“…last boat off Ocracoke Point,” the old woman said. “My name is Lorraine Tate. My husband, Bud, was the harbormaster that night. He stayed behind on the dock to tie down what he could. He told me before he died, ‘If anybody ever laughs at Hollis, you call his family and you tell them about Pelican Run.’” I walked back into the fellowship hall, put the phone on speaker, and held it up so the whole choir could hear.
“There was one house at the end of Pelican Run Road,” Lorraine said. “A young woman lived there with a baby girl. She refused to leave. She said the storm would turn. Hollis had already made five crossings. On the sixth, he walked up to that house in water to his knees, picked the woman up over his shoulder while she screamed at him, and carried her and the baby onto the boat.”
My aunt Dolores had stopped laughing. Her hand was frozen at her necklace. Lorraine’s voice broke. “Bud watched that house go into the sound forty minutes later. Nothing left but the pilings. Hollis made him promise never to tell the woman how close it was. He said she’d been humiliated enough.”
Everybody in that hall knew the story from the other side. For thirty years, Aunt Dee had told it at every Thanksgiving: how her big brother dragged her out of her own home like a sack of feed, in front of the neighbors, and how she lost everything because she was “forced” to leave without packing. She never forgave him. She never knew there was nothing left to pack.
Dee turned toward my father. Her face was white. “You never told me it went in the water,” she whispered. My father shrugged on his cane. “You were already mad at me, Dee. Seemed easier to let you stay mad than to let you be scared.”
The baby girl from that night, my cousin Jenna, was sitting in the second row of the choir. She stood up slowly. Then Aunt Dee crossed the room and wrapped her arms around her brother for the first time since 1989. “My cat never carried anybody,” she said into his shoulder, and the whole hall laughed, but this time it was the right kind.
