Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne
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.
May 15th
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