The Keeper's Son

by Homer Hickam

  The submarine turned away before the charges went off, huge sheets of turquoise lightning flashing beneath the sea. Then it swerved back into the Maudie Jane’s wake.

  Josh saw Preacher go down. Josh dragged him to the galley hatch, yelled at someone to take him, then dodged inside the wheelhouse. “We can’t outrun it, Skipper,” Phimble called over his shoulder. Phimble cranked the wheel over to put the patrol boat into another wild turn.

  “The Beaufort fishermen, Eureka,” Josh said. “The Loggerhead went aground near here.”

  Phimble understood. He slammed the wheel hard over to starboard, then bent forward to catch sight of the Killakeet Light through a shattered portal. The wheelhouse suddenly erupted in another storm of glass and splinters as the U-boat gunners found their range again. Josh snarled as something hit his back. Stobs went down on the deck, holding his hands over his head. Phimble, the backs of his hands bleeding, kept the patrol boat speeding ahead. The pounding of the machine gun bullets into the deck and the hull was tearing the boat apart.

  Phimble studied the dark sea until he saw a hint of luminescence in the water. The U-boat came alongside, then slammed into the Maudie Jane’s bow. Phimble threw the wheel hard over and tore away, slashing within a few yards of the swirl of white water. The U-boat followed, plunging across the swirl.

  The machine gun on the U-boat abruptly stopped firing. Josh crawled out of the wheelhouse and looked aft. The flares were receding. The U-boat had turned nearly sideways and was leaning over, as if a giant hand had reached up and snatched it. It had struck the same shoal as the Loggerhead.

  Millie and the other boys climbed to their feet in the galley and found that they were standing ankle-deep in water. Once went forward and threw open the hatch to the head. A flood of water hit him, spinning him down the corridor. He ran topside, where, dripping, he made his report as succinct to Mister Thurlow as possible: “Holy shit, sir! We’re sinking!”

  Josh ran below and forward, peering into the head where the planking was punched inward, sheets of seawater spewing through the cracks. “Get mattresses and start piling them in here,” he ordered.

  Once and several of the boys started pulling up mattresses from their bunks and rushing them forward. “Are we done for, sir?” Millie asked. He had Preacher stretched out on one of the tables.

  “Not by a long shot. How’s Preacher?”

  “Bullet in the gut.”

  A bucket line was organized to assist the bilge pumps. Phimble kept the throttles full ahead. “Try for Doakes, Skipper?”

  “No,” Josh said with an eye on the boys in the bucket line. They were young and strong but he knew the water was coming in faster than they could bail. “Head straight in. We’ll beach her.”

  Straight in it was, and straight in took them directly to the beach just south of the Crossan House. Dosie was just starting her patrol. “Look,” she said to Genie. “I do believe there’s the Maudie Jane.”

  The patrol boat plowed through the outer line of breakers and kept coming. It was an amazing sight to see, as if a crazed whale had decided to hurl itself out of the ocean. Genie started bucking at the sight. The Maudie Jane came on, flying through the waves until she struck the beach. Then, with a noise like a million fingernails dragged across a chalkboard, she shrieked across the sand, plowing a furrow until she bashed into a line of low sand dunes, a spray of sand sent flying as she climbed atop them, quivered for a moment, then subsided.

  Dosie calmed Genie down and rode to the boat. She saw heads begin to pop up from the deck. Josh crawled from the wheelhouse and pulled himself to his feet by clinging to a rail. “G’morning, Dosie,” he said, as if he’d just encountered her during a leisurely stroll.

  “Damn, Josh,” Dosie said, gasping. “What happened?”

  Josh looked around as if he needed to confirm his answer. “Well,” he said at last, “I guess you might say we’ve been wrecked.”

  46

  The Keeper sat in a hard-backed chair, a book balanced on his knee, and watched Harro asleep in Josh’s boyhood bed. He watched with an attentive expression, at once suspicious, yet concerned, as if the boy was nothing of what Willow claimed he was, and everything. Willow was sleeping downstairs on the couch before the cooling embers in the fireplace. Doc Folsom was gone; so was Rex, having borrowed Thunder to go into Whalebone City and bring back a party to bury Joe Johnston. Dosie had left on patrol.

  That the boy had a certain resemblance to Trudelle, there was little doubt. The set of his mouth, the cheekbones, the high forehead, all could be rearranged in the Keeper’s mind to form into his wife’s gentle and patient face. Yet, those same features might be formed in other ways, too. If this was Jacob, it was a vastly improbable coincidence, but then again, Keeper Jack had seen too many instances of such coincidences occurring, especially when it came to the sea giving up its secrets. Had not, after all, Mrs. Donley found her husband Brick in the marsh three weeks after he’d fallen from a fishing boat in the Stream? Had not a plank containing the shipping license of a freighter washed ashore at the lighthouse, a freighter that had been lost off Hatteras the year before and included six Killakeet boys aboard her? Had not, in every instance he could think, the sea and the island somehow eventually provided an answer to what had happened to those who went out and, for one reason or another, not returned?

  The Keeper allowed a sigh. What if there was never anything that could confirm or deny who the boy was? What if, instead, no proof at all ever came, one way or the other beyond Willow’s belief? What would happen then? Would Josh, who after the placement of Jacob’s headstone seemed to have finally come to terms with the tragedy, revert to his continuing torture? It had driven him away from Killakeet once. Likely, it would again, even if the war didn’t do it. It would have been best if you hadn’t come, the Keeper thought as he kept studying the boy.

  Yet . . . here he was. He was the right age and had the frame and the features of the young man Jacob might have grown into. He was an orphan without knowledge of his parents. And it was not outside the realm of possibility, after all, that Jacob might have been found on the Stream by men too kind to let him drown but selfish enough not to endanger themselves. And if that had happened, it was perfectly feasible that Jacob might have ended up in Germany and grown up to join that country’s navy. After all, men without family or money gravitated toward military service, no matter what country they lived in.

  A chain of circumstances, Keeper Jack considered, each one feasible, each linking to the other. If such links had been forged, then one could easily see the next link, that the German navy would bring the boy across the Atlantic, a natural occurrence considering the high probability of war that had existed between Germany and the United States ever since the Nazis had taken power. And even if there had not been war, might not the boy have eventually ended up as a merchant sailor? And any seaman who came to American waters would eventually sail the Stream that washed past Killakeet. If one could accept all the links, a case could be made that it was almost inevitable that, had he survived, Jacob would have returned as a young man just like Harro. The more the Keeper thought of it, the more his hopes rose that, indeed, his lost son slept before him.

  He had gone to Emerson, who always seemed to have an answer. He opened the old book and let his thick, calloused finger trace the message: A sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal powers, souls are now acting, enduring and daring, which can love us, and which we can love.

  This is a boy who needs love, Keeper Jack thought. And if he is Jacob, he shall have it. But if he is not, then perhaps he should have it as well.

  He closed the book, and inevitably the arguments in his mind started anew. No, this can not possibly be. This is hope gone wrong.

  Shaking his head, Keeper Jack placed the book on the floor and wearily rose from the hard-backed chair. He did not even have to take note of the dim light at the window to know dawn had come and it was time to climb the
tower and douse the light. He found Willow still asleep on the couch, the quilt that usually draped its back pulled around her. She was so pretty lying there, her face angelic in its sweetness. Certainly, Willow had taken to the boy upstairs. Maybe, he thought, this had all happened so that Willow would find the love she deserved.

  But that was not clear thinking. Harro was headed for a prison camp for the duration of the war, a place where he would be subjected to disease and privation. Once he was gone from the island, it was likely no one would ever hear from him again.

  Willow stirred beneath the quilt, then opened her eyes. “Keeper,” she said. “Is Jacob awake, too?”

  Keeper Jack sat on the coffee table beside the couch. “No. He was very tired from yesterday, you know. I think he may sleep for a while longer.”

  Willow stretched beneath the quilt embroidered with colorful whales and dolphins. Trudelle had sewn the quilt for the baby and Keeper Jack had kept it all these years. “Willow, may I ask you something?”

  “Yes, Keeper.”

  “Are you going to talk so easily now? All these years, you would not even look me in the eye when I spoke to you. And when you did speak, you spoke sort of . . . well, peculiar. You made sense but it was more as if you were talking to yourself than anyone around you.”

  “Was that wrong? No one ever told me that I was being bad.”

  “It wasn’t bad, dear girl. Just different.”

  “How should I talk?”

  “Well, honey, I guess any way you want. But it’s best to have a back-and-forth, like we’re having now. And it’s just nice if you look at the person you’re talking to. Do you understand? But you haven’t been bad at all.”

  “I guess I never wanted to talk much,” she said, “not after I couldn’t be with Jacob anymore. That made me mad and then I got in the habit of not saying anything except what I wanted to say when I wanted to say it.”

  The Keeper touched her cheek. “You are a remarkable girl, Willow.”

  “I love you, Keeper,” she said. “Everybody loves you.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he replied, but he was all but simpering at the compliment. “Why don’t you sleep some more? When”—he nodded toward the stairway—“when he comes awake, we’ll have breakfast together and talk some more.”

  She snuggled back beneath the quilt and in a moment was sound asleep. The Keeper envied her innocence, and her peaceful slumber, unmarred by doubts. He went on to the lighthouse and climbed the old iron steps with a heavy pace. At the top, he swung over the door to the lamp, then crouched behind it to turn the valve that pinched off the gas. The flame went out with a gasp. It always seemed to Keeper Jack that the light literally died each morning, such was the finality of that last, choked attempt to stay alive. Yet, at night, the flame jumped awake so exuberantly and with such familiarity, he often wondered if it was in fact the same flame, not a new one at all. It certainly looked the same, a golden orb, edged in a translucent and glimmering blue corona. Perhaps, he thought, it was the same for hopes that leap full-bursting to life when Providence allows the wheel of life to turn. Perhaps what he was feeling was not the birth of a new hope but the coming to life of an old one that had never truly died, a sublime hope, per Emerson, cheering ever his faithful heart with unending love.

  The Keeper went out on the parapet as he did each morning to see what he could see and, especially now, to clear his mind and ponder anew the nature of hope and love. It was there he spotted the Maudie Jane at tortured rest atop the line of sand hills just south of the Crossan House. At that astonishing sight, he forgot all else save to wonder in awful fear if perhaps he had not discovered a son, but had, in terrible fact, lost one.

  47

  The two U-boats edged near, then stopped. Small waves smacked the hulls, and the wind sighed through the wounds of torn steel. Krebs studied Vogel’s boat, trying to determine what had battered it. Bullet holes in the tower fairing were a clear indication of fighting a surface vessel, and a big scrape on its bow indicated a collision. “What happened to you?” he hailed across the gulf between the two boats.

  Vogel’s executive officer, Leutnant Sizner, returned the call. “We fought the American patrol boat last night,” he said.

  “Who won?”

  “We did.”

  “You sank it?”

  “It’s aground, thrown up on the beach.”

  Krebs surprised himself when he felt relieved to hear the patrol boat had survived. “Where’s Vogel?”

  “Asleep. He was exhausted after the battle.” Sizner was taken aside by one of his men for a moment, there were a few words exchanged, then he returned. “Kapitän Krebs, I am coming across to assume command of the U-560.”

  “Come ahead,” Krebs said.

  Max whispered, “Sir, you can not allow this.”

  “I have no choice.”

  “There is another way.”

  “There is no other way.” When Max started to say more, Krebs hushed him. “Don’t say it and don’t think it, either. One hanging is enough between us.”

  Sizner was paddled across in a raft, then clambered up on the tower. “You are relieved, sir,” he said to Krebs upon arrival.

  Krebs nodded. “What happened in your battle with the Americans?”

  Sizner, a lumpish sort of a man with a dense black beard, looked troubled. “We pretended we were you, actually,” he said after a moment of hesitation, as if he had to decide whether to lie or not. “We sent out a long signal so that the Americans could get a fix on where we were. We waited for them beside a wreck so they couldn’t detect us, then rose and attacked just before dawn.”

  “You didn’t use a torpedo?”

  Sizner looked sheepish. “Kapitän Vogel didn’t want to waste one. Lieutenant Schlake said he would take some men across on rafts and kill the crew. It turned into a bloody affair. Schlake was killed. I saw it, though I still scarcely believe it.” Sizner’s hand drifted to his throat, rubbing it. “One of the Americans, a big officer, nearly chopped off Schlake’s head with a tomahawk and then killed two others in what seemed an instant. Then the patrol boat ran and we chased it until we hit a sandbar. When we got off the bar, we went looking for the Americans and found them beached. We were leaking fuel so we headed into deeper water to make repairs.”

  “What other damage did you sustain?”

  “None structurally. However, we lost six men, including the lieutenant. Our tower machine gun was also thrown overboard when we hit the sandbar.”

  “My congratulations on your successful attack, Leutnant,” Krebs said dryly. “So what are your orders?”

  “Kapitän Vogel has decided to proceed with the operation on the island tonight,” Sizner said. “It is an opportune time with the patrol boat out of action.”

  Krebs nodded. “I will act in the capacity as your adviser, if that suits you. Max—you know my exec, yes?—Max will remain in his position as will the rest of my officers and subofficers.”

  Sizner stiffened. “I have been given no orders as to the disposition of your officers and men, sir, and I agree they will be left in place. However, I’m afraid you must go across to Kapitän Vogel’s boat and there remain for the duration of our operations.”

  Max said, “That is ridiculous. Trust me, Leutnant, you will want Kapitän Krebs’s advice.”

  “Nonsense, Max,” Krebs said lightly. “The Leutnant knows his business. Show him around the boat, what’s left of it, and let the fellows know he’s in command. I’ll get a few things and then go see Kapitän Vogel.”

  “He will not see you,” Sizner replied evenly. “You are to be put under arrest and secured in the aft torpedo room.”

  “I see,” Krebs said. “Well, I’ll try not to get in their way back there.”

  “I am grateful for your compliance, Kapitän,” Sizner said. “I will note it when I testify at your court-martial.”

  “And when I swing, you will even shed a tear for me, is that it, Leutnant?”

  Si
zner shrugged. “No, sir. I will be glad to see it. For treating with the enemy, you deserve to hang.”

  “Well, you’re an honest sort, I will give you that.”

  Sizner squared his cap in preparation to meet the crew. “And you, Kapitän Krebs, are a traitor, even though I have no doubt that you are still the best U-boat commander in the fleet. I will give you that.”

  48

  Preacher died that morning, to the relief of the Maudie Janes. It seemed to them that Preacher was a man who’d gone from telling the good news of heaven to take a turn in hell. They guessed there was a deep reason for that and they didn’t like to be around anyone that close to Providence, for good or evil.

  Their unease, however, did not keep each of them from doing his best for the man while he lay silently and indifferently dying on a sand hill gradually soaked with his gore. Each boy had made a solemn journey across the sand to where Preacher lay staring up at what had started as a crystal blue sky but was, as the day wore on, tending toward clouds. Preacher had his full length exposed, having kicked off the blanket each time it was put over him. His eyes were wide and staring and he held with one hand his bandaged guts and with the other a Bible that Dosie had brought to him, for pity’s sake, when no one else had thought of it. Each boy first covered with Preacher the weather, according to Killakeet custom, and then they told him what a good shipmate he was, and how they’d enjoyed his sermons, and they sure hoped he’d be back aboard the Maudie Jane real soon. Except for the weather, everything they said was a lie.

  But Preacher didn’t know the boys were telling him lies. He clutched Dosie’s Bible and heard their words, more or less, but they didn’t much register. His mind was elsewhere. It wasn’t death he saw coming so much as sleep, and that was his revelation, that death was sleep, and it might not be dreamless. He found the revelation somewhat useless because he had no great enthusiasm to live on after death, even as a dream. What he wanted was to get near God, to have just one moment—it need not last more than the blink of a gnat—so he could figure out who God was. Preacher didn’t much think he was going to get that moment, so he lay there disappointed at the prospect of death.