Hatteras Light

by Philip Gerard

  At last, the water was in his eyes.

  Tonight he welcomed the night watch, a reprieve from dreams. He paced and smoked and saw into the transatlantic darkness with clarity and suspicion.

  When he spied the lights of the freighter steaming north, hard by the shoals, he didn’t hesitate: He raised the alarm with a great blast of breath. Then he watched four flashes, like matches striking, felt four concussions in his own chest, regular as heartbeats.

  2

  THE D’Arcy McGee was a coal burner of Canadian registry bound for Newark with a cargo of rubber from the Far East. She took four direct hits that swamped the engine room and left her listing badly in the shoals. Her final momentum and the action of the waves and a mild breeze were driving her hard toward the Bight of Hatteras and a shallow grave.

  “She’s too close in,” Malcolm said. “If she comes in any closer, we can’t use the boat.” In the choppy breakers, a rescue by boat would be foolhardy. “Let her stay in deep water.”

  But she drove toward them even faster now, the wind freshening. Chief Lord and two men were already fetching the Lyle gun and the breeches buoy on a boxcart. Chief led Homer to the waterline and waited. They could do nothing until the D’Arcy McGee came to rest.

  Jack and Keith Royal came on the run, summoned by Cy Magillicutty on the telephone.

  “Good Lord! She’s almost on the beach!” Keith said. “What was she trying to do, anyway?”

  “Hug the shoreline, save some fuel,” Jack said. “Outsmart the Hun.”

  Malcolm didn’t say anything.

  “At least she’s not burning yet.”

  Malcolm shook his head. “She’s burning inside her belly.”

  Keith could smell her now. Soon the flames waved like pennants above the deck, backlighting the low squared silhouette of the ship.

  “There’s nothing to stop him now,” Jack said. Suddenly he wished Halstead’s boat were back in action. It was a silly defense, but at least it was a defense.

  Malcolm stood between Keith and Jack, powerless. If he could, he would swim that surf and drag the survivors back two at a time under his arms, but all he could do was wait. The crew had been making progress along the shoreline, stalking her as she drifted south in the shallows, and now the D’Arcy McGee was almost directly abeam of the slip where Halstead’s boat had been docked. Then the black ship grounded with a prolonged shudder that echoed in her great iron belly and escaped her holds like a death rattle.

  “Now,” Malcolm said, assuming command. “Go to it!”

  Joe Trent and Toby Bannister dug a cross-shaped pit and buried the sand anchor, while Ian MacSween and Will Fetterman unlimbered the block and tackle and raised the high wooden crotch that would support the shore-end of the lifeline. And then Malcolm, shrugging aside Chief Lord and Cy Magillicutty, hefted the two-hundred-pound Lyle gun out of the boxcart himself. His chest swelled with purposeful strength. The brass barrel was warm to his touch.

  The other men meanwhile laid out the breeches buoy—a cork ringbuoy with canvas trouser legs sewn underneath. Through his megaphone, Malcolm hailed the D’Arcy McGee.

  She lay no more than a hundred yards out, her bow pointing south. On the inclined deck, several dark figures moved about drunkenly.

  “Try the signal lamp,” Malcolm ordered.

  Toby Bannister manipulated the blinds of the signal lamp and in a few seconds another light blinked on deck.

  “They’re ready for a line,” he told Malcolm.

  The Lyle gun was loaded, the thin white messenger line coiled perfectly in the faking box beside the barrel. Hal MacRae elevated the muzzle and aimed it amidships, since the fire was so far confined to the stern.

  He tugged the lanyard and a sharp report stung the air. The line uncoiled in a long arc, swallowed by the sky, bending in the wind, lifted. And missed.

  “Windage, Mister MacRae—windage!” Malcolm bellowed. Cyrus and Will Fetterman hauled in the line hand over hand and McRae coiled it as perfectly as before.

  The second try sent the line waggling like spittle over the water in a higher arc. It caught on a boom, and they could see men scurrying to retrieve it. When the signal came, Chief Lord attached the stout hawser to the light flying line and Toby sent another signal. The men on the ship hauled in the light line until they had the hawser, which they ran through a block on the boom. The other end was run through the pulley on shore, completing the circuit.

  Malcolm and Chief Lord rigged the breeches buoy under the hawser, and on Malcolm’s signal they hauled it out to the D’Arcy McGee, the men lined in the surf as the breeches buoy sailed over their heads like a miniature tramcar.

  Jack Royal took his place on the crew, but his ordeal aboard the Sealion had taken more out of him than he knew. Giddy after only a few minutes’ exertion, he faltered to his knees in the surf and felt a strong hand on his shoulder lifting him by the scruff of his jacket.

  “Malcolm—” he started to say.

  But it was Keith. He pulled Jack to his feet as roughly as he could and put his own hands on the hawser, hauling in concert with the others as the first man rode the breeches buoy in above the inky seas.

  3

  HALSTEAD HAD MANAGED to finish most of the bottle before curling up with his knees under his chin and the corked bottle wedged tight in his crotch. He heard a clamor of voices and the crack of cannon fire. The wind carried ammonia, salt, and cordite, and ventilated his dreams with that confusion of smells. He woke up and grunted. Something was going on.

  4

  THE FIRST FIVE MEN to ride ashore in the breeches buoy were badly injured and had to be lifted out of the lifesaving seat. Three were burned and two were all cut up from shrapnel. In the two and a half hours it took for those five to make it ashore, the weather worsened. The seas turned to chop and the fresh wind seemed to come from all directions at once. The man in the buoy seat bobbed like a monkey on a stick.

  “It’s the outside edge of a hurricane,” Chief Lord said. “I can feel it.”

  “It’s all wrong for the season,” MacSween said.

  “Ain’t they always,” Chief Lord said.

  They were working to a crowd now. Littlejohn and his wife were passing out cups of coffee and Mrs. Patchett’s children took turns playing with Homer. Virginia, Mary, and Dorothy congregated around Seamus, who stood like a statue in a town square, his rifle shouldered like a minuteman’s, his head cocked to the wind, taking it all in. Jack reclined on the beach alone. Mary watched Keith labor in the surf. She noticed that her father-in-law wasn’t the only armed man on the beach. Rifles poked out here and there, and a few pockets bulged with the weight of pistols. Mary wondered how it would all turn out.

  The men on the crew didn’t talk much, conserving all their wind for the strenuous job of retrieving the breeches buoy again and again.

  The sixth man to come ashore was lucid enough to tell them there were scores of men on line behind him.

  “What are you talking about?” Malcolm seized him by the collar. A freighter that size, he knew, shouldn’t carry above two dozen hands and probably carried fewer, with the wartime shortage of manpower.

  “Marines,” he said. “Australian marines. Came ashore at the Falklands for transport to England.”

  “Lord of Hosts,” said Chief Lord. “At the rate she’s burning, we’ll never get them off in time.”

  Malcolm said, “We might.”

  “Who are you kidding?” Chief Lord said.

  The crew continued hauling in sooted sailors and marines, one by one, the process an agony of failing hope. There were so many still to get off, and now the conflagration on deck was general, lighting the whole beach like an early sunrise. Soon the deck would be untenable, and the men huddled there with such remarkable discipline would be forced to hurl themselves into a sea where currents crossed like cyclone winds.

  The stink of rubber burned the breeze.

  The hawser stretched out to the vessel like a high-tension line, black and precis
e against the orange glow behind it. A dark cloud accumulated above the D’Arcy McGee and crawled steadily shoreward.

  “There’s just one more thing,” Malcolm said, and took a coiled line out of the boxcart. He slipped Homer out of harness, then he led the horse to the water.

  5

  CAPTAIN STRACKEN WAS still out of his head, reciting Tennyson in English and hearing the bells of Bach ringing off the bulkheads.

  “Max. Kommen Sie hierher!” he called.

  But Max was topside, where First Officer Kraft was having the devil’s own time maneuvering the balky submarine in the chop. Submerged, she had shipped entirely too much water, and now he wanted to run on the surface, pump out the bilge, recharge batteries, and satisfy his own curiosity about what was going on. The attack had been a surface affair, a bold thrust under a waning moon.

  “Can you smell it, Max?”

  “Rubber. Of course I can smell it.”

  “No, not rubber—death. The death of armies. Tires, boots, gaskets, balloons. Tires, most of all. An army without transport going nowhere, dying on its own ground. Can you smell it?”

  Kraft made an exaggerated sniffing sound and drew the acrid scent deep into his lungs.

  “How can you do that?”

  “Penance.” He laughed. “My God, she burns bright.”

  “Bergen’s work.”

  “Have you ever thought what they would do if they captured us?”

  “I know what I would do.”

  “For killing the innocents? Let me tell you, boy, they are none of them so innocent.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “For firing on merchantmen on the high seas?”

  Max shook his head and lit a cigarette he had pilfered from the captain. “For mocking honor.”

  “You want heroes in this war? There are no heroes in the Schlachthof.”

  “No, only der Techniker, like our Bergen.”

  “He’s due for promotion, don’t you think? And so are you. You have held up admirably.”

  Max smoked and kept his own counsel for a few minutes. He did not want a promotion. Above all things, he didn’t want that. His only hope lay in his common station, his only dignity in the fact that he wasn’t in charge, not of anything, and never would be. He smoked until Kraft lost interest in him and began bothering the crew about navigation, casting orders about like a man fending off blows. The rudder damaged, they were drifting in dangerously close. She wasn’t responding to the helm as neatly as Kraft would have liked. They couldn’t send a diver over, not at night in these waters, so they would make do. Sluggishly, U-55 came about and steamed south, close off the Bight of Hatteras.

  Max noticed movement and lights on the beach. He raised the glasses for a closer look. He saw the breeches buoy, slung out over the water, crawling toward shore, saw the line of broad-backed men leaning into their task, some of them waist-deep in water, now the spume breaking over their shoulders. Then he saw something else.

  He started to call Kraft but thought better of it. What he saw, burnished in the glow of flames, taking each breaker head-on so that foam splashed and curled about it, was the figure of a man on horseback struggling toward the doomed ship.

  6

  MALCOLM ROYAL HAD no illusions about his own safety, but he worried about drowning a good horse. On he drove, his mouth clamped shut to keep the little courage he still felt from spilling out. Homer balked under him, pincered by his powerful legs. He compelled the horse forward by main force of will. He was scared enough to be grateful for solitude. No one required calming words, no one required assurance, no one required commanding. The beast was simply mastered, as Malcolm was, the pair of them in full career in a direction neither wished to go.

  Halfway there, Homer was foundering. Stupidly, Malcolm felt for stirrups to raise himself.

  Homer staggered in a riptide, then found a sandbar and gathered his legs onto it and they moved forward once more, Malcolm now carressing Homer’s neck and soothing him with nonsensical murmurings that were meant as much for himself as for the horse.

  The men aboard the D’Arcy McGee realized at once what was going on. When he was close enough, Malcolm raised a hand and indicated they should jump. He watched them hurtle into the surf like bundles of rags. He cast the line toward them in a singing arc, and someone tugged at the end of it. Malcolm fastened the bitter end around his waist and stiffened to keep his seat as weight accumulated on the other end, then all along the length of the line. They had the idea. “Good boys,” Malcolm said, “good boys.”

  He pivoted slowly, timing the waves just right. Homer was swimming now, blowing spray out of his nostrils, and took a couple of minutes finding something solid under his hooves. Malcolm held on to Homer’s mane. Homer leaned out like a thoroughbred running toward the cheers. Behind them a line of men bobbed along the rope and tried not to drown.

  7

  JACK ROYAL, the wind whipping tears out of his eyes, his face clenched like a fist, observed Malcolm’s progress.

  8

  “DEAR GOD,” Mary Royal said. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Virginia held her arm.

  “He’s a showboater, that one. I always said so.”

  Dorothy, standing behind the sisters, said: “They’re all crazy.”

  “Don’t start,” Virginia warned.

  “Would you look at him!” Mary said. “Just look at him!” Her heart was flung high in the overwhelming adventure of the moment, then plummeted, and she was instandy miserable.

  9

  HALSTEAD HAD COME OUT to the beach, sobered, and volunteered. He was amazed. He watched Malcolm Royal coax the horse out of the breakers onto the beach while the rest of the crew, the breeches buoy temporarily stranded on the crotch, waded in to pull out the survivors trailing Malcolm. Chief Lord and Cy Magillicutty hauled in the line, and the others heaved the survivors bodily from the foam and onto dry land.

  Malcolm stood heaving, head pressed into the horse’s neck. “Good boy,” he said, stroking Homer’s neck. “Good boy.” Homer staggered to his knees and Malcolm with him. Mary stood over her husband, kneeling in the surf.

  10

  OLD FETTERMAN LEANED close at Littlejohn’s ear, pointing with his cane, and said, in between coughs: “Look what Malcolm caught.”

  11

  THEY HAD GOT every man who was coming off the D’Arcy McGee. No one could really believe what had just occurred, least of all the men who had been saved. Malcolm worked among them, organizing, reassuring, congratulating. The women lent a hand dressing wounds. It was time to get out from under the storm before it delivered its cargo of rain. They watched the D’Arcy McGee burn.

  In the glow of the flames, the U-boat was suddenly visible behind the freighter.

  “It’s the Hun!” Seamus cried. “They’re landing!” He raised his rifle without hesitating and let go the magazine in quick unaimed shots.

  “Stop it!” Malcolm yelled, running toward his father and then ducking at the last second to avoid having his head taken off.

  Seamus fired out the magazine and fetched another from his pocket. Now others were moving close to the water or picking out perches in the dunes and firing on the German, their muzzle flashes illuminating their faces.

  Some of the women screamed, others fled. A few clapped their hands over their ears and flung themselves on the beach, ready to die. Someone behind Mary Royal hammered at the sky with a cap-and-ball pistol. Fetterman shook his cane over his head like a sword. “Bastard,” he said, “bastard.”

  The melee lasted about a minute and a half. Then the rain came, and they broke and ran for cover, as the German U-boat floated off into the storm, and the air, tasting of rubber, smothered their lungs.

  12

  MALCOLM LABORED.

  He held the pen upright between his index and middle fingers, his swollen thumb against the point to keep it in place as he wrote in a careful but ragged script: Freighter D’Arcy McGee, Canadian registry, grounded shortly after midnigh
t south of the Light after U-boat attack. With breeches buoy & Homer, our horse, removed sixty-two men, inch Australian marines.

  There, it was finished. His hand throbbed from the effort. He wanted to say something about the confusion he was feeling. He felt no better than a mooncusser or a wrecker, luring ships to disaster with the assurance of a light. It was all turned around now, and each lost ship somehow counted as a betrayal, although he could seriously entertain no alternative to his duty.

  Malcolm wished the wind would dash the windows and extinguish the Light, that lightning would intervene, or accident. But it was a Fresnel lens of the first order, the glass of the bonnet was reinforced and had never buckled in all the forty-seven years since it had been installed, and he, not God, was its Keeper.

  He rubbed his hands on the soft indigo flannel sleeves of his fatigue uniform and his hands stung with the new circulation. With the knuckles of his thumbs, he cleared salt water from his eyes before it could fall on the page and blot his words.

  1

  ALVIN DANT HAD LABORED most of his life under threat of breaking even. When the fishing was bad, it was worse for him. Somehow the others always managed a catch. When it was good, it broke his nets with a bounty of table fish he could not collect. With his profits he was always paying off past debts, cancelling what was owed, so that his future was always slightly in mortgage and he was forever trying to catch up.

  He worked with determination, drank only occasionally, and was a conscientious if imperfect father. And luck was a thing he had heard about, all right—other men sometimes had it. But Alvin Dant never gambled at cards, avoided borrowing money for luxuries, and trusted his boat and his seamanship and not the gods.

  Brian was working the bilge pump by hand, as his father had done until just a few minutes ago. “One more hour,” the boy chanted as the pump handle stroked up and down, “one more hour.” That was the modest goal Alvin had set for them.

  The main force of the storm had not yet reached them. The turbulence now was just the preliminaries. For the time being they were safe enough. For the hour.