Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (13 page)

“What did you find?” asked the Pastor, as he leaned closer to Frank, trying to see.

“It’s a pipestem, part of an old clay tobacco pipe.”

“What does it tell us?”

“Could have belonged to a sailor. Here, we can date the pipe with some precision.” Frank reached in his pocket for a small steel ruler. “OK,” he said as he measured the bore. “You see, Pastor, there was a fellow named Binford who developed a formula for archeologists to date tobacco pipes. Pipe bores got smaller from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. So if I measure this bore,” he calculated some figures on a piece of paper, “Then multiply a formula, Binford tells me the age of the pipe.” He paused as he looked at the paper. “Well, this is not very helpful for you, Pastor.”

“Why?” said the Pastor.

“This pipe is dated about 1700.”

“The slave graveyard,” said Maggie.

“I see what you mean,” said the Pastor. “Slaves were not imported into the Eastern Shore until then. For this to be their graveyard it would have to be dated later, 1720, maybe 1750, giving them time to live for a while then die. The strata where we’re digging is too old for a graveyard.”

“The pipe is not definitive. We’ll keep looking. It does tell us about the ship in here. It’s an old wreck if I’m reading this pipe correctly.”

The tawny cat reappeared and was standing at the edge of Frank’s area.

“Cat knows something we don’t,” said the Pastor.

“That cat understands it’s too hot to work,” joked Frank.

“Cat might know more than you think,” said the Pastor, staring at the animal and leaning down to stroke its light orange fur. The cat purred. Frank stood up. “I’ll get the camera and take a record shot of the clay pipe in its site.” He set the fragment back into the soil strata where it had been. “Say, I just thought of something.”

“What?” said Maggie.

“Maybe that tobacco smoke I smelled came from this pipe.”

Maggie threw a handful of muck at him and he ducked, laughing. The cat jumped into the pit and sniffed at the pipe, rubbed against Frank’s bare leg for a moment and then bounded away into the high grass.

“One thing I learned from my father,” said Maggie, watching the cat and Frank. “If an animal likes you, you’re probably all right.”

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 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 tassels 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.”