Hatteras Light Page 9

  Keith was buffeted in the shoulder by the boat and sprawled on his face in the surf, swallowing salt water. Malcolm lifted him out with one rough hand.

  “Steady, boy,” he said.

  A crowd had gathered on the beach, including Littlejohn and Fetterman and all their wives and families. Someone had sent to Kinnakeet for the doctor, and meanwhile Halstead’s men organized litter details to carry the injured to the station.

  “Good boy,” Malcolm said to Keith. “Let’s get under way.”

  Keith had almost forgotten: They had to go back for the others.

  They rushed the boat into the surf, but this time it was more difficult. They were tired, and the seas had been building for the past two hours. Now the wind was blowing almost head-on. On the first try, the wall of foam tossed them back to the beach, and then twice more the sea rebuffed them.

  On the fourth attempt, they stood on the curl of a breaker for one heart-stopping moment, then ducked into the trough and were under way. “I must be slipping,” Malcolm said. It had taken three-quarters of an hour to go fifty yards.

  With Chief Lord gone, Malcolm had put Keith on the Chief’s oar, and now he pulled through a wall of pain the like of which he had never known in all the hundreds of miles he had rowed at Harvard.

  In half an hour, they had gained the lifeboat, which had drifted south in the wind. Chief Lord hailed them, and they set about transferring first the injured and then the able-bodied to the surfboat to run the beach again.

  Chief and Jack climbed aboard last of all. When Keith moved to relinquish the stroke oar, Chief Lord laid a hand on his shoulder. “Stay put, boy. You got her here all right.”

  It was a fast run this time, with the wind on their quarter. The waves were faster. And when they had crested the last line of breakers, and the surfmen were in the water, the boat broached to and flattened Joe Trent with a nasty clip to the head. Chief Lord yanked him out of the water, and Joe staggered to the beach. When the rescued sailors were unloaded, a Navy man wound cloth bandages around Joe’s head.

  “Stay in,” Malcolm told him.

  “I’m going out.” And he did.

  This time it took nearly two hours to reach the tanker. Incredibly, she was still burning, but had settled by half, and they saw she could not stay afloat much longer. They pulled five men out of the water and recovered two more bodies, floating on a hatch cover.

  “She’s going down!” MacSween shouted. They could hear the violent wrenching and creaking of the last metal bulkheads caving in under the weight of water, the sound carrying in ragged pieces across the air, like shrapnel. They pulled so hard the oars warped in their locks; they were frantic to outrun the vortex that would claim the tanker and everything in half a mile of her.

  When it was safe, they watched the flaming hulk settle the final few fathoms and the fire extinguish in an acrid black smoke. In a minute, she was gone.

  “I hope we got them all,” Malcolm said. But he had seen no trace of the ship’s master, nor did he expect to now.

  The last run out and back took five hours. When they landed, it was almost daylight. The waves ran fast and short. The crew pulled the boat onto the beach and lay down in the sand as Halstead’s men pulled the rest of the survivors out of the boat. But Malcolm stood erect, holding Homer’s neck, for fully half-an-hour until his men could find the strength to load the boat onto its carriage and walk the three hundred yards to the station.

  “Twenty-five,” Littlejohn said. “You brought in twenty-five, Malcolm.”

  “Twenty-seven,” Malcolm said.

  “Of course.” Littlejohn hadn’t counted the two bodies. “Only two didn’t get off at all. It’s goddamn amazing.”

  “Don’t be cursing, Littlejohn. Not on a night like this.”

  They plodded back to the station, put the boat away, and slept in their oilskins, and it was two days before Malcolm could unclench his fingers enough to hold a pen to the logbook. But it could wait, he thought, nothing would change.

  7

  THE NIGHT HAD TURNED NASTY, with a stiff onshore wind. Mary Royal reached the waterline just after the life-saving crew put out, and Littlejohn, who had picked up the Mayday on his wireless, brought the gang from the store. Jack’s wife Virginia arrived by and by, leading little Kevin by the hand, all wrapped up in a miniature sou’wester.

  More than a dozen people were gathered just back of the high-water mark by the time Malcolm’s crew was halfway to the tanker, and they did not speak at all while they waited and watched and measured the lifeboat’s progress on the moon-silvered sea.

  The Navy men were unpacking medical supplies, and Halstead had his glasses out. He gave orders for a man to take the lighthouse watch in the event that (God help us, he said) there were any more ships in distress out there tonight.

  Virginia heard him, and noticed that Dorothy stayed close to him.

  Littlejohn said, “Don’t you be worrying, Mary. That one knows how to handle a boat. For him, this ain’t even weather.”

  “That’s right,” Kevin said, letting go his mother’s hand. “Daddy and Uncle Malcolm can row a hundred miles a day!”

  “Kevin, please …”

  “Mister Littlejohn, why is it burning like that?” Mary asked. They still could not get over the fact of the tremendous fire, the like of which they had never seen before.

  “Oil, Mary. Gasoline. She’ll burn for weeks, if she stays afloat.”

  “Then the danger …”

  “Oh, she’ll go down tonight, mark me. She’s been punctured to the heart, sure as we’re standing here. She’s got a hole in her, but it’s in the wrong place, thank heaven.”

  Virginia gasped. “Will they come back?”

  “To finish her, you mean.” It was Fetterman, come limping up, arthritis grating in his knees, a bottle of beer in one hand, the other leaning hard on a crutch that he had carved himself.

  Virginia stared at him. “Will they come back?”

  Fetterman lodged the crutch under his arm and stuffed his beer bottle into his belt to free his hands and fussed with his pipe. He shook his head slowly. “There’s no telling what that fellow will do. He’s a different kind of critter altogether. But I expect even a Hun will have some decency in him.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Mary asked.

  “Oh, I doubt he’ll waste another torpedo. He only has so many, you know.” But Fetterman didn’t remind her about the deck cannons he had lately fitted to his model.

  Mary was relieved, though she knew they should all wish the German would use up his warheads on a ship that was already lost. She looked out to the sea and tried to imagine Keith pulling an oar among Malcolm’s crew, and couldn’t. She wished he had taken his gloves.

  “That son of a bitch,” Virginia said. “That son of a bitch.”

  “Ginny—”

  “I don’t care.” She yanked hold of Kevin’s hand. “Take a good look, Kevin. Remember it. Remember what that son of a bitch is. He’s trying to kill your father, to kill all of us. You don’t forget that when you grow up—”

  “That’s enough, Ginny.” Mary said. “Everybody’s upset about this.”

  Kevin only looked frightened. Fetterman turned away, showing no emotion. All he felt, really, was a small sadness, the disappointment of things being repeated over and over again to no purpose, like repeating a grade in school all your life. He was not at all convinced Malcolm’s crew could find their way back to the beach tonight; too much was already wrong.

  8

  ALVIN DANT COULD not have said what woke him. He’d been dreaming about old Fetterman. In the dream, he was standing over Fetter man’s shoulder, watching him carve. It was Littlejohn’s store, and a tremendous blow was going on outside, and all the men who would normally be out fishing or running the trading packets were sitting around the big coal stove and smoking, but their voices were a confused, foreign-sounding murmur.

  The blow lashed against the windows, but the men inside didn’t notice. F
etterman finished model after model in the dream, then deliberately smashed each one onto the floor at his feet, so that after a while there was a heap of broken toy ships covering the floor. Fetterman went about his work religiously, while the pile grew and the voices continued to make no sense, and the rest of the men ignored Alvin Dant.

  Fetterman’s eyes were narrowed and his jaw was set, as if the work were a duty, not a diversion.

  Then, Dennis, Alvin’s brother, was outside, waiting to be let in. A man was with him. Alvin couldn’t see his face, but he was wearing a tall hat in the style affected by gentlemen. The door was locked. Dennis did not try to force it—he had never been a violent man. Meanwhile, the rain drenched him and the wind whipped the tails of his sou’wester around his hips and flattened the bill of his bonnet. He stood there with the Light behind him in its regular sweep, while inside, the coal-oil lanterns flickered on old Fetterman’s hands as they went on and on building and destroying, now a frigate, now a schooner, now a seagoing tug.

  In the dream, Alvin was trying to get past Fetterman’s chair to go unlock the door, moving so slowly it could hardly be called movement, his limbs struggling against a paralyzing inertia. Just when he had his hand on the latch, his brother’s patient face only inches away beyond the rain-tracked glass, the dream went black, and he woke to a brilliant light off on the western horizon.

  “Littlejohn never locked his doors in twenty years,” he said out loud.

  “What?” Brian was already up, standing at the wheel again and watching the glow increase. The night was silent except for the lapping of water against the freeboard and the creak of rigging.

  “She’s pretty far off,” Brian said.

  “Not so very far.”

  “Out of our reach.”

  “Aye. Look at the poor thing burn.”

  Alvin remembered he had brandy on board, and now seemed like the time to break it out. He might as well have a drink with his son, if they had to watch that kind of destruction.

  “Who is it, Dad?” Alvin listened for the edge of fear in his son’s voice, but did not catch it.

  “I don’t know. Must be a tanker.”

  “I never knew a ship could burn like that.”

  “Here, have some of this.” He took his own swig without waiting, then handed the bottle to Brian, who had never drunk with his father before. “Must be a tanker, that’s all I can figure. I don’t know what in God’s name else.”

  “They don’t care about that, do they.”

  “What?” He hit the bottle again.

  “The men in the submarine. They don’t care about the ones they burn.”

  Alvin snorted. “I can’t tell you what a man cares about, boy. Let alone those pirates.”

  “You think we’re very far out?”

  “Who knows where we are. By all rights, we should be halfway to Scotland by now. But nobody has ever figured these currents out. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Brian moved from the wheel and found a seat from where he could still watch out the wheelhouse window. His hands were turning in his lap.

  “Here—it’s about time you tried one of these.” Alvin dug a pipe out of his pocket and profferred his tobacco pouch. “Fill it loose, tamp a little, then fill it again. Top-light it first, then tamp it again. Then light it for good.”

  Brian was clumsy at first, but very soon his hands were steady, and he was puffing from the pipe. Alvin fixed his own.

  “She’ll burn all night.”

  “Like as not.”

  “We’re not going to get back, are we, Dad.”

  Alvin reflected for a moment on his dream. He could not interpret it, but he was strangely comforted by it.

  “I don’t know, boy. I didn’t think so at first, but now I don’t know. I thought we’d drift off the charts, but if that tanker was caught in the coastal shipping lanes—I mean, he was steering by the Light, wasn’t he—then maybe the sea doesn’t want this old boat. Maybe we’ll get back.”

  It was the longest speech he had ever made to his son. He often spoke for hours with Dorothy, and that was odd, he knew. A man was supposed to have difficulty talking to a daughter. A son was supposed to be a soul mate, the one who understood why year after year you did the same damned things for no better reason than that they were yours to do. But Dorothy had turned out different than he’d counted on. Maybe losing her mother like that had made her gravitate naturally to him. But no, that should have made the children turn to each other, and they never quite did that. Dorothy confided in him, and in Mary Royal, never in Brian.

  And while he knew his daughter’s love was a marvelous rare thing, it also scared him because he didn’t quite understand it.

  In whom did Brian confide?

  Tonight, after that odd dream, and stemming from no connection with it that he could fathom, Alvin knew all at once why Brian had never come to him: simple fear. Brian was the child of his mother’s deathbed, and Alvin Dant didn’t know how, but he was very sure now that he had cowed Brian. He had made Brian responsible, not for making him a widower, but for taking away Dorothy’s mother. It was all very clear now, and he took another drink. Brian drank, too, and smiled, as they watched the tanker burn.

  Alvin recalled something else from his dream: the blood on Fetterman’s hands. Fetterman carved deep gashes in the meat of his hand with each stroke of the knife, so that the floor was littered with broken ships dappled with blood. Yet, he kept carving.

  “Pray for a storm to wash us in, boy,” he said, pausing to take a slug of brandy. “A storm will either sink us or save us.”

  1

  PATCH PATCHETT ARRIVED home very late and was surprised to find his wife and children gone. There was not even a note. His buttocks were sore from riding the mule all the way back from Hatteras Village, for he was not used to the trip. The Hermes had ridden at mooring for so long that not even he could remember the last time he’d taken her out.

  He wasn’t a sailor; he knew that. He was a beachcomber.

  Once he had found a box of four dozen hats at the waterline. For weeks after he had worn a different hat every day—one day a bowler, next day a derby, a slouch hat for roaming the beach, and a touring cap of genuine pigskin for riding his bicycle. He had sold about half the hats to Littlejohn and given the ones he had no use for to his wife’s relatives. People on the island still wore those hats, though lately his wife’s uncle complained that the brim on his Panama was fraying and could he please get another? As if Patchy hoarded a salesman’s stock in his shed.

  His bounty was always short-lived, but he always shared it.

  “So she’s finally gone and left me,” he muttered, not at all surprised, lighting a lamp in the dark house.

  He was confused for a moment, though, because it didn’t seem right that she would leave him on the very day he had begun to show some ambition about the boat. And she knew him well enough to know that when he set his mind to a thing he generally finished it, no matter how rare and silly the thing he set it to. He had, for example, spent the better part of a summer drilling a well that came up salt water and would always come up salt water, as anyone on the island could have told him, and did. But he had it in his mind that only having a well would save him the trouble of cleaning and repairing the cistern every spring.

  Now he sat down to think, and once he had stopped scraping around on the floorboards with his brogans (a clumsy innovation for him, as he usually went shoeless), he heard the commotion out on the beach.

  He listened over the wind and then curiosity got the better of him. He kicked out of his shoes and gained the crest of the dunes lickety-split and beheld an enormous crowd assembled on the beach by the Light. He spied a boat—it must be Malcolm’s crew—land and nearly capsize, and only then did he register the fire on the horizon.

  He knew his U-boat was out there.

  “What’s happened?” he asked Littlejohn.

  “An oiler. Malcolm’s brought some of them off, that’s all I can tell you.�
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  “He’s going back out, then.”

  “Sure. What do you think.”

  “Hello, Patchy,” Fetterman said. “Your wife’s here.”

  “I don’t mind. You got a smoke?”

  Fetterman turned away, shaking his head. Littlejohn obliged him with his tobacco pouch, and Patchy had a time getting his pipe to go in the wind. He shielded the small flame with his hands till they were pink and hot.

  “It’s a good night to go out.”

  “Not so bad,” Littlejohn agreed.

  “Except it ain’t the weather that’s making that tanker burn.”

  “No, it ain’t.”

  They walked among the crowd. “What you been up to, Patchy? I figured you’d be the first one out here.”

  “Had some work to be doing on the boat.”

  “You had it to be doing last February.”

  “You didn’t happen to bring a bottle of beer or three, did you?”

  Littlejohn laughed. “I don’t know why I put up with you, Patchy. I don’t know what you’re good for.”

  Patchy reflected on that. It was an interesting question, one that had framed itself in his own thinking as he jounced along on the mule and cleaned the grease from under his fingernails with handfuls of sand on his way home. “You sold a lot of hats on account of me.”

  “And I bought a load of junk, too. Ah, well.”

  “Hey, Patchy.”

  “Mrs. Royal. Mrs. Royal. Dorothy.” Out of the corner of his eye he spied Pat gaining on him with little Penny and Parvis in tow. Parvis was named for a great-uncle of his wife’s who was sabered to death serving under Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run.

  “Lordy, I thought you were dead and drowned,” Pat Patchett said. “I thought the sharks had eaten your meager brains and spit out the gristle. Where’ve you been?”

  “Working, what do you think?” He cast a smug sidelong glance at Littlejohn, who just then had a severe fit of coughing.

  “You ought to do something about them lungs, Mister Littlejohn. You see there, Patchy? This night air ain’t good for the kiddies. I’ve got to get them home.” Penny and Parvis slouched beside her like orphans.