The Keeper's Son

by Homer Hickam

  Preacher grabbed Josh’s hand. “Thank you, Josh. You’re a friend of me and the Lord.”

  “Well, we try, Preacher,” Josh said, and escaped.

  Fishermen walking toward their workboats saw Josh as he went on down to Doakes and waved, as did the clammers and oystermen with their buckets and rakes. His boys, the crew of the patrol boat they called the Maudie Jane, also came along, mixed in with their parents and wives.

  Just before he entered the station, which was marked by a low fence anyone could step over and a gate always left open, Josh looked down the beach toward the lighthouse and caught sight of his father riding on the big gelding named Thunder. It was Keeper Jack’s ritual to come into Whalebone City after the lamp was doused in the mornings. The Keeper was wearing his blue serge winter jacket, brass buttons agleam, and his cap with the Lighthouse Service crest. Though he was seventy-one years old, he still carried himself like a young man, and a proud one at that. For all Josh knew, back at the Keeper’s House was one of those young women his father occasionally sent for from Morehead City. It was the stuff of merry gossip amongst Killakeet ladies how Keeper Jack would get out his big old phonograph and his records of classical music and play them for his “girlfriends.” They apparently liked it. Occasionally, he had to come in and stay at the Hammerhead until one of the girls gave up her dream of being the Killakeet Keeper’s wife and went home.

  Josh waited until his father reined in Thunder, which wasn’t hard since the horse rarely went much faster than a slow man could walk. There’d been a time when Thunder had lived up to his name, but these days he was content to plod. “Good morning, Son,” Keeper Jack said with two fingers to the brim of his cap. “Pretty night, wasn’t it? All soft, though I expect the wind to pick up.”

  “A little blow a-coming, I’m thinking,” Josh answered.

  The Keeper nodded, then patted Thunder’s neck. “Come see me when you get a chance, Josh. I’d like to sit a spell, talk to you about this and that.” When Josh said he’d do it, Keeper Jack clucked his tongue and Thunder clip-clopped on.

  At the military dock, Josh found Ready O’Neal, the gunner’s mate as well as the son of Queenie and Buckets, sitting on a piling reading a Morehead City newspaper that was about a week old. “What’s the paper say about the weather, Ready?” Josh asked.

  “Haven’t spotted anything, sir, but there’s a Studebaker for sale. I like them cars. Bosun Phimble gave me this paper to look at the picture.”

  “You ever drive a car?”

  Ready looked up, then shook his head. “You know I ain’t, sir. Ain’t no roads on Killakeet.”

  Bosun Eureka Phimble strolled up to the dock at that moment. Phimble was the son of one of the famous Negro Pea Island surfmen from up Hatteras way, not that anybody on Killakeet gave much of a damn what color he was. What people cared about on Killakeet was whether you could handle a boat or could fish worth a hoot or had a good eye for wrecking. Eureka Phimble was pretty much the best there was at all of them.

  Josh took note of the poke sack Phimble was carrying and hoped it was filled with cookies. His big breakfast was already dwindling in his gut, and Phimble’s wife, Talkie, was a great baker. She was also the island’s schoolma’am, teaching grades one through six in the island church, eight to twelve o’clock each day. The older kids, those few who went on with school, mostly went across to Morehead City and lodged there.

  Phimble offered up the poke and Josh stuck in his hand and discovered it was indeed filled with cookies, peanut butter ones at that. The bosun pointed at the headline on the front of the newspaper, which said, “Battle in the North Atlantic.” “You know, sir,” he said in a conversational tone, “we’re going to get into that war sooner before later.”

  Josh reached for another cookie. “Could be you’re right, could be you’re wrong,” he replied in an attempt to keep the conversation going and the poke near.

  “You might recollect German U-boats came over here during the Great War,” Phimble added.

  Josh knew firsthand that Phimble was correct. It had happened in 1918 and Josh had seen the entire thing from the parapet of the lighthouse. The U-boat had dispatched a freighter with a double shot of torpedoes and then just sat there, daring any other merchantman to try to get past. The Killakeet surfmen pushed out from Doakes, pulling their oars hard to rescue the men off the sinking freighter. They went right past the U-boat as if it weren’t even there. The U-boat captain was so astonished, he had taken his hat off to them. The story had even made it into a North Carolina history book.

  “You ought to read that article,” Phimble said. “I’d say this crop of U-boats are killers.”

  Josh wasn’t a big reader of newspapers, although he made it a point to read at least one novel every year. He especially liked that writer Ernest Hemingway, although he thought Mr. Hemingway was of the opinion he knew more about fishing than he really did. Still, Josh obliged Phimble, borrowing the front page of the paper from Ready and reading it while eating another cookie. The story said a convoy going past Iceland had been attacked by German submarines and the British and Canadians had fought them off in a day-long battle. Six freighters had been sunk but a U-boat had also been destroyed. The convoy had gone on, only to be attacked by another wolf pack of U-boats. The result of that battle was not known.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me at all to see those old German boys come this way,” Phimble said. He took his poke of cookies and stepped on board the Maudie Jane and went to the stern and leaned, significantly, on the empty depth-charge racks.

  Josh considered the empty racks, empty because the Coast Guard did not authorize him to have any depth charges. This led him to further contemplate the empty machine gun mount on the bow. Then he looked at the headline on the newspaper again. “Ready,” he finally asked, “where’s the machine gun?”

  Ready looked up from his paper. “In one of the forward lockers, Skipper.”

  “You ever get it out, look at it?”

  Since he was the gunner’s mate, Ready knew Mister Thurlow had asked him a fair question. He considered his best answer. “It’s clean,” he allowed. “I look at it ever so often, make sure it ain’t rusty or nothing. But get it out? Never had a reason to. There’s no ammunition for it.”

  Josh was rarely gruff with his boys, reminding himself he was on Killakeet and Killakeeters didn’t need to be yelled at to do their jobs. “Tell you what,” he said softly. “Why don’t you unpack it, then bring it up and at least see if it’ll fit in its mount?”

  “Sure, Skipper,” Ready said and then went back to reading his paper. Ensign Thurlow had not, after all, said when to do the work. Ready would get to it, sooner if not later, tomorrow or the next day. That was the thing about life on Killakeet. Time seemed to stretch out pretty much forever, measured by the seasons, not the clock.

  Josh waited, saw Ready wasn’t moving, then said, in a lower register, “Ready, I mean right now.”

  Ready put his paper under his arm and went on board, whistling. He went below and looked in a forward locker, and sure enough, the machine gun was there and it still didn’t have any ammunition. Nonetheless, he hefted it and headed topside. It fit very well on its mount. The other boys looked at Ready and he replied with a shrug.

  Josh boarded the Maudie Jane and went over to Bosun Phimble, who was watching a ball of silversides pushing up a disturbance in the water, what Killakeeters called a jerl. “Eureka,” he said, “do you think we could fight if we had to?”

  Phimble stopped watching the jerl and raised an eyebrow. “Who’s ‘we,’ Skipper?”

  “Well, the Maudie Jane.”

  Phimble raised his other eyebrow. “Fight who?”

  Josh glanced forward at Ready O’Neal, who was pretending to fire the machine gun while the other boys were firing invisible rifles. They were having themselves a regular little pretend war, more or less like cowboys and Indians. “You know. Like you said. A German submarine, say.”

  Phimble took his time fra
ming his answer. “Skipper,” he said at last in a quiet voice that had the force equivalent of hitting Josh between the eyes with a plank, “this outfit couldn’t fight a German ferryboat.”

  Before Josh could completely absorb Phimble’s answer, Once Jackson, half of the Jackson twins, came up and reported. “Mister Thurlow? Can you answer me a question?”

  Josh could tell Once from his brother Again only because Once had a dimple in his right cheek caused by a collision with a table corner when he was three. The two teenagers were actually named Frank and Mickey but Doc Folsom had said, “There’s once,” when he’d birthed the first Jackson baby, “And again,” as the second one came into the world. The names had stuck.

  “What is it, Once?” Josh demanded, after tearing his eyes from Phimble.

  Once had on a big grin, a trademark of both boys. “Can we fish today?”

  Josh was pleased to let the boys fish. They deserved to make a little extra money, considering how pitifully small their regular pay was each month, and the fish market was always willing to pay top dollar for tuna, wahoo, and marlin. “After we get out to the Stream and make sure all’s well, you can,” Josh said.

  Phimble shook his head as Once cheerfully went below to bring up the fishing tackle. “We ought to be putting the boys through some drills, sir, not fishing.”

  “Let me run my boat, Eureka.”

  “I’m just telling you, sir.”

  “I know. But look at them! They’re Killakeet boys. They’re not like the men we had with us up on the ice.”

  Phimble shrugged. “We weren’t men until Captain Falcon made us that way. You remember how he did it, sir. He drilled us until we dropped, pounded us far worse than the enemy ever would. We got so we hated that rat bastard so much we took it out on the poachers. They never had a chance when the ol’ Comanch hove into view.”

  “Eureka, I know you mean well, but—Ready, stop playing with that gun! Take it below!—but the Maudie Janes didn’t sign on to fight. They’re just seagoing surfmen. Their job is to go out and rescue folks, not kill them. You know all that.”

  Phimble knew and he didn’t know, too. Coast Guard was Coast Guard as far as he was concerned. Rescue and killing, it was all part of it. He knew what Josh could do. He had seen the big ensign wade into a band of poachers, swinging that Aleut ax he liked to carry, sending the rascals scattering, those who survived, that is. He had also seen Josh collect a bullet in his leg. God, that had been a bloody fiasco. Captain Falcon had been off his beam that day, for sartain! But it seemed to Phimble maybe Josh had latched onto peaceful ways a bit too hard since they’d come to Killakeet. If the U-boats showed up . . . well, the boys aboard the Maudie Jane were going to die and that would be on Josh Thurlow’s head. Phimble made up his mind right then to make sure that didn’t happen.

  On the Stream, all seemed in order, the freighters and tankers coasting by with no problems, so Josh gave the Jackson twins permission and they started fishing and, before too long, so was nearly every one of the boys except Stobs, who kept the radio, and Fisheye, who was left below to watch over the engines. Bets were taken all around on who would catch the biggest fish. There wasn’t much money aboard, most of the boys’ service pay going to their families as soon as they got it, but what coins the crew had were soon clinking into Millie the cook’s biscuit sack as stakes. Millie wrote it all down in a little notebook. When on patrol, the boys liked to bet on lots of things, mostly whatever somebody thought up and sounded good. One time, they’d bet on whether Marvin, their little black-and-white mascot terrier, would next pee off the starboard or the port side. Those who had bet on starboard, which included Millie, started enticing the little dog to that side of the boat with chunks of breakfast sausage. Those who’d bet on the port side cried foul. Marvin, unable to get to either side because of the boys lined up and arguing there, went down to the stern and raised his leg over the transom. After that, he never peed anywhere else and his urinary habits were scrubbed from the crew’s games of chance.

  “Let’s go a bit farther out into the Stream,” Josh told Phimble. “Bigger fish out there. As a matter of fact, we’ll let the boys fish all night. Then, tomorrow morning, we’ll drop the catch off at the fish market. Christmas coming up, they can use the money.”

  Phimble loved going out into the deeper, tropical water of the Gulf Stream. Out there, he could open the Maudie Jane up and let her run, which was not only fun but good for the engines, too. He turned the boat easterly as the boys raised a cheer. Once had already caught a fish, a good-sized wahoo, and Again had something big on his line, too.

  Josh stuck his head inside the wheelhouse. “Stobs, call Chief Glendale, tell him to let the boys’ kinfolk know we’re on patrol tonight.”

  “Fishing all night, sir?” Stobs asked.

  “Patrol, Stobs.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  When the word got around that they’d be fishing the night away, Ready O’Neal got out his fiddle and Bobbie McClung his banjo, and all the boys started singing “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Marvin started howling, his snout to the sky, and Josh clapped his big hands, nearly on the beat. Phimble grinned and pushed the throttles ahead, then tapped his foot to the hobo tune while the Maudie Jane bounced across the waves, going out to where the water was blue and deep, and the tropical wind whistled free and clear, and the big fish danced their eternal dance of life and death.

  5

  In a dense, swirling fog, Krebs kept hurling invectives from the U-560’s tower. “Come on, you bastards! Show yourselves!”

  “We’ve lost them, Kaleu,” Max said tiredly. “Let’s submerge. The men need sleep. So do I and so do you.”

  Krebs, his dense beard coated with ice crystals, ignored his second-in-command. “Just show a shadow, that’s all I ask,” he snarled, but his voice was sucked away by the fog. Even the sea was muffled. He crashed his gloved hand on the rim of the tower fairing and cursed.

  Max yawned, as if he were bored. When trying to convince Krebs of anything, he’d learned it was necessary to keep emotion out of his voice and his demeanor. “You know it’s tricky business up here,” he said reasonably. “The water is cold, and it can fool Pretch’s sound-detection gear. Those propeller sounds he heard could have been a hundred miles away. Anyway, that was sixteen hours ago.”

  Krebs raised his nose to the air. “Can’t you smell the ships, Max? I can. They’re all around us. I can feel them, too.”

  Max fell silent. He’d done his best. And he felt nothing except the bone-chilling wind that cut through every seam of his leather coveralls. Only the day before, the U-560 had been mercilessly battered by a Liberator bomber. After Krebs had come up with a brilliant tactic to avoid the first two depth charges, the next ones had holed one of the U-boat’s fuel tanks and blown gauges and air lines apart in the control room. God only knew how they’d survived the attack. Krebs, still gritting his teeth from the pain of a badly twisted knee, had taken hold of the situation and sent the sub on a wild, gyrating descent. More depth charges followed, but an aircraft’s advantage was lost after the first attack. If a U-boat could put some water between it and the sky, there was always a chance. With a captain like Krebs, the odds were even better.

  To get his blood moving, Max made a tour of the tiny tower, checking to see that each lookout at least had his eyes open. It was probably too much to also expect them to be paying attention since they couldn’t see more than a few feet in the damnable fog. They were all nearly frozen by the bone-numbing Norwegian wind.

  For his part, Krebs had taken enough aspirin to stop an elephant and drained his private store of schnapps until finally his twisted knee had gone numb. In any case, he wasn’t going to let his knee get in the way of his duty. Based on the excited chatter going back and forth from BdU, dozens of small convoys were streaming out of English ports, heading north. The British and the Russians had apparently decided to make a big push to get supplies to the Red Army. Admiral Doenitz had vectored in as many U-boa
ts as possible into the Sea of Norway. Krebs’s boat had been kept the farthest south to serve as a trip wire. But nothing, since the first convoy, had been seen. There had only been continued frustration. And now all this goddamned fog!

  Krebs sniffed the air. “Wait. I smell something. It smells like . . .” He stopped and considered the odor. It was sweet petroleum, slightly burnt. “There’s a destroyer out there,” he said, so softly no one on the tower heard him. “Max?” he called.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Take the boys below. Chief, take us down.”

  But it was too late. In an instant, a ship plunged out of the fog, her bow aimed straight at them. One glance was all Max needed to identify it as a very angry English destroyer. “Chief, down, down!” Max roared.

  “No!” Krebs barked. He flipped the lid of the voice tube to the engine room. “Hans, give me full turns! Chief, hard to starboard! And send the eighty-eight crew up here. Hurry!”

  “Kaleu!” Max yelped. “We must dive!”

  “Not enough time, Max.”

  Max took another look and saw Krebs was right. There was a puff of smoke from the destroyer’s deck and an explosion erupted behind the U-560. Water pattered over the men on the tower. The next shell would probably be on top of them.

  The deck gun crew scrambled out of the tower hatch and down to their piece, pulling out the barrel tampion, throwing a shell into the breech, and cranking it around toward the destroyer. These were old hands, practiced and quick.

  “Wait, boys!” Krebs yelled at them. “Fire only on my command.” Another round whistled past, just missing the tower. The lookouts flattened themselves on deck. Then a few of them raised their heads, astonished that the captain and Leutnant Max were still standing as if nothing had happened. “Hard a port, Chief!” Krebs said. He was suddenly exuberant. “I’m going to hug that old English lion!”