Hatteras Light

by Philip Gerard

  He had not seen Papenburg for a very long time.

  Earlier they had surfaced off what the charts had declared to be an uninhabited island, Cape Lookout, nothing but sand dunes and a lighthouse. As usual whenever they surfaced in a safe zone, the crewmen were permitted, two by two, to go to the tower for five minutes of fresh air. The air in the submarine got overloaded with carbon dioxide when they ran submerged, and it made the men easily tired. Also it made them stink a damp, rotting stink.

  Max stood his turn like all the others, and it took all the willpower he could muster to force himself back down the hatch to the stink of confinement. He thought himself a prisoner now, after seven patrols, and held no real hope of ever leaving this vessel. This captain, Stracken, whom he had met at a cabaret on leave from his last boat, had told Max he reminded him of his son. Captain Stracken had arranged a transfer for him to U-55, one of the largest class of unterseeboot, a transatlantic submarine cruiser with forward torpedo tubes and 9.5-inch deck cannons fore and aft. Before the war it had made experimental commercial voyages, carrying jewelry, gold, bonds, and scientific instruments between Germany and South America in the stormless undersea. It carried fuel enough for fifty days’ sailing, and had lately rendezvoused with a supply convoy on a moonless night in an untrafficked latitude in the mid-Atlantic.

  The captain had adopted Max as a kind of valet. Stracken was an old hand, master of a merchantman before the war, who had never really abandoned the notion of a cabin boy, though Max’s official title was surgeon’s assistant. He lanced boils, dispensed liniments and vitamin pills, but his real job was to keep Stracken company.

  The captain had no son: Max had figured it all along.

  While Max stood on the tower, dolphins played around the boat. He stared in wonder till his turn was up. When he went below he heard one of the deck cannons thumping overhead, but it was just Bergen testing the range against the sand. Someone said there was a man on the island, but that was impossible.

  Max had heard they were losing the war, and the news made no impression on him. It had been going on so long—ever since he had been a man—that it all ran together. He had no family anymore; that was why he had enlisted in the U-boat Service in the first place. He listened to the engines.

  They steamed the surface all day, recharging their batteries, and Max was called to the tower as they overtook a lightship. It was the Diamond Shoals, recognizable by the black and white diamond pattern of its paint. The captain laughed when he discovered his mistake. “Hatteras,” he said, stubbing a finger onto the waterproof map. They had had a stormy crossing and had made landfall farther north than they had intended. Like the Plymouth Pilgrims, he thought, for he knew his history. Captain Stracken took new bearings by the lightship, then U-55 steamed north toward the smoke of a cargo vessel.

  At sundown, they took the freighter by hammering her with the deck guns at the waterline. Torpedoes were precious—they must conserve them. She didn’t burn long, settled by the bow and sank in a matter of a few minutes. There wasn’t much activity on deck, for most of the crew were caught in their hammocks. She never even got her boats off.

  “We will hide in the shoals,” Stracken said.

  Behind him Hatteras Light burned, and the lightship Diamond Shoals rode at station somewhere in the gathering fog. Max Wien went below and felt the world closing in around him, stifling him, and he couldn’t get his breath for a long time.

  6

  HAM FETTERMAN carved by lamplight in Littlejohn’s store on the Kinnakeet Road long after it was closed up for the night. He was allowed. Sixteen of his ships lined the shelves in back of the counter. He was Littlejohn’s pride, master of all the sailing ships of the imagination.

  His hands worked all by themselves, shaping the soft wood by feel. He built like a shipbuilder, not a modeler: laid a keel and then proportioned all the rest. He could manufacture to flawless scale all the fittings and brightwork, all the shrouds, stays, halyards, canvas, capstans, binnacles, whaleboats, lifeboats, transoms, hatch covers, cannon, crowsnests, crosstrees, gangways, companionways, coamings, dodgers, cockpits, wheels, even the ship’s bell.

  He held this new one in his hand, stroking it like a cat with the other. It was ugly, all right, but even ugly things must be built well. It had the hump of a whale and the belly of a shark, and there was no complicated rigging.

  He worked it some more with the ivory-handled rigging knife. Whalebone, scrimshawed with a tableau of men in boats after a right whale, souvenir from the Charles W. Morgan. Fetterman had watched Teddy Roosevelt’s ship pass off the Light in 1898, twenty good years ago, carrying home the remnants of his fevered troops. Fetterman had been old even then. It had been night, and he had seen only the ship’s lights, but there were Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders steaming back from that other war.

  Ham Fetterman reached for his fifth bottle of beer and wondered what was the use of getting old if nothing new was ever going to happen to you.

  7

  KEITH ROYAL, Malcolm’s youngest brother, was living in the Keeper’s house adjacent to the station with Malcolm and his wife Mary. Malcolm, ten years Keith’s senior, had married late: he was slow getting around to things like that. His bride was closer in age to Keith.

  Mary Royal was born a Dant and raised on the island. Half a dozen times she and her sister Virginia had been south to Morehead City to visit cousins, and twice Mary had gone alone to Savannah. She had thick raven hair and worried over her figure, as most of the island women did not, she knew. Malcolm was a man of moment on the island, and she carried herself accordingly.

  In the kitchen, his back to her, Malcolm was packing a lunch pail and a vacuum bottle of coffee. His shirt fitted him like a sail at the back, and Mary always loved how big he was even though it scared her. It was like living at the foot of a mountain, and when he came to her in the night she often held her breath, as much from fear as from fascination.

  “You’re going?” she said. “You just came down from the tower.”

  “Seems like I ought to be over there, you know. Just in case.” He had a way of wrinkling his eyes above his beard so that just a shard of blue showed out from under each brow. It made him look gentle.

  “I wish you wouldn’t. You don’t have to.” It was an old argument. The other members of the crew lived in enforced celibacy, permitted to spend one night at home after every nine-day tour, though of course there was plenty of day leave during the quiet times. Malcolm, who could go home whenever he pleased, had always felt self-conscious about his privilege, Mary knew, and was reluctant to take advantage of it.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. She wasn’t a small woman, but next to him she looked like a child. “If anything happens, I want to be there. It wouldn’t do not to be there.”

  Keith came in from the beach, where he had been walking. “You want company?”

  “I’ll have plenty of that. You stay here and be company for Mary. I guess I can handle a few Germans, all right. If anything happens, I’ll telephone.” Malcolm never used the telephone.

  “I’ll sleep light, Malcolm,” Keith said.

  “You do that, boy.”

  Malcolm went out. It was beginning to drizzle. There would be no real storm, and in the fog the U-boat would be as harmless as a wet match. Still …

  Overhead he could see the Light, circling through the thickening fog. He nodded to it, pulled down the brim of his cap. They would be sounding the fog signal all night.

  8

  “I’M GLAD YOU CAME BACK,” Mary said. She and Keith were drinking coffee and playing cribbage, a game he had learned up north at college. All the young men played it at Harvard; it was the thing. He would teach her poker one of these nights when he knew her better.

  “You don’t mean you missed me,” he said. “I was just a kid when I left.” Even he laughed at that. He had been gone just about three years, one year short of a degree in history. He hadn’t come back even once in all that time, and Malcolm had take
n it hard.

  Jack had confronted him when he got back. “What right?” he had demanded. “What right?” But that was Jack. Malcolm was the brother he loved. Jack was too hard on people, on everybody, on himself. That was why Malcolm was Keeper.

  “Sure, we all missed you. Malcolm used to talk about you for hours on end,” Mary said. “He would read your letters—he couldn’t understand how you could write so much. You were all we talked about that first year.”

  She was still getting over the baby, Keith thought. She had miscarried in April, last month, and he had come down immediately upon receipt of Malcolm’s first letter in three years. He couldn’t say honesdy that the letter had anything to do with his impetuous homecoming, but he knew well enough that Malcolm was a man who needed a child.

  “Malcolm wants me to join the crew. He says they’re short-handed.” One of the Trent boys had gone off to Canada to be a flyer in the war. Keith just didn’t know. Joining the crew would be a promise to stay. No one was sure if he would stay, least of all Keith, who had left school in midterm.

  “He needs you, all right, but not like that.”

  “He says to take my time, think on it. That’s what he said.”

  “Malcolm thinks everybody has time. Tell me, what made you come home all of a sudden? I know the obvious answer, but that can’t be all there is to it.”

  “I don’t know exactly. I guess it was time.” That was the only honest explanation he had: it was like a bell had sounded in his brain signalling time was up.

  “Malcolm should have written sooner then,” she said, “or I should have. But I didn’t really know you.” Mary, knew him now, though, through his letters. He had made conversation possible in her house.

  “It wasn’t that,” he said.

  He moved her pin in the pegboard and sipped coffee, a luxury since the start of the war. Most of the islanders were back to drinking yeopon tea, a bitter, stimulating brew, but Malcolm, with typical providence, had laid in a stock when he saw the shortage coming. Outside, the drizzle went on. Keith looked past Mary, out the window. There are things out there, he thought.

  9

  AT DAWN, Malcolm Royal rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and made his entry into the life-saving station logbook in a coarse hand: “The sea, she hid from us all night.”

  10

  PATRICIA PATCHETT, old Fetterman’s granddaughter, was irked at her husband. “Peter, you should be doing useful work, man’s work. The Hermes needs paint, this shack is falling down around our ears, your kids run around like ragamuffins, and you spend your time sucking up suds and conjuring submarines. I swear I don’t know what to do with you.”

  Patchy meditated on Stede Bonnet, the gentleman pirate of the capes who had turned to plunder on the high seas to get away from a nagging wife. He wondered if he would ever have the gumption to go a-pirating.

  She was right about the Hermes, a beamy Jonesport lobster boat that Patchy ran to and from the mainland, ferrying supplies by contract for Littlejohn and any others that required goods. He ran on his own schedule, an eccentric one heavily dependent on his mood. But it needed an engine more than it needed paint. Trust a woman, he thought, to worry over the appearance of a thing.

  “I’ll see about the boat today, don’t you fret, woman,” he said.

  Just now, Hermes was berthed at Oman’s Dock a dozen miles south in Hatteras Village. He understood from Oman that he could get replacement parts for overhauling the engine on credit, but he had not been down lately to check. This morning was as good a time as any. It would get him out of the house. He loved his wife as well as any man, he supposed, but sometimes she just made too much noise.

  “Before you go running off to gossip with Oman, there’s some loose boards on the shed. Practice on them.”

  I know what I’d like to practice on, he thought, gripping the hammer. He dug out a sack of nails and went to work on the shed at the back of the house. He had been meaning to do it for weeks, but he enjoyed the adventure of beachcombing so much he often talked himself out of his chores, especially in this fine weather. You never knew what you might find. It could change your life, all at once, just like that.

  “When you get to the village, I’ll be needing some things.”

  “Go to Littlejohn’s.”

  “That man’s a pirate. Besides, he doesn’t have what I’m wanting.”

  She didn’t want to run into old Fetterman, he thought, that was all.

  Patchy hadn’t had the nerve to go down to the beach since yesterday afternoon, but suddenly he wasn’t in the mood for errands. He drove home the last nail and shook the side of the shed half-heartedly to test for stability, then left the hammer where it fell and trotted across the road and over the dunes.

  11

  PATCH PATCHETT was amazed at what the storm had left: piles of lumber, still cabled together in great bales. Enough to build a house, a mansion, enough for fences, sheds, porches, a new boat. He danced about in front of the great blond bales landing like barges on the beach of Buxton. He was a wealthy man now, he shouted and didn’t care who heard. He hopped from foot to foot, clapping his hands jubilantly, hooting his thanks to the god of storms. When Cy Magillicutty came by on beach patrol, Patchy claimed all the lumber officially by right of salvage.

  “Mine,” he said, “all mine!” His head swam with the realization that he was the new economic power on the island.

  Cyrus shook his head. “We’ll see. You guard it while I report to Malcolm.” And he went away in a hurry.

  Then Patchy remembered: there had been no storm. The body of the first man he found washing in the surf was blackened, as if by fire.

  1

  AT OMAN’S DOCK, Alvin Dant, Virginia and Mary Royal’s uncle, smoked a long pipe and watched the fog. It was early, and in an hour or so the fog would blow clean away, he knew.

  Alvin and his son Brian were ready to shove off. It was only twenty-five miles out into the Gulf Stream, and the fishing would be good in this weather. It was almost always good, except during the worst storms, though sailing into the stream could be a tricky business. Not so long ago Alvin’s brother Dennis had disappeared with a good boat in fair weather not twelve miles off the Light, and nothing ever came ashore from the wreck. Alvin had the caution of a family man.

  Alvin’s daughter, Dorothy, would be twenty-one tomorrow, and they planned a celebration. He thought he had done well raising her to womanhood without a wife. She looked nothing like Brian: she was a petite brunette, like her mother had been, while the boy was tall, lanky, and blond. Dennis had looked that way in his youth.

  Alvin had ordered a Singer sewing machine for Dorothy all the way from Norfolk, knowing it would be the last thing she would expect. It had cost him dear, but it was what she really wanted so she could make some decent clothes for herself, and he felt she was entitled to a few good things. He knew little enough about what a young woman needed.

  He fixed his pipe and stepped aboard while Brian cast off the bow and stern lines. He turned her over. The engine sounded good this morning, strong.

  Oman advanced down the catwalk. “Al, have you heard the news? There’s dangerous water out there.” He gave the details, which were sketchy, an elaboration of Patchy’s minor adventure. “If I was you, I’d be staying with the fleet.”

  Alvin Dant nodded from the wheelhouse. “I hear you, Frank. But the fish are neutral, they tell me.”

  “Keep an eye skinned, all the same.”

  Alvin Dant waved, then steered his boat away from the dock and throttled for open water.

  2

  WHEN HE SPOTTED Patch Patchett windmilling over the dunes and heading for the station with Cy Magillicutty’s rocket flare marking a smoky roostertail in the sky behind him, Malcolm Royal knew he had been too quick in entering the log. The man runs with his hands flapping like wings, he thought.

  Patchy burst through the door. “Malcolm!” he wheezed. “You have to come see—”

  “A ship?”r />
  Patchy nodded and gulped air. Cy Magillicutty came in. “Now how did you get here so fast?” he said to Patchy.

  “Must be something special,” Chief Lord said. Jack Royal was on his feet and throwing open the door of the carriage house while the others gripped the tongue of the boatcarriage at the handles and rolled it outside. Chief Lord brought the horse, Homer, from the corral and with MacSween’s help harnessed him. In two minutes they were in the surf, pulling over the combers.

  “Pull, boys, pull!” Malcolm said. There was lumber all over the surf now. He sat in the stern and handled the steering oar. Cy Magillicutty crouched in the bow with a boathook to ward off flotsam.

  “Malcolm,” Chief Lord said quietly, “we won’t find them. If it happened that far out that we couldn’t see it, we won’t find them now.”

  “Pull,” Malcolm said. Chief was right, of course, but they had to make sure. There was always the ghost of a chance.

  “The bastards,” Jack said, “the sneaking bastards.”

  “Pull,” Malcolm yelled. “For the love of God, pull!”

  3

  OF A CREW OF THIRTY-SEVEN, they recovered only three, all of them on the beach. Littlejohn supervised the burials, as was customary, and Malcolm notified the authorities at Portsmouth by wireless.

  Malcolm stared at the sheet a long time before he wrote anything down. He dipped the pen in the inkwell and, under the date, wrote in a painful and barely legible hand: Put to sea at 0730 & searched five hours. Rescued not a soul. We shall be busy from now on. And signed it, M. Royal, Keeper, Cape Hatteras Station, recalling an old line of his father’s: And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.

  4

  DOROTHY DANT WAS alone in the house. She had been up before sunrise to fix breakfast for Brian and her father, then had gone back to bed. She slept late, and when she woke just lay in bed for a full, delicious half hour, savoring the fact of her impending birthday, stretching and squirming luxuriously, feeling sexy and vigorous and ripe. Her birthday was always a lucky time, and this time her luck had delivered Keith Royal home to her. Something would be decided tomorrow, she felt sure. She would see to it.