The Keeper's Son

by Homer Hickam

  Josh took the little boat in tow, tying its painter to the stern of the workboat. He checked the sun. “We got to get back and light the lamp, Jacob,” he said to his brother. Josh was worried now. What would happen if he didn’t get back in time to light the lamp before darkness? Not only would his father hear about it and never trust him again, true disaster might occur. The ships at sea depended on the light. They could pile up on Bar Shoals without it. Josh had to hurry but it was difficult to get across the Stream, which was determinedly pushing him north. He would have to point the bow of the workboat directly southwest, he decided, and let the wind blow him across. With the Stream pushing him northeast, it would average out and he’d go mostly westerly. But that meant the hull of the workboat would be against the full power of the Stream. It would be hard to steer but he was confident he could do it. He had to do it.

  The wind picked up, the way it will off the banks as September afternoons wear on. There was a chop on the sea that hadn’t been there a minute ago, too. Josh got up to adjust the sail. Jacob kept getting in his way. He tripped over him and Jacob started to cry. “I’m sorry, Jacob,” he told the baby.

  Then, when he turned his back, he heard a splash and to his horror, he saw that Jacob had fallen in. The workboat was moving along with the wind behind it. The Stream was insistently carrying Jacob away. Jacob’s face was in the water. Josh had no choice. He dived in and swam as hard as he could. The Stream carried him and within a few strokes he had Jacob, who sputtered and started crying again. “Please, Jacob,” Josh begged. “Don’t cry. It’s going to be OK.”

  But Josh wasn’t so certain. Now he had to catch the workboat. He should have reefed the sail before he dived in. All the canvas was shaken out and the workboat was, if not a fast sailer, a steady one.

  With one arm holding Jacob, Josh swam after the two boats. He had always been a powerful swimmer, and even against the Stream, he managed to catch the stern of the little red boat just before she passed. Desperately, he grabbed her with one hand and with the other lifted and dropped Jacob into the cockpit. Then Josh went hand over hand to the work-boat and climbed aboard. He was exhausted from the swim and shaking from the terror of almost losing his brother.

  The wind had shifted and was blowing even harder. Josh had to get to shore. He looked over his shoulder. Jacob was sitting in the little boat and had stopped crying. In fact, he was smiling at his brother. Josh got the tarpaulin and tossed it into the little boat’s cockpit. “Stay under the tarp, Jacob,” he said. “We’re going home, don’t you worry. We’re going home right now!”

  As he ran for shore, fighting the tiller, Josh looked over his shoulder every few minutes to check on Jacob, not that he needed to. He kept hearing him laugh as the little boat bounced across the waves. He was such a happy child and even the shock of being tossed in the ocean had not changed him.

  The wind began to blow blister-hard now and it started to rain. Josh was having to use every ounce of his strength just to keep his heading, but still he kept checking the towed boat. Jacob had crawled under the tarp. Josh looked over his shoulder and saw Jacob’s bare feet sticking out from under it. That was when the wind piled into him, a terrific gust, and knocked the workboat nearly over. Josh was tossed out into the warm fast current.

  He came up swimming. The workboat had righted herself but her sail was a flapping mess. That was good, Josh realized. Otherwise the wind would have surely blown her past him. He climbed aboard and looked to make sure Jacob was all right, and that was when the greatest horror he’d ever felt coursed through his body. The little red boat was gone. The new painter was tied off on the workboat but the other end had come undone. Josh hadn’t checked the knot. A landsman had probably tied the thing, some sort of granny knot that had come loose with all the bouncing around. The near knockdown had finished untying it and sent Jacob off on his own across the waves.

  “I’ll find you, Jacob!” Josh screamed desperately into the wind, then set the sail and clutched the tiller and began to turn the workboat around against the mighty Stream.

  PART ONE

  GUESS NOW WHO HOLDS THEE?

  1

  Dosie Crossan returned to Killakeet Island to the creak of saddle leather and the jingle of tack, leading a big brown mare down the ramp of the Wednesday ferry from Morehead City. When she had left the island a dozen years before, she had been a rich man’s daughter, bright and cheerful and filled with boundless dreams. By November of 1941, Dosie had lived through the Great Depression, discovered what it meant to be hungry, put herself through college by selling encyclopedias door-to-door, and been fired as an assistant editor of a New York publishing house for taking a lunch break that lasted three days. She had also loved too often and been loved back too seldom and was as wary of most men as she was capable of skewering them with a few well-chosen words. In short, Dosie Crossan had left a girl of hope and returned a woman of experience.

  Young and pretty women who appear world-weary are attractive to a certain class of men, which is to say nearly all of them. In her riding outfit of a white blouse tucked into jodhpurs, which were in turn tucked into knee-length brown leather boots, she was a “right goodsome package,” as the ferry master had it to his skinny, long-legged mate, who had replied, “Yeah, and she knows it, too.”

  But Dosie didn’t know it, which was much of the reason why love had not only eluded her all her adult life, but come very near to destroying her. It was why she habitually wore a wary, yet yearning expression on her otherwise pretty face. Men had often chased her and professed endless love to her, but she thought surely their attentions were mostly a sham and couldn’t understand why they had done it. She saw herself, in terms of beauty, as needing more work than was possible. She was, to her thinking, neither tall nor short, her figure routine, and her face, though blessed with unblemished skin, uninspiring. Her brunette hair, which she considered her best feature, was silky, but only because she brushed it religiously, and it lapped down to rest lightly on her shoulders. Often, when she held her head in a certain way, a lock of her hair drifted across her cheek and it gave her, though she had no concept of it, a look of such vulnerability that men felt driven to protect her even as they longed to ravage her. Dosie had a clever mind, interrogative and incisive by nature, careful by design, but it was incapable of seeing herself as others did. That was a blank spot. She took no notice, for instance, of the ferry master, who had difficulty taking his eyes from her during the three-hour journey.

  The ferry master was not a particularly imaginative man, but something about the woman who’d come aboard his ferry that morning had struck his heart like an ocean storm. Perhaps it had been the manner in which she had stood so proudly on the deck of the ferry and held her mare’s reins and watched each seabird and leaping fish and spit of sand as if she were required to memorize each of them. How happy their sight seemed to make her! As he kept watching her, sideways, glimpses for a moment, then away to come back again, each time longer, the master’s heart grew warmer until it was as near afire as a man approaching fifty could bear. And now, after landing, he watched her inspect her surroundings, her summer-sky-blue eyes, which had known sadness—a man can always tell—now aglow with something akin to joy, though all there was to see was a line of plank shacks and nets drying on wooden racks and a few workboats bobbing at rude piers. “I’ve never been so glad to be anywhere in my life,” she said to her mare, startling the mate, who thought at first she was talking to him.

  The big mare—Dosie had told the ferry master coming aboard that the horse’s full name was Genie’s Magic but she called her simply Genie—pawed at the sand as if not quite knowing what to make of the place. The master suspected she was a horse more used to being in green, grassy meadows, and not up to her fetlocks in brown, dry sand. If so, and if she was going to be kept on Killakeet, things were very much about to change for the mare and the young woman, too. Killakeet was sand and more sand piled onto sand, alleviated only by the sea and Pamlico Sound.r />
  The ferry master sighed forlornly and went inside his cabin while barefoot boys dressed in bib overalls ran up from the shacks and then stood openmouthed at the sight of the big horse under full English tack. Genie tossed her head when one of the boys crept over and touched her saddle, then stamped sideways with a low rumble in her throat.

  “Be careful!” Dosie snapped, and the boy ran away, stopped, and spat in the sand in embarrassment. The other boys stood scuffing the sand with their toes and wiping their noses with the backs of their hands. Dosie’s heart sank at the sight. They were so threadbare and hangdog that she thought of the pictures in Life magazine of ragamuffin Polish children made orphans by the German army. I must make it up to them, she thought.

  “I’ll give a nickel for each of my trunks if you boys will help move them,” she called. Then she nodded back to the ferry where sat four steamer trunks and the mate gazing at them and scratching up under his cap. It had taken two husky dockworkers to get each heavy piece aboard, and the mate was strapped to figure out how he was going to manage to get them down into the sand by himself. He doubted a tip, too.

  The boy who had touched Genie’s saddle stepped out in front of the other boys and said, “I’ll give a penny a trunk to the one boy who helps me. Who’s it going to be? You, Huey? Well, come on.”

  To the relief of the mate, the two boys ran up the ramp and attacked the first steamer trunk, half carrying it, half dragging it into the sand, then they ran back for the next one. Back and forth they went until all four trunks were at the bottom of the ramp.

  Dosie called the boy over. “What’s your name?” she asked as she gave him his twenty cents from her pocket.

  “Herman Guthrie, ma’am,” he said. “My maw’s Mrs. Abby Guthrie, who heads up the Fish Market ladies. My brother’s Fisheye, engine man on the Maudie Jane, that is to say the patrol boat out of Doakes. Paw’s dead, drownded a year ago, but before that he was a fisherman, mostly mullet and menhaden when they run.”

  “Well, Herman,” Dosie replied, made a little breathless by the historical family recitation, “I’m sorry to hear about your father. I’m Miss Theodosia Crossan, but friends call me Dosie.”

  “Oh, I know very well who you are, ma’am,” Herman said. “It’s known all over Whalebone City that you was coming, by the men who came acrost and got your house ready.”

  “And is it ready?” Dosie asked, amused.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. Quite ready, I’m sartain.”

  “Herman, I need those trunks taken to my house. If I pay you an adequate fee, can you manage it?”

  Herman looked dubious. “That’s a far piece, all the way acrost the island and down the beach past the lighthouse.”

  “Shall we say two dollars a trunk?”

  The boy’s eyes nearly popped. “Yes, ma’am. I reckon I can manage!”

  An elderly man and a woman had wandered up from the shacks. The man, dressed in coveralls and a faded cotton shirt, and the woman in a cotton housedress with a flower pattern and a gray sweater over it, had spent the time alternately pondering the horse and Dosie’s negotiations with Herman. “Hello,” Dosie said to them, after Herman ran off to gather his troops.

  “Right fine weather for a trip across the sound,” the man responded. The way he pronounced it, it came out sounding like roite foine.

  “I was glad it was calm,” Dosie said, after taking a moment to interpret the Killakeet brogue. “I was afraid Genie would get seasick.”

  “What kind of horse is she?”

  “She’s a quarter horse,” Dosie answered.

  “Well, young lady, if I [Oi] had a quarter, I’d [Oi’d] give it to you for her, that’s for sartain. So you are here to open up the Crossan House?” When Dosie nodded, he said, “You see, Etta, I told you the Depression was over. Why else would the Crossans come back?”

  A hopeful smile formed on the woman’s otherwise pinched face. “You don’t know me, Miss Dosie, but I’m Etta Padgett. I used to come by to pick up your laundry.”

  “Why, I do recall you, Mrs. Padgett,” Dosie said, pleased that she really did remember after she mentally subtracted a dozen years and a few cares from the woman’s face. “How are you?”

  “Tolerable. And this is the mister. His name’s Pump.”

  Dosie shook his hand. “I’m so glad to meet you.”

  “Well, little lady, same here. All I mostly ever saw of the Crossans was their clothes hanging on the line. Good to meet one in person.”

  “Is your whole family coming?” Mrs. Padgett asked eagerly. “I can still do the laundry with the best of them.”

  “Not yet. I’ll be alone, at least for the next several months.” Dosie hesitated, then added, “I’m on something of a spiritual journey, you see.”

  The couple shared a look, then Mr. Padgett said, “Killakeet Island’s not a bad place for the spiritual. Queenie O’Neal used to hold sea-nances regular at the Hammerhead Hotel until one night the ghost of Blackbeard hisself showed up and turned their table over. You shoulda seen those ladies scatter, ran out into Walk to the Base a-squalling.”

  “She ain’t talking about ghosts, old man,” Mrs. Padgett growled out of the side of her mouth, then smiled sweetly at Dosie. “You know where I live, honey? Just two tracks back from Doc Folsom’s infirmary on the Atlantic side. The house with the gate curved along the top. You come see me or send word if you need anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I will,” Dosie said. Then, seeing that Herman had successfully completed his subcontracting and that an entire army of barefoot boys were lifting her trunks across the island, she stepped into the stirrup and swung her leg over Genie’s back, settling familiarly into the saddle. She clicked her tongue and said, “Walk on,” and Genie did, following the boys and the trunks. They reminded her of ants carrying bread crumbs.

  Before long, Herman fell in beside her, deciding his troops had no need of close supervision. In fact, they were racing one another to see who could get across the island with the trunks the fastest. He began to point out the sights. “This would be Teach Woods, ma’am,” he said as the track led them through a vine-filled forest of live oak, red cedar, and juniper trees.

  “Yes, I know,” Dosie said. “It was named after Edward Teach, who was Blackbeard the Pirate. Have you looked much for his gold?”

  Herman was astonished that Dosie knew about Blackbeard’s gold.

  Dosie laughed. “It’s the same with every crop of kids here. When I used to come here for the summer, my brothers and I looked for it, too.”

  “You didn’t find it, did you?” Herman asked suspiciously.

  “No, and I remember how disappointed I was. Now I realize just looking was treasure enough.”

  “That don’t make no sense,” Herman said.

  “At your age, it wouldn’t. But give it a few years and it might.”

  Before long they had passed through the woods and reached a line of sand hills, six to eight feet high, that barred the approach to the beach. The track turned north behind the dunes to Whalebone City. Dosie could see its cluster of wooden houses and the moderately tall steeple of its church, and down the track that was called Walk to the Base, she could see the old Surfmen’s House, a two-storied, whitewashed structure with a lookout tower in its center, the glass panes sparkling in the sun. It had once housed the legendary surfmen who’d gone out in storms to rescue the crews of battered ships. Now, it was the headquarters of Doakes Coast Guard Station.

  “I live up that way, ma’am,” Herman said, pointing. “We got a nice house just back of Walk to the Base one street over toward Pamlico. Granpaw built it with planks wrecked from a sugar boat named Carole English fetched up on Bar Shoals around ninety-seven or so. The church there was built by wrecking the Frances Clayton, a goodsome schooner. I guess, come to think on it, there ain’t a house in town what ain’t been built from wrecking.”

  Dosie looked over the village, recalling the fun she’d once had as a girl exploring it. I’ll come visit, she promised
herself, but not until I’m ready. Then, she nudged Genie toward a notch in the dunes through which the boys and her trunks had disappeared. The roar of the ocean assaulted her as she and Genie passed through. Genie pulled her ears back and stamped her hooves and would have shied, but Dosie told her to stop acting silly and walk on. Shivering nervously, Genie obediently crossed the high-tide mark and entered the windswept strand of brown sand and pounding surf that seemed to go on forever.

  And then there it was, a mile or so south, the great Killakeet Lighthouse, a dazzling white tower with a single black bar painted halfway up. “I had forgotten how beautiful it was,” Dosie said, and then she breathed in the warm, saltladen air, which felt like a tonic. The temperature had risen with every step toward the Atlantic side of the island. Killakeet was on nearly the same latitude as Bermuda and kissed by the same tropical water brought up by the Gulf Stream.

  The boys carting the trunks scarcely glanced at the lighthouse, nor did Herman choose to mention it until Dosie kept going on about it. “I’ve been to the top of it,” he said. “It’s right high. And you can see the Stream out there, all a deep, thick blue.”

  “I never went up on it,” Dosie confessed, “although I always wanted to.”

  “Keeper Jack would take you, I’ll bet.”

  “Keeper Jack. There’s a name I haven’t heard for years,” Dosie said wistfully. “I wondered if he was still the keeper.”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am. I guess he’ll always be the keeper, lest he dies.”

  Dosie recalled that she’d hung back whenever her brothers had gone to the top, mainly because she had hoped that Josh, Keeper Jack’s son, would offer to take her. But Josh, six years older, had never paid the slightest bit of attention to her even though she took every opportunity to stand near him, often sighing, and had once even given him a present of a flattened copper penny with his name stamped on it, made by a machine on the boardwalk at Atlantic City. He’d said, “Thanks,” and put it in his pocket and never mentioned it again. When she’d left the island, her heart had been a bit broken by Josh’s inattention. Now, she could understand why he had ignored her. When they’d last been together that summer of 1929, she’d just been an ungainly thirteen-year old, probably smelling of milk, which her mother made her drink more or less constantly for her bones. Josh had been a college man, home to visit, and sophisticated beyond measure. He had even smoked a pipe.