by Homer Hickam
As they drew nearer the lighthouse, there was no sign of anyone on the parapet, nor was there anyone evident around the Keeper’s House. It was a neat and cozy-looking white house with a chimney at each end. Several rockers sat on its porch, and clay fern pots hanging from chains swayed in the wind. “Keeper Jack’s most likely in Whalebone City,” Herman said. “Today’s his poker day.”
“I suppose Josh is at sea,” Dosie said while nudging Genie away from the keeper’s lawn, the only green grass they’d observed on the island. “I heard he joined the Coast Guard.”
“I reckon so,” Herman said. “He usually takes the Maudie Jane out every day, not counting weekends. Fisheye says he ain’t never seen a man quite so happy to get out on the water as Ensign Thurlow.”
“You mean Josh lives here on the island?”
Herman squinted up at her as if uncertain he’d heard her right. “Why, yes, ma’am. He’s been here for a couple of months now, come in from duty in Alaska. He commands Doakes Station and captains the patrol boat.”
“Well, I’m surprised,” Dosie said, and she was. “Does he live at the lighthouse?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. He stays at the hotel so he can be near his boat.” Then, as if quoting someone, Herman said, “There ain’t nothing more important to a Killakeet man than his boat.”
While Dosie considered the news of Josh Thurlow, they kept going south, the Crossan House gradually creeping into view. It was precisely as she remembered it, perfectly suited for its location, driftwood gray, a cedar-shake roof, a porch that wrapped nearly all the way around with plenty of rocking chairs, and dormer windows on the second story. It was a sturdy, unpretentious house, with a charm given it by the wind and sea that had battered and weathered it now for over thirty years. She recalled that her father liked to call it the “unpainted aristocrat,” though officially it was called the Crossan House.
When they reached the gate, Dosie held back. She sent the boys to carry the trunks to her room, which she described as the one at the top of the stairs, and to the right, having the best sea view. They seemed to know right where to go. Every one of them had been inside, Herman explained, and more than once. The house had never been locked in all the years it had been unoccupied, and every so often, a boy just had to poke through it, just to see if anything had changed. Of course, no one on Killakeet would ever think of stealing anything out of it.
Before she went inside, Dosie asked Herman if he was interested in being hired on a more permanent basis. “You want me to fetch and carry?” Herman asked.
“A bit more,” she said. “You will come after school each day—an hour afterwards, let’s say—which will be around one in the afternoon, correct? You will first go to check on Genie in her stable behind the house, make certain her stall is mucked out, and she has proper feed and water, and so on. I would also like her brushed each day, and if I haven’t ridden her, you will take her for a walk. I will teach you how to do all that. Fetch and carry as you say to the grocery store, of course, when I need it, and odd jobs about the house. Could you do all that?”
“Surely, ma’am.”
“There’s something else you must know, Herman, if you’re going to work for me. Sometimes, I may get very quiet. I probably won’t talk to you and my eyes will be red from crying. Pretty soon, though, I’ll get better. Just do your work and don’t be frightened. Do you understand?” When Herman nodded his head, Dosie continued, “On Saturdays, I will want you here during the morning only, and on Sundays not at all. Fifty cents a weekday day, a dollar on Saturday. What do you think?”
Herman thought fifty cents a day and a dollar on Saturday was about as much money as any boy on Killakeet Island would ever make. But he allowed a little caution. “Why will you get quiet, missus?”
“I’ll be thinking about over there.” Dosie waved vaguely westward across the island. “And how it makes me sad.”
“North Carolina? I ain’t never been acrost to it but my paw used to go to buy whatnots, and he never came back too sad as I recall.”
“Well, not North Carolina,” Dosie explained. “Just over there and beyond. I’ve come here to rid my thoughts of it, to cleanse my soul, you might say, to find a purpose in life if there is one.”
Herman didn’t know what to say to any of that, so he didn’t say anything, smart boy that he was. Dosie climbed down off Genie. “What’s your decision?”
“I’m your boy,” Herman answered without a moment’s hesitation.
“Then I am your boss and you are my employee. I will pay your wages on time and you will work like the devil.” She offered her hand. “We’ll shake, like Americans.”
They shook, the bargain was sealed, and Miss Dosie Crossan began her spiritual journey on Killakeet Island with Herman Guthrie along to fetch and carry.
2
Within a few hours of darkness, nearly all the lanterns in the little houses of Whalebone City were extinguished and its people abed, resting up for another day of work on and along the sea. Outside, the cry of the wind and the drumming of the Atlantic and the hiss of the sand provided the island’s nightly symphony, a performance that too often kept Josh Thurlow awake, entirely because he could calculate with precision what the blended melody of wind and sea and sand meant.
For most visitors to the Outer Banks, it was the unpredictability of the elements that gave the place much of its charm. But to Josh and the lifelong residents of the islands, the elements, though often swirling and violent, were not confusing in the nonce. They were all a part of an overall and understandable arrangement that could be used to deduce that which was, and that which was to come. Windspray against the skin, the ocean a certain color, clouds gathering on a particular arc of the horizon, or the distinctive snap of a sail or a flag, each told its own story. They were predictors of storm or calm, and whether the wind would soon change and its direction, and its near velocity, and the coming height of the waves and strength of the surge. The ability to forecast based on the elements was a requirement to catch fish, and Killakeeters existed only to catch fish, with a nod to culling clams and oysters, and, of course, the keeping of the light.
Usually, when sleep wouldn’t come, Josh would get up from his bed and draw on the silk robe he’d been given in Ketchikan by a fancy girl who’d favored him, and stand at his open window and breathe in the island air, and look over the stars if there were any, and watch the flashing lamp of his father’s lighthouse. He would allow himself then to think again how it was impossible that nothing of Jacob or the little boat Josh had put him in had ever been found. Even after those seventeen years, it ground at Josh’s soul. If he stood long enough, fatigue would usually set in and he would fall back into his bed. If that didn’t work, there was always a bottle of Mount Gay rum to help him through the night. Josh had spent a little time on Barbados, an island as warm and lush as the rum it produced. When he took a glass of Mount Gay, he could almost transport himself back to a time of tropical breezes and friendly women. It was a comfort.
One night, Josh dreamed that Jacob was outside the hotel. He distinctly heard his brother’s baby voice call out, “Bo! Bo!” Unnerved, he pulled on his robe and went down the steps and outside, taking note that he was sharing the porch with three gulls and a pelican, all former patients of the bird hospital kept intermittently by Queenie O’Neal, the Hammerhead’s proprietress. For some reason, their presence irritated him. “You boys get on out of here,” he rumbled in his best captain’s voice.
The gulls, all males, blinked at Josh, then went back to sleep. One of them had been brought to Queenie with a fishing line wrapped around its wing. Another had managed to get a hook snagged in its beak. Queenie had snipped the hook off and used petroleum jelly to fill the hole, and it had healed nicely. The third gull had lost a leg, somehow, probably to a bull shark, which tended to be aggressive in the fall. Queenie had dipped the stump in extract of goldenrod to kill the infection. The pelican was an ancient creature, a well-known island character everybody c
alled Purdy. Purdy had simply checked himself into Queenie’s hospital, never to leave. He waddled a few steps at Josh’s reproof, then tucked his head under his starboard wing. It was well-known that Purdy had once been married to a pretty little thing, but he had outlived her and no longer seemed much interested in making eggs with any one of the young, rowdy females down on the dunes. Josh shook his head at the old bird. “You know a good thing when you find one, don’t you, Purdy?” Purdy made no response, which was a response in and of itself.
The houses of Whalebone City were all dark and silent. Walk to the Base, which led to Doakes Coast Guard Station, was empty, not even a dog to raise its leg. Still bothered by the dream, Josh breathed in the air, made tangy by the salt spray that hung everywhere, and chided himself for wanting to look for his brother up and down the sandy streets. A creaking sign, nudged by the light wind, interrupted his concentration. It was Doc’s sign, announcing his infirmary. It reminded Josh that it was Doc who had brought him back to Killakeet, back with a letter and a lie.
Dr. Jonathan Barksdale Folsom, Josh thought grumpily, the most beloved man on Killakeet Island and an incurable busybody. Doc had sent a letter to Josh just this past April and it had turned his life upside down. Josh was eight years then with the Bering Sea Patrol under the tutelage of the famous Captain Falcon, a well-known Coast Guard brawler who picked fights with fur-seal poachers. The letter was waiting for Josh when Falcon’s cutter, Comanche, tucked into Unalaska for fuel and ammunition. It was a letter that nearly tore Josh’s heart apart, a carefully crafted message that Josh took as word that his father was dying and that if Josh wanted any time with Keeper Jack at all, he’d best come back home and tout de suite, as Doc had put it. Captain Falcon believed that the men who served under him had no family beyond the Comanche so he was reluctant to let Josh go. At last, he had been persuaded after Josh saved his life—it was at least the third time and so finally made an impression—and wrote the letters necessary to have Josh reassigned to Doakes Station. Once back on Killakeet, however, Josh discovered his father had indeed been dying, but only as all humans on the planet are from the moment they are born. After Josh had gone to his father and managed a restrained interrogation as to his health, he determined that Keeper Jack was, in fact, sound as a Yankee dollar and perhaps sounder, considering the Depression that had persisted for nearly twelve years. “You lied to me,” Josh had complained to Doc Folsom shortly afterward, finding the man contentedly rocking outside the planked-wood shack that passed as his infirmary along Walk to the Base.
Doc was a fastidious little man who wore old-fashioned shirts with cellophane collars, and bright red suspenders to lift his gabardine trousers. His shoes were polished wingtips, and his hat a brown derby, always worn at a cocky angle. With his Adolphe Menjou mustache, he was quite the debonair gentleman. At Josh’s righteous charge, Doc had reared back in the rocker and grinned beneath his mustache and tucked his hands beneath his suspenders and allowed as how “a lie ain’t one until it happens, my boy.”
“What does that mean?” Josh had demanded.
“I wrote that your father would likely be dead within two years,” Doc answered, without so much as a hint of either embarrassment or guilt, “and the two years ain’t up. In fact, there is, according to my calendar, something like a year and six months to go.”
And so it was Josh had returned in September 1941 to Killakeet Island, a place that reminded him more or less constantly of the awful thing he’d done, that of losing his brother, and the reason he’d left in the first place. After a while, he’d forgiven Doc for the lie that wasn’t yet a lie, and suspended his speculation that his father had been a party to it, and accepted that here he was and would be until that time the Coast Guard decided it had a purpose for him elsewhere.
So Josh stood in the sand that night in late November and listened to Killakeet’s symphony and thought of Jacob, his only comfort a terrible one, that the baby had perhaps drowned and drowning was an easy death. When Josh had asked, Doc had maintained its ease. “After the first breath of water,” he said, “the lungs don’t hunger anymore. You just go to sleep.” Josh could only hope it was so, even while he doubted in his heart that it was, or that Jacob had drowned, in any case. A moth boat, for that was the kind of racing boat Josh had put Jacob in, was an eminently buoyant and seaworthy craft. It should have been able to ride out the storm, and Jacob should have been found sitting in it, perhaps wet and unhappy, but still found the very next day.
But he wasn’t, nor was there ever so much as a trace found of him or the moth boat. And that is what frustrated Josh. Impossible, he said once more that night in the sand outside the Hammerhead Hotel, though not aloud.
Queenie O’Neal was a light sleeper. She heard Josh’s footsteps on the complaining stairs, and the front door creak open and close. She knew it was Josh since no other lodgers were in her hotel. When she heard him fussing at the birds, Queenie feared he might be drunk on that Barbados rum he favored. If so, he would need her help. He was, after all, even at thirty-one years old, a motherless child. Queenie gathered her pink nightgown around her and went down the stairs and peeked through the window in the door and saw Josh standing barefoot in the sand in his silk robe, which was billowing around him in the light sea breezes. Queenie watched for a moment longer, then put on the embroidered shawl she kept in the parlor closet and went outside. It was the habit of Killakeeters to first cover the state of the weather to one another before launching into the purpose of any conversation. “A warm breeze off the Stream,” she said, and he replied, “It’ll bring in a small blow,” and then Queenie got to cases.
“What’s the matter, Josh?” she demanded. “Why are you standing out in the sand? Are you sick?”
“I’m just getting a breath of air, Mrs. O’Neal,” he said.
Queenie stood with her toes curled against the cold boards and watched Josh breathe his air and it started her to wonder about a few things. It was well-known that Josh had experienced some hard times on the Bering Sea. He’d been engaged in some battles, according to what had filtered back, and he’d gotten involved with an Eskimo woman so the tale went, who’d died. All those things plus losing his little brother might make a man prone to sickness, the kind that was in his head, Queenie thought, and she might should ferret it out. “Maybe you need a sleep tonic,” she suggested tactfully. “Doc left me some the last time I had trouble sleeping, that time I stobbed my toe.”
“No, thank you, ma’am,” Josh replied, and went back to his breathing with an occasional glance at the stars.
Queenie inspected Josh, as only a woman can. The boy had, of course, grown into a fine-looking man. What Thurlow man wasn’t handsome, after all? Moreover, the Thurlows tended to come tall, which Josh was, and wide-shouldered, which he also was, and with good, square-jawed manly faces tanned from the sun and properly weathered by the wind, which applied to Josh as well, not counting the deep scar he had on his chin, which, rumor had it, was the result of a confrontation with a polar bear. Josh was, in fact, pretty much the spitting image of his father, subtracting forty years, of course, and imagining away the Keeper’s gray beard. It was difficult to see much of his mother in him, however. Trudelle Thurlow had been a Killakeet Thompson, a clan of wreckers who tended to marry across to the coast. The Keeper had married her late in life, she a widow at twenty, her first husband drowned down by Miracle Point when a storm raised up and swamped his flat-bottom skiff. Trudelle had been olive-skinned with a high, intelligent forehead and sharp cheekbones and full lips, all of which added up to more than a little Cherokee, or so the speculation had gone. It was Jacob who had gotten his mother’s face. Now that Queenie reflected on it, perhaps Josh had also received something of his mother’s nose, though he’d gotten it broken brawling up there in the Bering Sea so it was hard to tell.
All of his physical characteristics Queenie absorbed in an instant, being a woman, as well as determining that that there was something surely churning inside Josh Thur
low. “You heard about Dosie Crossan coming back?” Queenie asked, knowing very well the answer, but hoping to discover more by his reply.
“At least a dozen people told me all about her and her horse,” Josh said, with an edge of impatience as if he were anxious to get back to his thoughts. “Have you seen her?” he added, and Queenie could tell by his tone that he was only being polite, not interested.
“No. Etta Padgett did, though. Said she’s turned into a right fair-looking young woman, though she was wearing pants like a man. She hired Herman Guthrie as her fetch-and-carry boy.”
Josh said, “I recall her, I think. Pretty little girl all dressed up in ruffles and such. Her brothers were hell-raisers. We got along famously. I nearly drowned one of them that time I built an undersea diving helmet out of a bucket and a bicycle pump.”
“She always had a crush on you, you know,” Queenie said.
Josh was startled. “Why no, I didn’t.”
“Boys don’t usually,” Queenie said, having gained all the information she required. “Good night, Josh.” She glanced over her shoulder before opening the door and saw that he had already turned away, once again breathing and looking at the stars.
