The Sea is a Thief (2 page)

Beau and his sister Anna stood far from Nancy, behind most of the others, back by the gate of Bagwell Waterfowl and Provisions.  They took no notice of the Bagwells, and few in the crowd took any notice of them.  It had been three years since their father's death.  The urgent concern of their neighbors, and the charitable kindness that accompanied it, had long since faded to the dull disregard of hard-working people who owned little and rose early each day to maintain it.  Beau and Anna had trouble, it was true, but who on the island did not?  Trouble came in a dozen or so varieties, like the hard candies in the wooden barrels at Bagwell Dry Goods, and most every man tasted each flavor from time to time.  

Beau was angry.  It hadn't been much of a fight. These Virginia sailors, whoever they were, had proved an embarrassment.  Three of his friends from the island had already left to volunteer for the Army of the Potomac under General Beauregard.  They would surely not have disgraced themselves with so pathetic a display.  In his heart, Beau burned to join his friends.  He imagined them encamped at some wilderness outpost of the Southern line, cleaning their rifles as they roasted venison around a campfire, silently preparing a deadly ambush for the invading Yankees.  

For Beau, it was not to be.  At eighteen he was old enough to enlist, and, short as he was, he was strong.   He already showed his father's keen eye with rifle and shotgun.  That wasn't enough for the Sergeant-Major meeting new recruits at the Accomack County Courthouse.  “Too deaf for this army,” he bellowed, shaking his bushy red beard.  Beau stood frozen, not knowing what to say, though the Sergeant-Major's words were unusually clear.  

Beau knew he was half deaf.  Everyone who knew him knew that, too; he made allowances for it, and so did they, as they had done since he recovered from the scarlet fever eleven years before.  Elizabeth Reynolds, the medicine woman who kept the lighthouse, had tended to him.  William Daisey fetched her from Assateague in his boat, as he always did when family was sick.  She stayed three days, sleeping by Beau's sickbed in front of the fire, as a winter storm blew up outside and the thin little boy tossed and sweated his way through the fever.  When it finally broke and he rested, she knew he would live, but she feared the illness would exact its price.  So it did, fleeing without his life but snatching away the hearing in one of his ears.  Beau felt his deafness like an unhealed wound.  The islanders didn't much care about it, and he rarely encountered strangers.  He spent most of his days carving decoys and sometimes fishing, when the local boat captains were short-handed enough to put up with his temperament.  Neither profession was demanding on the ears.  

The Sergeant-Major felt differently.  “When you hear a command on the line, what will you do, boy?” he thundered.  “Will you advance when you should retreat, or th' other way round?  How many of your fellows will take a Yankee ball because you cain't hear?” Again the beard shook. “Go back home and do whatever good you can for your family.”  Beau studied the black and grey chevrons on the man's uniform sleeve as he made an x with his pencil on a long roll of paper.  He waved a thick arm towards the courthouse doors and it was done.    

Beau had returned home very late with a heavy black walnut branch in his hand and a look on his face that his mother and sister knew well.  Anna sat with him and tried to talk as he carved.  Beau would have none of it.  She was only a year younger, and knew his moods, the many dark ones and the few light ones.  She could tell the weight of his heart from his grip on the handle of the knife.  Beau turned the black walnut branch into a hooded merganser, feathers trailing its slender neck.  It was useless as a hunter's decoy, like so many of the ducks he carved.  He turned the words of the Sergeant-Major into a poison that settled inside him, bubbling up on occasions such as this, when he stood at the back of the crowd and watched the
Venus
burn.

He turned away, patience spent.  Anna followed by his side, hastening to keep up.  At times like these she made it her business to let her older brother speak his mind, calming him by doing so.  The cottage wasn't far away.  When they reached it he would likely retreat into the kitchen behind his workbench until long after she fell asleep.  “I know your feelings, brother,” she offered, “but this ship may be a blessing.  Another attack may come at any time.”  Both knew how the island felt about loyalty to the Union: though emotions ran hot in both directions, there would be no secession on this ragged little shred of Virginia.  The oyster cast the final vote on that issue, and the oyster's allegiance was clear.  Beau spat on the roadway, kicking an offending shell from his path. “
Damn
Bagwell, and damn his packing house, and his stars and stripes,” he snarled.  “The flag on his flagpole is bought and paid for in Yankee greenbacks!”  Anna bit her tongue.  She hated when Beau swore.  He wasn't wrong.  He was just letting this stir him up, as something did on most days.  She fell silent as she realized that her effort was in vain.  Soon she would see her mother, who might be ready to pause in her work, and Anna could relate the tale of the battle to her.  She wouldn't want to talk long
.  
Mother's work was always waiting.

The familiar lane fell away as Anna neared home, replaced in her mind's eye by a vision of the Battle of Cockle Creek.  First she saw the two lean, swift launches, leaping across the silver chop of the channel like water skimmers.  The smart gold-embroidered caps were cocked on the sailors' heads.  Their tunics were kites in the morning breeze.  Then came the rifle fusillade, momentary scarlet fire, the chalky bluish smoke floating spirit-like into the sky.  The rifle reports had taken two heartbeats to drift across the water, the steady barking sounds distinguishing the real battle from what might otherwise have been a strange dream.  As if on a cue, the waiting black ship had lurched into motion, its stacks sending basketfuls of cinders hissing into the air like so many miniature demons.  It ran straight on its course, crawling across the channel as the horseshoe crabs do at the first high tide of the spring.  

After that came the thunder and lightning: huge black artillery shells arcing towards the anchored privateer, a screaming, luminous hail that buried itself in the flanks of its quarry.  The unseen explosions inside turned its wooden ribs inside-out, splinters and shards cascading downwards.  The
Venus
wailed and groaned in its agony like a horse foaling, and then fell silent as its masts began to loll and tilt, its formerly brave defenders waving their arms and legs crazily as they leapt towards the surface of the water.   

Finally, she recalled the return of the
Louisiana
, steaming back against the chop, the mid-morning sun throwing flares of light from its bright brass cannons.  Its decks were alive with busy crewmen, their pride on display in their firm stance at the railings.  

The Battle of Cockle Creek had ended for all of Chincoteague Island but Anna Daisey.  The spectacle that had fed her eyes in the early morning had only begun to uncoil itself in her mind.  The sights were sharpening and focusing, the unfamiliar objects taking their places in the all-too-familiar landscape that was her life.  This evening she would draw them, as she drew the things she loved, and the things she wished to remember.  In her trunk were drawings of the wild creatures of her beloved Assateague: white geese on the marsh packed as tightly together as pebbles on a river bottom, a winter storm gathering over the ocean, a foal searching for its mother's milk.  This was something new altogether.  She would make at least three drawings, she thought.  At least three; perhaps more than that.    

There was little more for the crowd to see, and a great deal more for each of them to do, as there always was.  In clusters of two and three they fell back from their vantage points on the wharves and headed back to their work.   The uproar that had called them away was over.  Each one's pace quickened as he took inventory of the tasks that awaited him in a shortened day.  The talk among them was mainly of security, and an elusive prosperity.  Perhaps oyster shipping would continue without interruption, and prices would hold steady.  Perhaps they would even increase.  A man could hope!  Their faith in the Union had been justified, at least for the time being.  They had trusted Edmund Bagwell with the fate of Chincoteague partly because he talked sense and partly because they had little choice.  In this, too, they had done well; Bagwell had kept his promises, and today's outcome had been good.  They had hitched their wagons to the right horse.

Now they could get back to their farms, their fishing grounds, and their oyster beds.  It was about time.  Ten o'clock was no hour to be starting work.  

 

CHAPTER TWO
 

Troops on the Island
  
 

 

Captain Henry D. Sharpe stood at the powerful telescope in his cabin on the
Louisiana.  
His hands were clasped behind his double-breasted blue coat, its nine rows of brass buttons undone.  He made a careful survey of Chincoteague channel.  Mid-October, and it was hot and dead calm, the hottest and calmest of all the days since his arrival in the channel just a short time ago.  He pictured the fast-approaching autumn in his native Providence.  The fresh breezes would slap at the waters of Narragansett Bay.  The cool evenings would invite a blazing fire at his marble hearth on Waterman Street, the carved mahogany sailing ships on the mantelpiece reflecting its glow.  This was a very different climate—not unlike Veracruz, a place he did not wish to recall.  October, and the pests of summer were still near the peak of their strength.  A green-headed fly landed on his temple.  He slapped at it with a rolled-up chart.  The fly buzzed away over the water, leaving the Captain with a painful little welt.  It was not the first of the day. “Blast,” he cursed to himself.  “When do these creatures retreat?”   

Sharpe had served the Navy for fifteen years. Since his graduation from the Naval Academy, duty had taken him almost exclusively to northern waters, after his brief initial command in the Mexican War.  He preferred northern waters; for the Captain, the lure of the sea was less when the sea took on the smell of the southern latitudes.  Off the coasts of his native New England, the waves washed clean against the pebbled beaches.  Glossy black mussels clung to the cliffs, and sea oats bloomed on the dunes.  The cedar-shake cottages of the fishermen were cloaked in a weathered grey that spoke to him of home.

How different this Eastern shore of Virginia was.  The channel was treacherous with shallows and sandbars, and surrounded by the dreariest sort of marshland.  At flood tide it was more or less a proper sort of channel, but as the tide fell, the creeks and marshes all around him spat the seawater back laden with a thick black muck, offensive to the nose and the spirit.  The channel and its shores seemed to be made entirely of it.  It stank.  As a breeder of flies and mosquitoes it had no equal.  

Fish were abundant here.  He observed the fishing boats coming into port full. The cod and mackerel of New England were absent, replaced by flat, bottom-dwelling flounder and others unfamiliar to him.  Shellfish were plentiful, too; small groups of men waded about, bent double in the muddy water, filling floating baskets with large pale-gray clams.  Others, leaning over the low rails of the sharpies in teams of two and four, used dredges and tongs to bring up quantities of good-sized oysters.  From sunup to last light, Captain Sharpe's telescope revealed watermen at work.

Sharpe squinted into the glass at the hulk of the
Venus
, trapped in the mud of Cockle Creek three miles to the south.  A boatful of men, tiny as fleas at this distance, clambered up the planking of the hull in pursuit of some useful bit of hardware. Already the privateer had been stripped of most anything of value by the industrious islanders.  
That's a fine spot for a strategic blockade,
Sharpe thought: ships sailing into the Chincoteague Bay would be forced to pass the guns of any vessel anchored there.  The rebels must have calculated that they could hold the island by striking the first blow.  They hadn't counted on the personal intervention of the Commander at Hampton Roads, who had quite a lot to tell Sharpe about the virtues of Chincoteague oysters and duck before handing him his current orders.

It was already warm below deck; the iron hull magnified the heat.  Angling his telescope down the narrow channel, he scanned the marshy island that formed its southern border.  It showed no sign of habitation, though he thought he saw cattle, or perhaps horses, along its shore
.  
Heat rose in waves off the sparkling water as a flock of slow, long-legged white seabirds rowed their way across his field of view.  
Wallops Island
, his charts called it.  If actual Wallops were living on it, they kept well out of sight.  

Swinging the lens east brought the town of Chincoteague into clear view, with its narrow piers and plain, square frame buildings.  Such a contrast to the grand wharves of Providence that had greeted him as a boy, when he returned from his first sea voyage with his grandfather.  He could see townspeople in the Chincoteague streets, but their livestock often outnumbered them.  The cottages were small and lacked decoration.  There were just a few larger structures, most of those, it seemed, warehouses or the like.  Only the Atlantic Hotel, as its long signboard proclaimed it, made any sort of appearance, and that was homespun at best.

This sad and primitive little place was now his to protect.  He would do his duty.  Neither the tasty duck, nor the delectable oyster, nor the good people of Chincoteague Island would suffer harm on Henry D. Sharpe's watch.  His orders were clear: “closely blockade” the channel.  No time limit was specified.  He was floating in the middle of a watery alleyway in a cast-iron bathtub, with a crew of ninety at his disposal and no threat on the horizon.  After the quick and easy triumph of October 5
th
, no vessel would be foolish enough to provoke him.