Kiss River (16 page)

Friday, April 10, 1942

T
oday I turned fifteen, and I feel as though I am completely different. Not just my age, but some part of me I didn’t know could change. The part that trusted people. The part that always felt safe and secure. The part that thought of Germans as faceless demons out there under the ocean. I know different now, and I don’t think I’ll ever be the same.

Late last night, just as I was going up to bed (or at least pretending to go to bed, knowing that an hour or so later I would sneak out to the beach to be with Sandy), Daddy came in the house and told Mama and me we needed to come outside with him. I decided I better go so I didn’t rouse their suspicions. He took us up to the gallery of the lighthouse to watch the sky because there was a shooting star shower. The lighthouse is dark now. We had to turn it off because of the blackout, and none of us can sleep well, no matter how hard we try. We are all crotchety and irritable. But having it dark makes it easier to see the stars.

Daddy carried the flashlight, but he didn’t turn it on as we climbed to the top of the lighthouse. All three of us climb those
steps in our dreams. The sight from the gallery was breathtaking. The moon was just a little white sliver, and I’ve never seen the sky so clear before, since there were no lights anywhere. It was hard even to tell where the ocean ended and the land began. We leaned back against the glass wall of the lantern room and looked up at the sky. I had seen three stars fall when Mama suddenly told us to look out to sea.

She was pointing out in the ocean, a little to the north, and I suddenly saw what had caught her eye: a light was blinking out there. We watched it for a moment, and my father said, “It’s an SOS signal!” Sure enough, I began to see the pattern of three long flashes, two short, then three long ones again. My father handed me his flashlight.

“You two stay here,” he said, already heading for the stairs. “I’m going out there. I’ll need you to shine the flashlight so I can find my way back in.”

“I’ll go with you,” Mama said to him.

“No,” he called back over his shoulder. “You make some coffee so there’s something hot for whoever’s out there when I bring them in.”

“I could run down to the Coast Guard station,” I said. I could think of nothing I’d rather do, actually.

“No, you cannot,” Mama said. “Not on a night dark as this, with that murderer out there.”

She followed Daddy down the stairs and I sat down on the gallery, shivering all over. It was cold up there and windy, but it was the turn of events that truly had me nervous. I knew that Sandy was on his patrol, and I wondered if he was able to see the SOS signal from where he was. It might have been a little far north for him.

I peered over the floor of the gallery and could barely make out my father dragging his boat to the water. One thing I
could
see, though, was how rough the waves were. Without the moon, the foam looked gray and it flew up in the air as the waves batted against one another. I felt terrified that Daddy was going out in that.

Even though the water was roaring, I could hear the motor of Daddy’s boat chugging through the ocean, and I felt relieved when I knew he was past the breakwater. He’d turned the lights
on at the bow and stern, which is strictly against the rules, but I guess he figured he had to let the SOS boat know he was coming. Soon, I heard his motor cut out as he reached the other light. All I could see was two lights bobbing then, moving this way and that, but I had no idea what Daddy and the people in the stranded vessel were doing. Then I heard Daddy’s boat start running again, and watched as the two flashlights moved toward shore. First I thought the other boat was just following Daddy’s, but then I realized Daddy was towing it.

I pointed the flashlight in their direction to guide my father in. The two lights bobbed like crazy as they passed through the breakwater, sometimes moving completely out of my view, scaring me to pieces, but after a moment I could see them being carried in on the waves. When I knew they were safe on shore, I ran down the stairs.

There were two men in the boat, which was a dinghy, actually. A little thing without a motor, so no wonder they’d been stranded. “Let’s get these men into the house,” Daddy hollered to me as I neared them.

They were boys, actually. Probably a few years older than me, and they were so shaky and tired they could hardly get themselves out of the dinghy. I let one of them lean on me as he found his land legs.

“Thanks, lass,” he said to me in the most beautiful accent.

“They’re Brits,” my father said to me. “Come inside, boys. The wife will have some coffee to warm you up.”

The boys reminded me of the night I first met Sandy and snuck him into the house. They were shivering all over and their faces were white with fear and cold. But they didn’t sound a bit like Sandy. I loved listening to them. One of them had almost white hair and was a little odd-looking. His eyebrows and eyelashes were white, too, and his eyes were very strange, sort of a pink color. I tried not to stare, but it was hard. His name was Miles. The other, Winston, was very handsome. He looked a little like Teddy Pearson at the Coast Guard station, only with a British accent. Mama gave them some chicken and collard greens and corn-bread dumplings left over from dinner, and we pushed their chairs close to the fire while they told us what happened.

They said they were on a British trawler called the
Mirage
when it was torpedoed by the Germans. Winston got tears in his eyes when he talked about it, and Miles’s lower lip shivered, but he was very quiet and barely spoke at all. I felt sorry for both of them. I could just imagine what it was like to watch your friends dying right before your eyes. There had been three of them in the dinghy, Winston said. The third man jumped overboard to try to save one of his shipmates and never surfaced from the sea. It was a terrible tale.

Mama said that since it was so late, the two men should sleep in the spare room if they didn’t mind sharing a double bed, and that in the morning I could run over to the Coast Guard station to tell Bud Hewitt what had happened and report the information on the
Mirage.
The men agreed to this.

Before we all went to bed, though, Mama smiled at me and said that it was now officially my birthday, since it was nearly one in the morning. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday” to me, or some version of it, at least. I figured they must sing a different birthday song in England, because Miles and Winston were pretty bad with the words. I felt embarrassed by the attention. After a while, they went up to bed and so did we. I was dying to tell everything to Sandy, but I didn’t dare sneak out because I knew Mama and Daddy would not be sleeping soundly with the strangers in the house. I hoped Sandy wasn’t worrying about me. This would be the first time I missed coming to see him when he’s on patrol.

I fell straight to sleep, though. Maybe I needed a good night’s sleep after all those nights spent on the cold beach. But I was not going to get one.

This is hard for me to write, to actually put down in words. I started having a dream that I was on the beach, and Sandy was lying next to me, nuzzling my neck and kissing my cheek, and then he slipped his hand under my nightgown and touched my breast, something he has never done in real life to me. I liked the way it felt and I put my arms around him. He was bony. His body had changed, and I remember thinking to myself, “This is a dream and this is the dream Sandy.” Then I suddenly woke up and realized it was
not
Sandy lying next to me at all, but Miles, the blond man from the dinghy! My room was so dark. How I
miss the light from the lighthouse! I started to scream, but Miles clamped his hand over my mouth, pinning my head to the bed. I tried pushing him away from me, but although he was skinny he was strong, and he held something against my throat. It was cool and smooth, and I knew it was a knife. I have never been so scared in my entire life. Once he’d let me know about the knife, he set it on the bed next to me, then used that hand to reach under my nightgown again, this time stopping between my legs. It was disgusting. I started to cry, out of fear, I guess, but also because I wanted Sandy to touch me there, not this terrible bony white man. I squirmed, and thought about trying to reach the knife, but I didn’t dare because I was afraid he would grab it from me and kill me with it. He was lying on my left arm. He took his hand from between my legs then, and I heard the zipper on his pants. The thought of what he was planning to do made me feel so sick and scared. Suddenly, I had the strangest idea, almost like an instinct. His hand was still clamped over my mouth, so I quickly opened my mouth wide. One of his fingers slipped inside my mouth and I bit it as hard as I could. He howled, yelling at me, using words I’d never heard before. They were rough-sounding and raspy in his throat, and I knew he was no Brit. He was a German! He’d pulled his hand from my mouth and smacked me across the face, but I was already screaming. I’ve never made such a racket. I screamed at the top of my lungs, crying out for Daddy. Miles grabbed for his knife, but I managed to get one of my legs coiled up and kicked him with all my might and he fell right off the bed. I grabbed his knife then, fumbling on the floor for it because it was so dark, and then Daddy was in the room. I started sobbing when I saw him because I knew I was safe then.

“He’s a German, Daddy!” I yelled quickly, reaching for the light on my night table, not caring about the blackout rules. I flicked the light on and saw my father standing in the doorway, his rifle at his side. Miles or whatever his name was pushed past him. He looked real frail, but he was strong and just bashed right through my poor father and turned left to take off down the hall. I watched Daddy raise the rifle to his shoulder, aiming down the hallway where I couldn’t see, and I heard the pow of the gun and then the thud of the German dropping to the floor.

I couldn’t breathe or speak. I just sat there in my bed, my mouth hanging about down to the mattress with shock. My father looked down the hallway a minute, then turned to me.

“Are you all right, Bess?” he asked me.

I managed to spit out that I was all right, and then Daddy turned and ran the other way, toward the guest room, and I knew he was going for the other man. He was going to kill them both.

Mama ran into my room and sat down on my bed and held me, and I cried in her arms like when I was a little girl with a skinned knee. She held me so tight, and I knew that no matter how many harsh words there are between us, no matter how often we disagree on things, nothing can kill the love we have for each other.

“Be careful, Caleb!” she called after my father, but she didn’t let go of me. “My baby,” she kept saying, rocking me, and I loved being rocked that way. Sometimes I think of myself as a woman, but right then, I was just a little girl. After a while, she asked me if he’d hurt me. She couldn’t say the word
rape,
and I didn’t want to hear her say it either. I told her I was all right, just scared. I couldn’t tell her about the way he’d touched me. The thought of it still made me want to throw up. I wanted to heat up some water for a bath. But then I remembered the dead man in the hallway.

Mama and I sat there for what seemed a long time, listening for the crack of the rifle again, but we didn’t hear it. Neither of us wanted to leave my room and face that dead German. We just sat still together, holding on to each other, waiting for whatever would come next.

After a long time, we heard my father’s footsteps on the stairs. They were heavy and tired-sounding. He came into my room and sat down on the bed. He rubbed my head a little and asked me again if I was all right. Then he told us he’d lost the other man. He’d run off into the woods.

Daddy went over to the Coast Guard station and called the sheriff, since they have a special phone there. The sheriff came over and talked to me for a very short time because he wanted to get some men together to go out and look for the second man, Winston, although by this time we were pretty sure that wasn’t his name. I was glad he didn’t talk to me long, since I didn’t want to have to give him details of what Miles had done to me, and I
sure didn’t want everybody in the Banks to know. I was embarrassed enough as it was.

We were all downstairs then, but all I could think about was the body up in our hallway. I hadn’t looked toward it as I left my room for the stairs. The sheriff went to take a look at it. Daddy had shot the man in the back. That was not a good thing to do, and I was worried he might get in trouble, but the sheriff came back down, saying one of his men would be in later to take the body away and clean up the mess.

The sheriff got in touch with Mr. Hewitt and they did some checking into the ships that would have been sailing that night and there was no British trawler called the
Mirage.
The two men were probably saboteurs from one of the U-boats, the sheriff said, bluffing about their ship being sunk in order to get ashore. Daddy felt bad that he had fallen for their trick, but Mama said anyone would have, not to be so hard on himself.

Mama made me hot chocolate and I felt comforted by both my parents, like when I was sick and they took care of me. I finally got my bath and then we sat in the living room around the fireplace, Daddy only leaving my side to fetch more wood for the fire. It must have been just an hour later when the sheriff and one of the deputies came back in our house. They’d found the other man, they said. He hadn’t gotten far from our house when something attacked him—probably a wild boar, from the look of his injuries. He had lost a lot of blood and was unconscious, and he’d been taken to the hospital in Norfolk.