The Keeper's Son

by Homer Hickam

  Then Lieutenant Thurlow came and knelt and took Preacher’s hand and told him he thought the clouds would likely scud away and that Preacher was as good an auxiliary coastguardsman as there ever was. Preacher had squeezed his eyes shut and allowed a choked laugh, though it hurt like hell to do it. Preacher had watched Josh Thurlow swing his little ax—swish, swip, and swop—and three men were dead without a lingering moment to contemplate their fate and their future after death, nor make amends, nor cry for help. All they had been given was a quick death, but perhaps that was a blessing.

  Josh rose to be replaced by a hangdog Dosie Crossan. Preacher gave her a thank-you for the Bible, or at least he hoped his lips moved enough that she recognized what he was saying.

  Dosie left and Preacher saw a seagull come passing by against the clouds, and then Keeper Jack came. By then, Preacher was considering all the words in the Bible, how they simply lay there, and depending on how you read them, they might say anything you wanted them to say. They could be read right to left, or up and down like the Chinese did, or perhaps in three dimensions, through the book rather than on each page. As Keeper Jack knelt and prayed above him, Preacher wondered if it was dying that made him philosophical or the morphine. He regretted he would never know for certain.

  Preacher wanted to tell Keeper Jack how much he would miss seeing him at the services. The Keeper was a quiet sleeper, not one of those cracking snorers who often interrupted his sermons amidst the titters of the ladies. Keeper Jack had come with Purdy, the old pelican. Purdy looked down on Preacher with a concerned expression, then winked at him. Preacher didn’t know that pelicans could wink, and then he realized it wasn’t Purdy winking at all. It was someone else. Stars swam in Preacher’s head.

  Oh, if heaven was going to be this sweet, Preacher thought, where he might consider all things in such a detached, philosophical manner, he might come to love it, even if it lasted a time too short to measure or too long the same. And then Preacher died while Keeper Jack was back to speculating on the weather, and Purdy had waddled off. Some said the man died in bitterness and loss, while others weren’t certain, matching Preacher’s opinion.

  After Preacher had passed, Keeper Jack took Josh aside and told him his thoughts about the boy, that maybe it was possible he was Jacob. “Daddy, that’s crazy” was Josh’s retort.

  “But what if he is? At least, consider the possibility.”

  “What I have to consider,” Josh said, “is that all these years you’ve lied to me, telling me you thought there was no hope for Jacob.”

  “That’s not the way it is at all,” Keeper Jack replied, a bit testy. He hadn’t had much sleep, after all. “I’ve always believed that eventually the sea would give us an answer.”

  “And you think this German is it? Daddy, there’s nothing to prove it at all except for crazy little Willow.”

  “She sees things the rest of us don’t,” the Keeper insisted.

  “Believe what you want, but that German is not Jacob.”

  “We’ll soon know,” Keeper Jack said. “First chance he gets, Doc is going to look into his files to see if he took Jacob’s fingerprints when he was a baby.”

  “Doc agreed to that?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t he?”

  Josh left his father before he got shouting mad at the old man and went down to his boat. “What do you think, Pump?” he asked Willow’s father, who was inspecting the gash in the boat’s bow.

  “Fixable,” Pump said. “A little planking cut just so, caulking and such.” Then he said, “What wonderful news about Jacob being found. It’s a miracle, that’s what it is.”

  Josh resisted the urge to batter the man. “Pump, that German is not Jacob. Don’t be starting rumors that he is.”

  “Well, he could be,” Pump said. “I mean, it’s possible, don’t you think?”

  Buckets O’Neal came over and agreed with Pump’s assessment on the boat. “High tide will float her, Josh,” Buckets said. “You want us to have a go at fixing this hulk?”

  Josh did. Though he had no depth charges, he still had the three-inch gun and the machine gun. With at least two U-boats operating off Killakeet, the Maudie Jane needed to be out there. Since Stobs’s radios were dead, Josh had sent word for Chief Glendale to call Captain Potts about what had happened, but he didn’t expect any help from that quarter. None had been forthcoming before, so why now?

  To Josh’s irritation, Buckets also agreed with Pump’s assessment of the German boy. “What a miracle little Jacob being found. Who would have believed it?”

  “Shut up, Buckets,” Josh growled. “That kraut is not Jacob.”

  “Your daddy said he could be.”

  “There’s a considerable distance between could be and is.”

  Queenie drew Josh aside. “My land, Josh. The good Lord doth provide, don’t He? After all these years, the boy is back. I knew you didn’t lose him.”

  Josh slumped in despair. What, after all, did he expect—pessimism from a people who lived on a spit of sand that got swamped by hurricanes every few years? “Queenie, there is no proof whatever that that German is Jacob. Please pass that along to all the ladies and everybody else.”

  “But he could be,” Queenie insisted.

  “Jacob is dead, somewhere out there,” Josh said, nodding toward the sea. “That is what I believe.”

  Queenie fixed Josh with a sad, motherly smile. “You should hope more, Josh.”

  “Well, I hope your husband and the other men can fix my boat.”

  Dosie wanted a minute and Josh gave it to her. She steered him over by the high-tide line of sand hills. “I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. It’s a hard thing for me to say but I’ve got to say it. I love you and it doesn’t even matter if you love me back.”

  Josh would have preferred, at that moment, that Dosie had struck him across the nose with a two-by-four. He didn’t have time to think about love on a morning when his patrol boat was flung ashore, and his father had proposed that some German U-boater was actually his little lost brother and most Killakeeters seemed bound to believe it, and Preacher just dead because Josh had come up with the crazy idea that a man who’d lost his faith might as well become a machine gunner. “Well, Dosie,” he said, “that’s a very nice thing to say.”

  When he didn’t add to it, she said, “That’s what I thought. You don’t love me.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “You didn’t say anything worth hearing,” she said, and stomped away.

  Buckets came up to Josh, seeing as how he was suddenly quite alone, and tugged on his sleeve. “We’re on our way back to Whalebone City for our tools and such,” he said. “We have agreed to the length and width of the strakes, although I doubt we have the lumber to do the job proper, so we’re likely to end up using more than a few butts or scarfs, which ain’t going to be pretty. We’ll tick them for rabbets so the strakes will come in pretty dear, as long as you don’t mind the blocks aren’t on the sheer clamp.”

  Josh had never been much of a boatbuilder and what Buckets had said was completely bewildering, but he nodded and answered, in his best officerly fashion, “Just as long as she don’t leak much.”

  “That’s what I told the boys you’d say,” Buckets said, a finger next to his nose.

  Josh looked around for Dosie but she had disappeared, God only knew where, but likely stirring up trouble. He’d hurt her feelings, he guessed, but he didn’t have time to worry about it. He spotted Herman down by the Maudie Jane holding a bucket of caulk. Nearly every boy on Killakeet was there, aching to help their big brothers and uncles and fathers get the patrol boat back into action. So were the little girls. In fact, now that he looked around, Josh supposed that there wasn’t a soul on Killakeet that wasn’t on that beach, all pitching in to help. Chief Glendale brought the jeep and Preacher was already loaded in it. He would be placed in a rude coffin of wrecked lumber and buried with all the others behind the lighthouse.

  “Did you cal
l Captain Potts about our battle?” he asked Glendale.

  “I did, sir. He’s up in Norfolk, meeting about something. The duty officer said he’d get back to me. I ain’t heard a word.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “No, sir, we’ve been on our own since this whole shebang started. Reckon it’ll stay that way for a bit longer.”

  Josh saw his father walking up the beach toward the lighthouse. He could also see two figures coming toward him: Willow and the German boy.

  Josh was close to being overwhelmed by everything that had happened. But he couldn’t be overwhelmed. He had responsibilities. On the eastern horizon was a column of smoke, likely a torpedoed tanker. The war had not stopped for all the business of Killakeet, and the U-boats were still out there doing their deadly work. But one of them, a big black one, had been knocked around, and Krebs’s boat was surely damaged, too.

  Josh watched the Keeper greet Willow and the German, then turn around and join them in their walk toward the Maudie Jane. Josh made a decision. There would be a quiet visit between him and the boy who was not his brother behind a tall sand hill where they might not be observed, and there Josh would be told all that he needed to know, through broken teeth if came to that, and he nearly wished that it might. He smacked his big fist in the palm of his hand and waited.

  Then Doc came up behind him and lifted his shirt. “Hold still, Josh,” he said. Josh held still, not exactly sure what Doc was doing, then felt a sharp pain in his back. “Got it,” Doc said with satisfaction.

  Josh turned on Doc, who was staring with a bemused expression at an inch-long bronze sliver clamped in his pliers. Josh had forgotten he’d been hit in the back during the fight with the black U-boat. “Doc,” he said, “why’d you tell Daddy you’d look for Jacob’s file? Remember when I first came back? I asked you about it and you said you didn’t have it.”

  Doc opened the pliers and let the blood-wet sliver drop in the sand. “Well, Josh, if you must know, I decided your purpose was morbid curiosity and I didn’t believe it was good for you.”

  “Morbid curiosity? Doc, I had a long time to think while I was in Alaska. It came to me to hire a private investigator to visit orphanages to see if anybody remembered a baby like Jacob. I even told you that, if you might recall.”

  Doc airily waved the pliers. “I suppose I must have heard you wrong.”

  “I don’t believe you have any files, Doc, on Jacob or any other baby. That’s the truth of it, ain’t it? If you do, where are they? Must be a stack of ’em tall as the lighthouse.”

  “They’re in my outbuilding.”

  “That musty place? It’s been flooded a half dozen times that I know of.”

  “They are on a high shelf.”

  Josh peered closely at Doc’s placid face. “Why are you lying?”

  Doc shrugged. “A lie isn’t one until it happens.”

  “A favorite expression of yours. In this case, what does it mean?”

  Doc wiped the bloody pliers on his pants leg, then tucked them in his pocket. “It means I have already found Jacob’s file and it does indeed have his fingerprints in it. And as soon as I have yon boy’s fingerprints, I shall know the answer as to who he is, or, we might suppose, at least who he isn’t.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it.”

  Doc raised his eyebrows. “Well, Josh, one thing I’ve learned over the years is that some things, even if we are certain they are not true, may well prove otherwise.”

  49

  The problem with taking the German boy behind a tall sand hill and beating the truth out of him was that Josh liked him. Josh liked him because he kept saying he wasn’t Jacob, and also because his face so reminded Josh of his mother. It was a contradiction but Josh was too tired to worry about it. In any case, Harro volunteered some of the information Josh was after without being asked for it. “The black submarine you fought last night was not mine,” he said. “It was probably a Type Nine that is also working off Killakeet.”

  “Who’s its captain?” Josh asked, not expecting an answer. He looked around for an appropriate sand hill to do the necessary pounding of the boy.

  Harro hesitated, then shrugged. “Kapitän Vogel. He is the commander of all the boats along this coast. It’s treason, me telling you that.”

  “That’s all right,” Josh answered, relaxing. “You would have told me, anyhow.”

  Dosie, unable to stand being left out, had drifted in to listen. When there was an entire second of silence, she said, “I want another word with you, Josh.”

  “Not now,” Josh replied in as gruff a tone as he had ever used with her. As far as he was concerned, she could play her games with somebody else.

  Dosie nonetheless took his arm and steered him off to the high-tide mark. “I forgive you for not being in love with me.”

  “I do love you, you dit-dot,” Josh snapped. “But you also drive me nuts.”

  “Well, you drive me nuts, too!” Dosie cried. Then she grinned. “Do you really love me?”

  Josh tore off his cap in frustration and came near to throwing it down but decided otherwise, hats being hard to come by. He plopped it back aboard. “Yes, I do.”

  She turned her head in that adorable manner she had and it made Josh want to grab her and hold her and tell her how pretty she was and feel her warm body against his. Dosie saw all that in his eyes. “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” she said, batting her eyes at him.

  “You are oversexed,” Josh accused. Then, he said, “I like that in a woman.”

  “I bet you do.” Dosie walked off, her hips swaying maybe a bit more than usual.

  Josh watched after her, then shook his head and went back to Willow and Harro and his father. Doc had joined them and, remarkably, had taken the boy’s fingerprints on a sheet of white paper. Harro was cleaning the ink off his fingers in the sand. “I’ll compare and let you know,” Doc said importantly.

  “It is a waste of your time,” Harro said.

  “I find it a most interesting exercise,” Doc replied.

  “This boy is a prisoner of war,” Josh said. “He should be locked up.”

  “He’s not a prisoner at all,” Keeper Jack said. “He’s my guest at the house.”

  “But the authorities will be taking him soon.”

  “Why do they have to even know about him?”

  Josh was astonished. “Daddy, this is a German U-boat crewman, no matter who else you think he might be. Remember the Lady Morgan and all those bodies?”

  “My boat didn’t do that,” Harro said.

  “I will compare the prints this evening,” Doc said to Keeper Jack, and went off to see about patching up Bosun Phimble’s hands. So far, Phimble had claimed to be too busy to let him pull the tiny shards of glass out of them.

  Josh turned on his heel and walked toward the Maudie Jane. At least aboard his boat, things made some sense and he could yell and everybody would do exactly what he yelled at them to do. But then he thought of Dosie and saw she was standing in front of her house, watching him, and waiting for him, too, he supposed. She raised her hand and then he thought maybe the Maudie Janes were doing fine without his instruction and that maybe Dosie ought to have a look at the wound Doc had left in his back after pulling the sliver out. She surely had some iodine and it might do the trick, though it would burn like acid. Yes, he decided, he would let Dosie do it. It was the right thing to do, all things considered.

  Once and Millie, patching the holes in Maudie Jane’s deck, watched Mister Thurlow walk toward the Crossan House. “Skipper’s going off to throw a leg over Dosie,” Once said in an envious voice.

  “Who can blame him?” Millie replied. “What a woman she is!”

  “Ma said she likes the skipper too much and ain’t ever going to trap him,” Once worried. “Said why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”

  “There’s a war on,” Millie said. “We might all be dead this time tomorrow.”

  “What’s that an
answer to?” Once demanded.

  Millie shrugged and got back to patching. “Maybe nearly everything,” he said.

  50

  Darkness, vast and black, and Vogel’s raid began. Clouds had moved in steadily all day and the moon and stars were shrouded. Not even the ocean’s natural luminescence provided a glimmering trail as the black U-boat, propelled by its electrics, came gliding in to Doakes Station. Quickly, nine submariners swarmed onto the dock and formed themselves into three teams. One team was to blow up the warehouses, one was to pillage the headquarters, and one, armed with a machine gun, was sent to guard the approaches to the village. No one saw them. Chief Glendale had gone home for the night.

  At first, all went according to plan. The team assigned to the warehouses began to set the charges. The team assigned to the Surfmen’s House kicked in the front door (had they tried the knob, they would have found it unlocked) and charged up the stairs and wrecked the empty radio room. Then they rooted through the files for secret documents. Since only one man had a rudimentary knowledge of English, this proved a fruitless search and they settled for strewing the papers about. The machine gun was set up in what its team perceived was the main road of the town, or at least the widest track of sand. There, they waited, the ugly snout of their gun pointing down Walk to the Base. Soon, the team that had pillaged the Surfmen’s House joined them and sat, waiting for orders. They were nervous, and being on land felt odd, after all their weeks at sea.

  Vogel came ashore and told the demolitions team to blow up the warehouses. The demolitions team rolled out the wire and took protection behind a sand hill and waited until their U-boat had backed away. Then they plunged the handle of the detonator and the warehouses went up in a mighty eruption. Then Vogel led the demolitions team to find the rest of his men. He found them watching the warehouses burn. He told the machine gun crew to fire a burst down the road. They did. “Now, round everybody up,” Vogel snapped to the ranking man, a bosun named Hennsen. He and seven men went running down the sand track and began knocking politely on doors. “Kick the doors in, you fools!” Vogel yelled, just as one of the sailors was blasted away by duck shot from a shotgun poked through a window. Then someone tipped over a kerosene lantern and a fire broke out. People started running this way and that, silhouetted against the leaping flames. There was a lot of yelling, which unnerved Vogel. He wanted everybody to quietly and meekly follow orders.