Slave Graves

by Thomas Hollyday

Charlie and his yellow bulldozer were gone, the machine loaded on a flatbed truck and removed. The great roll of debris from the destroyed farmhouse was still perched beside the site, the red paint dry, a small puddle of the red blotched on the soil. A stylish television reporter from a Baltimore station was standing near the bulldozer roll, her cameraman recording her report.

  “Jake Terment, a true American hero, was killed in a strange accident yesterday in this muddy field near his ancestral home here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In the words of the town mayor, one local man who had known Jake Terment since childhood, ‘Jake Terment was the best thing ever happened to River Sunday. We don’t know what we are going to do down here without him.’

  “As we reported earlier in the financial news, the Terment Company offices in New York are closed today partly in mourning for Jake Terment and partly because the company has declared bankruptcy. Acting President Spyder, of the Terment Company, who was formerly a close aide to Jake Terment, stated that the company is highly leveraged and failure to finish this Maryland project has caused several large loans to come immediately due. The Acting President insists that every effort will be made to repay joint investors on projects throughout the United States and to maintain Terment Company stock values.”

  “That’s a laugh. I bet those suckers will get nothing,” said the Pastor.

  “That reporter’s national. I was interviewed this morning, Frank. You were still sleeping,” said Maggie.

  “What did she ask?”

  “She couldn’t understand what prompted anyone to have a fist fight with Jake Terment. She was amazed at the demonstrators. You’re going to get a call, Pastor. I told her about your General Store and the fire and she wants to do a follow-up story. She also spent some time out on the road talking with the butterfly people who are out there handing out materials.”

  Maggie smiled, “Oh yes. She wants to meet the jaguar man.”

  “Good luck to her,” grinned Frank.

  “I showed her around the site. She had many questions about our discoveries. Her main point was, however, that the television public was very shocked by Jake’s accidental death. He was such a popular and well known businessman.”

  “I got no problem after a man is dead if people see him as better than he was,” said the Pastor.

  “I think Solado and that cat just scared the hell out of Jake, but I wasn’t going to tell her,” said Maggie.

  “I felt sorry for Jake. As bad as he seemed to be, I don’t think he deserved to die.”

  “You’re getting to be the old Frank again,” said Maggie.

  “You’re a better man than I am,” said the Pastor.

  “Where is Soldado anyway?” asked Frank.

  “Nobody will see him again for a while,” said the Pastor. “He’ll take his boat and go hide down on some creek in the southern Eastern Shore or out in the Wilderness Swamp.”

  Maggie handed Frank a cellular telephone. “I’d like to know about that bell.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Frank. They sat in the grass on the edge of the site.

  In front of them there was great activity in the dig area. Several teams of Maryland archaeologists and specialized personnel had been brought in from other projects around the state. A variety of sophisticated electronic instruments were being set up to penetrate the soil.

  “Cathy was put under special orders by the Governor yesterday afternoon to get this project straightened out,” said Maggie. “The new orders are that the site and especially the skeletons are to be excavated and studied with great care.”

  There was dirt on Maggie’s forehead. Frank reached over and rubbed it away. She smiled. He dialed the call.

  “You and the Pastor would enjoy this place I’m calling,” said Frank. As he waited he described it to them. “It’s a large room lined with books. In between there are large multipaned windows which look out on the city of Boston. Small iron staircases climb among the bookshelves. Alcoves display ship models and marine items like compasses and sextants marked with the names of famous ships. In the center of the room are long massive wooden tables with researchers working among piles of papers and research reports and computer terminals. There are great glass exhibition cabinets with ancient logbooks displayed and in spaces among the bookcases there are antique paintings. When you stand at the door you feel like a ship, ready to knife through the room, your mind filling with knowledge the way a ship’s sail fills with wind, ideas tumbling around you like waves, tidbits of exciting data winging by like strange sea birds. The lights hang from the ceiling and illuminate all this in strange shadowy ways that reflect differently each way you turn. It’s like being able to see the history in that room from different perspectives, almost different centuries, each time you move your eyes.”

  He paused, listening. “Research room please.”

  After another wait, “Is Antonius there?”

  He looked at Maggie. “The secretary is trying to find him. He’s a tall guy with long grey hair. He towers over the other researchers.”

  He smiled as he heard the boisterous voice on the other end. “Antonius, it’s Frank Light.”

  “Frank Light,” said Thomas. “It’s good to hear from you. Where are you? At that university?”

  “Still there. How are you?”

  “Putting books back in the right places.”

  “You and your systems,” said Frank. “The reason you have to work so hard is that no body can understand your filing systems. I tried and failed. I don’t know any of us who ever really figured it out up there.”

  “So what’s happening?” asked Antonius.

  “I need a favor.”

  “Sure,” said Antonius.

  “We’ve got an old ship’s bell down here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “A marsh near a little town called River Sunday, Maryland.”

  Antonius sighed, “The Maryland town where the big name real estate guy got himself killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re working on that same project?”

  “The same.”

  “Tell me more,” said Antonius. Frank nodded at Maggie and the Pastor. He knew Antonius was hooked.

  “We need to know about the name lettered on the ship’s bell we found.”

  “Sure. What’s the name?” asked Antonius.

  “The ‘Adam and Eve,’ said Frank. “Also it says ‘London.’ There’s no date on the bell but we think the wreck was about 1690-1710.”

  “Hold on. Let me get to my files.”

  Frank put down the telephone. “He checking his computer.” He returned the telephone back to his ear. They waited in the hot sunlight.

  In the space which had been Grid Q where they had found all the slave skeletons there were now five workers.

  “They have found more layers of those skeletons,” the Pastor said.

  Maggie said, “We think that some of the slaves were on half decks built up over the main deck of the hold. When the fire occurred the half decks and their occupants tumbled down upon the slaves chained below. That would explain the jumbled bones that they are finding. They have found more than fifty sets of remains so far, some chained directly to the large ring bolts in the flooring.”

  “This morning we heard that there is interest in forming a local group to operate this site as a monument,” said the Pastor. “People like Birdey Pond want to serve as board members.”

  “That would be wonderful,” said Maggie.

  “There will be a need for some good archaeologists to be on the staff.”

  The telephone crackled. “I’ve found her,” said Thomas. “It’s a strange story. Got a few minutes?”

  “Go ahead,” said Frank.

  “The citation on this story is from a probate case argued in London in 1693. The lawyers for the litigant were arguing that a Richard Terment, a colonist in Maryland, had the complete rights to the fortune of his brother Henry Terment, who had been lost at sea on
a voyage to West Africa and Maryland. The case was not contested. Apparently these brothers were the only family who had any right to the estate. It was a very large estate for that time. According to the summary of the case, this Henry Terment had been a merchant, mostly in Africa, and had made a fortune in the slave trade to the Caribbean. He had a mansion located on the Thames River and a country estate in Kent as well as his own ship, the Adam and Eve.

  “Richard Terment was in Maryland at the time of the case. He had a plantation in Maryland, a small plantation apparently. His brother Henry had a substantially larger land holding next to Richard. Henry owned a sizable number of slaves and indentured servants who worked for the brother Richard. All this land was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland near a port called Sunday. The records call it a parish or church town. I assume this must be one of the early names for River Sunday.

  “Henry had an agent in Whydah which was a slave port in West Africa. That agent’s records state that he purchased a substantial quantity of cowrie shells from London, specially imported from India, to engage in trading in Africa.

  “One thing I noticed immediately, Frank, that was odd about this Terment. He owned the ship completely in his own name. Usually these trader merchants would own the ships in shares, several merchants to a ship. Then if the ship was lost their mutual ownership acted like a kind of insurance to share the risk and the loss. In his case he owned the ship all by himself. I expect he was so sure of his success he wanted to keep all the profits for himself.

  “Here’s some details about the ship itself. The Adam and Eve was a merchantman, a little under a hundred feet between perpendiculars, sternpost to bow stem. It had a figurehead of two naked figures embracing each other. It had galleries on its stern, apparently quite fancy because Henry traveled with the ship as its captain. It was ship rigged which meant that it had three masts.

  “In the agent’s records there is a lot of inventory information. In a case like this there are always debts and even though he owned the ship some of the cargo was financed. So the court demanded to know how much was lost so the creditors could be satisfied. For example there were ten guns on the ship, iron guns, twelve pounder semi culverins which Henry had purchased with some of the cost being paid on the return of the ship to London. In case you are wondering, Frank, these traders carried a lot of guns because of the pirates who used to raid the shipping lanes down through the Atlantic passage into Africa and then in the Caribbean and Chesapeake areas.”

  “Captain Terment sailed to Africa, purchased slaves from his agent and was then bound for Maryland. The agent’s records show what he bought and when he left the Slave Coast. The court also had a document from Richard’s lawyer in Maryland stating that Henry never made it to Maryland. On the basis of this, the court determined that Captain Henry Terment and the Adam and Eve went down in a storm with all hands and the slave cargo being lost.

  “In the court case Richard Terment of Maryland claimed all of Henry’s estate as the surviving heir. There was no will. Since there was no other family, the estate was totaled and Richard got himself a very large estate. “

  Frank said, “We have the wreck of the Adam and Eve here in Maryland at a spot where part of Richard Terment’s Maryland plantation was located at the time of the death of his brother. The Adam and Eve did not sink in the ocean. It sank here in Maryland.”

  “Seems that way. Oldest motive there is, money,” chuckled Thomas.

  “Ask your friend about the giant?” interrupted Maggie.

  “Here’s another mystery, Thomas. One of the skeletons in the wreck was a huge man. Could you run a search on persons in the records who might have been of great size?”

  “There’s a few newspapers on the computer. The early journals rarely mention names.”

  “Do me a favor. Try a key words like giant and Terment and tie it to the time of the ship.”

  “Hang on.” After a few minutes, Thomas came back on.

  “You won’t believe this,” he said. “Your giant is Captain Henry Terment.”

  “He says the giant is the Terment who was lost,” said Frank to Maggie and the Pastor.

  “It’s an obituary in the London newspaper. The kind of thing they write after a major hanging. Only this is for a man they call the “Tormentor.” I’ll read you the excerpt.

  “Today word reached London that the “Tormentor” is lost at sea. This man, also known as Henry Terment, was notably the largest man in civilization, a brute of a person in physical size and mind, surrounded always with his portable army of strong, vicious men. None can forget his long braided hair. None can forget the sharp jeweled cutlass he wore with such impertinence. None of us who had the misfortune to be in his presence can fail to remember the terror, the fear of a disagreement with him which had already cost the lives of twenty good and brave men in duels and other private misfortunes. Here was the terror of a man the King himself could not keep arrested because Terment’s power of force and money was so great. This was the man who claimed he could ‘torment gold.’ The Good Lord Himself has intervened and proved this man dead at sea in his last pursuit of more wealth.”

  Frank repeated the story sentence by sentence as Thomas read it to him. After Frank hung up he looked at Maggie and the Pastor.

  “Jake’s father used that phrase, ‘torment gold’,” said Frank. “Jake told me that.”

  “Brother kills brother. One of the oldest crimes in the Bible.” The Pastor looked thoughtful. “Back up here on the Nanticoke, Richard could have come down to the ship by himself. He could have got them all drinking and drugged them somehow. It would have been easy then to lock them in the ship and to set it afire. There would have been no witnesses. Later on slaves and indentured servants could have been brought in to cover the wreckage with soil. Any kind of explanation could have been used and in those days, people kept their mouths shut for fear of being killed.”

  “It’s damn close to the perfect murder,” said Frank. “If it had not been for the digging up of this so called graveyard, old Richard would never have been found out.”

  “So what do we do with a three hundred year old murder case?”

  “We can be pretty sure from that health examiner that no one in this town will have any interest.”

  The three of them laughed.

  “We can document it, that’s about all,” said Maggie.

  “So that leaves the question,” said Frank. “How much did Jake actually know about what was out there in that marsh?”

  “He knew,” said the Pastor. “You mentioned they both knew about ‘tormenting gold’.”

  “We’ll never be sure,” said Frank. “If he did know, Jake thought the secret was safe. He probably didn’t worry about the river rising, the soil erosion exposing the wreck. He knew he could quietly fill in the marsh and plant a cornfield. He could get rid of any artifacts,” continued the Pastor. “What he did not count on was that he had let the bridge fall apart over the years and had to fix it. That got him in a bind about this little marsh property. There was no other land on which to build the bridge supports.”

  The Pastor smiled. “The tide water had washed out more soil than Jake realized. That’s how come the wreck got found by that bulldozer, ‘cause it was so close to the surface.”

  Maggie added, “Then, you found the clues and, because you were more honest than Jake had calculated, you couldn’t quit, Frank. All this put Jake in a position where he became desperate.”

  The Pastor smiled. “Even more desperate because Jake couldn’t let that mansion be lost. Peachblossom was his family heritage. That manor house was probably the only thing Jake cared about all his life. That’s where you got to understand people like the Terments.”

  “I got this feeling he looked on this as a duty,” said Frank.

  “Yes,” said Maggie. “Maybe even more so because of the rumors about him that his real father was not a Terment. Maybe that led him to assert himself as the savior of the family.”

&n
bsp; The Pastor said, “Some of the demonstrators stretched that orange banner on the monument out in the harbor. The word ‘Butterfly’ in big black letters can be seen from shore.”

  Frank looked at Maggie.

  “You could write this,” she smiled. “The dead slaves get new life. Jake, who in an ironic way, was also a slave, a slave to his family, gets death.”

  “Yeah, but what would we have done if Jake hadn’t had the accident?” Frank said.

  The Pastor looked at them. “Sad to say, if he had not had that unfortunate accident, if he had not died, all those people out there would only have been able to slow him and his company for a few hours. Even if you had succeeded in beating him up and chasing him away to stop the bulldozer, all would have been only for a short time. In a few hours Jake would have been back with plenty of lawyers and a lot more green coated guards. Maggie’s boss was on Jake’s side. She wanted to close the site. Without State of Maryland support, all of us would have been forced out of there.”

  “What made the change? His death?”

  “His death allowed the Governor and his people to cater to those demonstrators. There were a lot of votes out there, white and black,” said the Pastor.

  Frank pulled on the brim of his hat. “What about the Union soldier?”

  “Let the story be known,” said the Pastor.

  “Adam and Eve,” Maggie said to herself. “That’s why it’s so hard for most of us to be sorry for Jake.”

  “What?” said Frank.

  “Go back to the Bible,” she smiled. “After Adam and Eve blew the deal in the garden, we all became slaves, each in our own way, and we’re not likely to love whoever we think are our slave masters.”

  Chapter 24