Slave Graves Read online

It was the time of day when the heat was so heavy the insects did not move. Maggie, Frank, and the Pastor watched as Soldado drifted his craft into a mooring. Their hands tried to shield their eyes against the brilliant river glare.

  “If Soldado said he’d be here, I was pretty sure he’d come.”

  The Pastor continued, “He’ll take us out around the island. You can get an idea of the land here. Then we’ll come up on the wrecks from down the river .”

  As they prepared to wade out to the boat, Frank asked the Pastor, “Tell me more about Soldado.”

  “Soldado goes back a long time around here. Most of that time he’s hated Jake Terment. Soldado and his mother used to live out on the island. It was a little house, tar paper walls, just a mile or so over the bridge. His mother came from Mexico. The Yucatan. She was a very beautiful woman when she was younger. Very tall. She worked in one of the Terment migrant labor farms. Soldado was born in the camp. Some say his father came from around River Sunday. Some even say it was Mister Terment himself. Jake’s father did provide her the little house, helped her with her citizenship. Of course, Mister Terment never really let go of anything he gave. The house had a large mortgage.

  “We were all kids together, growing up on the Island. When Soldado was a teenager, he was a lot bigger than the rest of us, me, Jake, Billy, the other kids that we played around with. Soldado knew stories of famous sailing ships . He wanted to go to China, he said. He used to make up games. He’d pretend to be the captain of a clipper ship and we were the crew. Then we’d go into his warm house and his mother would make us molasses sandwiches, nodding her head with a toss of her black hair and smiling at Soldado making up all these ship stories.”

  The Pastor smiled. “There were these ship models in his house. Jake wanted to be captain too but in those days we could vote for who we wanted and we always chose Soldado. Of course Jake didn’t like anyone being in charge over him so he and Soldado were always fighting. Jake was smaller and Soldado used to just hold him by the shoulder and let him flail his fists at the air. One day Jake sneaked into Soldado’s house when no one was home. He broke one of the models. Then he went and showed some of the pieces to Soldado. That model sat inside the front door on a yellow, black and white table and it was Soldado’s favorite. You should have seen it, Frank. Anyway I think that was the last time the two of them even tried to get along, playing or anything else. Soldado threw Jake hard against the wall. The nails holding on the tarpaper cut Jake’s face. That was how he got that scar over his eye.”

  “In a few years Soldado went off to the merchant marine. He was on a ship that got sunk during a typhoon. He helped save some of his fellow sailors . The town of River Sunday gave him a parade when he came home. I remember seeing him in the convertible with Miss River Sunday, the high school girl who won the Fire Department beauty contest that year. All the ministers of the white churches and the mayor were there in cars too. Maybe there might have been one or two black preachers too. Not me, you can be sure. In those days, my church was outlawed by both the blacks and the whites. After a while Soldado went back to sea and commanded freighters for a long time. He finally retired and came home. That’s when he and Jake went at it again. Jake’s company was buying up the land. Jake’s father had died and Jake wanted all the island. The development had not been planned yet. Jake was just doing what he always did, trying to control everything. Anyway, Soldado didn’t want to sell. For one thing his mother was getting right along. He wanted her to live out her time on the island. Jake’s people wouldn’t go away. They found a way to get the property anyway by taking over the old mortgage at the bank. They found a way to push for payment, money that Soldado and his mother couldn’t handle. Soldado was not alone in getting bought out. Jake’s company found mortgages on tractors or buildings that they could foreclose and then forced sales of many farms out there. I heard that folks mysteriously had their dairy cattle get sick and die or their chicken houses catch fire. Soldado didn’t have a lot of cash. His retirement was a pension from the steamship company that he had served with. He had been a captain when he retired and he had saved fairly good money, but it wasn’t enough to handle paying off his mother’s mortgage. Terment’s father had made that mortgage on the shack so big there was no way Soldado and his mother could clear it. So the day came when Jake moved him out. Jake even came down to River Sunday that morning to see the job done and stood right on Soldado’s porch while Soldado had to pack his stuff, the models, everything, and take it out of the old house. Jake was there with Billy and three or four other police officers. Jake gave the house to the River Sunday fire department to burn down, to use for a practice house fire to train their new volunteer fire fighters.

  “A few months later Soldado’s mother died. He blames Jake for her death. Says losing that little house, as poor as it was, broke her heart. These days, he lives off his pension and has his water finding business. Like most of the men around here he does a little crabbing and oystering. He has a room he rents in River Sunday but most of the time he lives on his boat. I’m one of the few folks he still talks to. He says that all the people in River Sunday work one way or another for Jake Terment.”

  They came to the side of the boat. Soldado was on his knees working on the engine, the engine cover on its side to the left of him. He did not look up.

  “I was over to your site and made some marks where you might want to dig,” he said.

  “We noticed,” said Frank. “We appreciate your help.We want to thank you for taking us up to see the old ships.” Soldado still did not look up.

  The salt smell of the river mixed with the odor of rotting seaweed. That stink drifted around them in the heat. Soldado walked over to the side of the boat where the steering lever was located. He pressed a small black button and the engine turned over and began its slow throb. Exhaust smoke puffed from the tall stack into the air above the boat. Then the smoke, as slight as it was, drifted down on Frank and the others, and mixed a new pungency with the river smell.

  Maggie sneezed.

  “You all right there, little lady?” asked Soldado.

  Maggie smiled and nodded.

  With his boat entering the channel, Soldado began to steer for the bridge. “We’ll run up around the island.”

  The throbbing engine made tremors in the surface of the coffee in the cups. Maggie took her coffee and climbed up on the top of the small cuddy cabin. She pulled her tee shirt up up under her breasts and tied it so the sun was on her skin. She took the white string off her hair and her long blonde hair fell past her shoulders. Then she leaned back on her elbows on the cuddy roof. The slight breeze from the forward motion of the boat flicked her hair upward so that it served as a burgee for the boat.

  The boat moved under the rusty center span of the old bridge. The span arched over them about ten feet above. The motor resounded as the craft went under the span, loud echoes pumping against Frank’s ears. There was darkness. The sunlight created a pattern of shade lines from the grillwork above in the road, the lines raining like prison bars over the boat. . Frank could see decades of bird nest history on the ledges of the old concrete bridge supports. A gull, surprised and angry, flew off with a sudden whipping of wings.

  “You want to look at these fracture cracks,” Soldado said over the throb of the engine. “Terment got himself into a bind. All his talk about building on the island so the town decided to stop fixing up this bridge. Just let it fall apart. The mayor and the rest of them in River Sunday figured they’d get Jake to build a new one. Kind of foxed him. Jake has to replace it whether he wants to or not. It’s too worn out to support all that new traffic coming over to his houses. Didn’t seem too smart of him if you ask me but he’s the big businessman, not me. I just run a crab boat. I expect if he’d been a little smarter, made them keep it repaired, he might not have had to build no new bridge, might not have had to go near that swamp at all.”

  “That’s what I wondered from the beginning,” said Frank. “Why
couldn’t he have built the bridge, if it was so important, somewhere else along the river?”

  “From what I understand,” said Maggie, her words drifting back to the others in the middle of the boat, “This bridge was put here because it was always the simplest place to build, the shortest distance. Other places along the river were much wider and deeper with more soft bottoms and currents.”

  “You’re right,” said Soldado. “He’s got to build it here or not at all. For one thing the other folks along the river won’t let him build anywhere else. Second, he owns this area here. His neighbor, she won’t let him build on her land.” He pointed to the Pond house, back under trees. “She’s in there plotting how to muck up old Jake, I bet,” chuckled Soldado. “Her old man left her a ton of money. Just the other day I heard another story about her. Years ago, this fellow told me, she’d go into the Chesapeake Hotel during the hunting season, November, December, when all the tourists were in River Sunday, coming in to hunt geese and ducks out on the Nanticoke and on North Creek. In the hotel the hunting guides left their brochures all over the tables so the tourists could get their numbers and call them up to arrange hunting trips. Well, Birdey’d go in there and pick up the brochures, carry them outside and throw them into the trash. Then she got all the bird watchers, peepers, to do the same thing. Got so there had to be a guard in there to keep them from taking the brochures. They started going right up to the tourists and giving them material on not hurting animals. It got so the tourists were canceling their reservations. Finally the guides just stopped contacting their clients in the hotel. She made it a lot harder for them to do business. Most of them guides don’t dare tell where they meet their clients, afraid she’ll show up. She’s got a mind of her own, she does.”

  A large Coast Guard channel marker was ahead of them to port. Its green mass strutted into the sky with a blinker light and small railing on top. The shoreline on both sides of the Nanticoke River at this point were covered with small pines and bushes. In addition, there was earth of red and brown colors. Roots of decayed trees were caving into the river or already lay buried in the shallow water of the river’s edge. Ugly snags struck into the air, bare of leaves. Where Frank could see beyond the masses of honeysuckle and brambles, he had quick glimpses of tassles waving in rich cornfields.

  “This swamp probably hasn’t changed since the Native Americans were here, before the Europeans came,” said Frank.

  Soldado corrected him. “Before them, there were the visitors from the south. I know, because my mother descended from those southerners. They were Mayan nobles, warriors,” said Soldado. “My mother taught me that the Mayans traveled here two thousand and more years ago.”

  He glanced at Frank. “Long before the Europeans came to plant tobacco, the place on the mainland where the bridge to the island begins was where the tribes from the north would meet to trade with the Nanticoke. The Mayans would come there too. These northern people were eventually called the Iroquois and the Susquehannock. In time there was war between them. The Nanticoke fought the Susquehannock and Iroquois for many years. There was a final battle right here at this place in which the Nanticoke were completely vanquished. My mother said that in her magic she could still hear the screams and see the blood of the dying children. In their defeat the Nanticoke were forced to give up their children to the northerners. This place where you dig was where the children were taken prisoner and were carried north as slaves. The slave bands were put on their arms and these captives never came home again. It became a place of misery where no Nanticoke would visit or live.”

  “If that’s true, that explains all the arrowheads we found,” said Maggie.

  Soldado looked at her solemnly, “You dig enough you’ll find the Mayan things too.”

  The craft chugged further along. After about twenty minutes, the river came to a fork.

  “We’ll go up to port and head towards the Chesapeake Bay and open water,” said Soldado.

  Frank could see that the Nanticoke River continued inland and narrowed as it extended away from them into the backcountry of the Eastern Shore. As they turned to port, the craft entered a small deep creek, about two hundred yards across. On both sides, there were the same pine trees and hedges and endless swampland stretching away from the riverbank.

  “We’re on North Creek. You’re in the middle of the wetland we know as Wilderness Swamp. This swamp has always been famous for its black duck and canvasback hunting. Supposed to be the best duck gunning on the whole Eastern Flyway. The birds come in from rafting out on the Chesapeake Bay and feed in here on the wild rice in the shallows. The hunters wait in their duck blinds in the marsh grass and reeds. In the old days, market gunners from Baltimore would hunt in here with great guns that looked like howitzers. They could kill several hundred birds with one shot.”

  A breeze picked up. Soldado raised his voice high to be heard. “The creek makes Allingham Island honest, makes it into a true island.” They watched to port as the boat moved slowly past the marsh, about twenty yards offshore from the first of the green reeds poking up in the water.

  Sodado went on, “This area is the reason Mrs. Pond is so anxious to keep the island from being built up with lots of houses. The sewers from those new houses will kill the wetland and all the birds and animals and insects that live in it.”

  “I’ve found that the nature folks care more about the animals and the insects than they do about any people,” said the Pastor. “I could never get any support from them for helping people.”

  “It’s beautiful here,” said Maggie, dipping her toes into the river and making small ripples. “It’s the last of the wet areas along the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The real estate developers have built on every other one.”

  The wetland stretched back several hundred yards and stopped at a cliff that was higher by twenty feet over the swamp grass. The breeze blew currents of air which moved over the grass like waves. A dense smell of life came from the grass.

  “Smelled the same way ten million years ago when humans started coming out of that kind of muck. You go in there,” Soldado continued, “You’ll come across little pot holes and trails where the muskrats and the other animals live. It’s like a city in the grass. We go in there and we can’t survive like the wildlife can. Boots, bare feet, mosquito juice, it doesn’t matter. We get beat halfway across the swamp and we have to come back. Sometimes I think that’s why we destroy these wetlands because we can’t live in them and the animals can and we don’t like letting the animals have anything on us.”

  Two mallard ducks, male green and female brown, got up and skimmed the creek as they lofted together. The wake from the boat barely kissed the marsh grass yet made the fragile water reeds tremble. Soldado’s workboat approached the open area of the Chesapeake Bay. The water under the boat was changing from a slightly rippled current to a movement of slow swells, lifting and dropping the narrow hull. After several swells hit the boat, Maggie almost lost her balance and then pulled her feet out of the water. In the distance a harbor tug was heading up the Bay to the right, its exhaust boiling a dense black smoke into the blue sky.

  “That’s channel water out there,” said Soldado. “No seaweed to foul our prop. We’ll head south along the island.” The shoreline gradually changed to sandy beach, backed up by lonely trees and fencerows. Some of the island farms came into view behind lines of more trees, the barns and farmhouses floating on cornfield seas.

  “Lots of corn grown here for the poultry business. Big chicken plants further south. Fortunes have been made in the little creatures. People got to eat. When I was still on an ocean deck I carried lots of them to Africa, breeding stock for the chicken business over there.”

  A mansion, white columns against red orange brick walls, with a sweeping lawn and ancient trees carefully arranged by some ancient plan stood out from the rest of the houses on the island. At the right of the mansion was a small cove extending into the island abut two hundred feet. On the left o
f the cove there was a large wharf where the white Terment yacht was moored along with a small Boston whaler runabout.

  Soldado pointed at the mansion. “That’s Peachblossom, the Terment house,” he said. “To the right are pilings where in colonial days the tobacco ships used to land for cargos of island tobacco. Jake has to keep it dredged out all the time because it silts so much around here. There’s something you might be interested in.” Soldado pointed to great trees a few hundred feet down the shoreline from the yacht, the size of the green trees showing well the many centuries they had stood and grown big with life. “Those are the trees where the Monarch butterflies land. You see them flies in the fall when they fly through River Sunday heading south.”

  “Hard for a butterfly to get a good lawyer,” Frank chuckled.

  “You got that right.” Above them a small red airplane began to circle. Maggie pointed to it just as it began to trail orange smoke.

  “That pilot’s almost as old as I am. He keeps to himself like he’s still fighting out in the Pacific. I’m one of the few people he’ll still talk to. Flies out of his own field. Just a runway through a cornfield with one shed to keep his plane. He made ace flying Hellcat fighters shooting down Japanese Zeroes out in the Pacific. Came home to his farm and hasn’t gone much out of the county since.”

  The plane circled the first letter of its message into the blue sky. A “B” took shape. The mouth of the Nanticoke River appeared, signifying the end of the island. Where the river poured out into the Bay there was a slight chop and the spray began to soak Maggie.

  “You getting too wet up there?”

  “No,” she said, “I love it.” Frank could not help noticing how her tee shirt was soaked, fully outlining her well shaped breasts. Soldado steered his boat near a steel buoy to port, its anchor chain tangled with seaweed, the rusty channel marker rising and falling with the swells. A fish hawk nest was in the top of the buoy. The hawk got up and flew around and threatened to dive on them as they went by.

  “Osprey’s just trying to tell us to stay the hell away from her children in that nest. Can’t blame her,” said Soldado. He pointed ahead. “That’s Stoke’s Point. Some call it Fort Stokes. There’s the fortifications for an old War of 1812 outpost there. Then, if we go by Stoke’s Point we come around into the harbor of River Sunday. We’re not going that far. We’ll head back up this side of Stoke’s Point.”

  As they went up the Nanticoke River Frank could see off to the right three hulks of large ships. Soldado began to describe the wrecks. “Here’s what folks call the wheat or lumber schooners. These wrecks been here as long as I can remember. I guess this is what Jake is trying to tell you he’s got up there by the bridge. Anyway I’ll bring her on by and you folks can go in and study them all you want. They stopped using these sailing ships for carrying wheat when the highways got built and the trucks started hauling to the processing plants. The owners just left these hulks in here to die.”

  “Maybe Jake is right,” said Maggie. “It just seems like our shipwreck is older than a hundred years.”

  “I wouldn’t believe anything Jake tells you,” said Soldado. “However, I do know this. You come back here in a few years and these wrecks will look just like what you got up there.”

  Soldado anchored the boat against the current so her bow was pointed toward the channel. The water was very shallow. Maggie and Frank waded from the stern into the muddy shoreline to study the wrecks. Above them, trailing its cloud of orange smoke, the airplane completed its second letter, a “T.”

  The arching bow of the first wreck was pointed towards the channel as if its hull was still straining to be free. Tension in the old boards was still trying to spring loose from rusty fastenings, from the bending and clamping of its straight fibers to make the curves. Two masts stood proud and there was a stub of a bowsprit. The trailboards and railings were all washed away. Inside this wreck some of the deck remained. Frank and Maggie agreed that they would not try to walk on the old deck. It looked far too rotten. All of the wood below the tide line was covered with the green and brown growths of the thousands of water creatures infesting the hulk. The two of them examined the frame and planking structure of the bow, which was ten feet above them. There was nothing but slippery seaweed growth to climb on.

  “One of us has got to get up there to look at the bolts and fastening patterns.”

  “Here, get up on me,” said Frank.

  Frank helped Maggie climb up on his shoulders. They lost their footing and fell into the water twice. Soldado and the Pastor laughed at them, giving advice. Finally Maggie climbed up and was holding on the ship framing, her bare feet leaving wet prints on Frank’s bare shoulders.

  “Anything for archeology,” said Frank. After studying the worn timbers for a few minutes, she looked down. “She’s built entirely different than our wreck, Frank. There’s almost nothing the same. Timber size, planking, fastening methods. This, I would think, is a later type of construction.”

  They waded over to the second hulk, rusty chains linking it to the third wreck so that the bows of both were side by side. This hull had charred railings as if it had been in a fire.

  Maggie climbed up on Frank’s shoulders again. “I can see some handmade spikes here, Frank,” Maggie reported.

  “That may mean late Eighteenth Century. The lines still seem to be different. We don’t have the same apple shaped bow that we have at the site. These boats have sharper bowlines, entry lines more like Nineteenth Century clippers.”

  They waded back to Soldado’s boat. The soft bottom caused them to lose their footing several times.

  “He’s finished writing,” the Pastor pointed to the sky. Frank looked up. A wavy line of mist spelled the word BTRFLY.

  “Like I say, he fights wars,” said Soldado.

  “There’s a lot of them to fight,” said the Pastor, thoughtfully, as he watched the letters vaporize away to nothing. Soldado got his boat underway and they moved slowly up the river. After a few minutes Frank noticed a fire blackened building on the right bank, hidden behind a row of loblolly pines.

  “That’s the cannery I was accused of burning down,” said the Pastor.

  “It’s a large building,” said Frank. “Looks like some of it is still useable.”

  “Not much. By the time the fire department finished there was nothing left of the wiring and improvements we had done. The walls were weakened. The fire destroyed the building as a space for ours or any other business. You can’t see it from here but the roof on the other side is completely open.

  The Pastor went on, “Back when I came home from the war, the other men from River Sunday who had been in Vietnam, some black, some white, some Hispanic, they came to see me. They had saved their mustering out pay and they were waiting for me to return. I remember it was a hot day like today.”

  “One of them said, ‘Pastor, we have this money and we want to start a company. We been fighting for free enterprise so we want it ourselves. We want to do something with the money, something that will free us from working for the people who have always given us orders. If we start a company of our own we can have that freedom, work for ourselves, and also make enough money to live here in River Sunday. We need to make a living but we don’t want to be in the position of losing our jobs whenever some rich white man feels like firing us to save his profits. We need our own company. Will you help us put it together?’”

  “The young man talking to me, we all called him Chipmunk. Nervous like. Always tapping his fingers. Played good drums. As for me, I had never done much business before. All of us grew up doing a little trading but most of us did not have much of the finer training in books and accounts, the kind of know-how needed to run a first rate business . We all knew, however, that the key to our future success was economic power, green power. We knew that we had to have money to be free. The white people in River Sunday had always been in charge of most of the farms and little assembly factories and the lumberyards. They were the peo
ple who had traditionally owned and run those businesses. So we first had to find something to do to make money . We sat around and decided that our best product was going to be ourselves. We all knew how to work hard. We just wanted to get the money out of that hard work into our own pockets. We decided that we were going to sell our services to whoever wanted them. We agreed that the money would come back to the company, not directly to us. I remember we also agreed that we would use the money to help each other, not to become like the same people we wanted to escape.”

  “You guys banked the profits,” said Frank. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “We wanted to bank the profits. That’s right. So we started out. We ran the business from the church. The congregation helped out. Byemby the business started making money. If someone wanted to have a roof fixed, there was our company and our roofers and there was the competition. If someone wanted a television fixed there was our company and there was the competition. Many of the white owned businesses in River Sunday had black employees and after a while some of those black employees threw in with us. It took a lot of courage on their part to leave other jobs and come with us, but they did. It got so we had a lot of the trained workers and a lot of the jobs to be had around River Sunday and the other close by towns. We had white workers too. This wasn’t any black only business. Nossir. It was a business of the people. Like we’d say, it was by the people and for the people. Keep in mind, too, that all our employees were stockholders and, besides their salaries, they started getting dividends. They got part of the profit, some of these people, for the first time in their lives, getting more than a little envelope at the end of the week with some money. They had ownership. It meant a lot.”

  “What was the name of the business?”

  “General Store. After a while we had outgrown the church building. We rented the old cannery building that Mister Terment still owned near River Sunday. The Terments ran that cannery all through World War Two and the Korean War, canning tomatoes for the Army . When the California farmers started growing cheaper tomatoes, the Eastern Shore canneries like the Terment one in River Sunday just went broke. The army contracts moved out there and that was the end of the cannery business. The building had been vacant for years when we went into it. Jake’s father wouldn’t sell the building to us. He would only rent it on a short term basis. We had the money but he wouldn’t take it.

  “Why?”

  “Control. His type of white man did not want us black people to own anything in what he thought was his town.” He went on, “Then the trouble came. I remember it was late one night. I was closing up, standing there in the dim light in my office in a back room of the cannery building. I had sent everyone home. Everyone had been working so hard. I thought I saw a person in the shadows outside my office window. The window looked out over the back of the cannery area, into some brush and then the river, maybe twenty yards to the bank of the Nanticoke.”

  “So I went outside to see what it was. We didn’t have a watchman. We had grown so fast and we thought we knew everyone in town. We didn’t think we had anything to worry about. We were wrong.

  “Inside the old cannery we had set apart offices, filled the rooms with accounting machines, file cases, typewriters, all the records. We even had the first IBM computer in River Sunday, one using the paper cards. Since the building had been a cannery, we had to take all the machinery out of it. The parts of those food processing machines were piled up out back of the building. There were also some junk cars there. I think one of them was a Terment truck that had carried the tomatoes from the Puerto Rican and Mexican migrant worker farms. It was there worn out with flat tires, vines growing through the open bracketed out windshield.”

  “My mother probably rode in that truck few times,” said Soldado.

  “There was lots of scrap metal and wooden crates stacked up and lots of briars, I remember the briars pulling at me as I climbed back of the building and followed a small footpath in the darkness. Ahead, I saw a man running away from me. He had seen me first. I heard his feet crashing into the trash back there. He was maybe a hundred feet ahead of me down behind the building, his shape showing up on and off as it was lighted by each window he passed.

  “I knew right away it was Jake Tement. I knew the way he ran, how he kind of bent sideways when he ran, like he was trying to hide. I called out, ‘What you doing back here, Jake?’ There was no answer. Then the running figure was gone. There was only the noise of a few insects buzzing. I could smell the river.”

  “It was then the blast of flame screeched up the wall of that old wooden building, pieces of wood flying off in the air towards the river, landing with steam in the water, the flames accelerating towards the sky with so many sparks like stars, all the new paint we had put on that building peeling off in burning sheets.”

  “I knew Jake’s lurk. I knew him from when I worked up at Peachblossom for his father when I was a little kid. I knew it was Jake because the Terments like to burn things. That’s the way they do.”

  “All this was before Jake became a celebrity businessman?” asked Frank.

  “Yes,” said the Pastor. “He was just starting out, still working for his father in River Sunday in those days. I knew it was my word against his and it was his father’s building. What could my business partners and me do? We had no records. They were all burned up. We had great losses but we could not document them. All the records burned up. The next day all over River Sunday white people, many of them our former customers, talked about how foolish we were to use a black electrician on that building, how we should have got a good firm to come in and make it right, how the old wiring always starts fires, how all the black homes around River Sunday always had bad fires because the black folks wouldn’t fix old wires, how they were too ignorant to fix old wiring. We had to listen to all of it.”

  The Pastor was quiet for a few moments, his face showing the pain of the memories. Then his eyes brightened. “You ought to come down to my church office sometime after this project is settled. I’ll show you the picture they took of me with President Lyndon Johnson at a big luncheon in Washington at the White House. Yessir. We got an award from the Office of Economic Opportunity for our work at General Store.”

  “Nobody ever investigated the fire?”

  “Mercy, Frank. In River Sunday in those days, to get any real law, to get anything changed or done, you had to have whatever it was you wanted done be something that everyone around here wanted done. Mister Terment and his son were part of the majority. If they wanted it done, it gets done. If they didn’t want it done, it didn’t get done. Let me tell you, there wasn’t any outcry for justice when the cannery burned down. When the Terments broke the law they just made sure they had the majority on their side.”

  “Ain’t nothing much changed,” said Soldado.

  “Why would Jake and his father burn you out?”

  “The have-nots were winning. The haves fought back, protecting their interests. Leasts, that’s the way we see it,” said the Pastor.

  “You didn’t really lose,” said Maggie. “Your picture was on the bulletin board of my high school for several years, your picture and part of one of your speeches. You looked great in the picture.”

  “That was the difference. You went to school near Baltimore, a different part of Maryland than River Sunday.”

  “The line I liked was ‘To get the real size of a country, you have to measure the hearts of its leaders.’

  “That was what I said in my acceptance at the award July 17, 1968, standing in front of the courthouse in River Sunday. Mr. Johnson came in by helicopter too. A lot of Washington people attended, not many folks from River Sunday, but that was the way it was in those days.”

  The top of the crane that was moored at the bridge was in sight over the distant treeline. It was a black speck engineered above the natural randomness of the trees. As the boat moved along the river channel the crane details became more exact, outlining a black beacon against th
e blue sky. Then in a few more minutes they were nosing into the anchorage. The crane was a huge bludgeon towering over them as they waded ashore.

  Maggie was a hundred feet ahead of them and as she climbed to the top of the low bank at the shoreline she yelled back, “The site. It’s been wrecked.”

  Soldado waded back to his boat, reached back over the side and pulled down a sawed off double barreled shotgun. He splashed to catch up with Frank and the Pastor.

  The white twine connecting the various grid stakes had been cut and was in disarray. “No human tracks,” said the Pastor, looking at the soil. “They were careful to leave no tracks.”

  “We may have surprised whoever it was.”

  “Someone wants to delay us. Why else would they cut the markers?”

  “Who wants to delay us?”

  “Think about it,” she said. “It could be your friends, Pastor, who want to slow us down so we will find the graveyard.”

  The Pastor shook his head. “No, I would know if anyone from the church had done this.”

  “Frank, it could be Jake and his friends trying to scare us out of here,” said Maggie.

  “Maybe it’s the butterfly people,” suggested Frank. “I would think though that they’d be more interested in our staying here as long as possible.”

  “I’ll take Jake,” said the Pastor.

  Maggie ran to the farmhouse to call the police.

  “She’s wasting her time,” said the Pastor.

  In a few minutes she came back. The Pastor and Frank were already restringing the stakes.

  “No harm done, just a little delay,” said Frank.

  “Well, so much for the cops,” she said, a dejected tone to her voice.

  “What did they say?”

  “I talked to the chief.”

  “That’ll be Billy. He and Jake are pretty close,” said the Pastor.

  “The chief said there’s been some reports of dogs tearing up stakes at the construction sites at the bridge. He said he’d keep a car on patrol up our way in the future.”

  “No animal did this,” said the Pastor.

  “Jake,” said Soldado.

  “Look,” said Frank. “We’ve fixed it. Let’s just get back to work.”

  “Jake, he knows I’m always waitin’ for him, watchin’,” said Soldado. He waved his shotgun as he started back towards his boat. “Ain’t no way a man like that should be allowed to keep livin’.”

  Chapter 8