Hatteras Light Read online

  “Are you after something special, or just nosing around in general?”

  Virginia stepped deliberately into the kitchen. “That’s no way to be, Dot. I just came to make sure you were all right.”

  “I’m just dandy.”

  “And to talk a little, you know.”

  “The only talk anybody’s had for me lately is bad news. You got good news?”

  “Not like that.”

  She unwrapped her shawl and laid it over the back of a spool chair. “Do you have any hot tea?” she said, arranging herself in a second chair. The basket she laid on the table.

  “We always have damned tea. Kinnakeeters, yeopon eaters.”

  “We’re not really Kinnaketters.” Over the years her family had drifted north from the inlet and accumulated around the lighthouse in the company of Royals, Fettermans, and Littlejohns. “Anyway we’ll get English tea again when the war is over.”

  “Do you think so? Do you think it will ever be over?”

  “Soon.”

  “That’s just for children, when they get impatient. Don’t do that with me, Virginia. I like you too much.”

  Dorothy busied herself making tea from the bitter yeopon leaves and added a dollop of cream to cut the acid.

  “I guess your secret is out,” Virginia admitted.

  “Oh? What secret is that.”

  “Oh, come on. I saw him shucking for parts unknown in a brave hurry.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “You’ve got the wrong man, Dot. Can I tell you this? You always had the wrong man.” Dorothy had flirted at one time with the Trent boy, now gone away to fly aeroplanes, and a succession of Ocracoke boys with tenuous futures in the fishing fleet. “You don’t want to break Keith’s heart, honey.”

  “It may not be as fragile as you think.”

  “He’s a good boy.”

  “He’s an ass, all right.”

  “Dorothy.”

  “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but what do you want? This hasn’t been a good day.”

  “The good days are behind us for a while, I’m afraid.”

  Dorothy sat down. “It’s none of your damned business and you know it.”

  “He’s an outsider. It’s everybody’s business, don’t you know that by now?”

  “That’s no way to judge a man.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s the only way around here. He won’t stay. He’ll break your heart like you’ve never had it broke.”

  “You’re the queen of the heartbreak tale today.”

  “Be snappish if you want to. But you and I both know he’s going away when the war goes away, and you’ll still be here with us. You have a lifetime to consider.”

  Dorothy stood and went to the door. “You think you have Jack. But no woman on this island really has a man.”

  Virginia rose and busied herself at the stove, setting the potatoes to boiling and preparing cabbage and pork for the two of them. When she had it all working, she sat back down and poured herself more tea.

  “I won’t eat that,” Dorothy said. “You can make it, probably you should do that, but I can’t eat it.”

  “All right.” Virginia thought of her husband in the company of other men at the life-saving station. They would be smoking out the night and lying to one another with great gusto, some of them carving or doing scrimshaw, others reading old papers and handling cards. “Better ask your young man,” Virginia said, “why he showed me his back if he’s so proud to be courting you.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “I take care of my man.” She gave Dorothy her back and when she was gone, Dorothy delivered the pork, cabbage, and potatoes to the steel trash can out back where Rufus and the cats would get it, and scraped the pot clean with a knife.

  3

  AT THE LIFE-SAVING STATION the men were nervous. They rubbed their eyes with the horny heels of their hands and fussed distractedly with pipes, smoking them hard and fuming pungent burley clouds that sank to the floor and hovered there like ground fog, while they grew restless and irritable and moved too much, talked too earnestly, laughed too readily and too loud.

  “I wish it would just happen.” Cy Magillicutty said.

  “What are you talking about?” Toby Bannister asked.

  “Whatever it is that’s waiting.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Nothing,” Malcolm broke in. “Nothing’s going to happen tonight that hasn’t already happened.”

  Chief Lord came in. “That Homer is awful spooky tonight. Chasing the wind like it was made of ghosts. I wonder what’s got into him.”

  “You’ve all got too much imagination, even the damned horse,” Malcolm said. He alone was not smoking, and the others could tell it was deliberate.

  “Maybe so, Malcolm,” Toby said, “but don’t hide out upstairs. Have a cup of coffee with us. We have a little bit left.”

  “The hell with it,” Malcolm said, almost in a whisper, and went upstairs.

  4

  TIM HALSTEAD’S COLLAR flapped in the wind. He bent his head and stalked through the storm, unsure where to go. He had just been hustled out of bed and off into the night like a fugitive. These were not his people. This was not his place.

  He watched the lighthouse beacon make a full revolution and thought about going into the stationhouse for warmth and company, but a hundred yards off he turned toward Littlejohn’s, where there was sure to be a bottle of bootleg rum, even for an outsider, at the right price.

  5

  UPSTAIRS, Malcolm considered: Somewhere, bearing down the coast, was a troopship running without lights. All those men. He lit his pipe and watched the flame of the wooden match disappear into the rough black bowl.

  6

  WHEN HALSTEAD BOUGHT his rum, things were queer. The store was full of men in weather gear, and a new box of tool handles had been prised open. The blond wood was new and bright. Conversation went off like a light when he entered, and the men stared at him with blank, humorless eyes he could not read.

  “Awful blow, eh?” he ventured, and nobody answered. Littlejohn got him a fat bottle and smiled with his lips, handing it across the counter. Halstead took a long swallow and offered it around. Nobody took him up on it. The fire in the stove was loud and unsettling.

  “Good night, gentlemen,” he said and turned his back on them, not knowing what might happen. He was so rattled that he crossed the road and sat out of the rain under an old rowboat and poured rum into himself like fuel. He felt better. Across the road, the shadows of men moved in front of the window of Littlejohn’s, blocking out the light.

  He corked the bottle, got up slowly, and went to his billet to fetch his sidearm.

  7

  JACK ROYAL ACHED all over. But he was feeling strong, and he enjoyed the pain: it made him focus. The men followed him single file down the dark road. Seamus with his Krag, Oman with a fish billy, Joe Trent, Ian MacSween, Hal MacRae, Will Fetterman, and a dozen others from the village wielding ax handles, these were his army. They made for the Light.

  8

  HALSTEAD, a .45 automatic strapped to his belt, descended the staircase and approached Malcolm.

  “Malcolm,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “You think I don’t already know what you have to say? I’ve been counting hands myself.”

  “What will you do when they come?”

  He shrugged and took out his pipe but did not light it, only scraped half-heartedly at the bowl. “What do you expect me to do, Lieutenant? Just how many choices are there?”

  Halstead lit one of his few remaining maduro cigarettes. “You’ve got a point there.”

  Chief Lord stood with them against the sideboard. “How long, Malcolm?”

  “Soon, Chief.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell the men?”

  “If they don’t know by now, there’s no use telling them.”

  “In the British Navy, they would be hanged to a man.”

  “Well, Ch
ief, that’s a thought.”

  Halstead smoked nervously, trying to slow down, calm himself. “I never thought anything like this would happen,” he said.

  Chief Lord was feeling the magic working, but not here, out there on the water somewhere. This magic had the flavor of life. He knew there were things nobody could see. “Wait and see how it all turns out,” he said. “You may be surprised some more yet.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Halstead answered. “I have a lot to consider as it is.”

  “How are you feeling now?” Malcolm asked.

  “I can fight.”

  “That’s not what I meant, boy. We don’t need you to fight. You’ve done your fighting. If it comes to that, fighting won’t help.” Chief Lord nodded and played with a string cradle, whipping it back and forth, weaving shapes out of the air. “I just wanted to know how you are, that’s all.”

  “Better. No real harm except—” Halstead was thinking of dead men and lost ships, courage for naught and loyalty where loyalty was a mistake in judgment. “I am an outsider,” he finally said.

  “We are all of us outsiders,” Malcolm said. “That’s what nobody remembers. Who are we Hatterasmen? Fugitives, castaways, pirates, deserters, people who ran out of places. Huh. We have no call to be such snobs.”

  Chief Lord smiled broadly and nodded. “Refugees,” he pronounced.

  “This submarine will go away,” Malcolm said. “That’s what nobody understands here. This submarine is not the point.”

  Halstead went upstairs as Chief Lord recited, “And I beheld as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them that had gotten victory over the beast.”

  Before anybody had a chance to make sense of that statement, Cy Magillicutty put a hand on Malcolm’s arm and said, as softly as he could, “They’ve come, Malcolm.”

  9

  MARY ROYAL WAS FINISHING the painting when Keith burst in. He didn’t even look at the portrait, though the lines were definite now and the figure had taken on identity.

  She didn’t turn when he entered, but sat with brush in hand, poised on the brink of color.

  “It’s happening, Mary. Now. Come on.”

  She dropped her brush on the floor, grabbed her coat, took hold of his hand, and went with him out the door and into the storm.

  10

  ABOARD U-55 the quiet was so complete and unnatural that Captain Stracken thought upon waking that he had died and gone to hell, since he imagined that kind of quiet would drive a living man mad. Max Wien imagined instead that they had sunk to some unheard-of, unplumbed depth, that the gauges were in error, that very shortly they would bottom out on some deep ocean shelf where they would breathe up their allotted air and lie entombed under the tides.

  The quiet was only the pressure on their ears and the dullness of senses that had been too long awake.

  But the propeller noise was suddenly insistent and growing closer, and Kraft ordered them up.

  “There she is,” he announced, once U-55 had breached and settled and Max had clambered with him onto the conning bridge. “Do you know how many men are about to be drowned?”

  Max stared at him. He understood it was a troopship; no one could mistake the high prow and square superstructure, the broad, ungainly bulk of her. Inside, every square inch would be packed to capacity with men, confined six deep in claustrophobic hammocks, allowed to go on deck by turns only once a day or so, otherwise breathing air so foul most of them wouldn’t be fit for duty for a week after landing. When the torpedoes struck, they would be trapped down there in darkness, with no way out. The companionway hatches would already be barred from the outside by Naval marines, against the possibility of mutiny or riot, and in the confusion no one would act to unbar them in time.

  Max trembled in advance of the slaughter, and the troopship steamed on, lining itself up nicely for them, showing no lights.

  When she was as yet a thousand yards off, Kraft said, “Ready torpedoes. Ready the goddamned things.” Max watched, hand on the rail, unable to let go. Kraft intended to steam up to point-blank range and take her on the surface, where they could watch the whole thing. Max heard all the machinery go into motion belowdecks.

  11

  RUNNING FOR HOME, Patchy was afraid. Now there was a chance. Now he was responsible. Now the history was working itself out in a way that no one would have dared predict a few days ago. He imagined the faces of the crowd on Oman’s Dock as his low-bellied Hermes plowed into the pale of canehung yellow lamps, towing in the lost boat.

  His vision was going. He rubbed his eyes with grimy, benumbed hands, tried to stare into the blankness at the end of his wake, but caught only the vaguest outlines of the Dant boat and the dim light of her paraffin lamps. He felt the struggle of his own balky engine to pull such a heavy load.

  He talked to himself. He sang bawdy songs. He hit the grog. He gripped the wheel with both hands and closed his eyes to clear them and make sense of the jumble of information in his head about direction, current, bearings, wind, and landfall. He had the sense that his boat knew the way home.

  He was in tune with the labor of the engine, the churn of water off his bows, the creak of rigging, and the moaning of the old timbers as they settled to their work. And then a sound stopped his heart: the bilge pump had quit.

  Hermes plowed heavily ahead, the roughening seas breaking down inside her now, seawater leaking in through a hundred rotholes, wormholes, and splayed boards, until at the end of an hour her bow was riding so low that each new sea broke over her gunwales and left the foredeck awash in black water. The towing hawser held the stern from seesawing hard on the trough, so the bow had no spring to point her head high on the crests, and Hermes was now submarining into the waves, not surfing over them. It was only a couple of miles more, Patchy figured. He kept the ax handy and gave her all the throttle he dared.

  And when he closed his eyes to clear them again, his mind’s eye held a picture of a man falling, tumbling soundlessly from a high place, releasing his treasure as he landed.

  12

  ALVIN DANT HELD THE WHEEL, trying to be of some use to Patchett by lining up in his wake as best he could. They were moving more slowly now, he reckoned, measuring his headway against the foamy wake that was eerily luminescent on the black water. His eyes were fastened on the hawser, anticipating the moment when it would snap like a whip, curling through the air with the sudden dramatic release of tension, and leave Patchett’s boat invisible in the sea ahead of them.

  “It will hold,” Brian said.

  “You seem to know something I don’t, boy.” He couldn’t deny that Brian’s confidence was infectious. Suddenly he had plans, visions of a future that good judgment told him he had no right to have. But they were getting closer all the time.

  “He’s riding lower,” Brian said.

  “I can feel it.” The hawser was no longer strung above the seas but cut through them, with the Hermes invisible on the other side. The gimballed paraffin lamps flickered in the Pelican’s pilothouse. Patchy’s lamp was lit, too. It twinkled uncertainly ahead like Polaris on a cloudy night.

  “You didn’t expect it to be him, did you?” Brian’s hands were now on the wheel, overlapping his father’s.

  “I’ve given up expecting anything. You take what comes.”

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do. We missed Dottie’s birthday party, you know.”

  Alvin Dant laughed. “If that’s all you’ve got to worry about.”

  “Can you imagine what this has been doing to her?”

  “What? I haven’t had time, boy.”

  “We can’t lose her.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You heard me,” Brian insisted. “We just can’t lose her.”

  “We’re not losing anybody. Nobody, you hear?”

  But Alvin kept seeing the German officer slump forward in the dinghy, Brian’s stubborn hands around the old rifle. Alvin felt the lump of dollar bills in his shirt
pocket. “Carry on, Patchy boy,” he said to no one. “Keep her moving.”

  He skinned his eyes for Hatteras Light. Any minute they would see it, he was sure. They should have seen it by now. Inside the Light they’d be in range of Malcolm and his boys. There was all kinds of hope tonight.

  13

  THE TROOPSHIP WAS DARING THE SHOALS, running close in and fast. Kraft kept the glasses on her as she closed with the U-boat, noting the sharp outlines of miscellaneous guns on her superstructure.

  “What’s that?” the lookout whispered in alarm. He pointed due east at two puny lights that seemed to blink on and off.

  “Is that our destroyer?” Max asked.

  “Nein, ich glaube nicht,” Kraft announced after a moment of study. “If it’s anybody, it’s a fisherman. He’s making slow progress.”

  Max wondered if it was their fisherman.

  “No,” Kraft said, apparently reading his mind. “That would be too much luck even for this patrol.”

  The lights grew closer as the big ship bore down on them from the other direction.

  “Bergen. Fire on those lights as soon as they are in range.”

  “What about the troopship, sir? Won’t that give us away?”

  “It will be too late for them.”

  Max took the glasses and studied the lights and wondered if whoever it was would understand what was going on, the necessity, the inevitability of it. Of course not.

  “Steady,” Kraft said. “Steady, we’re going to have quite a night.”

  Max had no energy to curse him. Instead he pinned his eyes on Hatteras Light, and wondered what chance a man in the water would have of getting there, if he had something to float him. For the first time on any patrol he laced on a life preserver.

  “Don’t be dramatic,” Kraft said. “We’re in the catbird seat, my friend.” Down below, Max heard the murmuring of the crew, and from the main hatch issued a steady draft of foul, dead air.

  14

  AT LONG LAST, Patchett spied the Light. He had been looking for it so long and fearing he would miss it so hard that he gasped. His legs went watery under him, and he was forced to steady himself against the wheel. His vision cleared, and the numbness left his hands. He felt the ache of his bones, the tightness in his joints, the uncomfortable swell of his bladder, the pang of each individual organ jostling for position around his stomach, his ribs sore from the hard labor of his lungs all night long, his tired eyes, his swollen feet, his brain burning inside his thick bucket of a skull.