The Last Ship (3 page)

I knew nothing of the land but I had begun to learn. The gunner’s mate looked around the shining expanse of grass, then at me.

“I’d say it would grow most anything. I mean, that grows in this latitude. What was that you were saying about the rains, Mr. Thurlow?”

“Most of the year about twenty minutes a day,” the navigator said. He was an officer almost feverishly committed not just to the stars which guide ships but to geography, seasons, weather, the movement of waters, to all the permutations of the earthly system, a Vesalius of the planet. “By the clock.”

“That explains,” Delaney said. “That and the springs, that creek. And those bees. Nothing is as smart as a bee.”

I could feel the men looking at one another. Sailors are slow to question a ship’s captain but I could sense theirs as clearly as if they had spoken them aloud. Was it to be here? Delaney picked up another handful of earth and let it run through his fingers.

“It’ll grow things, Captain,” he said. “But it’ll take a load of work. The hardest kind of work in the world, I mean.” He paused a beat. “Stoop labor.”

He looked at me rather intently as though, too delicate to put the matter directly, he was wondering whether I comprehended what was meant by those two words.

“I understand, Gunner,” and said it back myself to make clear that that at least I knew: “Stoop labor.”

“Aye, sir. It’ll be the only way here.” And once more like a couplet clap of somber bells: “Stoop labor.”

Gently embracing us on either side was the sound of water, one way the creek on its course through the ravine, the other the murmuring sea. The former sound certified the first indispensable gift we asked of the island. We walked through the grass and came to where the island ended. A gentle cliff, itself like an immense dune, dropped down to clean beaches.

A sound startled us. We turned to see a white burst of birds, cawing and wings flapping, take flight. Some kind of tern. They caught a wind current and headed out, seaward.

“Let’s have a look,” I said.

We climbed along the top of the dunes and found their nests, tucked in astutely under the protecting ridges. Not all the terns had taken wing at our approach. Three remained on guard duty, looking entirely stalwart and competent, fussing furiously, snapping out savagely to stab at us with their respectable beaks and keep us off their nests. So there were creatures approaching birth beneath them. Silva looked at me, eyes point-blank on mine, and then out to where the diminishing white shapes of the hunting terns could be seen flying in tight formation low above the blue.

“There are fish out there, Captain. The question is . . .”

Once Angus Silva had been a trawler fisherman, out of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was a born sailor, almost literally so, having been in either boats or ships since he was seven. He had the burnished skin and chiseled features of generations of Portuguese ancestors who had known no livelihood save the sea, and curly hair, thick, black as licorice. Into that face his Scotch mother had inserted eyes as blue as the sea beyond soundings and they gave it a curious effect, to me a somewhat saintly one, as though above some altar. Silva would have been rightly startled to hear that. He, too, now would be counted on much beyond his rating of boatswain’s mate second. I spoke to him.

“The question is,” I said, “in what abundance.”

“Aye, sir,” he said soberly.

“Tomorrow morning: take a boat out. Very early.” If I knew little of the land, I knew the sea and when fish ran. “We have to be certain, Silva. Very certain. Beyond any chance of mistake. You understand?”

“Aye, sir. I’ll be over them before first light, Captain. If they’re there.”

We stood a few moments more, all of us, unspeaking, with our thoughts. One of these, an alleviation to the unpredictability that was never absent, surely was a kind of quiet exultation at seeing these living things. The hummingbird, the bee, the terns: they bespoke the island, a thing that lived, breathed. Another, certainly for me and doubtless for all, was a somber taking the measure of that willowy grass, which we continued to study like appraisers. We came back from the nests and I stood on the heights looking out into the vastness of the ocean reach. Beside it everything else had always seemed small to me, almost insignificant. I never really felt free ashore and cared little for what went on there. But now it was the shore I had to turn to, the land which offered sustenance, if such were to be found at all, though the sea would have to provide its share. The water stretched, great and silent as a painting, far as the eye took you, as virgin as at the first creation save only for the ship, slightly darker, sitting in regal stillness between pale azures; as though too painted there and seeming but to enhance the infinite loneliness. The destroyer: I had always loved them. I thought how lucky I had been to spend nearly all of my Navy life in them and luckiest of all, or so I felt at the time, finally to be given this one to command. Then I thought of her company and how they had thus far borne up, under trials, under calamity and horrors to test the most valiant of men. A fierce resolve filled me: to shield them from all further harm; to bring them through. Then as I looked at the ship, the pain came as it had so often, a quick, throbbing thing, an overpowering sense of loss, of the men taken from her. I had learned to be prepared for it. I waited, confronting it as an old enemy by now, forcing it down, burying it as I had learned to do, knew I must, until its next sure resurrection. I faced back, from sea and ship, and stood looking at the plateau of grass: another thought, one I was not prepared for, struck me like a blow. Had we not lost them, the food which that field might, with immense work and even more immense luck, yield, together with what we had aboard, could not have been enough, whereas with present size of ship’s company we stood a chance. I stood shocked with a sense of shame that such a thought could occur to me.

Vertical sunshine now fell full on our plateau as the sun crossed over and brought a new awareness: the sun nourished; it would yet, on this latitude, add a sure fierceness to the struggle of parturition, of making this meadow yield to us what we wanted from it.

“Men, let’s go back to the ship,” I said.

We came down off the plateau and along the creek, through the trees and brush to the beach, and started along it toward the boat in the distance, sitting intrusively on the naked shoreline. The navigator and I walked a little behind the others, speaking in quiet tones.

“Well, Mr. Thurlow?”

“Favorable climate for it, you’d have to say, sir. Two rainy seasons of about two months apiece. November-December, May-June. Most days in the nonrainy season, just a twenty-minute shower as noted. Usually about thirteen hundred hours. We’ll probably have today’s before we get back.” He looked at his watch. “In fact, almost any moment.”

We stopped and studied the countenance of the island, trying to penetrate it with our minds, to break through its secretive demeanor. I looked north and then across it, where the low ledge of cumulus still preserved unrevealed the far western side. Were there people somewhere in there? I was on the verge of an hallucination. We had become accustomed to, experts in, hallucinations, in chimeras. I looked back to this side, where each way the land curved to form the U-lagoon. To the south the grassy plateau ended in the long ridge which sat like a sea lookout above the beach.

“That ridge,” Thurlow said thoughtfully. “Nothing else but just that. Reminds me a touch of the coastline down toward Carmel. The way it sits up there, I mean, rather cockylike, looking down at the sea. Were you ever in Carmel, Captain?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Thurlow. I was in Carmel.”

We went on. Sure enough Thurlow’s rain came up. Just out of nowhere. We stepped off the beach and stood under some trees and waited for it to finish. And sure enough, only about twenty minutes. A clean, straight fall, virtually soundless, gentle as dew. Then the sun was back out, just as though it had never happened. The island had taken a shower to refresh itself.

“Congratulations, Mr. Thurlow.”

He looked at his watch. We started back up the beach. “Actually I was seven minutes off. Highly irregular, what?” Lieutenant Thurlow was a sort of defrocked Rhodes Scholar, with the distinction, he once told me, not without pride, of being the only grantee ever to be sent down from Oxford. For what transgression he never said. At least he had been there long enough to get fluent Russian out of it, a linguistic talent that had served us well beginning with that astonishing arrangement with the Russian submarine at Gibraltar. It was his conceit, and form of humor, at times to speak in mock British tones, phrases. It was not a type of wit I would ordinarily have appreciated but in Thurlow even I sometimes found it amusing, I never knew why. Maybe it was just Thurlow himself I found amusing, most of the time. He had an undeniable charm: off and on he was by way of being my court jester. No one aboard had been so . . . well, almost blithe about our circumstance; no one seemingly so little changed by it. This acted to give him an edge, an advantage. He was a truly gifted navigator, and, as I have said, knew a great deal concerning the earth’s manifestations other than just stars. Within the limits of his one central interest, he was a sound thinker. If he had a fault, it may have been that when he ventured beyond that interest he sometimes thought too much. He understood things better than people. I had had little choice but to make him executive officer, the ship’s assigned exec having been on emergency leave when we launched in the Barents. Still I would much rather have him than not have him. He had the far-ranging mind, inventive, out there on the frontiers. Qualities we would need, need now and later.

“No problem about showers,” he was saying. “All hands can just strip and stand outside for twenty minutes.”

“I don’t think we can keep looking.” I stopped and picked up a handful of beach. It was uncommonly fine sand, in texture and tint like a woman’s face powder. I looked up to where, considerably down-beach from us now, high above the sea, stood the tableland of the silky grass. “Delaney seemed pretty sure it would give us, stand a good chance of giving us, what we need. Not easily. But nothing will be. Replenishment of stores.” Food, we both understood. For some reason, perhaps because it was the final barrier, one tried not to say the word. “We’re getting too close.” Nor did I mention fuel.

I spoke without looking at him.

“That rainy-season pattern. Planting times in that kind of situation?”

Ignorant as I was of such matters, I imagined I knew that one, just by common sense, but Thurlow would know more.

“Right after the close of one rainy season. The drill is: get them in and out before the next one arrives.”

“Do I understand you correctly? Another such calendar arrangement would not come again for five months?”

“That seems so if these calculations are accurate. And they have to be. My opinion, sir.”

There would be hard work, brutal as work could be, in that sun, of a kind most of the men had never been near, knew nothing whatever of. Stoop labor. The phrase was not hard enough to convey the ferocity of it, especially in these latitudes. The men to endure it. Then the land up there to come through, that dozen acres to harbor a fecundity we in truth could only guess at. The contents of Delaney’s shipboard greenhouse to take to their new home. The necessary luck, the gunner’s mate had educated me, wherever growing things are in venture . . . if all that came together. We needed to be right the first time. The reserves for fail-and-try-again were simply not there.

“So we would have to move fast. Begin right now, in fact?”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

He stopped there, waiting. There would be no further help from that quarter. But none was really expected. I knew it and he knew it. It was not his part to take responsibility, not this one. He had learned well the old Navy lesson: Never stick your neck out an inch further than is required, lest it get chopped off at the collarbone. Not applicable to ship’s captains, these not being chosen for their ability to avoid hard decisions.

“Then that would seem to settle it. We have no choice.”

We stood silent on the strand. He said nothing but gave me a look that contained a question as to whether there was more. So I offered a little of it. A lie would not do. But vagueness, given things as they were, was acceptable, even imperative. A captain was allowed that in the name of his men’s welfare. It was no time to get the other started as scuttlebutt. It could whip through ship’s company, and as the most disturbing of elements, just when all our powers, physical, mental, emotional, were spoken for by the plain of grass.

“For the time being,” I said. “For our immediate needs. Then we’ll just have to see.” I stopped there. Thurlow, or any other of ship’s company, would get no more for now.

I looked seaward. “And of course out there will have to deliver. If we can trust those birds. Well, we can trust Silva. We’ll know that part by tomorrow.”

I turned and scanned the land again. “It’s a pretty place,” I said finally. I seemed to want to conclude it with an inanity.

This he safely agreed with. “That it is, Captain. A pretty place. When will you tell the others?”

“Soon, Mr. Thurlow. Soon.”

“Oh, Captain?”

“Yes, Mr. Thurlow.”

“The women, sir. Do you plan to bring the women ashore or leave them aboard?”

I turned, facing him. I saw his knowledge that even as he said the words he had gone too far.

“Who said I was planning to bring anybody ashore, Mr. Thurlow?”

I could hear the hardness in my voice, and it must have been in my look as well for I saw the sudden fear in his eyes, fear of me. Well, that was all right, too. If ever exactitude in matters of discipline, than which nothing else can hold a ship together, were demanded, it was in this.

“All I meant, sir, was if just possibly here or somewhere else . . .”

“Mr. Thurlow.”

He stopped, I think truly aghast now that he had ventured there, in such forbidden waters. “Mr. Thurlow,” I said, and heard the cold edge. “When I decide something, and then when I decide it is time to tell you of my decision, I will do so. Do I make myself clear?”