Hatteras Light

by Philip Gerard

  Oman explained all this and watched them nod their heads. “You know why we’re here,” Oman said. “We have trouble. We’re here to decide what to do about that Heinie pirate prowling around offshore.”

  The crowd was waking up, shifting to get comfortable, getting ready to listen.

  “This has never happened before,” Oman went on. “Our beaches are sticky with black oil, we’re pulling drowned men out of the surf, and our fishermen can’t even go to the banks for fear of their lives and their boats.”

  Above the general murmur, Tim Halstead’s tenor rose crisp and official. “Excuse me, may I address this meeting?”

  Oman waved his hand in an exaggerated gesture of invitation, and Halstead, now sunburned and with his rough edges rubbed off a little, came to the lectern.

  He cleared his throat like a valedictorian. “I’m an outsider. I was not born on this island, and I know that makes what I say suspect.” There was a more vigorous murmur of assent than he would have liked, but he kept on. “The Navy is quite busy at the moment. There are submarines attacking all over the coast—Narragansett Bay, Long Island Sound, Delaware Bay, Hampton Roads—”

  “We aren’t needing a geography lesson, Horatio!” a man in the back called out, drawing a nervous laugh out of the crowd.

  “I’m just trying to tell you why the Navy hasn’t sent a cutter.”

  “They’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “No,” Halstead said, “they’re just swamped—”

  There was a titter from some of the men, Jack Royal included. Halstead hadn’t intended the pun.

  “The Navy sent me here to handle the situation, and I intend to do just that.”

  “The way you handled the Abilene City, son? The way you handled the lumber ship? The lightship?” Different voices naming each ship.

  Malcolm Royal stood up slowly. He spoke quietly and no one interrupted. “Ladies and gentlemen, please. This man has already put himself in harm’s way on our behalf. Which of you can say as much? The least we can do is listen politely—or is that no longer our custom here?” He looked around, his great shoulders half turned like a turret, then resumed his seat with a gentle settling of breath.

  Chastened, the company attended.

  “Thank you.” Halstead spoke more evenly now. “I have one of your best men, Jack Royal, navigating for me” A round of scattered cheers and applause: “Good for you, Jack,” and “Jack’s true blue.”

  “—and you have to admit, this U-boat hasn’t been very bold lately. It’s my guess he’s getting a little timid.”

  “You mean, he’s afraid of you?” a voice called out, thick with incredulity. Laughter followed.

  “That’s not what I said. But he is being more cautious. I ask your patience. We’ll go out again in the morning, and we’ll keep going out every morning until we get him.” He paused, hands on the rails of the lectern. “Let the Navy handle this. That’s all I have to say.”

  He stepped from the lectern, his shoes clicking sharply on the lacquered wood floor of the church. He had a sense that somehow he had failed. His own men sat at something like attention, and he was bucked up by sight of them. They, at least, would follow him anywhere, he was sure. He had their respect now. That’s all that really mattered. He had got them in today, hadn’t he? He had got off a shot at the U-boat that other time, hadn’t he? All they had to do was worry that submarine until a cutter could be dispatched to blow him out of the water.

  He could do that. Sealion could.

  “Anyone else like to venture an opinion?” Oman asked.

  Seamus Royal caned himself to the front with his rifle, commanding their attention like an old general. “You’re damned right, I would. Now I been on this sandbar a lot of years, and ain’t nothing like this ever come up before. I think … I think we have got to expect an invasion.”

  There were shouts of disbelief, groans, and general disorder. “You’re way out of line, Seamus!”

  Seamus raised his rifle like an Arab, pumping it up and down in his fist while the crowd broke out at him, calling:

  “You’re seeing bogeymen on the beach, old man!”

  “Why would they invade us?”

  “You’re all wet, Seamus Royal.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Been at the jug again?”

  “The Huns?”

  “Don’t be getting carried away with yourself, Seamus Royal.” The last voice was Littlejohn’s. “Don’t be starting at shadows.”

  “Nevertheless, we have to be prepared,” Seamus countered.

  “We have nothing they want.”

  “We had nothing the Yankees wanted, either! Yet they came and took it just the same. Are you forgetting how they crawled over this island like crabs, picking it clean—”

  “The Huns are not the Yankees.”

  “I don’t know about that!” Seamus was pincering his hand and drew general laughter. “They may be worse.”

  “What would they want here? All we have is sand—”

  “And room!” Seamus’s big finger poked at Littlejohn across the rail. “They can assemble their troops here for a general assault on the mainland, don’t you see? That’s what I’m saying. And we’ve got to be ready. We can’t depend on the Government. The Government sends us a posturing nonesuch and a toy speedboat! We need a militia! We’ll be defending our homes, man!”

  “Back up a little, Seamus,” Oman said.

  But as outlandish as his argument sounded, it had the ring of possibility about it. The Yankees had taken the island by surprise, and Norfolk, Portsmouth, Beaufort, and all the capes of Virginia and the Carolinas would be easy game for an army that got this far. Hatteras and Ocracoke islands had harbored whole fleets of pirates in the old days.

  “The question remains: what do we do about the U-boat?” Oman held the floor. Already the men itched, craving a smoke. Reverend Simmons intervened in a timely manner and granted permission for smoking, just this once, due to the circumstances, and the pipes came out like flasks at a funeral. Oman waited for the filling and tamping and lighting to get over with, then went on, “What can fishermen, storekeepers, surfmen, and their families do about a submarine warship killing and plundering within sight of our homes and threatening our lives and livelihoods with each day more that it hides in the Diamond Shoals?”

  It was a good question, and not many had ready answers. Even Seamus’s militia project was of no immediate value in neutralizing the U-boat. If and when the Huns tramped ashore, “like red ants from a rotten tree,” as he put it, that would be the time to keep the powder dry and dig in on the beaches.

  There was a general clamor as the islanders talked it over, shouted about it, argued, laughed, cajoled, or gave up.

  Fetterman rose from his seat like an artificial creature being erected one stage at a time. Littlejohn sat with his head in his hands. Fetterman leaned on the rail of his pew and turned around, not bothering to approach the lectern.

  “I have something to say.”

  “Another country heard from,” Oman said graciously. “Go ahead, Ham. And the rest of you cork your holes and listen to the gentleman.”

  “I have lived longer than ever I hoped or wanted,” Fetterman said. “I have seen Yankees and pirates and bootleggers and a good deal worse. And now I’ve seen this, too. And I tell you: this is different.

  “This murderous lurking Teutonic bastard is hunting by the Light—our Light! He navigates by it, he ambushes by it, he kills by it. He knows exactly where the shipping will pass—he can estimate by tonnage just how close in they’ll dare. For him, it’s shooting fish in a barrel. With that Light, he is damn near invincible.”

  “We can raise a false light,” someone said. “The way they used to do at Nags Head.” To the north, Nags Head, according to legend, was named for the practice of tying a lantern to the neck of a horse and leading it along the beach to lure disoriented vessels onto the shoals, where they would run aground for easy looting.


  “There’s only one thing we can do,” Fetterman said. “We can turn out the Light.”

  Then there was silence. Only twice had the Light ever gone out: once when the original wood tower burned down from lightning, and again for two years during the Civil War when the lens was dismantled by vandals who wore either butternut or blue, depending on who told the story. But on neither occasion had the islanders themselves been a party to it.

  “You can’t be serious.” It was Keith Royal. “Civilization going to pieces, and all you can think to do is make it worse.”

  Malcolm stood up. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Ham. It would be a disgrace. To even contemplate it is a disgrace—”

  “Wake up, can’t you!” Dorothy Dant shouted from beside Keith. “Can’t you see he’s right? This island is not all there is! Turn out your precious Light and run him onto the shoals! Then he won’t be so damned clever.”

  But even as she said it she had a vision of her father and Brian, struggling through a heavy sea looking landward for help, for the Light, and seeing only unrelieved black sky. But they were dead, she knew. Littlejohn had told her. It must be a mistaken vision.

  Malcolm spoke just once more, and then the meeting disintegrated into groups of men and women arguing hotly or solemnly about a matter which rendered consensus impossible and frightening.

  He said: “Not while I’m Keeper.”

  1

  SEAMUS ROYAL LEFT the meeting feeling so many things at once that he could not rightly get it all straight in his mind.

  First and foremost, he was proud of Malcolm and Jack.

  Everybody knew Jack was the only thing that had kept that posturing fool Halstead alive this long. God willing, Jack could bring that ridiculous cigar-shaped boat home every time. Jack was the lucky one. Nobody would ever drown shipping with Jack. Jack had a temper, true enough, but he was a family man, the salt of the earth, a father and a husband, a progenitor of tradition, the kind of man who would turn up again and again in stories, same as Malcolm. Maybe more. Jack was smarter by half, and he was a courageous man who knew how to cut the risks and do the job without any fanfare.

  Malcolm thought him a hothead, Seamus knew, but Malcolm was so steady even the Light itself seemed by comparison capricious and unreliable.

  Malcolm was damn near a legend already on the island, the way Seamus himself had been once. The old-timers—salts like Oman, Littlejohn, and Fetterman—knew all about Seamus, and he had served notice tonight. He had done that.

  But it troubled Seamus that some had not taken him seriously. Maybe he should have left the Krag at home—maybe that was just a tad too melodramatic. People frowned on overstatement.

  But he was angry about the Dant men—that godless Hun had destroyed a harmless fishing boat. There was no mystery about it in Seamus’s mind: The German didn’t need a reason to destroy—that was the error here. These people, his people, were treating this emergency far too rationally.

  How could you be rational about a German submarine? It was piracy, and worse: it was spiteful.

  Now there would be action, Seamus knew. Fetterman’s speech about turning out the Light would provoke something, and Seamus would need to sort this all out over a bottle of bond before he could throw the weight of his reputation and experience behind any scheme.

  “Mister Royal—can I talk to you?” Dorothy Dant was walking beside him. He hooked an arm around her and felt her squeeze into him. He unclamped his pipe so as not to trouble her with the smoke.

  “You can have all my time you want, Dot. It isn’t in such great demand.”

  They went together through the balmy evening. The weather had calmed down. Tomorrow would be a wonderful day, he knew. He could tell. He had read the sky often enough all these years.

  “Where’s Keith?” Seamus said.

  “I was wondering about my father.”

  “Yes. The wireless report, wasn’t it. I can’t tell you anything, girl. Your dad was a fine man, we all respected him. We’ll look after you now, every one of us. You have all the family you’ll ever need.”

  “You know the currents around here better than anybody.” She paused, having a hard time with what she wanted to ask. But Seamus had not been Keeper of the Hatteras Light for all those years by being thick to what was on people’s minds.

  “Dottie, I can’t say for sure. But it seems to me—and I can only go by the wireless report—it would have to be around Kinnakeet. Maybe even a little farther north.”

  “I see.”

  “But Dottie …”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The thing is, if the Labrador got them? They may never come ashore at all.”

  She stared up at him, and a shadow of fear passed over her face. He had seen that look before. That was the one thing she had not wanted to hear from him.

  “Then he’s joined Uncle Dennis,” she said, mostly to herself.

  “There’s no use fretting, girl. The worst is over. We can hope a little, can’t we?”

  She drifted away without answering, and he felt like a very old man to be talking of death so glibly.

  2

  THERE WAS A WIRELESS MESSAGE waiting for Malcolm when he returned. Toby had taken it down himself. In two days’ time a cadre of staff officers would arrive to present Malcolm with the Gold Medal for Life-Saving.

  The men all shook his hand. Jack waited till the rest of the crew and the Navy people had their turns and then offered his right hand to his brother. Their eyes fixed on one another’s, and Chief Lord watched the two brothers square off in a handshake.

  “This is no good,” Malcolm said at last, withdrawing his hand, and Chief saw that Malcolm was embarrassed by all the fuss.

  “No,” Jack said, “but it’s what we have.”

  3

  THEY WOULD RIDE the surface all night long, drifting. They had no other choice.

  Captain Stracken lay fevered in his bunk, his head bloated with concussion and infection. Max stood over the man and felt the blood swell and pulse against his own temples. He breathed deep and exhaled. He listened to the frantic rasp of metal files, the hammer of rivet guns, the hush of welding torches, till he couldn’t stand it any longer. He climbed aloft into the terrible moonlight and watched his shipmates labor on the flat deck on a quiet sea. Their arms and legs, their shoulders and heads shone with a nimbus of moonlight, though he could not make out their faces. They started and froze at every alien sound, like deer. He remembered deer in the snow under a moon like this one.

  “What are you doing up here?” It was Kraft. “Never mind. I can see it’s no use anymore. You do what you please. I wash my hands.”

  “Will they finish by morning?”

  The mate shrugged. Max thought he looked different than a few hours ago but could not locate the difference in the map of the man’s face.

  “Who knows.” He lit a cigarette, one of a precious few he had left. He offered one to Max, who declined. Kraft nodded, and Max knew he had redeemed himself a little. “I don’t think we can dive no matter when we finish. I don’t think we are much of a shark anymore.”

  Max nodded. He felt sorry for the men working so feverishly, glancing over their shoulders in dread of being taken by surprise.

  “Look at them.” Kraft dragged on his cigarette, held it out inspecting it between puffs. Max thought all he lacked was a blindfold.

  “Our captain,” Kraft said, “is used to things the old way. He doesn’t understand what we’ve been doing, not even now.”

  “He’s a natural submariner. You can’t deny that.”

  “Is he? I don’t know. He is born to command, but I think submarines are not his line.”

  Max considered that, surprised to hear Kraft say it. Max had always pictured Stracken at the bridge of a grander ship, a battleship or a cruiser, but still he would have looked thin and worried there. He would have looked his best on the quarterdeck of a sailing ship, a clipper or a schooner, the masts raked for speed and the bridge ope
n to weather, the sails a brave target a dozen miles off. “He doesn’t see much honor in skulking around, you mean.”

  “Yes, that’s it. I think you’ve hit on what I was trying to say.”

  “And you?”

  Kraft laughed a quiet, pleasant laugh. Max couldn’t recall ever having heard him laugh before. “That’s the thing, boy. It is easy to start liking it, if you’re the right sort of man. Honor is not what applies here, that’s your mistake. I would not leave the U-boat service if you gave me my own dreadnought.”

  Max understood now why Kraft was so relaxed: It was over for him. He had no faith in Stracken’s or finally even his own ability to get them home, or to a rendezvous. He knew he would never have his own command. What did ship’s discipline matter to doomed men?

  Kraft checked his chronometer. “Three more hours of darkness,” he said. “After that, we are in the hands of God, and I for one am not counting on His sympathy.”

  He smoked and stood watch over the laboring sailors the rest of the night, Max going below by turns to check on his captain and returning to stand beside a man who offered nothing to admire and every reason to be afraid.

  Max strained his eyes toward the island. Twice ships passed to the west and the work was halted while the men held their breath and lay flat on the deck, not to offer a silhouette.

  The captain continued in his fever and then, with dawn at his back, Max saw the low profile of land. It hugged the horizon the way he imagined U-55 did. Above the land, he thought he saw a tower, and at the top of the tower a glinting flash, the Light searching for them.

  4

  AFTER THE VILLAGE MEETING, at their father’s request, the three sons joined Seamus at his house, their old home. Malcolm stayed only a little while, and this he did reluctantly, as he had wanted to spend a few minutes with Mary on the way back to the station.

  The sons arrived more or less separately and met at the door. Malcolm had not had his good news yet, and Keith was still brooding about Dorothy. They mumbled greetings before going inside.