The Last Ship (56 page)

Thus a strange and sealed ship, no hands in view except the few in the pilot house necessary to navigate the ship, day after day, night after night—the two barely distinguishable—we proceeded ghostlike through the miasmal gloom. By now no one needed to be persuaded as to the perils of radiation contamination, the nature of its affliction. Those poor souls on the beaches of Amalfi, those animals in the Kenya bush, had been our teachers. In the closed pilot house I would sometimes glance at Selmon standing at his repeater, which afforded readings of the outside; looking steadfastly at it. The only illumination that of it and the shining ovals of light cast by the binnacle, the engine-order telegraph, the gyrocompass. All of us become considerably thinner from reduced rations, there was something especially skeletal and disembodied about his naturally slight figure in that gloom. He was going virtually without sleep. Standing there now like some haggard hierophant before the altar, gazing reverentially into his hallowed reliquary; preparing, as some intermediary before a higher power, to cast from it his sacerdotal pronouncements, our sole chart and compass.

Sometimes then, myself, checking the gyrocompass, turning savagely, stepping out for the briefest look into the stillness, behind me the pilot house doors rolling shut on silent runners, and peering through the substance as though it might somehow be clearing. Standing on the bridge wing in the bone-chilling air, now to zero levels here five degrees south of the Equator, peering through the caliginous pall. The substance had a taste to it, there was something foul and corrosive in its breath—gritty, granular, a fetid, dirty thing, redolent with the taint of virulence, of death. Choking, stifling: One wanted terribly to cough but held back, fearing that if one started one would fall into uncontrollable spasms never to stop; the murky turmoil swirling back across the ship and around her mainmast, the swirls faintly illuminated by the red and green running lights shining from the ends of the bridge wings. Nothing visible. No sea, no sky, no horizon. It was as if we were back in the mists of time. We moved in an etheric stillness, a silence broken only by the soft swish of the slowed ship slicing through the waters into the tumult of vapors, which with instant avarice closed around us and held the ship in its embrace of feral, choking blackness, seeming a solid obstacle in her path so that the ship appeared to have to shove her way through it. It was as if we were approaching Hades’ shores, had entered and were navigating the Styx itself, now and then hearing the deep moan of the wind from unseen skies above us, whispering through the halyards like laments from the dead.

No, for the hands—the great majority of ship’s company—kept below decks, risks of a physical character which presented themselves during this long part of our passage while present were less of a threat than those of another kind. That greater risk came from a supernumerary who had boarded the
Nathan James
and who went by many names, came in many spectres, some of which were derangement, mental disorder, loss of reason, insanity.

 *  *  * 

I myself brought them regular reports from topside; had to tell them over and over again, their hopeful faces looking up at me, that there was no change, no lifting of that vicious gloom. Bear in mind that these were men accustomed to working in the pure ocean air. Now cooped up, sealed below decks, not permitted to venture topside. One became aware of a strain which seemed to draw our minds ever tighter as the days—all nights really—went on, the tension becoming something very like a chronic physical pain. Feeling, each of us, the mass of that unseen awful substance sitting down on the ship. I sensed some sinister emotion creeping into them; a feeling that we might never come out of it; that they were doomed forever in perpetual night to this existence, ending in—what? Men, even men of proven fortitude, have limits. It seemed an immense mystery. Despite all of Selmon’s explications, making it clear to any rational mind, we could never fully understand it. Oh, yes, intellect could understand it; it was clear enough. Heart could not. Daily, the strain became more visible in some . . . the mess deck gradually becoming a little hell of its own. We lost any clear idea of time, the night-day synonymy contributing to this. Sometimes the screeching of the wind heard through our steel walls sounding like a threnody, seeming the sounds and sighs of evil conjurations creeping in upon us like some malevolence aimed only and explicitly at us—who else could they be after? We seemed at times like men being driven slowly, inexorably, to sanity’s edge by this hideous force fastened upon us, in its unspeakable cruelty sucking our strength, our spirit, our very life’s blood—most of all, our hope.

Of course, I made frequent short talks to them; not prolonged things; sailors take inspiration from deeds, from comportment, more than from words; the best thing I could do for them was to suppress my own inner terrors, to present insofar as within my powers a steady countenance. I spoke honestly; maybe they gave me credit for that. Each time I descended from the bridge and that black world above into as dark a world—that other tense and insulated mental and emotional twilight world where they sat huddled, waiting—each time I came off that ladder, their faces looking up at me, the first times with hope, this gradually flickering out to become a kind of deadness of eyes as they awaited the same unchanging word from me . . . I could only report to them invariably that there was as yet no breach in conditions above. At first “everybody shall be safe” little speeches; knowing sailors too well to do too much of this; after a while giving up such phrases entirely, since they could not come from my true heart, something they would instantly know. Never presenting to them a face of despair—that equally not mirroring my feelings, not yet—but simply making my reports, giving them the straight dope. Their only word from the outside, these accounts, in that cavern they were as blind men; the only thing keeping men in that prison, their knowledge that topside lay death; quick death. Selmon’s sensor readings: figures of which I made certain we kept them meticulously informed; by now every hand aboard having intimate knowledge as to rad tolerances, a kind of specialty added on to whatever each sailor’s principal specialty happened to be.

As blind men: It was as though they had fallen into some bottomless black pit, the mess deck itself, in which there was no ladder to climb out of. Literally there was and some—overtaken suddenly with who could say what?—tried. I had foreseen this possibility and delegated Preston and Brewster, our two strongest hands—not to station themselves there obviously as guards, itself threatening as emphasizing our prisonlike aspect, but, one or the other, watch and watch, to keep always near that ladder in the event anyone should attempt escape. On one occasion, McPherson, a shipfitter first, himself a man of exceptional strength, moved steadily toward the ladder, Preston stepping athwart it.

“Out of my way, Boats.”

“You don’t want to go up there, mate.” The big boatswain’s mate spoke quietly.

The shipfitter started to move around Preston. The boatswain’s mate shifted his body in exact response to block him. Then it happened. McPherson stepped back and made a charge; a really thunderous charge, quite exactly like a bull at his tormentor in the ring, a bull which could stand no more, straight for Preston. As he reached him, the boatswain’s mate’s enormous hands came over and seized him, lifted his body clean, completely over his head—then simply dropped him to the deck, or rather lowered him, almost softly—not slamming him down—just dropping him. The shipfitter looked up at him; seemingly come to his senses.

“Just an idea, Boats.”

“Sure,” Preston said, yanking him up. “Anybody can have an idea, Mac. I have them all the time myself. Go have a cup of coffee.”

Exceptional coping, yes, valor of a kind, also shining through. Lieutenant Girard spent the greater part of her time in the mess deck, where most of ship’s company kept gathered, generally just quietly talking with one sailor or another. She was tough and she had a strong will—I had long been aware of those qualities, also of her sensibilities. But now this other side of her, this astonishing mansuetude. It was as though a fierce inner-kept obsession had seized her, a determination that we would beat that terrible force that was trying to take us under; putting in long brutal hours, seeming determined to pull this tottering man, that, through by her own sheer force of will, to will them through. Once I came upon her there, her arms around a man crying into her shoulder, her free hand slowly stroking his head until he quietened. One of those who came nearest to full collapse was Girard’s own assistant, probably the person on the ship she was closest to, Storekeeper Talley, who practically worshiped Girard. It was almost as if Girard brought her through, by her love and her strength, and a kind of ferocious insistence to Talley that by God she was going to make it because Girard said so. Her ingenuity, her resourcefulness, in coming up with whatever might remotely assist our struggle. Reading aloud: That was her suggestion. How little one would have imagined that something so simple would have helped so much! Girard bringing books from our library in an astonishing variety, great novelists, poets, simple adventure stories, to all of which the crew would equally listen as intently as children. Readers including herself, the Jesuit, Porterfield.

Speaking of the last-named, speaking of fortitude . . . of valor. Porterfield, as a helmsman. But also: of hymns and poker. Presently he and his guitar (sometimes accompanied by Gunner’s Mate Delaney on his fiddle; the gunner, by the way, being one of the more fortunate hands aboard in having a daily job to do: a plan he had brought to me almost immediately the murk began to form over us—the salvation of our precious storehouse of plants, by removing them from their exposure to outside air to a place deep in the ship, keeping up their lifeblood of photosynthesis through ultraviolet lamps borrowed from sick bay) . . . Porterfield on his guitar, I was saying, leading the men and women in every kind of song anyone had heard of that he could play—the helmsman having an astonishing repertory. A lot of hill songs, folk songs of all kind, but more than anything else hymns. Partly because Porterfield knew so many of them and consequently through long years on the ship so did the men. “How Firm a Foundation,” “In the Garden,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Rock of Ages.” They seemed to have less to do directly with religion as such than with the brotherhood of shipmates, the act of singing together seeming an expression of it, to me little short of a gallant one. At times, stepping into the mess deck, one had the impression there was a permanent choir practice in progress. Not a bad choir, the men’s and women’s voices, the singing soft, curiously soothing, healing; though not infrequently it was something like the rousing “Beulah Land” . . .

I’m living on the mountain,

underneath a cloudless sky,

I’m drinking at the fountain,

that never shall run dry;

O yes! I’m feasting on the manna

from a bountiful supply,

For I am dwelling in Beulah Land.

“I’ll be damned,” the Jesuit said once to me in my cabin when we were going over our morale readings. “I never knew singing those damn hymns would do so much good.”

The men seemed also to find the reading aloud of Scripture from time to time an assuasive thing, and Porterfield had a good reading voice with its soft accent of the hills. Old favorite passages they seemed to want most of all; you might step into the compartment to see his tall, lean figure standing there amid the mess tables, the men looking up at him, listening attentively from the Old Testament . . .

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake . . .

Or from the New . . .

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing . . .

In addition, with my permission, Porterfield brought into the open the poker game which, supposedly clandestinely but actually also with my permission, had long been operating in the remote confines of the steering gear room, leading to other simultaneous poker games as under Porterfield’s tutelage more and more of the crew became interested in this pastime. At these times, stepping into the mess deck, one had the impression one had wandered into a Las Vegas gambling hall. Mostly it was Porterfield himself. Just being around the tall, bone-lean helmsman seemed to act to quiet men; I don’t know why: some assurance he radiated that against all evidence all things would come right; in that respect he was like Girard. Maybe, in his case, those peaceful Kentuckian tones: People somehow felt safe when he was near, a sense of warmth, of security. I wanted to relieve him of his watch duties so that he could devote all his time to these matters. He wouldn’t have it.

“Captain, if I couldn’t take my turn at the wheel, I wouldn’t be good at anything else. I’d probably go around the bend myself.”

Boxing bouts even: the Jesuit taking on his various old sparring partners, and any new ones who cared to try—seeming a curiously efficacious outlet for who knows what emotions.

Even so, these measures were but anodyne; an emollience standing thinly between us and the depths. I felt the men sinking deeper into themselves. Some appeared simply dumbfounded by it all. Sometimes terror in their eyes. Faces liquescent with pain, with incomprehension. Some lapsing into torpor, a numbness of spirit; the first symptoms of aphasia, catatonia, beginning to attack some. A sense of holding back an immense pressure. Occasionally a man stupefied with fear, sobbing convulsively, suddenly breaking out into indecipherable noises—once I had to strike one of them across the face, yes, an officer, young Ensign Woodward, and with the men watching—I had no choice—it would have been dangerous to let him go on in front of them. They had the decency to look away. Once had to shake a woman sailor—Thornberg—by the shoulders, to stop her crying, rising suddenly, approaching hysteria, her collapsing then into my arms, where I held her until the sobbing faded away. One would come upon a man just sitting in profound reflection, as if trying to figure it all out; another in a deep corner of the crew’s compartment, huddled unto himself, in a kind of white solitude, head bowed, muttering something incomprehensible, low incantations; men knotted over a mess table in attitudes of prayer; men with expressions of vacancy in their faces, sepulchral stares, yet with wary eyes, as if something were about to spring on them; faces in a rictus of agony; plaintive sounds issuing, emanations of repressed anguish, of ruthless misery, unnamable fears; a man counting his rosary beads over and over; now and then a man quietly crying; one’s unintentional glance would trip on a man caught in the motions of nervous trembling, on his face the shock of terror, a touch of lunacy—one would look quickly away—somehow one knew by some kind instinct whether to do that or to go sit by him; a face twitching with the strain, both trembling hands used to raise a cup of coffee to the lips—in a pitiable attempt at some countervailing to these onslaughts, I had put the coffee ration back to two cups daily. Sometimes—and I came to consider this favorable—a bluejacket would simply go into a trance, become oblivious to anything and everything; favorable because it served as a kind of anesthesia to bring him through. We did what we could as one shipmate or another became afflicted. Talking to him if that seemed to help or just sitting close by; myself dropping into a seat alongside one of these, murmuring into his ear something whether useless or helpful I could scarce tell. We helped, or tried to help, yes, I would say with great tenderness helped one another, whichever needed help most at any given moment it came about as we, gathered around him, her, brought that shipmate through, coaxed, willed him through. Men stayed in the mess deck, seeming to huddle close to one another, afraid to go to their bunks, afraid to be alone, finally falling asleep in their emotional exhaustion, heads on mess tables. Not constant these various manifestations. Sometimes whole days of peace, of no one breaking out; but then always their sure recrudescence. Always one felt also the great inner fight underway; men and women who had been through too much to yield now, their immense will to live; holding on to mere existence with clawing hands.