The Keeper's Son

by Homer Hickam

  Josh took a long minute to think about what would happen if war came to Killakeet. The truth was, he wasn’t certain if his Maudie Janes were up to fighting submarines or not. They certainly didn’t look very military. Other than their white tub caps, not one of them wore a regulation uniform when at sea. For the most part, they were barefoot and had on a variety of woolen sweaters and cotton knit work shirts that hung loosely over their dungarees, nearly the same thing their fathers and brothers wore on their workboats. On the other hand, Josh considered, it didn’t much matter what they looked like as long as they could fight. What he needed to do, he decided, was to get some depth charges for the racks and some ammunition for the machine gun and practice a bit. He should also train Jimmy Padgett to operate the sonar machine, which had never been switched on.

  But then Josh reminded himself that he couldn’t just go over to Morehead City and requisition depth charges and ammunition, nor could he send Jimmy anywhere, just because he wanted to do it. It wasn’t like ordering up a jeep, even though he still didn’t remember doing that, either. The Maudie Jane was designated a patrol and rescue boat, not a warship, even though it had a sonar machine, depth-charge racks, and a machine gun. Those items were in case of war but were otherwise useless. And even if he got depth charges to put in the racks and machine gun ammunition, it was illegal to fire even a pistol from a Coast Guard boat, even the cutters, without approval from headquarters in Washington, D.C.

  Josh went forward to Phimble and told him all that he’d just concluded. Phimble asked, “What would Captain Falcon do?”

  Josh had a quick reply because he knew very well the answer. “He’d steal the depth charges and start dropping them on every old wreck out here. He’d blast this ocean into smithereens.”

  Phimble didn’t say anything more. He didn’t have to. Josh was looking grim, rubbing the back of his neck the way he did when he was thinking hard.

  The Maudie Jane was on a southerly heading so as to pass down the likely line of drift. The horizon was clear, except for one thin line of clouds toward the northeast. The weather was holding good. For the next half hour, the Maudie Jane droned on until she arrived at a swirl of marbled turbulence that marked an outcrop of Bar Shoals. “There they are,” Once said from the bow, and sure enough, so they were.

  The lookout masts of the Beaufort fisherman were protruding from the swirl of white water, and bobbing heads to the south presented the crew. Phimble ran down on each one of them, and when a few proved too cold to take a line, Once and Again dived in and kept them afloat until the other boys could drag them over the transom. Soon afterward, the masts fell and the wheelhouse busted loose from the hull below and bobbed to the surface and swirled away. Broken planks started shooting up as if they were coming out of an underwater volcano. “Look at all that lumber,” Once said in admiration. “We’ll see them on the beach soon enough.”

  Josh heard Once and went to the bow and watched the planks and the wheelhouse drifting off and his heart sank. Once was surely correct. The debris of the fisherman would soon be caught by the Stream, swept up toward Hatteras, then turned around and brought back to Killakeet by the inner current. That would take about two days, and then most or all of it would be washed up on the beach, probably somewhere south of the Crossan House. You could nearly set a clock to it. “Dammit,” Josh swore. Jacob and the moth boat should have taken the same trip. Why hadn’t they?

  “Are you all right, sir?” Once asked.

  Josh shook his head. “No,” he confessed. “I’m not.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Don’t you have enough to do?” Josh barked. “If you don’t, go see Bosun Phimble.”

  Once’s mouth fell open, but then he saw that Mister Thurlow was in a bit of a state. He crept off, leaving Josh with a harsh recollection seventeen years old that, once begun, was nearly impossible to stop.

  After the little boat that contained his brother had come untied, Josh had searched across the Stream until darkness had forced him to shore. He was scared but still believed Jacob would be found. Every boat on Killakeet would go out, and with all of them looking, they would find Jacob in no time at all.

  Josh had landed the workboat on the beach and raced up the steps to light the lamp just as the sun had set. It was a responsibility he knew he could not shirk, even in those desperate circumstances. When the great light began to make its sweep, he sailed down the circular staircase by sliding his hands over the rails, taking the steps four and five at a time. He hadn’t stopped running until he’d reached Whalebone City to spread the alarm. Soon, every boat on the island was out looking with lanterns held high through the abating storm. The grapevine along the Outer Banks was powerful. By morning, nearly every boat from Currituck to Lookout was out searching for a little red boat.

  Everyone looked for weeks but nothing was ever found. Not so much as a plank. In the days that followed, Josh sailed up and down the coast alone, tucking into every inlet and coastal town, asking if anyone had seen anything of the little boat. And then the son of a doctor who had a beach house along the coast above Currituck admitted that he’d lost his new moth boat, come untied from the dock, probably due to a sloppy knot. The doctor told Josh that his son’s boat had been painted a bright red. Although Josh had discovered who had lost the boat, it didn’t much matter. No one ever saw it again. As for Jacob, he was simply gone. And as much as Josh told himself over and over that it just didn’t make sense, that it wasn’t possible, that Jacob couldn’t be gone without a trace, he was.

  Josh shook off the memory and went aft to see to the rescued fishermen. “Too bad about your boat,” he told them. He didn’t know what else to say and he’d lost what good humor he’d had, thinking about Jacob.

  “Thank you for coming after us just the same,” one of them answered, struggling to his feet while Josh gave him a hand. The old man had a scraggly white beard, and a fisherman’s deeply lined and tanned face. “Billy Ferguson. Captain of the Loggerhead, out of Beaufort. Leastwise, I was. I figgered to get my motor going or put out an anchor if I didn’t. What I didn’t figger was that blamed little shoal being there. We don’t usually come this far north but we heard tell the fishing up here was good.” His eyes, red from the seawater, took on a sad, distant look. “Well, the old girl’s gone now. A sorry mommick. It’s going be a poor Christmas for my crew and their famblies.”

  “I’m surely regretful, Captain,” Josh said, this time in a more sympathetic tone. To lose a boat was a terrible thing, but when it was your living, it was all the worse.

  Phimble took the Maudie Jane straight back to Doakes, where each of the Beaufort fishermen was adopted by a Killakeet family, to be sheltered until he obtained passage back home. Josh helped the boys clean up the patrol boat, and then headed for the Hammerhead. He was about out of steam. A bottle of Mount Gay in his room definitely had his name on it.

  Old Purdy raised his head as Josh came up on the pizer. “How would you like to take some rum with me, Purdy?” he asked. “I’m not a bad sort, you know. Why, we could sit and talk over things, like women.”

  A voice from a corner of the pizer, a feminine voice, said, “Why, Ensign Thurlow, are you and the bird females? I’m much surprised. I took you both for men.”

  Josh peered into the corner, and gradually his eyes adjusted to the darkness. “Well, Miss Crossan,” he said, “why ever are you in the dark?”

  “It’s a position I am usually in,” Dosie replied, rocking in a rocker. “I am in for a day of shopping and Queenie allowed me to rest up here before going home.”

  “A day of shopping you say? But there’s only one store in Whalebone City.”

  “I am a thorough shopper, Ensign. Thorough!”

  “Then where are your packages?”

  “Tied to Genie, who’s just around the corner. She likes one of Doc’s milk goats. They’ve become pals.”

  Josh leaned against a porch post. “I was just on my way up to my room where I have a bottle of Barbad
os rum, the darkest and richest in the Caribbean,” he said. “I have two tin cups. I would be willing to share.”

  “Here on the porch? That is, I mean, the pizer?”

  “If that’s your wish.”

  “Then by all means, mister, let’s have a taste of your rum.”

  Josh swept through the door, nodded to Queenie in the parlor who, for some reason, was looking very satisfied with herself. He headed for his room and soon returned, a bottle of Mount Gay rum in hand and two blue-enameled tin cups hooked in his fingers.

  Josh sat in the swing nearest Dosie’s rocker. He poured her a finger, then two, and handed it over. He gave himself an equal amount and held his cup out to her. “Here’s to blue skies and bowlegged women. That was Captain Falcon’s favorite toast.”

  “Sounds like my kind of man,” Dosie said, clinked her cup on Josh’s, then knocked back her two fingers. She held her cup out for another. “By God, that is good stuff!”

  Josh raised an eyebrow but obliged. “Doc says there’s nothing that calms the spirit so much as rum and true religion.”

  “Him and Lord Byron,” Dosie sniped. She eyed her cup appreciatively. “Mount Gay, huh?”

  “Finest rum in the world.”

  “What was the name of the woman?”

  “What woman?”

  “The woman who taught you to drink Mount Gay. This is good stuff. Guy like you I figure would tend toward the cheaper booze. This is a first-class, uptown kind of drink.”

  “Thank you for your good opinion of me,” Josh said with a wry smile. “Her name was Luzette, if you must know. She was French, more or less, some might call her a mulatto. I just called her one fine woman. She worked at a place on Nelson’s Street in old Barbados. She was a pretty good teacher, now that you mention it, and one of her lessons was that good things don’t come cheap or easy, be it the ladies or drink.”

  Dosie raised her cup. “Well, here’s to Luzette. I’m encouraged that you could be properly trained, even if it was by a wicked woman.”

  “Why, Luzette wasn’t wicked at all. Just . . .” Josh hunted for the proper word. “Interesting!”

  “Save us from interesting women!” Dosie laughed. She took a swig, then seemed to come to a decision. “Look, Josh, I’m sorry I left so suddenly down by the point. No excuses, just an apology.”

  “Accepted. And I apologize for saying the wrong things, whatever they were.”

  She gave him a grave look, started to add something, then relented. “I heard you managed a rescue today.”

  “A small one,” Josh bragged. “It will probably only be sung about in legend and verse for a score of years. It’s what we do in the Coast Guard, you know. Semper Paratus. Always ready.”

  Dosie thought Josh Thurlow had gotten more witty as the conversation had progressed. This pleased her, even though she was still smarting over his account of Luzette. “Let’s see a bit more of that,” she said, holding out her cup and slurring her words only a little.

  Josh was impressed. He was still working on his second drink and there she was, wanting a third. Then he became cautious. “Maybe you ought to go a bit slower with this stuff,” he said, as friendly as can be. “It’s good but it’s powerful.” He mentally patted himself on the back. She would be thankful, him being so concerned for her well-being and all.

  But Dosie looked at him and he looked back at her and then he watched her happy face dissolve into something he couldn’t quite define. In a second, however, it changed into something he could define very well. He’d made her mad. “I don’t need a big, shabby Coast Guard ensign to tell me how to live,” she growled. She finished off her cup and tossed it into his lap, then made to whistle. All she could do was spew ineffectually between her puckered lips which made her even angrier. “Herman, where’s Genie?” she finally demanded as she climbed unsteadily out of her rocker.

  Herman had been sitting in the darkness nearby. He raced around the corner and trotted back with Genie. “Here she is, missus!” he cried.

  “We’re going home,” Dosie said, her voice cracking.

  “Is something the matter with you?” Herman asked in a worried voice.

  “Not a blamed thing,” she answered and climbed unsteadily into the saddle. Then off they went, Herman leading Genie, who left a dump of manure behind to mark her brief appearance.

  Josh sat in the swing and smelled the horse pile, which matched the way he felt. He still held his rum bottle in one hand, his cup in the other, and Dosie’s in his lap. Queenie came outside. “Well, that was a mommick,” she said.

  “What happened?” Josh wondered. “Things were going pretty good, I thought.”

  “What happened, Josh, was that you acted like a man.”

  “Well, ain’t that the general idea?” he demanded.

  “Not with this one,” Queenie said. She sat down on the rocker and took Dosie’s cup out of his lap. She tipped the bottle of Mount Gay still in his hand until it glugged twice, then turned it up straight. “Not with this one,” she said, again, her lip over the edge of the cup but a thoughtful expression otherwise.

  Buckets came outside and took a breath. “Damn, Queenie. What’s that smell?”

  “Nothing a shovel wouldn’t help,” Queenie said and Buckets went off to find one.

  8

  I f they aren’t careful, their eyes are going to pop out of their heads. That was Krebs’s thought as he pondered the lookouts on the tower. The U-560 had reached the Bay of Biscay and the final twenty-mile traverse before reaching its home port of Brest. A warning had come over the wireless from BdU to keep watch for enemy aircraft. Krebs had reminded his boys not to relax. They weren’t home yet.

  After a month at sea, the U-560 was going to need more than a little time in the dockyard. Ragged holes on the tower and the deck testified to furious attacks from aircraft and destroyers. A coat of algae shimmered on the wooden slats of the splintered deck. Rust had formed everywhere, even on the attack periscope. The interior of the sub, always malodorous, was enough to make a man puke. Rotted food, piss, shit, vomit, and Winkler’s decaying blood slopped around in the bilges. After the boy had died, his corpse had lain in Krebs’s bunk for a few days with the thought that he would be brought back for his family to properly bury. It had been a bad decision. After the man had begun to stink, Krebs had him hauled out and buried at sea, tossed off the bow in a weighted canvas bag while Krebs murmured a quick platitude and lookouts nervously watched the skies. Since his bunk smelled like a decaying corpse—even throwing out his mattress and blankets hadn’t helped—Krebs had to sleep sitting up, his stiff knee held straight, at the tiny navigator’s desk. The crew fought each other to be lookouts, anything to get a breath of fresh air. The Chief did his best to keep the boys in line but only so much could be done. Packed inside a pressure chamber for over a month, they had had enough. Krebs was glad that he had decided to bring them home. Happily, BdU had agreed with his decision.

  For his part, Max could think of little other than his wife. He’d already talked it over with Krebs and gotten permission for an extended leave. He was going to Dresden, where, if all had gone as planned, Giesela had secured an apartment. He was ready to dive in and swim to France, if that’s what it took. Then he’d be on the first train to Germany.

  “Alarm!”

  Max looked up to see only a flock of birds. He started to laugh and chide the lookout for his mistake, but then took another look. They weren’t birds at all. They were airplanes and there had to be at least thirty of them. Please, God, be the Luftwaffe, he silently prayed even while he knew it wasn’t.

  Now everybody on the tower was yelling. The machine gun crew opened up. But the aircraft were too high. They were orbiting like sea hawks, taking their time. The water beneath the U-boat was shallow and the English pilots knew it. The U-560 was trapped. Max’s heart sank and he started to think about how cold the water in the bay was. How long could a man live in it?

  “All but the gun crew get below!” Krebs
ordered. “Chief, take us down.” He explained his plan to Max. “There’s a deep spot off to starboard. I marked it as we came out.”

  How Krebs had marked it, Max had no idea. France was just a smudge on the horizon. But he didn’t ask any questions, just kept pushing the lookouts through the hatch. The machine gun continued to bang away as the U-560 dived.

  “Three points to starboard, Chief,” Krebs called through the hatch, then ordered the gunners below. Krebs took a last look, just for the log. The aircraft were the type known as Mosquitoes. One of them peeled off, its wings winking with machine gun fire. He heard the bullets splash the water, then work their way toward the tower. He dived through the hatch and waiting arms caught him as he came through.

  A lookout pulled the hatch over and latched it to the sound of clanging bullets. His hand slipped and smashed against the rim, tearing away a chunk of flesh. He sank to his knees, clutching the bloody hand to his chest. No one came to help him. All eyes were on Krebs.

  Krebs checked his watch and counted off the seconds. “Take us down to thirty meters, Chief.”

  “There’s only fifteen here, Kaleu,” the Chief replied in a strained voice.

  Krebs calmly repeated his order. “Down to thirty meters, if you please.”

  Multiple splashes overhead told the story. Depth charges had been dropped but Krebs noted they were not directly overhead. They’d been released a moment too soon. The charges went off, and shards of sound pierced the U-boat, some of the men holding their ears and shouting to equalize the pressure. The Chief in happy consternation watched the depth gauge pass twenty meters and keep going. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said.