Читать книгу Dredging the Choptank - Kimberley Lynne - Страница 10

April 2nd

A Chilled Wind

Because of its physiographic variety, Maryland is nicknamed Little America. The timbered Allegheny Mountains of the Appalachian Plateau in the state’s western corner taper down into rich piedmont farmland and eventually meander into the coastal plain that engulfs the Chesapeake Bay. The roads between Baltimore and Cambridge belt cities, skirt suburbia and span a massive estuary. Half an hour and the city fades away as the road curves into the emerald tunnel of Route 97, banking south. A temperate zone has its price for green; lush vines and junk trees crowd the woods, cloaking light poles and road signs. Cross the Severn River twice, and hunting, fishing and boating shops crop up between strip malls. On the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, Route 50 sinks down to the level right under the horizon, where it bakes and floats all the way to the Atlantic. Rippling fields rise up around the tarmac, and the wind smells of brine and sun, even under nights of rain. The sky lowers over the car roof, and clouds touch down behind the farmhouses. Flocks of birds mysteriously emerge from the alfalfa and loop and curve overhead. The air’s thick with water. The car hovers over the road. Time suspends to a crawl, stutters and corners of it reach backwards. People talk slower.

The ex-rector of Cambridge’s Christ Church blames the town’s many typhoid epidemics on its isolation. “Cambridge’s so alone,” Father Martin said. “They were all dying and had no where to go.” Disgustingly, the typhoid outbreaks are better blamed on the county’s extremely high water table. With a high water table, graveyards and privies easily contaminate water sources. Dorchester County is damp; its wetlands house a convergence of six rivers: the Blackwater, the Chicanacomico, the Choptank, the Honga, the Nanticoke and the Transquaking.

“So, you’re going to Cambridge,” said my friend Lou, grinning. At the time of that statement, we were sitting at the bar in the Club Charles in Baltimore.

“I’ve got a writing gig there,” I said. “I know it sounds like the boonies, but there might be some good ghost stories.” The real boondocks probably weren’t Cambridge itself; the true boondocks lurked outside of town in the gangly stretches of corn, swamp and neck overwhelming it. “I think I wanna tell ghost stories.”

“Nice,” he said, tipping back on his bar stool. “Just don’t leave Route 50.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you been there? You leave town and all bets are off. It’s one freaked place,” Lou said, smirking and drinking beer. “Cambridge’s very strange,” he said. “It’s an odd mix. It’s filled with people who think it’s the hood, and with old, weird people and Deliverance outside of town.” He’s a mediator, another North Dakotan, married to Adrienne and the one who tells the Bill Pullman Story. He has short, sandy hair, and the friends in his group sometimes refer to him as The Emperor.

Late afternoon in early April, teetering on the brink of dusk, I drove southeast to my first meeting with the Dorchester Arts Center. Eighty miles from Baltimore and beyond the Bay Bridge and the Eastern Shore town of Easton, Route 50 twists at the edge of the thick forest of southern Talbot County, and a vista opens to allow the Choptank River, the northern boundary of Dorchester County, to cut its twisting path through the Eastern Shore to the Bay. As my car hurtled over the mile-and-a-half-long Frederick C. Malkus, Jr. Bridge, the setting sun lit a wide, orange ripple of water, rolling sideways across the darkening river, following me to the Cambridge side. The crest of the wave riveted me; surely it was an optical illusion or a boat wake. But there were no boats in sight. The river was clear, and there was no obvious source for the wave. I wondered about river currents.

Directly after the Choptank, I veered off Route 50’s fast food sprawl and out of the 21st century onto Maryland Avenue. Victorian and Depression clapboard houses crowded out convenient stores and business parks. A deep, brackish drainage ditch lined the side of the road by the river; drainage ditches line most Dorchester County roads. Little earthen bridges over scummy moats allowed access to homes. After a mile of quaint Avenue, a narrow drawbridge spanned several hundred years and thin, idyllic Cambridge Creek.

“Once you go over the creek, you turn right into the town. You can’t go wrong,” said Judy.

The creek was thick with boat; sail masts hollowly clanked my arrival. Boat slips lined the retaining walls of restaurants and condominiums. A paddleboat named the Choptank Queen carried a smattering of tourists, pointing at the land. Seagulls screeched and swooped over the hood of my car. Several watermen unloaded dripping baskets off tipping oyster boats.

In the decades after the Civil War, during the unsteady Restoration, some Confederate Eastern Shore watermen broke stringent racial boundaries of the rural Eastern Shore. They worked side by side in the 1870s oyster industry with fishermen of color. Those color-less work habits drove Dorchester County gentry to complain that in Cambridge “mongrels were usurping the kennels of thoroughbreds.”3

Like Maryland, Dorchester County is split socially and economically, between the reigning, blue-blood elite of Cambridge’s High Street and the fishing and farming, blue-collar marsh inhabitants outside of town.

“There’s a huge disparity of classes in Cambridge, still,” said my friend Debbie. She’s a lawyer for the state of Maryland and a native Baltimorean. In college, she made up an adjective to describe the clanking, clicking noises that kitchen utensils make when they bump into each other; she called it kirky. Her slightly turned-up nose is coated with freckles.

“Weren’t there riots in the 60s?” I asked. Those were the Cambridge ghost stories I remembered. “Something about the courthouse.”

“It was the 60s, Mary. There were riots everywhere,” Debbie said.

Cambridge has a population of 10,911 living residents in a wet, 6.78-mile stretch between a river and a creek. Its town dock was a battlefield during the Oyster Wars, and the Choptank was a battlefield during the American Revolution, The War of 1812 and the Civil War. In 1945, journalist Lee McCardell described the town. He said, “the old Eastern Shore is High Street, subdued, shady, possibly a little aloof, with fine old houses and spacious lawns guarding its dignified and stately march down to the river.”4

That’s High Street: aloof, stately, and guarded while four blocks away to the south hulks a clapboard ghetto of peeling, one-room shacks.

Wealthy historic High Street is a study in Queen Anne and Federal architecture, with some Greek revival, Georgian and Shingle thrown in to break up the columns. Primeval trees form an umbrella that shade governors, assemblymen and lawyers: the white men who once ruled Dorchester County and the state of Maryland. None of the original thirteen colonial families own the houses of High Street now, but they were once the first families of the county and the state. Their names are on the Declaration of Independence; their portraits hang in the Maryland State Capitol. I was told that there are thirteen families who still rule Dorchester County. Not all of the original names are the same, but shake the tree and the first thirteen thud to the ground.

The Christ Episcopal Church and the Dorchester County Courthouse cap the south end of High Street like porch columns; the Choptank River Long Wharf Park caps the north end. Cambridge Creek runs parallel to High Street from the Wharf to the back of the courthouse. Halfway down to the river, on the creek side of High Street, leans the Dorchester County Arts Center. The path of the ghost walk would span High Street from the Center down to the Wharf, up to the Church, across to the Courthouse and back to the Center.

Mammoth houses crouched back from High Street; their wide, lush lawns provide a safe moat between the living room and the plebian path of the public trekking to the marina at High Street’s river end. I had traveled over the bridge and through bubbling marsh to the true Land of Pleasant Living5 during its gentrified settling into another bucolic night. High Street at April twilight could be the opening shot of an American dynasty film; the rich night poised on the brink of epic story.

These people are loaded, I thought as I unbuckled my seat belt. What’s an arts center doing in this high rent district? The taxes alone could deplete a non-profit budget.

I’m thoroughly middle class. When I left my car, I immediately felt estranged, as if the Cambridge night oxygen was not suited for my lungs and as if the insects were whispering about me. The tree roots reached through the cracked sidewalks for my legs. A female figure turned into the draperies in the lamplight of #116. I felt watched.

The sensation of being watched is woven into the beginning of many Dorchester ghost tales.

I hesitated and forced myself forward.

The Arts Center at #118 High Street was built in 1790 and is half of what was once a hotel. In 1906, Captain James Leonard left the hotel business and sliced the building in two. Engineers rolled what is now #116 on logs to its present position fifteen feet away. Captain Leonard’s granddaughter told me that her great aunt rode in the house as it rolled away, playing with her dolls.

116 from 118. It’s a stretch, I thought, but cut the Divine Proportion in two.

1.618 or the number PHI or the Divine Proportion is the transcendent mathematical ratio that repeats in a staggering number of proportions across nature, ranging from humans to bees. PHI is so peppered throughout the plant and animal kingdoms that early thinkers deduced that the number’s source was God. It surfaces in the spirals of seashells, tornadoes, waterspouts, crop circles and whirlpools.

What kind of building was left from a halved Divine Proportion? I thought as I stood on its rippled sidewalk. An unsteady, spiraling one, I decided.

The white-shingled face of #118 sported two letterboxes with quilting flyers beside its closed door; otherwise it could be a private residence. Bumpy bricks led to crooked steps. The front porch tilted towards the courthouse, and, yet, oddly, had a small puddle on it. Despite the rainy spring, I wasn’t sure how a tilted porch could carry standing water. I opened the door and a bell rang, its sweet tinkling overwhelmed by the sound of whining sanders in the back of house. The air in the building sucked in, as if another door was simultaneously opened somewhere else. The gift shop door was to my right and a small art gallery to my left. The chewy air tasted thickly of wood. The gift shop was empty; its sand candles and watercolors yielded no clues to the committee’s whereabouts. The whine of sanders that drowned out the doorbell drew me to the back of the house where a group of saw-dusted men carved duck decoys in a long hall. I returned to the front door and braved the shallow, narrow uneven stairs. My knees ached and popped as I climbed. The second and third floor hallways were lonely and twisted. The ceilings were low. Someone was watching. I turned, feeling vertigo, and the ceiling dipped lower. Disoriented and considering a retreat to the car, I staggered down the steps to the second floor hall where I stopped by a watermark on the wall above the wainscoting: a long, serpentine curve of brown, bubbled stain that I had not noticed on the search upstairs. I reached up to touch its peeling paint, and something cold and wet passed me, brushing by me.

Whoosh went a chilled wind.

Is it for me? I thought wildly.

Something sodden licked my cheek and splashed into my eyes. It burnt briefly. I wiped it away; it felt slippery, similar to glycerin. I lurched back to the stairs, running my damp hand down my jean skirt.

This will change everything.

Assume that death is a transition in dimensions. Assume that apparitions cross dimensions. What enables those moments? What allows certain spirit energy to cross over and leave only vestiges on my cheek? Once time parallels are linked is there a perpetual circle between them, a spinning portal of sorts? Like a spiral of the Divine Proportion?

“Do they need passports?” I asked the second floor landing.

Lit by the dim, front hall chandelier, Judy stepped out of the gift shop below, slight, freckled, and concerned. She looked like a substitute teacher in her pastel sweater and skirt. I stared at her, clinging to the balustrade, panting, wondering if she was real.

“Are you Maryland?” she asked brightly. She seemed real. She was way too perky to be a specter. Her cinnamon eyes matched her auburn hair.

I took a deep, calming breath. You can do what you want, I thought, but the outcome’s gonna be the same.

“Who’s going to be the same?” Judy asked as she led me through the gift shop to the back kitchen, a small, cluttered room lined with crooked shelves heavy with art supplies. Mismatched chairs ringed a table that was wedged between the shelves and the door.

“Where was this room before? When I looked before?” I muttered. “How could I have missed an entire room?” I couldn’t hear the sanders of the decoy makers anymore.

“Here she is,” Judy announced happily to two women in the kitchen. “I found Maryland!”

The two other women who comprised part of the ghost tour committee sat in the warm, cramped quarters. I knew intrinsically that these women were Episcopalian. They were the image of the Episcopal ladies who had served me cool lemonade in my youth after service on The Church of the Good Shepherd lawn. I had met them at Easter vigils and potluck suppers. I had helped them serve Shepherd’s pie and peas to the masses. But, Episcopalian or not, I was still a Baltimorean from the Yankee side of the state and, at the very least, an outsider.

I know a man who was born in Cambridge and, yet, despite his birthright, is considered an outsider by locals because his parents, who were teachers, transplanted there. I recently received a joke e-mail titled North vs. South; it listed advice for Northerners relocating South. A closing warning read: “if you do settle in the South and bear children, don’t think we will accept them as Southerners. After all, if the cat had kittens in the oven, we wouldn’t call ‘em biscuits.”

Among xenophobic Cambridge insiders, they refer to us outsiders as foreigners, pronounced fo-nouners.

According to Chief Winter Fox, the definition of a Dorchester native is one who can stand in the middle of the community and recite back six generations without consulting a crib sheet. A Dorchester native can visit all their ancestors’ graves too, unless, of course, they’ve been swept away by flood, which is common. In 1608, the Nanticoke Indians recited to Captain John Smith their heritage of thirteen generations, back to the 1300s. Smith estimated that the Nanticoke tribe had one hundred members and the Choptank tribe had only thirty.

Thirteen and one hundred and thirty.

Thirteen, like the number of original Cambridge families, like the number of the original colonies, like the estimated 13,000 years that Homo sapiens have been roaming North America, like the 13.7 billion years that this universe has been around. Thirteen like the thirteen stars in Solomon’s Seal, like the twelve apostles and Jesus, like the twelve Zodiac signs and the sun, like the thirteen arrows in the eagle’s foot in the U.S. Great Seal, like the thirteen laurel leaves in the eagle’s other foot, the eagle on the back of every U.S. dollar bill.

The committeewomen knew no High Street ghosts.

There’s a ghost upstairs, I thought, but I bit my lip.

Lynn, the blonde Arts Center board member in chinos and a pale pink Oxford, was as flushed as her blouse. “Well, there’s that Christ Church story about the slaves dying in the basement,” she admitted slowly, leaning across the table, her eyes sparkling mischievously.

“But we can’t talk about that,” said Margot, the pencil-thin tourism director. Her bracelets clanked, and her nails were perfectly manicured. She wore chocolate-colored silk that matched her hair. She tapped her pen as she pinned me to my folding chair with her withering glare.

Of course not, I thought. This is Maryland’s rural south. I could get strung up if I followed that lead. I sadly decided not to ask anyone about that story.

“It probably didn’t happen anyway,” Judy said from the head of the table. “It’s just a story.”

“Stories are powerful,” I muttered. No ghosts, much less slave ghosts, and I had expected a full list of research. The list was part of the agreement. I didn’t want to dig. Digging took time. I needed the money quickly. Judy handed me a towering stack of history books to comb. They wanted to know when they could see a first outline. They wanted the tour up and running by mid-July.

“Is that possible?” Margot asked as she clenched her Mount Blanc pen.

“Depends on the amount of research I have to do,” I answered carefully. “I think I was promised a list . . .”

“I’ll call you with leads,” Judy said quickly. “I’ll send letters to all the High Street residents, asking them for ghost tales.”

I thought of the bucolic, American upper class street outside and wondered how successful that request would prove.

“I’m sorry, but are you bleeding? On your cheek?” Lynn suddenly asked.

All three of them focused on my face. My left hand rose up and felt a raised, swollen, sore spot where the wall water had splashed me. I thought of asbestos abatement and Revolutionary War era lead paint. My fingers were damp with clear fluid, not blood. The fluid sparkled briefly on my fingertips.

“No, I’m not bleeding. I’m fine. Just a little rosacia,” I explained, hoping the embarrassment of that confession would distract them. I dug in my purse for a mirror, manically reaching for my makeup bag.

“You can go upstairs to the bathroom, if you’d like,” Judy said. She looked worried. She stood and motioned towards the gift shop. Her nails were not polished. She painted water colors and threw pots with the art classes.

I’m not going back upstairs alone, I thought. It had gotten dark since I had swerved to miss a ghost in the upstairs hall.

I found my compact and checked my cheek. On my left cheek rose red bumps, like an old TB test, in a row along my zygomatic arch, the curved bone under my cheek muscle. It wasn’t festering or open or bleeding. It looked like an allergic reaction, like poison ivy.

Get out, I thought.

“What POV do you want? Narrator?” I asked them instead, clasping the compact shut and stacking the books. They were baffled. “Point of view, POV,” I said, trying not to shake. “Who’s telling the story?” They hadn’t considered that. They had spent all their previous meeting time deciding that the tour should be named Tales of the Hauntingly Weird and Unusual.

This the title of a tour of a street without ghosts, I thought.

“What does it matter who tells the story?” Margot asked, checking her gold watch.

“Well, it’s folklore, so I assume that it’s in a storytelling kind of frame,” I tried to explain. “Ghosts are more believable when you believe the person telling the story.”

“Oh,” Lynn said.

“Well, that makes sense,” Judy said.

I left not long after, toting my tower of history books and back peddling for the exit. I felt vaguely claustrophobic in the building. Judy held the uneven front door for me.

“It rained,” I said, stating the blatantly obvious. The street and the sidewalk were lightly dampened in the dark.

“It rains a lot here,” Judy said wistfully.

The night air was cool and moist and blew the tomato blossoms on the plants that lined the porch. “Those tomato plants are so big,” I said. Their yellow heads nodded sagely in the bug-whispered breeze. “Isn’t it a little early for them to bloom?” The ones that lined my backyard fence in Baltimore were tentative green shoots, despite the rainy spring. These were in full bloom a month or two early.

“Oh, we need to thin those. They should be in the backyard, but things grow fast here. And we get lots of volunteer plants. All the water. Our basements flood monthly, but it’s very lush. I can give you a cutting when you come back,” Judy said. “I’m sorry about the lack of ghosts. I wish we had more stories for you.”

Under the smell of flowers and rain, there lingered the smell of history, of swamp, of decay, of rich story lurking in the night.

“Oh, the stories are here,” I said.

I lugged the books to the car and waited for Judy to go inside. As soon as she did, I checked my cheek in the car mirror. It looked redder than usual. I dabbed a Wet Ones across it and took a Benadryl. I was proud to be retentive enough to carry Wet Ones and Benadryl. My eyes watered; I’m allergic to spring and its blossoms and pollen. At the Bay Bridge, my cheek stopped throbbing or maybe it stopped throbbing when I stopped thinking about it throbbing. I drove home through the night to read the history of Dorchester County.

I have written some romance novels and plays, and although a few have been historical in genre, I had never forayed into investigative folklore compilations. I was starting with the closed clam of the Chesapeake, the town that reluctantly relinquished John Barth and his cagey and brilliant Floating Opera, the town whose brick courthouse burnt down in the middle of the night in May 1852 when the fire originated in the Register of Wills.

The Orphans Court offered a reward for any information for what they suspected to be an incendiary event.6 The night of the 1852 courthouse fire, Edward LeCompte, the Dorchester County deputy register and a descendant of one of the original thirteen families, took home his complete files on the Minutes of the Court. Local legend claimed that a disgruntled son started the fire when he learned that his recently deceased father had cut him out of his will. Historian Elias Jones records that Edward’s father, Samuel LeCompte, died in January 1862, a full ten years after the fire.7 No one was ever arrested for the suspected arson.

So the legend motive didn’t apply. Did LeCompte have a premonition?

History does not always jibe. Its human record has few checks and balances, and Dorchester County lost most of its records that firey night.

I fell asleep with Jones’ thick book on my chest.

I dreamt of a flotilla of boats sailing in slow formation down the Choptank, shore-to-shore, hull-to-hull. There was a festive quality to the boats. They were all painted bright blue and were draped in white Christmas lights. Dark lines connected the boats in a long, uneven row. Men in dark coats systematically hurled something overboard but I couldn’t tell what. I couldn’t see the nets behind the boats, but I could hear cannons in the distance. They were slowly dredging, dredging the river for a body.

I woke up suddenly. I must’ve jumped.

“Hey, babe,” my boyfriend Karl said. He was awake, reading some heavy Holocaust tome, a different kind of ghost story. Karl was born in Washington, DC, and he wears one type of outfit: black tee shirt, khakis and scuffed black work boots.

I rolled over, away from his reading light. “If I disappear while I’m writing this Cambridge thing,” I mumbled into my pillow, “the first thing you do is dredge the Choptank.”

“Yeah, sure, baby,” he replied absently, turning a page. He sounded as far away as 1852.