Teetoncey and Ben O'Neal Read Online Free PDF Page A

next day."
    "What did you see?"
    "Timbers busted up. Some clothes, boots. Barrels. Anything that would float. Spars." I decided not to discuss the row of bodies under the tarpaulins, nor to say I'd seen her papa after Jabez dropped him, mouth open and stony dead, at Filene's feet that night. "There wasn't much to see."
    "No chests?"
    Now, that was a very odd thing she wanted to know about. I shook my head. "I didn't see any. They don't float unless there's a lot of air space in them. Truly, there wasn't enough of that ship for the wreck commissioner to come down. Not enough for
vendue.
That's auction. Everybody bids on what is left."
    She was thoughtful for a minute. "Where did it happen?"
    "Not far from here. About two miles. I'll show you someday." Of course, she'd seen it two nights ago; once before that in daylight. I had to keep reminding myself of that blank period in her life.
    We were just about to the ocean and I drove the cart up on a dune. The ridge sloped down to the beach and tideline. "Stand up, Teetoncey," I said, "and you'll see a sight most people have never seen."
    Planting her feet in the canvas bag behind Fid's tail, she rose up and saw our skeletons of ships that stretched for miles along the beach in both directions. She didn't say much for a moment but then asked, "Did the
Empress
look like that?" She pointed to the nearby
Hettie Carmichael,
which had most of her keel, a lot of ribbing, and some of her stern left.
    I said, "Not at all. What was left of the
Empress
could be put in five mule wagons." I did not tell her the Gillikins were having an extra room built from timbers of the
Empress.
    We went on to Heron Head Station with Tee in a pond of silence.
    Although he gave me a dark look, Keeper Midgett was most kind to Teetoncey. He introduced her to all the surfmen, as if they'd never seen her before. They made over her, especially Jabez. Then Filene found a bottle of sarsaparilla but she declined it and true to himself, he didn't offer me any. Finally, he got his notebook with smudged pages on it, showing signs he'd thumbed it a hundred times; then that stub of pencil began moving jerkily across paper as if it had a brake on, swallowed in his thick fingers.
    Surprisingly, she didn't tell us much more than we already knew. But it was of intense knowledge to learn that the bark had blown its sails out one day past Norfolk, then drifted back, rudder shackled, at the mercy of the long rollers, until it foundered on Heron Head Shoal. Her papa had tried to swim to the beach, as Jabez had guessed, after her mama had been bashed on deck. We also learned that her papa, who was a landholder and a barrister, which is like a lawyer, had chartered that ship, paid fully for her voyage from New York to the Barbadoes and back. That took a pretty penny, I was guessing. So the Appletons had to be rich. There were some other details that would not be of interest to land-faring people—a sea flooded her steam boiler for the donkey engine, stopping the pumps.
    Speaking very officially, Filene said, "Of the thirteen bodies, we identified what we thought was your mama and papa. There was also a man I took to be the master by the way he was dressed..."
    Teetoncey said, "His name was Hawkins."
    Filene slowly wrote it down.
    "There was also a peg-legged man."
    Tee said, "The only name anyone called him was Ezra. He was the cook. A West Indian."
    Filene wrote it down and then asked, "Miss, did you happen to see the cargo manifest o' that ship? What was aboard her? I git the impression she was in ballast." Ballast was mainly empty but with enough rock aboard to keep her steady.
    Naturally, not being a sailor, Tee asked, "What is a manifest?"
    "A list o' cargo an' passengers. We found a pad of 'em off the
Empress
but they were blank. Didn't tell us anything but the ship's name." He dug around in a drawer of his rolltop desk and came up with some old water-stained manifests off other ships. He adjusted his specs on his nose for