The Odyssey of Ben O'Neal (3 page)

"I can't, ma'am."

In fact, it was Reuben who had talked about that glorious moment when the last line separates from the dock and the ship becomes a world of its own; that moment when it lifts on the first ocean swell, outbound. "I just can't do it," I repeated.

Mrs. Crowe let out an exasperated sigh and tapped a fork by her plate in annoyance. She did not like to be overruled. "Well, if you must go on and expose yourself to the most wicked people on earth, you go to J. M. Jordan's in the morning and tell him Ethel Crowe sent you. He's a fine Christian man, honest as a creek pebble, and won't steer you to a hellship."

J. M. Jordan's.
I nodded gratefully. I'd heard of Jordan's, the foremost ship chandlers. They provisioned vessels, supplying food and all manner of things.

"Moreover, I suppose you'll enjoy listening to sea stories around his Heatrola, hot or cold, though I wouldn't give a whit for a sea story. Sailors are all terrible liars as well as drunks. But all the best captains come to Jordan's, over Oscar Smith or D. S. Baum."

Reuben had mentioned Jordan's, and that Heatrola, a big, barrel-like stove, come to think of it. I thanked her kindly.

Mrs. Crowe then nodded permission to Mr. Stone, who resumed his discussion of fast locomotives to pull hotshot freights on the N&W line.

After dessert, of hot peach dumplings doused with thick cream, Mrs. Crowe cleared the table, served coffee, opened the windows to let smoke out, and retired to the kitchen with a curt warning to drop no ashes on the parlor rug and a reminder to me to "think about it."

"I will, ma'am," I promised.

Twilight had spread over the port.

Red and green running lights, white mast lights, were moving around the branches of the Elizabeth River, hulls almost hidden in the gloom, though the ship whistles and tugboat toots from the harbor were not as frequent now.

Six bells, seven o'clock, was rung down on the ships as Mike and I paused briefly on the fourth-floor landing, which had a wide window affording a good view.

"That's Portsmouth over there, and the ferries dock here at the foot of Commercial. Those are the Merchant & Miner docks down there. Old Bay Line. Over there is the naval hospital."

Paddle-wheel ferries, their walking beams rocking like steel seesaws, churned the water between Portsmouth and Commercial Street. Small boats crisscrossed the wakes, bucking and plunging. Almost dead ahead of us, a white vessel, aglow in every window and port, moved slowly upriver.

"She's from the nations capital. Norfolk & Washington Steamboat Company. They dock at the foot of Water."

She blew hoarsely as a small oyster dredger crossed her bow.

Ah, the life in a bustling port city, I thought, my feet almost floating up with contentment. On the morrow there go I, were my thoughts.

In the room, Mike settled down and lit up a white clay pipe, giving me the notion that I might possibly want to spend some money on a pipe and sack of tobacco. It would make me seem older, I concluded. With my lifelong companions on the Banks, Kilbie Oden and Frank Scarborough, I had tried tobacco, both the shredded kind and chewing plug, with not much instant pleasure and some later illness. Yet sitting there and puffing, Mike looked very mature.

"Sure you don't want to think about that N&W machine shop? Mrs. Crowe knows the foreman."

I shook my head. "Made up my mind this morning on the
Neuse
to try and find Reuben down in the Caribbean. He's my big brother, mate on a brig running between Trinidad, the Barbadoes, and Port Fernandino. That's in Florida. He doesn't even know Mama's dead."

"No one else left in your family except him?"

"Not a soul. Papa died a long time ago. Then brother Guthrie. Mama died last month."

Smoke rose and eddied into Mike's blond hair as he turned solemn and thoughtful. "My old man just as well be dead. He gets paid noontime Saturday an' drinks till sundown Sunday. He used to beat up on all of us. That's mainly why I left home. Worked as kitchen boy at the Vanderbilt in New York City first."

I shook my head sympathetically and sat down on the edge of the bed, hoping I could stay a while. "I never knew my papa."

Mike laughed hollowly. "I wish I'd never known mine."

That wasn't a nice thing to say and I wanted to change the subject but didn't do a very good job of it. "You ever get homesick?"

There was thick silence a moment. "Sometimes. I spent Christmas Day between New Bern and Lizzie City. Five passengers on that whole train. We slowed down for little towns and I could see people that morning in their front rooms opening their presents ... trees with candles on them..."

I suddenly felt sorry for this boy.

"You'll get that way, too, believe me," Mike said, green eyes warning. "It'll hit you when you least expect it. One thing, you can always go back home and no one will slap you or cuss you."

No one ever did that, I recalled. Never.

Mike went on with the distressing subject. "I can't remember when there wasn't meanness in my house. Even my brother and sister turned mean."

I could not remember a single time when Rachel O'Neal was really mean. Oh, she was cantankerous now and then; nagged now and then. Always jumpy about me going near the water. But never mean. "I guess I had a good house after all," I said, wishing we hadn't gotten onto this subject this particular evening.

"Lucky you didn't get born in mine," Mike said.

I told him about our house and a sand pony and dog I'd had, but he wouldn't talk about his house. He did mention his dog, Burnie, rescued from a stable fire. Not much else.

For a painful moment, a clear picture of our house, tucked at the end of a pathway in red myrtle, scrub holly, and live oak, popped into my mind. Then the faces of Mama, Filene, Jabez, Mark Jennette; Kilbie, Frank, and Mr. Burrus, even surly Hardie Miller, passed before me. I found myself getting clog-throated and said, "We knew everybody, just like family."

"Maybe you should have stayed on and waited for your brother."

What an untimely thing for him to say: I looked at him and struggled with that idea again, not that I hadn't been struggling with it since early morning. I pushed it back and tried to clear my mind. "But, stuck out on those Banks, sometimes I went crazy, Mike. You ever seen them?"

"Closest I ever got was Lizzie City."

"Sand and shipwrecks. Lifesaving stations. Not much else. No roads, no electricity, no chamber toilets. You could put Chicky village, Clarks, Buxton, and Hatteras in four square blocks of what I saw today."

Mike nodded. "I still might trade you for Scranton."

I blew a breath. "I don't know what got into me yesterday. I took a look around just before I left and it didn't look so bad..."

"Hmh," said Mike.

I hit the bedspread with the palm of my hand. "Tell me about trains, Mike..."

He did, but somehow we got back to Heron Head and, nearing ten o'clock, Mike said to me, "Well, Heron Head sounds a lot better'n Scranton."

That was hard to believe. "Yeah, but you're out of Scranton now, riding these trains every day. You been everywhere, New York and Philadelphia..."

He nodded but got up and went over to the window. When he turned back, I could not understand the look on his face. It seemed dark and empty. "I guess..." Then he walked back over and grasped the counterpane up by the pillow. "I'm tired of talking."

Just like an adult, I thought. Exactly like one.

"I'm sleepy, that's all, Ben," he said, an edge still in his voice.

"See you in the morning," I said, mystified by his change of mood, all clouded over in seconds.

"If you're up that early. I've got to be on the train by seven-thirty." He was very upset and wanted me out of there.

"I'll be up," I said, and wished him good night.

Closing the door behind me, I went on down the hall in puzzlement. What could I have said that annoyed him?

Clean and neat, my own room had fresh linen, along with a china washbowl and matching wash pitcher on a low, granite-topped bureau. By the bed was another small stand with a Bible on it, inscribed
GIFT OF THE LADIES' RAILROAD AUXILIARY
. Mrs. Ethel Crowe ran a good place indeed, and I would recommend it to anyone. Rachel O'Neal would have likely approved of this place, I thought. But, looking around, it was still a strange room, so different from my own.

I heard a trolley sound over on Granby. Bell clangs and a scrape of steel. Otherwise, there was almost complete silence. The men downstairs had gone to bed and I was sure Mrs. Crowe had donned her nightcap and creamed her face. Breakfast began at six.

I stood a moment longer, realizing it was the first evening I'd ever spent away from the Banks. There was no pound of surf, no cry of night birds. No familiar wand of warmth from Bodie Island Lighthouse. There was a different smell in this room. Nothing like the faint, damp pine odor of my own. Nothing was the same. Everything had changed overnight.

Suddenly I knew why Mike had become upset. There'd been love and warmth in our house. On those Banks, people cared for each other. I'd told him about something he could never have. No wonder he'd trade Scranton for Heron Head. I thought about him getting cussed and slapped....

In bed, I sighed and twisted around, thinking about Mike and about everything that had happened in the past months. The wreck of the
Malta Empress.
Teetoncey washing ashore, her parents drowning. The whole perplexing business with the silver bullion carried by the
Empress.

Finally, the night Mama died.

The tears came on without warning.

M
OST OF
M
RS
. C
ROWE'S
boarders had already breakfasted and were on their way to the N&W yards with lunch pails, several down to the glistening river to catch a workboat for the Southern Railway terminal over at Pinner's Point, across the way. There was an early morning hurry that I'd never noticed on the Banks, where everyone wriggled stocking toes over a second cup of coffee and mulled the weather before lifting the door latch. There was no calm daybreak here. The city seemed to awaken on the move and was rumbling by seven o'clock.

Mike Grant, standing on the front porch, was leaving, too, for Union Station. Anxious to go. Even fidgety. "Look me up when you come back in, Ben." He seemed wound up.

"I sure will."

The drummer nodded, almost as if I were a stranger, pounded down the steps, and headed rapidly for Main Street, long legs eating ground.

I called after him, "Thanks again."

Floating back came, "Good luck." Then the boy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, turned the corner and was gone. Perhaps forever.

I stayed on the porch a moment longer, then thoughtfully climbed the stairs back to the fourth floor. I usually did not meet someone of a morning and see him go off the next.

I sat on the bed a few minutes and then said to myself,
I've got to do it now. This minute or never.

Tugging the brown jacket on, adjusting the blue wool cap at an angle on my head, I peered into the small mirror a moment, sticking my chin out, thinking that even a scraggly mustache like Mike Grant's would be of some help. Finally, taking a steadying breath, I descended to the kitchen, where Mrs. Crowe was doing the breakfast dishes. I stood in the doorway. "I'm going now."

She looked up. "Just follow the directions I gave you."

I nodded.

Her eyes took me in, shoes to wool cap. "You should have books in your hand, and be going off to school, not to any rough-and-tumble docks."

I didn't know how to answer that.

She lifted a reddened finger out of steam water and aimed it between my eyes. "If Mr. Jordan is in right mind, he'll tell you to stay exactly put until your big brother comes back."

"Yes, ma'am," I replied, sorely tempted to do just that. "I'll only see what kind of ships they have."

"Be off," she said curtly. "Find out for yourself."

"Yes, ma'am." I nodded and walked out.

It was too early to go to the ship chandlers, I thought—an awful excuse—so I bought a copy of the morning Norfolk
Virginian-Pilot
at the corner of Plume and Granby, then sat down on the curb to read the shipping section, which was always a bible for Filene Midgett. After the mail rider visited, Filene could not make it through the day without reading the arrivals and departures, who was loading what, and what ships were feared lost.

I must go forward a little bit and look back upon that March of 1899. Though I did not realize it and few other people did, it was a time of great change. The twentieth century was nine months away. Electric railways and horseless carriages were already on the streets. Although it was noisy and smelled like something out of the devil's own kitchen, the internal-combustion engine seemed to have a future. Marconi's wireless was soon to be going aboard ships, and the Wright brothers, of Dayton, Ohio, absolutely believed they could do what birds did: fly.

It was all happening and I had little knowledge of it. Even the face of the sea was changing, and I had little knowledge of that either.

That sunny Wednesday, along Norfolk's sprawling waterfront were one hundred and fifteen schooners, one brig, two barkentines, three barks, and forty-eight steamers. They were tucked by wharves and piers all the way from the spines of rail tracks at Lambert's Point south to below the high steel bridge over the Elizabeth River's muddy East Branch.

No sailing man quite believed his day was over, and it wasn't yet, but the British freighter
Inchmaree,
loading for Rotterdam, could carry more in two holds than the biggest schooner in port. According to the newspaper, her manifest (the cargo list) would show 155,174 bushels of corn, 100 bales of cotton, 5,840 sacks of flour, 75 hogsheads of tobacco, 50 barrels of dried apples, 1 flat car of softwood logs, and 67 cars of hardwood logs, and much more. Smoked pork and hog guts and lard.

Along the waterfront, down from Freemason and Jackson and Fayette streets, Commercial Street and the narrow lanes, then flanking the distance of East Main Street, with its saloons and tattoo parlors, there was a sound of winches and a slap of steel cables. The SS
Habil,
West India Fruit and Steamship Company, had loaded general cargo for Kingston, Jamaica. She'd bring back bananas, oranges, and coconuts. The
J. Otter-bein
was loading iron pyrites and manure salt for Hamburg. Steamers of the Clyde Line, Merchant & Miners, Johnston Blue Cross, Baltimore Steam Packet, White Star Line to Liverpool, and others, were also working cargo, and mixed in with them were the tall masts of ships that still sailed before the wind.