From Lands Over

PROLOGUE

I don’t really know why your yuppie readers think an old man’s stories are so important that you won’t just let him die on this island, in the peacefulness here. I left it alone all these years. The story of the way it was. The way I was. Of why it came to be. Kept it to myself. And then you came. Talked to Sharon. Convinced her. I was willing, hopeful I think of just passing over, willing to let it all be. Sharon wants it and that’s enough for me, always has been. So if you want an interview, if you want it told, and you have the time to do the listening, and God gives me the time to do the telling-in the words of the ‘first Frank’-I’ll do ‘er.

You ask me first about the shooting. I don’t remember much. I came out of the house and I felt this sucking in on my left shoulder, then I was falling. There was a flash of pain, just a flash, and then I was nothing.

The bullet took me high on the left shoulder, midway between the shoulder and the neck. Breaking my shoulder and my collar bone, exiting out the back along with a pound or so of me. It was a mid-distance shot. The police found the place where the shot was taken, from a patch of woods three hundred yards away. There were footprints, and threads and things. The police interviewed me two days after I awoke.

We are checking out every lead, Justice Oden, the police captain said, our prime suspect though is Bill Bob Jervis. He had the motive, and he can shoot.

Forget him, he didn’t shoot me. I don’t know who did, but it wasn’t Bill Bob.

Why do you say that? the captain said.

The guy that shot me missed his target.

Justice Oden, you got shot, you were under, out for two weeks. You’ll never have full use of your left arm again. You were hurt bad.

I know all that. But the shooter missed his target. You don’t aim for the top of the left shoulder. Whoever he was, targeted either a front mid-chest shot or a head shot. Either way he was off by twelve to eighteen inches. He missed the shot.

It was still a good shot, and Jervis is the best, they tell me, that’s ever been.

That’s why it wasn’t him. He wouldn’t have missed the shot. There’s another reason too, we’re both ‘down homers’, ‘Shoremen’; his grandad and mine rode out the great storm of ‘09 together. No, he didn’t shoot me.

They found the shooter two months later. He was an ex convict, Robert Peter Masters, who I sentenced to twenty-five years in prison when I was on the trial court in Maryland. I sentenced him after a jury convicted him of an aggravated assault on his wife.

Masters had been a deck hand on a scalloper out of Ocean City. They had been at sea for seven days and were working the bottoms up off Long Island, when they’d stopped in Montauk to sell their catch, to reprovision, and to let off steam. He’d gotten drunk early, around nine. It was then that a crew member teased him; told him that his estranged wife was screwing one of his friends, a charter boat captain, when Robert was at sea. Doing all kinds of things with him. It wasn’t true, but Robert believed it, wanted to believe it, I guess.

Robert left the bar then, hot wired the first car he came to, and left for Ocean City. It was morning, around six, when he broke through her front door. He was in the bedroom before she had her feet on the floor, and she never got them there. He began to beat her on the bed as she screamed again and again. The screams awakened the neighbors and they called the police. It took five minutes for them to arrive. Had it taken six he would have killed her. He had dragged her into the kitchen and was just finishing scalping her when the police wrestled his scalloping knife from him.

He had broken two of her ribs on one side, one on the other. She had a ruptured spleen, a broken jaw and several missing teeth. In another minute he would have cut her throat. He was charged with attempted murder and several other charges, including the aggravated assault charges. The jury, for whatever stupid reason, only found him guilty of assault. I made up for it. Maxed him out at twenty-five years in the slammer for wife beating. Trying to give the wife a period of peace from him, a time to hide so he couldn’t find her.

He threatened me that day, the day I sentenced him, but I hadn’t paid much mind. I hadn’t expected him to be happy. Normally the underclass isn’t overjoyed when a heavy hitter sentences them. It’s part of the heat, the threats a judge gets. You don’t worry, just figure, if they get you, you’re got. And he had gotten me.

He had spent years thinking about two things. Killing his wife, and killing me. He bragged even, to his cell mate, his squeeze, about how he would do it. Find where I lived, get a place to hide, shrubs, woods, a ditch even. Get a deer rifle with a scope on it, and drill me between the eyes when I walked out the door in the morning.

When he was released on parole, he went to a gun show in Harrisburg and purchased an assault rifle with a scope. They asked no questions of him, he volunteered no answers to the questions they should have asked. He then went to a commercial gun range and zeroed in the rifle. It was the next morning that he was waiting in the woods on the rise across from the house when the car arrived to pick me up for the trip to the Court. He had shot me on my second step from the door, aiming right between my eyes. He had been five inches wide and seven inches low. And I lived because he wasn’t Bill Bob Jervis.

While my condition was still considered critical, while it was still uncertain whether I would live, he killed his former wife. Three days after he shot me.

She hadn’t hidden, his former wife. Brave, perhaps stupid, maybe economics gave her no choice.

She had stayed in the same area, Ocean City, while he had been in prison, and his friends kept him informed of where she lived. He shot her too, but at close range. Inside her house. He probably wanted her to see it coming, to know she was going to die.

But he had given his prison squeeze a gift before he left. A bargaining chip. When his former cell mate heard that I had been shot, and then Robert’s former wife, he realized that the talk had not been idle, Robert meant it, was doing it. He had a guard take him to the Warden. And he told of the conversation.

The FBI killed Robert three months later at the docks in Morehead City as he got off a flounder dragger. When they yelled at him to freeze, he grabbed a gun and they had to shoot him. So they said. Eight times they shot him.

They found it, the cancer, while I was still in the hospital recuperating from the shooting. I listened to the prognosis and knew then that I couldn’t give the Court enough time to meet my standards, even for a little while. It was everything, really, the shooting, the cancer. That meant it was time; there always is a time. A time for beginnings; a time for endings. For me it had begun before I was born. In a great storm in my grandfather’s time.

A long time ago on a ‘land over’.

1

ASSATEAGUE-A ‘LAND OVER.’

There were three of us. We had two different mothers; but we made no distinction. We were the Odens; the two boys, Fred and Frank, and then the baby Mary brought, that we called ‘Little Bit’, at first. I was named after our grandfather. The ‘first Frank’. I never knew why they skipped to me as a namesake. But maybe even then they knew what would happen. What would eventually bring me to this other ‘land over’ on the Deep.

Our father was an Oden, Walter, the ‘first’ Frank’s son, so we all started out rough and some of us stayed rough. We knew what that meant and so did everyone else above in that area of Assateague known as Ocean City, where two of us were born and where we all grew up. To understand the story of our lives after the War you have to understand our father, Walter, and our grandfather, Frank, the times, the places of our beginnings and our early lives, and the journeys from there to here. Our journeys began with Walter and his began in the then forgotten part of that area of Maryland east of the great inland bay, known as the Eastern Shore. A region that has since become renown for its quaintness. Walter began while the Eastern Shore was blessed with obscurity, before those who were attracted to its uniqueness, conformed it, leaving only memories of the way it was.

Before the bridges, before even the ferries ran, the Eastern Shore was yesterday. A region with a different pace. A place with its own meaning, a different spirit; a life that divested itself from that which it did not understand and more importantly did not want to understand. It was black duck baiting and market hunting, it was bootlegging, smuggling, a place of hunting camps, fishing camps, timbering, farming, trapping. A place where men lived. But also a place of single fried oysters, of chicken and dumlins’, and the ol’ fat ‘ens that made them possible. It was greens, par boiled muskrats, and black-eyed peas. It was blackbird and sandpiper pie.

On the ocean side, there was a spit of land, an island, isolated beyond even the remoteness of the Eastern Shore. Assateague. Our first ‘land over’. A narrow, long strip, barren, harsh, carrying the burdens of the high dunes built again and again over centuries by blowing sand, and intermittently leveled by storms and storm tides. Dunes that were the mainland’s shield against the sea. Dunes that by delaying their own destruction for even one or two storm tides until ‘wash over’, delayed the onset of destruction on the mainland behind. The ‘land over’ was where the winds shrieked, where the sea thundered, where the vagaries of currents and waves and wind created the man killers-the offshore shoals, and where, in the midst of all of them,

the sea concealed its riches. Riches that brought men to satisfy man’s appetite, and in the process themselves satisfied the appetites of the sea.

It was on that spit that Walter first heard that which he would hear for all of his life-a thundering to match his heart-the howling and concussions-the outward manifestations of the language of an angry sea.

He was born to Mary, and to the ‘first’ Frank, for whom I would be named. But it was Mary that bound the family together at Ocean City. In that place it was what the women did in the days of Walter’s birth. Mary was the one with poetry in her soul; the chronicler. Self-educated. A grammarian, even. Well spoken and well read. Strong. A woman who, through her own will, had shed the accent of the islands. A teller of stories: of ‘the storm’, of ‘the judge’,the story of ‘the fish’, of the Florida migrations, and of others as well. Mary would live to be ninety-six and it was mostly from her that we, her grand children, would come to know of the way it was before the great war. We would live the way ourselves after the war, and during the ‘bad war’, Vietnam, that came after, and what came after it. We would see honor and character leave. But we learned of the times of our grandfather, the time of honor,from Mary. From her I learned the story of the times before us; the beginning of the story I shall tell.

Frank, our grandfather, as his father before him, and his as well, followed the sea. Walter, our father, would himself, in the not far future, also go to sea. There was but that one world for men born in those days on the ‘land over’, although on this day, as on the one after, the days of Walter’s birth, the sea was not in the mood to be followed. On the day of his birth the sea was enforcing the inevitable payment it imposed on those who dared to challenge. A payment that, although sometimes delayed, was always exacted. Walter was born in the great storm of ‘09-a hurricane of remembrance. A ‘blow’ by which to measure the storms to come.

This great storm formed, as do many such furies, off the slave coast of Africa, and followed the slave trade routes to the West Indies, before turning north by northwest. It first became of notice when it passed over the islands of the West Indies. There it announced the magnitude of the payment it would extract by the hundreds of the dead it would leave to float amongst the islands of the eastern Carribean, there to be sustenance for creatures, large and small. Unsatiated, the storm turned towards the coast of the mainland to the north.

In those days, before the naming of such storms, before they were hunted for or even formally forecast, they none-the-less announced their presence to those that knew their language. It wasn’t only the drop in barometric pressure as the storm approached. It was more than that to those who understood. It was the extra ordinary warmth of the inshore water that made them wary during this storm season. It was the feeling of heaviness in them as the offshore swells grew, the distance between swells, the out of place sheen, the mirror slickness in an un-calm season. It was the sea birds flying north during their southering period, the early offshore movement of inshore fish. It was the feeling that things were different, a strange unease that made the fishermen of that coast pull their pound nets and try to tuck the pound boats in behind the seaward dunes. And if time permitted, take them to the creeks and guts of the bays back behind the offshore bar that was the ‘land over’.

An uneasiness grew that made those who had a place to stay further inshore, move inland. For others, such as those who migrated from below the great cape for the fishing grounds of this coast, except for the sea to be temporarily denied them, this coast was all they had. It was their life, and, as they recognized, it was often their death as well.

When the swells changed, and the sea birds went crazy, and the surface turned to rolling mirrors rising and falling as they came head on, Frank’s crew, dressed as always in canvas-like outer wear, treated with oil for water proofing, called sou’westers, and hip boots attached to belts by straps to keep them up, followed the other pound fishing crews in launching their boats into the already rapidly rising surf. They had to get the nets and other gear in before the full energy of the storm hit the offshore shoals. The fishing companies that maintained the fishing camps and the fleets of pound boats had as their main concern the gear at sea. Boats, captains, and men were easier to replace.

Frank’s crew members were all from Ocracoke. There were two colored men (that’s what they were called in that time) who came up when Frank came. And four others, white men, who came up later. All of them came to improve their economic situations. On the boats and in the camps there was no black or white, at least not in those years. A man was expected to haul his lines and his oars, and his color made little difference, especially at sea. They fished together. Sometimes they died together.

Although Frank and his crew of six did not know it, the great storm was almost upon them as they prepared their boat during the haul offshore to the pounds, giant net traps attached to pilings on the offshore shoals in the migratory paths of the ground fish of that part of the coast. In this season, Frank, in recognition of his six years of service, had been given the pound on the shoal considered the best for fall fishing, Great Gull Bank.

But, the location that afforded the best fishing did so by reason of its greater distance offshore, a factor not favorable in the teeth of a storm. The center of the fury was already less than a day and two tides away, when Frank’s crew passed through the already heavy surf for the long haul to Great Gull. At first the storm’s center lay hidden deep inshore in the Hatteras bight, that westward indentation tucked south of the cape of

Hatteras. Its full force, intensifying in a large body of unusually warm water that attracted it to the bight in the first instance, was for a short time kept at bay from its northward course by the cape itself. But the price was heavy. The people of the cape were in the northeast quadrant, the worst quarter of the storm. They died by the dozens.

The cape would not long delay the storm’s inevitable debouch to the north. At the time Frank’s crew was feverishly hauling aboard the nets and the enclosed catch to be barreled, and preparing to begin their run for the beach, the storm passed over the cape itself into the open sea again, but not far. It felt the need to hug the coast feeling for the warmth it found inshore in the bight. And the warmth was there in this unusual season, helping the storm regain the strength it lost as it crossed the cape below.

Its great seas, no less killers in and of themselves, far preceded the winds of death; a deadly warning to the coast above the Virginia capes, Henry and Charles, of the devastation now tracking so as to bring the center of its body, its eye, ashore where Virginia and Maryland meet. The storm would finish its trans-ocean/trans-hemisphere journey from the slave coast, so as to plunge its north east shoulder into the ‘land over’. Into the middle of Assateague. It would crash and charge ashore, following the path of fishermen who would initially outrun its death winds, but who would not all avoid the deadliness of its forerunner seas.

The pound fishermen, Frank’s crew amongst them, caught at sea in this time of no inlets had no choice but to run, as always in the teeth of storms, for the beach, where the horses and carts waited to haul the boats and their catches ashore. Frank’s crew’s journey to the beach was, by far, the longest and their landfall the latest. As Frank’s boat neared the shore, its laboring motor drove it onward toward a beach, only intermittently seen as the giant swells passed under the keel and rose before the bow in an undulating series of shimmering curtains. The booming of the giant swells at the shore break drowned out the noise of the engine. The surf s thunder smothered even the thumping of the hearts of those who had no choice but to attempt to ride the thunder to the beach; no choice but to conquer almost unconquerable fear; to go into a place of death. They would have to land on a beach all but obscured by cottony spray. A spray thrust upward in reaction to the final unleashing of force as the swells rose upon entering the relative shallows, and grew higher and higher and steeper until their own weight, and the push of the 5,000 mile journey from the slave coast in the caldron of the sea, created a maelstrom as the waves made their final assault against the shore.

As the boat approached that area where no one wanted to, but all had to go, the scene aboard the boat belied the hectic pounding of the hearts within their own special vessels. Frank prepared the boat.

Break out the oars, he yelled. We’ll need to help ‘er get through this mess. Three a side. Sharp now! Watch for the broach and pull hard for’ard on the up side and drag on the down side.

Soon the bow rose up on the steep back of the last swell before the break, and then the giant sea dropped from beneath them and the boat went over the edge to immediately begin a broach. Frank yelled: She’s goin’! The bow was caught and she went, beam too, in the moving wall of the breaking sea. In a second, a second when Frank thought of Mary and the child she was carrying, the boat capsized, spilling the barrels of fish and the barrels of fish roe, the gaffs, nets, lines, oars and all the gear that accompany seafarers-and them as well-into the boiling surf.

There the storm would claim its first victims north of Hatteras. Six aboard would not reach dry sand alive. Only Frank would survive. Only he would survive the immediacy of the wreck; survive to reach the shanty where his son, Walter, would the next day be born in the storm whose impact would be forever etched into the characters of all coasters who would survive.

The horse tender on the beach saw the oarwork of the crew as they frantically, and vainly, sought to straighten the boat so she could run to the beach, and then the jumble and thrashing of the oars as they moved independently during the capsizing, almost with malevolent intent, seeking out in the bedlam of churning bottom sand and pounding, breaking seas, those who had been their masters but a short time before. And the horse tender watched in horror as only three fought free from the anchors of the boots and sou’westers, surviving the assault of the now broken boat, oars, barrels, and nets, surfacing in the ‘boil’. He watched, helplessly, as two heads were sucked seaward in the inexorable grip of a ‘rip’ returning a shore slough’s overflow of storm water seaward. The only consolation, if it could be counted as such, was that the constant roar of the sea masked the cries as the sea claimed the two forever.

One head remained in view, drifting down current below the ‘rip’. One had managed to shuck his oilskins and cut the boots loose with his knife before he could be kept under by their weight, and in the dim, swirling madness beneath the surface managed to grasp a barrel as it broke apart on the bottom, and the next wave thrust him further in, beyond the immediate reach of the ‘rip’ that claimed the two. But, as yet, salvation remained illusive. The strength of the north easterly current sweeping south parallel to the beach was such the fisherman’s ability to push any appreciable distance toward shore was minimal, even when for brief moments the bottom was underfoot. The strength of the current kept him from maintaining enough vertical position to enable his now bare feet to grip the bottom. It was running faster even than a man could run in the deep sand of the foreshore.

The horse tender, recovering from his shock-induced inaction, seeing the last man being swept southward, unhitched the boat cart, mounted the dray horse by the harness collar and caused it to gallop south through the sand after the survivor. When the survivor was abeam, the horse tender caused the large dray animal to charge into the surf. There they came on the almost exhausted man and, shielding him from part of the force of the surf, were able to place the harness within his reach, and with his will alone, all physical strength virtually gone, the last fisherman was able to tangle one arm in a loop of the harness and was in that fashion brought to shore.

Frank touched dry sand as Mary’s water broke.

2

THE SHANTY

The shanty had been built from Frank’s meager savings from six seasons of captaining for the company and from the market hunting of the canvasbacks and black ducks down from Canada in the winters, added to by sums received for the muskrat furs, and the occasional otter or fox pelt, accumulated from the trapping of the burrows and ‘runs’ of the ‘rats’ in the salt marshes on the bay side, and in money received from the itinerant fur buyers whose buying circuit occasionally reached the barrier island. The fish company, money poor but land rich, had given Frank an acre of beach just behind the dunes upon which the shanty was placed.

The structure was, like the pound boats, clinker-built with outside walls of grey weathered boards, overlapped for strength, caulked with tar and hemp like the very boats after which the construction was copied, with a cypress shake roof, shingled from the cypress prevalent in the even more prevalent swamps of the nearby mainland. A small porch faced seaward away from the back bay marshes populated in summer by biting green head flies with their wasp-like bites and the salt marsh mosquitoes with their voracious appetite for blood. Predators that, when in numbers, had been known in calmer times to drive the wild horses nose deep into the surf. The shanty was elevated and anchored by pilings pumped into the sand. Four rooms inside. There was a general room for cooking with a hand pump for water; water heavily stained by the iron from its aquifer; another room for living and for the rare moments of relaxation afforded in that time. Two small bedrooms completed the shanty. An outside privy completed the curtledge. It was rough shelter in a tight time. But it was their’s. It was their beginning. It was where Walter came to be.

There, just as Frank was escaping death, Mary was about to be joined by a midwife, all of the medical aid then available on the ‘land over’. Mainland doctors were seldom willing to travel the nine miles from the nearest town and then cross the railroad bridge to the incipient beach resort, Ocean City, as it came to be called, and then to drive by horse and wagon the two miles down the beach, or to cross the back bays by small sailing vessels, or by rowing, even in calm weather, and never when the booming of the surf carried for miles inland, and its spray could drench one even in the relative calm behind the dunes.

3

THE RESCUE ATTEMPT

Frank, not knowing that Mary’s labor had begun, mounted behind the horse tender, galloped up the beach to the nearby company shed where the barrels of fish and roe were processed to be shipped, first by horse and ox-drawn cart to the railhead two miles up the beach, and from there by train to the markets of the northeast. A railhead whose existence brought Frank to the ‘land over’ in the first instance, and made the fishing industry profitable, to a degree at least. The company’s other three crews had come ashore while the surf was still passable, and were at the shed ‘packing out’.

Upon being informed of the tragedy, the other crews harnessed the horses to the boat carts and joined Frank and his horse tender in madly galloping down the beach to search for possible survivors before the full force of the storm was upon them. Or to search for the bodies that might be driven to the beach on what would be the last incoming tide in conditions in which a search could be made. The men, noting the intensity of the northerly current’s strength, went far south in hunting not only for what they hoped to see, but fearfully for what they did not want to see, but, what none-the-less needed to be seen.

There six miles below the camp they came upon one of the crew, dead, but not from drowning. The body belonged to a crewman who mercifully died of head injuries inflicted by contact with the flailing oars in the capsizing itself. He at least had not known the despair and horror of making it to the surface only to then realize that he was beyond all hope with the shoreline receding as he was caught in the intractable grip of the monstrous seaward ‘rip’. A mile below him another crewman’s body was seen still in the grip of the current and two of the horses had to be unhitched from the carts to go into the surf with riders to retrieve his body. His neck had been broken during the initial wrecking of the boat, apparently by his head being driven into the bottom. His end was also quick.

As the winds and seas increased the searchers continued south for two more hours. Then the wind and its driven sand and blown spume, by now pushed by winds already beyond full gale force in the eight hours since the storm escaped the cape, and approaching hurricane force, created conditions both at sea and on the beach that so hindered their efforts that a continuation was futile. Any survivors would already be on the beach, as it was evident that survival in the chaos of the sea was no longer possible.

Reluctantly, the exhausted men, and the horses, fatigued as well and now additionally encumbered by lifeless burdens resting on the boat carts,

turned north. They headed back toward the packing shed, the single mens’ bunkhouses and the few shanties of the married men, that made up the fishing camp of their company, the farthest south of the four camps of this coast. In a single file in order that those behind would have some minimal cover from the wind driven, stinging and biting sand, they started out. Not long after they began their northward trek, they noticed that the dunes were leveling initially from the wind alone. Before they went two miles the man in front yelled,

What’s that ahead?

Frank struggled forward and observed across their line of march a white line extending from the sea westward as far as could be seen. Wash over, Frank responded. We’ve got to get there before it ‘closes out’. Lets go!

Then began the first mad dash in the heavy sand as darkness began its final descent. The biting sand and driven spume were ignored as the men forsook the questionable lee of the horses in front to charge abreast up the beach. They ran to where the surf, after breaking on the foreshore, now rolled across the beach to the bay side marshes through a small breach in the line of dunes. There they gathered as the breach continued to create itself by widening and scouring the sand bounds that sought to contain it.

Boys, it’s now or never, Frank hollered above the thundering of the waves. It ain’t gonna get any better. We make it now or not at all.

With that they all plunged into the water of the wash over, some mounting the horses, where their progress northward was almost matched by their westward movement as the current of the new inlet pushed across to the bay. As they approached the north shore of the cut, their breaker driven westward movement almost brought them to where the wash over disgorged its rising waters into the deeper water of the back bay beyond the ‘land over’. Recognizing the great danger of being sucked into deeper water, a mad, disorganized scramble followed. One horse, its feet becoming entangled in its boat cart harness, lost its footing and was immediately swept into the bay with its rider. The man dove from the horse as it collapsed under him and was grabbed by a nearby rider and dragged above the current line into the marshes on the north side of the wash over. There they all gathered in the lee of the nearest dunes to the north. Here the horses were unhitched so they would be unencumbered for the remainder of the struggle north. The carts with their cargo of the dead were left. One would be found days later, ten miles away, at Copperhead Landing, with its macabre, decomposing cargo still aboard.

Staying behind the dunes when the water and the marshes permitted, and clambering to the seaside when necessary, the men and horses fought on, now in total darkness as the surf increased and the tide reached its zenith. The winds stepped across the hurricane line to begin their separate journey into a realm of destruction not seen in then living memory.

Eventually, they were within a mile of the camp when, in the darkness ahead, the ghostly image of the horizontal carpet of the sand ahead of them changed into a dark and white picture of another storm tossed ‘wash over’, but this one’s width, in the total darkness of the night could not be ascertained. It was apparent that its depth was much greater than the first ‘wash over’ as the surf was breaking in the new ‘cut’ itself, the foreshore having already been destroyed. The men gathered for a discussion of their plight.

With the thundering of the surf and the howling of the wind around them, Frank yelled, We’ve got a hurricane here comin’ on. It looks like its ‘gonna’ be a bad un’. This cut is impassable. We can’t make it across. We damn sure can’t make it across the bay. We’re ‘gonna’ ‘hafta’ find somewhere with some protection.

What ‘bout the horses? the captain of another crew shouted.

We’ll just ‘hafta’ let ‘em go. They’ll have to make it through on their own.

What will the owners say if we lose the horses? the other captain said.

Ain’t no never mind now, Frank answered, that’s for later. If this thing keeps on they’ll have a lot more to worry ‘bout than the horses. We’re already hurricane force, and the wind’s been up only since ‘bout two o’clock, and gale winds only since shortly ‘afore dark, and these big winds have just come up at the peak of the tide. If it keeps blowin’, or even blows harder through the outgoin’ tide, we’re not ‘gonna’ get across that thing even at low tide and we’re ‘liable’ to have to stay over here through another high tide. We’ll be lucky to get clear of this. We won’t even be able to get to our families let alone take care of a bunch of horses. Let ‘em go.

4

TAKING SHELTER

With that the frightened horses were unharnessed, and loosed to make their own way as best they could as the men turned around and struggled southward through the sand, away from the widening breach that separated them from the camps to the north, and for some, from their families. They formed a frightened procession of men and horses, all heads lowered from fatigue, stumbling south, sometimes in line abreast, often in line astern, as the winds at their backs dictated.

Two miles south of the breach they came to a large dune area they had traversed on the way north. It was on one of the widest areas of the beach where the back bay was the narrowest. It was the highest remaining area they had seen on their northward journey. Moreover, unlike most of the dunes to its north and south, its elevation extended for a considerable distance westward, almost to the extensive marsh buffer to the west. Here the men sought shelter. They huddled on the dune’s west face in the immediate lee to escape the frenzy of the storm as it was about to vent its full spleen against its constant antagonist-the land.

In the hours as the tide ebbed into the great force of the wind, it was held mostly at a standstill in the deep wash over to the north and the deepening one to the south. Eventually, however, as the waters of the back bays, called by nature to ebb seaward, but denied sufficient passage through their entry apertures by the huge seas now crashing in the deeper waters of the cuts, built up all along the westward side of the island, and inched first slowly, and then more rapidly up the westward face of the dunes until, almost universally to the south and to the north, the lower dunes were devoured. At first slowly, then faster, an exodus eastward of sea water began across the low-lying areas. An exodus that consumed more and more of the dune and eventually the foreshore area as well.

The fishermen, almost burrowed into the west face of the fragile highland of shifting sand, could not, thankfully, observe much of what was happening around them. By now the wind was blowing a steady ninety miles an hour and gusting to a hundred, and the full fury of the storm was yet a tide away. During the long hours of the darkness the men were bound together by the greatest of bindings, fear. As they lay prone on the dune’s wall they flinched as objects, some identified and some not, blew by, or pounded their way into and across the sand that they shared. Gulls, sandpipers and other shore birds, blew by in the night, as the storm relocated the coastal birds. As the men lay there like ghost crabs frantically trying to

dig deeper, they became aware during the flashes of lightning that had become a part of the storm, that the marshes to the west were now fully covered with the bay water of the ebb. It was, even now at the end of the ebb, advancing through the scrub bayberry bushes and stunted pines. It advanced in the direction of the rise of the dune line’s west ramparts of sand.

A storm surge began, and with the end of the ebb and the beginning of the flood, their perch was becoming more precarious. As the tide shifted to the flood, the surge advanced upon their elevated position from both windward and leeward.

Frank, seeking calm in a time of cataclysm, thought of how he came to be at this place at this time. He thought of the other island, like this one a barrier island; the island of Silver Lake; the island of Teach; the island of his birth, where he had married. Ocracoke. Another ‘land over’.

5

OCRACOKE TIME

He grew up, as did all of the children of that island, isolated. A place where formal schooling was not as important as learning how to exist in a subsistence economy, how to live off the land, or rather how to live off the sea. Frank remembered learning how to scrounge through the sea flotsam that appeared after the storms of that coast passed, for items and wreckage-made planks and timbers, and other debris that could be incorporated or otherwise transformed into walls and porches, coops, fences, boats, and even into bric-a-brac if the need arose. He grew up learning how, in the salt sea grasses on the full moons of late spring and early summer, to net soft crabs, many ‘doublers’ as the ‘Jimmys’ sought to protect their soft ladies. Learning about ‘Jimmy potting,’ how to entice the female peelers to the pots by baiting them with amorous ‘Jimmys’. And then tending them in ‘floats’, so that when shed into their soft stage they could be saved from their cannibalistic kin, and from shell hardening, to be more properly devoured by another animal. He remembered the fishing of the great long nets in the sound of Pamilico, set to catch the gills of the creatures whose inner reproductive compasses dictated their travel in the same places at the same times of every year.

It was at that ‘land over’ where he first saw Mary at an annual family gathering to celebrate the catch from the spring spawning run of rock, known above the Mason-Dixon as striped bass. It was a gathering that included half the island’s population. Mary was a distant cousin, herself an Oden. The island’s insular nature, that a century before attracted Teach of the lit fuses in the black beard that gave him his common name had, over time, removed some of the stigmas of related marriages. Half the island’s population was related. Its isolation caused its people to look inward, and in the looking they often found themselves.

He knew of Mary. He had heard of the beauty and intelligence of the young distant cousin; a girl said to have taught herself to read. Unusual for that island, she had, so it was rumored, taken to writing poetry about their life in the shadow of Hatteras. She was so unlike him. The opposite of his roughness and unrefined way of considering things. But her beauty surprised him as her resoluteness, yet gentleness, would surprise him over the years to come.

As the storm’s roar continued and he dug even deeper into the side of the dune, he looked back to the special places in his mind, remembering that she was then but a girl, really. Fifteen. A mere girl somewhere else. But in

that place far from the cities of the north, on that island at that time she was already entering womanhood. It was the way of the place. The year was 1903. Frank recalled that he was but nineteen himself. At that time he had never been off the island but to fish and crab in the sea and the sounds. Then, he had only known of that island’s life.

He and Mary walked and talked throughout the three days of the gathering. They sat together at the various meals and ‘joinings’ of the clan, and when they could not arrange to sit next to or across from each other, their glances remained the conduit for what was passing between them. From that moment of their first meeting, Frank had known with whom his life would be spent, although what his life would be, remained for fate to dictate.

But he knew how the process must continue. In their remoteness from the outside, and their closeness within a limited social environment, the islanders had developed a relatively rigid patriarchal system by which the propensity for conflict due to social limitations was avoided. While the fathers normally would not dictate who the daughters could marry, their approval of those selected by the daughters was almost always necessary. In the island environment of the time conflicts were to be avoided at all costs. Their closeness required an adherence to a certain way of things. Custom was paramount.

After Mary told him that she would be pleased if he talked to her father, Frank, as was the custom, went to old Walter Oden, Mary’s father, to ask his permission to pay court to Mary. As now, six years later, he lay on the side of the dune on the long island to the north, he remembered old Walter’s response, a response that caused him to leave that island below the great cape for this place.

I want more than this island for Mary, old Walter had said. Tain’t much out there anywhere, but it has to be better off-island. We have no markets here, no cash money; we barter ever’thing. We’re always on the edge. Where’s a future? You come back when you can get Mary off-island. When you have more than what ever’one else has to offer.

In the screaming of the wind of the great storm he thought of Mary’s reaction when he told her of old Walter’s response to his overture.

Then just do it, she had said. I’ll be here. Where would I go?

And he told her of the stories of a still hard, but better life, to the north that he had heard of, on an island called Assateague. City people had started a beach colony or resort and had run a railroad to the island. Several of the boys from Ocracoke had gone north to work in the fishing camps that had sprung up around the railhead. A railhead that had access to the markets of Philadelphia and New York. Although the fishing didn’t pay much, and it was offshore and dangerous, and the work was very hard, it paid cash money, specie almost unheard of on the island below the great cape. And hard work was a known condition here anyway.

Besides, Frank told Mary. The Ocracoke boys have been able to make extra money by gunnin’ the marshes and back bays for ducks during their winter migrations, especially the large rafts of ‘cans’, and the black ducks, baldpates and sprigtails. They’re close ‘nough to the cities that they can ship the ducks in barrels north on the railroad. I know it’s hard to believe but city people pay lots of money for anything shipped there. They’ll even buy brant breasts up north. And I’ll be able to trap some, he told her. It’s goin’ to take a while. Maybe a year. Maybe two.

Her response had been clear and simple. Go! I’ll be here; I’ll be ready when you come to get me.

And she was. Two years later Frank came for her. He’d brought the golden rings with him, and they’d been married on the island, each saying, he remembered now,

With this ring I thee wed.

Now, four years later, she was in the shanty to the north of where he sought shelter on the dune, hopefully safe, late pregnant with their first child. He was afraid for her, for what was happening there in the shanty. Although it had been built with the knowledge of storm tested generations, this was a storm of strength beyond his experience, almost beyond his prior imagining, and even beyond the tales of great storms past that were legends below the cape. He wondered, in the chaos where he lay, how she was faring in the dreadness of the storm that was amongst them. He kissed the ring then, lying there on the ‘tump’, the golden ring that bound them years ago on Ocracoke. Kissed the ring and prayed for her.

6

THE BIRTHING

As the winds grew and the waves began to crash into the shanty’s pilings, and the storm’s full force began to descend upon the coast, as Frank and the fishermen sought, futilely, to recover their lost mates, and than began the hours-long struggle to save themselves, other waves, waves of pain coursed down the body of Mary. Each wave of pain, first in irregular order as the initial storm waves had pounded upon the beach hours before, but then in almost regular cadence, but matching the increasing wildness of the sea, now seemed to begin at her breasts and move down her body to a crescendo of agony, of sharp piercing pain and a pounding and a pressure. Agony that each time broke between her legs-only to stop-only to start again in ever greater intensity. The waves of pain increased throughout the night, as if matching the pounding of the storm waves on the body of the beach as the winds increased to and beyond hurricane force.

When her water had first broken, she sent one neighborhood boy to the camp to fetch Frank, and another to summon the midwife. No thought was given to the doctor. He would not come in any event. Only the midwife would come.

The first pains came while she waited for Frank and the midwife. The first pain, like the early waves of the storm fast then approaching, did not forecast the waves of pain that were to come, again and again, for hours and hours, through the tides of the storms, its and hers, still to come. The degree of the intensity of both the storm and her pain were only later to be known. The first pain while she was alone had been a pounding, a tenseness, an uncalmness, a stretching pain, but not like the pain to come in the hours left of Walter’s birthing.

The midwife finally came, brought on a horse drawn boat cart, as even then the seas thrust water upon the beach, mid-calf deep in places between the shanty and the community to the north where the midwife lived. The midwife, sent her husband home to see to their children. No one yet knew in that earlier time of the storm the violence that would be unleashed before the storm’s raging would be over. She would be trapped, like Mary, in a shanty in the teeth of a storm, both wondering, when wonder could be recognized between the pains and the administering to them, whether their men had found shelter. In the times of this, a first birthing, they were unaware that these early pains were the result of cervix widening-the beginning of the dilation that would have to occur before the ordeal would conclude. While in some women there is a temporary period between the early pains and the

greater pains that bring on the pushing, there would be no pause for Mary. The transition, when it came, would be immediate. From great pain to greater pain.

This, Mary’s first labor, would last for eighteen hours, through two flood tides wrapped around an ebb. Hours when Frank fought to preserve his life, while Mary fought to create new life, all as the storm continued its rampaging assault against the land-and the creatures that lived upon it; seeking to take the creatures of the land as they took the creatures of the sea.

The storms raged on. On the height of the first flood tide, as Frank and the fisherman, turned back by the second wash over, were trudging south seeking the high dune system, when the wind first reached hurricane force, the shanty’s privy was lost. Carried over the sand, and then the back bay water. Cartwheeled by the wind, it rolled southwestward across the bay. An outhouse, parts of which, would end up in the front lawn of the Mayor of Berlin, seven miles west. The latrine hole would long before that be filled by current driven sand so that when the storm was over it would be as if the privy never existed. But, the outhouse left, unseen and unheard in the noise and tumult of the storms inside and outside the shanty. As the storm increased and the danger became more evident, the midwife helped Mary move to the floor along the wall of the rear of the house, and cracked the rear window above to reduce pressure in the event the front of the house would be wind-breached. Thus it was that Walter would be born not on a bed as were most, but on a floor.

After the abbreviated ebb finished and the next flood was well begun, as the eye of the great storm approached on a course for a landfall at the shanty, as Frank grasped the beach grass and lone bayberry shrub atop the dune and fought against being carried away, Mary’s labor approached its zenith. It would plateau there throughout the flood, taking her strength, as the ripping of membrane would cause her blood to flow, draining, ebbing as the tide outside rose. In the last hours of the flood as the eye approached, the winds passed the hundred mile per hour mark, then a hundred twenty, and were gusting even higher. Wind that peeled the cypress shingles of the roof above like the peeling of hard-boiled eggs-some cleaving cleanly from the roof, some taking pieces of the underlying boards, leaving portions of the interior open to the sky. Wind that took the tin chimney aloft to transport it to a nearby county; that took half the porch as the midwife cowered in the corner. Wind that blew the beach sand in through every aperture, no matter how small, to form piles of sand below. But the pain and the pressure became unbearable and, mercifully, Mary lost consciousness as her home, the shanty, was being disassembled piece by piece.

The hours passed. The storms came on.

7

THE DUNE

The surge was like nothing they had ever heard of or imagined. A fourteen-foot wall of storm driven water atop a tide advancing from the rear and the front towards the twenty-foot elevation atop the dune. The men grasped the meager grasses and shrubs and each other, in an effort to stay land bound in the fierceness of the winds, as all along the line the waves scoured and eroded the adjacent dunes until there was sand flatness all around, with a cap of water, wave, spume and foam, like an icing of a devil’s cake. Only a ‘tump’ of dune top with desperate men attached rose out of the water.

But then, after several hours of utter desperation, a ray of sunshine, and then another, and in a few moments more a patch of blue above. The wind laid down, barely blowing now where they were, but still howling all around in the walls of their funnel of cloud reaching up to blue sky. With no wind pushing waves in the immediate vicinity the surge diminished.

They were in the eye. They knew what would happen as the eye passed on westward. The wind would rest for a few short minutes, but then the storm would show them its diversity, that it could blow almost as hard from the west and southwest. They knew they faced a new danger. The back bays and creeks were full of storm water driven across the island and through the wash overs by the easterly and northeasterly winds as the storm approached. Water that had nowhere to go but seaward, now to be driven by westerly hurricane winds. The men knew that their fate would be resolved by whether the flattening of the beach to the south and north of them had been sufficient to ease the water’s return to the sea so that an universal wash over eastward could occur over all of the beach, thus sparing their salvation ‘tump’.

Then the winds returned, the clouds closed in above them, and they returned to the chaos of the storm. Almost blinded by the wind, spray and blowing sand, they hunkered, burrowing into each other in their efforts to stave off death for another hour until the winds, always quicker to diminish on the backside of a storm, calmed.

8

WALTER

As the leading eye wall passed over the shanty, the abrupt calmness caused Mary to awaken. She felt an uncontrollable urge to push into her pain. She did. Our father was born. He would be named Walter after Mary’s father, as was the custom.

He was a large baby-over ten pounds-and loud. All he knew was that he had been comfortable, warm and relaxed in the silence of the place he had been. And then his world changed. He began to be pushed and moved about, always into a tighter and more restricted place until finally he could no longer enjoy even the small pleasure of kicking and moving around. He stayed this way for hours-not happy. Not understanding why it could not be the way it had been. Then, after hours of being restrained, he had been let out of the constant pushing and shoving of the restraint.

He was out where he could once again move and kick; but, not where he had previously been; not where it was warm and comforting, but out where it was cold, out where the screaming around him was no longer muffled, but where the cries were sharp and piercing, where there was a constant howling in the background, where it was cold and where water, cold water, dripped upon him. He joined in the howling and crying. He did not like this place. He was angry.

The midwife, reassured by the temporary respite of the eye, came to Mary and cut the cord and cleaned Walter as best she could and handed him to Mary. She then noticed that Mary continued to bleed, heavily. The midwife got her bag and stitched what rents she could reach, and the pain caused Mary to again lose consciousness. But Walter attached himself to Mary’s breast, and lay securely in Mary’s arms, there on the floor of the shanty in the eye of the storm.

9

THE BACK SIDE OF THE EYE

The great storm’s eye moved westward and the rear wall of the eye passed over the shanty as the following wind edge engulfed them and the madness came again, undiminished, abruptly, but this time from a contrary direction. It came from the west and south west, able now to finish the work of the storm left undone by the easterly and northeasterly winds of its leading edge.

The fastenings of the remaining half of the porch could not resist the new twisting and turnings resulting from the new direction of the wind force, and with a ripping and cracking noise it was blown from the house and flew to sea in the first gusts of the following edge of the storm. Next, as the midwife screamed and Walter howled, a plank flew through one of the rear windows, to immediately create a immense head of wind pressure that, almost simultaneously, blew out the windows on the seaward side of the house. The wind then furiously stamped through the shanty, like a bull in a Spanish street, driving before it many items to be transported through the ocean side windows-eastward.

A small scow, twirling on the surface of the water from the wind pressure on its upturned bow, was driven in amongst the pilings below, and with another crack, a piling was snapped off, and with the scow, driven out towards the breakers where it would survive while the scow was demolished, to be the driftwood/firewood of the morrow. Mary slept on in her unconsciousness, as Walter intermittently suckled and howled, and himself burrowed into the warmness, seeking sanctuary amongst his mother’s breasts.

Below at the ‘tump’ only