Seven minor skirmishes marred relations in these years, and there would have been more if the Nanticokes had succeeded in persuading the Choptanks to join them. On various occasions emissaries were sent north proposing that the Choptanks fall upon Patamoke and eliminate it, but the peaceful little Choptanks refused—“We are not a warlike people. With our whites we are at peace.” And no arguments could goad them into attacking.
This earned the Choptanks no merit with the whites; an Indian was an Indian, and when a real battle erupted in Nanticoke territory, white settlers along the Choptank assumed that they must be the next targets; in anticipation they began firing at whatever Indians they spotted. In this they were encouraged by the harsh edict promulgated by the government:
Notice to all citizens. The Nanticoke Indians have been declared the enemies of this Palatinate and as such are to be proceeded against by all persons in all ways.
As a result of this invitation to violence, a desultory warfare developed in which the whites repulsed any Indian who sought to establish contact with any settlement; the bewildered Choptanks would come downriver to ensure peace, and before they could land, guns would blaze at them, and they would retreat in confusion. On one such occasion the oldest son of Tciblento—a full-blooded Indian—was killed, and when runners went to Turlock’s hut to inform her of this, she greeted them indifferently.
“Hatsawap was shot by white men.”
“What had he done?”
“Nothing. He came to talk peace.”
She did not react to this sad news, simply sat in her rags rocking back and forth on her haunches.
“Tciblento,” the runners said, “you must talk with the white men. We are not at war with them.”
“But they are at war with us,” she said. They talked for a long time, recalling better days, and when Turlock came in from hunting in the marsh, dark and dirty, and wanted to know why the Choptanks were there, one of them said, “Tciblento’s son was killed by a white gunner.”
“They’ll all be killed,” he said, and Tciblento nodded. She cooked a raccoon for them and they left.
The forest warfare did not diminish, for the Nanticokes did not propose to allow white men to dispossess them. They became skilled in ambushes and made life upriver difficult, so that in December 1652 the government issued the famous draconian orders which led to their elimination as a fighting force:
The Nanticokes and their allies constitute a peril to this Colony and they must be disciplined. Declare war on them with every strength you have. Vanquish, destroy, plunder, kill or take prisoner. Do all these things to all or any of the said Indians you chance to meet. Put them to death or capture them alive at your pleasure. There must be no truce.
Now the hunters who clustered at Patamoke had their days of glory. They would hide behind trees that commanded well-known trails, and whenever an Indian appeared, man or woman, they would blaze away. The forests ran red with the blood of Indians, and fire consumed villages which had known no war.
The carnage was especially heavy among the confused Choptanks, who had given not a single cause for such bloodshed. In the entire history of the Choptank nation, no Indian had ever killed a white man or ever would, yet now they were hunted like squirrels. Tciblento’s second Indian son, tall Ponasque, wise like his grandfather, and a companion climbed into their canoe and came downriver to plead for sanity, but as they passed the point east of Patamoke, three hunters spotted them. Taking careful aim at the young men, who could not take evasive action or protect themselves in any way, they began firing.
The first salvo fell short, and the leader of the hunters cried, “Higher!” So they aimed higher, and now they shot over the canoe. “Lower, just a bit!” And on the third fusillade pellets struck the Indian in the forward position and he fell sideways.
Two of the hunters cheered, but the leader warned, “It’s a trick! Hit him again!” So the hunters kept firing until Ponasque fell, too, and the canoe became so riddled that it sank with the dead bodies.
Now one of the lesser chieftains crept through the woods to plead with Turlock, and after he had informed Tciblento of her other son’s death, and she had sat impassive as before, the Indian turned to Turlock and asked, “What must we do?”
“Stay covered. I keep Tcib.”
“We’ll starve.”
“Maybe ... Tcib ... too.”
“How long will this hunting last?”
“Year. Then ... tired.”
“Turlock, let us go to the town and prove our peacefulness.”
“They ... shoot you. Me, too.”
“You know their ways, Turlock. What can we do?”
“Nothing.”
And he was right. In those terrible years of elimination nothing that the Choptanks could have done would have convinced the white men that they were different. The pressure for land had begun, and this placed Indians athwart the ambitions and destinies of the newcomers, and no kind of truce could ever be engineered.
The little Indians moved through the forest in search of deer, but it was they who became the targets. Children would go out to play—no discipline could prevent them from doing so—and they became the goal in a deadly game. White hunters cheered as lustily when they gunned down a boy of seven as they did when they eliminated a woman of seventy, and always the perimeter was pushed back, back until the remnants huddled in their huts the way Tciblento huddled in hers.
In 1660, when Timothy Turlock was fifty-two, he received word which made the later years of his life more congenial than the earlier ones had been. Life in the marshes was never easy; true, there was always food, but if he needed even the smallest tool, he found it almost impossible to acquire the goods required for barter. Coins he never saw; over a period of nine years he never touched money except for the time he stole a pot containing a hidden shilling. So through the years he had stolen an amazing assortment of things. Whenever he approached a plantation his hawklike eyes roved as he identified items he might want to appropriate on some later visit, and a magistrate once said of him, “If Tim Turlock were on his way to the gallows, his beady eyes would be locating things to steal on the way back.”
Miraculously, he kept his little family alive by subterfuges which required more work than if he had taken an honest job, and then his luck changed! The Indian wars, never of a magnitude equal to those on the western shore, were nevertheless nagging affairs, and hunters spent so much time shooting Indians that they overlooked the real menace that came creeping down from the north: wolves invaded the peninsula and a bounty was offered for their extermination.
For every wolf killed the county commissioners will give rations of powder and pellet plus one hundred pounds of tobacco. Proof of killing shall be the right-front paw and the right jowl of the dead beast
With an incentive like this, Turlock could swing all his powers into action, and he ranged the forests north and south, dealing destruction to the savage predators. He became so adept at tracking the large beasts, and so lethal in dealing with them, that admiring citizens who felt their cattle safer with him around said, “Turlock succeeds where others don’t because he lives like a wolf and thinks like one.”
What they were not aware of was that canny Timothy Turlock had convened a strategy session with his twin sons at which they had devised a naughty plan to subvert the new law to their advantage. “Stooby fine in woods,” the admiring father had said in opening the meeting, and he was correct. Stooby, so-called because a hunter in Patamoke had said, “That boy looks downright stupid,” had become at thirteen a master woodsman; he had inherited his father’s natural cunning and his grandfather Pentaquod’s inclination toward forest lore. He loved the deep quiet of this land, the way animals moved across it and the flight of birds as they searched for seeds. He was a much better hunter than his father and often detected the presence of wolves while Timothy was still fooling with his musket.
“Must be quiet,” Timothy would say like a miniature field marshal, but Stooby wo
uld merely point to where he had already located the wolf, and when they fired, it would be his gun that killed the predator.
“Stooby stay woods,” Turlock said. “Charley watch town.”
The boys could not fathom his scheme, but when his beady eyes narrowed to slits and his grin disclosed the blackened teeth, they knew that good ideas were brewing. “Charley, find where wolves bury.”
And then Charley understood! With a grin as malevolent as his father’s he said, “Night, I dig up paws ... jowls.” And when he said this, the three Turlocks chortled, for they knew they had uncovered a gateway to endless riches: Tim and Stooby would kill wolves and deliver the emblems for bounty, and as soon as they were buried, Charley would come at midnight to dig them up, and they could be handed to the officials over and over ... once the earth was blown away from their previous burials. The Turlocks were going to acquire a lot of tobacco.
On one trip north the hunting was poor; not even Stooby could locate wolves, and so the pair went farther afield than ever, a development that did not worry them, because they lived off the land and slept wherever dusk found them: a few pine branches, a fire in a hollow, and in the morning a dash of cold water in the face. But at one awakening Stooby warned his father, “Beyond there, houses maybe.” He spoke in a curious amalgam of Choptank, gestures and short English words, but he never had difficulty in making himself intelligible; the hunters who had labeled him-stupid had confused reticence with ignorance.
When they had progressed several miles without finding wolves, they did come upon a group of houses built by Swedes twenty years earlier, when that nation was endeavoring to secure a foothold in the New World. The Turlocks, naturally suspicious, scouted the settlement for some hours and satisfied themselves that ordinary men and women appeared to be following ordinary tasks, so toward noon they broke out of the forest, crossed land which had been lately plowed, and started shouting hellos.
Numerous people ran from the houses, and soon the Turlocks were surrounded by sturdy farmers and their wives talking a language Turlock had never heard before. Finally a lad was found who had sailed on an English ship, a blond boy about Stooby’s age with a quick tongue, and he was most eager to talk.
“We’re Dutch. From New Netherlands. And we’ve just knocked hell out of the Swedes.”
“What are Swedes?”
When this was interpreted the farmers chuckled, and one man pushed forward a strong-limbed young woman with the fairest blond hair Timothy had ever seen. “She’s a Swede,” the boy said, and bearded, filthy Turlock grinned at her.
They stayed at the Dutch settlement for six days, wearing the boy interpreter out with their questions, and for some reason which young Stooby could not analyze, his father consistently reported the condition of Patamoke to be better than it was and his place much superior to the hut in which they actually lived, but when the time came for departure, the boy discovered what the plot had been. In the woods, awaiting them on the path back to the Choptank, stood Birgitta, the Swedish girl, and by expressive signs she indicated that whereas life for a servant girl in, the Swedish settlement had been hard, under the Dutch it had been hell. As the trio disappeared in the woods, she turned for one last look at her prison, made an indecent gesture and delivered what Stooby took to be a chain of Swedish curses.
They moved fast lest the Dutch try to recover their property, and for two days they exhausted themselves, so that when night came they simply collapsed, but on the third day they judged themselves to be free from capture, and they moved in stately fashion, with Stooby scouting for wolves and his father not caring much whether he found any or not. That night Timothy suggested that Stooby build his own sleeping quarters, then, carefully waiting until the boy had done so, he chose a spot far removed for the pine-boughed lean-to in which he and Birgitta would sleep.
The distance was not great enough; through the night Stooby heard strange sounds and riotous laughter, and jumbled words in Choptank and Swedish, and when day broke, the trio dawdled through the woods. For the second time in his life Tim Turlock had won the affections of a woman without actually wooing her and without knowing a dozen words of her language. He was able to do this because he existed on a primitive level in a primitive society where actions were more significant than words; his animal capabilities manifested themselves in a score of unspoken signals, and two women had been willing to gamble their lives on his ability to survive.
On the trip south he and the Swedish girl became robust companions; they had great fun together, day and night, and despite the difference in their ages, for she was not much older than his sons, it became apparent to Stooby that they intended staying together. He was not surprised, therefore, at what happened when they reached the marsh. His father went boldly to the hut, banged on the door, and shouted, “Tcib, get out.”
The tall Indian woman, neat and disciplined even in rags, came bewildered to the door, saw the fair Swedish girl, and understood. It took her less than ten minutes to gather her pitiful belongings, and with no discernible recrimination she departed. She was no longer needed; she no longer had a home.
Charley elected to go with her, and when she started to walk through the woods he cried, “No! That canoe is ours,” and he threatened to beat his father’s brains out if any objection was made. Defiantly he paddled his mother down the creek to Patamoke, where she would shift from hunter to hunter.
Stooby never hesitated; he would stay with his father and hunt wolves, and on those increasingly frequent days when Turlock preferred to remain at home in dalliance with Birgitta, he hunted alone and did rather better than when his father impeded him. But now there was no Charley to dig up the emblems for resale, so Turlock himself had to go out at night and slink about the dumps, retrieving paws and jowls.
It is easy to reconstruct the history of Timothy Turlock during these years because his name appears with such troubled frequency in contemporary court records. The London judge’s opinion that Turlock was a ferret, scurrying about just beyond the vision of man, was validated in these years. The marsh-dweller was now in his fifties, small, quick, sly, dirty of dress and habit, a frequenter of swamps, an invader of proper locations. That he should so often have been charged with stealing minor objects was not surprising, for Turlock was incapable of passing a usable object without appropriating it, but that he should also have won the affection of Tciblento and Birgitta was a mystery. One might have thought that this repulsive little man with the missing teeth would be last in any process of amatory selection; perhaps his sly insistence accounted for the mystery, or the fact that he openly lusted after women and allowed them to see it. In any event, he was a rebuke to proper Christians and a constant thorn in the side of the court.
He was, as the records prove, frequently fined and often whipped, but the latter punishment was a heavier trial to the community than to Turlock, for at the moment he was led from jail toward the post he began to utter such lamentations and shrieks of pain as to make a most unsavory spectacle, and since the judges knew that the whipping would have no effect on him, they were reluctant to sentence the community to such travail.
“We should have hanged him at the first session,” one of the commissioners said, following a miserable trial in which he stood accused of shooting a townsman who had tracked a deer into his marsh. But others felt that his existence was justified because he did kill an extraordinary number of wolves—“Like a carrion buzzard, he helps clear away the refuse of this town.”
So Turlock went his way, a curious little man who had already sired six bastards: two by Tciblento, one by Birgitta, and three by various indentured girls who had been publicly whipped for their transgressions. These six were the beginnings of that tremendous horde of Turlocks who would populate the Eastern Shore, each inheriting important characteristics from Timothy: they would love the land; they would want to live close to the water; they would develop companionship with birds and fish and animals; through the sixth generation none would be able to re
ad or sign a name, and all would abhor such regularities as paying taxes and getting married.
And yet sometimes even that happened. Turlock had the brazen effrontery to go into Patamoke court and claim that he had purchased Birgitta’s indenture from the Dutch, and when both she and Stooby confirmed this, the magistrates had to issue papers proving that he owned her services for seven years, but when she became pregnant they decreed that ownership did not include bedroom services. He was fined five hundred pounds of tobacco—which he obtained by selling one wolfs head five times—and Birgitta was publicly whipped.
She was not actually whipped; whimpering and sobbing, Turlock came into court volunteering to marry her if the lashes were forsworn, and reluctantly the judges allowed the wedding to take place. It was a strange affair: Charley and Stooby attended, as did their half sister Flora and the anomalous Tciblento, who sat through the ceremony looking at the floor.
She was living a strange life, sixty-eight years old, tall and dignified as ever, but obviously fallen upon evil days. No more the softly tanned deerskin dress or the edging of mink, no more the necklace of silvery white shells. She lived with strangers beyond the fringes of the harbor; her only consistent friend was Charley, a resentful, difficult boy who hated white men but strove to be like them. He was often in court.
One day when his mother was tending a shack for two hunters, he went into the forest for deer, and as he was returning, dressed in various rags such as dispossessed Choptanks wore, one of the very hunters with whom his mother lived shot at him, thinking him to be an Indian. The bullet went through his left shoulder but did not knock him down; stanching the blood with a dirty rag, he walked home, but fainted as he reached the shack. Tciblento tended him without tears. The hunter justified himself—“He looked like an Indian,” an excuse to which she made no response.