Hatteras Light Page 16

“Don’t just stand around like a bunch of hens, come on in,” Seamus said. He had already cracked a good bottle and poured out four generous helpings.

  “Boys, we have not had a conference in so long I don’t know.” His rifle leaned against the wall behind the table. Keith was at first overwhelmed by the odors of his childhood: the greasy burn of the kerosene lamp, the salt smell of old wood, the sour odor of lacquer, the heady aroma of his father’s pipe—all of them gone a little stale now. The house smelled like the house of an old man, like the man himself was steaming away into essence.

  “I agree with you,” Jack said, scraping a spool chair away from the table and taking a seat. “Let’s get that straight right off the bat.”

  “With me or with Ham Fetterman?” Seamus asked.

  “Both,” Jack said, and scratched a match. He held it into the bowl of his pipe.

  “And you, Malcolm?”

  Malcolm and Keith pulled out chairs. Seamus crossed his hands on the table.

  “How can you even ask? It goes against everything. And you, of all people.”

  Seamus looked at Keith. “And you?”

  “I’m not sure I have a right to an opinion anymore.”

  “I will hear you out. So will they.”

  “I just don’t know. You can’t be sure it will work, and if it doesn’t, then you will have disgraced yourselves for nothing—”

  “Ourselves, you mean,” Malcolm chided. “You’re here now.” “If you want it that way.”

  “There’s a time for thinking and a time for action,” Jack said. “I’m tired of all this thinking.”

  “It never was your strong suit.” Keith was immediately sorry he’d said it.

  “That’s enough of that,” Seamus said.

  “You haven’t told us how you stand,” Keith said.

  Seamus didn’t have it all worked out yet, but he had a strong inkling Fetterman was right. “I am fairly sure it will kill that Heinie bastard if we pick the right weather. He strikes after sundown, most times, or just at dusk. If the weather was treacherous and he had the Light long enough to take the bait, he would get all turned around on those shoals and come to grief by morning. It would depend on where he was and what kind of weather we got.”

  “The worse, the better,” Jack said.

  “That’s about it.”

  “Listen to you,” Malcolm said. “Do you forget what business we’re in?”

  “He can just dive and avoid the weather,” Keith said. “That’s nothing to him. We have to catch him on the surface in shallow water.”

  Jack said, “That makes sense. Go on, surprise me some more.”

  “There are a lot of risks,” Keith said. “Suppose our own ships get caught out there on a night like that? Without the Light to steer by?”

  “They wouldn’t have any stars,” Malcolm agreed.

  “We can keep track of shipping, that’s all,” Jack said.

  “There are other risks. It’s not ours to turn off, you know. It belongs to the Government. That makes all this the Navy’s decision. And that means Halstead.”

  “That one! He’s in charge of enough things he can’t handle as it is,” Jack said. He poured more drinks all around. “He has no authority over the Light. None. It’s ours.”

  “He is our superior officer,” Malcolm reminded him. “We can all be shot for disobeying orders in wartime—have you thought of that?”

  “Sabotage is sabotage,” Keith said.

  Jack sipped his drink. “They would never do it,” he said. “You don’t know,” Keith said. “They’ve done it before in other places.”

  “If it turned out all right,” Seamus said, “I think then they’d be forced to grant us our due.”

  “That’s too easy,” Malcolm said.

  “We must act together,” Seamus said. “We will worry this thing to a conclusion.”

  “Not me,” Malcolm said, rising. “I have to go on station, and so does Jack. We’ve bent the rules about enough for one day, I reckon.”

  “I’ll be along,” Jack said.

  “No,” Malcolm said, suddenly afraid of conspiracy. “Now.” Jack rose and knocked back his drink before following Malcolm out.

  Keith was alone with his father for the first time in years. There was an awkward moment in which Keith watched the old man across the table. He had never understood his father at all and understood him now less than ever. Yet, he liked the old man. They drank the whiskey and just smiled at each other. He was aware of the pull of his father’s personality, the draw of a current as persistent as gravity. He did not fight it; he did not want to. “I should have been back when she died,” Keith said. “I know that.”

  “Shh. Don’t,” the old man said. “It’s all right.”

  “But—”

  “No, don’t,” the old man said. “I think I know how it was up there, and how it is now. I have corresponded with your dean. I felt it was my duty.”

  Keith had had no idea. How much did his father know? Had he known about Dorothy’s visits as well? Who could figure the old man?

  5

  A KNOCK AT SEAMUS’S DOOR had brought Littlejohn and Fetterman in out of a night almost brighter than the lamplit kitchen where the four of them sat now, starting the talk all over again.

  Littlejohn said, “I am not awfully fond of this scheme.” In the last minutes of the John Shay, the masts had shuddered in their steps as the hull rammed the sandbar, crushed by its own weight while the sea hammered at her beams. All because a man of inferior seamanship who believed himself right had taken the helm in a crisis. “It feels all wrong.”

  “It is not wrong to protect your own and your country against the enemy,” Seamus said.

  “It is when you’ve got to do it this way.”

  “You’re both missing the point,” Fetterman said.

  Seamus poured another round from the second bottle. Keith drummed his fingers on the tabletop. These were the men who had peopled his childhood, yet he did not know them beyond their shapes, the spaces they occupied in the community. Littlejohn had a territory, so did Fetterman, and his father owned all the territory of his youth. Now the men, and Keith too, drank and smoked, working up to the final question, a thing Keith damned over and over. This was what he had fled from up north: decision.

  “Who will do it?” Fetterman asked. “Someone will have to take charge.”

  Littlejohn showed a wry smile. “Nothing good ever comes from this kind of talk.”

  Seamus got up to stretch his legs. He arced his back and sighed deep from in his chest. He coughed. There was congestion in his lungs these days, and he could only suppose it came from all those nights in the open, a hazard of accumulated weather. He drew a handkerchief and coughed into it. “And what do you think of all this, boy? You’ve been to school. You know history. Advise the old men who don’t know anything.”

  “Yes, lend us the benefit of your store-bought wisdom,” Fetterman said, then quickly added: “I don’t mean nothing by it, Keith.”

  “What are you after, Seamus—a friend in the history books?” Littlejohn asked. “Something to justify what you would have us do?”

  “Not that,” Seamus said. “I just want—I want—what’s that lawyer’s word?”

  “Yes,” Keith said. “Exactly. A precedent. But I’m afraid I don’t know of any. I don’t think there is one.”

  Fetterman snorted. “I could have told you that.”

  “Then we’re right back where we started,” Seamus said.

  “Yes,” said Fetterman. “So who? Which one of us? Seamus? Littlejohn? You, Keith?”

  “I don’t know,” Littlejohn said. “You can count on opposition.”

  “Malcolm,” Keith said.

  “Halstead,” Littlejohn said. “And his crew, every man armed.”

  “By God,” Seamus said, “I’ll do it if no one else will.”

  “We’ll see,” Fetterman said. “In the meantime, it’s enough to know we’re all in.”

  “
I have to give it to you, Ham,” Seamus told him. “You saw right to the heart of it.”

  “All my genius is not in my hands, Seamus.”

  They laughed, but not much. Keith didn’t feel very good. He was in a conspiracy—was that too strong a word?—to sabotage Hatteras Light, probably the most important navigational aid on the Atlantic seaboard. He watched the men’s faces, their brown hands, his ears full of white noise.

  Fetterman had an urge to carve. He was too drunk for that, he knew, but his hands fidgeted with his knife anyway, opening and closing the blade.

  Littlejohn spoke to no one on the way out, and walked back to his house alone, head down. The John Shay. The British captain. The look on that silver-whiskered gentleman’s face when the blunt Irishman raised the rifle and insisted on humility, the one attitude the captain was incapable of. An impossible moment. The crewmen become thugs, abetting their leader, binding the captain hand and foot so that at the grounding he had no more chance than if he’d been trussed in a weighted sack. And the African hands, who had witnessed the mutiny with more apprehension than comprehension, were no swimmers, either. That’s why they made such good sailors: they had faith only in the ship.

  How long had it taken to run aground—a minute? An hour? Time stalled the instant the Irishman took on the ship’s master. But the moment of the grounding was unforgettable: There is no sound like the sundering of massive timbers deep in the heart of a great ship, or the ungodly shriek that precedes the splintering of a cedar mast and sounds like it issues from your own spine. A sound a man might stand to hear only once in his lifetime.

  Littlejohn’s survival had been highly accidental and vaguely just, since he’d refused to be a party to mutiny. It all had something to do with the Irish problem, with which he was not intimate, and he stood by dumb as the Africans, watching. Justice had been selective rather than fair.

  He walked by his store and saw it quiet, lightless. In the moonlight it seemed to glow at its edges, which were straight and elegant as a ship’s lines. The beams he had fashioned from salvaged ship’s timbers. For all his prosperity, he was just another castaway. He reached up and ran a hand along the lintel, wishing it was new lumber.

  There were pirates in Littlejohn’s family. His forebears had poached the gray seal, privateered against the British, smuggled personae non grata during the opium wars, pillaged the Barbary Coast and the Cote d’Or. He was one of them. He had not acted to prevent mutiny. He limped behind the store to his house, the leg suddenly paining him badly. His wife would be waiting, she who knew little about him and didn’t ask, who studied palms and worried over dreams and kept a hemlock switch over the doorway as proof against witches.

  By way of greeting, she said to him, “Mrs. Patchett told me a robin got in her house today. She had the devil’s own time getting it out again.”

  “If that’s all she has to worry, about.”

  “Mister Littlejohn, you are a peculiar man. Why, that’s the worst omen there is for a man who’s gone on a journey.”

  “And who’s going anywhere.”

  She smiled knowingly. “You’re not as dense as you let on. Now come on. I’ve got biscuits making.”

  6

  WHEN KEITH GOT BACK to Malcolm’s house, Mary was sitting on the porch in the moonlight, painting.

  “I had intended to paint by the dawn,” she said, “but I almost prefer this.”

  “What is it?” There were only a few tentative lines on the canvas, but they troubled him already.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “You’ve never used browns and grays before.”

  “It’s something I just came up with.”

  “What is your subject?”

  She lifted the paintbrush like a wand. In the eerie nightshadow he half expected magic from it, electric and sparkling.

  “Not what—who.”

  “A portrait?”

  She nodded, applying a faint brush stroke. “When you recognize it, let me know.”

  Keith watched her paint for a while, smoking from nervousness now. Watching her, he relaxed, and the conspiracy and Dorothy too slipped from his mind. He went to the stove and made a pot of tea. When she had finished painting, and for a time they had quietly sipped tea, she said to him, “Would you like to see the sunrise?” And hand in hand they walked over the dunes and found a hollow to sit in. There was the Light off to the left and down the other way Halstead’s unlit mooring. Keith wondered if he was on board now, sleeping.

  “You don’t mind putting an arm around me, do you? It makes me feel safe.”

  “No, I don’t mind.” They sat together, looking out to sea.

  As a youngster, Keith had tagged along behind Malcolm patrolling this beach. Whenever Malcolm would get too far ahead, without looking back he would stop and wait for Keith. Sometimes, Malcolm would let him carry the brass coin, but never the signal rocket.

  “Will you marry Dorothy and take her away?” she said. There was an edge of challenge and sadness in her voice.

  He dug idly in the sand, feeling the cool flow of it between his fingers, cleansing them by abrasion. “That seems to be the question of the hour.”

  “You once loved each other very much.”

  “Yes, I remember that time.” But he didn’t. There had been weekends in hotels when he was at college. Dorothy seemed to enjoy those meetings, but they troubled Keith. There was so much space in between, and Dorothy was different each time she came. Things were happening in those spaces that were not common ground, and the mystery and the wondering sickened his stomach. There was no certainty between them, no fidelity, or if there was fidelity it was an accident. In all the time before he had gone away from the island they were just kids, and kids loved one another in a reckless, generous way that did not endure. You could never live up to your childhood romance.

  “I love Malcolm,” Mary said.

  After a long silence Keith said, “There will be some history going on here. Maybe that’s what brought me back.”

  “You don’t believe in destiny.”

  “No, not like that.”

  He stretched, loosened his arm on her back, turned to watch the Light’s beacon circling toward them and away again. “But it may be a mess, all the same. Folks are going to be butting heads.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Once people take sides, they may never get back together, never really trust one another again. Sometimes I think we should let the Light decide itself—on or off? It’s guarded us all these years like the Cyclops in the Ulysses story. Is it really up to any of us?”

  “The Cyclops was a monster.”

  “Only to Ulysses, who was a foreigner. On the island he was a tower of strength. He was a shepherd.”

  “You mean Ulysses was the impostor.” He stared at the Light awhile.

  “What are you thinking?”

  He rubbed his hands clean of sand. “The Dark Ages. I’m wondering if they’re coming back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the Roman Empire started collapsing at the end of the fifth century, the Vandals swarmed all over Western Europe. They held the coastlines and used the lighthouses to lure ships close enough to attack them. To put a stop to it, the Roman keepers destroyed their own towers, and the lights went out all over the coast. Funny, I just now thought of it.” Here, then, was Seamus’ precedent.

  The Light turned round and round, sweeping the silvered sky, while all around its beam the darkness deepened. There were thunderheads far off and high, moving fast and throwing shadows across the moon. Keith didn’t think there would be any weather. He expected a clear, mild dawn.

  They sat together in the sandy hollow. Mary rested in his arms, and far across the beach, down by the waterline, they spotted the beachman moving ghostlike on his rounds, his footsteps silent on the wet sand, his head bent as in sorrow.

  7

  LONG AFTER THE BEACHMAN HAD PASSED, they filled the hollow together.

  8

&nb
sp; KEITH HAD BEEN RIGHT about the weather: The high clouds scoured the moon and then kept right on going, and the dawn was cloudless and untroubled. The combers broke gently against the shore, and the tidal pools were busy with pipers and gulls.

  “Look!” Mary said.

  Keith sat up now. “I don’t see anything.”

  “North a little, directly off the Light.”

  The profile was so low in the water it almost seemed shimmed into place between sky and sea. At first only the hump of the tower had made him notice it at all.

  “Good Lord—come on!” Keith yanked Mary to her feet and led her running through the break in the dunes.

  9

  ON THE CATWALK of the lighthouse, Malcolm spied the U-boat through his glass. He drew back from the eyepiece and caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to watch two lovers on the beach trying to outrun daylight. He followed them with half an eye, saw only their backs, envied them their freedom. Then he bellowed a warning to the men on station and clambered down the wrought-iron spiral staircase inside the tower, his footsteps ringing like bells.

  Here, at least, was the main chance.

  1

  TIM HALSTEAD HAD CALLED on Dorothy Dant with little satisfaction late on the night of the meeting, as much to consult her on politics as to court her. If there was going to be trouble at the lighthouse, he would be smack in the middle of it.

  “The island has no politics of its own. They’re imported,” she said, putting him off immediately. She had an orneriness about her tonight, a kind of bitchiness. She kept her distance, and he wondered about the ease of their lovemaking two nights ago. It angered him to have given in to his passions so readily—did he have no will of his own? It caused him to wonder if, indeed, he were truly a gentleman.

  “You come here from the outside, you bring the politics with you.”

  “Yes. Of course.” He had answered deferentially, the way he might have answered an upperclassman at the Academy. What had got into her?

  “If you can’t get that damned Hun, then they’ll get him for you, that’s all.” Now she was insulting his professional abilities. He stood that, too, meekly, hoping for a better opening.