Black Duck

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  I wasn’t, either. I went home that day to my parents and Aunt Grace, and I stayed there. All the things I’d been doing before, I started up with again. They were good for me suddenly. The store was a good place to work. School was okay, and I did well there. I went on to the high school and when my father told me there wasn’t enough money to go away to a four-year college, I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to go anyhow. I went over to a technical college that had started up in New Bedford and got a degree in business administration. Then I came right back and helped Dad run the store.

  The laws banning liquor had been repealed by then. They went out in 1933 when the whole country voted against them. It had begun to sink in that the violence that came from keeping liquor out of people’s hands was a lot worse than the violence of people drinking to their hearts’ content.

  I knew the truth of that more than I wanted to. For years afterward, Billy Brady walked into my line of vision every time I saw a speedboat tear down the bay, or I came across a fisherman on the beach with his dog.

  I never told my parents or Aunt Grace I’d been out on the Black Duck. I never told any of my friends at school. The newspaper articles about the killings appeared, and I kept silent. When Roger Campbell and his crew were cleared of wrongdoing, people around here went crazy. They believed the government was covering up a crime. Still, I never gave my opinion about it. The funny thing was, even though I’d been there on the spot, I wasn’t sure myself whether the Guard had given us fair warning.

  There are times when truth becomes invisible, I think, beyond the reach even of those who believe they’re closest to it. And so I’ve never talked about what happened, or tried to describe it to anyone all these years.

  With the exception of one person.

  MARINA

  THE MORNING AFTER THE SHOOTING, BEFORE I went home, I stopped by the McKenzies’ house.

  Dawn was just breaking when I got there. I’d hitched a ride out of Newport on a milk truck heading for one of the big dairies on our side of the bay, then walked the rest of the way into town. My clothes had dried, but I knew I probably looked as bad as I felt. I stayed off the main street, hoping no one would see me.

  I didn’t knock. The kitchen door was open as I knew it would be. I hadn’t been there for months, but everything looked the same. The kitchen table was in its place under the lightbulb, already set for breakfast. The counters were neat, and Mrs. McKenzie’s china was put away carefully in its corner cupboard. I went by her portrait in the front hall and felt her eyes follow me as I turned up the stairs. I went slowly, on my toes, avoiding a creaky board I knew at the top.

  Nobody was up. Chief McKenzie was snoring in his bedroom down the hall. Jeddy’s door was open a crack. I peeked in and saw him buried in his blankets.

  I slipped by to Marina’s bedroom, went inside and closed the door behind me. She was sound asleep, her hair tossed across the pillow. I was afraid to wake her. I wished I could keep the news I had to tell her to myself. I wished she’d never have to hear it.

  After only a minute, she knew I was in the room. Sleep is porous that way. There’s usually a window raised somewhere in the unconscious mind. Her eyes opened and she looked straight at me.

  “Ruben? What is it?” She sat up.

  “Something’s happened.”

  “That’s Billy’s hat,” she said.

  “Yes.” I still had it in my hands.

  “The Black Duck’s in trouble?”

  I nodded. “We ran into the Coast Guard.”

  “Billy’s in jail?”

  “No.”

  “In the hospital?”

  “No.”

  “Well, where is he?” she asked. Then she looked at me and knew.

  It was the worst thing I’d ever had to see in my life, to watch her face cave in the way it did. I couldn’t think of what else to do, so I went over and sat on her bed and put my arms around her. I started to tell her what had happened. Halfway through she began to cry. When I got to the place where we came on the Coast Guard cutter tied to the bell buoy, where the machine gun went off and the Duck veered away, she covered her face and told me to stop.

  “I can’t hear any more.”

  So we sat together listening to the morning sounds outside the window. A rooster’s plain-and-ordinary cock-a-doodle-doo. A car’s motor starting up. Someone whistling a church tune out on the road.

  Footsteps sounded in the hall.

  “My father’s up,” Marina said.

  “Don’t let him know I’m here.”

  She went across to the door and turned the lock. When she came back, she asked in a whisper:

  “Was it Roger Campbell’s cutter tied up to the bell buoy?”

  I said it was.

  “He’s the man who fired on Billy’s dad. Everybody knows he’s loose with his guns. Billy thought he was crazy, and maybe he is. He was after the Black Duck, ever since they led him on that wild chase up the bay onto a sandbar.”

  I said I remembered that.

  “If he was tied up to the bell, that means he was expecting somebody.”

  “It seems like it,” I said. “No one would be out there otherwise. The fog was too thick. You couldn’t see ten feet.”

  “I think he was tipped off,” Marina said. “Somebody knew the Duck would be coming that way.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “Everyone around the bay was rooting for them. They kept clear of the syndicates and they didn’t carry guns. I know Billy was on the wrong side of the law, but who would want to set a man like Roger Campbell on him?”

  We looked at each other and didn’t know. It would be a few days before Marina read, along with the whole town, the newspaper story about a local police chief who’d called up the Coast Guard and done just that.

  The Last Interview

  DAVID PETERSON IS STANDING TRANSFIXED on the front porch, a pair of brand-new hedge clippers from Peterson’s Garden Shop in his hands, as Mr. Hart finishes this last bit of his story.

  Chief McKenzie was the tip-off man?

  That’s what the caller said.

  I knew it! That double-crossing rat. Was it to stop Marina from seeing Billy Brady? Or because the Black Duck was running liquor in the New York mob’s territory? Or was Roger Campbell paying him for information?

  Mr. Hart shrugs. Any one of those reasons would do. And probably would’ve done if Ralph McKenzie had made that call.

  Wait a minute. He didn’t?

  No.

  But, who did?

  Mr. Hart turns to look at the progress David has been making on the bushes over the front windows. You sure are clearing a space there. I’ll be sunbathing in the parlor before long.

  Who called? David asks again.

  It wasn’t the chief. He wasn’t at home when Manny brought Marina back from Tom Morrison’s that night. Jeddy McKenzie was there, though.

  David stares at the old man. Manny Biggs ratted on the Black Duck? His own cousin was on board.

  He was playing for more money, I guess. He knew he’d get paid for his information, probably a lot more than Billy would’ve paid him for rounding up the truckers in Harveston.

  So Manny told Jeddy about the Black Duck’s trip out to the Mary Logan that night.

  I believe so. Left a message for the chief is probably what happened.

  And Jeddy called the Coast Guard?

  He had to. It was police business. He was stepping into his father’s shoes.

  How did you find this out?

  Jeddy told me.

  David sits down on a porch chair. When?

  I stopped by his room on the way out of the McKenzies’ house that morning. I wanted to tell him the Black Duck had been caught. He said he’d made the call. “How could you?” I asked him. “You don’t know what you did.’’

  “I know what I did,” Jeddy said. “I was following the law.”

  David looks out across the lawn, which needs cu
tting. Out by the road, a single dead, leafless tree limb is poking through the swirl of greenery. It should be taken down before it causes harm by falling itself, he thinks. It might drop on a car coming in the driveway, or a person walking out there.

  What happened then?

  What happened was the chief packed up. He and Jeddy left town. Everybody wanted to get rid of Chief McKenzie by then. The Black Duck was a hero to our folks. They all read the newspaper article and thought the chief had been the tip-off man. He covered for Jeddy, and they went down south to . . .

  North Carolina, David says.

  That’s right.

  And Jeddy never came back.

  No. I never saw him again. Marina visited every few years. After the chief died, that is. She couldn’t forgive her father for what she thought he’d done to Billy Brady. She never guessed the truth. I wasn’t going to tell her and Jeddy certainly wasn’t, either.

  You must hate him, David says to Mr. Hart. You must hate Jeddy McKenzie’s guts.

  I don’t. It was all too much for him, I think. He’d believed in his father, and in police business, and in the clear divide of right and wrong. Fog wasn’t something Jeddy could deal with.

  Mr. Hart takes his glasses off and wipes his eyes. The thing is, he was a good kid. Like you. He was trying to find his way, trying his best to do what was right.

  For a long moment, they sit quietly together, gazing at the yard. Then David gets up and starts in again on the bushes with the new hedge clippers.

  He can’t imagine how he’ll ever be able to write all this down.

  AN ARRIVAL

  STRANGELY, EVEN AFTER THE STORY IS OVER, and he knows everything, and nothing is left to be told, David Peterson doesn’t stop going by Mr. Hart’s house. He rides over the next day, and the next, and the next. There’s a lot to be done around the yard. David cuts and prunes, digs and snips, plants and grooms. He takes down the dead tree limb out by the road. He’s good at this work and, out of sight of his father, really enjoys it. The old man is happy to have him. They talk easily back and forth.

  Have you written my story down yet? Mr. Hart asks.

  No, David admits.

  Well, get going. I’m not going to last forever!

  I don’t know how to start.

  At the beginning, Mr. Hart says. At Coulter’s Beach, when we found that body. I’ve still got Tony Mordello’s tobacco pouch, if that’ll get you going.

  Is the half fifty-dollar bill still in it?

  Where else?

  The old man goes in his bedroom and comes out with a limp leather pouch that looks as if it’s been squashed under a mattress for most of its life. Which it has, Mr. Hart acknowledges. He never found a better place.

  Open it, he orders. David does, and there amid the now almost scentless crumblings of what used to be tobacco leaf, he finds the old half bill, wrinkled and pale with age, but still giving off an aura of intrigue.

  You take it, Mr. Hart says. I don’t need it anymore.

  Really? The pouch, too?

  It’s yours. Time it passed to somebody else.

  Thanks! I’ll keep it safe.

  I know you will.

  I hitched down to Coulter’s Beach the other day. Tom Morrison’s shack isn’t there anymore, David says.

  Mr. Hart nods. He’s spruced himself up this morning. His hair is slicked back. He’s wearing a clean shirt. Broom in hand, he’s been sweeping off the porch, all the while keeping an eager eye on the driveway. He heard from his wife last night. She’s coming home today. Could arrive anytime.

  Tom’s chicken coops went out in the 1938 hurricane, Mr. Hart says. Tom didn’t care. He’d died and gone to the town cemetery five years before. I used to wonder how he was bearing up in such a civilized place, with all that company.

  David grins. What happened to Sadie? After Billy was killed, I mean.

  She stayed on with Tom just as you’d expect. Became a great crabber. Marina and I went down there from time to time. Tom always cheered us up. He was one of those that carry on no matter the hardship. It showed you what was possible.

  I walked around that cemetery, David says. I found Eileen McKenzie’s grave.

  Mr. Hart answers with a grunt. That cemetery has a good part of the town in it now. At least the part I grew up with.

  I saw John Appleby’s name on a stone. Is that him?

  Must be. He died young. A hunting accident is what they said. I always wondered. He was the kind of stinker nobody likes having around.

  Fanny DeSousa, Mildred Cumming, Charlie Pope.

  Yes, they’re all there. Mildred just died, lived to be ninety-six. People last a long time around here. Did you see the Hart plot in the south corner? It’s where I’m headed. My father and mother are both in residence. Aunt Grace, too. She never could find anyone who knew the score better than she did.

  I saw them. I couldn’t find any McKenzies besides Eileen.

  Nope, and you never will. Jeddy wouldn’t want to come back dead any more than he did alive. I don’t even know where the chief is buried.

  What happened to Marina?

  This question goes unanswered, and when David looks up from the bush he’s attacking with the clippers, he sees Mr. Hart staring at him. His glasses give off an amused glint. If you don’t know already what happened to her, I guess I won’t tell you.

  At that moment, the sound of wheels comes from the driveway and a taxi pulls up. Mr. Hart drops his broom like a hot potato. He gives his hair one last swipe, straightens his shirt and hustles down the porch steps to greet it.

  She’s here! he cries to David. She’s come back at last!

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THERE ARE TIMES WHEN HISTORY SEEMS SO close, you can almost reach out and touch it.

  The beaches and coastal inlets around my small Rhode Island town are unchanging places where the past can still wash in on the tide, bringing the same dark nights, sudden lights, disembodied voices and sounds of speedboat engines known to residents here during the 1920s rum-running era. My father recalls being awakened, at age eight, by a commotion on the shore below his family home. Bootleggers! Breathless, he watched from his window as their headlights danced across the sand.

  Black Duck was written out of this immediate local memory, and features a notorious rumrunner craft of that name, which really did smuggle thousands of cases of liquor in to our shores during Prohibition before meeting her final fate. Manned by a crew of four from communities around Narragansett Bay, the Black Duck ferried goods off foreign ships from Canada, Europe and the West Indies. These boats moored along the southern New England coast outside U.S. territorial limits, beyond the legal reach of the Coast Guard. Rum Row, they came to be known, and as the decade wore on, their numbers increased until a variety of freighters, schooners, sailing craft and fishing boats stretched for miles at sea, each awaiting contact with a shore runner like the Black Duck.

  There wasn’t much the government could do about this. America’s 1919 Prohibition law against the consumption or sale of liquor pitted a poorly funded assortment of policing agencies against a black market driven equally by the country’s mounting thirst for liquor and the enormous profits up for grabs to those who could supply it. The Duck was just one among many smuggling craft, some locally owned, some built, funded and backed by crime syndicates, competing against each other along the shore, often with bloody results.

  The Black Duck’s crew ran its smuggling operations at night, the darker the better, and often in bad weather to avoid detection. A true speedboat of her day, she was outfitted with a pair of 300-horsepower World War I airplane engines, enabling her to outrun most government boats. In addition, the men on board knew their coast well, and had the advantage of friends and allies onshore who could help them hide at short notice. Over time, their narrow escapes took on a sort of Robin Hood–like aura. And when, on the night of December 29, 1929, the crew was fired on, in dense fog, by a Coast Guard cutter that had apparently been lying in wait tied up t
o a bell buoy, the reaction in local communities was outrage. Three men died in a barrage of machine-gun bullets; a fourth, the boat’s captain, was shot through the hand.

  Protest came from all sides as many questioned whether “fair warning” had been given to the unarmed boat. A riot against the Coast Guard broke out in Boston. Threats were made against the family of the skipper who ordered the shooting. There was vandalism of Coast Guard stations, and politicians responding to public outcry demanded that the guardsmen involved be charged with murder and brought to trial. The furor carried all the way to Washington, D.C., where lawmakers, already alarmed by the dramatic rise in smuggling-related violence, began to look with new eyes at the problem. Demands were made in Congress for repeal of Prohibition. Meanwhile, reporting on the incident increased the general public’s awareness of the pitfalls of enforcing such regulations. Opinions wavered, then were swayed. Four years later, in December of 1933, the “noble experiment” for enforced sobriety in America ended when Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing the law.

  Within weeks of the killings, the skipper and crew of patrol boat CG-290 were cleared by a grand jury of all wrongdoing. “Fair warning” was given the smugglers, the Coast Guard insisted. Testimony was recorded in court to back this up. And yet doubts remained, and have remained down to the present, as to what really occurred out on the water that foggy night. Did the Coast Guard, either by design or in frustration, fire without warning on an unarmed vessel? Was this a case of authorities bringing undue force to bear? Even more interesting, had CG-290 been tipped off to the Black Duck’s route? If so, who was responsible: a competing crime organization, or an honest citizen attempting to uphold the law? The mystery remains unsolved to this day.