Diann Ducharme (7 page)

P
AP PULLED HIS HAT DOWN A BIT OVER HIS WATERING BLUE EYES, BUT
I could still see his saggy face. I knew someday, and probably sooner than later, I would have a face like a loggerhead from working in the sun’s glare day after day, but it didn’t bother me none. I liked to think
that Pap’s face belonged to the sea, as much as the fish we pulled from it did.

We’d been out on the Pamlico Sound since the middle of the night, laying the nets for spot and croaker. But I had to meet up with Mister Sinclair for yet another fishing run later this morning, and the day wouldn’t end anytime soon.

For such a gnarled coot of a man, Pap was a patient fisherman. He had a sixth sense for fish—what kind they were, where they might be, and what direction they were heading in.

Ever since I was a youngun, and Ma had passed, Pap’s been learning me about fishing, and I’m not ashamed to say that I know all I know from him. Pretty much grew up on his work boat. I helped mend his nets and listened to his far-fetched fishing tales. Pap told me early on that fishing was a holy skill, that it said so in the Bible. I figure Jesus must look on Pap very kindly indeed.

It’s like me and Pap got seawater for blood. If it’s swimming in the water, we just know by instinct how to catch it. We not only catch any type of fish God made, but all nature of water creatures. Porpoise, turtles, oysters, crabs, eels, and sometimes whales, depending on if we need the money that bad to go off on the hunt. I will say that whaling is much easier when the beasts wash dead onto your beach.

But fishing on a June day like today is my favorite thing to do, being mere inches above the sound. It’s like a passel of little miracles happening all day long, just for me.

The rest of the country can scurry around like rats, packing guns or politicking, but out here people are free to be simple. I like to think of mainland North Carolina as a great big brass band a-playing in a stuffed-up room, and the Outer Banks as one easy stroke on the fiddle, cutting right through the clean ocean air.

But it ain’t often easy. Pap and me arise afore dawn and follow the sun all the way across the sky, most days. Oftentimes we just catch a
few winks on the boat, an old sail for a blanket. We breakfast on seafood, we sup on seafood. And shitting over the side of the skiff in broad daylight isn’t a circumstance.

As a way of living, it was all getting old to me.

Today I was sloppy pulling the nets up, and Pap was getting real cross with me. But try as I might to think on hauling, I kept wondering on Miss Abigail Sinclair. There was just some unruly quality to her, even though she was all shelled up in those fancy clothes. ’Course, she was easy on the eyes, no denying that.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have myself a gal, Eliza Dickens. She’s a hard worker and a good cook, make me a fine wife. I’ve known her since we was ’bout yay high, no taller than my shinbone. She’s got me thinking it might be a good idea to have a wife, set up house. So maybe early next year we’ll tie the knot, once I get some learning. I figure if I’m a lettered man, there ain’t nothing holding me back from a decent job.

See, a new lighthouse is set to get built down the Banks a ways, in Cape Hatteras. The whole Banks is in an uproar over its construction. Number one, they say it’s to be the tallest brick light in the world. And number two, its building is expected to give Banker folks jobs left and right.

And it won’t stop there. Word has it that the U.S. government wants to build lighthouse after lighthouse on the Banks. Plenty of jobs for able men, if you are so inclined to believe the talk. And there’s not a soul on the Banks that don’t want to get hired.

Sure, there’s lifting and hauling jobs aplenty, but I like the notion of those finger-pointing jobs, myself. It’s my bet that they’re having a devil of a time finding men around here to scribble down the little whatnots, and mull over the bigger ideas, and that’s where I hope to fit in.

I’ve heard tell these government jobs pay men regular good
money by every hour they work, and a steady job like that is mighty tempting, out here where we never know when our next catch of fish or flock of geese might show up. Just thinking on the money to be made in Hatteras by a bookish type of man, and with skills like mine to boot, makes me want to dive off this old boat and start swimming down there today. But I’m far too yellow-bellied to reveal my highfalutin plans to Pap just yet.

Still, I’ve been reciting the list of letters in my head over and over, sometimes backwards to frontwards even. My mind seems real natural at it, so far. I been wanting to learn reading and writing since I was a young feller, seeing the Banks visitors, and sometimes the Reb and Fed’ral soldiers a few years back during the occupation, reading their thick newspapers and carrying ’round books that looked like they told of the mysteries of the world. Made me feel a big old buoy-head, not even able to write my own name.

But native folks ’round these parts don’t read or write much, so there was nary a soul to teach me. Pap told me to forget about schooling. But I don’t want to haul pound nets and live in Pap’s humble abode for the rest of my life. I sure don’t want to trade kegs of fish and strings of bird for every last thing I lay my hands on in this world.

I see how bone-tired my pap gets nowadays, with a lifetime of labor riding his back. I try to haul extra hard to make up for his loose limbs. I look on him, his pouched-up red face and his white shaggy brows, and feel terrible sad for the thoughts in my head. I’d miss Pap greatly if I were to leave him. I’d miss the water, too, and this skiff. This skiff we called
Tessa
, after Ma, but no one would know that because we didn’t know how to write the letters on her. And Pap was too proud to ask anyone to do it for him.

When Pap slumped over for a catnap on the way back to Nags Head, I pulled out the paper that Miss Abigail Sinclair had given me
last week. The paper was getting all bent up and stained from my pulling it in and out of my pockets, and from tracing my fingers over the letters.

I recollected the way the pink tip of Miss Sinclair’s tongue peeked out the corner of her mouth a bit as she wrote the letters on the paper, and my face reddened as if from a long day in the sun. I’d sure hate to have Mister Sinclair read my thoughts right about now. He’s the breed of man you just don’t want to disappoint, like a man o’ God.

Mister Sinclair is the tallest, broadest man I’ve seen hereabouts, a rare giant of a man. Every man, woman, and child around stares after him like they seen a Jesus miracle walk by, all wide-eyed and pointing. His head is crowned with a mess of curly red hair, and his short beard is ruddy gold. The trimmed facial hair gives him such a dignified look that I have a mind to grow hair like his on my own chops.

I’m no bootlicker, but I’ve been studying him, his high-bred manners and such, ever since that day last autumn when I took him goose-hunting up yonder on the North Banks.

He’s what they call a “gentleman” planter, come down a few generations. I know he’s rolling in money since he always sports the finest fashions, even though all we do is fiddle around in the dirt and water and mess with bloodied fowl and fish. And anyone that’s willing to pay good money for some other man to help him hunt and fish must have a pocket full of rocks.

Back in December I picked out some men hauling pine over to the ocean, and we all watched Mister Sinclair’s cottage grow up bit by bit during the winter. We’d take to gathering at the ocean on our time off, to cook up some bluefish or trout on a fire and polish off some mountain dew while we looked on the unlikely sight of a house being built smack on the ocean sand.

It seemed of late to be the fashion for the rich men on the mainland.
We all liked to speculate on what kind o’ men’d like to do something like that—must have sponge for brains. Either that or they’d never seen the ocean wash clear across the island and meet up with the sound.

But when I met Mister Sinclair, he was so high ’n’ mighty like, seemed to know more than even I did about his chances, that it didn’t seem right to back-talk him. He said he planned on sending his family to the cottage in the summer, to take the air, like many mainland folks been doing for years now, just not on the ocean side. We Bankers, we all hunker down under the trees, and if you don’t mind me saying, it’s a much safer spot.

Once we docked in Nags Head, I helped Pap salt and load our catch in crates and haul it to the hotel. The summer folk were almost on their knees begging for fresh fish, enough so that we were talking about bringing in Jacob Craft, a comrade of mine known widely for his ability to tell a good yarn while plucking a banjo. He was also hands down the best waterman around. He had about ten years on me, though, so I cut myself some slack.

Coming back from the hotel, I saw Mister Sinclair waiting on me near the pier. He was early and all slicked up, as usual, in spite of the heat.

“Something wrong, Mister Sinclair?”

“Something’s come up. There’s to be a change of plans today.” He turned to look across the Roanoke Sound. “You familiar with that runaway-slave colony over on Roanoke Island?”

No one really called it a colony for “runaway slaves” ’round here. It was the Freedmen’s Colony, a much nicer turn of phrase. But I just
said, “Oh, to be sure. Not many left in the colony proper, but there’s a number of folks that look to be staying on the island.”

He slapped at a gallnipper on his neck with a big hand. “You got time to take me over there today? I’ll make it worth your while.”

“No fishing, then?”

“Plenty of fish to catch tomorrow. I need to see this place. It just can’t wait.”

He called the shots, as usual. But it did sound mighty peculiar to me. Not many folks cared to see the Freedmen’s Colony these days.

I wasn’t much bigger than a boy when the colony got started, but I recall watching a steady stream of Negroes hitching boat rides to the island during the war. They’d heard that the island was Union territory after the Battle of Roanoke Island, and they were hell bent to get to free land.

But before anyone knew it, Roanoke Island was overrun with nearly starved black folks with nothing to do and no food in sight. Man alive, was it pandemony. More folks on the island than there ever had been. Few thousand people, at one point. And it ain’t very big—only eight miles long and two wide.

Next thing I heard, the Yankee government took over the island’s unoccupied land—the land that belonged to the white Rebs, you know—to build the colony. The local white folks gritted their teeth and complained among each other, but went along with it even so. Trees got felled, then a handful of schoolhouses and churches got built, and houses with proper roads between. The colony even got a steam sawmill. Things were on the up-and-up for those folks.

The colony did all right for a few years, before the Reb soldiers came home to the island after the war and realized that Negroes had set up hundreds of homes on their land. That didn’t go well a-tall. ’Course, the freedmen ended up with the little end of the horn, in the
end. Got forced out one way or the other. But some stayed on, hoping things would turn around.

Still, it wasn’t much to see, and I couldn’t prophesy what business Mister Sinclair might have there.

Pap was done for the day, so I used
Tessa
to get us over to Roanoke Island, a couple miles west of Nags Head across the Roanoke Sound. With the skiff docked, we borrowed two horses and rode over to the remains of the Freedmen’s Colony on the northwest side of the island.

It had been a while since I’d ventured over here, but I could tell this part of the island had seen better days. The trees that used to grow on the northern part of the island were almost all gone, cut down for firewood and freedmen houses and wartime buildings. Must have taken a lot of wood, for sand was all that was left.

In the village itself, three wide avenues—called Lincoln, Burnside, and Roanoke—cut through about twenty-six streets, but the lines marking the sides of the streets were less and less clear-cut. Everywhere were weeds and little trees already taller than a youngun, no one with the gumption to pull ’em up no more.