The House at Royal Oak (5 page)

“If you ever find anything missing, you just let me know,” he said on one of his regular bicycle visits. “Between my brothers and myself,” he added, “we pretty much see whatever's going on around here.”

What Scott meant, I eventually found out, was that two of his brothers, a son, and a niece owned houses lining the
main road into the village and also at the intersection of the second road, which leads to the little ferry, established back in 1683, to Oxford. (Further along, another road called Ferry Neck, by the way, does not go to the ferry.) This means that you can't easily enter or leave the village without being seen by at least one Kilmon.

It also explains why his niece feels comfortable closing up the used furniture and antiques shops at night just by draping rope across the outdoor displays of objects for sale.

In time I learned that Scott, a retired high school music teacher, is an environmentalist who heats his house with scrap lumber and that he is a gardener. Tourists will stop to photograph his artistic creation, the tomatoes on towering vines, the lettuces, lima beans, potatoes, squashes, spinach, cucumbers, okra, and peppers, all framed by red, orange, yellow, and magenta zinnias. In the background, sunflowers grow almost as high as his barn. Once one of our guests asked us if they might pick flowers from his garden. This would not be appreciated, Hugo advised. Scott's own Garden of Eden is what it is.

Scott's family settled in the area in the 1700s when much of the land was still forested. He himself never mentions this, I think because he belongs so intimately to this place that he doesn't feel any need to say it. I came across the information at the public library. Shipbuilding at the nearby ports of Oxford and St. Michaels first brought sea captains and merchants, shipwrights, lumberjacks, and blacksmiths, many as indentured servants, to the region in the seventeenth century. As trade picked up and shipping and shipbuilding prospered, more arrived and settlement spread out. By the 1750s, along
the only road leading down the peninsula to St. Michaels, surveyors found a few old houses standing as the forerunner of the village of Royal Oak along with “about forty apple trees.” Over the next century, a church, a general store, a carriage maker and funeral director, a blacksmith, a schoolhouse, a post office, and the nearby Royal Oak train station were established.

By the early 1900s “Black Cinders and Ashes,” as passengers called the Baltimore, Chesapeake and Atlantic Railway, brought summertime visitors in substantial numbers to the area. Spewing cinders and smoke, the train raced through the countryside at more than fifty miles an hour. Others arrived by steamship and carriages transported the vacationers down shady roads to boardinghouses like the Pasadena, which advertised for “summer boarders—$5 a week—children half rates.” The region began to promote itself as the “land of pleasant living,” “God's own country,” and even “the healthiest place in America.” In its heyday, Royal Oak boasted, in addition to the post office and schoolhouse, two churches, two saloons, one barbershop, and five stores.

Reserved about himself and his family's history, Scott Kilmon easily shared his knowledge of the surroundings.

The gigantic white oak that, according to legend, gave the village its name? “It stood just a few yards down from my house in front of the general store.”

Much has been written about this tree, and it is still discussed locally as if it had died recently. I was surprised to learn that it has been gone for almost 150 years. Farmers banded together under its branches to form the Hearts of Oak Company, which fought in the Revolution and then again in the War of 1812. Forty feet around, it stood as a landmark for at
least two centuries and it must have been quite a sight, to judge by a local historian's description of the tree “majestically clad in his forest green, a king in the forest, truly a Royal Oak.”

At one point the tree was trimmed back because, according to a news account, “the branches overspread the county road, causing a menace to travel.” When the tree finally died, it was widely lamented:

In the passage of time all things must decay—as an evidence of this, the Old Royal Oak, about eight miles from Easton, so extensively known since the Revolution, and more recently since the War of 1812, from being pierced in both conflicts by the balls of some of Britain's “Long Shooters,” and ever since having some of them suspended from its limbs—has from old age and the heat of the summer's sun withered and died. This old tree has a tremendous body and no one living, we presume can tell its age.

Easton Gazette,
July 31, 1868

A competing story about how the village got its name centers on the shelling of the town of St. Michaels, three miles away, during the War of 1812. Known as “the town that fooled the British,” St. Michaels would have suffered considerably, according to the locally published history,
Tales of Old Maryland,
but for “the long head of one General Benson” who ordered the houses darkened and instructed residents to carry lights to their upper rooms and roofs. This, it was said, caused the British on ships in the harbor to aim their cannonfire too high and largely miss St. Michaels. Two shots did reach the huge oak tree over in Royal Oak, according
to this version of events, which was thereafter called the Royal Oak. While Benson can certainly be credited for preparation of the town's defense, Pete Lesher of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum observes, “The lantern story first appeared in print in the
Tales,
almost a century after the battle, and contemporary sources make no mention of lanterns or a blackout.”

In any case, two cannonballs with metal straps crafted by a Kilmon ancestor hung for many years in the Royal Oak. Did they really come from a British ship? I asked Scott.

“Probably not,” he thought. “More likely, militiamen brought them back as a souvenir, but they did hang there in the tree for years and periodically it was sport for someone to steal them.”

Whoever stole the cannonballs always returned them, he said. “So now we keep them locked up in the post office.”

This is true. You can see them suspended from the ceiling over a display of postal service envelopes. Near the cannon-balls hangs a framed, yellowed newspaper clipping about the famous Royal Oak fried chicken, which visitors enjoyed at the inn, along with the fresh air, sandy beaches, boating, fishing and crabbing, “watermelon feeds,” dancing to live band music, and relaxing in hammocks strung in “cozy nooks” among the trees.

How to make this famous fried chicken turned out to be one of those secrets folks were not in a hurry to share. The postmistress, Miss Ebbie, answered vaguely. Someone else suggested asking the man who helped Hugo haul away a lot of junk from our property, whose family has lived in the area for generations. If members of his family hadn't been cooks
at the Pasadena, they would know someone who had cooked there. Hugo called him up to ask if I could come over. That's how things are done around here.

When I arrived fifteen minutes later, his sister uncovered a pan on the stove. “Is this what you're talking about?” I looked in the pan, which was full of crispy, caramel-colored fried chicken. Oh, yes.

After forking a serving onto a plate and handing it to me, she came to the point. “It's supposed to be made with lard, but you can do without.”

While I ate, she gave me the recipe. “Buttermilk if you've got, to soak the chicken, then flour, salt, and pepper.”

A few questions and answers later, I thought I had it.

It was easier finding out from Scott what happened to the general store that stood behind the Royal Oak Tree. Once filled with a vast array of dry goods, including ready-made clothing, boots, and shoes, along with groceries and medicines, it also offered favored turn-of-the-century souvenirs of a stay in the country: postcards, colorfully painted gourds, and dried sunflowers.

“The store was right here.” Scott pointed to his front yard, filled now by the vegetable and flower garden.

“Needed sun for the garden, so my brother and I—”

He aimed another appraising look at the newcomers.
I Know they're preservationists but are they rabid ones?
he was clearly thinking.

“So my brother and I—we
burnt
it down.”

When the weather was nice, we visited back and forth in each other's yards and I came to know that Scott was always
around and keeping an eye out. “Did you enjoy the evening last night in Royal Oak?” he asked at the post office early on a Saturday morning after I had arrived in town late the previous night.

Gradually, other members of the Kilmon clan emerged—Scott apparently served as their advance guard—and began to include us in village life so easily that I only noticed it long afterward. Scott's niece Julie let me bring furniture home from her shop to try out, to see if it fit, before paying anything.

Scott's brother Al had a stack of old green shutters for sale in his yard. I measured and thought that the shutters would fit the upstairs windows of our house. This was remarkable because all the windows had been individually hand-built and each one differs in size. Al sold the shutters for a song. When Hugo went to install them, he found that the hardware on the shutters matched the existing hardware on the house to the millimeter.

It shouldn't have been any surprise, when big trouble turned up in our second year, that our neighbors in Royal Oak came forward. Scott's wife, Susie, offered to help with anything at all. Julie's husband, Jerry, mowed the lawn. Other neighbors brought over venison and freshly caught rockfish.

Scott's son Steven brought a goose and someone else offered recipes. For children, cook a goose all day in a crock pot with a can of mushroom soup. For adults, braise a long time with orange, because the Canada geese that fly through here are tough birds.

And finally, at that time, came an invitation to hunt, which meant much, much more than it might seem. The
importance of a local way, I came to understand, can be measured by how long it is withheld. The invitation to hunt was two years in coming.

Yes, there are hunting clubs around here and hunting guides. Yes, a limo will pull into the field behind our house, a hunter will get out, fire a shot, and return to the limo while the driver retrieves the dead goose and stows it in the trunk. This was different. This invitation to hunt with a neighbor meant initiation into one of the private worlds of the Eastern Shore, where people hunt for food to feed themselves and their families as they have for generations. Certain fields and farms are available at certain times—you have to know where to go.

But all that was later.

Robbie kept the third date we made to buy the property. At the lawyer's office, settlement on the house and the future direction of our lives took less than forty minutes.

A TANGLE OF VINES WOUND AROUND THE CHIMNEY
and up into an old locust tree that leaned heavily against the front porch. The vines, poison ivy with leaves larger than a man's hand and a hefty trunk, were clearly succeeding in their plan to bring the locust down and the porch with it.

On the day of sale, the house looked much better than I'd remembered—taller, more graceful, and plainly once proud. Behind the overgrowth thirty feet high at the back of the property, lay a long, beautiful cornfield stretching to a line of trees at the horizon. At the same time it all looked much, much worse. How had I overlooked the leaning locust, four boarded up, broken windows, and seven “No Trespassing” signs? I could not picture it as someplace anyone would ever choose to visit—and pay for the privilege.

“Typical buyer's remorse,” a friend later remarked, amused. “But I can't believe you fell for that old family heritage line.”

On top of seller's and buyer's remorse, a third remorse hovered over the sale that morning, which the lawyer alluded to in
few words. “The sheriff has taken care of things, I assume?” Robbie nodded and answered quietly. “Tenants are gone.”

It was sad that the young mother and father who had tried to make a home in what was now our house had to leave. If not for us, I rationalized, then for someone else and no one could have predicted what happened to them. When their month-to-month lease was up, they refused to leave, so Robbie had to evict them and the sheriff kept watch while he carried all their possessions, clothes, furniture, baby toys, and new shoes—still in boxes—outside. People stopped by and picked over their things, neighbors said, until nothing was left. I wished I did not know that or that the family broke up. The mother went to her parents' house with the baby, people said, and the father, who stayed behind, landed in jail.

Knowing all this might have deterred Hugo or me alone, but together we were Bonnie and Clyde. The place had everything that makes old-house fiends swoon, from original wood floors to high ceilings to premodern air-conditioning in the form of windows opening to all four directions. It had original plaster and architectural detail, even a secret backstairs. The stairs were exactly like the steep, narrow backstairs at my grandmother's farmhouse where I loved to sit, eating her homemade caramels and eavesdropping on the grown-ups.

For Hugo, the house brought back memories of his childhood summer home. Both houses were a child's idyll and both were sold off when the next generation showed no interest in doing the work necessary to keep them up. The intersection of
these two lost happy houses goes a long way to explaining our passion. It answered the large, pressing question that came to haunt Hugo as much as me: If not this house now, then what, and when? There was the money issue: You can't afford to be all that picky if you don't have much. Above all, the place suggestively promised the chance to fuse our pasts and future within its walls.

Squinting up at our new acquisition, our future, I tried to imagine lace curtains lifting in the bay breeze, a well-kept garden, guests strolling outside to admire the sun setting over the cornfield, Hugo and I holding hands and watching discreetly from the bay window. An appealing, old-fashioned flavor permeated the setting, yet it would be an easy reach for weekend visitors from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, even New York. I reviewed our decision tree again and sighed. Buying an up and running bed-and-breakfast was out of the question.