Storm Warriors (11 page)

Grandpa was spending his time in the garden, weeding, tying up plants, picking beetles off the leaves. Some days I helped him, and in between working, he told me stories.

“Did I ever tell you how your Grandma Dahlia and I got separated?” he asked one day, his head leaning back against the garden fence where we'd sat down to rest.

I blinked. He never had told me that story. I'd always wondered but thought it would be mean-hearted to ask.

“No, Grandpa, I don't believe you have,” I said.

He closed his eyes, and I felt him going back in time, remembering. “Once your daddy was born, my Dahlia used to come see me on Saturday nights with him slung to her back, sleeping. Mistress Callie let her stay overnight, then, and she and your daddy spent Sundays with me.”

I tried to imagine Daddy as a little baby, and I laughed. Grandpa opened his eyes a slit, then closed them again and continued.

“Things were going along the way we thought they always would. I'd work all week, sunup to sundown, with thoughts of
Saturday night keeping me going. Then the war came. Mistress Callie's husband went off to fight the Yankees, and Dahlia said there wasn't hardly anything for her and your daddy to eat at their place anymore. I took to saving what I could from my rations to send home with them.

“About a year after the war started, two Saturdays went by and my Dahlia didn't come. I asked Master Johnson could I have a pass so I could go see what was the matter.”

Grandpa's face, with the sun showing up the hollows and creases, looked sad.

“When I got to Mistress Callie's place, my Dahlia was gone. The mistress said she couldn't hardly run the farm without her husband there, and the food stores were so low she had to sell off her best hands. I wanted to kill the old woman right then—wring her neck like a scrawny chicken. But I controlled myself. Real quiet, I said, ‘Then you won't want to be feeding my son,’ and I went to fetch your daddy from the quarters. He was about two years old, I reckon. I carried him back to Master Johnson's place.

“Master Johnson didn't ask me a thing—I guess he figured I'd gotten him a new slave boy for free. And Mistress Callie never came looking for her stolen property either. She must have been too guilty about selling off my Dahlia like that. And she didn't want to feed a child too young to work.

“Right about that time, the war came close and all day we heard the boom-boom of guns and cannons. You could feel it in
your chest—it shook the earth. And the sky turned dark with black clouds that came from all the gunpowder. Master Johnson said the Yankees would be coming soon. He wrapped up his money and silver in a sheet, then took me into the woods with him. He told me to climb up this rotten tree—it was hollow with a hole up high—and drop the sack down in. If the Yankees killed him, he said, I'd know where it was.

“Now, my kinfolk used to say that old Master Johnson was my daddy, but I never believed them until that day. My mamma died before I could ask her was it true. But he never had any white children of his own, and here he was showing me his hiding place.”

“Did the Yankees come?” I asked.

“They came, all right. They didn't kill Master Johnson, but they took every stitch of meat out of our smokehouse and near emptied both the corncribs. Then they set fire to the master's house. We all ran with buckets of water to put the fire out—it would have been one sorry sight, Master Johnson having to sleep in the slave quarters after his house burned down!”

Grandpa laughed, then coughed a bit.

“Did the Yankees find the silver?” I asked.

“Lord, they tore up the place something awful looking for it, slicing the featherbeds with knives and breaking open crates and jugs. They knew he'd hid it. I think that's why they set the house afire—they were angry about not finding the money.

“A few years later, when the war ended, Master Johnson says to me, ‘Ulysses, you're as free as I am now. You can stay on and work for me, and I'll make sure you have what you need, or you can leave.’ I didn't stay long. When I was fixing to leave, Master Johnson took a piece of muslin and wrapped some money up in it and gave it to me. That's when I knew he was my daddy—he didn't have to do that.

“I used that money to buy our first fishing skiff. When I sold my first load of fish, I started putting ads in the newspapers for my Dahlia, so she'd know where I was and that I was looking for her. Everybody was putting ads in the papers in those days—seemed like every man and his uncle was looking for kin they'd lost.”

He was quiet for a time, rocking his head back and forth gently against the wooden fence rail.

“I guess I'm the only one still putting ads in. Seems everyone else either found their kin or gave up looking.”

I put my hand on his arm and squeezed. “You want a drink of water, Grandpa?”

We both got up and went to the rain barrel.

“We can put in another ad when we go with Daddy to Manteo,” I said. “We've sold so many fish I'm sure he's got an extra dollar for you.”

Grandpa nodded, but his eyes looked far away, like he was still seeing a North Carolina past that I would never know.

I dreamed of fire—of red flames leaping from the rescue station roof to the lookout deck. But it was Grandpa, burning up with fever next to me, who'd made me have the dream.

“Daddy, Grandpa's sick,” I whispered in the darkness.

Daddy lit the fish-oil lamp. I got a cool wet rag for Grandpa's forehead, and Daddy propped him up so he could sip some water.

“How you feeling, old man?” Daddy asked.

“Just tell whoever's hitting my head with that brick to stop, and I'll be fine,” Grandpa said.

“That bad?” Daddy asked. His forehead was wrinkled with worry.

Grandpa nodded slightly and eased himself back down on the bed.

“I'm taking you to Doc Fearing in the morning,” Daddy said firmly.

Grandpa groaned and rolled over.

I climbed into bed with Daddy. Before he put out the lamp, I saw the fearful look in his eyes.

The next morning, Daddy said to help him get Grandpa to the skiff so we could take him to Manteo to see Doc Fearing. But Grandpa said he'd never been to a doctor in his life, and he felt too miserable to see one now. They argued for a while, and Grandpa won.

The day after that, Grandpa was feeling good enough to get out of bed, so Daddy ordered him to get in the skiff for a trip to Manteo. Grandpa said he was getting better on his own and didn't need to waste Daddy's money on some old ugly doctor. They argued until Grandpa won.

The weather was hot, and Grandpa said he wanted a bath. I went with him to the sound, where we waded in, being careful to stay away from the stinging sea nettles that floated on top of the water. When Grandpa asked me to scrub his back, I did it gently, running my hands over the raised scars that ran in jagged crisscross patters over his skin. It turned my stomach to think that the man who had made those scars, so many years ago, was also my great-grandfather.

Three days later, Grandpa got much sicker again and took to his bed, shivering and moaning that his head was about to
explode, it hurt so bad. I sat with him and kept a cool rag on his forehead.

Mr. Etheridge paid us a visit. He said Grandpa looked like he had malaria, and that in a day or so, when he felt a little better, he should go see Doc Fearing to get medicine or he'd just get terrible sick again like he was now. Then he told us the story of how he'd had to do a rescue when he had malaria back in 1881.

“I would have liked to be abed, the chills and fever were so bad,” he said, “but a gale blew up and the schooner
Thomas J. Lancaster
ran aground. Lord, that was a dark day. The captain must have tied his youngest daughter to the rigging, then tried to save his two other little girls who'd been washed overboard. The captain and both girls drowned. We found the youngest child, dead, hanging upside down by her feet in the rigging. The cold wind and wet must have killed her. She couldn't have been more than three years old. We did manage to save half the crew and the captain's wife, though I reckon she'd rather have died with her husband and three daughters.”

I didn't think that story was a very good way to cheer up a sick person, but Grandpa looked a lot brighter by the time Mr. Etheridge left. And the best part was that he agreed to see Doc Fearing and ask for quinine, the same medicine that had made Mr. Etheridge better.

The next day was hot, with no wind, but Grandpa said he felt well enough to walk to the skiff. Daddy and I took turns rowing
across the still water, the oars splashing between the weeds and sea nettles. When I wasn't rowing, I scooped up water to pour over my head to ease the heat.

In Manteo there was hardly a breeze to blow away the yellow flies and mosquitoes, and they about ate me up. We supported Grandpa, one on each side of him, to walk him to Doc Fearing's house.

As we opened the gate and started up the front walkway, Grandpa stopped. “Roses,” he said in a hoarse voice.

“Come on, Grandpa, we're almost there,” I said.

“Take me to those roses,” he demanded.

Daddy glanced at me, then toward Doc Fearing's front windows, like he hoped these white folks wouldn't mind an old, sick colored man sniffing at their garden.

The roses were pink, bug-eaten, and wilting in the late July heat. Grandpa stumbled over to them and took a long breath of their perfume. “That's it,” he said softly. “That's just the way she smelled, those Saturday nights.”

I leaned over the rose blossoms, closed my eyes, and sniffed, imagining that I was hugging Grandma Dahlia and burying my nose in the nape of her neck. It was a sweet, rich smell.

The door to the house swung open, and when I opened my eyes, Mrs. Fearing was standing on the front porch with her hands on her hips.

“What on earth are you doing?” she snapped.

Daddy said Grandpa was sick and we were here to see Doc Fearing, but none of us offered an explanation as to why we were in her garden. She looked us up and down, and I realized that we must have appeared sorrowfully ragged. We wore clothes mended with my rough stitches, had sand stuck to our skin where we were sweaty, and I was half-soaked with the brackish water I'd poured over my head.

“He'll see you on the porch,” she said finally, and went back inside.

Doc Fearing brought his black bag out with him. “Ulysses, you look terrible,” he told Grandpa.

“I figure I must be almost dead, the way everyone keeps insisting I come see you,” said Grandpa. “We should have saved ourselves a trip and gone to see the reverend instead.”

The doctor laughed a little but then frowned as he pulled down Grandpa's eyelids and examined them.

“Keeper Etheridge had malaria and he got all better, right?” I asked.

Daddy put his hand on my shoulder and shushed me. “Let the doctor do his work, son,” he said.

I slapped a mosquito on my leg.

“Mmm-hmmm,” Doc Fearing murmured as he held Grandpa's wrist, pulled out his pocket watch, and stared at it for a while. “Your pulse is very rapid,” he said. “I want you back in bed immediately.”

“I told them that's where I belonged,” Grandpa said.

Doc Fearing went inside and came back with a brown glass bottle and two tin cups, one full of water, the other with a little molasses and a spoon in it. Into the molasses he poured a small mound of dark powder from the glass bottle and mixed it with the spoon. He told Grandpa to take the powder three times a day for ten days.

When Grandpa spooned the medicine into his mouth, he screwed up his face like he'd just eaten cow dung, and reached quickly for the cup of water. He said if the malaria hadn't killed him in ten days, surely the taste of that powder would.

“Get him to bed, keep him comfortable, and make sure he takes the quinine powder,” Doc Fearing told Daddy. Daddy promised he would.

As we rowed home, the sun sank low over the sound and turned red in the summer haze. A little breeze picked up and cooled us off. And I was glad Grandpa had gotten the medicine that would make him better.

On August 1, the life-saving crewmen came back. They all looked fattened up, from their wives' cooking, no doubt. They said George Midgett was feeling somewhat better but had failed his physical exam and wouldn't be returning. Lewis Wescott, who used to be just the winter man, came back to work in August with everyone else and took over Mr. Midgett's place of surf-man number two. This December they'd need a new winter man. Secretly, I was glad that William wasn't yet old enough to fill the position.

Grandpa was feeling a little better and asked me didn't I have anything better to do than put wet rags on an old man's forehead all day. I shrugged. “If I leave, will you take your powder?” I asked him. He nodded solemnly.

I decided to walk up to the Oregon Inlet station, where the
surfmen had returned as well. The day was warm, with puffy summer clouds and waves that rolled in one at a time. I walked at the edge of the water, splashing into it when I got hot. I picked up scallop shells and threw them sidearmed at the glassy parts between the waves, trying to make them skip.

At the Oregon Inlet station, Mr. Willis was on the lookout deck. I waved to him and called hello. Mr. Forbes was in the cookhouse fixing supper, and the other surfmen were all off fishing, having finished their drills for the day. I asked Mr. Forbes for a drink, so he sat me down with a cup of water and a mound of sweet potatoes to peel and chop for him.

“I heard George Midgett won't be back this season,” he said.

I was just nodding and saying, “That's right,” when suddenly there was a loud thwack as something crashed against the windowpane.

“Stupid birds,” Mr. Forbes mumbled. He went outside and came back in holding a limp, silky black loon. “Too bad it wasn't a duck, or I'd add it to the stew,” he said.

“Loons are no good to eat?” I asked.

Mr. Forbes chuckled. “They are if you like to eat dirt.”

He laid the bird down on the table and went back to chopping onions. I picked up its head and let it drop with a thump. “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“I'm taking a run in to Manteo to deliver and pick up the mail tomorrow. I'll bring it to my dogs,” he said.