The Watermen: Selections From Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  And the big Chesapeake showed what a marvelous breed he was by leaping into the free water, swimming swiftly to the edge of the ice, then breaking a way for himself right to the goose. Clutching the big bird proudly in his jaws, he plunged back into the icy water, pushed aside the frozen chunks and returned to the blind, entering it with a mighty, water-spraying leap.

  ‘That’s what I call a dog,’ Jake said proudly, and the men agreed.

  Lucifer did not perform so well. He retrieved his goose all right, but hesitantly and almost with protest. He didn’t want to leap into the water in the first place; he was not adept at breaking ice; and when he returned to the blind, he ran along the ice for as long as possible before going back into the freezing water.

  ‘He did get the goose,’ Jake admitted condescendingly, and for the rest of that long day on the Chesapeake the two dogs performed in this way, with Hey-You doing as well as a water dog could and Lucifer just getting by.

  Tim never spoke a harsh word. Lucifer was his dog, a splendid, loving, responsive animal, and if he didn’t like cold water, that was a matter between him and his master. And toward dusk the dog found an opportunity to repay Tim’s confidence. Jake had shot a big goose, which had fallen into a brambled sort of marsh from which Hey-You could not extract it. The dog tried, swam most valiantly in various directions, but achieved nothing.

  In the meantime Lucifer remained in the blind, trembling with eagerness, and Tim realized that his Labrador knew where that goose was. After Hey-You had returned with nothing. Tim said softly, ‘Luke, there’s a bird out there. Show them how to get it.’

  Like a flash the black dog leaped into the water, splashed his way through the semi-ice into the rushy area—and found nothing. ‘Luke!’ Tim bellowed. ‘Circle. Circle!’ So the dog ran and splashed and swam in noisy circles and still found nothing, but he would not quit, for his master kept pleading, ‘Luke, circle!’

  And then he found the goose, grabbed it in his gentle mouth and swam proudly back to the blind. As he was about to place the goose at Tim’s feet, the Irishman said quietly, ‘No!’ And the dog was so attentive to his master that he froze, wanting to know what he had done wrong.

  ‘Over there,’ Tim said, and Luke took the goose to Jake, placing it at his feet.

  The feud between the two watermen continued. The men at the store fired it with unkind comments about Lucifer’s deficiencies, but once or twice Caveny caught a hint that their animosity was weakening, for at some unexpected moment a man would see in Tim’s dog a quality which made him catch his breath. Outwardly every hunter would growl, ‘I want my dog to be rough and able to stand the weather and ready to leap at anyone attackin’ me,’ but inwardly he would also want the dog to love him. And the way in which Lucifer stayed close to Tim, anxious to detect every nuance in the Irishman’s mood, tantalized the men at the store. All they would grant openly was, ‘Maybe Tim’s got somethin’ in that black dog.’ But Jake Turlock would not admit even that. ‘What he’s got is a good lap dog, and that’s about it. As for me, I’m interested solely in huntin’.’

  Aside from this disagreement over dogs, and a fistfight now and then, the two watermen maintained a warm friendship. They hunted together, fished together and worked the oyster beds in season. But it was the big gun that cemented their partnership, giving it substance and allowing it to blossom.

  In these decades when the Eastern Shore flourished, the city of Baltimore also flourished. Some discriminating critics considered it the best city in America, combining the new wealth of the North with the old gentility of the South. The city offered additional rewards: a host of German settlers who gave it intellectual distinction; numerous Italians who gave it warmth. But for most observers, its true excellence derived from the manner in which its hotels and restaurants maintained a tradition of savory cooking: southern dishes, northern meats, Italian spices and German beer.

  In 1888 the noblest hotel of them all had opened, the Rennert, eight stories high, with an additional three stories to provide a dome at one end, a lofty belvedere at the other. It was a grand hostelry which boasted, ‘Our cooks are Negro. Our waiters wear white gloves.’ From the day of its opening, it became noted for the luxuriance of its cuisine: ‘Eighteen kinds of game. Fourteen ways to serve oysters. And the best wild duck in America.’ To dine at the Rennert was to share the finest the Chesapeake could provide.

  Jake Turlock and Tim Caveny had never seen the new hotel, but it was to play a major role in their lives. Its black chefs demanded the freshest oysters, and these were delivered daily during the season by Choptank watermen who packed their catch in burlap bags, speeding them across the bay by special boat. When the boat was loaded with oysters, its principal cargo, the captain could usually find space on deck for a few last-minute barrels crammed with ducks: mallards, redheads, canvasbacks and, the juciest of all, the black. It was in the providing of these ducks for the Rennert that Jake and Tim began to acquire a little extra money, which they saved for the larger project they had in mind.

  One night at the store, after arguing about the comparative merits of their dogs, Jake said, ‘I know me a man’s got a long gun he might want to dispose of.’

  Caveny was excited. ‘If you can get the gun, I can get me a couple of skiffs.’

  Turlock replied, ‘Suppose we get the gun and the skiffs, I know me a captain who’ll ferry our ducks to the Rennert. Top dollar.’

  Caveny completed the self-mesmerization by adding, ‘We put aside enough money, we can get Paxmore to build us our own boat. Then we’re in business.’

  So the feuding pair sailed upriver to the landing of a farm owned by an old man named Greef Twombly, and there they propositioned him: ‘You ain’t gonna have much more use for your long gun, Greef. We aim to buy it.’

  ‘What you gonna use for money?’ the toothless old fellow asked.

  ‘We’re gonna give you ten dollars cash, which Tim Caveny has in his pocket right now, and another forty when we start collectin’ ducks.’

  ‘Barrel of that gun was made from special forged iron. My grandfather brought it from London, sixty-two years ago.’

  ‘It’s been used.’

  ‘More valuable now than when he got it home.’

  ‘We’ll give you sixty.’

  ‘Sixty-five and I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Sixty-five it is, and we get possession now.’

  Twombly rocked back and forth, considering aspects of the deal, then led them to one of the proudest guns ever to sweep the ice at midnight. It was a monstrous affair, eleven feet six inches long, about a hundred and ten pounds in weight, with a massive stock that could not possibly fit into a man’s shoulder, which was good, because if anyone tried to hold this cannon when it fired, the recoil would tear his arm away.

  ‘You ever fire one of these?’ the old man asked.

  ‘No, but I’ve heard,’ Turlock said.

  ‘Hearin’ ain’t enough, son. You charge it with three quarters of a pound of black powder in here, no less, or she won’t carry. Then you pour in a pound and a half of Number Six shot, plus one fistful. You tamp her down with greasy wadding, like this, and you’re ready. Trigger’s kept real tight so you can’t explode the charge by accident, because if you did, it would rip the side off’n a house.’

  The two watermen admired the huge barrel, the sturdy fittings and the massive oak stock; as they inspected their purchase the old man said, ‘You know how to fit her into a skiff?’

  ‘I’ve seen,’ Turlock said.

  But Twombly wanted to be sure these new men understood the full complexity of this powerful gun, so he asked them to carry it to the landing, where he had a fourteen-foot skiff with extremely pointed bow and almost no deadrise, chocks occupying what normally would have been the main seat and a curious burlap contraption built into the stern area.

  Deftly the old hunter let himself down into the skiff, kneeling in the stern. He then produced a double-ended paddle like the ones Eskimos used, and also two
extremely short-handled single paddles. Adjusting his weight and testing the double paddle, he told Jake, ‘You can hand her down.’

  When the two watermen struggled with the preposterous weight of the gun, the old man said, ‘It ain’t for boys.’ He accepted the gun into the skiff, dropped its barrel between the chocks, flipped a wooden lock, which secured it, then fitted the heavy butt into a socket made of burlap bagging filled with pine needles.

  ‘What you do,’ Twombly said, ‘is use your big paddle to ease you into position, but when you come close to the ducks you stow it and take out your two hand paddles, like this.’ And with the two paddles that looked like whisk brooms, he silently moved the skiff about.

  ‘When you get her into position, you lie on your belly, keep the hand paddles close by and sight along the barrel of the gun. You don’t point the gun; you point the skiff. And when you get seventy, eighty ducks in range, you put a lot of pressure on this trigger and—’

  The gun exploded with a power that seemed to tear a hole in the sky. The kickback came close to ripping out the stern of the skiff, but the pine needles absorbed it, while a veritable cloud of black smoke curled upward.

  ‘First time I ever shot that gun in daylight,’ the old man said. ‘It’s a killer.’

  ‘You’ll sell?’

  ‘You’re Lafe Turlock’s grandson, ain’t you?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I had a high regard for Lafe. He could track niggers with the best. Gun’s yourn.’

  ‘You’ll get your fifty-five,’ Jake promised.

  ‘I better,’ the old man said ominously.

  Caveny produced the two skiffs he had promised, and their mode of operation became standardized: as dusk approached, Jake would inspect his skiff to be sure he had enough pine needles in the burlap to absorb the recoil; he also cleaned the huge gun, prepared his powder, checked his supply of shot; Tim in the meantime was preparing his own skiff and feeding the two dogs.

  Hey-You ate like a pig, gulping down whatever Caveny produced, but Lucifer was more finicky; there were certain things, like chicken guts, he would not eat. But the two animals had learned to exist together, each with his own bowl, growling with menace if the other approached. They had never engaged in a real fight; Hey-You would probably have killed Lucifer had one been joined, but they did nip at each other and a kind of respectful discipline was maintained.

  Whenever they saw Jake oiling the gun, they became tense, would not sleep and spied on every action of their masters. As soon as it became clear that there was to be duck hunting, they bounded with joy and kept close to the skiff in which Caveny would take them onto the water.

  Duck hunting with a big gun was an exacting science best performed in the coldest part of winter with no moon, for then the watermen enjoyed various advantages; they could cover the major part of their journey by sliding their skiffs across the ice; when they reached areas of open water they would find the ducks clustered in great rafts; and the lack of moonlight enabled them to move close without being seen. The tactic required utmost silence; even the crunch of a shoe on frost would spook the ducks. The dogs especially had to remain silent, perched in Caveny’s skiff, peering into the night.

  When the two skiffs reached open water, about one o’clock in the morning with the temperature at twelve degrees, Tim kept a close watch on the necks of the two dogs; almost always the first indication he had that ducks were in the vicinity came when the hackles rose on Hey-You. He was so attuned to the bay that one night Tim conceded graciously, ‘Jake, your dog can see ducks at a hundred yards in pitch-black,’ and Turlock replied, ‘That’s why he’s a huntin’ dog, not a lap dog … like some I know.’

  When the ducks were located, vast collections huddling in the cold, Turlock took command. Easing his skiff into the icy water, he adjusted his double-ended paddle, stayed on his knees to keep the center of gravity low, and edged toward the restive fowl. Sometimes it took him an hour to cover a quarter of a mile; he kept the barrel of his gun smeared with lamp black to prevent its reflecting such light as there might be, and in cold darkness he inched forward.

  Now he discarded his two-handed paddle and lay flat on his belly, his cheek alongside the stock of the great gun, his hands working the short paddles. It was a time of tension, for the slightest swerve or noise would alert the ducks and they would be off.

  Slowly, slowly he began to point the nose of the skiff at the heart of the congregation, and when he had satisfied himself that the muzzle of the gun was pointed in the right direction, he brought his short paddles in and took a series of deep breaths. Then, with his cheek close to the stock but not touching it, and his right hand at the trigger, he extended his forefinger, grasped the heavy trigger—and waited. Slowly the skiff would drift and steady, and when everything was in line, he pulled the trigger.

  He was never prepared for the magnitude of the explosion that ripped through the night. It was monstrous, like the fire of a cannon, but in the brief flash it produced he could always see ducks being blown out of the water as if a hundred expert gunners had fired at them.

  Now Caveny became the focus. Paddling furiously, he sped his skiff through the dark water, his two dogs quivering with desire to leap into the waves to retrieve the ducks. But he wanted to bring them much closer to where the birds lay, and to do so he enforced a stern discipline. ‘No! No!’—that was all he said, but the two dogs obeyed, standing on their hind feet, their forepaws resting on the deadrise like twin figureheads, one red, one black.

  ‘Fetch!’ he shouted, and the dogs leaped into the water and began their task of hauling the ducks to the two skiffs, Hey-You always going to Turlock’s and Lucifer to Caveny’s.

  Since Tim’s job was to man his shotgun and knock down cripples, he was often too busy to bother with his dog, so the Labrador had perfected a tactic whereby he paddled extra hard with his hind legs, reared out of the water and tossed his ducks into the skiff.

  In this way the two watermen, with one explosion of their big gun, sometimes got themselves as many as sixty canvasbacks, ten or twelve blacks and a score of others. On rare occasions they would be able to fire twice in one night, and then their profit was amazing.

  As soon as the two skiffs reached Patamoke, the watermen packed their catch in ventilated barrels, which they lined up on the wharf. There they purchased from other night gunners enough additional ducks to make full barrels, which they handed over to the captain of the boat running oysters to the Rennert, and at the end of each month they received from the hotel a check for their services.

  Night after night Jake and Tim lurked at the edge of the ice, waiting for the ducks to raft up so that the gun could be fired, and as the barrels filled with canvasbacks and mallards, so their pockets filled with dollars, and they began to think seriously about acquiring a real boat in which they could branch out.

  ‘There’s a man on Deal Island, got hisse’f a new kind of boat,’ Turlock said one morning as they were packing their ducks.

  ‘What’s special?’

  ‘Claims it’s the best type ever built for the Chesapeake. Made especially for drudgin’.’

  Time out of mind, watermen of the Chesapeake had used two words with unique pronunciation. There was no such thing as an oyster, never had been. It was an arster, and to call it anything else was profanation. And a man did not dredge for arsters, he drudged them. Jake and Tim proposed to become arster drudgers, and the boat they had in mind was ideal for their purpose.

  It put in to Patamoke one day, and Turlock ran to the Paxmore Boatyard and asked Gerrit Paxmore to join him in inspecting it. ‘This is quite remarkable,’ the Quaker said. And he began to analyze what the Deal Island men had done.

  ‘Very shallow draft, so it can go anywhere on the flats. Single mast far forward, but look how it’s raked! Gives them a triangular sail. More room on deck. Also allows the tip of the mast to hang over the hold, so that they can drop a line and haul cargo out. Enormous boom to give them drudging power. Very low
freeboard, so they won’t have to hoist the arsters too far, and it looks like it could sleep six.’

  But then his practiced eye saw something he definitely did not like. ‘She has no protruding keel, which accounts for her shallow draft, but she does have a retractable centerboard. I don’t like that, not at all.’

  ‘She has to have,’ Turlock said. ‘To counterbalance the sail.’

  ‘I know, but to insert a centerboard, you’ve got to penetrate the keel.’

  ‘What’s the fault in that?’

  ‘At Paxmore’s we never touch the keel.’ He looked at an old boat tied to the wharf, its backbone hogged. ‘Our boats don’t do that.’

  He would not discuss the new craft any further, but returned to his yard; Turlock, however, asked the captain if he could serve on the next oystering, and the Deal Island man said, ‘Come aboard,’ so Jake dredged for six days, and when he came ashore he told Caveny, ‘That’s the finest boat’s ever been built. It helps you work.’

  So they went back to Paxmore, and Tim listened as his partner extolled the new craft. ‘Mr. Paxmore, that boat helps you drudge. You can feel that huge boom bendin’ to the job.’

  But Paxmore was adamant. ‘I would never feel comfortable, building a boat whose keel had been half-severed.’

  ‘Suppose you don’t feel comfortable? How about us? We’re buyin’ the boat.’

  ‘I build by my own principles,’ Paxmore said. ‘If someone else can use my boat when she’s built, good. If not, I’m ready to wait till the proper buyer comes along.’

  Jake stepped back, looked at the self-satisfied Quaker and said, ‘You’ll go out of business in six months.’

  ‘We’re in our third century,’ Paxmore said, and he would not discuss boatbuilding any further.

  As a matter of fact, the question almost became academic one wintry February night when the two watermen had crept out to a spacious lagoon in the ice; there must have been three thousand ducks rafted there beneath a frozen late-rising moon. Caveny became aware of how cold it was when Lucifer left his spot on the gunwale and huddled in the bottom of the skiff. Hey-You turned twice to look at his cowardly companion, then moved to the middle of the bow as if obliged to do the work of two.