Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  Washburn was in his office one September morning when what he judged to be an almost ideal client appeared. He was in his middle sixties, distinguished in appearance, had a gray mustache and was conservative in dress. He drove a Buick station wagon stylishly weather-beaten, probably a ’74. He moved as if he knew what he was about, and when his wife appeared, she wore expensive low shoes and soft tweeds. They both looked like hunters, but they had no dog.

  “Hullo,” the visitor said deferentially to the girl at the reception desk. “I’m Owen Steed.”

  “Of the local Steeds?”

  “Way back.”

  Washburn came out of his office, smiled graciously at his receptionist and asked, “Could I intrude, please?”

  “This is Owen Steed,” she said.

  “I thought I heard that name. I’m Washburn Turlock.”

  “We’ve seen your signs. My wife said she thought ...”

  “I do a little genealogy,” Mrs. Steed said quietly. “Weren’t the Steeds and the Turlocks ...”

  “Intimately,” Turlock said. “When my ancestors were pirates, yours were being ducked in the river for being witches. Unsavory lot, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah, yes,” Mrs. Steed said. “Rosalind’s Revenge. Is it by chance still occupied ...”

  “A ruin,” Turlock replied, and without allowing the visitors to sit down, he suggested that he drive them to the wharf at Peace Cliff, where he was sure the Paxmores ...

  “Paxmore?” Mr. Steed asked.

  “Yes, they’re an old family. Quakers.”

  “I’d rather not impose ...”

  “They wouldn’t care, I’m sure.” He reached for the phone to see if he could utilize the Paxmore dock for a short trip to Devon Island, but Mr. Steed thrust his hand out so imperatively to prevent the call that Turlock dropped the idea. “We’ll go to a wharf closer in,” he suggested, and Mr. Steed quickly assented, “That would be better.”

  Washburn Turlock had discovered that in selling really large properties, there was no substitute for taking his clients to them by boat, and he maintained three or four powerboats at spots convenient for exploring the Tred Avon and what he termed “the better rivers.” There was something about seeing the Eastern Shore from the water that was ravishing; it destroyed inhibitions and opened pocketbooks. In proposing to show the Steeds their ancestral home, he intended to assault their memories and soften them up for the real sale he intended making later, but since this subsequent property stood on water, he observed a fundamental rule of the Turlock agency: “Never show an important property at low tide. The client may be shocked at how shallow our water is.” So he stole a furtive glance at a special German wristwatch he wore; it showed not time but the condition of the tide—was it high or low? What he saw satisfied him; the tide was coming in. “We’re off to see one of the great mansions of the Eastern Shore,” he cried.

  On the short trip across the Choptank he found that Owen Steed had gone to Princeton, like so many of his uncles, and from there had entered the oil business, in Tulsa, where he had risen to the rank of president of Western Oil. He had retired, apparently with what Washburn always referred to as a bundle, and was now seeking to renew his acquaintance with his past. He was a prime prospect for one of the million-dollar establishments.

  “Did you grow up at Devon?” Turlock asked as the boat entered the creek.

  “I was born there, but I grew up with the Refuge Steeds.”

  No information could have excited Washburn more. He had on his list a plantation of two hundred acres at the Refuge that would excite any potential buyer, but would be irresistible to a returning Steed.

  The visit to Rosalind’s Revenge had precisely the effect Turlock sought. As the visitors landed at the crumbling wharf he said, “From here the Steed ships sailed to England,” and as they climbed the disintegrating path he said, “Some of these trees go back two hundred years.” At the mansion, its roof almost gone, he pointed out the two cannonballs lodged in the moldering wall and the great room in which Webster and Calhoun had dined. He was meticulous in his orchestration, allowing some grandeur to sink in but not enough to induce melancholy.

  “Couldn’t this be restored?” Mr. Steed asked.

  “Of course,” Turlock said promptly. “Except that the island’s disintegrating.”

  He showed them how the persistent northwest storms had eroded Devon to the point that many of the slave buildings had fallen into the bay, and the visitors were satisfied that any chance of salvaging the famous old mansion had vanished decades ago. Mrs. Steed started to utter regrets about the loss, but Turlock quickly diverted her to happier possibilities. “While we have the boat,” he said in an offhand way, “why don’t we look at a little piece of land that’s come on the market recently? One of the old Steed places. The Refuge.”

  As they passed beneath Peace Cliff he observed Mr. Steed looking with some interest at the telescope house, then quickly looking away, but he attached no significance to the incident. Mrs. Steed, however, wanted to talk about the house, and Turlock told her that it represented the best seventeenth-century style. “One of our architectural glories. That and the Patamoke meeting house.”

  He was about to comment on the telescope construction, knowing that prospective clients enjoyed information about architecture, when he saw Mr. Steed staring back at the Paxmore house. Immediately he changed his tone, observing brightly, “Now we’re heading for Steed Creek.” He paused, tried to estimate the degree of interest these two had in a real purchase, then added, “The creek invites you to look around ... as a former resident.” Mrs. Steed smiled.

  Then the boat slowed, and Turlock adeptly turned it so that his passengers could catch a glimpse of the peninsula on which the Choptank chieftain Pentaquod had built his refuge in 1605. A lawn of more than an acre swept down from a substantial house surrounded by oaks and loblollies; a solid wharf jutted out from the shore, inviting someone to tie his boat; small white buildings stood to one side; and all about the place reigned a quietness that calmed the spirit.

  The silence was broken not by the chugging of the motor, which Turlock had prudently killed, but by a loud raucous cry from one of the streamlets that defined the peninsula. It was a kind of cry that Mrs. Steed had never heard before, and as she looked about in some consternation, she saw above her a gray-blue bird with a long projecting beak and very long trailing legs.

  “Kraannk, kraannk!” it called. Then, seeing the boat, it veered away, to land a short distance up the creek.

  “What is it?” she asked, and Turlock told her, “Great blue heron. You’ll have scores of them here.” It was a bold tactic, this speaking as if the client already owned the place, but sometimes it worked.

  “We’ll take it,” Mr. Steed said.

  Washburn was not prepared for this and he started to say, “But we haven’t mentioned—”

  Mr. Steed interrupted him, “We’ll take it.”

  “But the price ...”

  “You can haggle with Mrs. Steed, and I warn you, she’s damned good at haggling.”

  Mrs. Steed said nothing. The peninsula was so magnificent, so infinitely better than she had imagined the Eastern Shore could be when contemplated from Oklahoma, that she felt no need to comment. Instead she leaned over and kissed her husband. Owen Steed had come home.

  The Steeds never doubted that they had picked up a bargain. For $810,000 they acquired not only the Refuge itself, two hundred and ten choice acres with 9,015 feet of waterfront and all the buildings pertaining to the old plantation, but also two adjacent farms providing an additional three hundred acres of cornfields and woodland. “The beauty of the cornfields,” Washburn Turlock explained shortly after they moved in, “is that when they’re harvested you can leave generous amounts of corn, which ensures geese unlimited. You can have three different sets of blinds—in the water, on the shore and in pits throughout your fields. Mr. Steed, you can entertain half of Oklahoma, come next November.”

  “That�
�s hardly what I had in mind,” Steed replied.

  “You could lease them out and earn back your taxes.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “What I mean, with the exposures you have, the geese are going to flock here. You could pick up six, seven thousand dollars a year for hunting permissions.”

  Ethel Steed interrupted by wanting to know where she could find someone to drive four pilings into the creek bed, and her husband asked, “Whatever for?” and she said cryptically, “You’d never believe what the men at the store told me,” and when the pilings were driven she wanted to know where she could locate an ironworker to forge her some shallow steel baskets. This was too much, and Steed demanded to know what foolishness she was up to, and she teased, “Wait till spring comes, and you’ll see something striking ... if the men at the store weren’t pulling my leg.”

  It was a long wait. December 1976 was fearfully cold, and even men in their eighties could recall no similar season when every expanse of water, from the merest creek to the great bay itself, froze solid. Winds howled down out of Canada with such heavy burdens of freezing air that thermometers dropped to historic lows, and the weather station at the mouth of the Choptank announced that this was the coldest winter ever recorded. Not even the remembered freezes of the 1670s surpassed this brutal year.

  It was a trying time for the Steeds; Owen had promised his wife respite from the thundering winters of Oklahoma—“You’ll find the Eastern Shore a gentle place ... a little frost now and then.” This became their theme during the protracted freeze. Mrs. Steed would rise, see the unbroken snow, the creeks frozen so solid that trucks could cross them, and she would say, “A little frost now and then.”

  The long weeks of subfreezing weather—the whole month of January with the thermometer rarely above thirty-two—did not inconvenience the Steeds insofar as their own comfort was concerned. Their new home was snug; the fireplaces worked; the Turlock boy who cut wood from the forest kept a comforting stack beside the door; and it was rather fun to test oneself against the bitter cold. They walked together, bundled in ski suits, to all corners of their estate, and found delight in picking their way across frozen streams or pushing through marsh grass that crackled when they touched it. It was a challenging winter but one warm in associations, and they discovered that what they had hoped for back in Oklahoma was happening: they were growing closer to each other. They talked more; they watched television less; and certainly they spent more time together both indoors and out.

  The difficult part of the winter came with the birds. One morning Ethel Steed rose to look out her window at the familiar scene of snow and ice and saw to her horror that a whole congregation of ducks had gathered on the left fork of the creek, trying futilely to break the ice so that they could feed.

  “Owen! Look at this!” He joined her and saw that these creatures were famished. For six weeks they had been cut off from grasses at the bottom of creeks and rivers; they had been able to dive for nothing; their feeding places were frozen solid.

  The Steeds put in urgent phone calls to their neighbors, and the advice they got was concise and harsh: “Mr. Steed, thousands of birds are perishing. Worst place of all is the creeks around your home. What to do? Feed them, damnit. Buy all the corn you can afford and scatter it along the edges of the ice.”

  Without waiting for breakfast, they jumped into their station wagon, maneuvered it carefully down frozen roads and hurried out into the country east of Patamoke. They stopped at a dozen different farms, begging for corn, and when they had purchased a load which tested the springs of their Buick, they directed other farmers to the Refuge, buying from them as much corn as they could deliver.

  They hurried home with their cargo, broke open the bags and began scattering the corn broadcast along the ice, and before they were half through with their work, great flocks of ducks and geese moved in, sometimes to within six feet of where they worked, and it was clear that the birds were starving.

  For three days the Steeds bought corn, spending more than a thousand dollars, but when they saw how desperately the fowl needed it, how hungrily they waited for the Steeds to appear, they felt more than rewarded. Never before had they seen waterfowl at such close quarters, and when a flock of seventeen white swans flew in, emaciated and near death, Mrs. Steed broke into tears.

  Her husband halted this in a hurry. “Let’s get the axes and break a hole in the ice. Those birds are dying for water.”

  So in their fashionable hunting togs they worked until heavy sweat poured from their bodies, trying to hack an open space in ice two feet thick, and then Owen had an idea: “I remember a Currier and Ives print in which they sawed the ice.” He fetched a long saw, and after making a hole in the ice, widened it out to an opening about ten feet on the side. Before he was done, more than three hundred birds had flown in to compete for the water.

  For two days the Steeds did little but stay at the hole, watching the splendid birds as they ate and bathed. “They’ll explode!” Ethel Steed said, but the birds continued to gorge themselves. Then she began trying to identify them; with the aid of color plates she was able to spot the green-headed mallard and the copper-headed canvasback, but that was about all. There were at least twelve other breeds which her husband could rattle off: “Black, gadwall, redhead, teal, scaup ...” Once he had hunted ducks with a powerful gun and good eye; now he was content to feed them.

  It was while endeavoring to explain the difference between a bufflehead and a baldpate that he had his bright idea. Running to the house, he telephoned Annapolis and after some delay got Admiral Stainback. “Spunky, this is Owen Steed. Tulsa. Yes, good to hear you, too. Spunky, can you hire me a helicopter? I know you can’t get hold of a Navy one. But there must be ...”

  The admiral, a crisp Oklahoma man who had done much business with Steed’s company, wanted to know why his old friend should need a helicopter, and when Owen explained that it was a mission of mercy, saving a hundred thousand geese, he said, “Hell, that would justify one of our choppers!” And he asked for specific landing instructions.

  Within an hour a Navy helicopter landed at the Refuge, within fifteen feet of the barn, and was loaded with bags of corn. Admiral Stainback sat in back with Ethel, while Owen rode co-pilot to do the navigating. With graceful ease the chopper lifted into the air, tilted to starboard and swept at low altitude up one river after another, while the passengers in back ripped open bags of corn, scattering the golden kernels across the frozen rivers.

  It was a trip that dazzled the Steeds: each pond of water, no matter how small, reflected from its icy surface the shimmering rays of the sun; each cove was a frozen diadem. Marvelously attractive were the thin strands of rivulets which in summer would go undetected; in frozen splendor they shone like veins of silver. The relationship of water to land was sharply defined; the mystery of the Eastern Shore lay revealed, this wedding of snow-covered land and bejeweled rivers.

  Even when the bags were empty and their muscles tired, the Steeds did not want the flight to end, for they were seeing a wilderness of beauty that might never be repeated. Generations could pass before the shore would again be frozen as it was this day, so when Admiral Stainback asked on the intercom, “Shall we head back now?” Owen said into his microphone, “I’d like to see how the Choptank develops,” and Stainback said, “Said and done. Pilot, fly to the headwaters.”

  With lovely, falling, sideways motion the helicopter dipped low toward the mouth of the frozen river, then turned east and flew slowly up the river that Steeds had occupied for so long. There was the mansion, half eaten away by summer storms, its widow’s walk collapsed. There was Peace Cliff and the red roofs of Sunset Acres, where the marsh had been. Here were the gaping, rusted girders of what had been the Paxmore Boatyard, and beyond it the new red-brick homes in Frog’s Neck, replacing the burned-out wooden shacks. But it was east of Patamoke that the Choptank became most memorable, for here vast marshes spread along the shore, marked now and then
by rotting piers to which the ancient steamboats had come, all white and silver and shot with romance; now the pilings were eaten to the waterline and silt filled the harbors where women in bombazine had once waited for their lovers returning from Baltimore. How noisy it had been then; how silent now.

  There were the long stretches of river totally unoccupied, looking much as they had in 1700, and up toward the end the vast, rusting sheds at Denton where huge riverboats had once brought their cargos of guano from Peru. Beyond lay the flat fields of Delaware in which the river rose, and beyond them the vast Atlantic Ocean, whose waters salted the Chesapeake and all its estuaries.

  As they flew at a few hundred feet above this frozen wonderland, Ethel saw from time to time some hole broken in the ice by mysterious forces; often the opening was no larger than a tennis court, but about it clustered thousands of birds, desperate for water, and often, at a distance from the opening, lay swans and geese and ducks whose feet had frozen to the ice, holding them prisoner till they died.

  “We can go home now,” Owen said from his front seat, and like a homing pigeon the helicopter twirled, found its heading and crossed frozen fields to the Refuge.

  There was one aspect of that fearful winter to which the Steeds would never refer; it was too painful.

  One morning as Owen was shaving he heard the mournful cry of the heron—“Kraannk, kraannk!”—and he looked out to see two gaunt birds, whose habits he had studied with loving attention, land on the ice and walk in long awkward steps to those spots at which they had so often fed, hoping to find them free of ice, that they might fish.

  Desperately they pecked at the unyielding surface. Then, with mounting terror, for they were starving, they hammered at the ice with their feet, a kind of death-dance. Accomplishing nothing, they pecked again, their long necks driving sharp bills with a force which would have broken normal ice. But this was different, and the poor birds moved from spot to spot, frustrated.