Diann Ducharme

by The Outer Banks House (v5)

  I ran over to them as fast as I could in a wet dress, my damp hair tangled down my back. The man with the vest was lying facedown in the sand, totally exhausted. His back labored up and down as he sucked the air into his lungs, coughing and spitting.

  But the other man, who was lying faceup, stared at the rain clouds, his eyes like marbles. There was no sign of life in his pallid face. I screamed to the crowd of people for help and tried to drag him to a safer spot up the beach, but he was too heavy for me.

  At last some of the men came running down the beach to us. One of them—a black man with a vest over his flapping rags—pulled the sailor by the arms away from the surf and started pumping on his chest. I watched him in awe, never having seen a black man try to save a white man’s life before.

  The man who had tried to rescue the sailor from the wreck was moaning a bit, and struggling to push himself into a sitting position. Pebbles of sand stuck to his forehead, and his blond hair was plastered to his skull. Yet his blue eyes shone through the gray light.

  I hardly recognized him, without the usual grime all over him. He was as slickly clean as a shell in the sand, and so handsome, in his bravery, that I had to remind myself to breathe.

  Ben smiled faintly to see me standing over him, but he was still breathing hard through his mouth and couldn’t speak. I walked around the back of him and hooked my arms under his and helped him to his feet. I unfolded the blanket I had brought and wrapped it around his shivering body. We stood close while I clasped the blanket at his neck. We looked at each other, but his eyes were hard to read, in the chaos.

  “I shouldn’t even be here,” I said. “I’m useless.”

  He shook his head slowly. Then he rasped, “You carried a blanket.” He swayed on his feet like a drunk, his hair streaming ocean water down the rough wool.

  Then Ben looked to the man working over the petrified body of the sailor. Ben’s white face was so filled with sadness that I started to cry. Hot tears mixed with the rain on my face, but I didn’t make a sound.

  The man must have tried to work the water out of the sailor’s lungs for a quarter of an hour, until Ben stepped over and stopped the tired arms from pushing.

  “Jacob, it’s all day with him. Best cease and desist.”

  The crowd had gathered around us now, watching the persistent efforts. The Banker women clicked their tongues and whispered prayers into the wind and finally walked away, slowly, back to their homes on the sound side.

  Eliza Dickens came running toward the beach, screaming Ben’s name in the whipping wind. She stopped to question a few of the retreating women, then came tearing down the sand to us, strands of wet hair lashing her panicked face.

  I said quickly, “Come tomorrow, Ben. We can finish the book.”

  Ben’s eyes closed, as if he had half a mind to sleep on his feet. The book was likely the last thing on his mind now.

  Eliza didn’t even look at me as she ran past. With a little owl screech, she ran right up to Ben and hugged him desperately, kissed his blue, trembling lips and heavy eyelids with rapid little pecks.

  I turned my head and made for the cottage, where I could see my family, tiny blurs on the porch. As I stumbled up the shore, I heard Eliza scold, “I told you not to try to save no more folks from the sea, now, didn’t I? You nearly drowned the last time, you recall that?”

  I remembered the time Daddy had referred to Ben as “a local hero.” Now that unlikely description made sense. Ben and his black friend Jacob were two of the handful of people here who cared enough to risk their lives to save those poor souls drowning in the ocean, yet he never said a word about that to me.

  No wonder Robinson Crusoe upset him so much. It wasn’t about power over another, out here. It was about respect for the island, a simple love of mankind. Just doing what was right. The realization hit me like the force of the wind.

  A few folks, mostly hotel guests, stayed nearby, lingering in death’s aftermath like surviving soldiers, happy to be alive but wondering what else was in store for them.

  Later in the evening, after saying a prayer for the sailor who had succumbed to death so close to our own cottage, we ate a somber, and still cold, meal.

  Then I volunteered to check on the horses, since Justus, who normally tended to the animals, seemed to have other plans for himself. He was superstitious about storms, apparently. He had been cowering in a corner of the kitchen all day, his arms wrapped tightly about his long legs, flatly refusing to move a muscle until the wind stopped whistling.

  While everyone readied themselves for an early night, I pulled the hood of a walking cape over my head and strode through the soggy sand to the small wooden stable.

  The night seemed bruised and tender, recovering from the storm’s beating. The air felt fleshy against my skin, darkly alive.

  Mungo and Clementine the cow were restless, knocking back and forth in their stalls. Their hides were damp, and their food was almost gone. I fed and watered them and crooned to them until they relaxed their necks and snorted peacefully.

  Then I walked down to check on the Banker pony. She stood quite still and looked at me calmly over the top of her gate. She didn’t look disturbed in the least. She must have weathered similar storms in her wild life on the Outer Banks.

  But something was definitely bothering her. She hadn’t eaten any of the oats that had been put in the stall. In fact, she hadn’t eaten much of the food that Justus had given her since we’d purchased her over two weeks ago. As I examined her in the darkness, I could see her ribs swimming beneath her nappy red coat.

  I hugged her neck to my face and whispered, “You’re as finicky as Mama. The other horses like oats just fine.”

  She brushed her nose firmly into my cold hand, sniffing the remnants of the meal I had just eaten. I tied a rope around her stout neck and reached around to push the door open. Then we both stepped out into the night.

  She strode through the wet sand and soon found what I knew she was wanting—a hearty growth of soggy saltmeadow hay. She feasted as if she had been dying for food. I knew then that it would be hard for her to break the habit of this hay. She would always yearn for it, no matter what was put in her stall.

  The horse finally got her fill of the salty hay, so she turned to go back north. But as we neared the stable, I untied the rope around her neck.

  “Run along, girl.” I smacked her hindquarters firmly.

  She snuffed at my hands one more time and then left me. I watched her meander up the beach until I couldn’t see her anymore. The darkness swallowed her up, but I knew she was out there somewhere, feeling her way back home amid the shredded strands.

  Scraping the sand off my boots at the cottage, I realized that I had never given her a name.

  The next day I spent deep in my reading, trying hard not to think about Ben, and whether he would come for his lesson. The supplies were in their places on the table, the pages of Robinson Crusoe occasionally ruffling in the ocean breeze. Even Winnie kept poking her head out the window, pretending to be looking at the waves, still rough from the storm.

  But the afternoon came and went without him. I was on the verge of hysterical tears, trying to read through the same page of Moby-Dick that I had been stuck on for hours, when an insistent rap on the western screen door startled me.

  Hannah answered the door, and a few seconds later came to find me on the porch, her eyes dancing. “There a young man here to see you, Miz Abigail. Says he’s Jacob. He say he got a message for you from Mr. Benjamin.”

  I jumped off the rocking chair and tried not to outright run around the porch to the other side of the cottage. And there stood the man who had tried to save the sailor’s life the day before. He was Ben’s good friend, I knew. He was looking up at the house and running his hand over the wooden porch rails.

  When he saw me he took his hand off the rails, briefly flashing a rough ivory palm. He didn’t smile.

  “Ben sent me to tell you he won’t be coming to get his learning
today.” He donned his cap and turned to leave.

  My stomach in a knot, I blurted, “Wait. Please, Jacob. Did he give a reason for his absence? Did he seem … angry?”

  “He nursing a bad cough, sound like he gonna bring up a bird’s nest. But no, he ain’t angry. Just dead tired is all.”

  “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  “I do. He say he like it here.” He paused for a few seconds, trying to hide a wry smile by looking at his feet. “Even though the house is mighty unlikely.”

  Encouraged by his frankness, I moved a couple steps closer to him. “Ben said our house was strange?”

  He snorted a bit. “Well, it ain’t the most natural sight in the world.”

  As I looked at him shuffling under me, I became conscious of my higher ground. I walked down the steps to stand next to him, eye to eye. And I felt like it was the first time that I had really looked at a black man.

  I could see that Jacob’s skin was very black, from his time in the sun. His features melded well together, and taking in his face was as refreshing as gazing out the open window of my cottage bedroom for the first time. There was nothing in the way of unsullied appreciation.

  “What do you think of it?” I asked.

  He looked at the house in front of him and shrugged. “I used to think it the devil’s house, when I first sees it. Gave me the heebie-jeebies. But I reckon I’m getting used to it. Folks can get used to just about any sight, they sees it long enough.”

  I scanned the flat terrain, dotted here and there with locals still scouring the beach for remnants of the shipwreck. Earlier in the day a barrel of wine and several drowned chickens had washed ashore. “Everyone must think we’re simple-minded. And maybe we are. I’m not sure anymore, myself.”

  He laughed, showing spaces between his teeth. “This here house has been the talk this summer, no doubt. I try to weave it into most every yarn I tell. Most everybody took bets on when the ocean would take her.”

  For some reason I pictured that rude woman at the market keeping track of the Bankers’ bets, cackling hopefully about the house’s demise.

  “Oh my Lord! That’s terrible! I hope you all lost money after yesterday’s storm. The cottage weathered it well, I think.”

  He snorted. “Don’t mean a circumstance to us, one bitty storm like that was. We’ll think what we’re gonna think. We’ll wait for September, October to come ’round, and then we’ll think on it some more.”

  I nodded. Bankers knew more than we did about many things, I thought. “Tell Ben that he can come back here any time he wants to. Tell him that I’ll be waiting.”

  He looked me in the eye for just a second and then wagged his head slightly up and down. He strolled a few paces, then turned around and came back.

  “Ben may look strong and talk the talk and all. But he’s soft under that browned-up skin o’ his. He’s a simple man. He’s not cut out for all”—he stopped and surveyed the cottage one last time—“this here.”

  Then he walked off for good, his legs moving so fast he was almost running. I had the feeling that he couldn’t get away from the cottage fast enough.

  Hannah appeared at the screen door with a broom in her hands. “He seem like a real nice man, that Jacob. Ooooh, and strong, too. Those arms, just like sweet hams! What he like, Miz Abigail?”

  I tried to focus on Jacob for lovesick Hannah, but I could see only Ben’s face in my mind. I rubbed my hands over my arms gently and said so softly I could hardly hear myself, “I like him very much.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Benjamin Whimble

  July 22, 1868

  How infinitely good that Providence is which has provided, in its government of mankind, such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the dangers which surround him!

  —ROBINSON CRUSOE

  I WAS FRYING UP SOME FLATBREAD AND EGGS OVER THE COOK FIRE WHEN Pap came out of the crooked outhouse, still half asleep. Pap’s black Labrador, Duffy, followed along, sniffing ’round the fire for some forgotten tidbits.

  I gave Pap a tin cup of well water and a plate of food and sat down on the ground with him to breakfast.

  The light through the thick stands of pine and oak trees was mostly silver shadows. It was so early, the sun hadn’t even poked over the horizon yet.

  After a few bites of the hot food, I attempted the talk that I had been dreading for days. “Pap, I got some news. You might think on it as bad news, but try to look on it as something good for us, bring us regular money.”

  He couldn’t look me in the eye. He shook his fork in the air. “You going to work that construction site in Hatteras, I reckon,” he muttered.

  I nodded, then blurted in a rush, “Yessir, I aim to venture down there come September, see how it goes. ’Course, it might be a big ol’ waste of time, and I’ll likely mosey on back again. But then again it might be a real good thing. I could make enough for you to retire, rest yourself for a change. And until then, I got Jacob all set to come over and help you out. You won’t even miss me.”

  He blew out a whistle of air and shook his head. I got up, my heart scrabbling like a crab in a pot, and walked over to the bucket to wash my plate and skillet.

  “So you gonna leave your old man, just like that. What you think I can do on my own, son?”

  And here I thought he’d be proud of me, getting a paying job like that, even though I didn’t get it on my own accord. With one letter, Mister Sinclair had somehow fixed it all, like he said he would. He told me Mister Stetson had agreed to take me on as a crew worker without so much as a face-to-face. I’d be pouring sweat for a good long while to come, but still, I was right dumbfounded at Mister Sinclair’s letter-penning skills.

  ’Course, Pap would never know all that business, if I could help it. He’d likely kill Mister Sinclair with his bare hands for messing with his livelihood.

  “Listen, Pap, we both know you can’t fish forever. You get tireder by the day—heck, by the hour. I got a job that can support us both. You can finally rest, lay abed! Sounds good enough to me!”

  “I thought I raised you up better ’n that, you ungrateful boy. But I see I failed you in your sense of fam’ly. Your ma must be wreaking some kind of pandemony in heaven, to hear you talk so to me.”

  Duffy heard his agitation and came to lie down next to him. Pap sat rubbing her ears and muttering under his breath, “First he starts learning his letters … hobnobbing with town folk, thinking better of himself … Now he’s gonna leave his old pap, Duff.”

  He brought his head up quick and said right loud, “Well, here it is—if I can’t fish, I’ll die. How’s that? I’ll lay around this old shack some poor sample of a man, and die dreaming of the water, his own flesh and blood having left him for a godless gov’ment job, no less. Just like every other young man out here, thinks he’s gonna make something of himself. What they don’t know. Suck out their souls, more like it.”

  Duffy barked at me, two short, angry yips. “Pap, I have to do this, for both of us. Now, you’ll be fine. Jacob’s a good man, and a hard worker. I don’t want you to kill yourself off over this.”

  I looked to our house, a one-room cabin made of lopsided pieces of broken wood, washed ashore from some hapless ship. The roof—if you could rightly call it that—leaked in about a hundred places when the littlest drop of rain came. We slumbered on pieces of old ticking stuffed with seaweed, and owned just a few burnt-up pots and pans, left over from Ma’s long days of working over a cook fire.

  It was hard to admit, since we worked so damned hard every day, but we barely scraped by, never knowing what the winds of fortune were going to bring. It was a tough life, and I wanted something better. And not even my pap was going to keep me from trying to raise myself up.

&n
bsp; “Pap, I aim to start this coming autumn.”

  It just about killed me how quiet Pap was on the boat. I kept trying to make conversation about this and that, but he’d have none of it. Just sat slouched over, smoking on his pipe, and made me stake all the nets, even though my arms still felt like stewed dumplings in sauce. The sun came out awful hot, too, so that the back of my neck burned fierce and my whole body turned to runny clabber by the afternoon.

  To make the time pass, I thought on Abby, and how I was to see her again, after that bad turn of events the other day. How Jacob had told me what Abby had said yesterday, that she’d “be waiting on me.” I made him repeat what she had said, word for exact word, ’til his eyes rolled back in his head. I featured those words written in gold writing on a piece of Abby’s nice paper, they sounded so good to me.

  I had been kicking myself for letting my temper get the best of me that day we argued, and it gave me no end of grief during my fitful recuperation on my flimsy pallet. Her flinty green eyes and red hair came a-blowing into my dreams full of tall waves and drowning folks reaching for the sky.

  It wasn’t like me to get so angry, ’specially not at a lady like Abby. There was just something about her that got my blood pumping. I wanted to make her sit up and think. I wanted her to know that she was pure iron underneath that puffed-up outer layer of hers.

  She didn’t see it yet. To me, she always looked like she wanted to say more than she ended up saying. Like the truth of her was still inside her, bursting to get out. I just knew she was something special, a pearl in a oyster.

  And when I finally got to her cottage later in the day, I saw her there at our learning spot on the porch, all alone and “waiting on me,” I reckoned. And I have to say, it felt real good to be back at that strange house again.

  “I thought you’d given up on me,” she said.

  Feeling giddy as a forgiven dog with his tail thumping low and his ears back, I fairly ran up the steps. “Well, I still got some learning to do, ain’t that right?”