Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (15 page)

“What was the name of the business?”

“General Store. After a while we had outgrown the church building. We rented the old cannery building that Mister Terment still owned near River Sunday. The Terments ran that cannery all through World War Two and the Korean War, canning tomatoes for the Army . When the California farmers started growing cheaper tomatoes, the Eastern Shore canneries like the Terment one in River Sunday just went broke. The army contracts moved out there and that was the end of the cannery business. The building had been vacant for years when we went into it. Jake’s father wouldn’t sell the building to us. He would only rent it on a short term basis. We had the money but he wouldn’t take it.

“Why?”

“Control. His type of white man did not want us black people to own anything in what he thought was his town.” He went on, “Then the trouble came. I remember it was late one night. I was closing up, standing there in the dim light in my office in a back room of the cannery building. I had sent everyone home. Everyone had been working so hard. I thought I saw a person in the shadows outside my office window. The window looked out over the back of the cannery area, into some brush and then the river, maybe twenty yards to the bank of the Nanticoke.”

“So I went outside to see what it was. We didn’t have a watchman. We had grown so fast and we thought we knew everyone in town. We didn’t think we had anything to worry about. We were wrong.

“Inside the old cannery we had set apart offices, filled the rooms with accounting machines, file cases, typewriters, all the records. We even had the first IBM computer in River Sunday, one using the paper cards. Since the building had been a cannery, we had to take all the machinery out of it. The parts of those food processing machines were piled up out back of the building. There were also some junk cars there. I think one of them was a Terment truck that had carried the tomatoes from the Puerto Rican and Mexican migrant worker farms. It was there worn out with flat tires, vines growing through the open bracketed out windshield.”

“My mother probably rode in that truck few times,” said Soldado.

“There was lots of scrap metal and wooden crates stacked up and lots of briars, I remember the briars pulling at me as I climbed back of the building and followed a small footpath in the darkness. Ahead, I saw a man running away from me. He had seen me first. I heard his feet crashing into the trash back there. He was maybe a hundred feet ahead of me down behind the building, his shape showing up on and off as it was lighted by each window he passed.

“I knew right away it was Jake Tement. I knew the way he ran, how he kind of bent sideways when he ran, like he was trying to hide. I called out, ‘What you doing back here, Jake?’ There was no answer. Then the running figure was gone. There was only the noise of a few insects buzzing. I could smell the river.”

“It was then the blast of flame screeched up the wall of that old wooden building, pieces of wood flying off in the air towards the river, landing with steam in the water, the flames accelerating towards the sky with so many sparks like stars, all the new paint we had put on that building peeling off in burning sheets.”

“I knew Jake’s lurk. I knew him from when I worked up at Peachblossom for his father when I was a little kid. I knew it was Jake because the Terments like to burn things. That’s the way they do.”

“All this was before Jake became a celebrity businessman?” asked Frank.

“Yes,” said the Pastor. “He was just starting out, still working for his father in River Sunday in those days. I knew it was my word against his and it was his father’s building. What could my business partners and me do? We had no records. They were all burned up. We had great losses but we could not document them. All the records burned up. The next day all over River Sunday white people, many of them our former customers, talked about how foolish we were to use a black electrician on that building, how we should have got a good firm to come in and make it right, how the old wiring always starts fires, how all the black homes around River Sunday always had bad fires because the black folks wouldn’t fix old wires, how they were too ignorant to fix old wiring. We had to listen to all of it.”

The Pastor was quiet for a few moments, his face showing the pain of the memories. Then his eyes brightened. “You ought to come down to my church office sometime after this project is settled. I’ll show you the picture they took of me with President Lyndon Johnson at a big luncheon in Washington at the White House. Yessir. We got an award from the Office of Economic Opportunity for our work at General Store.”

“Nobody ever investigated the fire?”

“Mercy, Frank. In River Sunday in those days, to get any real law, to get anything changed or done, you had to have whatever it was you wanted done be something that everyone around here wanted done. Mister Terment and his son were part of the majority. If they wanted it done, it gets done. If they didn’t want it done, it didn’t get done. Let me tell you, there wasn’t any outcry for justice when the cannery burned down. When the Terments broke the law they just made sure they had the majority on their side.”

“Ain’t nothing much changed,” said Soldado.

“Why would Jake and his father burn you out?”

“The have-nots were winning. The haves fought back, protecting their interests. Leasts, that’s the way we see it,” said the Pastor.

“You didn’t really lose,” said Maggie. “Your picture was on the bulletin board of my high school for several years, your picture and part of one of your speeches. You looked great in the picture.”

“That was the difference. You went to school near Baltimore, a different part of Maryland than River Sunday.”

“The line I liked was ‘To get the real size of a country, you have to measure the hearts of its leaders.’

“That was what I said in my acceptance at the award July 17, 1968, standing in front of the courthouse in River Sunday. Mr. Johnson came in by helicopter too. A lot of Washington people attended, not many folks from River Sunday, but that was the way it was in those days.”

The top of the crane that was moored at the bridge was in sight over the distant tree line. It was a black speck engineered above the natural randomness of the trees. As the boat moved along the river channel the crane details became more exact, outlining a black beacon against the blue sky. Then in a few more minutes they were nosing into the anchorage. The crane was a huge bludgeon towering over them as they waded ashore.

Maggie was a hundred feet ahead of them and as she climbed to the top of the low bank at the shoreline she yelled back, “The site. It’s been wrecked.”

Soldado waded back to his boat, reached back over the side and pulled down a sawed off double barreled shotgun. He splashed to catch up with Frank and the Pastor.

The white twine connecting the various grid stakes had been cut and was in disarray. “No human tracks,” said the Pastor, looking at the soil. “They were careful to leave no tracks.”

“We may have surprised whoever it was.”

“Someone wants to delay us. Why else would they cut the markers?”

“Who wants to delay us?”

“Think about it,” she said. “It could be your friends, Pastor, who want to slow us down so we will find the graveyard.”

The Pastor shook his head. “No, I would know if anyone from the church had done this.”

“Frank, it could be Jake and his friends trying to scare us out of here,” said Maggie.

“Maybe it’s the butterfly people,” suggested Frank. “I would think though that they’d be more interested in our staying here as long as possible.”

“I’ll take Jake,” said the Pastor.

Maggie ran to the farmhouse to call the police.

“She’s wasting her time,” said the Pastor.

In a few minutes she came back. The Pastor and Frank were already restringing the stakes.

“No harm done, just a little delay,” said Frank.

“Well, so much for the cops,” she said, a dejected tone to her voice.

“What did they say?”

“I talked to the chief.”

“That’ll be Billy. He and Jake are pretty close,” said the Pastor.

“The chief said there’s been some reports of dogs tearing up stakes at the construction sites at the bridge. He said he’d keep a car on patrol up our way in the future.”

“No animal did this,” said the Pastor.

“Jake,” said Soldado.

“Look,” said Frank. “We’ve fixed it. Let’s just get back to work.”

“Jake, he knows I’m always waitin’ for him, watchin’,” said Soldado. He waved his shotgun as he started back towards his boat. “Ain’t no way a man like that should be allowed to keep livin’.”

Soldado had been gone for several hours. It was getting darker and the mosquitoes were incessant. Frank’s skin itched with the dirt and sweat. He was tired. His exhausted mind kept thinking that one more scrape with his trowel, one more uncovered micro sphere of earth, one more spoonful of dark soil might provide the next clue to this ship’s past.

“Hey, there are more bones here,” said the Pastor working a few feet away. Frank crawled quickly over to the Pastor’s grid. Maggie was not far behind.

“Good Lord, you have found more skeletons,” he said, surprised. “I had a feeling we’d find something but I didn’t expect more bones.” He looked closely at the first skull that the Pastor had uncovered. “It’s a Caucasian. The nose area is definitely the same as the soldier. Keep in mind, Pastor, you’ll be looking for African skulls if there are slaves buried here.”

“There’re three skulls,” said Maggie. “All Caucasian. Over there’s a big hand around what looks like the grip of a sword.”

“A cutlass. A pirate’s weapon. See the jeweled decoration coming through the encrusting. The way the man is gripping the hilt shows he was using it as a hammer, not as a weapon,” observed Frank.

“These skulls, they are all adult skulls but the one, it’s huge, like a giant. Try to work down to the center of the grid pit. Maybe we can find the legs or arms of one of them,” said Maggie.

“Did you notice how the skulls are in the same direction, like they are looking at something?” asked the Pastor. “That ought to be a clue. You’d think the skulls might be a little bit more in disarray in a fire.”

“Yes. What do you think, Maggie?”

“The giant fascinates me.”

“There might be something in the records about a man this size being in the Chesapeake,” said Frank.

“Anyway, there are the same burn fractures in the skulls but then see how the skulls are almost tortured in their position,” said Maggie.

“Like they were hit by something, a falling beam perhaps,” said the Pastor.

“Or restrained. They might have been locked into a compartment in the ship. They might have been trying to escape. They were pushed up against a door. I’ve seen similar body positions in fires where the bodies were trying to get out a closed exit door,” observed Maggie. “That would explain using the sword as a hammer. Maybe these people were trying to escape from the fire and that’s why they are looking in the same direction.”

“If they were crew, and that’s a possibility, they would have had to have been restrained in some way. If they were crew and were not restrained they would have escaped the fire,” added Frank.

“Why would anyone burn the crew?” asked the Pastor.

“Witnesses to something?” suggested Maggie.

Frank ran his fingers over the soil strata marks at the edge of the pit. “There’s not much evidence of this part of the ship having any more damage than the rest. I mean an explosion, like of the ship’s gunpowder stores.”

“These skulls might rule out the plague theory,” observed Maggie.

“Yes, a restrained crew doesn’t fit that theory. Dead and dying sick people perhaps, but not men pushing against restraints. I think we have ruled out plague,” said Frank. He continued, “So what do we have? A burned out wreck that was never salvaged. A dead crew and a giant with a jeweled sword. I’ve worked on many shipwreck sites, some of the best ones in this hemisphere. Usually an archaeologist has a mystery or two to figure out. The mystery might be something like what kind of wine was in the old bottle that was unearthed or what town in Europe manufactured a ceramic shard. Nothing to wake up in the middle of the night worrying about. However, I worry about this.”

They decided to stop for the night and sat on the porch of the farmhouse in the dark. Bugs were scratching and crashing against the worn screen of the porch to get to the light that was on inside in the old kitchen. Frank munched on one of the sandwiches that the Pastor’s church group had prepared.

“These are good. Maybe we can contribute something to the church,” said Frank.

“You two are doing enough. The people want you to have this food. The church elders committee sent it up here with me special.”

It was still very hot and the soil stuck to their skin. They were dirty and tired. It had been a long day. The three of them looked alike, human shapes covered and stinking with the muck. Maggie joked that they had fooled the mosquitoes and the bugs were swarming around them instead of the marsh.

“I wonder,” Frank asked, “if anyone saw this ship burn. Maggie, your initial research would have turned up any written records so we know there’s no documentation. I wonder though if anyone could have seen it burn. It must have been a spectacular fire.” He took off his hat. His hair fell over his face and he pushed it back, creating black smears of dirt on his forehead.

“Sure. Native Americans might have seen it,” said Maggie. “From what I’ve read about the Chesapeake Bay and especially this Eastern Shore area, there were not many Europeans here in those days. Not many Native Americans either. The big tobacco farms were managed by overseers who worked for European absentee owners. There are even some legends that report pirates careened and scraped their ship hulls in these rivers.”

“The Terments were here,” the Pastor reminded them.

Maggie was thoughtful. “There should have been stories about it that came down in the local history books. How could the Terments or anyone else have missed seeing a ship on fire? It must have been visible for many miles, even across the Bay.”