Teetoncey and Ben O'Neal (2 page)

Mama fell silent a moment but had that planning look on her face, chewing her lower lip. "I jus' recollected somethin'. A week ago I ordered two gingham dresses from Chicago for Teetoncey but have let that letter sit. After you tell Filene in the mornin', you make the mail boat."

It would take six weeks to two months for that order to be filled, I well knew. "She's going to be around that long?"

Mama didn't answer directly. "Least we'll send her back to London lookin respectable."

The few clothes she was wearing when she washed ashore in early November had been pretty much mommicked, torn up, in the surf and I had never found her other shoe. She was decked out in borrowed clothes and borrowed shoes, plus a dress Mama had made for her.

I gazed at the Widow O'Neal, as she was often known on the Banks, but did not speak my mind—Mama, why don't you plain admit you plan to keep that castaway girl awhile?

Instead and much safer, I said, "I'll go on to bed." That way, I might possibly get to sleep before she slipped in beside me and started to snore, which she could do with great power.

I did look in on the girl. She was having her sweet dreams. Her mouth was slightly open and her breathing was deep. That Purple medicine was not to be denied. Boo Dog had returned to the oval rug and lifted his big yellow head to stare at me as if I were an intruder. That fickle dog had taken it on himself to guard her, losing some noticeable respect for me.

I went on to bed but did not drop off right away. Mama stayed up for almost another hour, far past her eight o'clock bedtime unless it was a revival night in Hatteras village or up in Manteo. I'm sure she was thinking, too. Perhaps the good Lord had decided to compensate her for the sea's killing of a good and righteous but unaffectionate husband, John O'Neal, and my second brother, Guthrie O'Neal. I am equally sure she had thought about it during the many previous days when the girl was ill of mind. Now that it was positively known that Teetoncey had no living soul to tend her, a purpose in the surf casting her up was clear. The good Lord had ordained it.

I heard Mama move out of the kitchen and into that small room where I'd lived since the crib. She was probably looking down on the Teetoncey girl again, probably fussing with the comforter for a moment; lowering the wick in the lamp so it couldn't possibly smoke.

I heard her whisper something to dumb old Boo Dog. Maybe, "Rout me if she wakes."

That woman certainly deserved a girl inas-much as I hadn't turned out to be one. I had long lived with the painful fact that she'd hoped I'd be a female, then I wouldn't go to sea nor be a surfman and die in a gale. She'd even dressed me as a girl when I was five years old. I pretended I was fast asleep when she came in, and concentrated deeply on listening to the ocean roar.

A few miles away, to south and east, rows of high waves, cresting white in the blackness, rolled over Diamond Shoals, which lay off Cape Hatteras, and then raced toward the beach, finally passing under the warm beam of Hatteras Lighthouse. On north from Hatteras Point, they marched endlessly, going past Wimble Shoals and lesser bars to spend tons of water against our fragile but defiant Outer Banks.

Though the sand strips appeared to be slumbering for the night, entirely deserted, I knew there was movement on foot and mule and sand pony. Surfmen of the lifesaving stations were plodding along in the cold dampness above the grasping white water, now and then looking out to sea. During and after a gale of wind were the perilous times when the ships loomed suddenly, riding helplessly in spindrift that whipped off the long crests of Atlantic Ocean rollers.

I hoped that no ship would wreck that night yet it was always an exciting time when they did.

W
HEN CALM DAYLIGHT
widened over the beach and sand ridges and flats, the sound-side marshes, the scattered silvered houses and red-roofed surfmen stations, sharpening the whalebone fences at some of the villages, word began to carry. Soon, it would go from Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills on over to Roanoke Island, and then down to Buxton Woods and Hatteras. I carried it willingly.

Teetoncey could talk and knew who she was.

Long before she was awake, recuperating from the events of the rough night, I rode Fid, our brown and white tackie, just an old, ugly big-hoofed sand pony, up to Heron Head Lifesaving Station and skidded off in back, by the cistern, near the door.

I opened it without formality and yelled in at Keeper Midgett, startling him.

"She's not crazy. Her names Wendy Lynn Appleton, and she's from London."

Shoving back from the table and his swamped plate of pancakes and molasses, Filene said approvingly, "Well, I declare..."

Surfinan Jabez Tillett, sitting opposite Filene, was caught with his mouth full and sputtered something no one could have detected.

Mark Jennette, another surfman, just in from patrol, said in astonishment, "Is that so?"

Lem O'Neal, third cousin of mine, and Malachi Gray were also eating.

They'd all thought the British girl was hopeless.

I took delight in repeating Mama's instructions. "Mama said don't call the inspector until you talk to her." I had changed it to make it a little more positive and saw Filene redden, as usual. There was always an undeclared war between Keeper Midgett and the Widow O'Neal, though they had admiration for each other. Yet I could never resist throwing on verbal coal oil.

I jumped back on Fid to depart the sturdy two-story government shingle that housed the surfmen and all their rescue equipment and lifesaving boats. The building sat on dunes above the high-water mark, with a lookout cupola wedged in the juniper shingle roof.

Filene must have untangled his massive body from the table because he filled the doorway in a jiffy. He yelled, "How did it happen?"

Rapping both feet into Fid's shaggy belly, so he'd go to a fast trot, I yelled back, "Mama'll tell you. I got to make the mail boat, Cap'n."

As I drew away, Fid stretching out to a gallop, I heard Filene bellowing, in a voice loud enough to flatten the sea, "Ben O'Neal, come back here." Family cousin or not, I had long been petrified of that block-faced keeper, and conversations of any length tied my tongue and ended in untruthful webs. It was far better to pit Mama against him.

Besides, there was no doubt that Filene would soon board his own pony and trot inland to our house, there to confront Mama with her latest maneuver concerning that girl, absolutely unauthorized by the federal Lifesaving Service, which was law on the Outer Banks. There was also no doubt that Filene would lumber to the recently installed crank phone to ring all the stations—Nag's Head, Bodie Island, Oregon Inlet, Pea Island, New Inlet, Chicamacomico, Big Kinnakeet, Little Kinnakeet, Cape Hatteras. Filene would jubilantly pass the word and hint that he had some part of it:
Teetoncey, the castaway girl, had her brains unaddled.

I understood his point of view more than Mama. Over a period of many shipwrecks, hundreds of them, nothing quite like it had ever happened on the Banks: The sole survivor of the
Malta Empress,
a snip of a girl of then indeterminate age, had been unable to utter a word, much to the chagrin of Filene Midgett, who prided himself on exacting accounts of wrecks. Regulations required precise survivors' reports and here was one who did not even mumble. Having logged seventy-one wrecks in his own time of heroic service, Filene could not remember such a patience-trying incident and often said so.

The outer sand trail, wide enough for a pony cart or mule wagon, running north and south just behind the dunes on the ocean side, was still wet from the night's nor'easter, stone gray except where wands of early sun touched here and there. There was another partial main track that followed close to the sounds—Currituck, Roanoke, Pamlico, etc.—on the west side of the Banks, connecting the villages. Then paths for foot or pony, crossing the Banks, extended to the sea between the two parallel trails, which sometimes blended.

There wasn't much on the beach itself, except the rotting-out hulks of wrecks every few miles, and plenty of driftwood which filtered off the Carolina mainland, washed out to sea through Oregon or Hatteras inlets, and then returned to the beach to soak up sun for a hundred years. Aside from the wrecks and hauling gill nets, stuck with sea trout or bluefish at sunset during spring, summer, and fall, the ocean sand didn't occupy us very much. Mainlanders sometimes sat on it or collected seashells, which was equally ridiculous. What can anyone do with a seashell?

I steered Fid, his nostrils steaming in the dawn cold, over a dune and dropped down to the beach just south of Heron Head Shoal, where the
Malta Empress
had broken up, and looked out at the white water churning over the bar. Mean water, always. Smooth as buttertop on a calm day, lapping innocently. Dangerous as a nest of cottonmouths when the blows come down from the north.

"We claimed her from you, all the way," I remember shouting defiantly toward the sandbar. I meant Teetoncey, of course. Might as well let the shoals know, too.

Then I cut sharp back inland and rode straight to Mr. Burrus's store at Chicamacomico village,
Chicky
village, a place of work for me several days a week, and jumped off on the flimsy porch, opening the door that had a brass bell from the wrecked schooner
Betty Coffyn
strapped to it.

Mr. Burrus looked around as I came jingling in. Thin sweater buttoned, overshoes and apron already on, felt hat perched low on his forehead, he was ready for the day and hopeful of doing more cash than credit business, an unusual circumstance. Our sand strips were poor, though not impoverished. There was plenty to eat. Gardens, cows, and pigs. Fish by the ton.

"Teetoncey talked," I had to blurt.

"I'll swan. You don't say. Well, I'll swan." Mr. Burrus, too, was truly surprised.

Mis' Burrus separated the burlap curtains that hid their living room from the front of the store. She was never too far from that curtain so as not to miss a juicy word. "She did talk, now?"

"Name's Wendy Lynn Appleton, and she's from London, like I told you I guessed long ago."

"That is a miracle," Mr. Burrus said soberly.

"She and her mama and papa boarded in the Barbadoes on their way to New York and London. That much we know. We hope she'll tell us more today..." My mouth got dry and I had to swallow. "Main thing, she knows who she is."

"Did it all by herself," Mr. Burrus wrongly concluded.

"Not at all," I was quick to say. "Mama sent me to the beach with her last night in the thick of that gale of wind. Hair of the dog that bites you! She come unloose at Heron Head, soon's she saw that wild water. Screaming and everything. I had a time with her. Whatever it was that got locked up in her mind because of the wreck got unlocked and she remembered it all, and got her speech back..."

I knew what Mis' Burrus would say next: "I do deceive the good Lord had a hand in this."

"Yessum," I answered respectfully, but I wondered where the good Lord had been hiding the night the
Empress
laid her splendid keel on the sand. That barkentine had been firewood in five minutes. Thirteen dead that the Lord didn't have to fret about again. I added pointedly, "But
He
also robbed her of every living soul she had. That girl is a convicted orphan now."

Mis' Burrus frowned at my notion that
He
had overstepped
His
bounds but Mr. Burrus only clucked sadly, rotating his round cheeks at Teetoncey's plight. He'd grown to like the girl, even when she couldn't talk.

A sallow man from the Post Office department, down from Elizabeth City, was in the store after having spent the night on a cot midst the cheese and dried apple smells. He asked what everyone was so excited about.

"Tell him, Ben," said Mr. Burrus.

I took a breath and retold it briefly, not that I minded. How the
Empress
had wrecked, and the sea had given up the girl, sprawling her icy on the beach to be found by Boo Dog and myself. How I'd carried her home and Mama nursed her back to life only to have Doc Meekins, with his noble book learning and in his whiskey breath, say she had a type of "catatonia," a shock of some kind. Now, she was cured.

Mis' Burrus, every bit as religious as my mama, added, like an amen, "Glory be!"

"You and your mama did a good turn," said die eye-shaded man from the P.O. department, and kept on counting to make sure Mr. Burrus hadn't stolen any stamp money. There were no thieves on the Outer Banks and no door locks, but the government was always suspicious. To quote Jabez Tillett, "We are a damn sight more honest than any politician."

I bought a stamp in full view, licked it, pounded it on the Chicago letter, and then dropped it into the wire basket which was the total Post Office department at Chicky—wire basket so Mis' Burrus could easier snoop the addresses. The mail boat was still at the dock waiting for this beady-eyed man to finish his quarterly tabulations. There was no more business to transact in Chicky, and nothing more to say, so I departed.

Fid trotted south again along what was the narrowest point of the Banks, the stretch between Chicky and Clarks. There were a few houses in the hammocks south of Chicky; not enough to warrant them village status. The sand strips broaden out nearing Buxton Woods and Cape Hatteras, the widest part of the Banks.

The shallow Pamlico was still choppy from the dregs of the gale, mud-spoiled, and I couldn't see any boats out as yet. Not a sharpie, bugeye, or skiff anywhere. In the winter, especially in rough chop, no one was too anxious to check the fish nets, strung between poles, until the sun was nine o'clock high. Anything caught by the gills was safe until frost was off the boat seats. But the Pamlico could be treacherous any time of the year as my late brother Guthrie had discovered on a squally spring afternoon at the age of thirteen, manning a shad boat for Old Man Spencer.

Arriving home, I found Teetoncey was still asleep and I hadn't been there for more than two minutes when I looked out and saw Filene dismounting from his tackie that had no name beyond "hee" or "haw." A notebook was tucked beneath the keeper's arm and a stub of pencil was up behind his red right ear.