Hatteras Light

by Philip Gerard

  Chief continued his music, slipping into a seventh chord, pleased by the sound of it. “You don’t have to get defensive with me, Jackie. I’m old enough to know what’s between you and him.”

  Everyone on the island had heard of Jack’s last fight with Malcolm, outside the schoolhouse. That time Jack didn’t get up, and the encircling crowd saw that never again would he be a match for Malcolm. Standing over Jack, his back to the sun, even Malcolm seemed surprised.

  What Jack wanted now was to escape the shadow, to command his own boat, to be a link in the great chain that held history in thrall.

  “I have seen your story a hundred times before. I have heard it told in far places, in the glottal tongue of pygmies and the nasal pout of viceroys. With and without vowels, in words you could not sound—”

  “And now it’s story time.”

  “No, Jackie,” Chief laughed, “I haven’t got any stories today. Try me tomorrow.” He put up the guitar.

  Jack finally raised his eyes. “Don’t stop playing. Not yet.”

  Chief went back to it, plucking the strings with his coffee-colored fingers, closing his eyes to hear the music better.

  “I’m glad you like it, Jackie. Music has charms, they tell me.”

  Jack finished whipping the ends and just listened to the music, something he rarely did, but Chief’s playing was hypnotic, his fingers spiderlike, weaving their intricate tunes. His hands were smallish and articulate, what the islanders called talking hands. He could turn a card or chord a guitar like no man.

  “These are strange times,” Chief said. “You can hear it on the night wind, in the way the cows talk to one another at the milking. Malcolm will need your strength.”

  Jack understood weakness, but he had no use for it, especially in himself. Somehow, he could never quite shake the conviction that it was his own fault for not growing as big as Malcolm. As a very little boy, he had wanted nothing so much as to be just like Malcolm. As a man, he had not changed so very much.

  “You just keep playing,” Jack said.

  2

  CHIEF LORD’S HERITAGE was almost as much a mystery as his standing with the Life-Saving Service. As late as the War of the Rebellion, the keeper of the Hatteras Light had been dismissed for employing Negro assistants—slaves—whom he could trust to maintain the station while he went about the loftier duties of lighting the lamp each night and keeping the log.

  But Chief Lord’s parents had not been slaves, that much was certain. He hailed from San Salvador. His accent was refined, his wit celebrated, his stories full of bawdy, outrageous lies that even Patch Patchett recognized as such but never objected to.

  He told a yarn, for example, of his mother the queen and her timely exile under guard of scarlet-suited soldiers to a mountain retreat, where the lizards grew as big as dogs and tiny men roasted and ate one another when game was scarce. He boasted of sailing swift, rake-masted schooners through American blockades to Cuba and the Philippines, delivering whiskey, guns, and women; of whoring on remote Alaskan islands with white women who cursed in Russian; of making and squandering several fortunes in opium, gambling, and ivory.

  Once, on a wager, he showed the men on station how to fight with a sword, what he called fencing. Only he didn’t call it a sword, but an épée. His legs bowed as if spring-loaded, his arms whipped like willow wands, his mouth maintained a wide showman’s smile as he dodged and ducked, parried and thrust, shaved candlesticks and parted lines.

  He claimed familiarity with the language of animals, and it was true that dogs and cats, horses and goats were always showing up in his vicinity, making bold, uncharacteristic noises. His skin was so black he claimed to have been reared in hell, where he was done to a turn before being loosed full-grown upon a world of pirates, smugglers, and soldiers of fortune. He had been all of those and more, a man of many rough lives.

  Yet he could tell the age of cognac by its bouquet, the quality of a cigar by the rustling sound it made rolling between thumb and forefinger. His waist was narrow, his shoulders broad but not heavy, his face lean and handsome and beardless, though on his upper lip he wore the fashionable, thin moustache of a gentleman. His wife was a mulatto, though it was rumored she was not his wife at all but a captive taken in a raid on another shore. Either identity suited the islanders. She rarely spoke and almost never accompanied him in public. She kept his house on the Sound side, away from neighbors.

  Malcolm found him reliable and smart, tempered by a kind of racially-honed tact that kept him from seeming arrogant, most of the time. Malcolm, if he could have gotten away with it, would have elevated Chief Lord to First Assistant, but he knew in a dull way that it was possible the Bureau of Lighthouses and the Life-Saving Service didn’t even know Chief was a Negro, and to call attention to his service might bring a supervisor from Portsmouth and dismissal for them both. It was possible.

  Anyhow, Chief Lord lived in comparative comfort. Some said he was a bootlegger, others claimed he had cached a treasure of jewels and gold notes in that private house of his, still others that he had independent means available to him in the form of monthly bank draughts—blackmail? ransom? inheritance? It was well known that his woman made regular sorties into Hyde County on his business.

  He was a man, at any rate, who had made some kind of fortune from his adventures, and who traded on that fortune for a modest house on a quiet island and the company of men like Malcolm Royal.

  3

  THEY SURFACED with the lightship silhouetted between them and the island. Max Wien guessed the lightship was not armed. The big light on the beach swiveled like a searchlight, but it was too far off to discover the submarine. With a loudhailer, the captain raised the watch of the lightship. He handed it to Max.

  “You have three minutes to abandon ship,” he shouted. His English, though limited, was flawless, and he had practiced that line. It was one advantage of the travel he had done before the war, when he had studied briefly at Oxford and met a girl and learned to drink buckets of ale without losing his composure. “Three minutes,” he shouted again. The bosun mimicked him in Morse with the signal lamp, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding.

  He watched the lightship’s crew scramble into a boat and lower in a hurry, then make for shore, one of them shaking his fist. That would be the captain, Max thought. Max’s part in this was over.

  “We will not use a torpedo,” Stracken said with some pride, it seemed to Max. He winced as the deck gun boomed sharply. The radio mast on the lightship popped and fell, and the light quivered on its tree but did not extinguish. The next round went into the bridge, but there was no fire. Max thought the lightship crew were still awfully close to be shooting like this.

  The captain suddenly ordered, “Cease firing.” They had other prey. The wireless operator had picked up a schooner beating away fast to the west. Stracken chased her for half an hour on the surface but couldn’t get within sight of her. “She must be using her engines to help her make wind,” the captain said. “That’s what I would do. Let this be a lesson to you, Max: finish what you start.” They headed back to finish the lightship.

  A dozen men were halfway to shore in their lifeboat when U-55 returned for the kill.

  Bergen put two more rounds into her and she exploded and heeled over on her beam ends. The thick mast that held the light pendulated in a slow arc until it slapped into the water. Max imagined it hissed as it went out under the dark waves.

  Captain Stracken looked well pleased. The small boat bearing the ousted lightship crew was all but invisible now. The Diamond Shoals stayed afloat momentarily, then was gone. Max stood at the rail and stared, feeling his stomach turn over. He couldn’t help but think there was something dreadfully wrong about putting out even a tenuous light on such a treacherous shore.

  The captain said in German: “We have blinded the cyclops, now we hide with the goats.” They went to ground in the Wimble Shoals, on the map the northern facet of the diamond.

  4


  DOROTHY DANT WAITED at Oman’s Dock with Rufus.

  “Maybe they’re onto a good school,” Oman said, bringing out tea. “Maybe they’re onto a really big run. God knows, their luck hasn’t been much lately. Could be it’s changing. It’s about time.”

  “Could be,” she agreed. That’s the way it would go sometimes, if her father didn’t want to lose the fish. He would stay out all night and through the next day, all week sometimes, and run the Inlet with the old fat-waisted fisher ballasted with blues and mackerel.

  But he would not miss her birthday, he had promised. “Not if we net the whale that ate Jonah,” he had said.

  Oman had known Dorothy since she was a baby, had known her father all his life, and he had been her uncle Dennis Dant’s best friend. “Don’t fret, girl,” he said. “Your dad’s a man that don’t need looking after.”

  But the other boats were already in, all the ones that were coming in. She hailed some of the fishermen, but nobody had seen her father’s boat all day. One of them thought he had headed north, where the trouble was. The others had all shied away south, to the Ocracoke banks.

  Oman followed her to the end of the dock. “He can take care of himself, girl, he always has,” he said with a hand on her shoulder. She nodded, remembering her Uncle Dennis. He could handle himself, too. He always had.

  5

  ALVIN DANT SAW the flash far to the east of where his boat rode heavily on the swells, stalled. Just at the moment, he could have used spars and a sail. Brian was working on it now, but he held out little hope. It sounded to him like something was really wrong this time, like a piston had snapped or the block had cracked. He was not an optimist.

  He knew what the flash was and he could guess what it meant. He had seen a boat explode once from an unvented bilge. And he expected when he looked back that way after the flash the lightship would be gone, and it was.

  “Brian,” he said, reaching the rifle out of its case. “Come here, we have to get ready.”

  6

  “HERE COMES A LITTLE BOY in a sailor suit,” Cy Magillicutty said, and they all got a good laugh out of that. Lieutenant Halstead entered Cape Hatteras Station and introduced himself. He had run his cigar boat into the fishing pier above the Light and left his crew on board.

  “I’ve come to assume command,” he told them.

  “We’re surfmen,” Jack Royal said. “We don’t need no fancy pants telling us where to hang our oars.”

  Halstead reddened but recovered himself. “You’re Coast Guard, and in time of war the Coast Guard answers to the Navy, and that’s me. We are at war, gentlemen. You don’t have to like it.”

  “Where’s the news in that,” Malcolm said. Still, he had a sinking feeling this Halstead was right. “Plan One, Acknowledge”—the prearranged signal to establish a chain of command—had been broadcast to all the life-saving stations in April a year ago, but it had not meant anything until now.

  “Which one of you is John Royal?”

  “It’s Jack around here.” He stepped forward.

  “All right, Jack it is. Congratulations. You’re going to be my second officer. I’ll need a man who knows this coast.”

  Jack looked at Malcolm. “I can’t leave the station.”

  “Yes, you can,” Malcolm said. He knew orders when he heard them.

  Chief Lord was so quiet he seemed to be saying something.

  Jack set his shoulders and forced himself to take three deep breaths. At the third breath they all heard it except Halstead, booming out faintly above the sound of the breakers: cannon fire.

  They rushed to the crest of the dunes, from where the second boom and the muzzle flash were unmistakable even to Halstead.

  “Off by the lightship,” Malcolm said.

  “I’ll fetch Homer,” Chief said quietly. The other men were already beating it back to the boathouse for gear.

  “Wait a minute—I didn’t tell you to go out,” Halstead said to Malcolm.

  “We have to go out, whether you say so or not.” Malcolm strode back to the boathouse so fast that Halstead ran to keep up. He advanced on the crew as they trundled out the boat and slipped in the hitch. “Jack Royal!” he shouted, and Jack, after a moment of wondering whether to hit him, rubbed his hands together as if to warm them, and followed him. Keith, who had seen the whole thing, marveled that Halstead looked no older than the boys he knew at school. Malcolm’s crew heaved the boat into the foam, and Malcolm wondered how they would ever be able to rely on a man who couldn’t even hear cannon fire above the sound of the sea.

  7

  CAPTAIN WALTER BARNETT, late master of the lightship Diamond Shoals, brought his crew safely over the combers and then capsized them at the foot of the lighthouse, hard by the jetty. Losing the lightship left a bilious taste in his mouth, and when the lifeboat came for him he ignored it and rode his oar in. He had to: he didn’t know how to swim.

  8

  HAM FETTERMAN CLOSED his eyes and ran his hands over what he had created so far. Rough. He fished a piece of emery paper from his toolbox. He did not often use emery paper, but this one was just too rough, and he had a feeling this hull should be smooth and cold as stone.

  The hull shaped under his hand, and his fingers resisted the bulge of the tower. He set it on the windowsill and sat down again in his straight-backed spool chair. From his flannel shirt pocket he drew a burl pipe. This one had lasted years and had a thick cake that made for a cool, sweet smoke. He regarded the hull, such as it was. He stared at it and puffed, his eyes a fury of concentration, his old body rigid. He stared, trying to imagine it metal, not the soft island pine it really was. He tried to imagine it hollow, full of men, tried to imagine himself inside, and could not. It was just too big a leap. He could go no further till he did that.

  To Littlejohn’s surprise, Ham rose from the chair and left without a word, still smoking, the burl pipe clamped between his few good teeth. Littlejohn stood at the store window and watched Ham Fetterman cross the road and wander through the gap in the dunes toward the beach, where the old man had not walked in years.

  9

  VIRGINIA AND MARY ROYAL JOINED Dorothy at her house on the Hatteras Road. Virginias seven-year-old boy Kevin was there, along with Ham Fetterman, the Littlejohns, and old Seamus Royal. The young men were missing.

  Seamus had left his Krag wrapped in oilskin outside, so as not to alarm the ladies. The world was going crazy—he had seen it happen before. Like when the Yankees came and picked the island clean of food back in ’62.

  But this was worse, because there was no way of telling just what the threat was or how long it would last. When General Burnside’s army of twenty thousand had blundered ashore at the Bight of Hatteras and marched up and down the length of the island and the Union fleet had shelled the unimposing sand forts on the Inlet, you could see what you were up against. Seamus had been just a boy then, but he remembered those long columns of bullying, ravenous soldiers, and how his cousins had ferried him across the Sound in a bugeye in the dead of night to wait out the war in the Hyde County tidewater. That was the only time Seamus had left the island. When he returned, he saw how the Yankees had stripped it like ants: the freshwater cisterns were dry, and homes and buildings had been demolished for wood to fuel the Yankee steamer fleet.

  Fetterman, older by far, remembered the face of the only islander the Yankees had managed to kill with all their shelling and charging: a slow-witted deaf boy, shot in the back for failing to answer a sentry’s challenge.

  And now the government that had invaded them without cause or provocation during that old war had sent a puffed-up snippet in a toy boat. A Yankee. And once the Government came in, it generally took a lot of getting rid of.

  At first there wasn’t much talk. They ate from baskets the Royal wives had brought: chicken, pork, fresh-baked goods, cider and beer. Fetterman kept Rufus in scraps.

  “There’s a lot offish out there,” Littlejohn ventured.

  “It’s the right time of
year, all right,” Fetterman said. “It surely is the right time of year. The blues will be running any day now. Oman will make a bundle out of salt fish, what with the war on.”

  Kevin brooded through supper and then said: “I’d like to blow that Heinie submarine out of the water, kaboom!” And Dorothy finally cried, as she had been wanting to do ever since coming back from Oman’s. She knew her father’s luck as well as anyone.

  “He probably broke a net or something,” Mary said. “You mustn’t let your imagination carry you away.”

  Virginia poured tea. She thought it bad luck even to talk about it while the man was at sea, worse luck when their own men were going out so much. Better leave it to Providence and hope for the best.

  “I know how to stop it,” Fetterman said. The conviction had been growing in him since this afternoon when he’d walked the beach.

  “Don’t you dare say it,” Littlejohn warned. “Not yet.” Littlejohn limped over to Fetterman to back up his words with proximity. In ’89 Littlejohn had come ashore to Hatteras from the shipwrecked East India schooner John Shay. He had jumped from the aft rail onto the oaken bottom of a lifeboat which capsized anyway, thirty feet of free fall, and broke his leg for good.

  “Stand fast, Littlejohn,” Fetterman said. “I’ve lived through the War of the Rebellion and the Spanish War and the assassination of three presidents and the return of Halley’s Comet. I guess I can live through this.”

  Mary wanted to give Dorothy a diversion from this kind of talk. She knew about the sewing machine Alvin had bought for Dorothy, since Mary had helped pick it out of the catalogue, and now she brought it out of its hiding place in the closet. But the unveiling of it only brought on fresh tears from Dorothy, and pretty soon Mary and Virginia were sobbing right along with her. Mrs. Littlejohn did not cry, but her eyes were bright with remembered grief.

  Littlejohn and Fetterman escaped to the porch, arm in arm, where they smoked and talked of old wars.

  10

  MINUTES AFTER THE SURFBOAT had gone out, Lieutenant Halstead had his cigar boat under way with Jack Royal beside him at the helm.