“I cannot spare the truth from you,” Job told Black-beard, who was drinking cup after cup of rum and setting his beard on fire. “Although we had our beginnings in England long ago, we landed on this island by way of North Carolina.”
Job offered this blatant lie because he felt certain it would snag Blackbeard’s attention, since it was well known that the pirate was in collusion with Charles Eden, the governor of North Carolina. For much of Blackbeard’s nefarious career, he had navigated the shallow sounds and inlets of North Carolina with never a fear. Indeed, any plot hatched from other territories to defeat Blackbeard and his seadogs was always foiled by a letter from someone in North Carolina, much to the disgust of Virginia’s Governor Spottswood, who was neither friendly with Blackbeard nor inclined for the pirate to remain in business or alive.
“How can this be?” Blackbeard bellowed through curls of smoke, squinting one eye in a threatening manner that suggested Job best be telling “they God’s truth or I will cut ye asunder into many pieces and send ye back from whence ye came, which is hell, ye villain!”
“I am neither villain,” Job promised. “From whence I came is North Carolina–not Hell–where ye have many friends and relations. Yet it cannot be known that we on this fair island originally came from North Carolina and managed to escape with our very lives because there was a terrible drought that withered our crops and parched our very tongues and we were short of supplies, so we crowded into bateaus and made our way here, leaving no word except Crotoan carved into a fence post and Cro carved into a tree to give rise to the expectation that we had gone off to live with the Crotans.”
Blackbeard reminded Job that the name of the Crotan Indians was spelled C-R-O-T-A-N as opposed to C-R-O-T-O-A-N, to which Job replied, “Yay, that is God’s truth. But it was not I who carved the tree, but another not as well learned as I.”
“Are you implying,” I probed Fonny Boy, “that the Islanders descended from the Lost Colonists who vanished after Sir Walter Raleigh dropped them off on Roanoke Island? Well,” I was talking to myself now, “it is a fact that when Walter Raleigh set out for the New World on May 8, 1587, his plan was to find a location on the Chesapeake Bay, but he was forced by hurricanes to settle farther south on Roanoke Island. So the Lost Colonists never wanted to be in North Carolina to begin with. I guess if you’re going to relocate, you would certainly consider your original destination, and Tangier was described as a nice island, with the exception of there being no drinkable water.
“However,” I decided, “the chronology makes what Job told Blackbeard impossible, because the Lost Colonists were already lost by the time Smith headed to Virginia and supposedly discovered your island in 1608. So I am forced to dismiss this theory entirely. Furthermore, we can’t prove, at least not to my satisfaction, that when Smith landed on Tangier, he wasn’t really on Limbo Island, and all of you are therefore not Islanders but Limbonians.”
Fonny Boy had the vacant look again as he slouched in the dentist’s chair, unfocused and twitching a little. The chair scraped again from somewhere in the back of the clinic and then banged loudly as it crashed to the floor, apparently overturned by the dentist’s tethered dog, who may have been dreaming, too, or so I assumed at the time.
“Well, I’ve got to run along,” I told Fonny Boy. “I’ll see what else I can find out about your people and why only Job Wheeler and Blackbeard knew the truth or the lies about Tangier’s past. And also why, after Job died and Blackbeard eventually met his much-deserved violent end, those secrets and others remained hidden in the account book in the Spottswoods’ attic.”
Fonny Boy’s Rapid Eye Movement was picking up speed as he stared off in a trance, gripping the armrests of the dentist’s chair as if he were watching an intense adventure movie. It was pointless to communicate with him further, and I left the clinic. I waved down a golf-cart taxi and headed back to the airstrip as theories and speculations clashed in my head and made little sense because I am neither a historian nor a historical novelist, although I do know people who are. As I set off for home in the helicopter, staying below 3,500 feet to avoid restricted area R 4006, then heading due south to avoid restricted area R 6609, I realized it was only fair and responsible for me to continue my arduous historical investigation on how this country started and what has happened to it since.