Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (10 page)

“Jake doesn’t change.”

The Pastor looked at the dust cloud of the disappearing station wagon. “Maybe part of his problem was the way he was brought up. I mean we all had tough times, but he always seemed to be alone. He was raised by a woman his father lived with but never married, as far as I know. She came from Baltimore. His real mother died when he was born. Some say that Mister Terment wasn’t the father. His real daddy was some Thunderbolt pilot stationed up the Chesapeake Bay who came by the local airport doing landings during the war. Lot of folks treated him like he wasn’t a Terment, like he was some kind of bastard child.”

“That must have been tough on him,” said Frank.

The Pastor nodded. “What made him so deep down mean. Then again, I think he got all the superstition from the woman who brought him up. She was something. Folks liked her better than they did the old man. She wore real bright clothes. I think she had been a dancer, a burlesque queen, up in Baltimore. She started coming around after Jake’s real mama died, after the war was over. Jake’s father met her and brought her down here with him. One of my friends told me. He was butler up there on the island one evening when she got drunk. She put on her G-string for some of the old man’s poker friends, dancing for all of them out there at night at the mansion after the little boy was in bed. She danced there in that paneled colonial room with all the old furniture. My friend and the other servants watched this through the partly open kitchen door. There was loud music. Terment was clapping his hands in time to this music, slow beat it was, on the record player. She was swaying around the room, stepping up on all the old antiques, her all naked. She kept throwing her clothes at the poker players, having a good time and laughing that real hooting laugh she had, her hair flying after her.

“Mister Terment went through a lot of servants. He fired any servant who saw too much of her dancing. He did this after he found out they were telling stories that he didn’t like down among their families and cousins in River Sunday. Of course it was his own fault. He would get the poor woman drunk and then she would carry on the only way she knew. He was a drinker, too, and that’s what killed him, his whiskey. Killed a lot of them old time white people.

He chuckled. “Talk about stupid. They got into this idea that their status was based on having their whiskey branded with their family name. The bottler went along with the damn fools but he said they had to buy a lot of cases to keep his inventory cost down. They weren’t alcoholics when they started as I understand it. They had to keep that whiskey coming though so the man would keep their mark in stock. They couldn’t pour out the whiskey so they had to drink it. Folks told me they’d see a couple of cases coming in every month. Poor fools drank themselves to death, that’s what I think, and just to show off. Kinda came to a halt in the late Fifties. Most of those people were dead by then and their children were too poor to keep up the orders or else they didn’t have the livers for all that whiskey.”

Frank laughed out loud at the story. So did Maggie.

The Pastor went on, “There was a story that Jake got his name when his mother was carrying him and his father was off in a poker game in Baltimore. Mister Terment had traveled over there to win some money off some rich black businessmen from East Baltimore. Turned out one of his black opponents was holding all the cards that night. He kept on goading Terment, making him careless. Terment wasn’t a member of the white hate groups around Maryland but he didn’t oppose them neither. Everyone at the game knew Terment didn’t have much use for blacks getting any financial power. He didn’t like the competition. So his opponent got Terment off balance, made him crawl and in the final big hand, taunted him with a bet, that if he won, he’d get to name Terment’s kid. Terment by then was so angry he took the bet. Like the man planned all along, Terment lost big, lost all his money he had brought to Baltimore. Then the black man grinned, laid down his hand of four Jacks and said, “Mister Terment, four red and white Jakes. I’ll just say Jake’s a good name for your baby.” He had to come home that night and tell his pregnant wife, who most of us around River Sunday knew didn’t like black folk any more than she liked him.”

“The woman, the dancer, who brought Jake up, wasn’t a bad sort. She was just ignorant. She was nice enough to me. Always putting out good food for me and my brother. In those days my father was gardener at Peachblossom. He had survived because he stayed away at night and never saw all the going’s on.

“My father’s job ended when Jake went to his father and got him to throw out my dad and mom and me and my brother. Jake was angry at us two kids for some reason, some game out in the yard that he had lost. He made up that my mother was stealing some of the silverware. My mother never stole anything in her life but some of the silver was missing. I was pretty young at the time. I didn’t understand that Jake had probably hid the silver himself just to get my mother in trouble. I still played with Jake for a few more years. I just didn’t live there at Peachblossom anymore.”

“I remember the dancer woman kept a bottle of dye for her bright red hair. Jake told me one time that he poured the dye out on the floor. He got slapped around pretty good for that, maybe by her but I think by the old man.”

“Does she still live up there at the mansion house?”

“She never did live up at the big house. The old man kept her down in a little cottage about a quarter mile from the house. It was one of the old slave quarters that he had fixed up. She would just come up to the big house during the day. After the old man died, Jake sent her away. Jake told folks that she wanted to live in Baltimore. She was an old lady by then. Still had that bright red hair. I guess she and Jake didn’t get along. I bet he didn’t give her a cent out of the old man’s money either, probably not even bus fare.”

“Jake would do that?”

“It’s a side of him that people don’t know. The woman liked animals. She was superstitious sure but she never hurt animals. I remember she would take a fly outside. A housefly. Wouldn’t let anybody kill a fly. Jake may hate cats just because she liked them, just to spite her memory.”

“I guess you learn to figure out people, being a preacher. You get to know both sides, the good and the bad.”

“Yes, you do. Little hard finding the good side of Jake Terment, though. It’s been one of the toughest jobs in my ministry, finding something good to think about that man,” he said, as he climbed down into his probe pit to continue his work. “Even in all the evil I saw in Vietnam I was able to find some good in the faith of some of the men. Not as easy when I start thinking about Jake Terment.”

Frank paused, “I wanted to help children in that war,” he said thoughtfully.

“Children?”

“Yes, in those days I thought that the war was to make South Vietnam into a haven for children, a place where these kids would grow not being slaves to the communist government, a place where they would be free.”

Frank worked at the soil again, “I went over there to help kids. Then this little boy comes along and nearly kills me and kills all my buddies, guys I had spent months with.”

“Viet Cong sapper?”

Frank nodded. “Big explosion. We never knew what hit us.”

They worked silently for a few minutes. Then the Pastor changed the subject. “So you and Maggie worked together before.”

“Maggie was the best field school student I ever taught.”

“You two make a nice couple, both archaeologists. It’s good to have the same career. My wife and I were both in the church. We talked about similar things. It was good.”

Frank had never thought of Maggie that way, of the two of them as a romantic couple. The last time he had seen her she was a student finishing college and he was a hardened war veteran just getting his feet back on solid ground as a teacher. On this site, they shared their expertise as professional archeologists. It was a form of equality, a mutual outlook on the problems and excitement of this wreck excavation. The equality brought them closer together, made him look forward to her opinions on each new discovery, as the hours went by in the tension and heat. They were not related in the normal sense of the word, not brother and sister, but, the Pastor was right, a special kinship was there between them.

“I hope to meet your wife before I leave,” said Frank.

“She passed away several years ago. It’s just me. Me and my church.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I live with the loss of her. I gather you do a lot of this kind of archaeological work, working on real estate deals, I mean.”

“We get a lot of requests at the university for expert opinions on sites. There’s always someone who wants to build something and hits into an historic artifact. It always seems to be a situation that requires everything to be done in a hurry. It’s easy to understand if you think about it.”

“Why?”

“I got this theory. The colonials who settled these areas were not stupid. They picked the same sites that developers today want. The Native Americans, they were smart too. That’s why Maggie found all the arrowheads near here. Each new century people want to change what they built. However, they want the same strategic locations on river banks, same vistas, all that kind of thing. Bridges are always built at important spots. So when the rebuilding starts new owners run into the old construction and guys like me come out to see how important the artifacts are.”

“That’s where the trouble starts,” said Maggie from her digging place.

“Sure. The historians and the developers are going to go round and round.”

“Most of the archaeologists feel there is no room for compromise,” said Maggie.

Frank sat back on his heels. “Maggie was involved in that Southern Maryland controversy, yet you say you chose her to come down here. Why, Pastor?”

“Don’t you think she is qualified?”

“Of course she is qualified. One of the best I know.”

“Why should the controversy affect our choice on this site?”

Maggie added, “Frank, you thought that because I was fighting to save Confederate relics that I was a racist and unsuitable for work on a site that might have black history.”

“I know you’re not a racist but I thought there might be folks who would not understand what you did.”

The Pastor interrupted, “I don’t understand how I can see Maggie as a racist if she is just being a good historian. Her job is to find the relics and describe them and preserve them. What was it, some kind of site for Confederate spies during the Civil War? Just because it’s not likely that I will be interested in the history of men who wanted to keep my family enslaved, doesn’t mean I don’t want her to do her job as best she can. It also doesn’t mean that I can’t respect her. I wanted her down here because of her reputation. I know she will do this job correctly and that she will fight to save anything that is significant, no matter what it is.”

“You are thinking about my being politically correct, Frank, just like any modern college professor,” said Maggie.

Frank smiled, “Pastor, I like the way you talk. I got to admit, I’m jealous of Maggie’s freedom to fight for good research.”

“That’s why I’m a little worried about what you are going to do down here, Frank,” said the Pastor.

“We’ll all do the right thing if we find anything.” He looked at the Pastor. “Jake seems to think you are kind of controversial too.”

“We’re all controversial in one way or another.”

The Pastor stood up and stretched. He had left his coffee on the ground near his pit and he reached for the cup. “Did you see the Terment monument out in the harbor?”

“Jake showed it to me.”

“Bet he did. There were all these newly freed black folks living in the town after the Civil War. Instead of giving them jobs building the monument, the jobs went to returned Confederate soldiers. The irony of it was that the Terments bet their plantation on the outcome of the war.”

“Bet their plantation? You mean, Peachblossom?”

“They got family members into high level positions in the Yankee government and army. After the Civil War was over, turned out the family members on the Northern side had title to all the land and wealth. They arranged transfers of the land back to the southern members of the family. The Terments never lost anything in that war.”

“The money they had invested in slavery?”

“They sold most all their slaves to cotton farmers down in Mississippi in the last five years before the war broke out. Like people sell out their shares before the stock market goes down, that’s all it meant to them folks.”

“Jake is the last of one of the oldest families in this part of the United States.”

“Yes. That he is. The Terments were here in the early days. Two brothers. One of them had the money and the other one worked for him. The one with the money, his name was Henry Terment, went back to England, got sick and died. The brother that was here, Richard Terment, the ancestor of Jake Terment and his father, was the sole heir and inherited the money. Then Richard started buying up all the land around River Sunday and on the island, all he could get his hands on. He was the colonel of a local militia, kind of a paid private army.” The Pastor smiled. “His money could not buy one thing though. Did you notice that the island is called Allingham Island?”

“You’d think that it would be called Terment Island,” observed Frank.

“That’s right, but the Allingham family settled the island long before the Terments arrived. Then, the Allinghams died and left the island to their infant son. The Terment who inherited all his brother’s money, well, he somehow became the trustee for that Allingham infant. The child died and Richard Terment bought the Allingham property at auction. The Maryland colonial legislature investigated, it was so shady, but Terment bought them off. Turns out though that the colonial Maryland governor had more money and friends in England than Terment did. The governor wouldn’t let him change the name of the island. Terment got the land but didn’t get the name. It remained on the maps as Allingham Island. Terment owned all that land but he had to call the land by someone else’s name. Knowing the Terments as I do, that must have aggravated them over the years. Jake has a lot of that family allegiance. I think that’s why he named the new town Terment Town. Jake probably hopes that the place will become known under the town name and that will get rid of the island name forever. Then he will have accomplished something his ancestor couldn’t do. Hard to believe that today a man like Jake even cares about his heritage, but he does. Probably the only thing he cares about. Yessir, I made a life study of that family, so I know Terments.”