The House at Royal Oak Read Online Free Page B

own escape, Tubman returned at least nineteen times to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom, including her aged parents. Harriet Tubman was considered a saint by blacks and a devil by white slaveholders. The bounty placed on her head was $40,000. She was never caught, and as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, she said she “never lost a single passenger.”
    In and around the ports of the Chesapeake Bay, black ships’ pilots helped fugitives and white boat captains also smuggled slaves north, sometimes for a bribe. Fleeing slaves traveled the bay so often it became known as Chesapeake Station.
    After the war ended, animosity between pro- and antislavery factions of the Methodist Church continued. The Southern Methodists, who during the war were said to climb out the windows of a local church rather than walk under the American flag hanging over the doorway, were offended by the antislavery stance of the mother church. The Northern Methodists, equally critical of the Southern Methodists (citing as just one example the bishop who had refused to relinquishhis wife’s slaves), determined to establish a greater presence on the Eastern Shore, including an outpost in Royal Oak. In 1883 they constructed an imposing three-story parsonage, painted white with red sashes and green shutters, for a circuit-riding minister. The foundation was built of brick and solid oak timbers.
    A few years later a fine white country church, complete with a graceful steeple and Gothic windows of pearlescent stained glass, was built close by. But the project did not flourish. The parsonage was sold off during the Depression and ten years later the church was abandoned.
    By 2000 the church, painted ochre with turquoise trim, was home to an occasional business in used furniture. The roofleaked, siding had fallen away from the steeple, and some of the stained glass was cracked or missing. The parsonage, anchoring the other side of the village a quarter-mile away, retained shreds of white paint but was otherwise in similar dilapidated condition. Partly rented out and partly boarded up, this house that Hugo happened on, for sale by owner, had been on the market for seven years.
    The owner returned our third phone call. He reminisced about happy childhood times spent at his grandmother’s house, picking apples, hunting for arrowheads in the fields, and sliding down the steep, frontstairs banister while trying to hold a chamber pot upright. He refused to let the house fall into the wrong hands. Others had made offers, and he had turned them all down. He might sell it to us if we promised to restore it. It was a good house, he said, and a good location.
    The tenants offered a different view of its location when we drove out to see the house together for the first time one Friday afternoon. “It’s a real sweet house,” the young woman who met us at the door said. “Of course, some people might be bothered by what goes on around here . . . smuggling, motorcycle gangs, too.”
    I glanced past her out to the yard and the garage. She followed my eyes. “They’ll use the garage, nothing we can do about it. They just show up here late at night, fifty, sixty at a time . . .”
    â€œI guess it gets pretty dark around here,” I managed.
    As she showed me around the first floor, I asked if she had any idea where these smugglers came from.
    â€œSmugglers? They come in the Tred Avon River and they’re up and down this road all night long. You know it’s them because of how fast they drive. Sometimes they’ll miss the curve and land in the ditch or they’ll slam straight into the fence. That’s how it got all dinged up.”
    At night she heard weird sounds coming from the padlocked and supposedly uninhabited second floor. “I don’t know what could be going on up there.” She gathered up her baby from the crib, held him close, and looked upward.
    It was quite a