Storm Warriors (5 page)

I nodded.

Grandpa got a faraway look in his eyes. “When your grandma comes back, we'll just have to teach her how to fish now, won't we?”

I laughed, and Grandpa gave me a mischievous grin. “And someday I
will
have a piece of land. Just a very small one.” He said it like he was giving away a secret.

“How will you do that, Grandpa?” I asked.

“When they bury me, that piece of land will be
mine
. I'll have a piece six feet by two feet that nobody else can claim but me.”

“Grandpa!” I frowned at him and jostled his arm. “Don't talk like that!”

“I'm just looking at the bright side,” he insisted.

I was still giving him a perturbed look.

“Stop your worrying,” he said. He took the rag out of my hand, dipped it into the basin of cool water, then pressed it against my cheek again. “You'll be grown and probably have young ones of your own before I'll let anyone even think about burying me.”

“Good,” I said.

“But I don't see any harm in you hoping to be a surfman,” he said. “And working hard toward it and all.”

That night I heard Grandpa and Daddy outside the cabin arguing. The ocean was loud and almost drowned out their voices, but I could still tell the argument was about me because I heard them say “the boy” several times. And from the sounds of it, Daddy
did
see harm in me hoping to become a surfman.

Even after the auction, coal from the
Emma C. Cotton
washed up onshore, a little at a time. One morning, Daddy took up a sack and told me we were going to gather coal so we'd have less to buy in Manteo next time. I knew he was also wanting to talk, to ease the silent anger that had stood guard between us since the night he'd argued with Grandpa about me.

He gave me the sack to carry, and he, for some reason, carried a fifteen-pound red drum he'd hooked by the gills and tied a line to. I looked at the fish, swinging on the line as Daddy walked, its dead eyes staring blankly. But I didn't ask Daddy why he was taking it along.

We made our way through the brush to the shore, then turned north. The day was cloudy, the wind light, and the ocean calm and dull green. As we started up the beach, the seagulls
screamed overhead and circled Daddy and his fish. The sandpipers ran in and out of the waves onshore, pecking at the sand for food.

I gathered the lumps of coal where they lay scattered by the receding tide and dumped them into the sack. We walked in silence, the dead fish swinging, and Daddy looking like he was figuring something in his head, frowning a little, and squinting into the glare of the white sky. I was leaning over to pick up a piece of coal when Daddy grabbed my shoulder and said, “Watch.”

He dropped the red drum on the sand near the water's edge, then moved back from it and motioned for me to sit with him.

Screaming seagulls flocked to the drum and attacked it. They ripped through the skin and pecked the flesh with their strong beaks until fish guts and blood stained the sand. The hungry birds pecked at each other, too. The stronger ones squawked and flew at the weaker ones, scaring them away from the precious food. One of the gulls—one that never made it close enough to the fish to get a bite—had only one leg. I wondered if he'd lost it in a fight over food this way.

“They don't know how to share,” I said.

“They can't share,” said Daddy. “There's only one fish.” He flattened out the sand between us with his palm. “There's not enough to go around.”

I watched the birds again and saw that he was right. There was not much left of the drum now except bones, guts, and head.
And what seemed like hundreds of gulls still flapped and squawked at each other, trying to grab the last bits of flesh.

“It's what I've been trying to tell you,” said Daddy. “About you wanting to be a surfman.”

I snapped my head around to face him.

“I better explain it to you before you get yourself beat up again … like those birds over there.” He jerked his chin toward the one-legged gull.

“It used to be that a black man could apply for a job in the Life-Saving Service in North Carolina, and if he was qualified, he could be assigned to most any station.”

I nodded. I knew Mr. Etheridge had come to Pea Island from the Oregon Inlet station and Mr. Wescott had come from Caffeys Inlet Station.

“They usually kept the black men in the lowest-ranking positions—number six or seven on the roster—but the whites and blacks worked together. Those were the ‘checkerboard’ crews,” he said. “That was in the 1870s, when the Life-Saving Service first started.”

The birds were beginning to disperse now, finding nothing more to eat.

“That was back when we thought the war had changed everything and we'd finally get the respect we deserved.” Daddy stared out at the dull green ocean.

“But now they've made Mr. Etheridge keeper,” I said. “That's
the highest position. And Mr. Bowser is the number-one surf-man, and Mr. Midgett is number two….” My voice trailed offwhen I saw the anger in Daddy's face.

“And there are no black surfmen at any other North Carolina stations,” he snapped. The blood throbbed in his temple, and his jaw clenched tight. “The whites don't want to work with colored men anymore, so they've put all the blacks here, and there's no place else to go.” He picked up a scallop shell and flung it at a squawking gull. “They've got eighteen stations for the whites. Some of those surfmen can't even read or write, and some hardly know the drills or how to swim. And you've got every black boy on Roanoke Island growing up wanting to be a surf-man, learning to swim, training himself in the drills, and knowing that one of the Pea Island crew will have to get sick or die before he can get the job.”

I looked at the drum carcass lying in the sand. “It's like they've thrown us one fish,” I said quietly. “So we can fight over it.”

Daddy nodded.

The last gulls circled overhead, then flew off.

“You leave the dreams of being a surfman to the boys from Roanoke Island. Most of them won't even get what they want. It's only the sons and nephews of the surfmen who will get the few jobs.” Daddy rose, picked up the drum carcass, and threw it out as far as he could into the water. “Fishermen have always
helped with the rescues, so you can keep on with that.” He looked at me and frowned. “And someday you'll get it through your fool head that having your own boat and nets is a damn good way to earn a living.”

“I
know
it's a good way, Daddy….” I hadn't meant to be ungrateful.

I had wanted to hope for more than being a fisherman. But if Daddy was right, that wanting to be a surfman just wasn't my dream to have, then I might as well give it up the way Grandpa had given up ever having his farm and be happy with what I did have.

Daddy stood, squared his shoulders, and looked out to sea as if there was something out there he'd lost. Daddy hadn't gotten everything he'd wanted either. I know he'd have cut off his right hand if it would have given him a few more years with Mamma.

I decided right then to show Daddy how much I appreciated having our own skiff. I decided to put thoughts of being a surfman out of my mind. I decided to become a very good fisherman.

The hunters had begun coming and going from Pea Island in November, around the same time as the ducks and geese had flown in from up north. Daddy said some of the hunters were rich men from the Northern states who came for sport, some were Southerners from the mainland who came for food, and still others came to try to earn their fortune from the Canada geese, brant,
and ducks that flew so thick their flocks darkened the sky. The hunters stayed in the cabins up near Oregon Inlet but wandered the whole of Pea Island, and shots ringing out in the early morning, or any time of day, were a familiar sound.

One afternoon in January, the lifesavers were done with their drills and had gone off hunting or fishing, and Mr. Bowser was keeping watch on the lookout deck. I was sitting on a sand hill repairing our cast net, carefully tying knots with new line. I heard shotgun fire close by and thought nothing of it. Then I heard moaning and shouting. Two white men came stumbling out of the brush, one half carried by the other and trailing blood.

“There's the station!” one of the men cried. Then he spotted me and shouted, “You, boy, call the keeper. This man's been shot!”

I barged into the station and up the steps to the lookout deck.

“Mr. Bowser, hunters are here. One has been shot!” I cried.

Mr. Bowser used the spyglass to take one last good look at the calm seas, then followed me down the steps. We both hurried toward the hunters. The uninjured one was tall and sandy-haired. As we approached, he called, “Where's the keeper? We need the keeper.”

“The keeper isn't here,” Mr. Bowser said. “I'm the second in command. You'd better let me stop that bleeding—”

“Don't let that nigger touch me!” The injured man waved his
hands like he was shooing away gnats. He was stocky and bearded and looked like the older of the two. “You get me to a doctor, or the keeper, but I'm not having that nigger try to doctor me up!”

The man's right thigh looked like the flesh and trousers had been chopped up together in a meat grinder. Bird shot must be sprayed all through that leg, I thought.

“I can send Nathan, here, to find the keeper, but he's a colored man, too,” said Mr. Bowser calmly.

A circle of blood had soaked into the sand under the injured man's right foot.

“Good God, you're bleeding to death! If you die, Mamma will never forgive me—let the boy doctor you, you idiot!” the sandy-haired man cried. He was almost as pale as his bleeding brother.

“Look who's calling me an idiot! It'll serve you right if Mamma never forgives you, shooting me like that.”

“Help me get him inside.” Mr. Bowser reached to support the bearded man.

“Get your hands off me!” he cried. But his face went suddenly slack, and his eyes rolled back. Then he snapped his head up and focused woozily on his brother. “I'm going. Tell Mamma I love her.” His eyes rolled back again, his head fell sideways, and his body fell limp into his brother's and Mr. Bowser's strong arms.

“Oh God, he's dead!” the younger brother wailed.

“No, just stubborn and passed out cold from blood loss,” said Mr. Bowser. “
Now
help me get him inside.”

The three of us carried the bleeding man into the station. Mr. Bowser laid a piece of canvas over the messroom table, and we lifted him onto it. He sent me into the equipment room to fetch the medicine chest. By the time I returned, Mr. Bowser had cut the man's trouser leg to reveal a torn-up thigh with fat, muscle, and bird shot mixed in a gory mess.

“First we'll stop the bleeding, then I'll clean it some,” said Mr. Bowser. “But you'll have to get him to Manteo to Doc Fearing, you understand?”

The younger brother nodded, his eyes wide with terror.

Mr. Bowser first tied a cord around the man's leg above the wound. “That's a tourniquet,” he told me as he worked. “It will help stop the bleeding.” Then he pressed with both his thumbs on a point below the man's groin. Slowly, blood stopped dripping from the wound. “Nathan, get the whiskey out of the medicine chest,” he said.

He poured whiskey over the torn part of the leg and used tweezers to begin picking out the sprayed bird shot. The younger brother watched, his shoulders shaking with sobs.

“We spent all our money on a shad boat and barrels and ice,” he said between sniffles. “We were going to sail back to Norfolk with five hundred birds—maybe a thousand.” He used his sleeve to wipe snot from his nose. “The restaurants up north—Washington,
D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York—they're crazy for ducks and brant and geese. We were going to sell those birds and get rich and make Mamma proud.” He broke down with a whole new round of sobbing. “But now look what I've done! I was behind him, and I tripped, and
bam
! Next thing I knew he was lying in his own blood, and …” He looked desperately at Mr. Bowser. “Can you save him?”

Mr. Bowser poured more whiskey over the wound, then poured a glass of it and handed it to the weeping man. “Pull yourself together. You're going to have to sail him to Manteo. Is your shad boat moored sound side?”

“Yes,” said the man.

“You get him to Doc Fearing right away. He'll want to sew this leg up and keep a watch for lockjaw and infection.”

Mr. Bowser poured a second glass of whiskey and handed it to me. “This rascal is going to wake up soon. When he does, pour that down his throat. It'll help with the pain and distract him from the fact that a colored man is patching up his leg.” Mr. Bowser tore a piece of clean white linen and began to wrap it around the leg.

When the man woke up, he was too weak to yell at Mr. Bowser. I held the whiskey to his lips so he could drink it.

Mr. Bowser sent me to the stables for a wheelbarrow and some hay. We loaded the hunter into the wheelbarrow on a bed of hay and wheeled him over sound side to their shad boat. The younger brother thanked us over and over again.

“You get him to Doc Fearing now, you hear?” Mr. Bowser ordered.

The injured man was either too weak, too drunk, or too stubborn to say thank you.

When they'd left, Mr. Bowser shook his head. “Damn idiot. Would rather bleed to death than get help from a black man.” Then he looked at me and searched my face. “You okay? All that blood didn't make you want to faint or gag or anything?”

“No, sir,” I answered. It hadn't bothered me at all. In fact, it had been about the most interesting thing I'd ever seen.

“That's good,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulders and we headed back to the station.

I stopped watching the surfmen do their drills and began spending each day with Daddy in the fishing skiff. Because it was winter, the fish in the sound weren't running much, so we spent a lot of our time talking about our small catch and wagering how big the catches would be when the weather turned warmer.

In the quiet, while we trawled along, Daddy told me stories about him and Mamma when they first met. He said he never thought a schoolteacher from a free family would take a second look at a fisherman who'd been born a slave and hardly had any schooling. But she had. He said Mamma used to laugh and say, “Must have been those strong arms of yours that got my attention, George, because it certainly wasn't the minnows hiding in your breeches cuffs that attracted me!” Daddy looked happy when he talked about her, with the sun shining on his smooth
cheeks. And I liked hearing stories about Mamma, like she wasn't so far away. Daddy said the muscles in my arms looked bigger from hauling in the nets and rowing the skiff on windless days. He said he was proud of me.