Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (5 page)

Maggie and the Pastor stared at him. There was a touch of apprehension in their faces and Frank knew that they were wary of him. Their faces showed hesitation, acceptance of the third member of their team but an acceptance given with reserve. They were not sure of him, not sure he was going to do a good job.

Frank smiled. “Look, guys, you two remind me of when I first got in country in Nam in the old days. The other guys wanted to see what I would do when the first mortars came in, a kind of test to see if I was all right, safe to be around.”

“We haven’t got any mortars here to try you out,” said the Pastor, solemnly.

Maggie said, “I remember how you used to be, Frank. That’s good for a start.”

The Terment Company station wagon clattered over the ruts and was gone, dust drifting across the corn field. Frank picked up his suitcase and hefted it up the steps into the old house.

“Give me a minute,” he called to the others.

They turned and headed back to the site. Frank carefully folded his suit and his expensive shoes and put them inside his case. Then he dressed in his work shorts, a cotton shirt and his slouch hat. He had worn that hat to many sites and it had brought him luck.

Outside again, he listened for a moment to the wildlife moving around where he stood, both inside the dense cornfield and also among the hedges of fragrant vines. Birds fluttered, chirped for accent, then shrilled their songs. Gnats worried the bare flesh of his neck and legs. He smelled the aroma of the wetlands, the smell almost a stink coming up from the newly exposed and bacteria rich earth of the excavation. In the heat, he felt his body oppressed by the same forces as those in a great steam engine cylinder, the heat and humid vapor thrusting against him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. His fingers touched a tiny mole there. His mother had told him long ago that he had that mole for wisdom. He grinned. He wondered what kind of wisdom he would need before this job was over. He started toward the site.

From the pattern of the dried and bent marsh grasses, he could see that an occasional high tide washed over this wetland. Still, that would not be much water and he was surprised that the ground was so wet. The soil on the marsh surface was crusted from the sun but his feet broke through into several inches of sticky muck. It was wet enough to cling aggressively to his work shoes. He wondered where the water came from if not from the river tides.

The bulldozer operator had done his work well. The site area was stripped bare of living reeds, with the only green coming from some older trees surviving around the edges of the marsh and some near the river, loblolly pines and oaks, the pines covered with rough bark on tall and slender trunks. The land was hot and smelly with only the surrounding edges still gracious terrain for its wildlife, especially its small animals. Their night tracks where they came out to inspect this disaster, could be seen among the tread marks of the bulldozer, like the five fingered hands of tiny soldiers searching through crisscrossed chevrons of military tanks. Crushed and dying grasses were everywhere. However, in the still untouched hedges where much of the wildlife still lived, masses of green richness were heavily overgrown and bent under many years of untrimmed growth of wild honeysuckle. Ever-present and treacherous wasps and hornets, their stings made ferocious from the stifling sunlight, buzzed on guard among the fragile blossoms of honeysuckle sugar.

“Muskrats,” said the Pastor as he watched Frank approach. “Their tracks look like hands.”

Ahead, more dead grass extended to the riverbank where there was a small drop leading down less than a foot to the normal high tide or high water mark. The shore was ringed with bits of driftwood, dried seaweed, rotting fish and dead crabs among growths of still living high grass. The tide was low so several more feet of the bank were exposed. A large mudflat extended into the river. It was covered with reeds which, closer to the river, took over from the field grass and mixed with more cattails. On the up-thrust parts of these plants, a bird or two darted and competed with various hovering bugs for perches. To Frank’s right, towards the old bridge, were several fallen gnarled trees, reaching far out into the river and horribly bent from storms.

“This is going to be as uncomfortable a site as I have ever worked on,” Frank said. He looked back at the gate to the main road, rethinking Jake’s invitation to live out on a comfortable yacht. Then he shrugged in resignation and reviewed the site again. He could see areas along the edge of the cleared area where Jake’s workmen had stockpiled large timbers and pilings, in preparation for the construction of the piers. Beside the stockpiles at the ends of the bulldozer swipes were tangled brush mixed with torn chicken wire fence and brambles, all twisted in the great rolls of wreckage that were the signatures of those machines.

“Those bulldozers cut up the land quick, don’t they?” observed Frank.

“We hope they haven’t cleared too much of what we have to study,” said Maggie.

“Looks like they took out mostly brush, not much topsoil.” Frank grinned. “Just brush full of angry wasps .”

“Don’t worry about snakes,” said the Pastor. “They’re long gone. The bulldozers scared them away. You see any I’ll take care of them. Snakes and me we get along fine.”

Frank smiled. “Maggie, we got a great volunteer here. Pastor, if I see any snakes, I’ll certainly call you.”

Across the river Frank could see the high crane and pile-driver. “That thing is pretty big, isn’t it?”

“Makes a lot of noise. I heard it this morning when I got here. Then the workers shut it down and went back to River Sunday until we get done.”

The machine was about a thousand feet away, immense against the tree line. Its steel latticework was profiled against the curves of the old trees. The rusty barge sides brushed harshly against the reeds. The machine lurked, its hammer ready to drive more pilings into the river.

“Big equipment,” said Maggie.

“A lot of money,” said Frank. He looked back at the pump. “We have to run that all the time I guess.”

“Soon as we go down a foot or so the water fills the test pits.”

“That’s strange,” he said, sniffing the air.

“The place stinks,” said Maggie.

“No. There’s another smell. Like burning tobacco from a pipe.”

“Nobody smokes.”

The Pastor smiled at Frank. “Tobacco smoke?” he asked.

“I smell it.”

“I don’t,” said the Pastor, his face serious.

“Me either,” said Maggie.

The Pastor looked at Frank. “When I was a boy,” he said, “My father told me that if I ever smelled tobacco smoke, and there wasn’t nobody smoking, then it was a sure sign that evil was nearby. There was a local legend, come down from the Nanticokes that used to have their villages around here, that the smell of burning tobacco was the way the good spirits kept the evil ones away.”

“Do you think the spirits are after me?” asked Frank, smiling.

The Pastor, his face thoughtful, said, “They might be after any one of us.”

“I don’t smell it anymore,” said Frank.

“If you guys are through with your ghost stories, let’s look at the wreck,” said Maggie.

The three of them squatted around the remnants of the wreck. On all sides were stretched the tense white surveyor strings, their clean straight lines out of place in the construction disorganization of the site. Besides the wooden stem-piece that Spyder had destroyed, there were several other timbers that had been ripped by the bulldozer from the ground. Some were of substantial size. Most had fresh marks on them where the bulldozer blade had cut into the old wood as it pushed them upward out of the soil.

“Cant frame construction,” said Frank, as he gently touched the heavy timbers. “The old ship carpenters built them this way for a long time. It solved the problem of strength when the bow rounded to the stem and the frames could no longer be at right angles to the keel.”

He pointed to some round pieces of wood that stuck halfway out of the timbers. “The way they connected them was by these wooden pegs. That’s a sign this wreck might be old. The problem for us is that in ship construction the carpenters often used the older methods in newer boats. Especially in a rural area like the Eastern Shore. So it’s hard to date her this way .”

“It’s a start,” said Maggie.

“Oak. I’m pretty sure of that. Whether it’s American oak or English oak I’d have to have an expert take a look. It might tell us where she was built. Then again the American merchants shipped a lot of oak to England.”

He looked closely at a part of one of the frames. “I think this timber was burned at one time.”

“That fits with what I found in one of my probes,” said Maggie.

“Sometimes the carpenters charred the wood so it would bend around the frames. However, this looks more like destructive burning. These timbers are likely from the lower hull below the waterline. That might mean the part above the waterline burned away before she sank. Then the river water put out the fire in the lower section. Let’s see.” Frank put some numbers in the ground at his feet. “So if the hull was twenty five feet from keel to deck, and she drew fifteen feet, all we may have is the lower fifteen feet. If she was sitting on the bottom when she burned, say at low tide, then the waterline might have been high and dry, well above the water surface, and we may have less than fifteen feet of her.”

He sat back on his heels and reconnoitered the site, his eyes moving along the white surveying lines, thinking of promising excavation areas. He tapped some of the up-thrust stakes lightly with his archaeologist’s trowel as he looked. He scratched his neck and adjusted his hat.

“OK,” he said. “What do we know and what do we think we know?”

“There’s at least the bow section of a ship here and no reason to think that the rest of her isn’t here,” said Maggie.

“Can we assume that it’s all here running out toward the riverbank and down a few feet under the surface?”

Maggie nodded. “I think that’s right. I think we should set up the dig on that orientation.”

Frank continued, “If this ship is early, if she dates to the Eighteenth Century or even before then, this would be a significant find. There haven’t been many of these early commerce traders found in the Chesapeake Bay. It would be a wonderful find.”

He looked at them. “Remember that Jake said it was just an old wheat schooner, beached up here in the marsh, left to rot. Let’s not get too excited yet. According to him, she sank and disappeared, maybe less than a hundred years ago. He’s probably right because it’s his land. He would likely have heard any stories or legends of any shipwreck being here any earlier. I mean, his family settled this farm, didn’t they, back in the colonial period?”

“Yes, but he wants us out of here too. I wouldn’t rely on him being too truthful,” said Maggie.

“Did you find any written records?”

“I did a quick search at the library here in River Sunday and in Baltimore. There’s nothing that I could find concerning any wrecks on this part of the river. There’s mention of a tobacco dock here in the early days but the loading place was moved to the Terment family plantation on the other side of Allingham Island. The loading areas were changed often in these rivers because of the silting. The rivers became too shallow to navigate.”

Frank drew with his finger in the earth. “Whatever her date, early or late, her bowsprit or any bow timbers will be out here beyond the stem that the bulldozer unearthed.”

He put in the lines. “Here. The stem and the bowsprit.” He looked toward the river. “We have to figure out how long she was. Maggie, what was the size of hull you used for your grid?”

“I estimated eighty feet, figured a line perpendicular to the riverbank and set my datum mark, my center measure, at forty feet from here toward the river.”

“That’s a good approach. At eighty feet she could have been either a large local schooner, built in the last century, or a three-masted colonial trader.”

Maggie continued, “Then I set up the rest of my measurements from that datum point. I thought it made the most sense to do all my measurements to the points where I guessed parts of the ship might be buried. I used a benchmark from the bridge construction for my elevations and marked the stakes.”

“OK.”

“I set up pit locations for excavation just like in your book, Doctor Light. Just like we did in the summer school. I like your system for a job like this. We can move from part to part of the ship if we begin to get some clues or find anything. I started two probes and then I had to worry about the surface water. When you folks drove up, the Pastor and I were getting the pump going.”

“Wait a minute.” She stood up and walked over to the edge of the cleared section and picked up a large notebook which was resting against a clump of marsh grass. As she walked back toward him, Frank smiled at the light bounce to her step.

“You always found things faster than any of the other students, Maggie. I figured you worked smarter than the others with a little luck thrown in.” He noticed the small gold Christian cross jouncing on the front of her tee shirt.

“Still got the cross. Maybe that was it. The source of your luck.”

“Maybe,” she said, her blue eyes cheerful in the sunlight. “I used to think it was. Some days I still do. You found more than any of us and you didn’t wear any cross. You just had that old hat.” She sat down cross legged in front of him and the Pastor, her bare legs spotted with dried dirt.

“Here’s the plan I drew up.” In front of them she spread a diagram of the site itself. It was a drawing of a twenty by eighty foot rectangle surrounded on its four sides by the farm property. On the top was the entrance lane and the large cornfield. To the right was the farm house with its outbuildings and the old box gardens. On the bottom of the diagram was the riverbank and the Nanticoke River. To the left was the large hedgerow, the county road and the entrance to the old bridge. In the center, within the rectangle, she had sketched the deck plan of an early trading ship. The ship lines converged on the point in the diagram where the actual bow frames had been found. She had drawn the ship’s hull parallel to a line constructed direct from those bow artifacts. The line ran back to the riverbank, almost perpendicular to the river, and with the proposed stern of the wreck about thirty yards from the water.