Slave Graves

by Thomas Hollyday

Soldado left to tend to his crab lines. They listened to his engine fade into the distance. Frank looked at his watch. It was nine AM.

  “You’re thinking,” said the Pastor, “that finding these skeletons is not going to be enough to delay the bridge.”

  “If they were the bodies of some people who had been killed recently by some serial killer maybe that would stop the bridge construction. I’m sure in fact that it would. But these persons died a long time ago and, like Jake said, most people don’t care that much what happened to them. Like that Doc Bayne said, call him if the bones are recent.”

  “Some people do care.”

  “Yeah, but do they care enough about some burned sailors, even if they were killed by some colonial criminal, to give up several million dollars of investment money?” said Frank.

  “It’s a tough job convincing people the loss of the money is worth finding the answers to the history puzzles,” said Maggie.

  “You learned that at your Southern Maryland excavation.”

  “It was a lot like it is here.” She dumped some soil from her dustpan on to the plastic sheet laid out beside her dig and studied it for a moment then went back to work. “We were called down there when the shopping center, was almost completed, and the contractor was applying blacktop. There was still one section open to insert another drainpipe. The hole was right in the center of the lot.”

  She stood up and stretched. “Ah, that feels better. Anyway, the men working on the hole for the piping found a part of a brick foundation. Same as here, the project had to immediately stop. We got a call that afternoon and were down in the evening. We worked by lights. Cathy made sure we got everything, portable x-ray equipment, magnetometers. I was put in charge of several archeologists.”

  “We began to enlarge the hole, Frank. Like here, all we had to do was prove it was nothing more than a smokehouse, or an old barn of no importance, and we could go home. I remember there was this large paving machine full of macadam that was sitting right next to the hole. The smell of tar was getting all of us sick.

  “At about midnight, we dug into wire, coils of the stuff, all copper. The wire was the type used in telegraphs back in the Nineteenth Century. Then we started new holes ten feet out from the original. The contractor had to move the paving machine back. He also had to come in with jack hammers to cut out the blacktop. He was not happy at doing all this extra work. On top of that, the police there were not able to stop the workmen from making angry remarks to us. There were the usual remarks that the redneck workmen made to our women. One tried to say something about my body and I glared at him so hard, he walked away and left me alone.”

  “He probably had never run into a woman who had the guts to threaten him,” said Frank.

  Maggie continued, “Research was being done in the local library. We were told that the land had been farmland and woodland. There had been no railroad within twenty miles and no telegraph lines. Then we made an astounding discovery. Down a few inches below the strata where the wire was located were a variety of Confederate artifacts. In small metal boxes were the remains of cloth ribbons with Secession mottoes, Confederate flags of various sizes and some uniform material and insignia. Then we found rusted guns, mostly revolvers but also rifles.”

  “The word went out to Washington to the National Archives and to museums that were involved in Civil War history. About seven in the morning an intern in Richmond working at the Museum of the Confederacy turned up an obscure reference to a secret telegraph station in Southern Maryland. It had been used in 1864 for transferring messages from the Confederate intelligence agents located in the District of Columbia.

  “We did not report any of this to the media. I was a state employee and it was a State of Maryland project. There was a certain requirement of privacy between the landholder and the government. That did not stop a local reporter from sending the story to the Washington newspapers. The result was that by noon we had visitors standing all around our site. Some of them were unfriendly and all of them had one cause or another.

  “Cathy was pretty good about it. I told her I wanted to finish the work; she told me that the Governor’s Office wanted the project finished yesterday. She went out on a limb and gave me half a day to find what I could, document it, and cover it up.

  “Then I found a skeleton. With the equipment we had at the site we could not determine the race of the skeleton. The time period of the soil strata around the body was all Civil War, no question.

  “More research came in from the museums. There was a son of the landowners who had served in the Confederate Army intelligence service. He had disappeared right after visiting his family and on his way into Washington on a mission. It seemed that this might be a Confederate hero. There was suddenly political pressure from black politicians to close the site. Needless to say, relatives of the white landowners called the Governor to request more extensive digging. I told Cathy that she had to give me more time, that this was an important site, that little was understood about the Confederate activities in this part of Maryland. I argued we ought to collect the information. She told me she was getting in her car and coming down to close it herself.”

  “I was interviewed on national television. The reporters buzzed in with a helicopter and a great noise. In three minutes of live coverage, the fact that I answered only the simplest archeological questions about the site meant that I became the poster girl for every radical group in America. When I said that we were digging to get more accurate historical research on the Confederacy meant only one thing to those creeps. It translated that I was either for or against their agendas. Every reporter twisted what I said to support whatever his news report was covering, every kind of radical idea possible.

  “Cathy closed us down that evening at dinner time. I went home before they poured the blacktop. I did not go back to work for a week because I was so disgusted. Then Cathy convinced me to come back to the office. She said I had the strongest credentials of anyone in the office. She said that to replace me, she would have to submit budget requests for two years in the state bureaucracy. I realized that without enough workers, many other Maryland projects would be jeopardized. I came back, out of love of archeology more than anything else. The first thing Cathy told me was that she had learned her lesson, that she would never go out that far again. That’s why she’s the way she is.”

  He smiled. “I know the feeling.”

  “Do you?” Maggie looked at him, a long hard look. Then she went on, “Cathy did me a favor in a way. She kept me in archeology. I owe her that.”

  “Maggie,” Frank said earnestly, “If we can find some reason to fight for this marshland, I’ll stand in front of Jake’s bulldozer myself. I just wish I had a few more workers here today.”

  Maggie said, “There’s no time to train anyone. We should have had them two days ago when we first started. I wish we could get another worker like you, Pastor. You have a great attention to detail. If you ever want to change professions, we could bring you into the archaeological field.”

  “Unfortunately my church people work long hours in day jobs. They can’t get out here,” said the Pastor.

  “You must have made some compromises in your life. How does a Pastor of a small church get a Cadillac?” asked Frank.

  The Pastor didn’t take offense. He carefully scraped some more of the clay away from the leg bone in front of him. “That car got willed to me by a woman in River Sunday. She wasn’t even a member of my church. She lived on the far side of the harbor, the other direction from the way you come up here. The folks around here call that area Tulip Neck. This lady had a mansion, not quite as old, but just about as large as Peachblossom.

  “Well, one morning in the spring of 1980 I got a call to come over to the center of town to this lawyer’s office, her lawyer, a white man who had lived in River Sunday all his life. I can tell you though that this was the first time for me, even though River Sunday was a very little town, that I ever said a word to him. So h
is secretary let me into his office and I sat in front of him while he finished up some call on the telephone. Then he got up and came around his desk and shook my hand.

  “The lawyer said, ‘Pastor Allingham, I’m sure glad you could come by here this morning.’ then he looked at me with a sort of smile and he said, ‘I don’t expect you to say yes but did you ever know Mrs. Steers?’”

  “I said, ‘Nossir, I never had the pleasure. Might be long ago my father knew her.’”

  “So he continues, ‘Well, she has passed away.’”

  “‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sorry for her family.’”

  “‘Well,’ he said ‘that’s very nice of you.’”

  “Then he sits back down at his desk and lifts up a folder and pulls out an envelope. ‘I wanted to tell you as her executor that she has left you an automobile.’”

  “‘A car?’”

  “‘A car. Yes. She has authorized me to buy you a new Cadillac coupe and to maintain and insure it for your use from the estate as long as you want the use of the car.’ He pulled a set of keys out of an envelope.”

  “‘Here you are. I assumed black would be a good color, you being in the ministry and all.’”

  “Well, I can tell you I was mighty surprised. I said, ‘Thank you,’ when he gave me the keys.”

  “Reasonable thing to do, say thank you,” smiled Frank.

  “Yes. Then I sat there while he was rummaging through the file folder. Finally he said to me, ‘There’s a note in here for you also from her.’ He handed me the letter. It was written in large flowing script like nothing I had ever seen before, not like the handwork that we had learned in our River Sunday schooling, but maybe something foreign.”

  Dear Pastor Jefferson Allingham,

  Before his death, your father was a frequent and welcome visitor at Tulip Neck. He came to preach to me in lieu of my going outside the farm to a church in River Sunday. He also helped me plan and grow my flower gardens. Your father grew the most beautiful peonies. He said that these flowers were the most reliable, that they kept on being beautiful every spring without all the care the other plants required. I grew to depend on those plants just like I depended on your father tending to their physical health and to my spiritual health. The talks with your father were as valuable to me as any other moments in my life.

  In my life, being often misled by emotions, I spent my money on poor goals. Your father was one of the few who helped me do penance and find forgiveness, a forgiveness that was like the peonies coming back as beautiful each spring no matter how poorly I had lived my winter. Perhaps in memory of your father I can do some service that will be valuable. It seemed logical to give you something reliable for your own life as a way of remembering your father. I know that you travel to see your parishioners. Please accept the gift of this Cadillac automobile. My attorney will see that it is properly insured and maintained for you. I have told him that it is my wish that you get every expense on this car covered by my estate.

  Sincerely, Mrs. Steers

  “And that was all there was to it?”

  “That was all. The lawyer seemed to be a little upset. He said that the estate would be willing to pay me money instead of the car.”

  “I said, ‘No, that was what she wanted so I would use it for the work of the church.’”

  “Strange,” observed Frank. “She didn’t take the time to find out about you and your brother starving up there at the old church building.”

  “I was wondering about that,” said Maggie.

  “No,” said the Pastor. “I understand her. It’s like in the old slavery days. Nobody got their freedom while the white slave owners were living. They only got freed in the wills after the white folks died.”

  “There’s a lot to learn,” said Frank.

  “I heard later though that she gave out several of these kind of gifts from her will. She was an odd old lady and had kept mostly to herself. There was a story around that German submarines used to come up to her house to get money for Hitler.”

  “Did they?”

  “Nobody ever found out. There are lots of those stories going around on the Eastern Shore.”

  “You’ve had that car for a long time.”

  “Yes I have. I think I was right to keep the car too. I’ve had it for a while and had it repaired a few times. I can understand why that lawyer just wanted to give me the money. I think he gets tired of me still coming around with repair bills.”

  “You’re going to have a high mileage Cadillac.”

  “I think, Frank, that I will probably drive that car into my grave.”

  “We’ll put on your gravestone a little poem,” grinned Frank:

  “Here in God lies Allingham

  Never to part his Cadillac sedan.”

  Maggie laughed. “You can do better than that, Frank.”

  The telephone rang in the farmhouse. Maggie stood up and splashed through the muck. She called back, “Frank, you’ve got a call.” Then it was Frank’s turn to run across the muck towards the house. Maggie was standing inside the doorway, holding the telephone.

  Frank sat down at the table. He pushed back one of the piles of Maggie’s handwritten field reports and pulled a piece of clean paper in front of him.

  “Frank Light,” he said.

  “Just a moment, Frank,” a female voice said. Frank recognized the soft sound of the university president’s receptionist. In his mind he could see the carpeted office, the mahogany desks, the computer terminals and the portraits of past university officials.

  The line clicked. “Frank, how are you doing down there on our little reconnaissance?” said his boss.

  “Yessir. I had not called in because I wasn’t sure how much longer this job would take.”

  “Well, that’s all right. I just want you to take care of Jake Terment. Is everything going well?”

  “I think so.”

  “I got a call from New York. From the tone of the call it sounds like something is wrong.”

  “Who called you?”

  “One of our trustees, Frank.”

  “Well, Jake Terment is in a hurry for us to get out of here.”

  “You can understand that. What do you think of him?”

  “He’s a little pushy,” laughed Frank.

  The president also laughed. “I didn’t expect him to be as interested in history as we are, Frank. I’m sorry you have to rush this one. Maybe you can wrap it up today and get back here.”

  “I can’t get out of here for a little while yet.”

  “Well, just don’t overstay your welcome. I don’t want Jake Terment to get the wrong idea about our university. Frank, it’s people like him who support our departments including archaeology here.”

  “I certainly can’t leave today.”

  “Frank, if I have to ask you, you will leave. Don’t you agree, Frank?”

  Frank did not respond. There was a long pause. Then the president went on, his tone less friendly, more demanding. “Frank, I guess I’m asking you. You get back up here in less than twenty four hours, a lot less if possible. You leave Jake Terment in a damn happy mood when you do get out of there. I want to see you as soon as you get back on campus. Do we understand one another?”

  Frank didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I guess that’s a yes,” said the president. “Come on, Frank. This reconnaissance is not the end of the world. There’s someone else here, wants to talk to you.”

  Another click, a new voice. “Frank?” It was Mello.

  “Yes,” he answered. She seemed far away, a stranger, not the warm flesh, the clever mind, he had loved so fiercely only days ago.

  “You sound different,” she said. “I was thinking you’d be back already. Then I thought you might get tick fever or some other disease from being done there in that God-forsaken place. I’ve never been to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. What’s it like?”

  “I feel different,” he said, looking at Maggie as she made some
notations in her site journal. “The place here is raw, new, different. I feel like I did back when I first got in country in Vietnam, strong like I was in those days.”

  As if she had not listened to what he had just said, Mello went on talking with no change of tone, no real worry in her voice, “Working in all the heat and sun probably isn’t doing you any good. You’ll soon be home, sitting in our air conditioning. When are you coming back?”

  “Not until I finish my job.” He realized he had never heard her say she was worried about anything or anyone.

  “Your BMW needs an oil change. The schedule just came up on our computer. You told me to remind you. You treasure that new car.”

  “I’m not concerned about the car.”

  “That’s a change. What is going on? You sound very different.” Her voice was strained, maybe concerned. “The president says you finished the work down there.”

  “He’s wrong.” There was silence. He knew she was sitting down in the President’s office, her short dress up on her thigh, her left hand caressing her leg the way she did unconsciously, the way she did that had brought him running from the first day that he saw her.

  “I think the insects down there bit you, maybe gave you a fever. Don’t do this to yourself, Frank. The President says you are excited about some piece of wood you’ve found.”

  “I have to do this right.”

  “Frank, all you have to do is what the president says,” she said, her voice loud. “Your career is here, being a member of the university team. I’ve told you that. Have you forgotten the most important lesson I’ve taught you? Where the Hell do you think that car came from? Where the Hell do you think I come from? We like winners, Frank. You want us, you have to do what you are told.”

  He answered her slowly, “I’m beginning to think I may not be grown up enough for you, Mello.”

  “Then I guess there’s nothing more to say. You know how I feel. Business always comes first.”

  “I’m keeping that in mind.”

  “All right, Frank.”

  “I understand,” he said. “It’s all or nothing.”

  She paused. He could see her swinging her leg, puzzled like she got sometimes when things did not go her way, thinking what to say next. Then she made her basic decision. He had watched her do this many times. Whenever she was on the telephone and ran out of words, he’d seen her just hang up. She did that now to him. The dial tone returned. Frank looked at the telephone receiver for a few moments as Maggie watched him.

  “Bad news?” asked Maggie.

  “You could say that. More proof why I got selected to come down here. I think my boss almost guaranteed Jake Terment that I would do whatever the man wanted on this job. It’s nice to know that people you work for have confidence in you.”

  As Frank walked back across the site to the pit he suddenly felt very tired. He looked down. The cat was walking alongside him. Strange he thought how he was getting more muck on him every step he took while the cat’s light orange fur remained clean.

  Frank kneeled down in area Q and returned to work without speaking further to the others. He thought back to the last time he had seen Mello, to the feeling of her in his arms. Then his mind was back to the present, to the site in front of him. The thoughts of Mello did not linger.

  He saw his face in the shallow puddle beside him. He did not like what he saw. There was not much reflection in the dark water, but there was enough to see that he had changed from that young man of a few years ago, far more than he had realized. The professor who had driven into this country was not the man who had gone to Vietnam. Even the returning veteran, as disillusioned as he was in those days, was not the man he saw today. The face was that of a man in the control of others. He worried if he could trust himself to have the integrity that the Pastor and Maggie needed.

  He should have realized that his career had come along too quickly, that life had become too easy. He had moved too fast from an academic life to the administrative responsibility that came with being director of his department, from his teaching to his involvement in the business of a university career. Then, with this trip to the Eastern Shore, all of a sudden, the real world had burst into his protected university career.

  Frank was disappointed in himself but he was also happy that he was here with these two. He also knew that he had taken off the custom tailored suit, the uniform of his career. Dressed only in the old khaki work shorts he had worn on countless other digs, he was bare enough to feel free of the pull of the university bureaucracy and its money driven hypocrisy. He felt that he could think and see his life more clearly. He saw a movement behind him, something more in the reflection in the puddle. He looked up at the edge of the test pit. There, the cat, its Mayan leopard markings shining in the sunlight, watched Frank to see what he would do next.

  Chapter 11