Leon Uris (41 page)

Porter leaned forward in stern manner.

“Major Boone, Tom, I think we may have passed too quickly on your request to garrison the Amnesty Islands. When will this ‘Random Sixteen’ be completed?”

“In a few weeks, Admiral.”

“I’m going to give it all a thorough review. Get the balance of the paper down here as quickly as it is finished.

“And Ben, you’d better stick around Washington. If we decide to change our position, we’re going to need you pacing the halls. Understand?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Ben said.

“We will continue with this tomorrow at . . .”

“Fourteen hundred,” Donovan said.

“Adjourned.”

The admirals and the captains departed, passing Porter Langenfeld one by one with a very unusual wordlessness and without handshakes, yet each man tapped the boss on the shoulder.

Then came Chester Harkleroad.

“That took balls, Porter. I’ll give you no problem.”

Richard X. Maple was the last to leave. Langenfeld tugged X’s sleeve and beckoned him to come close.

“Any chance we can get this young fellow . . .”

“O’Hara,” Maple said.

“Any chance we can get O’Hara transferred to the navy?”

•
38
•

Willow Fancy paced the dock anxiously, then heard the whistle of the ferry coming into view around the bend.

She spotted Jefferson’s shiny, hand-painted livery van on deck. templeton brothers saddlers, it read, and in smaller script, the address, and it even had its own phone number, Skerrytown 18.

Mr. Templeton, a Negro, was a frequent purveyor from the mainland. The ferryman unchocked his wheels and signaled him to roll off.

At the end of the pier he stopped, set his brakes, and jumped down into his wife’s embrace.

“She here?” Willow asked.

“Yep.”

He helped Willow up to the driver’s bench and set into motion.

“How’s the baby?”

“Matt’s doing fine. Granny Laveda feeding him nothing but cotton candy and taffy.

“Amanda all right back there? You didn’t have to hide her.”

“I know, but me and Miss Daisy and Amanda all agreed she draw too much attention. Besides, woman, it’s cold out here.”

In a few moments they were able to turn off the road behind some high marsh grass.

Jefferson drew the curtain, leaned back, uncovered Amanda, and helped her up. Willow jumped down, followed by Amanda, and they hung on to each other, breaths darting, trembling, Willow tearing.

“Oh God, Willow.”

“You’re okay, Amanda, you’re all right now.”

They hugged and gasped, then Amanda stretched out her stiffness.

“How bad did it go with Mr. Horace?”

“Bad. I’ll tell you later.”

“Where’s Miss Daisy?”

“Mother turned me over to Jeff in Annapolis. She was very brave for me.”

“About time Daisy was brave.”

“Ladies,” Jefferson said, “we should get going.”

Amanda squeezed in between them, the girls covered with a lap robe.

“How long before Zachary comes?”

“Maybe a month.”

“You’re going to be ready enough. I’m glad we’ve got you here.”

The van chimed as they made on down the mucky road. Jefferson Templeton did not like coming over to the shore in winter. It made both horse and wagon really filthy.

Matthew Fancy died before his daughter, Willow, was born. One of Horace’s accountants went over Fancy’s books. He’d earned a good living and lived pleasantly but had given it all back, and more, to his never-ending petitioners. Horace awarded Laveda a generous share of stocks, which allowed her and her daughter to lead a gracious life.

Laveda’s only surviving brother, Ned Green, ended up sharecropping on a defunct plantation on the Eastern Shore. The land was eventually taken over by forty black families, who created the crossroads village of Nebo.

Veda, as Laveda was called by her kin, purchased a 160-acre farm for Ned and his wife, Pearly.

It was hard-luck soil, variable loam and a marshy mix of sand and clay. The villagers of Nebo were all survivors of slavery, mostly tobacco workers.

Ned was one of the leaders. He and his people reckoned that if they could dam and trap the spring runoff waters, they could build up a decent topsoil.

After slavery, no one wanted anything to do with tobacco or cotton. The Nebo settlement, in communal agreement, rotated general crops. After trial and despair, they were able to get decent yields of corn per acre, crops from a fruit orchard, vegetables, peanuts, and some grain. This would have provided a marginal existence, but it was augmented by the men’s doubling as hunters, trappers, and baymen.

The community owned four Chesapeake Bay skipjacks and was allotted a Negro fishing ground the boundaries of which were marked by buoys, a bridge, and a lighthouse. It was not a prime area, but the black baymen had a sense of sea harvest in their fingertips.

They tonged and raked oysters and clams and trapped the melding crabs and terrapin of growing popularity. There were fish aplenty, from catfish to drum, if the creeks and marshes were played right.

Very special permits for guns and ammunition were issued and the men became dead shots at the blizzards of waterfowl, sea ducks, honkers and geese and deer and muskrat.

Wild horses were captured and broken.

Wild horses, you say? In the beginning, they were transferred from the mainland to dodge the tax collector and gained their freedom, like some of the slaves.

In the crabbing season, women picked and packed in a nearby canning factory, and some winter jobs were to be had in the boatyards.

By order of a council of elders, which included the preacher and women, only the pick of the harvest went to market, and Nebo got a reputation as sweet as their onions.

Mind you, a black man was a black man on the Eastern Shore, where he trod with caution, fear his constant companion. Yet there was an arm’s length of accommodation and civility, so long as the black man kept his place. Most of the night riding and lynchings took place at the southern end of the shore, which was in Virginia.

Nebo found itself a niche and was mostly let alone. Much of the slave labor had come from Barbados and other Caribbean Islands but had always been in transit. Those who stayed in Nebo were second generation, from the tobacco fields, and kept fine Christian traditions.

One must remember that the Eastern Shore was the birthplace of Harriet Tubman and Frederick A. Douglass. She, of Dorchester County, had operated a brilliant underground railway, and he, of Talbot County, was the greatest and most powerful black voice the nation had ever known.

Since pre–Revolutionary War days, a community of Quakers farmed around Wyman Creek Landing and built a small town and a Friends meetinghouse. In the beginning, the Quakers were ardent abolitionists. Over time, many broke away from Wyman Creek in order to own slaves. The core that remained were antislavery, so their community and fields had served as a friendly buffer for Nebo.

Out of the mainstream, Nebo fared well. Many of the cottages were brick and painted and had charming flower gardens and nibblings of finery. They kept the skipjacks and nets in prime condition. The hunters and trappers in the village were skilled and the fields responded to the attentive care they received.

As masters of survival, the Nebo families knew their reality. The “Big Mosquito,” Sheriff Charlie Bugg, was reality, and the tithe he received from Nebo kept his larder full. Most troubles
never got to court and no prisoner from Nebo had ever been sold into contract labor. It was a livable arrangement.

The ghost of Matthew Fancy never entirely left Horace Kerr alone. After his death, Laveda and Willow continued a somewhat mystical relationship at Inverness. Now and again, during slavery, a slave-master relationship grew close and continued after emancipation. Matthew Fancy had been Horace’s most trusted assistant and one of the brightest men he had ever known. Laveda oversaw Inverness with great skill and had a strong bond with Daisy, her former owner.

Amanda and Willow were like sisters.

Laveda was drawn to the consuming beauty of the tans and coppers and browns and rusts and flares of orange of the Eastern Shore.

As a respite from Baltimore, she built Veda’s Cottage, as it was called, on Ned Green’s land and sponsored a one-room schoolhouse, the only black school in the county, and named it for Matthew, and kept its shelves filled with books.

After a bit of grumbling and hemming and hawing, and after close personal inspection, Horace allowed Amanda to spend some of the springtime and autumn in Nebo with Willow. Amanda’s visits were golden times for the girls from the ages of ten until their cotillion.

They were maudlin that last year in Nebo over the inevitable drift into separate lives. The flame of their friendship would remain, but it flickered. Horace and Daisy were not all that sad because there came a time when black-and-white intimacy needed to diminish.

Directly after Willow’s debut, she was courted by her escort, Jefferson Templeton, a nicely cut fellow in his late twenties.

Willow had lived in the comfort of a white mansion, inherited her father’s lawyering mind, and dared dream bright dreams.

Wise old Laveda realized Jeff Templeton would be as much as Willow could hope for. A single black girl was the lowest coin in
the Republic. Willow’s gifted mind was rented by white law firms, but never mentioned.

Slowly but surely, ambition oozed from Willow in the face of grim reality and she gave up her dream.

The Templeton family, named for their former owners, were stalwarts in Baltimore’s black community, building on a skill learned in slavery. The family patriarch, Josh, had become a master leather craftsman on a large horse ranch. His work was so fine that owning a “Templeton saddle” became like owning a rare orchid. An entire generation rode to the hounds with their white asses bouncing up and down on their Templetons.

Old Josh was clever, making enough prized saddles to be able to build a small leather factory that crafted a full line of tack, harnesses, running martingales, and farm leather.

Jefferson and his three brothers inherited a rare enterprise. The money came mostly from white folks and Jeff knew how to josh with them and let them believe they had outfoxed him.

But Jeff and his brothers still had one foot stuck in slavery, as would his entire generation and generations to follow. The barking hound was never far behind and life meant getting through without pissing off the white folks.

Ned and Pearly Green waited anxiously at the farm gate. They could hear Jeff Templeton’s wagon chiming before they saw it, and their hearts ran fast.

How long had it been? Four years since they had last seen Amanda Kerr. Ned tugged the rope and the gate swung open and Jefferson lifted the women down.

They stared.

Pearly had shrunk some. Her face was clear, saintly, and beautified by life on the Eastern Shore. Ned’s hair was all white, and though he was bent, he was still a power of a man.

They came together and held their girl wordlessly and tight.

“My, my, you has done some growing up,” Ned said.

And they jabbered atop of one another up the path to the house.
It would take time before Amanda would be able to clearly pick up the lingo, cadence, and slang of their language, but it carried a melody of joy and relief.

Pearly had once been a domestic slave at the Virginia end of the shore and had become one of those Southern chefs of legend.

The big kettle hung in the fireplace bubbling with Pearly’s crossbreed of gumbo and bouillabaisse, with every creature of fin and shell from the bay represented.

They set around the fireplace and passed the jug, nipped and whistled as the bite went down to their shoes. Thanks to Charlie Bugg, the village’s modest still escaped unraided.

Pearly lit her corncob pipe and cleared the side table of photographs. Out of nine kids, six had survived and grown up and left, except for Ulysses, who pretty much ran the farm now. He had been named after General Grant, who sent a federal battalion to guard the Eastern Shore and keep it in the Union. Ulysses had his own cabin, which included Sugar, a sassy, bossy wife.