Revenge! : Helen Chappell

About the Cover Photographer Cindy Ewing Steedman

A Talbot County native, Cindy currently lives in the Cordova area in a house of her own design. Her home is surrounded by a large, fl ower-fi lled yard and enclosed on three sides by woods. It is the source of many of her favorite photos, including the wintry scene on the cover.

Cindy grew up on a dairy/grain farm, where her parents instilled in her a love of nature and animals. She has been an amateur photographer since she purchased her fi rst camera after graduating from high school.

Cindy is enjoying retirement after 42 years employed as a registered nurse, primarily in the emergency room. When she wasn’t working, she found relaxation in gardening, beachcombing, hiking and nature photography. Being outdoors was, and still is a great stress relief for her. Cindy fi nds herself most at peace when she can enjoy the beauty and serenity of nature.

Wildlife, landscapes, and local scenes are her favorite photography subjects. Cindy always has her camera with her, frequently stopping to photograph whatever catches her eye. Living on the Eastern Shore, shefi nds numerous opportunities to capture nature at its best. Some of her favorite shots include a lone blue heron, a majestic bald eagle sitting in a tree or an early-morning sunrise view.

Cindy is the winner of several fi rst place awards in photography from the Talbot County Fair, including a “Special Award” in 2007 for a photo of a monarch butterfl y. Her photos have been published in Shore Monthly magazine and “Cordova As We Remember” periodical, as well as on Cooperative Living magazine’s Facebook page.

Revenge!

by Helen Chappell

“The karma bus is slow,” my wise friend Annemarie says. “But it makes a lot of stops.”

It’s only human to want to get back at someone or someones who have done us wrong. And barely a week passes without some bit of nastiness happening. It can be a fleabite of rudeness ~ someone horning into a line in front of you ~ or monumentally awful ~ some madman dictator trying to smash your country and slaughtering millions of people ~ but the wrongs are out there.

And it’s a natural response to want to get back at whoever did you dirty.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

It takes a lot of strength and a lot of patience to wait for that karma bus, and not all of us are intelligent, patient or conniving enough to wait. So, we do stupid things.

It’s unfortunate that we live in an age where dueling is outlawed. Slapping your smarmy frenemy with a glove and telling them to meet you at dawn in Hoboken with pistols sounds like a satisfactory way to avenge your honor. (If I told you my theory on why Burr challenged Hamilton, it would make you blush even in this day and age.)

Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay.

Come on, God. With all due respect, we haven’t got all day here. Bill Billionaire embezzled all the money from the employee pension fund and absconded to Brazil, with whom we have no extradition treaty. While some of us can be reasonably sure there’s a warm chair in the Hitler Memorial Stadium skybox for him, that doesn’t refund our life’s savings. Plots like the one we’re hatching for him are the stuff Netflix scripts are crafted from.

As a kid, I was fulminating against some bit of bullying in school. My aunt, who partially raised me, listened and advised me not to think about trying to get even. “Just you wait,” she advised me. “They’ll hang themselves on their own rope, and all you’ll have to do is watch them dangle slowly, slowly in the wind.”

As time has passed ~ lots of time ~ all the things she told me, things I thought were dated and small town and provincial, have turned out to have a great deal of truth to them. That my bullies were gym girls who got in trouble over the rope climbing just adds to her prescience. I swore I’d get out of that school and accomplish something in the real world. I guess I did.

The best revenge is massive success.

Winter Items On Sale To Make Room For Spring!

410-822-6711 13 N. Harrison St., Easton www.ladedatoo.com

Remember Princess Diana’s revenge dress? It was black velvet, sexy, lowcut and off the shoulder with a raised hem. And she looked ravishing in it as she swept out of the limo in the light of a thousand popping flashbulbs.

It was around the time that Chuck had announced he wanted to be reunited with Camilla. It was a royally messy royal marriage. Usually, the old husband dumps the old wife for the hot young number. Much to most people’s surprise, the old husband was dumping the hot young thing for the frowsy old mistress. There’s a good reason King Chuck is known in some circles as

Men and Women Electrolysis Guinot Facials Permanent Makeup

123 N. Washington Street, Easton, MD 21601 410-310-7306

“Fog.” He is thick and wet.

But in that dress and in that moment, Diana had her revenge. She’d never looked hotter or more beautiful, and even after her tragic death, she’s still won that war.

Living well is the best revenge.

Of course, if the enemy kills your father and your brother and holds you hostage for years and years, your natural desire is to get even.

Take, for example, Vlad Tepes, AKA Dracul, “Little Dragon,” who somehow escaped his country’s enemy, the Turkish Empire, to rule Walachia, a territory in what is now Romania. Dracula, as he came to be known to us, took his revenge in ways so horrible I don’t want to type them. Be it publicity or truth, he was said to impale his enemies on stakes so he could watch them die slow, horrible deaths. He was immortalized ~ or, rather, the novelist Bram Stoker immortalized him ~ as a vampire. So, he achieved a kind of immortality that, if legend were true, he might have enjoyed.

The point of revenge is not in the completion but in the process.

One gets the feeling that Dracula would not be a lot of fun at parties.

Lest you think I’ve wandered too far off the marshy track, let me

remind you that a lot of us have Eastern Shore Alzheimer’s. Anyone who came here from away and underestimates our ability to forget anything but a grudge is in for it.

I personally know of several grudges that go back generations. Maybe so far back no one quite remembers what the original quarrel was about, but the vessel of wrath in which the anger, resentment and envy are stored is alive, housed in a velvet case, taken out every once in a while and polished to a fine sheen. And some foolish petty action is taken.

If revenge motivates you, go for it! But the main thing is to set your game in order.

When I was growing up, I often heard this story bandied about by the farmers and watermen who spent their evenings hanging around John Lewis’s store in Hudson. If I was quiet and invisible, I heard and saw quite a lot, and this is one of the stories of revenge I heard.

There were two brothers who were always competing with each other. Apparently, the older brother always did slightly better than the younger. Had a better house, a bigger boat, married the girl they both liked, had a bigger catch, you name it.

Now, from what I could gather, the younger brother was a shade lazier and, like a lot of losers, was prone to blame everyone else for his failings. We all know someone like that.

So, it came about one summer

that the older brother would find, from time to time, the live box he’d been keeping filled overboard next to his boat would be empty when he came to work in the morning. Not so much as a peeler left in there. At first, he thought maybe he wasn’t fastening it correctly and all his crabs were escaping. But after it happened three times, he knew someone was stealing from him.

Now, stealing from someone’s live box is one of the lowest crimes you can commit on the water. Worst is stealing the whole live box, but that’s hard to do, since everyone knows everyone else’s box.

So, the older brother decided he’d sleep aboard his boat and see who was stealing from him. He really thought it was a couple of bad teenagers, and he meant to give them hell and let their parents deal with it, because that was going to be worse than anything he could do.

So, in the middle of the night, he hears someone fooling with the box next to his boat, and he pulls out his shotgun, meaning to scare the kids.

Only it’s not the kids. It’s his younger brother, caught red-handed with two or three bushels of crabs.

The way I heard it, there wasn’t a jury in the county that would convict a man for shooting someone in Don’t mess with Big Jimmy!

the dark for stealing from his live box.

But big brother had a better idea.

The way I heard it, the whole waterfront was in stitches that morning when they came to work in the dark and found the little brother all locked up in the live box.

I heard the little brother moved to West Virginia after that, because he’d never live down his crime around here. We moved after that, and I went away college. I know I never saw him again. But many years later, in literature class, I learned the definition of the word schadenfreude, which is possibly the best form of revenge.

Helen Chappell is the creator of the Sam and Hollis mystery series and the Oysterback stories, as well as The Chesapeake Book of the Dead. Under her pen names, Rebecca Baldwin and Caroline Brooks, she has published a number of historical novels.