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was too scared to go and hugged the mast. One threatened to knock him off, saying an awful cussword. It was sixty feet to the deck. Reuben wouldn't budge, though they gestured to kill him, but did go up a second time that night, not knowing anything about what he was doing. Ben admired him greatly.
    Yet Reuben would say, "You stay with your mama. That's not a good life out there, Ben."
    Well, was there anything good about the Banks for a boy of twelve, finished school? Why couldn't they all realize what he wanted to do was go to sea, then come back sometime and be a surfman? A keeper, someday. Confession was good for the soul. Yes, be like John O'Neal.
    He'd even named his boat
Me and the John O'Neal.
He'd found it in the spring, half sunk, floating down the cut by Gull Island, over in the sound. He'd waded out to his waist to bring it in. It was a small shad boat, homemade, stoved in on the portside. Not the eighteen or twenty-six footers, with a foresail added to a sprit mainsail and jib, that the Creef and Dough families built up at Roanoke Island. But it looked almost like them, with a round bottom, square stem, and sharp prow.
    She didn't have a name or number. So he'd claimed it. He painted her new name on the transom after replanking the portside.
    Shaving a timber for a mast, he finally got his hands on some old sails and recut them. All summer he'd sneaked off to teach himself to sail. He knew hod would have been raised if his mother had found out about it, but she didn't know a solitary thing about
Me and the John O'Neal.
Or so he thought.
    As Ben mounted the last rise the sea opened up before him, tossing rays of sun back into the sky, flinging up glitter from the troughs. The breakers were still high, and the inshore water was murky with sand, but the ocean was flattening out and by afternoon would be blue and peaceful again.
    He stopped and let his eyes sweep the horizon. No sails were out there, not even a plume from a steamer. But the ships that had ducked into Hampton Roads, up at Norfolk, would be weighing anchor and pressing on south by sundown. It would be back to normal.
    But it just didn't seem possible that this was the same water of last night; that it could go devilish crazy in a few hours; smash ships like toys. Then become gentle and almost smile toward land. But he'd noticed, from time to time, as he'd run along the edge of the surf, that the waves sometimes tried to reach for him. Or maybe he was just imagining it.
    He looked out across Heron Shoal. Water was tumbling over the bar, as it always did. But there was no sign of a ship's grave out there. Not even a piece of broken stick to say that the
Malta Empress
had joined the ghost fleet there the day before.
    It wasn't always that way. Sometimes the ships grounded in moderate weather when some mate went to sleep. Before it turned heavy again, the men would go out in boats to take off sugar or salt; molasses or turpentine or coffee. He had once seen them float hundreds of barrels of molasses ashore. Then again, there were those like the
Empress
that sank without a trace except for pieces that hit the shore. Or for survivors like the one now in his own house.
    He wondered about her for a moment; if she was indeed British; wondered if she'd come around. He didn't like to think about his mother having to tell her that her parents, if that's who they were, had been claimed and had gone leeward, which was the Banks term for death. "Loo'ard" it was pronounced.
    He looked far south. The wreckage had bobbed that way during the night on the surging tide, and, as always, people were on the beach sorting through the debris; helping the surfmen. He could see several wagons and mules; some ponies and carts.
    He went in that direction along the littered, storm-gullied sands, Boo Dog winding ahead; sniffing at dead fish and old, feeble gulls that had fought the gale; giving up to flutter down and go loo'ard.
    It took about thirty minutes to make the walk and on