area, the stately geese retreated just far enough to keep out of range. Again he found no corn, but he did find something almost as interesting: on a bramble in the middle of the area in which the geese had been feeding most avidly he spied two heavy threads used in weaving canvas.
“Damn!” he growled, his thick neck jammed down into his collar as he stared at the signals: At midnight he rolls a hunk of canvas out here, covers it with corn, attracts a thousand geese, then rolls it up before dawn and leaves no sign. Except these. Carefully he lifted the strands of cloth from the bramble and decided that each night for the next week he would inspect these fields for corn spread out on canvas, which left no telltale marks.
“Hey!” a harsh voice called as he placed the evidence in his wallet.
It was Amos Turlock, with two of his sons. “What you doin’ on my land?”
“Inspecting the clever way you bait your geese.”
“No baitin’ here.”
“The canvas, Amos. That’s an old trick and it’ll put you in jail.”
“What jury ...” He allowed the sentence to hang, and Pflaum backed off. What jury, indeed, would indict a Chopta
nk Turlock on the evidence of two strands of canvas webbing? In fact, what jury of men from the store would indict him if he marched along the wharf with The Twombly and sixty dead geese? Half the jury would expect to get one of the geese when they delivered their verdict: “Innocent.”
Hugo realized that since Turlock had been alerted, it would make no sense to try to catch him at the baiting game, but if the wily old fellow could be tricked into using his gun, then Pflaum could confiscate it on sight without the necessity of a jury trial. So he allowed Amos to think that his focus was on canvas baiting; indeed, he came out two nights in a row to let the Turlocks know he was watching their fields, but what he was really watching was the cabin for some sign of where the family kept their long gun. He detected not a single clue.
On St. Patrick’s Day, after drinking several beers with young Martin Caveny, and nodding to Hugo Pflaum as he prepared to drive his eighteen-year-old Ford back to the cabin, Amos Turlock took a long nap, from about seven in the evening till midnight. He then rose, looked for his son Ben and his Chesapeake Rusty and led them into the marsh. The dog had long since learned to make no sound as they approached the area where the gun was hidden, but when he saw it safely loaded into the skiff that Amos used, he leaped joyously for the sturdier skiff in which Ben would ride to pick up the dead geese. He was so intent on helping his masters on another hunt that he failed to notice the faint scent of a stranger, a man in a rowboat lurking off the end of the marsh.
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.