Storm Warriors (2 page)

“Damn, if they're not loading their baggage as well!” Daddy said under his breath.

Four sailors had climbed safely into the surfboat, and a large crate was being lowered from the schooner's deck.

I frowned. Didn't they know these men were risking their lives to save them?

With the surfboat sitting low under its heavy load, the crew rowed back toward shore. The three remaining sailors watched, waiting for a second run.

Near shore, the surfboat got turned almost sideways. I yelped as a tall wave broke over its side and the men had to throw their weight to keep from capsizing. Daddy and I ran to the water and, with the Oregon Inlet crew, grabbed the sides of the boat and dragged it up onshore.

The sailors jumped out and scrambled up onto dry land as we unloaded the crate. Suddenly there was a tremendous crack, loud as a gunshot.

“She's breaking up!” someone yelled.

“Take oars!” Mr. Etheridge shouted. “Go!”

We shoved the surfboat back into the sea, and it crashed through the breakers, the men pulling hard at the oars. The sea would be rushing into the belly of the schooner now. Soon she would be in pieces. The captain and two sailors waved
frantically. No one would be thinking of loading baggage now.

Another crack sounded, and the schooner lurched.

I watched the mast, willing it to stay intact until the men were safely out of its reach.

The sailors looked panicky. Two of them already clung to the ladder. As the surfboat approached them, one sailor tried to leap in too soon, missed, and had to be hauled in over the side, his legs flailing like a scared chicken. The other sailor, and finally the captain, always last, were loaded in, and the crew rowed furiously away from the wreck. Only when they were a safe distance away did I dare to take my eyes off the mast.

“You, boy, do you know where the teapot is at the station?” It took me a moment to realize one of the Oregon Inlet surfmen was talking to me.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Let's go, then.”

There was a creaking and a crash. When I turned to look at the wreck again, the mast had fallen.

I followed the surfman, and the four sailors followed us in tired silence.

At the station, I stoked the fire and pumped water for tea.

“I'm Mr. Forbes,” said the surfman as he put six mugs and the steaming teapot on the table in front of the sailors. “And you are?”

We looked at them expectantly, and they looked at us.

All four of them had hair the color of sea oats—so blond it was almost white—and three of them had faces and hands as red as fish blood. I wondered if they were that color all over, or if it was just from the cold. They said nothing.

“Are you not from the States, then?” Mr. Forbes asked our guests.

They sipped their tea, folding their cold hands around the warm mugs. “Dank-ew,” they each said, nodding.

Mr. Forbes sighed. I watched to see if the redness would go away as they warmed up.

So these were the Europeans Mr. Bowser had told me about—men from Poland, Sweden, Norway, and other countries from across the Atlantic who signed on as crewmen on American ships. They were white men but, Mr. Bowser said, had never been taught to treat a black man as less than a man. I smiled at them, and they smiled back.

There was the sound of approaching voices.

“I'd never have had you take the baggage if I'd known we were that close to breaking up,” said a man with a Yankee accent.

“We can't thank you enough,” said another Yankee. “The
Emma C. Cotton
will be a total loss, but you saved all men on board.”

The schooner—the
Emma C. Cotton
—must have come from a port in a Northern state.

I helped Mr. Forbes and Pea Island's cook, Lewis Wescott, prepare a breakfast of bacon and biscuits for everyone. I carried the pot of hot coffee from the cookhouse to the main station house and stepped into the dining room. There, I stopped. The men were sitting around the table, helping themselves to the mounds of biscuits and thick slabs of bacon. All of the men: the Oregon Inlet crew, the Pea Island crew, Daddy, and the sailors. White men and black men sitting at table together. It was just like Mr. Bowser had told me it would be after a rescue on Pea Island.

“You going to bring that coffee over here or just stand there and wait for it to get cold?” Mr. Bowser called to me.

I hurried to the table with the pot, and Daddy handed me a plate full of food.

That wasn't the first time I felt it—the wanting to be a surf-man—but I probably felt it then stronger than I ever had before. Stronger than when we lived on Roanoke Island and William, Floyd, and I did mock drills with an imaginary surfboat. Stronger than when Daddy, Grandpa, and I moved out here to Pea Island and I first watched the surfmen do their drills. Stronger than when Mr. Meekins said he'd teach me how to swim in the heavy surf.

On the way back to our cabin was the first time I said it to Daddy. Turns out I probably should have kept it to myself.

“Dammit, Nathan, you've got no appreciation for what I'm
giving you,” he said. His round face had more lines in it than usual, and his shoulders, usually so square and strong, drooped a bit. “I've got us set up with our own boat and nets, working for ourselves. Would you rather work as a day laborer for pennies, the way most black folks have to?”

“No, I'd rather be a
surfman,
” I said, knowing I should have bit my tongue and kept quiet, especially with Daddy so worn out.

We reached the cabin, and he yanked open the door and slammed it behind us.

“Nathan.” He fixed me with his dark eyes. “There's a lot you don't understand … about the way things are. You won't ever be a surfman. Now put it out of your mind.” He sniffed, smoothed his bristly mustache, and plopped onto his cot. I stared at him, my fists clenched. But this time I kept my mouth shut.

“Now let me get some sleep,” he said, and turned his back to me.

Grandpa came in with an armload of brush for kindling and said he was going fishing since he was, apparently, the only one around here with sense enough to think about getting something for supper.

I lay on my bed and closed my eyes but didn't sleep. I was powerful angry at Daddy for telling me not to hope, and only wondering a little about those things he said I didn't understand.

So far, I've seen three dead people. The first was when I was six years old and Mamma's sister, Aunt Stella, tried to birth a baby. She and the baby both died, but she was the only one I saw, laid out in a pine box in the sitting room of her house. That was when we still lived in Elizabeth City, back on the North Carolina mainland.

The second dead person was the reason we left Elizabeth City. It was two years ago, when I was ten. One summer night, Daddy woke me, Mamma, and Grandpa well before dawn and said we were moving to Roanoke Island, where Mamma had cousins and where there was no Klan. We packed up quick, then shuffled through the dark streets toward Daddy's fishing skiff, carrying our belongings in crates and baskets. I kept asking why we were leaving. “Why, Daddy, why?” I kept after him, until he
put down the crate he was carrying and took me by the hand. He told Mamma and Grandpa to wait and walked me past the Presbyterian church, out toward the Baker farm, to a quiet spot where a pin oak spread its branches against the night sky. Swinging from one of the branches, a rope around his neck, his ears and most of his fingers chopped off, was the Ames boy.

My legs went weak with the horror of it. I clutched Daddy's hand and cried.

“They don't need half a reason to lynch a man,” Daddy said in a low growl. “Not even half.”

I didn't ask one single more question about why we'd left our rented house without even telling the landlady, why we ran off in the night, or why we were moving to a place we'd only visited twice to see Mamma's cousins. All I needed to know was what Daddy had already said: we were going to where there was no Ku Klux Klan.

On Roanoke Island I went to school with the other colored children—the Berrys and Pughs and Bowsers. Miss Ella Midgett was already the teacher at the colored school, so Mamma couldn't get a job there, but Daddy said that was all right because he and Grandpa could just catch more fish.

That's where I first met the surfmen—the Pea Island crew, who each came to Roanoke Island one day a week on their day off to see their wives and children. Grandpa found out he and Daddy had already met the keeper of the Pea Island station,
Richard Etheridge, back when Mr. Etheridge was part of General Wild's African Brigade, which occupied Elizabeth City during the war.

That's also where I got to know William and Floyd, two boys from school. William was older than me, about fourteen or so, and Floyd a little younger than me. They taught me how to swim in the Croatan Sound, off the west side of the island near where we lived. They were both related to surfmen—nephews or cousins or something—and told me how they both wanted to become surfmen when they turned eighteen. They'd puff up their chests and recite the surfman's motto: “You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.”

William's family had a rickety old rowboat, and when it wasn't being used for fishing or oystering or taking William's uncle back and forth to his job at the fish market in Wanchese, William and Floyd and I snuck away with it. We rowed it to the northern part of the island, landed where there were hardly any houses, and pretended we were surfmen. “Take life preservers!” William would shout. “Take oars! Go!” We'd shove the rowboat back into the water, leap in, and row furiously out to an imagined wreck, William and Floyd each with an oar and me with a long stick. We welcomed phantom stranded sailors, who were always nearly dead and very glad to see us, loaded them into our “surfboat,” and took them back to shore. Sometimes we practiced capsize drills—took the rowboat out into the deep water and tipped it over
on purpose, the way the surfmen sometimes did on Tuesdays during their regular boat drills. We'd swim around and struggle with the boat until we got it righted again and the oars collected.

All that fun with the boat ended the day Floyd got hit in the head as the boat capsized. He was knocked out cold, and William and I had to hold him up so he wouldn't drown, and keep hold of the boat so it wouldn't drift away. Floyd took the longest time to come to, and by then the current had pulled us almost down to where all the houses were. We tried to right the boat and get out of there before anyone saw, but Mr. Ward spotted us with the boat still capsized and told our parents. We'd also lost an oar, which washed up two days later, and Floyd looked like he'd been bitten in the head by a shark, so there wasn't much use trying to keep it all a secret. After that, when we wanted to do surfboat rescues, we stayed on dry land and only pretended we had a boat, because not one of the three of us wanted to get another whipping like we each got that night.

The third dead person I saw was Mamma. One day last spring, she took to her bed with her throat so swelled up and sore she could hardly talk and her eyes bulging out like poached eggs. Daddy called on Doc Fearing, but he said it was the diphtheria and she was too far gone for him to help her. Two days later, she was dead.

Losing Mamma was the most sorrowful thing that has ever
happened to me. For weeks I'd wake up thinking I felt her cool hand against my cheek, and when I'd open my eyes and realize it couldn't be true, my chest about caved in with the sadness of it.

After we buried Mamma, Daddy didn't want to stay on Roanoke Island anymore. He didn't want to go back to Elizabeth City either, so when Mr. Etheridge said there was a fisherman's cabin on Pea Island near the station that hadn't been used for a long time, Daddy figured that was as good an invitation as we needed to move out here.

The cabin needed a lot of repair when we first came, but it had a stove, two beds, a table, and a few chairs. There was already a rain barrel under the eaves that was nice and full from early summer rains, and after a little fixing up, the privy was just fine. We built the smokehouse from salvaged wood and started burying fish heads in the sand to prepare a garden plot. Next spring we'll put up our garden fence, to keep the cows and wild ponies out, and our homestead will be complete.

Still, the cabin always feels like it's missing Mamma. I keep thinking I'll see her picking her way through the thick brush toward our front door, asking why did we up and move to the edge of the earth just because we couldn't find her for a while. And I wonder where she went—what it feels like to live in “God's house,” like the preacher in Elizabeth City used to talk about.

I know Daddy's missing Mamma, too, even though he doesn't say it. It seems like he put a hard mask on his face—a
mask that doesn't show whether he's sad or scared anymore but makes him look strong all the time, with his jaw set and his eyes steady like they're staring right through you to tomorrow. Grandpa says some folks grieve that way and Daddy will come around, just give him time. It hasn't even been a year yet since we lost Mamma.

When we first got here, especially on days when Daddy seemed like he couldn't stand to be around another living soul, I went off by myself to explore the island—all eight miles long and one mile across of it. I walked along the beach down to New Inlet on the southern end of the island and could just barely see the red roof of the New Inlet Life-Saving Station on the other side of the channel. I burrowed into the quiet stands of weatherbeaten pine, cedar, and oak trees and tracked raccoons and foxes in the sand. I went all the way to the north end of the island, where the bright red Oregon Inlet station sits near a cluster of hunting cabins, empty in the summer. If I was there at dusk, I could see the Bodie Island lighthouse flashing on the other side of Oregon Inlet. Then, of course, there's the Pea Island station, about two miles up from the southern end of the island and just north of our cabin. Its siding is painted cornflower blue but its roof and trim are vermilion, which makes it so sailors can see it from far out in the ocean.

I also found swampy places on the sound side and white sand beach on the ocean side, and a herd or two of cows and wild
ponies in between. The ponies are descendants of the ponies that swam ashore from wrecked Spanish ships years and years ago. With no one to take care of them, they all have patchy hair from chewing on flea bites and potbellies from worms.