The saltbox was a hive. Oily-cloaked men ghosted among Ben’s welded menagerie in the yard while working on five very small boats.
Tom Fox pulled an old punt, or sneakboat, out of the gut where he had submerged it to let the dried-out shrunken strakes soak and swell tight. Two other sneakboats lay near the pier.
No man would fire a big headache gun like Barking Betty from his shoulder. Not unless his life insurance was paid up. In the normal course of a fowling sortie, the gun would be laid along the sneakboat’s keel, its muzzle hanging over the front like an iron bowsprit, and braced against a thwart with a cushion stuffed with pine needles. The gun was coigned with wooden wedges for elevation. The sole hunter aboard used two small paddles, like a waterborne ping-pong champ, to maneuver the boat and traverse the gun left and right. In anything more than light airs, such a small, low craft would swamp. With hunter, dog, and heavy gun, its sides rose only inches above the water.
Ben stopped on the way into the house. “Tom, a day like today? Somebody’s going to drown in that thing.”
Fox cast an eye at the weather. Still horrendous. “Should be just fine come the time we want her. You’ll see. And all them little islands around about are as good as a breakwater. They’ll keep the waves plenty low enough for our doings, swagger die.”
Ben said no more. He had come dangerously close to telling Tom Fox his business. As it stood, Ben felt lucky to have gotten off the water alive in a boat as large as Miss Dotsy.
Then he saw Wade Joyce dash a soup pot full of boiling water into two other relics from Smith Island’s past. Hunter’s sinkboxes. Scalding water tightened the seams in old wood more quickly than simple soaking. The sinkbox resembled a coffin with hinged wooden panels extending outward from the gunwales. Like the flaps of a cardboard box, but bigger. The panels lay undulating on the water’s surface like a flexible deck to quell small waves. It was like a dry foxhole in the water where a man could lie down below the surface out of sight. Remington by his side, he would wait for his ducks to toll in range. Then the gunner could pop up out of nowhere and open fire.
Once again, Ben questioned the wisdom of using such a boat. A sinkbox showed even less freeboard than Tom Fox’s punts. These boats were built for tidal pools and marsh ponds, not for today’s wild Chesapeake. Ben nodded at Wade Joyce, but kept his mouth shut. He went toward the house with Ellis.
The living room was converted into an armory with Lorton Dyze bossing. He told Ben, “We quick paid a call over to the Smith Island International Maritime Museum. Picked up some odds and ends.”
Ben said, “So I see.” Before his last trip to the lighthouse, Ben suggested the men collect their pump guns. In addition to the three sneakboats and the two sinkboxes getting a quick and dirty refit outside, there was now a second big market gun measuring the tight space in the parlor. There was also a battery gun undergoing inspection.
In addition to concealment, the museum, with its grandiose name and its 501(c)3 tax exempt status was the Islanders’ work-around for the confiscation of their old fowling pieces. Though technically decommissioned, the guns could be restored by skilled hands to working status in times of want, or menace.
As for the hunting boats, the islanders had argued long and hard with authorities that they were harmless enough on dry land without a big gun aboard. Their owners pleaded, saying they could not let antique craft once belonging to their grandparents fall to pieces in a police impound yard. This was disrespectful of venerated ancestors, and of their heritage. Nor could they bring themselves to tow the fragile vessels up some godforsaken gut and abandon them to die. Not when a museum would preserve them for posterity. They’d even tossed in expressions like lifeways, and folkways to give the proposal a real anthropological sound when making their case to the state. It had worked. An old picking house was transformed into a tiny museum. The suggested contribution for admission was fifty cents.
It helped that it was off-season and the museum was closed ’til spring. It really helped that Dyze’s niece was the museum’s docent.
The second market gun was built along the same lines as Barking Betty. Huge. It was named Vesuvius for its volcanic eruptions of hot metal and death. The piece was old, and might kill a gunner if the breech ever failed when he touched it off. In harder times this gun and others like it were loaded with old nails, screws, nuts, bolts, and washers instead of proper shot. A popular island legend had it that one Baltimore restaurateur closed his kitchen and opened a hardware store to sell off what his pickers took out of just one barrel of ducks Vesuvius knocked down.
Sam Nuttle was oiling the gun’s big lock. On the coffee table lay a tompion he had carved from a Styrofoam trotline float. When greased, the plug would keep rain out of the barrel and ensure the powder stayed dry. Next to the tompion was a white plastic puck containing CCI No. Eleven Percussion Caps. The end table by the couch was loaded down by six clear plastic bags of Hornady double-ought buckshot. There would be no bird shot in the loads tonight. Double-ought was the man-killer.
To a waterman’s eye, a genuine battery gun like Chanticleer was a thing of beauty. It had eight muzzle-loaded barrels fixed in a wood frame that fanned them out in a small arc of a circle, like the tines of a leaf rake. Instead of discharging one large linear gout of shot like a market gun, Chanticleer’s splayed barrels spread the shot pellets laterally across a broader area. It followed the natural traverse of the flock’s attempt to escape on the wing. A sneakboat armed with a battery gun could throw its own version of a broadside like a one-man pirate sloop. Looking like an old god tuning a deadly pan-pipe, Sonny Wright meticulously cleaned Chanticleer’s barrels.
Dyze pulled Ben and Ellis aside. “I called up Bob Crockett over to Tangier. Explained the situation.”
Crockett was Dyze’s pal and opposite number on Tangier Island’s council. He was a good friend to Smith Island in times of trouble.
Dyze went on, “We figure a whirlybird would be grounded by this flaw. Not so a big aeroplane if Chalk has the sand to whistle one up for help. Bob Crockett and his boys, they’ll see to that runway before too long.” Dyze asked Ben, “That sit okay with you?”
This last sentence took Ben aback. Dyze was asking Ben’s approval. Was Dyze passing some kind of torch to Ben? More likely he was manipulating the only two men who knew where the gold lay. Ben did not care, and was not sure he wanted any kind of leadership in this rag-tag band. He was no Captain Morgan, and this was Smith Island, not Port Royal. All he cared about was that they listened to him for the next few hours, and listened close.
Ben said, “Okay Lorton. Good idea. Did you work out a boat?”
Dyze smiled. “We got Sonny’s Busbee.”
Ben was not thrilled. The Busbee was a seventy-year-old skipjack sailboat. Fifty feet long. Sloop rigged; the mast raked wickedly back. Its only engine ran the oyster dredge’s windlass amidships. To move legally while dredging, it either had to be sailed, or it was shoved by a small motorboat stowed on davits when it was not in use, at the skipjack’s stern. All depended on whether it was a sailing day, or a power day, as designated by landlubber state congressmen in Annapolis. Though truly majestic under sail, the Busbee was not what Ben was looking for at all. Not tonight.
Ben had to ask, “Wade Joyce wouldn’t put in his deadrise? She’s quick.”
Dyze huffed, like he was secretly nostalgic for ye olde close-hauled action under full sail. “Don’t need no go-fast boat for this.”
“Uh, yeah we do. Right now. We need to get to Deep Banks quick as we can. If we don’t deal with that bomb, we lose everything.”
At this, Dyze relented. Disappointed, he reached for his rain gear. “Ellis and I’ll talk to Wade.” Then Dyze gave Ben a pitying look. “Ye best step upstairs. LuAnna’s took a turn.”
Fear clawed Ben’s gut. Dyze did not need to tack on the bless her heart that always followed mention of the feeble-minded or desperately sick. Ben took the steep stairs three at a time. His ribs seared like a brand.
LuAnna lay on his bed more in a state of utter collapse than rest. Mary Joyce, Julie Nuttle, and Kimba Mosby applied cool rags to her head. Ben knelt, caressed her brow. She was burning up. Hypothermia one minute, raging fever the next. Her teeth chattered. She was enduring a medieval trial by ordeal, and she was innocent.
Mary Joyce said, “She had that gash in her hip. I cleaned it best I could. Sewed them good with fresh cleaned Dyneema fishing line. You’d figure in November that the bugs in the water wouldn’t be so bad, but she got herself something nasty. Might be pneumonia, too.” Bless her heart.
Ben noticed the bedside table was covered in white capped amber pill bottles. Looking closer he saw that each bottle had a different patient’s name on the label. The women had collected all the unfinished antibiotic prescriptions from neighbors around the island for LuAnna.
Kimba Mosby said, “Don’t worry, Ben. We’re dosing her good. This’ll break quick.”
Ben stroked LuAnna’s damp hair back from her face. “She needs a hospital.”
Julie Nuttle shook her head. “She needs quiet. A fast ride over the sound in this chop might be too much for her. We’re giving her everything she needs here, Ben. Count on that. And she’s tough.”
For a moment, Ben considered calling in the Medevac he had been so ready to summon for Charlene Harris. He knew Charlene was right. This business was his to finish. No authorities. As Lorton Dyze said, this weather would keep a helicopter grounded anyway.
Ben felt disingenuous even as he vented his frustration at Julie. “You don’t need to tell me she’s tough. Truth is, you don’t want anybody from off-island interfering in this business.”
The three nurses would not meet Ben’s eyes.
He said, “LuAnna? Can you hear me?”
LuAnna opened her eyes. “Of course ya big bully. I’m sick, not deaf. Quit hassling the girls. I’m fine. Go do what you need to do.”
Ben told the women, “She’s pregnant. She needs a hospital.”
Kimba Mosby, the Reverend’s wife, took Ben by the elbow. Gently led him out into the small landing between the bedrooms.
She patted Ben’s arm. “LuAnna’s been through so much today. She’ll be fine. She’s young. So are you. Thing is, Ben, she’s not pregnant now. Not n’mare. She didn’t want us to tell you. Wanted to break it to you herself later. Right now she feels terrible. Like she let you down. Right now she needs to know you still love her.”
Ben felt a small explosion in his chest. The thump of an incendiary bomb burning white-hot inside him like phosphorus. He was not angry at LuAnna. He wept inside for her. Ben’s rage was for Maynard Chalk and company. They were slaughtering innocents. Not only had they marauded too close to home, they had now penetrated his heart. Lining these men up against a wall, gunning them down into an open cesspit was too good for them. Cleaving to his original plan for handling this crisis would require a Zen master’s detachment and a fencer’s finesse. Ben knew this fury had no place here today. It would ruin everything. Still it boiled inside him.
He sat softly on the bed next to LuAnna, and took her hand. Kissed her brow. Julie and Mary stepped out onto the landing with Kimba.
He said “It’s okay, honey.”
LuAnna opened her eyes again. Shivered. She looked so small. “Did the girls feed you that bull about us being young?”
Ben nodded. “It’s true. There’ll be plenty time again.”
“Ben, I was already loving this one. Whoever she was.” Tears glistened in with the fever’s sheen on her face. “Couldn’t help it, coming from you like she did.”
“You think she was a she?”
“Oh hell yes. I prayed so, anyway. Lord knows I’d need back-up in the house with you on a rampage.” She caught her breath. “You still like me?”
“Always will. Any kid of ours is going to have to understand that, and get used to it. You’re my A-number-one Sally crab.”
“You’ll accept no substitutes?”
“How could I when there aren’t any? Not even close.” He kissed her cheek. “You better rest up. Seeing you all sweaty and helpless is making me hot.”
LuAnna laughed softly. Weak as her voice sounded, it rang inside Ben like the most beautiful music.
She squeezed his hand, whispered. “Please go kill them. For us. For her.”
Ben smiled down at her. “I love you, too.” If she lived through this, they’d weather anything together.