Storm Warriors (6 page)

On the night of January 12, the
James Woodall
ran aground. The surfmen didn't come to get us, which was just as well because helping with a rescue would have only made it harder for me to get surfman dreams out of my head. I liked hearing the story, though. The wreck happened near the New Inlet station, so the Pea Island crew went to help out the New Inlet crew. Mr. Etheridge said the surfmen from the Chicamacomico station came, too, with their new self-bailing, self-righting lifeboat, a huge boat that could fit twenty men in it. He said the surf was breaking all the way from the beach to the wreck, three hundred yards out, and that it took the strength of ten surfmen rowing like mad to keep that big lifeboat from being smashed against the wreck, even on its leeward side. They picked up all ten sailors and made it back to shore safely.

Besides fishing, the other thing I let myself think about was the way Mr. Bowser had fixed up that hunter's leg—stopped the bleeding and all. One afternoon when the station was empty, I went in and looked over the surfmen's collection of books to see if I could find the one that had taught Mr. Bowser to doctor that way. In the
1893 Annual Report,
I opened to “Directions for Restoring the Apparently Drowned.” There was a picture of a
surfman kneeling over a man who looked half dead, pushing on his back. “Rule II. To expel water, etc., from the stomach and chest …,” I read. “If the jaws are clinched, separate them, and keep the mouth open by placing between the teeth a cork or small bit of wood; turn the patient on the face….” Boy, did that sound familiar. I remembered the day they'd used me as the “apparently drowned” victim.

I scanned the bookshelf again and found a small brown volume:
Accidents and Emergencies: A Manual of the Treatment of Surgical and Other Injuries in the Absence of a Physician
. I pulled it from the shelf. Inside I found pictures showing where to press to stop bleeding in arms and legs, and a drawing of a tourniquet tied just above a man's elbow. This was it!

Suddenly I heard voices outside—the surfmen returning from hunting. I couldn't let them catch me snooping around! I slipped out the door and scrambled under the station between the pilings that held it up off the sand. I watched the surfmen's legs and feet as they walked, laughing and joking, toward the front door. Their voices faded as they went inside.

My heart pounded in my ears. The two books were still in my hands.

I hadn't meant to steal them. Actually, I'd only borrowed them, because I would certainly return them once I'd learned everything in them. I just needed a chance to read without anyone asking me why I was more interested in broken bones and
dislocated shoulders than fishing and hunting like normal boys, or tease me about looking for naked pictures just because there happened to be one in
Accidents and Emergencies
that showed the location of the principal blood vessels in the body, or tell me I wasn't allowed because these weren't books for children. I wanted to read them in peace and quiet, and the only place I figured I could do that was in my hiding place under the station.

I decided I could read a little each day, and once I'd learned all I could, I would return them the first chance I got. I hoped the surfmen wouldn't notice the books were gone. They usually spent their time reading the newspapers and the fat novels that lined the bookshelves.

I read for a while about bone fractures and how to splint them. “In fracture of the jaw,” I read, “close the mouth and put a bandage round, so as to keep the two rows of teeth against each other.” The man in the drawing looked like those bandages were going to make it powerful hard to eat, talk, or even spit properly.

When I'd read about all I could put in my head for one day, I dug a shallow hole. I buried both books and marked the place with a mound of sand. I'd come back later with rags to wrap them in to protect them. Then I crawled out from between the pilings and ran home.

Every day I found time to sneak under the station to read. I read about cleaning and bandaging wounds and how to tell if a wound is infected. I learned the procedure for hypothermia: get
the patient's wet clothes off, then rub his arms and legs with linseed oil, wrap him in blankets, and feed him a tablespoonful of hot water and whiskey every hour. I worked on memorizing the three pages in the
Annual Report
on resuscitating the apparently drowned. Mr. Meekins had told me that Keeper Etheridge sometimes woke the men up in the middle of the night and had them recite those pages just to make sure they really knew it. I figured if it was that important, there was no reason I couldn't memorize it, too.

Those books were the best thing I'd ever read—even better than
The Water World,
a book all about the ocean which my teacher, Miss Ella Midgett, loaned to me because she said I was such a good reader. And they gave me something to think about other than repairing nets, hauling in fish, mixing up brine for the fish barrels, and carting the barrels to Manteo to sell.

The best part about fishing was the visits every few days to Roanoke Island. Usually, all I had to do was help Daddy dock the skiff and carry the haul up to Griffin, Sample & Company General Store. Then Daddy wanted to be left alone to haggle over price with Mr. Griffin, so I was free to go find my friends. William and Floyd had been avoiding me since our fight in the boat room, so Fannie was who I usually set out to find.

If she didn't come running down to the dock to greet me, then I could find her in her backyard hanging clothes for her mother or inside doing some other household chore. The day
I found her chopping potatoes was the day I let her in on my secret.

“Pump me some cooking water, Nathan?” she asked, wiping her hands on her apron and eyeing the pile of sweet potatoes on the table.

She handed me a large pot, and I went out back to the pump. The water flowed ice cold and clear—much nicer than the rainwater off the roof we always used.

“That's a lot of sweet potatoes,” I said when I came back in.

“Mamma wants four pies to bring to church tomorrow,” she said, and started in on that pile with a peeler and a butcher knife like she was racing to some kind of sweet potato pie finish line.

I sat and watched the knife flash in her hand. Later, I wished I'd told her to slow down. It flashed and thwacked the cutting board, and flashed again until suddenly Fannie cried out and there was blood all over the board. She shook her cut hand and whimpered.

“Hold still,” I told her. I stuck the dishrag into the pot of cold water, then grasped her hand with it and held it above her head. I squeezed the veins in her wrist with one hand and pressed the cold rag against the cut with the other. “This will stop the bleeding,” I said. “You'll be fine.”

There were beads of perspiration across her nose and cheeks, and she looked dizzy.

“Are you going to faint?” I asked. “Fainting usually makes the bleeding stop sooner, but I'd rather you didn't.”

She scowled at me. “No, I am
not
going to faint.”

“Well, if you feel like you're going to, just lower your head—”

“I told you I am not going to faint!” she snapped. She did look better now that she'd started arguing with me. “And I want to know how it is you know so much about fainting and cuts and the like.” She stared me down the way Mamma used to when she was fixing to get the truth out of me.

“I … uh … I just know, I guess,” I stammered.

If I hadn't been holding her hand up in the air, Fannie would have crossed her arms right then. As it was, she looked me up and down and said, “Miss Ella did not teach us that in school, and nobody is born knowing how to doctor, and you'd better give me a better answer than ‘I just know.’ ”

I sighed. I could see that Fannie was at least as good as Mamma had been at getting to the truth. “You promise you won't tell anyone?” I pleaded.

Fannie nodded solemnly and made a cross over her heart with her free hand.

I lowered her hand and peeked at the cut. It wasn't that deep, and the bleeding had mostly stopped. I dipped a clean corner of the dishrag into the cold water again. “Here, hold this tight for a while longer,” I said.

She looked at her cut, made a scrunched-up face, and quickly covered it with the rag.

I cleared my throat and leaned toward her. “I borrowed two
books on doctoring from the station library,” I said, my voice low. “I've been studying them.”

Fannie's eyes sparkled. “So
that's
how you knew!” she exclaimed. Then she sucked in her breath, as if she'd just that moment understood the part about “borrowing.” “I bet you're whispering because the surfmen don't know that you took the books, right?”

I felt my face flush. “It was sort of an accident—and then once I had them, I didn't want to give them back before I read them.”

This time Fannie did cross her arms over her chest. “Nathan Williams, I don't know whether to be proud of you or ashamed of you.”

“Me neither,” I admitted. “But I'm almost done with my studying. Soon I'll put them back where I found them, and no one will know, I promise.”

She smiled. “And if you hadn't studied, I might still be bleeding all over those sweet potatoes! I promise I won't tell.”

I bandaged Fannie's hand with a clean rag from her mamma's rag basket and helped her clean up the blood. Then Fannie supervised while I peeled and chopped sweet potatoes
slowly
.

If only I'd been able to keep my promise to Fannie the way she kept her promise to me.

February started out warmer than January had been. But on February 5, Mr. Moore from the weather station in Washington, D.C., telegraphed to Mr. Etheridge that we were about to be hit by a storm. Daddy and Grandpa and I moored our skiff on four long mooring poles, brought food and water inside the cabin, and waited.

The southeast gale started on February 6. It shook the cabin and beat the windows with rain and sand. We stuffed rags in the wall cracks, but we still had sand blow in during the dry spells and rain blow in during the wet spells. We used the chamber pot instead of the privy, and I got sick of the smell.

Daddy kept the fish-oil lamp lit and read to us from the
Fisherman and Farmer
newspaper. Even though it was two weeks old, it was better than listening to nothing but the clattering of the
walls and roof. Grandpa pulled out his greasy deck of cards, and we played poker, using raw beans to bet with. Grandpa ended up with the most beans.

By the third day of the gale, I was weary from the constant clattering and shaking. We'd run out of meat, and the chamber pot was very much in need of emptying. During a dry spell, Daddy said he'd take care of the chamber pot and I'd go to the smokehouse for a goose. Over supper, we'd say a prayer that the gale would end.

I stuffed a sack under my shirt and pushed open the cabin door. If the door hadn't been built on the west side, I don't think I could have opened it. As soon as I stepped around the corner, the wind slapped me in the back and nearly toppled me over. The low-growing cedars looked like they were wrestling each other, and even the thick gray clouds had been swirled into spirals by the wind.

I plodded to the smokehouse, crouching low to keep my footing. Inside, the walls shook and creaked, and the smell of smoked meat and fish made my mouth water. I lifted a large goose off its hook and stuffed it into the sack.

Outside again, I faced the wind head on. Sand stung my cheeks and stuck in my eyes. It was hard to breathe. I held one hand over my face and, pressing my shoulders against the force of the wind, trudged to the cabin.

I slammed the door against the storm and tried to blink the
sand out of my eyes. There was sand in my mouth, and it crunched between my teeth.

“I hope this goose lasts until the gale ends,” I said.

“I'd like the gale to end
now,
so we can eat that goose in peace and quiet,” said Grandpa.

Daddy agreed.

By the fourth day the wind died some, and by the fifth day it was time for us to start digging out. Sand was piled up against the smokehouse, cabin, and privy. Our rain barrel was overflowing with fresh water but half buried in sand. We also had company. A herd of cows, confused by the storm, had decided that our yard was their new grazing area.

“I'll be planting my garden soon,” said Grandpa. “I don't want those cows knocking down my fence and trampling my collards.”

He told me to take a stick and shoo them away. I picked up Daddy's shotgun and aimed at one of the cows.

“I said
shoo
them, not shoot them,” Grandpa said.

“I will,” I said. I made a gunshot noise with my mouth, and took aim at another cow.

Grandpa leaned on his shovel and looked at me crossly. “You get yourself a stick and chase them away before I take a stick to
you
.”

I put down the shotgun. “Can't we shoot
one
?” I asked. “A scrawny one that'll die before spring anyway?”

Grandpa's cheek twitched. “You go shooting other people's cattle, you'll see where it gets you,” he said.

I picked up a stick and went after the cows. They belonged to a rich white man who lived on the mainland. Pea Island was free grazing land, and he'd dropped them off here to graze on salt grass and anything else they could find. He'd pick them up next summer after they'd fattened up. The problem was, some of them wouldn't make it through the winter, with its storms and cold weather. I thought picking off one of the weak ones before it died and having us a nice steak would be a fine idea. Grandpa and Daddy didn't agree.

When we were done digging out at our house, Daddy said we should take our shovels over to the station to help. We found the crew digging out the stables, cookhouse, storage house, and station house. Mr. Wise called “Hello” to us from the roof of the station, where he was doing repairs.

Daddy, Grandpa, and I fell to work on digging out the cookhouse with Mr. Etheridge.

“We had a storm that hit around this same time in February last year,” said Mr. Etheridge as he worked alongside us. The shovels made a nice clinking noise against the sand. “But last year's was worse—freezing weather, with snow and a terrible wreck up off the coast of Long Island, New York, where they lost almost the whole crew.” A worried look crossed his face. “They'll be telegraphing soon to let us know of any casualties from this storm.”