The Last Ship (9 page)

“Was it any stronger earlier?” I asked.

“The first time, quite a bit stronger, Captain.”

“A false echo? Atmospheric aberration?”

“Always possible, sir. But it sounded different.”

Her whole being seemed calibrated to pick up the most minute nuances of sounds, detecting, separating, and classifying them across a wide and personal spectrum unknown to others, her world.

“Different?” I repeated.

“I know. Like those you heard, no code we know. But a different rhythm to it. The beat, even.”

“Let’s try some more.”

I stayed with her, another half hour it must have been, while she tried and tried again to raise something out there, if something there was. She sat back in her chair.

“Sorry to have got you up for nothing, Captain. It came,” she said sardonically, helplessly, “and now it has gone away. For nothing.”

“No. Nothing might be something sometime. Any chance at all, always awaken me.”

“Aye, sir.” She cast a wan smile. “Hope you can get back to your dreams.”

“They were pretty noisy anyhow. Walcott?”

“Sir?”

She had always seemed such a slight thing. But of late I felt I sensed something new, a certain frailty coming on, the beginnings of a wearing down from the endless listening hours, and a resolute struggle against it; something of the same concern I had had with a number of others in the crew, wondering, discussing the matter with the doc, whether it could be related to that terrible passage through the dark and the cold.

“I just want to say I’m mindful of what you’re doing.”

“Why, thank you, sir. Not at all.”

She had volunteered, as the best we had, to stand watch and watch, four on and four off, rather than the customary four and eight. It had become an obsession of hers to find, raise, something out there.

“If it ever gets too much, you’re to let me know, understood? I can’t have you vanishing away from lack of fresh air.”

“I
like
this air.” Her head moved to take in the tiny, etheric, portless kingdom where she reigned. For all her slightness she could have a firm, no-nonsense, territorial tone in her voice and I heard it now. “Besides, when it happens I want to be the one.”

“Yes. I know.”

“When. Those who say if. I know it’ll be when.”

“Of course. Always wake me.”

“Oh, I’ll do that, sir.”

I felt her soft smile, heard her voice. The latter was a thing of exceptional tenderness, a purring of barely audible sound. That way, I think, because listening the long hours was itself a quiet, soft matter, of great intensity and concentration, where loudness would have been an unwelcome, even perilous intruder.

“Good night, Walcott.”

But her earphones were back in place and she could not hear me. I stood a moment at the door looking at the small figure in her sailor dungarees, intent, waiting, everlastingly hunched over her wizard’s array of the most sophisticated electronic gear men had been able to devise. As I left I could hear her fingers resume their keying. Twenty-four hours, day and night, never stopping. Her or another operator.

I went topside, thoughtful. A party of four or five of the men was standing by the lifeline, in a pretense of being out for the night air but actually, both they and I knew, for something else. How swiftly word fled through a ship! I paused a moment, looking at them in the night shadows, at the mute question on their faces. I shook my head and went on by them.

I went back to my cabin, got down to my skivvies and into my bunk. If a man who follows the sea does not possess the unconditional ability to return to sleep after being jolted awake for various alarms, he will not for long follow it at all. He will crack and land on the beach. Especially a ship’s captain. I had known more than one, some of them friends and two classmates, to whom that had happened. I think the trick was that I had long since mastered the First Commandment for those who would go on ships. Avoid, as you would the greatest of perils from the sea herself, two things: Anger. Irritation. I had further mastered that other counsel of my missionary father’s: Worry is a sin. Or thought I had, though of late I had felt disturbances creeping insidiously into that skill, probing its defenses like the first building onset of heavy seas poised to strike a destroyer’s plunging bow. Then I was asleep, my last conscious thoughts being of the grassy plateau on the stranger island, where lay our hopes and which we would attack on the morrow, sitting high above the blue.

I
t was perhaps two hours before first light, that spectral moment when the curtain of opaque cloud which had hid the western part of the island chose to lift itself briefly and to provide me with a surprise and a riddle. Not a rumor of breeze solaced the stifling air; it lay like some palpable weight pressing down on ship and sea. For a few moments I remained in the dimness of the decks, watching the dark recumbent island across the lagoon. How like a sleeping beast it looked, the profound stillness of the night, the unstirring waters in which it lay, that southerly ridge giving it the aspect of a Sphinx of the sea, and like it too in its emanation of mystery. Then, with all abruptness, I felt a land breeze come up from it, seeming almost a gesture of amity, whispering across the water and touching our few grateful figures on the deck like a welcome fan. It was the first true semblance of wind we had felt since coming to this place. I stayed a moment, savoring it and idly examining the stars hanging limply in the heat-hazed western sky. As I watched, the cloud bank below them, given a gentle push by that errant breeze, began to move, the curtain parted, and I beheld on the island’s far side the dim phantasmic shape of what seemed a long spine of land, a surprisingly high, almost mountainous configuration, mountainous certainly for these latitudes. Then the clouds closed in again. It was like a fata morgana. Spirits, we are told, reside in the lofty places of the earth, on craggy heights. Of course it was the eeriness somehow of the night, the brooding island, the hush of the sea, the enigmatic cloudbank, impervious as a watertight door, the quick glimpse as of an apparition and a portent, given and taken away. Nonetheless, it was as though I were being presented a peek and a taunt: if you wish to know more, have a look. I decided on the spot where I would venture tomorrow.

But this in truth was no sudden decision: The spooky
coup d’oeil
but hastened the matter, set a date. From the first I had been aware that though our present side of the island appeared docile enough, it lay well open to the prevailing southeasterly winds, and that it was only a matter of time before high gales and even hurricanes would attack it, making it unsuitable to my other intention regarding the island and one I had zealously guarded even from intimation to my men. For that intention I would have to seek a lee shore. Whether the far side of the island provided as well certain other essentials also needed determination.

But this was for the morrow. This long day was fully spoken for: establishing, on the grassy plateau, the farming beachhead on which so much depended. I took one more look at our Sphinx—no answers, of course—then went on down to the wardroom for coffee.

 *  *  * 

If one were called upon to pick an existent body of men best equipped to begin life from nothing on an uninhabited piece of land, one would be hard pressed to come up with any superior to the ship’s company of a U.S. Navy destroyer. In the first place, the destroyer, for its own functioning and operation, carries a complement of basic skills difficult to surpass for versatility. The very designations given to the various Navy ratings attest to this fact. Shipfitter, machinist’s mate, molder, patternmaker, engineman, hospital corpsman; many others. In the second, from the very beginnings men who go to sea have come from every imaginable background. The notion that men who grow up by the sea constitute the principal source of those attracted to it as a livelihood is in error. The actual case is quite the opposite. It is the men who spend boyhood never having laid eyes there who are drawn, so many of them, to the idea of setting forth upon the great oceans. It is as though the call of the sea were heard most clearly not on the shores but on the farms and prairies of Iowa and Wyoming, far from any salt spray. So that in addition to the skills which they acquire in the Navy, sailors ofttimes bring with them other previous skills, not presently used but never forgotten. Of these, farming would be a prize example, and a numerous one. The great Navy fleets are full of farm boys; I never knew why so many turned up sailors and more often than not made very good ones, some of the best. It led one to wonder whether there existed some secret kinship between being a farmer and being a sailor.

Equal to, perhaps exceeding even the enormous asset of our diversity of skills, spanning virtually the entire spectrum needed to sustain men physically, we bring with us another capital.

It would appear that on coming of age a man is confronted with making one of two choices: the life of the imagination or the life of power. To these two I have sometimes felt that a third choice, so particularized is it, so discrete in virtually every respect, should be added: the life of the sea. I am not suggesting that this election is done necessarily in any directly conscious way, as, let us say, the way in which a religious takes vows. But I do feel the act to bear at least one similarity, in that, with so many sailors, it also proceeds from something deep and fundamental in them and against the grain of human life as practiced. Men who go to sea are different from men who stay ashore. To become a sailor, to choose the sea way, is more than anything else essentially to reject the values that drive so much of mankind. Sailors are almost entirely free of the smell of money, that aroma of avarice, that like some unpleasant body odor had come to afflict so much of human intercourse. The ritualized accumulation of possessions; that whole congeries of land barometers of “success” that goes under the general term of “material interests”: These are not of first importance to a true seaman. Were they, he would never take ship, for no vocation save possibly the priesthood runs in such an opposite direction from their fulfillments. Some think sailors innocent or even naive, like children, to leave behind such treasures, not comprehending that they leave behind also acquisitiveness, greed, covetousness, the manipulation for his own purposes one human being of another. Many see something almost unnatural in the choice: for example, in a man deliberately choosing to spend the great part of his life away from home. And they have a point. But it is one that itself marks sailors as men apart. And indeed there is a certain simplicity in naval sailors. But they are far from being naïve. In them resides a curious mixture of innocence and skepticism I have found nowhere else. They are remarkably discerning judges of character. Here it is impossible to fool them—no civilian, no shipmate, no captain can do so, and only a fool would attempt it. Seamen effortlessly see through pretense as through clear glass. It is a gift of the sea. They despise cant, hypocrisy, all insincerity, and can detect it in a moment. So precise is their perception in these matters that to this day I hardly understand why it should be so. It is as though in the act of rejecting certain normal or at least not infrequent human traits and motives for themselves, they had become experts at detecting them in others.

The replacement for land’s icons—since men must value something—appears to me, after being among sailors for eighteen years now, to be an uncomplicated belief in, the giving of high marks to, two qualities: forthrightness in human dealings; and coping, simple and direct, with whatever his world, that being life at sea, presents. In the sailor’s catechism, his articles of faith, this twain marks the man. The necessity for both are self-evident: the first in the fact that sailors live so closely together (a tiny example: Thievery is almost unknown on ships, looked upon as a capital offense, since there is not the slightest defense against it, and the rare occasion it occurs, however minor, can turn a ship upside down); the second in the inherent condition of a ship’s isolation. The sea is a faithless thing: one never knows what she may bring, either in her ever-changing temperaments or as a bearer on or under her of forces with hostile intent toward one. Even with no assist from the sea, the hazards a distant ship on the waters may fall upon, within herself or her company, are numberless. Dealing with these, it is entirely common for a ship to come up short in this, that, or the other. This ever-present circumstance of their lives, itself against the grain since most men desire to store up every imaginable aid for every conceivable contingency, seems perversely to be a thing that attracts men of a certain kind to the sea and makes of them good sailors, Navy men. By nature sailors cope; by long experience they are virtuosos of making do with what is at hand, and if nothing is, creating it. It was a talent I counted greatly on in the times ahead. The other imperative is one that is never given a thought, being taken for granted in a sailor as much as is the fact that he has eyes, arms, legs: One assumes the possession of courage in a Navy man. Even if one had the opposite intention, or temptation, that of cravenness, of cowardice, there is no way to avail oneself of it: one may turn tail and run off a battlefield—this has been known; when harm comes calling, one part of a ship is as hazardous as another; one may not run off a ship without landing in the sea, which is very deep, and the shore customarily far away.

A ship is like no other kind of life: set apart, dissevered—physically, spiritually, root and branch—from all other experiences. She is all alone; an extrinsic incarnation moving over great waters, a tiny principality, possessing of her own codes and worths having little kinship with those of the shore. Inherent, in her company, a comradeship of an order I take to be indigenous, idiosyncratic, to ships; members of a ship’s company being interlocked in a manner exceeding that even of families: from these one can also always walk away. On a ship only the same everlasting sea awaits. That mystic force: the feeling of shipmates for one another and for the ship that is, in sum entire, their home and life, their true country. Herein, it seems to me, lies the preeminent difference of all in the land and the sea way: that in the former, the graspings of men for their own interests are so often at the expense and even ill of others, almost, it would appear, necessarily so—if oneself is to rise, others must not; and that this process hardly exists on ships. Sailors are accustomed to thinking of the welfare of one’s shipmates equally with that of oneself.

None of this is meant to claim the aspects of angels for men who go to sea. Far from it. Treachery has walked many a ship’s decks; vileness; stupid men; worse, stupid and arrogant officers; worst of all, stupid and selfish captains. Indeed the sea would seem to divulge these attributes as fully as it does their opposites.

I have spoken at length about these matters, not because of their novelty (a thousand others, from Homer to Conrad, have said the same and legions of seamen know it in their blood), but in order to establish that nothing is more critical to our unknown future than this discrepant makeup of the body of men whom I lead into it. Their very nature, in character, in temperament, in everything that counts in the construction of that complex creature called a human being: Nothing sustains me more. There lies, however, another meaning in the same condition: the riddle which is not a riddle, the but seeming contradiction. By that nature also am I filled with my deepest foreboding; in the sense that, my best hope, it constitutes them as well able adversary—and a possibly dangerous one. Accustomed in the sea way to being ruled by captains with near sachemlike powers, they are paradoxically men of the most independent of minds. It is not by chance that man’s noblest deeds have occurred on the seas of the planet, far from any land, on the ships that course the great oceans; or that on these same ships, and for the identical reason, that of isolation beyond the reach of other forces, have been committed acts among man’s most profoundly evil. These antipodal directions for men to take seeming more potential in matters soon to be upon us.

 *  *  * 

First light was casting its glow, rose shading into carmine, over the island and across sky and waters, the annunciation of a tranquil day. I had sent upward of forty men chosen and indoctrinated by Gunner’s Mate Delaney ashore first. Now I stood at the top of the accommodation ladder with the deck watch and Delaney stood at the bottom as the sailors, each with infinite solicitude carrying a tray of seedlings in cut-down five-inch casings, filed by me and started gingerly down the ladder into the first of the boats, Coxswain Rachel Meyer standing amidships at the wheel. On the glassy water the boat bobbed hardly at all.

“Steady as you go,” I kept saying as the men passed by me. “Take an even strain.”

As the sailor reached the platform on the ladder’s bottom, Delaney received the tray from him, held it until the man had seated himself securely in the boat, then gave it carefully back. “Hold it with both hands, mate,” I heard him say in his Ozark twang. “Straight up. In your lap.”

Not until the entire boarding procedure had been completed but for one man did the gunner’s mate yell up to me. “Captain, we’re ready for another.”

Thus the first boat filled with men, each with a tray of seedlings. “Stand off, Coxswain,” I called down.

Meyer swung away smartly and the next boat came alongside. We filled three boats, including the farming gear—the grappling irons, the entrenching-tools, the lines—and then the flotilla got underway for the island lying half a league off.

Ever since we first raised the island that morning now less than a week back, both sea and lagoon had preserved an unruffled stillness. I was particularly glad that, carrying our fragile and priceless cargo, the same shiny patina of waters bore us this day. As we moved in, the quiescence of sea and island seemed to envelop us in a solitude in which even a voice was a jarring thing, the reigning peacefulness appearing to silence the men, leaving them with their thoughts; they sat very straight, exceptionally solemn, each grasping the tray in his lap with both hands. Delaney had put the fear of God in them about those seedlings. Our flotilla came on line abreast, so as not to have them troubled even by a boat’s wake, and at one-quarter speed. Beyond the bow I could see the advance party standing on the beach, watching us approach, behind them the island’s prideful green rising. Together, as if choreographed, the boats slid up gently out of the green-on-azure lagoon and onto the fine pinkish sand and Delaney hopped out, the first one. Again under the gunner’s mate’s nursing ministrations, the men first handed the seedlings out to the beach party, then each debarked himself and took back the tray that was his charge and responsibility. It was a wonder, the somber, tender ritual in which these sea-fashioned men moved, as if knowing all too well the preciousness of their lading. Then we off-loaded the farming gear.