Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  “Oh, he would kill me if he came in.”

  “Nonsense! He’s at the courthouse.”

  “His wife is worse.”

  “Does she starve you?”

  “She does. And whips me, too.”

  “But you did have the baby?”

  “I did. Precious little else to do in this house.”

  “The father?”

  Betsy looked away. She would not speak, nor would she uncover her back, but with an unexpected move, Rosalind caught her and pulled up her blouse. There the horrid marks remained, deep and livid. For some moments Rosalind stared at them, and against her will tears came into her eyes. She was. ashamed of herself, and mumbled some excuse as she dropped the blouse.

  “Who’s there?” came a harsh voice from a nearby room, and quickly Betsy straightened her clothes and replied, “Delivery of the tobacco paper.”

  “What are you saying?” came the stern voice, and soon Mrs. Broadnax, an unforgiving woman of fifty, stormed into the hallway about to abuse her servant when she saw Mrs. Steed. “I’m surprised you’d come here, poisoner and all.”

  “I’ve brought the fine, as your husband directed.”

  “Leave it and go. We’re not impressed with your kind.” And four days later Rosalind discovered how vengeful the Broadnaxes could be, for she was back home at Devon when a shallop sailed up to the wharf bearing a solitary man whom she had not previously met but of whom she had heard occasionally.

  He was thin and straight from much living in the woods. He walked with quiet grace, as if he commanded the trees through which he moved. His face was deeply pocked and his hair was white, revealing the seventy-three years which his bearing belied. He spoke with difficulty, as if words—any words—were alien to him, and occasionally he introduced Indian phrases which Rosalind had not heard before.

  “Stooby,” he said, assuming that she would know him to be a Turlock.

  “Turlock?”

  “Mmmm.” To any of her questions, he replied in a grunt, indicating affirmation or denial, and after a few minutes with him it was easy to determine which.

  “I am very pleased to see you, Stooby. My son Mark told me many good things—”

  He brushed aside her graciousness, for his message was imperativer “They whipping Nelly.”

  “Who’s Nelly?” she asked impulsively, then pressed her right hand over her mouth to correct her stupidity.

  “Steed’s girl. Broadnax whipping her.”

  “What for?”

  “Three children. Your three children.”

  And slowly the horror of the visit became clear: Judge Broadnax, infuriated by the insolent manner in which Rosalind Steed had responded to her penalty, and enraged by his wife’s account of how the tobacco fine had been delivered, had decided to strike back. He had come into court and personally charged Nelly Turlock with “having borne three bastards of her body,” and had sentenced her to ten lashes, well laid on.

  “When does it take place?”

  “Three days.” And then Stooby said something which revealed that even he could see the insane vengeance in this act: “Many years nothing. Your man dies—whipping.”

  “Yes. Broadnax would never have dared while my husband was alive. Nor Mark, either. They’d have shot him.” Then, for a reason she could not have explained, she asked, “Was Charley ...” She did not know how to phrase her question. “Were Charley Turlock and Flora Turlock Nellie’s parents?”

  “Mmmm,” Stooby said. “Little house. We all live ...”

  “Did you think it wrong, Stooby?”

  “Little house ...” He said this with such finality that it was apparent he did not wish to explore further the strange behavior of his brother: the hut in the marsh had been small, and in it strange pairings had occurred. But then his reserve broke and he clutched Rosalind’s hand. “Whipping, you stop.”

  “I shall if God gives me strength.” And all that day, after Stooby had gone, she devised stratagems to halt this miscarriage of justice, but she was powerless and knew it. Then, while there was still only an hour and a half of daylight, she thought of a way to shame the town into stopping this senseless beating of women.

  Calling her six strongest slaves, she ordered them to prepare her fastest sloop, and when her head sailor protested, “It’ll be dark,” she overrode him. “We’re only going to the cliff,” she said, and off they set with a fair wind pushing them at six knots.

  Waiting impatiently for the journey to end, and counting the fading light as if it were coins falling into a jar, she wondered if she had ever seen this river more benevolent: spring touched the trees along the shore, and the breeze threw tips of waves, white in the sunset. In the distance a fishing boat made for Patamoke, and as the day died the last geese of the year settled in coves to rest before their long flight north. She thought: How peaceful this river, and how wrong some of the things we do on its banks.

  Her calculation as to time proved correct, for she reached Peace Cliff well before dark and was able to direct the slaves to find quarters at the logging camp farther up the creek. She climbed up to the gray-brown telescope house, where, as she had hoped, Ruth Brinton Paxmore sat in the gloaming, watching the river she loved so much—“I saw thee coming and made little wagers as to when thee would arrive.”

  “I come on most serious business.” And she outlined the deplorable thing that was to happen two days hence at Patamoke.

  “Thomas Broadnax thinks he is Nebuchadnezzar,” Ruth Brinton said.

  “But it’s so hideously wrong, Mrs. Paxmore. Year after year these men assemble and dole out whippings to women who could not have babies without their connivance. But never are the men punished. Good God, my husband stalked this river with impunity, and never a hand was laid on him, but the minute he dies these awful justices grab for the woman and sentence her to be whipped. Why? Why?”

  “Thee has come to the right person to ask,” the frail old woman said, rocking back and forth in the gray light that seemed a part of her gray costume.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was whipped out of Virginia. I was whipped through Massachusetts at the tail of a cart.”

  “You—Ruth Brinton? You?”

  The old lady rose, went to the window, where glimmers of light still rested, and opened her blouse, disclosing the welts that neither time nor the dimming of memory would heal.

  “Oh, dear God!” Rosalind whispered. She stood transfixed, the awfulness of such whippings somehow intensified by this evidence on the body of a very old woman. She then saw with excruciating clarity that men ordered only young women to be stripped, as if the sexuality of the act were impossible if the victims were older—like their mothers or grandmothers. The punishment was therefore not merely a whipping; it was an act of lust, a purging of heated thoughts.

  And in that revelation she discovered how it could be halted. Her proposal was daring and fraught with much danger, but that it would be effective she had no doubt: “Ruth Brinton, on Thursday when they whip Nelly, you and I will stand forth and bare our backs too, and insist that they whip us, as well, for we share in her guilt.” This was so strange a statement that she added, “On behalf of the town we share.”

  “I’m eighty-one.”

  “It is testimony that is needed.” By some happy chance Rosalind had hit upon the one word that had the power to actívate the fighter in the old woman: testimony. A human being, to live a meaningful life, was required to bear testimony; in prayer, in the husbandry of the home, in the conduct of public life, a man or woman must at critical moments testify publicly as to fundamental beliefs. Ruth Brinton had always done so, which was why she was regarded throughout the Eastern Shore as a Quaker saint, difficult at times, stubborn always, but a testament to man’s striving for a saner life.

  “I’ll help,” she said. That night the two women shared the same bedroom, and before they fell asleep Ruth Brinton confided, “I shall do this, Rosalind, because it was thee who saved Amanda’s Lif
e when the pirates came. Thee offered thine to save her, and there is no greater love.”

  They spent the next morning, Wednesday, in prayer, and at noon, with the most serene equanimity, they went down to the Paxmore wharf and climbed into Rosalind’s sloop. Ruth Brinton’s sons were at work in the boatyard in Patamoke, so there was no one to prevent the old lady from leaving, and it was with a kind of spiritual exaltation that they sailed out into the Choptank, past the Turlock marshes and into the town harbor. As they tied up they chanced to see Judge Broadnax, stout and severe, but he refused to acknowledge them; on four different occasions he had been forced to fine the Paxmore brothers for refusing military service, which caused him to have an even lower opinion of Quakers than of Steeds.

  They slept that night at the Patamoke home of the Steed who was running the warehouse, and on Thursday morning they had prominent places at the whipping post, mingling with those excited citizens who had come to see the Turlock woman finally punished. The sheriff promenaded as if he were the hero of the occasion, snapping his nine-tails and looking toward the door of the jail from which the criminal would be hauled.

  At ten o’clock the door opened and Nelly Turlock appeared in a brown shift which could easily be stripped away. Faint with terror, she was led slowly to the whipping post, and as she passed, some in the crowd cheered and some muttered curses; as long as Fitzhugh Steed had protected her she had been insolent, but now revenge had come.

  Rosalind had not seen her before this moment; she seemed quite beautiful, but slatternly, and so dazed she did not seem to recognize who was taunting her in the crowd, nor who was suffering with her.

  Now came the time to bind her to the stake, and when this was done the sheriff reached up and pulled away her shift, leaving her naked to the waist, but before he could apply the first of his ten lashes an extraordinary thing happened. Mrs. Steed left the crowd, walked boldly to the whipping post and pulled down her blouse, standing half naked beside the sentenced girl. And while gasps of outrage were still echoing, old Ruth Brinton Paxmore stepped beside her, repeating the performance. When her withered back was disclosed, cries of disgust issued from the crowd.

  “Take them away!”

  “Profanation!”

  The display of the three half-naked women had precisely the effect that Rosalind intended. One was young and wanton and deserved whipping, but the other two were different: Rosalind was a lady, she was tall, her breasts were large and not seductive; and as for Ruth Brinton, she was a great-grandmother, horribly out of place in such a scene. The time when men would have enjoyed seeing her whipped was long past: her breasts had withered; she was disgusting, a travesty.

  “Take them away!” a woman shouted. “Obscene!”

  Then Rosalind spoke, not covering her breasts with her hands but standing clear: “I am as guilty as she. You must whip me, too.”

  And old Ruth Brinton added, “This whipping of women must stop.”

  But now Judge Broadnax appeared, quivering with rage because of an interruption he had not sanctioned. “What happens here?”

  “Two others demand to be whipped.”

  “Then whip them!” But he had delivered his verdict before seeing who the voluntary victims were, and when he saw Rosalind and Ruth Brinton standing beside the post, naked to the waist, he was shocked. “Cover them and take them away!” he thundered, and when this was done he ordered that the lashes begin, but with every fall of the cat, Rosalind and Ruth Brinton screamed in anguish, as if the knotted cords had fallen on their backs, and their cries echoed, and after that morning there was no more whipping of women in Patamoke.

  The incident had one unexpected consequence. Stooby Turlock sailed back to Devon to talk with Mrs. Steed, but this time he came attended by others; as he walked up the gravel path to the half-finished house he brought with him three blond children between the ages of seventeen and ten. They were clean, and obviously under severe instructions to behave themselves, and when Rosalind appeared, Stooby said, “I bring his children.”

  Gravely Rosalind shook hands with each of the stiff, suspicious young people, then inquired, “You say ...”

  “Fitz’s.”

  She asked their names, then suggested that they walk in the yard, and when they were gone she asked, “Why did you bring them here?”

  “Nelly gone. Never come back.”

  “She ran away?”

  “Mmmm.”

  Rosalind coughed and groped for her handkerchief. Little wonder that a woman who had been so humiliated should want to quit the river. “I would have stayed and fought them,” she told Stooby when she had wiped her nose. “I would have strangled Broadnax in his own—”

  Stooby put his hands over his ears. “Don’t say. Next they whip you.”

  “You don’t have to listen, Stooby, but Thomas Broadnax walks in danger. Now, what about these children?”

  “No mother. No father. They stay here.”

  And with this simple declaration, Stooby Turlock posed a moral problem for Rosalind Steed: what to do with the bastard children of her dead husband? The whole testimony of her life dictated that she assume responsibility for these three, and the vanishing of her own children was an added persuasion. But she also had a sense of harsh reality and knew that these children had been born in the marsh, of the marsh. Their father was a weak man, lacking in character, and their mother was worse. In these children there was not good blood. They promised small likelihood of achievement; intuitively she sensed that with them she could accomplish nothing.

  She had come to believe that the human stock populating this world was wondrously uneven. When she goaded her son into marrying Amanda Paxmore, there was not even a remote chance that the little Quaker girl would turn out badly; she came from solid stock, with the personal fire of old Ruth Brinton in her veins and the irreducible integrity of Edward Paxmore. She trusted that her sons at Bohemia would grow into stalwart men upon whom Devon could depend. But the children of her silly sisters across the bay—what timid and fragile things they would be!

  The three Turlocks now wandering in the yard came from damaged sources, and she was convinced that no matter how much love and force she applied to them, she and they would end in heartbreak. They belonged to the marsh, and to move them elsewhere would be cruelty.

  “Take them back, Stooby,” she said.

  “I seventy-three,” he said. “Soon I die. The children?”

  “They’ll find a way.”

  “Please, Mrs. Steed. Your children, not mine.”

  “No,” she said firmly. She would not try to share the reasoning behind her decision, nor would she retreat from it, but when Stooby pointed out that he had not the wherewithal to rear the children, she promised, “I’ll pay for everything.” And when she saw him leading the children back to the sloop, his shoulders sagging and his white hair shining in the sun, she was satisfied that whereas he must be disappointed now, he would in the long run see that she was right.

  She kept her word. She followed what was happening in the marsh and saw to it that Stooby had the funds needed to raise the abandoned children, but when she heard that he had given them the name Steed, she sent word that this was not wise, and thereafter they were lost among the Turlocks.

  Stooby did not die soon, as he had feared. Because of his sturdy life in the woods, and his lean competence in caring for himself, he lived on and on, giving Nelly’s children the love they needed and an introduction to swamp life. By the time the boys had left their teens, they were accomplished watermen, and because they had acquired Stooby’s intense interest in birds and river things, they became the principal suppliers of soft crabs and oysters, roasting ducks and turtles for soup.

  Rosalind, watching their sensible progress, thought: I was so correct in not taking them from their natural home. That day they were like waves which had ventured far inland, making a mark they could never again achieve. Now they’ve receded to their tidal level, and there they prosper.

  Her own
sons prospered too. In December of 1718 they returned from Bohemia polished young scholars, for the Jesuits had taught them Latin, Greek, Italian and French, and they were as familiar with Thucydides and Cicero as they were with the Douai Version of the Bible. They knew little of hunting geese or trapping beaver, but they understood the niceties of St. Thomas Aquinas and were, as the letter from the Jesuits said, “ready for the rigors of St. Omer’s.”

  Rosalind agreed that they must continue their studies in France—“Where in today’s world could a young man find better instruction?” But the thought of sending them across the Atlantic on the May convoy struck terror in her heart, for these were the years when the most hideous pirate of all ravaged the Chesapeake. After the mass hangings of 1713 there had been a diminution of piracy, but in 1716 a dark meteor had blazed across the Caribbean, Edward Teach, a man of horrible cruelties known as Blackbeard. In Jamaica he had roared, “Warn that Bitch of Devon we’ll be along to revenge the good men she hanged.”

  Twice he had ventured into the bay but had kept to the Virginia shore, wreaking enormous devastation, and at each burned plantation he told some victim, “Tell the Bitch of Devon we haven’t forgotten her.”

  Rosalind’s response had been instantaneous. She had offered the English navy her five ships, and the financial returns from three convoys had been sacrificed while her captains prowled the Caribbean, searching for Blackbeard. That canny criminal, trained as a British privateer in the War of the Spanish Succession, eluded them, and then in late 1718 word reached Virginia that he had holed up in a North Carolina inlet. Volunteers were called for, and Rosalind sent her ships, but no word had filtered back to the bay.

  “You can’t sail to France,” she told her sons, “as long as Blackbeard roams. He’s sworn to kill you, and me as well, and we must wait.”

  In the interim she held the boys close to her. They were the descendants of men who had resisted pirates, and if she had asked them to sail against Blackbeard, they would have done so, but she was satisfied to keep them at Devon. Samuel was almost seventeen, still outgoing and occasionally fractious; Pierre evaluated problems more sagaciously and remained more cautious in his responses, but she was pleased to see that each respected the other and consciously made concessions in order to sustain the bond. They formed a strong pair, and Rosalind thought: They’ll be able to run Devon once they get back from France.