Hatteras Light

by Philip Gerard

  “We’re going after him in this?” Jack was incredulous. The Sealion had none of the beamy balance of a surfboat—she was too long and narrow to be stable in rough water. Jack laced on a cork life-vest, knowing that if they ran into weather this boat would go down in one quick swamping.

  “Why don’t you call in a cutter? You don’t even have depth bombs. Aren’t you supposed to have depth bombs to chase a submarine?”

  “There are no cutters,” Halstead said. “Use your head. If we had cutters, do you think I’d be here? I’d still be in Beaufort listening to the radio.” And in the same breath: “Stand by torpedoes, stand by guns.” They ran without lights and made for the place the lightship was supposed to be, even though they already knew she wasn’t there. Halstead concentrated on what he would do in the next few minutes if they overtook the U-boat, and summoned all the confidence of his training. He assumed a martial bearing and offhandedly gave the helm over to Mr. Cross. He must make this all seem very routine to the men, else their fear get the best of them. Everything seemed very loud to Halstead just now. He tried to think about strategy, the tricks of maneuver, and drew a blank.

  “You’re out of your goddamned mind,” Jack said.

  “Four thousand yards and closing, Mister Halstead.”

  “Let’s hope the rotten thing is gone when we get there,” Jack said. “Otherwise we’re cooked.”

  “Don’t let’s get squeamish,” Halstead said above the noise of the engines, wondering why. He had never talked that way before, though he had heard somebody say exactly that in a London pub he’d visited once on a school trip. A man with no hands had bellied up to the bar and demanded a drink. At sight of his uncovered stumps, the barman, new on the job, had blanched. The man had smiled wickedly and said, “Lend a hand, then. Don’t let’s get squeamish,” and the pub had erupted in hoots and laughter. A favorite joke among the regulars.

  Jack ignored Halstead. If he ever really got started on this boy, he knew, he’d finish in a Portsmouth brig for good.

  Halstead glassed the sea with binoculars, scared to death he would spot something that required action. He saw only a lifeboat with a dozen men in it making for shore off the Light, too far away to help. He watched the flimsy boat ride a high wave and then broach to and dump its occupants into the surf near the jetty. His instinct was to avert his eyes, but he watched anyway, sure that in the next instant he’d see the men dashed to pulp against the rocks. But Malcolm’s surfboat played the jetty and plucked them out one by one, and the last rode an oar onto the beach. Halstead thought it a remarkable piece of seamanship.

  “We missed him, Captain,” Jack said.

  “Not Captain, just plain Mister.” At Halstead’s order, Cross throttled back, and the roar of the engines quieted a bit.

  “We still missed him.”

  “We’ll get him next time he shows his face.”

  “He’s probably watching us right now.”

  Halstead grinned stupidly, for something had just occurred to him. “He’ll have to come up to get us, Mister Royal. We draw too shallow to take a torpedo.”

  Jack realized he was right, the Heinie would have to come up to fight, and it irked him that Halstead had figured it out first.

  “Let’s head in, Horatio. We’re not doing any good out here—”

  Halstead turned on him in a fury. “Stop that! Just stop that! Do you hear, Mister Royal? You will please observe correct military protocol aboard my vessel, is that clear?”

  Jack Royal nodded, his face crimson to the neck. The crew were all watching, and he knew this was some kind of test for Halstead. Men like Halstead, he believed, were the reason the chain of history was straining to come undone all over the world. He read the papers enough to know that. But he said, “Yes sir.” And bit his lip to keep from saying more.

  By the time Halstead put in at the fishing pier again, it had begun to drizzle. Tomorrow he would start the men building a slip for the boat over by Buxton Woods, nearer the Light.

  Jack listened to the snap of whitecaps and heard a storm gathering power in the south, down in Bermuda maybe.

  This was not going to be as easy as Halstead had hoped. His uniform was drenched by the time he got to his tent, and he felt miserable. His mission here had gotten off to a bad start, the one thing he had promised himself he would prevent at all costs. He wanted to do this right, he believed in that. Writing reports by lantern light, he suddenly stopped, realizing his silhouette, feeling like a target.

  11

  MALCOLM HAD to put something in the log. Sometimes he figured the worst part of this whole submarine menace was the amount of writing it was causing him. He splayed his fingers as if stretching on gloves and gingerly took up his pen: Lightship Diamond Shoals lost to Gmn. gunfire today. Crew got off in lifeboat with no loss of life & we put to sea in time to assist in landing them. Our Light still burns.

  12

  MARY AND VIRGINIA ROYAL STAYED the night with Dorothy Dant. They did not expect their men home tonight anyway.

  1

  AT LITTLEJOHN’S STORE Patch Patchett pilfered a bottle of beer. “Put it on my tab,” he said.

  “The only tab you got is in your head,” Littlejohn said. Cy Magillicutty and Chief Lord laughed. Chief’s laughter was rolling, melodious, thorough. The beer was not for sale anyway. This was a dry county, and Littlejohn’s supply was bootleg that Patchy brought across from Hyde County on his erratic trips.

  Cy and Chief were in for tobacco, tea, and sundries for the station.

  “Peter and Pat Patchett,” Cy said, including Patchy’s wife. “Sounds like a little outboard that’s missing on one cylinder, don’t it?”

  They laughed some more and checked off provisions on the counter.

  “How’s that old bugeye coming along?” Chief Lord asked him. “Maybe you’ll be needing it some of these days.”

  “I ain’t needing it yet.”

  “You never know,” Cy said. “We had ourselves a lightship until about twenty-four hours ago. You just never know.”

  Patchy drank and swiped a sleeve across his mouth. “That lumber were mine. The Navy had no right to it, none at all.”

  “It belonged to the Government,” Littlejohn said.

  “Like hell.”

  “And the Government just took it back, that’s all.” “It was salvage. We got laws in this state.” “It weren’t ordinary salvage,” Cy said. “Don’t be acting like it was.”

  “All the same, it were mine. Didn’t I find it? Didn’t I guard it? Didn’t I report it? Didn’t I spend half a damn day hauling and stacking it? And for what? Government. Huh.”

  Chief Lord let loose with a raucous laugh. “Guarding it from whom, Patchy? It’s too enormous to carry off without a dray team and six or eight hired hands.”

  Patchy swigged his beer, morose. He didn’t mind this, though. It gave him something to talk about. People were listening to him now. He had spotted the U-boat, sent out the alarm about the freighter, found the lumber. He swigged his beer, feeling pretty good about himself. He wasn’t a bad sort. He was capable of things. He would have to get that across to his wife somehow.

  Anyway, he had salted away enough stray planks to put a new wing on his house, if he felt like it. Or get Fetterman to help him build a new boat, something real and worthwhile for a change instead of another toy for Littlejohn’s shelf. He might just hold on to that lumber awhile, though. Every piece was stamped U.S. Government, like somebody would steal it. That little nonesuch Halstead would probably want every stick of it back, if he knew, never mind that he couldn’t use all the lumber he already had. It was piled up around his little encampment in ramparts.

  Cyrus and Chief lingered awhile to play checkers, and Patchy spent the morning watching them play, his fingers twitching with their moves, his brain one step behind their decisions.

  At eleven, Seamus Royal came in carrying his rifle and the game stopped. There were half a dozen men around.

  “And what’s all
this? Don’t be bringing that howitzer in here, Seamus,” Littlejohn said.

  Seamus ignored him, as was his wont. He was seventy years old and could do as he damn well pleased. “I’ll just be needing some things,” he said.

  But that wasn’t why he had come, and Littlejohn knew it. He was after news.

  Fetterman had been lounging against the counter, keeping track of the checker game. Now he resumed his place in his carving chair, a tall, straight-backed spool chair of scarred oak. He had spent years in that chair, and no one else ever sat in it, whether Fetterman was present or not. Sometimes he tested his knives on the wood of the chair, leaving scars that would darken like old wounds. The arms were rubbed shiny from his sleeves. The floor at his feet was stippled with match burns and tobacco stains.

  “Alvin Dant is two days gone,” Patchett said. “Doesn’t that bother anybody? Poor Dorothy—”

  “You’ve got God’s own eyes, but your brain is a potato,” Fetterman said. Dorothy Dant had just come in, Rufus at her heels.

  Fetterman settled deeper into his throne. Patchy produced an old filthy pipe with a cracked bowl and fussed with it.

  Dorothy didn’t appear to want anything special. She came in looking self-conscious and pretended to inspect some shirts.

  Leaning on his cane, Littlejohn went over to her. “I have some tea brewing in the back, if you’re interested.”

  “Yes. I could use a cup of tea.”

  “Pick out a breakfast roll to go with it, Dot.”

  MacSween arrived to fetch Chief and Cyrus. The place was filling up, as for a meeting. Outside were half a dozen horses and democrat wagons. Rufus took up his post by the door to look after them.

  Dorothy sipped the yeopon tea and took delicate bites from the roll. Nobody spoke. Littlejohn drank coffee. MacSween stared at Seamus’s rifle, but did not touch it. Patchett smoked, and his pipe kept going out. Cy Magillicutty and Chief Lord leaned on the counter. Mrs. Littlejohn appeared like a ghost and started to say something, then thought the better of it. Whatever she left unsaid hung in the air along with the recurrent snap of Patchett’s matches.

  Finally Dorothy said, almost whispering, “Mister Littlejohn, is there anything you can do?”

  And yes, they all had their ideas about that.

  2

  MARY ROYAL HAD long ago dreamed of being an artist.

  As a girl, she discovered watercolors and, though she could hardly afford the materials, set about learning how to paint. She built an easel from scrapwood and collected all sorts of paper. She never painted seascapes, and that’s how Keith Royal knew she was an artist. Away at college he had remembered her often and, to his own shame, pitied her for marrying his brother. It seemed to him a fatal compromise.

  Malcolm was over at the station now, and Mary said, “Virginia and Kevin will be along soon.”

  Keith was trying out one of Malcolm’s well-smoked pipes. He had tried a pipe at college, but hadn’t had the patience for it. Here there seemed to be more time for such things.

  He couldn’t keep it lit, though, and opted for a cigarette.

  Mary was drinking tea, feeling guilty about having done nothing all day but laze about. She and Malcolm did not keep cows or goats or pigs, as many of the islanders did, nor did she have a garden to tend. His double duty as Keeper and surfman gave them a comfortable living. Even with a crisis on, she was at a loss as to what to do.

  Keith was pacing. “Malcolm wants me to join up. Jack, too, I guess. Now they’re shorthanded.”

  “Never mind what they want. We have enough professional saviors in the family already, don’t you think?”

  “I wish Dad would lose that damn gun.”

  “That’s two of us. Sorry you came back?”

  Keith shrugged. Maybe the reason he had come back had nothing to do with Mary or Malcolm or any of them. In the city, at college, he had grown tired of debating, tired of issues. There were no good answers now, not even history offered any good answers. Men all over the world were shrugging off a thousand years of civilization and culture. The killing had become so much its own excuse it was scarcely remarkable anymore.

  Dozens of his college chums had enlisted in the first flush of patriotism after the declaration of war, and plenty of them would never be heard from again.

  He had hoped that on this island, of all places, he would be free of decision. He would abdicate the responsibility he had already felt for being a student of history.

  Mary said, “They’ll come back, won’t they? Uncle Alvin and Brian?”

  “There’s no reason to suppose they won’t. It’s just …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  Mary looked at his pale, boyish face with its downy moustache, so unlike Malcolm’s sunburned, bearded, rugged face. Without meaning to, she took his hand in her own and petted it.

  3

  DOROTHY DANT WENT to the Navy.

  “I have my orders,” Lieutenant Halstead said. “We are after a submarine. Rescuing people doesn’t enter into it.” Halstead stood on the dune as on the poop deck of a sailing ship, sidearm at his belt, directing his men as they worked. They were building a slip for the boat in the bight, in the back eddies from the offshore meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current. And they were close to the Light now, as well. This was much better than the fishing pier, with the advantage of protection from the waves if not from weather.

  “You must try to understand, Captain.”

  “Please, I’m only a lieutenant, ma’am.”

  “My father’s been out there three days. Someone has to go out after him.”

  “Fishermen have been lost before. They always find their way home.”

  Dorothy was impatient, but she knew this boy was lost on the island. If she could offer friendship, he might come around.

  “Look, you have to go out on patrol. All I’m saying is to keep an eye out for them. What would it hurt?”

  The word hit Halstead square in the eye. Of course they would have to patrol. There was no real precedent for this sort of detail, but it made sense to be out on the water once in a while. They couldn’t just wait around for the German to show his face.

  Halstead looked at Dorothy Dant for a moment, trying to figure out how old she was, then decided it didn’t matter how old she was. She was in trouble, and he could help.

  “I’ll think it over,” he said. “But I’ll need some information about the boat, his course, you know, that stuff. Would you have supper with me later and sort of brief me?”

  Lieutenant Halstead was a man who could find her father and brother. Of course she would. “I’m not in the habit of dining in a tent, Lieutenant. I suggest you meet me at my home. It’s not far.”

  Later, while Dorothy waited for Halstead, Rufus sat inside the screen door, raising his muzzle to sniff the air. From time to time he whined, but she didn’t hear him above the rattle of the sewing machine.

  4

  THEY SURFACED before sundown, which Max Wien thought fairly risky. But he was glad for the air. He accompanied the captain to the tower, and Bergen scurried out to his place behind the deck gun.

  It was a glorious time of day. Orange clouds swept in over the sea. The sky was all movement and deep color, churning toward darkness.

  Max tried to remember what Germany was like. He had been wondering all day whether Papenburg had been invaded. Probably it had been. They had had no news for weeks now, and that was bad.

  He could imagine the mud and wreckage of the war in the cobbled streets of his hometown. Some last-ditch street-fighting, men dodging about in the rubble of houses broken by artillery, bodies here and there—old men and boys, the last ones left—and dead horses still hitched in teams to their wagons. The winding street up the arbored hill where his father’s house had stood now barricaded by the foreign army, the birches stripped and splintered by shellfire.

  He didn’t know if any of that were true, but it felt like it.

&n
bsp; They were close to the island and running parallel to shore. There was the lighthouse, the life-saving station, cottages, a village of sorts. Poor, Max thought, not much at all. They were near enough to see the white horse stabled in a corral adjoining the boathouse. Max couldn’t imagine what a horse was doing there. He marveled as the beast reared up on two legs and pawed the air.

  Captain Stracken spotted the telephone lines almost at once on this pass. He had assumed that a place this remote would be without communication. He cursed and stared through the glasses.

  Bergen fired on command, and a few seconds later a pole cracked in half, dragging down tangled lines. A mast shot. Below, the crew heard the news and cheered. Bergen fired three times more, one shot landing dangerously close to the life-saving station. God help us if we hit that, Max thought. He was not a faithful Catholic, but he crossed himself anyway.

  Stracken and the first officer counted it a successful action. They cruised the surface and fired at telephone lines as far south as they dared to go. Then they turned north to the hunting.

  5

  ALVIN DANT KNEW they must be very far out by now. The Gulf Stream had pushed him north into the Labrador Current, and that had started him east, toward Europe. It was an awesome thought, to cross the ocean on a fishing boat.

  At least the weather was fair, and they had plenty of provisions, barring accident.

  The two of them had the engine stripped. It lay in disorder about the deck. Alvin’s premonition about his luck had proved accurate: the engine had thrown a piston and cracked the head. The boat was too large to row, and they had no means of raising a sail. Alvin had checked the engine only yesterday, up to his elbows in grease.

  “We had better stow this and secure for weather,” he told his son. Fear balled in his stomach. But Brian seemed calm, even complacent, bored with the adventure.

  Brian, a naturally hard worker, methodically cleared the deck of engine parts and stowed them below. He covered the engine bay and made an inspection of the deck before joining his father in the wheelhouse.

  “I wish we could be fishing, Dad.”