“I thought you said you help Carl all the time.”
“Do, but he changed ‘em around last time.” He suddenly twisted a cutoff knob on one of the many pipes. “That’s her,” he declared.
The pump continued to labor and the pressure gauge wouldn’t go beyond 15. I pointed this out to Guthrie.
“Give ‘er some more time,” he said and leaned back, prepared to make small talk above the noise. “Carl coming down?”
“No.” I eyed the pressure gauge. “Just me this trip.”
“When you going back?”
“Thursday or Friday maybe.” Today was Sunday in early April. “We’re still not getting any pressure.”
“Reckon you didn’t turn off all the spigots?” he asked, ready to disclaim any part of a malfunction.
“Everything I saw. Except for one on the outside shower so the air’ll bleed out.”
“I’ll go see if she’s putting out water,” he volunteered.
Now that he was gone and it was just me and the pump, I realized I could hear water spilling from somewhere. In fact, I could feel water oozing into my sneakers. I seemed to be standing in a puddle. Shining the flashlight at the bottom of the water tank, I saw yet another open tap through which water was gushing. Once I closed it, the gauge needle finally crept up to 40 psi and the pump shut off.
Into the silence came the cry of gulls and a lapping of gentle swells.
“She worn’t spitting air anymore and I closed her off,” Guthrie reported. He eyed the gauge complacently. “Reckon that’s all she needed.”
” ‘Preciate your help,” I told him as we both stepped out into bright sunlight.
• • •
Harkers Island lies across from the Cape Lookout Lighthouse on an east-west axis, and I always have trouble getting oriented down here. When you look out over the sound to Shackleford Banks, you feel that because it’s seawater and Shackleford’s part of the Outer Banks, you must be looking east. In reality, you’re looking almost due south.
The wind was coming from the west, blowing off the land, and it was warm and spring-like. Beyond a grassy hump too low to be called a dune, the water of Back Sound lay smooth as one of my daddy’s freshwater fish ponds.
Behind us, nestled amongst three live oaks and some overgrown privet, was the small shabby clapboard cottage that had been built around 1910. Like most older houses down here, the builder had been a waterman, not a professional carpenter: the high-pitched roof originally covered four tiny rooms and shedded off over a front porch, with a hand pump and privy somewhere out behind. Even though Carl and Sue had added a bath and new kitchen across the back, brought in electricity and running water, reshingled the roof, and painted the warped clapboards a cheerful yellow, if you held your head just right, you could see daylight through some cracks and it still looked as if the first big wind ought to blow it slam across the island. Yet there it sat, despite eighty years of hurricanes and nor’easters.
Behind the cottage was a thicket of yaupon bushes and, beyond those, Clarence Willis’s mobile home faced the road and helped buffer the cottage from weekend traffic to the Shell Point ferry in the summer. The Willises, father and son, were watermen and boat builders like Guthrie’s grandfather; but they were to be away all week, according to Carl.
Carl and Sue are my distant cousins. At least, Sue is. On my mother’s Stephenson side. Their daughters are my age and I used to come down with them several times a year all through childhood and adolescence.
Between my brothers and their wives and a bunch of aunts and uncles, I can’t turn around in Colleton County without somebody telling someone else; so when Carl heard through the family grapevine that I’d been assigned to fill in at the Carteret County courthouse for an ailing judge, he insisted that I stay at their place. “We haven’t been down since February,” he said, “so all the water’s still cut off, but that’s no problem.”
Well, no, not if you don’t mind groping around up under the edge of the house for a half-dozen cutoff valves before you even tackle the pump itself. The house sits on low brick pilings, no skirting, no foundation, open to every blast of winter storms. Every time an exposed pipe freezes and bursts, Carl installs a new spigot so the pipe can be drained at that point, never mind the obstacles.
Guthrie was sucking at a bleeding knuckle where he’d knocked the scab off.
“Floor joist got me,” he said sheepishly.
I saw the other scabbed knuckles on his fist, then noticed a half-healed cut on his round chin. And although it had faded to a pale blue shadow, I could make out the remains of a bruise on the cheekbone beneath his right eye.
“Must have been quite a fight,” I observed.
“Ah, naw. Fell in my boat,” he said, sounding enough like one of my nephews to make it clear he didn’t plan to talk about it.
Fine with me. As a district court judge, I have to listen to too many stories of who took the first swing after who said what to go looking for yet another.
“When’d you get a boat?” I asked.
“November, when I turned fourteen,” said Guthrie.
“Your granddaddy give it to you?” I smiled, thinking how island kids must look forward to a first boat the way I’d looked forward to my first car.
“Naw, I worked out the money fishing and clamming.”
I forget what it was that killed his mother when he was two or three. Ruptured appendix? Or was it
