by Homer Hickam
“God dug us a little hole,” Krebs said, smiling.
“Wait until dark before we rise again?” Max asked.
“Yes,” Krebs said. “We will slink into Brest in darkness.” Our tails between our legs, he added to himself.
During every one of the U-560’s previous arrivals at base, there had been great ceremony with brass bands, an admiral or two, even movie actresses to greet them. Now, in the inky blackness of midnight, the submarine and its crew were greeted only by silence. Every man aboard was grateful for it. They wanted no attention, nothing to attract night-flying English aircraft their way.
Krebs and Max stood beleaguered on the tower. The Mosquito attack had resulted in the loss of a big section of wooden decking. The eighty-eight millimeter gun was still aboard only by virtue of its base plate, which was exposed, but its barrel was twisted into a surreal angle. For six hours, the Royal Air Force had pummeled the U-560 in that little hole only Krebs had known about, but the boat had survived until darkness or low fuel had sent the aircraft away. Fifteen extra meters of seawater. That was all that had kept the U-boat crew alive.
A watchman with a dim flashlight waved them past the concrete dock and into a submarine pen. Thirty-one relieved breaths were released by the crew when the reinforced-concrete roof slid overhead. “Engines off,” Krebs commanded, then grasped Max’s shoulder as the boat was tied up. “Go home, Max,” he said. “Kiss your wife for me.”
Max felt a surge of gratitude, but then his natural caution returned. “You are sure you will be all right, sir? Will you see to your knee?”
“I will turn myself over to the doctors the very first chance I get. More importantly,” he said, raising his voice so every man could hear, “I intend to get drunk and screw every whore in Brest!”
“And the overhaul, sir?”
“That is the overhaul!”
The crew of the U-560 suddenly realized they were alive and were going to stay that way for at least another month. They laughed and slapped one another on the back, their hearty voices echoing through the huge concrete cavern, playing back and forth. All together, it sounded to Max like a pack of howling wolves.
9
Just south of the lighthouse was a natural slip carved by a long-forgotten hurricane, and this was where Josh anchored the Maudie Jane. He paddled himself ashore in the raft to keep his shoes dry, but the Maudie Janes, save Bosun Phimble, were more straightforward, wading in to shore for a pickup game of straight base. Before he’d gone very far, Josh heard the sharp crack of a bat on a baseball and then the hoots of his boys. He turned and saw Jimmy, his white tub cap flying off his head as he ran for the base, which was actually a bent driftwood stick. Millie was scrambling for the ball in a sand flat lined with saw grass. Marvin, barking, was chasing Millie. That was one thing about Killakeet boys. Give them an idle minute and they could find something fun to do.
The lighthouse seemed to rise up out of the sand to greet Josh as he walked toward it. Beside it was a grassy field with a curved path that led to the Keeper’s House and Josh followed it, each step recalling a memory. He went inside, entering through the kitchen, the linoleum on the floor glistening from a recent mopping. He called out a hello but there was no response, no Morehead City fancy girl to answer sleepy-voiced from Keeper Jack’s upstairs bedroom. All Josh heard was the steady ticktock of the grandfather’s clock in the parlor. The Keeper was in the tower at this hour, polishing the lens. Josh had come to see his father, to discuss the “this or that” he had requested, but first Josh wanted a moment alone in the house. He’d not had one since his return from the Bering Sea.
What Josh most wanted to see was the room his mother had called her art palace. Before she died, her beach-glass and shell jewelry had become popular on the North Carolina mainland, tourists snapping it up. Josh had shown an example of her work, a necklace, to a captain’s wife in Anchorage. The woman, a Mrs. Fletcher, who was from a wealthy Seattle family and knew her jewelry well, said it was the finest manifestation of sea art she had ever seen. She also told Josh she would be more than glad to give him $20 for it or, her eyes batting, anything else Josh might ask of her. He had not sold her the necklace, nor asked for anything from Mrs. Fletcher, though she chose to give what she wanted to him, in any case. As a result, Captain Fletcher had threatened to have Josh assigned for life to the one-man weather station on Polar Bear Island. Captain Falcon had interceded by sending Josh off on a mission, one that had nearly gotten him and Bosun Phimble killed, as most of Falcon’s missions usually did. In the end, Josh had given his mother’s necklace to Naanni. She was buried still wearing it.
Josh looked over the driftwood on the shelves, and the shells and the beach glass stored in cigar boxes. Here was a box marked moonshells written in his mother’s distinctive looping cursive, and there was one marked cockles and there another titled sand dollars. There were dozens of the boxes holding about every kind of shell that might be found on a Killakeet beach.
A box marked This and That was on her worktable. Josh opened the box and saw, as he very well knew, that it held multicolored beach glass. He remembered how he’d caught Jacob that last morning playing with a spilled box of the weathered glass shards. Josh took that box, marked Alexander Hamilton, down from a shelf and opened its lid, finding inside a dozen or so pieces of ruby-colored glass. He picked out a piece and held it up to the light. It seemed to glow, nearly as if it had an inner fire of its own. His mother had said that Rose of Sharon beach glass was rarer than diamonds. Maybe that was why he had fussed so at Jacob that morning when the little boy spilled the contents of the box. I wish I hadn’t been mean to you, he said in his heart.
Josh placed the box back where he’d found it and left the studio and walked through the house. It seemed unnaturally empty and Josh recalled that when his mother had been alive, it had been filled with cats. Over time, they had all grown old and died. The last of them had died while Josh was in college. Most of the cats were buried, unmarked, near his mother’s grave. The Keeper had seen to that.
Josh walked to the tower, thinking of the endless miles of brass and glass he had polished in it while growing up on the island. Even as a boy, he had known it was not just his father’s job to keep the light, but the responsibility of everyone in the family. Before the light had come to Killakeet, the Thurlows had been just another family of wreckers living off the cargoes of ships thrown up against Bar Shoals. Some said the Thurlows were a little greedier than average and had even gone so far as to lure ships into the shoals by tying a light to one of the wild ponies and walking it back and forth on the beach as if it were a ship gliding by in safe waters. Whatever the truth, the Thurlow family, like more than a few Outer Bankers at the time, were considered a low and mean bunch who were not above slitting the throat of a wrecked sailor. It was said that when a Thurlow baby was born, the sheriff on the North Carolina coast requested the child’s name so he could draw up a wanted poster and save him the time of doing it later.
But when the Lighthouse Service came to Killakeet, the Thurlows were found to be squatting on the land that was placed best for the light. To acquire the property, the service offered the family the job to keep the light, and so it was that Josiah Thurlow became the first keeper. Since then, there had been two more Thurlow keepers, Keeper Jeremiah, Josiah’s son, and then Jeremiah’s son, Keeper Jack. It appeared, however, that the line of succession was ending. Josh had made no secret of the fact that he would not replace Keeper Jack. When asked why not, he would shrug and say, “I like the feel of a deck beneath my feet,” and leave it at that. Although his explanation was truth, there was a greater truth, as there nearly always is. The greater truth was that Josh was afraid of being all alone some fine day at the Keeper’s House, perhaps sitting in a rocker and waiting for the time to pass, and then he would see a little red boat go drifting by. He would know that he was insane then, or gone senile. Either way, he guessed it would kill him.
The interior of the lighthouse was co
ol and pleasant and smelled of wax and soap and paint and tar, a mixture of clean odors that told of ceaseless attention and care. The landing had been laid out in a checkerboard of alternating black and white blocks of marble. Josh recalled how much his mother had loved that marble landing and had often remarked on its simple and elegant design.
Josh climbed the winding iron steps until he reached the lantern room, and there he found his father standing on his tiptoes polishing the glass slabs that made up the great beehive-shaped Fresnel lens. Without looking at him, apparently recognizing his step echoing in the tower, the Keeper said, “Hello, Josh. A goodsome day for December, ain’t it?”
Without even thinking about it, Josh picked up a cloth and started to help polish the glass. “When December’s fair, January’s a bear,” he quoted the old saw.
The Keeper gave the lens he’d been working on another swirl of his cloth, then came over and inspected Josh’s work. “At least we got past hurricane season without catching one,” he said, fishing his glasses out of his pocket. Like all Killakeeters, he pronounced it “herrikin.” He peered closely, then gave an extra polish to Josh’s slat.
“Did I miss a spot?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why did you do it over?”
“Well, that’s a good question, Josh. I’ve invested most of my life taking care of this lens. Sometimes I think it won’t shine at all unless I personally polish every square inch of it every day. It’s just an old man’s conceit. I haven’t gone begomered, not yet.”
“I guess your Morehead City girls would tell you if you were,” Josh said, and then wished he hadn’t.
Keeper Jack smiled. “Don’t be jealous of them girls, Josh. They’re sweet, most of ’em, and they’re good company.” He peered at his son with a puckish expression. “You ought to go with me sometime, pick one of ’em up for yourself.”
Josh shook his head. “I got my fill of that kind of girl in Ketchikan.”
Keeper Jack laughed. “Another difference between us, Josh, my boy. I’ll never get tired of women of any stripe, even the kind that likes a few dollars for her favors.” He regarded Josh for a moment. “I know what you’re thinking. Me having those women here is disrespectful of your mama. If she were alive, Josh, I’d not have them, nor want them. But she’s not. She’s gone and I have to keep living.”
“I wasn’t judging you, Daddy,” Josh replied, though he was.
Keeper Jack shrugged and nodded toward the lens. “Fresnel was a Frenchman, you know, lived in Napoleon’s time, but the little tyrant hated him, mainly because Fresnel was a true genius, not some trumped-up short man after glory. I looked him up just recent. You know what he said? ‘All the compliments I ever got didn’t give me half the pleasure as the discovery of a truth.’ ” Keeper Jack squinted, as if looking at something far away. “Truth, Josh, that’s what this lens is all about. It takes the light, all scattered, and focuses it into a single beam, the way the events of our life, all strewn about, turn into solid truth if we look at them in a certain way. But most people, you and me included, are afraid of the truth so we just let things stay scattered in our mind.”
“I plead guilty,” Josh said.
The Keeper gathered up his cloths and secured them in a small, battered tin box. He put on his Lighthouse Service jacket and squared away his cap with the lighthouse crest in silver with gold leaves around it. The Lighthouse Service had been absorbed by the Coast Guard three years before, but Keeper Jack kept to the old uniform, as did most of the old keepers along the coast, who considered the end of their service a foolish decision by the Roosevelt administration. The Coast Guard was not much enamored with big brick towers operated by families. They favored tall, ugly steel structures topped by automated lights.
“I had a drink with Dosie Crossan the other night,” Josh said, to alter the subject. “She’s a bit crazy.”
Keeper Jack smiled. “Smitten already? That’ll make Queenie and the other ladies happy. I hear tell they’d like to see you take Dosie as a wife.”
Josh’s expression indicated his surprise at the news, which amused the Keeper. “The ladies think you need a wife, Josh. Dosie is their candidate.”
“Does she know that?”
“Why would she know? How could the ladies do their work if the young couple they were putting together knew what they were up to?” He chuckled. “Let them have their fun. You might enjoy it.”
Talking about a wife put Josh in a bit of a sweat. He decided to change gears. “I need your advice, Daddy.”
“As long as it’s not about romance. I don’t know a thing about it.”
“How about war?”
The Keeper’s expression turned grave. “That I know even less about, but go ahead.”
“If German U-boats come over here like last time,” Josh posed, “my boys ain’t ready to fight them. So I’m thinking about getting some depth charges, and some machine gun ammo, and training them. I suspect their folks won’t like it, though. The boys signed up for rescue duty, not to go to war.”
Keeper Jack went outside on the parapet and Josh followed, careful to put his hand on his cap to keep it from blowing away. As many times as Josh had seen it, the view was still magnificent. The Atlantic stretched forever beneath them, wild and free. “There’s been war along these banks since Blackbeard the Pirate,” the Keeper said, lifting his voice above the wind. “But we Killakeeters try not to get involved. We’re fishermen or we keep the light by rescuing them what’s in trouble. We don’t fight.”
“Times change,” Josh said.
The Keeper nodded. “Yes, they do, more’s the pity of it. But you asked for my advice and you got it.”
The Keeper pulled a railroad watch from his coat pocket, checked it, then went back into the lantern room and headed down the staircase. Josh supposed his father would keep to his routine even if Blackbeard himself showed up to talk over the events of the day. Next on his schedule was to check the kerosene level in the storage shed. At the landing, the Keeper abruptly stopped and said, “Josh, you’ve had your this or that with me and now I’ll have my this or that with you. My this is this. Pretty soon, I want you to transfer off the Maudie Jane to the lighthouse.” He held up his hand. “I know. You think you don’t want the job. But, Josh, I’m an old man. I don’t know how many years I’ve got left in me. No, I didn’t get Doc to write that letter. That was his idea and I regret it, but it happened and that’s that. Maybe it’s Providence as much as Doc what got you here. You’re a hero, Josh, for all that you did on the Bering Sea Patrol. I think the service would let you transfer if you put in your papers. That’s the one good thing about the Coast Guard eating up the Lighthouse Service. So why don’t you? If not for me, for the family tradition.”
Josh shook his head. “I just can’t, Daddy.”
“Oh, you can do anything you want,” Keeper Jack said. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
His father’s insistent tone got under Josh’s skin. “Maybe I just don’t want to do the same thing over and over again, day after day,” he said and, of course, instantly regretted it.
The Keeper’s expression darkened. “There’s a comfort with routine, Josh, especially if it results in something good.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
Keeper Jack found his smile. “Josh, let me ask you something. What do you think of me? Who am I to you?”
Josh gave it some thought. “Well, you’re Daddy.”
“Yes, but how do you think of me? Mean, angry, stupid, what?”
Josh buckled down to thinking through his father’s question, though he didn’t much like it. He didn’t think a son should go around thinking about his father that way. “Well,” he said at last, “you’re sure not stupid. You’re smart, I guess because you read so much. And you’re stern, meticulous, I might say, and your focus is always on the details.”
Keeper Jack laughed. “That’s because of all that brass and
glass I made you polish when you were a boy. But I ain’t stern at all, Josh, not most of the time. I’m actually a very silly man, all told. When I play poker with the old surfmen, you should hear me tell a story. Why, they laugh to beat the band. I told Pump Padgett the other day when he was going on about seeing a shearwater that I liked seabirds, too, especially young gulls from Morehead City! Got more than a few groans out of that one. And your mother knew how silly I could be. Why, Josh, right here on this very floor”—he stamped the black-and-white marble squares—“I took her in my arms one time and started singing and we danced all around and she and me just a-laughing. I can still remember the tune: ‘Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care.’ Oh, how she could toss her head back and laugh and laugh when I was at my silliest.”
“I guess I never saw you as silly,” Josh confessed.
“No, Josh, I guess not. How about you? Are you ever silly?”
After a moment of recollection, Josh said, “When I was with Dosie Crossan the other evening, I think I was silly.”
“I should have liked to have been a fly on the wall. Maybe the ladies are right. That girl’s the one for you.”
Josh kept quiet. He wasn’t yet willing to admit such a thing might be possible.
“Well, if you won’t do anything else I ask, here’s a small, easy thing,” the Keeper went on. “I’ve decided to celebrate the light come January nineteenth. The lighthouse will be fifty years old on that very day. I plan on having some big doings, food and drink for the whole island. Catch me a big tuna or two out on the Stream, won’t you? And come to the party and stand up with me as a Thurlow of the Light and by God, have some fun! Dance, sing, cut a rug, be silly with that girl!”
“Did you think this up all by yourself?” Josh wondered.
The Keeper chuckled and led Josh outside the lighthouse onto the grass. “Actually, it was Queenie O’Neal’s idea. Never saw a woman who liked a party more. She’s even invited your boss, Captain Potts, from Morehead City to share the evening with us. She has it all planned out that we’ll get up on a stage and say speeches, the whole shebang. Though where she’ll get the wood for a stage, I don’t know. Probably somebody will wreck some lumber for her.”