Harlan Banks and the Pirates of dog Island

By R. W. Alexander

Harlan Banks, 14 almost 15, sees an ocean for the first time and likes it. Harlan, a child of the Great Depression, is 14 almost 15 with a knack for getting himself into dangerous situations. In a generation of short people, Harlan is tall. At five foot ten inches, he is destined to be taller than his father someday if he survives being a curious teenager.
Harlan calls himself slender, leaning toward skinny. His hair is the color of old corn stalks just beginning to turn golden brown in the hot southern sun. His hair is shaggy most of the time, worn long and is always looking as if it’s trying to escape. He has eyes the color of a Robin’s egg, which is weird because his brother and Dad and Mother have brown eyes.
It’s the summer of 1939 and Harlan is visiting a cousin at East Point, Florida during Hurricane season. A barrier island off Apalachicola Bay has become the home of a rowdy gang of motorcycle riders which are running rough shod over citizens of the mainland.
Add to that his tendency of becoming excited at the mention of sunken ships with holds of gold and silver, Harlan becomes entangled in another adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R. W. Alexander
• Release date: Aug 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311304667

R. W. Alexander

Bob Alexander, writing under the pen name of R. W. Alexander is a true son of the south. Raised in Alabama, he has traveled throughout the country picking up tidbits of this and that where ever he goes. His books featuring Harlan Banks are the results of having of hours of listening to stories of the Great Depression and letting his imagination run wild.

Book preview

The ship battered by wind and sea, lay hard aground 50 miles from the center of the great storm. Its paddle wheel shredded by sand as it scraped the bottom of the trench between the two small islands; its main mast filled with wind was the only thing that was keeping the ship afloat. The sea floor surrounding Dog Island was so shallow that no ship could expect to sail so close to this spit of land and survive.

The stricken ship was supposed to be in St. George Sound which was deeper and a direct route to the port of Carrabelle, which was only three and a half miles away. Most ships avoided the area they were in now because it was too shallow for their vessel. The men on board didn’t have much choice in the matter of direction though; a hurricane out of Bermuda was plotting their path.

This Confederate blockade runner had valiantly plowed through 20 foot waves that swept aboard the boat and all aboard had survived. Then they were blown off course by driving winds that never seemed to diminish. Driven by hurricane force gales, the smaller masts broke first, then the main sail snapped like a dry straw, leaving the ship at the mercy of the sea. White gulls that inhabited these islands were gone, fleeing the dangerous gusts for safer shelters.

Through the driving rain and wind, Captain’s boy, ten year old Felix Anderssen, saw ahead of him three other ships. There were three vessels that he couldn’t identify, which had already broken up and was carried to a little spit of land further inland.

Through the occasional sheets of lightning he saw an island that appeared off the lee side of the boat. He had no way of knowing the place was named Dog Island because this was the little isle where merchant ships often offloaded their deckhands, known as dogs, while the ship continued to port in nearby harbors.

Able-bodied sailors were hard for any ship to find and it was just as hard to keep them from running away at the first port-of-call, especially if they had been shanghaied in the first place. Life aboard a ship in 1864 was dangerous and extremely hard. Often seamen, tired of toiling in the blazing son, jumped ship as soon as they could escape. To prevent this, they were dumped at the nearest island close to their port of call.

This was done to keep them from running away as soon as they got to solid ground. The ship would continue to port with sailors that were trusted to remain with the ship. On the way back to open sea, the ship would pick up the rest of the crew.

This ship the boy was on would not make it to the little island. It was still two hundred yards from the wreckage of the others boats and in slightly deeper water, but not deep enough to keep its hull from digging into the sand like a steel anchor.

Suddenly, as if the winds of the past few hours were just a prelude for the violence to come, blasts of wind and rain hoisted the craft out of the sea and flung it, skipping over the angry waves as if it were a paper boat thrown in the water by a spiteful child. Abruptly it stopped skimming the surface as its anchor buried itself into the deeper waters of the St. George Trench.

The impact of the Bella Marie’s wooden hull with the sandy bottom of the Gulf of Mexico was as if it had been hit by an out-of-control locomotive. The ship was then hurled about beneath the sea by walls of water as they crashed onto the boat that was rapidly breaking apart! Everything seemed to splinter and crumble at once. The keel began sheering off the bottom of the ship, throwing the men that had managed to stay aboard, into the unforgiving darkness of the storm and sea.

Young Felix Anderssen held on longer than most of his doomed shipmates, most of which were flung into the murky waters off Dog Island, Florida and drowned. As black as the night and as furious as the storm, the men that didn’t die immediately when the ship sank, wandered around in the water until they succumbed to the gale. Than night many ships would be destroyed by the great hurricane. Guns from The Union Navy could be heard through the violence of the storm on the other side of St. George Island as they tracked another blockade runner, trying to get supplies to Confederate soldiers.

Captain’s boy Anderssen floundered in the salty water and between the flashes of lightning, began swimming toward the group of vessels he saw ahead of him that were breaking apart in the battering wind and surf. Within a matter of a few minutes he swam to where the water was only waist deep. He could stand and catch a glimpse of the destruction of the ships that lay before him and hope that sharks were full from having fed on all the dead bodies in the area.

All of the ships had been carrying cargo of one kind or another; one with a load of coal and two with lumber strapped to their decks. He could see timber breaking free of its restraints and being swept away by the sea or sent flying with the winds of the hurricane. As Captain’s boy he would normally know his own ship’s cargo, but this time he wasn’t told, just that it must be worth a lot because there were four armed guards who kept watch on the boxes in the hold.

Now, exhausted and half-drowned, he burst out of the water and lay heaving and panting on the first land he had stepped foot on since San Francisco Harbor. He was being blinded by driving rain and blowing sand. Now Felix Anderssen stumbled further onto the little island and from a fallen palm tree, he tore a leaf off the top and covered his eyes with it, to keep out the swirling sand. He lay down beside the fallen tree and used it as shelter from the ferocious storm.

The fury of the storm abated; sand and debris were blown over the young cast-away by the wind which still whipped and stung the unprotected sailor. He left the shelter of his tree and started walking across Dog Island.

Chapter 2

Harlan Banks sat on a hickory stump in his front yard and tried to scratch the itch in the cast on his right leg. The problem was that it kept moving. He eased the willow switch into the plaster mold around his leg and searched for the itch that wouldn’t stay in one place. His friend Danny Jenkins had cut it for him from a willow tree down at the creek. It was a good switch; one that would bend but not break when he shoved it down inside the piece of plaster and gauze that covered his leg from knee to his toes.

He would scratch the itch in one placed and then it would show up someplace else. The heat inside the cast was now as hot as the Alabama sun. When the itchiness crept again to a new location, he sighed and threw the twig on the ground. It was useless!

It had been almost two months since he had badly broken his right leg. His ribs were bruised to the point that they still ached when he took a deep breath, so he tried not to do that. He was amazed at how many times a day you breathe deeply without even realizing you’re doing so. He was now aware of that because every time he inhaled without preparing himself for the pain, he groaned just a little.

Harlan also decided that just sitting around doing nothing wasn’t such a bad thing. He had never in his young life had a chance to just goof off. Now relaxation was forced on him and he decided he sort of liked being a bum, not that he ever really had a chance to just loaf around the house.

This was probably going to be the last year of the Great Depression, if you listened to the politicians, though very few people in rural North Alabama had gotten that message. He was used to working and doing anything he could to make money. He now had to keep the family from spending money on his doctoring and recuperation. They didn’t have money to spend on his healing.

Here he was 14 years old, almost 15, and this was the first time he could recall that he was just sitting on a stump in his front yard, contemplating an itch. It was too bad that he had to almost die to get this kind of treatment. Since he was getting better, Pa and Ma both were trying to find something for him to do now, something that wouldn’t aggravate his injuries if they saw he had an idle moment and was bored again.

It had all begun with a book; the first real book he had ever read, if you didn’t count newspapers. From it he learned of the outlaw Jesse James and because he showed an interest in the thief, he ordered a book from the county library of news accounts of the man.

Harlan’s history teacher was so impressed with the fact that one of his students had the initiative to actually read a book when he wasn’t forced to do so, that he pronounced him an extraordinary student in front of the whole class. Besides embarrassing Harlan, the fascinating stories of the fugitive made him want to learn more about the bank robber.

All this led to Harlan’s deducing that maybe Jesse James had ventured onto the mountain behind his house. Jesse had possibly buried some of the loot from a robbery he had recently committed in another Alabama town farther west.

One minute Harlan was sitting on a rock in a little cave on a mountain behind his house, and the next he was falling down a vertical shaft on that ridge and broke his leg, as well as almost killing him. That’s why he was sitting on this stump in his front yard, bored out of his mind and wishing he were any place but here.

Here was a rickety, falling down house that used to be a storage shack that housed soy beans. It wasn’t much but it was all Pa could find to house his family in this depression. They were kicked out of their previous little house further down in the cove when the landlord announced that they had to leave because he wanted to use the house to hide a moonshine still that he wanted to build.

It was easier for the landlord to make a few dollars selling home-made whiskey than trying to locate a job where there were none to be found. It took a month of walking around two counties, but he finally found this shed that was just one big room. After Pa and Uncle Al built a wall down the middle, they had two bedrooms, one for Ma and Pa and one for the two boys. It wasn’t much but it kept the rain off their heads.

They had no electric lights because they were so far out in the sticks that power poles had yet to be installed. If there had been a way to get electricity out there on their dirt road, they couldn’t have afforded it anyway, they were just too poor. With Pa just recently finding a job in Muscle Shoals helping to build a canal, money was still very tight. He wondered if everyone in America was living like them.

It was now the middle of summer and he should have been splitting firewood to sell instead of sitting on this stump. His parents wouldn’t let him swing an ax for fear he would further injure his leg or his bruised ribs. He sold firewood last year for one dollar a cord and that wasn’t easy, but it made him enough money to buy new boots for the winter.

While cutting, splitting and then stacking the wood was hard work, he never really thought much about it. It was just something that he had to do. A cord was a stack that was four feet wide by eight feet long by four feet high.

A farmer was clearing some land to grow cotton and he made a deal with Harlan that he could have all the wood he wanted if he would just cut it up and haul it away; he had already felled the trees. Harlan couldn’t do anything with the stumps but the farmer said that was all right, he would take care of them himself. Harlan wished he could be swinging that ax right this minute. But wishing wouldn’t get him anything except more wanting. He could almost hear Ma quoting some scripture that had to do with work.

Harlan figured that if he didn’t make it to heaven, it certainly wouldn’t be Ma’s fault; she was constantly reminding him of transgressions with Biblical proof that if he didn’t straighten up, he was headed for hell.

Danny Jenkins, his school buddy and best friend walked up from his house a quarter of a mile away and stopped at the Banks’ mailbox, You want me to take your mail to the house? he yelled.

Harlan said yes with a wave of his hand and Danny came running down the little pathway from the mail box. Trotting up to Harlan, His friend handed him a letter addressed to his mother. Thanks, said Harlan. I’ll take it up to her in a little while.

It might be important, Harlan, Danny protested. Give it to me and when I have a spare minute, I’ll run this right on up to the house. Harlan said in reply as he took the letter from his friend.

With that, Danny grabbed the letter out of Harlan’s hand and was running up to the house before the boy could object. Harlan figured that Danny had an ulterior motive for visiting the house, but Harlan knew something that his friend did not; there were no oat meal cookies in the house. Even in the midst of the depression, Ma had always had enough ingredients to make a batch of cookies. This week though, the chickens hadn’t laid enough eggs for Sarah Banks to trade with the peddling man for a sack of flower.

Harlan and Danny were both blonde headed boys. Harlan was 14 years old, five feet ten inches tall and slender as a willow branch. He had blonde corn-silk hair that looked like it had been cut with a cattle comb and a pair of garden shears. Even though there were a lot of gaps in his haircut, it didn’t look too bad after a couple of weeks.

His eyes were almost golden, the color of an old yellow Tom cat that used to sneak around the house until it met up with a raccoon that didn’t like yellow cats. In the summer he usually wore a pair of blue overalls with no shirt. This year was no exception, although one pant leg was cut off above the cast. He still wore the white bandages around his ribs and that made it even hotter.

Danny Jenkins had been his best friend for a little over five years, from the time Danny and his mother moved into the vacant house just about a quarter of a mile from Harlan. This made him the only boy in this rural valley in northeast Alabama besides Harlan.

Since Danny was a happy-go lucky sort of kid, he had no trouble making friends with Harlan, his family and his dog Spot. Every day they snuck off behind the school building to play marbles beyond the edge of the school’s property.

Someone on the school board decided that shooting marbles and keeping the ones that were knocked out of the circle was gambling. That being the case, no one was to play the marble game on school property. The problem was solved by not shooting marbles on that institution’s grounds.

Spot was a hunting dog which had no spots on him anywhere. It looked like the animal could be a mix between a beagle and a bird dog. The strange thing about Spot was there wasn’t a spot of any color on him except the brown that coved his whole body. When he came to their front door as a puppy several years before, Harlan thought it would be funny to call him spot, and so the name stuck.

Now it seemed that Spot was only good for chasing rabbits and eating the few table scraps that were left over from the dinners that the family ate. There was one other thing that their pet was good at and that was being a living, breathing burglar alarm. Spot had a great nose and if the wind was blowing right he could smell someone a half-mile away. They didn’t have very many unannounced visitors.

Danny came back to where Harlan was sitting on his stump and mournfully said, Why didn’t you tell me your mother hadn’t made any of her cookies this week. If I had known that I wouldn’t have made that trip to the house!

Danny Jenkins had blond hair like Harlan but there is where the resemblance stopped. Where Harlan’s eyes were an off-gold, Danny’s were as blue as an April sky. Harlan was slim where Danny was heavier, but not enough to call him fat. Danny was almost as tall as his friend and had hair color almost the same. Danny’s hair was longer than Harlan’s and since it rarely saw a comb, it looked like it was always trying to escape.

While Danny was complaining about not having any cookies, Harlan saw his mother walking down the path to where he was sitting. She held a letter in her hand and handed it to Harlan as she moved a short log from the wood pile that was closer to her son. Read this letter Harlan, she said as she sat down. He looked at it and found it was addressed to his mother.

Dear Sarah, since your letter of last week, Steve and I have been thinking that our son Gary would love to