Читать книгу Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 12

For Whom The Bells Ring

Somewhere on the outskirts of

Ocracoke Island, North Carolina

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The Scene: The Outer Banks, its restless sands battered by the unrelenting Atlantic, are linked to the mainland by either bridge or ferry and curve southward from Whalebone Junction on Bodie Island to Ocracoke Inlet. Clinging to the beaches of Cape Hatteras National Seashore are the fishing villages of Rodanthe, Waves, Salvo, Avon, Buxton, Hatteras, Frisco, and Ocracoke. All were once remote and isolated on that narrow splinter of sand, but now they lie scattered within the shadows of million-dollar homes on stilts.

The Sights: Down on Ocracoke, a ferry ride away from Hatteras, wild ponies ran without fear or fence on the beaches. Perhaps they were descendents of horses that swam ashore from the wrecked ships of Sir Walter Raleigh. No one knows for sure. But only a few are left, and they have been penned for their protection. Just beyond the shoreline, the notorious pirate Blackbeard ruled the waters of the Outer Banks and died there, killed in a gun battle in 1718. Some say Blackbeard left a treasure buried within the dunes. Only the wind and the sand know for sure, and they keep their secret to themselves. Fishing boats head out each day during the season in search of channel bass, cobia, mackerel, and the big blues. As one boat captain, Thurston Gaskill, said, “If you know how to fish these waters, you don’t ever go hungry.” He looked around at the quiet, simple, peaceful world at the ocean’s edge, then told me: “I often have nightmares of doing something so bad and terrible that the judge sentences me to ten years in a city.”

The Setting: Beyond the captain’s gaze, only a distant patch upon the water, is Portsmouth, a ghost town on a ghost island. Travel by boat, or you don’t go at all. Once, five hundred people lived among its dunes. Now there are none. As a generation died away, no one came to replace it, and gradually the isle held more graves than people. Portsmouth island and village continue to be protected as an integral part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore. It still showcases twenty empty and abandoned structures, but most of them are in ruin, the way a good ghost town is supposed to be.

For so many years, the Life Saving Station on the Outer Banks kept a watch for ships and men encountering trouble at sea.

(Photo: J Gerald Crawford)

The Story: Henry Piggott stood, straightened his cap, and glanced at the calendar on the bare and weathered wall of his pink Portsmouth home. The house should have been yellow. He had ordered yellow. Lord, how he did love yellow. But when the paint arrived by boat, it was pink. He could have sent it back, he guessed. He probably should have shipped it back. But Henry Piggott was in the mood to paint, so he pried off the lid, grabbed an old brush, and when he finished, he found himself living inside the pink walls and pink facing of a pink house.

The color didn’t look particularly bad, he thought. It kind of matched the innards of the sea shells scattered and broken down on beaches. Besides, it wouldn’t take long before the rains and winds – the salt spray and sea squalls – would sand the wood down to an ashen gray again. Always did. Between now and then, whenever then might be, pink would work just fine.

He always checked the calendar in case he might forget, and Henry Piggot could not afford to forget, not with all of Portsmouth depending on him. Sunday was a special day. He waited all week for Sunday, and it seemed to come around a lot sooner than it did when he was a kid running barefoot in the sands, waiting for the ferry and fishing boats to reach shore, and wondering why they even bothered when few strangers ever stepped on the island and nobody else had any interest in leaving. This was where they were born. This was where they died. Not a lot happened in between.

Henry Piggott shuffled out the front door of his home and walked down past the sea oats to the little wooden Methodist Church. The clock on his wall said it was five minutes to ten. He should have little trouble making it on time. A five minute walk, and he would ring the bells, just as he had done for as long as he could remember.

Always at ten o’clock. Precisely at ten o’clock. Never early. Never late. Didn’t want to wake the Good Lord too early, he said. The bells chimed loud and clear, the only sound on the island, not counting the frantic rush of the surf as it tumbled recklessly toward the dunes.

He rang the bells again. They sounded like a prayer. Prayers aren’t words, Henry Piggott said. Prayers are feelings. The bells were filled with feeling. Their echo didn’t fade away until Henry Piggott was halfway back up the pathway toward his home. The pink had turned a pale shade of pale. Another rain or two, and he would have to paint again. Maybe yellow this time. By now, however, he had grown accustomed to the pink and hated to see the storms rip it away. Henry Piggott shrugged and grinned. He would simply order paint and splash on whatever color they sent him. An old man, he said, didn’t care anymore.

Henry Piggott was the descendant of slaves who worked the farms and handled the offshore fishing boats of Portsmouth before and after the Civil War. Free men and women could have packed up their ragged belongings and left. The Piggotts remained. Not a great life, perhaps, but a good life. They were among friends on the island, and Portsmouth depended on them. No one ever paid much attention to the color of Piggott skin. They only knew that Rose, his grandmother, was a midwife who served as the only doctor and nurse in the village. For years, she and her sister Leah fished the surf and dug oysters to scratch out a meager living. But, alas, Rose was burned to death one evening down on the beach while roasting oysters. Maybe she could have been saved. No one knew. She was the doctor and beyond her own care.

Henry Piggott paused and gazed around him. He nodded toward the home of Frank Gaskill. The man could smell mullet coming long before they got here, Piggott said, and he could pole a skiff through the water without making a sound. Didn’t know Frank was on his way until he was already there and gone.

The old post office had served as a community store, which sold needles, thread, canned goods, cheese, salt pork, molasses, oil, and kerosene. With a good vegetable garden and a sea to fish, nobody on Portsmouth needed much of anything else. On every weekday afternoon, while waiting for Sunday, Henry Piggott wandered down to the dock and waited for the mail bags. Henry Piggott piled them in a wheelbarrow and rolled the letters and assorted packages back to Miss Dorothy Salter, unmarried and proud of it. She was postmistress. She sorted the envelopes, placed them neatly in pigeon holes, and by four o’clock the community had gathered on the front porch of the post office to pick up their mail. There was more gossip than letters to go around. Those were the good days, and those were good people. Henry Piggott had not forgotten a one of them and knew he would never see any of them again.

Even when a man was broke he had his memories.

Piggott laughed as he walked past the Styron-Keeler cemetery that held the grave of Sam Tolson. Good man. Hard working man. The inscription on his tombstone said it all: “Because of his striking resemblance to Booth, was arrested for the assassination of President Lincoln.”

Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong man.

John Wilkes Booth had pulled the trigger that fearful night in Ford’s Theater. Uncle Sam Tolson happened to be wandering free and loose on the streets of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the night the army marched in with pictures and posters of the assassin. Soldiers were looking for suspects. Uncle Sam wore the same size shoe, the same size hat, and, in the splintered light just before sundown, he looked enough like the famous actor to start spouting lines of Shakespeare, even though it was doubtful that he had ever read anything written by the bard. He sat locked away in jail for days and might have died on the gallows, but community leaders of Portsmouth traveled to Elizabeth City with sworn statements and affidavits swearing that Sam Tolson wasn’t guilty of anything except, perhaps, straying too far from home.

Henry Piggot paused long enough to wave at Marian Gray Babb and Elma Dixon. They, too, had grown older. They, like Portsmouth itself, were changing with the passing of time. Couldn’t stop it. Might as well go with it.

“Not much else to do till Sunday,” Henry Piggott said.

“How about the mail?”

“Boats don’t come anymore.”

“How about the post office?”

“Closed.” He shrugged. “Only thing open for business around here is the burying ground,” he said.

“But you still ring the bells at the Methodist Church.”

“Have been for years.” Henry Piggott glanced over his shoulder. “The Good Lord sure did take a liking to that church,” he said.” Back a long time ago, even before I was born, the summer had been severe – dry and hot. Crops burned and withered in the fields. Then when it turned winter, the days were cold, and the waters of the sound were frozen. Nobody was fishing at all. The minister stood up in that pulpit, and he began to pray. He told the Good Lord, ‘If it is predestined that there be a wreck on the Atlantic Coast, please let it be Thy will that it happen here.’ A few days later, a ship loaded with flour was cast up on the sands by the sea, and the famine ended.”

“Divine Providence?”

“Don’t know. I wasn’t here.”

“So you keep on ringing the bells.”

“They sound real pretty, don’t they?”

“I guess the bells call the congregation to Sunday morning service.”

“There ain’t no Sunday morning service,” he said.

Henry Piggott paused.

“There ain’t no pastor.”

He paused again.

“There ain't no congregation,” he said.

The pause grew longer.

“There hasn’t been a service held in that church for going on twenty years.”

On a cold, blustery day in 1971, seventeen good men and four women braced themselves against the chilled winds - with the rain carving ice from the edge of pewter clouds - and gathered inside the church to hear those final words prayed over the casket of Henry Piggott.

He had been the last man in Portsmouth.

When the funeral procession sailed away, Marian Gray Babb and Elma Dixon boarded the boat and went with them. Portsmouth was empty and alone, a ghost town with more memories than ghosts. In the distance, the church bells were ringing.

Everyone smiled. Henry Piggott had rung them for the last time.

The old lighthouse protected ships from running aground on the shoals beyond Ocracoke Island.

The last rays of an afternoon sun reflect off fishing boats home from the sea.

(Photo: J Gerald Crawford)