Hatteras Light

by Philip Gerard

  1

  HALSTEAD CURSED his luck all way into the bight. “Ain’t that the way,” he said to Jack Royal. “We try to go for the bastard, and the weather turns rotten. Dammit to hell.”

  Jack said: “Be thanking the Lord for what you’ve got—don’t be raising hell for what He might have given you.”

  “Shut up, Mister Royal.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” And so it went.

  The new engineer had proved a reliable, plucky boy. Twice the engines quit and he restarted them. He was a skinny red-head who already had a bad sunburn, and he had lain prone over the engine bay with his arms down inside like he was trying to extract live young. When the engines caught, Halstead listened to their roar the way sailors of another day would listen to their sails snapping with wind after a calm, the sound of men resuming command over their destinies.

  Pulling into berth, Sealion was sluggish, her belly heavy with seawater.

  2

  PATCHY HAD NOT expected rough weather, but he was prepared for it. He would go through the storm, and somewhere on the other side of it was Alvin Dant.

  Patchy wore his father’s sou’wester. He had gone north up to Wilmington, Delaware, to claim it after the letter came. His father had been working a rivet gun six stories up on the hull of an oversize tanker when a crane swung a load of ventilators against him, brushing him off the scaffolding like a bug.

  His buddies all said he was a good Joe, a hard worker who never complained, didn’t drink much, and pulled all sorts of overtime. Nobody knew what happened to all the money he must have accumulated in all those years of muscle work, since he didn’t believe in banks, didn’t gamble, and had never remarried.

  It was a genuine mystery, they said, and Patchy had no reason to doubt it. He never saw a penny of that money. He used to lie awake and concoct stories about his father’s fortune, what shadowy investments the old man had made, what great acts of philanthropy had been done in the Patchett name. He still harbored cautious fantasies.

  Patchy became frightened as the weather worsened. He wasn’t up to this kind of seamanship, yet it had been left up to him. Truth to tell, his stomach gave him trouble on boats—that’s why he kept to the land so faithfully.

  He thought that there must be only two kinds of men, after all: those meant to be on the water, and those meant to be on the land.

  Then what was he doing out here? Well, sometimes there were special circumstances, he told himself. The word was default. He felt scared in an important way, knowing that things larger than himself depended on his actions, and he decided every man had a right to feel that way just once. The Rough Riders must have felt that way struggling up San Juan Hill. The Wright brothers must have felt it as they launched themselves by turns to a giddying height over the Kill Devil Hills at Kitty Hawk, daring nature and held aloft by faith and a science they were only guessing at. Patrick Etheridge must have felt it the night he went out in place of Patchy’s father.

  Patchy had hoarded a few bottles of beer, and he figured now was a good time to start in on them. No sense in going down with a full virgin cache, if down he must go. He snapped off the cap with one hand and held the wheel with the other, then sipped the warm foam from the mouth of the bottle. He almost smiled there, all alone.

  In between gulps he sang bawdy songs to keep his courage up. He had sense enough to know he was not a brave man.

  Hermes plowed ahead at a good clip, showing no lights yet. He would give that Hun no target. Speed was his friend in this weather and on this trip. He felt it pulling at him, drawing him toward an inevitable rendezvous on the treacherous water, in the heart of an unnatural twilight.

  He hadn’t planned on meeting the tanker, cutting out of the curtain of rain like a ghost ship. He veered hard right to run parallel and in the opposite direction. There was no life on her high decks, no lights on her mast, no movement on her bridge as she cut across Patchy’s sky. He read the name, Proteus, and crossed himself quickly.

  It was the last ship his father had built.

  3

  THE CAPTAIN did not need a listening device to hear the ungodly churning of those big propellers overhead. It was quarry, and he had nearly missed the main chance by hiding out from weather.

  Cursing, he raised the periscope in its hydraulic sleeve until it locked. He reversed his cap and put his eye to the spyhole and saw black. The metal shaft stunned him, and he reeled to the deck, his eye socket crushed and his feet kicking the air. He heard the wrench of metal on metal, the gunshot sounds of rivets popping, the sudden rush of saltwater as voices answered in alarm. Men clamored about him, stifling him, and he interfered with their legs.

  Kraft was yelling for him to stay calm while they plugged the leaks. Someone pressed a towel over his eyes. Max, he thought, and heartbroken knew all at once the ship had steamed right over the periscope. His luck had turned.

  4

  FETTERMAN WATCHED the rain and turned the hull of the model in his hand. It puzzled him, the way his granddaughter Patricia puzzled him. It had an odd shape to it, as her life had an odd shape if you looked at it from the beginning. Why of all men had she taken Peter Patchett to her bed?

  It wasn’t a matter of forgiveness—Fetterman felt sure he could forgive anyone anything, or damn near. And he knew of no one else who could make that claim. He supposed it was a function of age, of perspective. And anyway he didn’t hold with that sins of the father stuff. That was all right in the Bible, where you were trying to make a point, but it broke down in real life, where you had to get along on approximations. The people in the Bible were just characters to Fetterman, not real people. He just didn’t believe you could be so hard on one another and still hold it all together.

  Patchy wasn’t a mean man, as far as he could tell. He just wasn’t anything. He was stillborn, neutral of life, a parody of a man. He wondered if there was love in the man, deep love like a man has for a woman, responsible strong love, like a man has for his children, sacred love, like a man has for his God and his people.

  Peter Patchett’s emotions seemed to Fetterman the unformed emotions of a child, changing by the moment, fickle and obnoxious, and that kind of love was just a caprice of mood and digestion.

  He lit his pipe. The meerschaum was yellow and browned in spots, like his own hands. He could not remember how old it was, or that it had ever been new. It was his favorite of forty or so pipes he had collected and not broken or given away in his lifetime. Littlejohn had asked him once why he didn’t carve his own pipes, if he was such a master carver.

  “You could make a fine pipe,” Littlejohn had said, “a work of art.”

  “But they’re not ships,” he had answered. “Pipes are not ships.” A pronouncement that summed it all up, as far as Fetterman was concerned.

  Littlejohn had never asked him again.

  Now Littlejohn lingered at Fetterman’s elbow. “You’ll be going to the meeting, then.”

  “Aye,” Fetterman said. “I dearly hate going to church in midweek, but if we must, we must.”

  “Oman’s bringing men from the village. Malcolm’s even coming from the station. I expect men from all the stations will be coming.”

  “Good. It’s their business, after all.”

  “So it is.”

  The match flared brightly in the bowl of the pipe. The bowl held the flame even after Fetterman discarded the spent match.

  5

  BECAUSE THE medical officer was dead, it was left up to Max Wien to work on the captain. Max, his fingers trembling, cleaned away the blood and mucous mess that had been a bright human eye.

  “Our luck went bad when we spotted that damned fisherman,” Kraft said.

  “Shut up,” said the captain, who was coming awake with an effort of stoic will. They’d lost their ears when the radio mast was shot off, and now they were blinded as well, but he didn’t intend that such minor damage should undo a fighting ship.

  “Hold still,” Max said with an authority that surprised even
him. Stracken grimaced.

  “I’m not foolish enough to think you can save the eye, but can you save me?”

  Max had little hope but said, “Yes, we can do that, Captain.”

  The bone of the socket had splintered and caved in, and Max gingerly put it right. The captain fainted. Max worked more surely now, and mopped the attendant blood with a succession of gauze patches that kept arriving from other hands. He stuffed the empty socket with sterile cotton and over it pressed a thick, soft patch that quickly darkened with fresh blood. He pondered whether to have the captain sit up or remain on his back, and ultimately decided to have him propped up on his bunk, his head thoroughly protected by pillows. If there was a depth bomb attack he didn’t want that fragile head banging against the bulkhead. The captain had already sustained one severe concussion. A man was assigned to wake the captain at intervals. Max would relieve him by turns.

  “He’s had it, hasn’t he,” Kraft said, when they had gone to the other end of the boat.

  “I don’t know that,” Max said, washing his hands.

  “Do you know what this means?”

  Max dried his hands thoroughly. “No, and I don’t think you do, either.”

  “You’re awfully insolent for an enlisted man.”

  “Hah. And I thought I was the doctor.”

  “You’re a doctor for exactly as long as you have a patient.”

  “The way this is turning out, I may be a doctor from now on.”

  “And you may be under arrest if you keep taking liberties.”

  “You’re in charge now. We can make for South America to be refitted.”

  Kraft shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Later, when the captain was awake, Max asked him what was going to happen now.

  “We have to come up, that’s all. We’ll simply fill with water and sink to the bottom if we don’t surface soon. Can’t you feel how we move?”

  “I guess Kraft will have to decide—”

  “That man is in command of nothing,” he said. “You hear? Nothing.”

  When they surfaced the seas were calmer but the weather was still thick. There was no sign of the tanker, no sign of the fisherman, no sun or light, just seas and a crippled submarine lying heavy in the water, looking no more dangerous than a big fish played to exhaustion and ready for the gaff.

  The captain insisted on going to the tower. Max accompanied him, pulling the captain by his arms through the hatchway.

  “My God,” Max said. The lookout tower, the stalk of the periscope, a good piece of the railing around the conning bridge were sheared clean away.

  “Not the time to be calling on that One,” Captain Stracken said. He leaned on Max Wien and his one eye was like a telescope, with no perception of context or depth. Max’s face was strange to look at. Bergen was on the bridge. Apparently discipline was breaking down now. The tower was torn and flattened, and Captain Stracken knew how close they had come to being sent to the bottom. That would have been ironic, he thought, because when a submarine sank like that there was hardly ever a trace, and their enemy would never have the satisfaction of knowing their fate.

  Bergen scrambled onto the deck to inspect his precious gun. It looked serviceable, but the aft gun had been uprooted like a tree stump, leaving a ragged star in the metal deck.

  “So that’s where all the water was coming from,” the captain said. They could hear the pumps humming below. He wondered if his batteries would recharge with them working like that. He was using a lot of power just to stay afloat.

  “We have holes to plug, Max.” Max was imagining the boat rocking like a toy under the weight of the big ship. The bow must have dunked from the blow to the tower, levering up the stern to get chopped by the big slow screws.

  “I wonder what kind of damage we did to her,” Kraft said.

  “Damage?” the captain said. “Damage? You must be joking.”

  The welding teams had come to the bridge, serious, pale young men scared to death to be exposed on the flat seas in broad daylight. Let there be no aeroplanes, Max thought. The captain looked at him as if he had understood, and nodded his head.

  6

  MARY ROYAL POURED herself a healthy slug of brandy and sat drinking and listening to the storm.

  I have the wrong brother, she thought.

  She had never expected any more of her marriage than what she had, but lately she felt opportunity passing like some ship plying the coast to the big cities up north. Not one great ship, perhaps, but a fleet of opportunity, sliding by one at a time on no particular schedule, concealed in weather and at the mercy of war, the tides, and the ingenuity of the men who steered them.

  She knew Malcolm no better than the day he had first approached and showed her the brass coin that each beachman carried to trade with his opposite number on the adjoining station’s patrol. It proved they had met, the beach covered thoroughly, no part left: unguarded. Their lovemaking was like that—meeting face to face at regular intervals, trading proof, then turning and retreating to their own private shores.

  Mary hardly ever drank and never alone, but now she sipped one glass of brandy and then three more, her eyes fixed on the stars of rain against the window. She thought of Malcolm and Keith, and as she drank, the stars ran down the window.

  7

  KEITH KNEW that if he asked Dorothy to go away with him, now, anywhere, she would go. It might not even require marriage. He tried to imagine Dorothy in five, ten, twenty years, no longer fresh, no longer on the beach, Rufus a fond memory, Malcolm, Jack, Mary, and Virginia just names signed to infrequent letters two weeks old before they reached him. Fetterman a ghost, Littlejohn a marker in the wind-scoured graveyard, old Seamus invincible, though, living out his glory in the house on the only hill in Buxton. Keith’s future separate, bound only with Dorothy’s, Hatteras Island no more than a quaint subject for conversation at cocktail parties where knowledgeable men and women with refined voices engineered history, morality, destiny.

  “Just why did you come back?” Dorothy asked. He couldn’t tell if she was angry or just out of patience. There was some small sympathy in her voice, some slight challenge as well.

  “For you,” he said and felt tricked.

  “Did you? Did you really?” She turned away, and he reached for his coat, befuddled. He would have left her then, holding himself to a sense of honor.

  “No,” she said, “you’re not going anywhere. I’ve waited this long, and I know my chance when I see it.”

  They loved again. Dorothy wanted this thing settled.

  8

  THE STORE WAS empty except for Littlejohn and Fetterman. There was the scrape of the carving knife, the drumming of the rain, Fetterman’s slow, heavy breathing. Littlejohn monitored the wireless, thinking about the meeting tonight, about action.

  Littlejohn had once shipped aboard a schooner trading woolens from Ireland and Indonesian rubber, with plenty of coastal trading in between. The John Shay. The captain was a Brit named Baker, a real bastard—haughty and irascible, a man who required of his crew not service but servitude. For him the British Empire was the whole world. The trouble was, except for a few swarthy deckhands picked up in the Africas, most of the crew was Irish. There had been a mutiny led by a man named Moran. Littlejohn had listened to Moran and the others, to all the arguments that added up to the same thing: men dissatisfied with themselves who thought taking over a ship would better their lot. Even then he had seen the folly of it. The logic, not the justice, was faulty.

  He could picture now, twenty-two years later, Moran’s plump Irish face peering over the rifle he had pilfered from the captain’s locker, and Captain Baker, in his vainglorious stupidity, trying to meet force with bluff.

  In the end the John Shay was cast onto the Wimble Shoals and broke up quickly during the night. If there were any other survivors, Littlejohn never heard of them. When his lifeboat had capsized, he had grabbed onto a piece of flotsam and come ashore somewhat more prosaically th
an Ishmael, a half-filled cask of malt under his arm. With that cache of bootleg he had managed to insinuate himself into the economy of the island.

  Littlejohn mused about tonight’s meeting, distrusting all the talk of action. Action had a way of making things worse.

  The radio crackled and through the static the captain of the tanker Proteus broke to report running afoul of wreckage fifteen miles off the Light. Littlejohn copied down the latitude and longitude.

  “I guess I had better tell Dorothy.”

  “I guess somebody better,” Fetterman said.

  “At least we know.”

  But Fetterman wasn’t listening. His knife had slipped, gouging the fragile top of his model.

  9

  THE CHURCH FILLED UP FAST and there was not even the pretext of a prayer before they got down to business. All the life-saving crews were represented. Malcolm and Chief Lord had left the station in Toby Bannister’s charge. And Jack had come with his boy Kevin, who was on hand as a runner in case the telephone line between the vestry and the station was interrupted.

  Jack and Malcolm sat on either side of Chief Lord, their combined shoulders a wall almost ten feet long. Their wives were at the back with the other wives, including Mrs. Patchett, with an urchin on each arm, unaccountably silent.

  Keith Royal sat with Dorothy, and Halstead insinuated himself behind them so he could talk to Dorothy when the opportunity arose. Littlejohn, his wife, and Fetterman sat in the front pew with Seamus Royal, who propped his rifle on the rail in front, its oiled barrel reminding them all why they had come.

  Reverend Simmons quoted from Job: “ ‘He divideth the sea with His power, and by His understanding he smiteth through the proud.’ ” Then presided for the half a minute it took to introduce Oman, Littlejohn, and Malcolm, civic leaders that they were.

  Oman, as mayor of the Village of Hatteras, went first. His duties thus far had not included disarming a submarine menace. In fact, except for dealing with telephone service and flood relief once in a while, he had few real duties at all. The island had never needed a constable—the families settled things between them, and crime as it was known on the mainland was unheard of—and most of its prominent citizens worked for the Government.