Emancipation Day (2 page)

“You got a drink in one of them things?” William Henry said to Harlan when the towel had cooled and been unwrapped from his face and the bottles of variously coloured lotions and ointments appeared in front of him, twinned in the mirror. He looked at the clock on the wall above the bathroom door. Going on eleven. A good time to start. It wasn’t first thing in the morning. He’d resisted long enough to convince himself that he had the urge under control. He had eaten bacon and eggs and toast and coffee at breakfast time or a little after, and kept it down. He had talked to Josie about the house in Walkerville he and Benny and Jackson were working on, tearing down a plaster wall. Thirsty work. Lots of people drank at noon, and it was almost noon now. “I know you keep some somewhere. Where is it?”

“I got some bay rum,” Harlan said, unpinning the bib from William Henry’s neck and stepping on the pedal that lowered the chair with a pneumatic sigh of relief.

A collar of tissue paper remained around William Henry’s neck, and he tore it off and leaned towards the mirror. Where had Harlan put his damned eyeglasses? They had speckles of paint on them, he’d forgotten to clean them after work yesterday. Was it yesterday? The day before?

“Just a tot, then,” he said. “Just a bracer.”

Harlan laughed. It was their old joke. “If you’re going to drink aftershave, Will, I got a better brand in my cupboard.”

Harlan opened the cupboard above the sink and took out a
bottle of Kentucky bourbon and two shot glasses. Their father was from Kentucky, it was a connection to him. Everything they did meant something.

“Here,” he said, pouring, “slap some of this on your face.”

“You’re a good man, Harlan.”

“To sitting in this chair,” Harlan said, raising his glass. “To Daddy.”

“To Daddy,” William Henry said, standing up.

Nothing ever tasted so good as the first drink of the day.

JACK

T
heir orders came at six in the morning. Full kit, battle dress, look sharp. Jack stuffed everything into his kitbag, made his cot and dragged his duffle and trombone down to the parade square along with the forty other members of the Navy Band, not knowing what was up. It was dark and wet, as usual, snowing and raining at the same time, a bitter wind coming in off the Atlantic. Greatcoats and oilskins over their Mae Wests. The hundred and seventy-six crewmen they were to accompany to their ship fell in behind the band, waiting to be paraded down Prince of Wales to the St. John’s dockyard. Black drizzle made the faint light leaking from behind the blackout curtains in the admin buildings surrounding the
parade square look like marker buoys in fog, more a warning than a comfort.

His head was still pounding from the night before. He needed a smoke. He’d been playing a dance at the K of C, the Knights of Columbus Hall in St. John’s, a few of the guys from the Navy Band, him on drums and trombone, Frank Sterling on trumpet and cornet, Rory Johnston on piano, Ken Bradley on bass, others who came and went. They called themselves the King’s Men only they said it fast,
Kingsmen
. They were supposed to finish at twenty-three hundred, but they stayed on, playing for the drunks and the diehards. They did it for fun, mostly, but there were girls there, some of them V-girls. V-girls also did it for fun. There were some nice girls, like Vivian, who’d brought him sandwiches during the break one night and, the next week, let him walk her home. Sweet kid, didn’t have a clue. He’d asked her out last week and she’d gone, too, no questions asked, but she was a real tease. Her eyes tell me yes, yes, yes, but her knees tell me no, no, no. Still, she might get him places he couldn’t go by himself. He’d call her when he got back to barracks. He didn’t know what music did for the other guys, maybe it helped with the boredom or cut through the fear, but for him it meant fitting in, belonging, five guys sneaking up on the enemy under cover of sound. And it wasn’t all pack up your troubles, either, it was Goodman and Miller and the Dorseys, it was “Moonlight Serenade” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” Frank was a whiz on the cornet, they were all good. All good together.

Across the square a driver and his mate were tossing kitbags and horn cases into a covered truck, water running off their helmets.

“What’s the deal?” Jack asked Frank.

“Fucked if I know.”

“I need a smoke.”

“I need a drink,” someone else chimed in. Gutterson.

“I need an Aspirin.” Frank.

“I need a girl.” Johnston.

“I got a girl,” said Jack, “in Kalamazoo.” Laughter.

He’d always been quick with the jokes. He fronted the King’s Men because he could tell a joke and knew the lyrics to all the songs. Got people on their feet. Give him the first bar and he’d sing the whole song, he loved it, the looks on the faces of the dancers when the music got to them. When a person is singing he looks you straight in the eye, ever notice that? He wasn’t himself anymore when he was a frontman, he was someone else, like an actor, someone with no past outside the song. He sang with his heart, like he was proposing to his best girl, like he was talking his way into barracks after lights-out. Honest, Corp, I’ve grown accustomed to your face. That always got a laugh. Like last night, when they finally rolled out of the K of C, “
Rolling home (dead drunk)
,” they didn’t know they were going to be called up at six a.m. Get a few pints in us and we’re all linked arms and swaggering down the sidewalk, holding each other up, “
Happy is the day when a sailor gets his pay, as we go rolling rolling home (dead drunk!)
.” That
was another reason he chose the Navy, for the songs. Sea songs older than hymns, old as the sea itself. Name one goddamned Army song, go ahead. There were Air Force songs,
Off we go, into the wild blue yonder
, but what was wilder or bluer than the sea? Not the sky, not here in Newfoundland, it wasn’t, it might be wild but it sure wasn’t blue. Battleship grey when it wasn’t pitch black.

Well, he wasn’t rolling home now, he was freezing his balls off on a parade square in HMCS
Avalon
in St. John’s bloody Newfoundland with the rest of the Navy Band, and these poor devils waiting behind them to be marched down to their ship. Crew change for one of the destroyer escorts, he guessed. They did this every day, two sometimes three times a day, not usually this early, not usually in the dark, but always this many. In the four months he’d been here, the band must have sent ten thousand men off on convoy duty. A lot of them never came back. He no longer looked at their faces. The band played something rousing to lift the men’s spirits as they marched them down Prince of Wales, past the warehouses and the few flag-waving citizens who still showed up, over to the Navy docks, saw them onto their ships to their likely deaths, then turned around and marched themselves back to headquarters where the next condemned crew was waiting for the same treatment.

When the Chief finally marched them out, it was close to oh seven hundred, still too dark to see the music on their lyres. They played from memory, Sousa’s “Salvation Army,” which he’d been playing since Sea Cadets. Rain beaded on his horn and
froze, collected on his cap and ran down his neck. Thank God he could play the trombone with gloves on, and that he’d coated it with cold cream to keep the rain off the brass. A handful of locals maybe walking to work stopped to wave or shout a word of encouragement. School kids ran along the sidewalk beside them, throwing pebbles at the bass drum.

When they reached the Navy docks, something broke in the routine. Instead of splitting them into two parallel lines so the band could play as the men continued up and onto the ship, the Chief marched the band straight up the gangway and onto the foredeck, where they looked about them like a bunch of cats that had just been dumped out of a sack. HMCS
Assiniboine
. Destroyer escort, like he’d thought, but what the fuck were they doing on it? The band was formed into six lines and stood at ease, feet twelve inches apart, instruments ready at their sides.

“We’re going to sea,” someone behind him said quietly. Sounded like Seddidge.

“No we’re not,” Frank said. “Some bigwig just wants a show.”

“We are.”

“We can’t be,” Jack said.

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because that’s why I joined the band, so I wouldn’t have to go to sea.”

There were sniggers among the ranks, but Jack was serious. The Chief turned and glared. A low rumbling sound, like kettle drums tuned to E, and tremors coming up from the metal deck
through the soles of their boots. The ship’s engines had started; the deck crew was getting ready to cast off. Jesus, they hadn’t prepared him for active duty. A few fire drills in the Armouries in Toronto, a lecture on chain of command. If a gunnery rating tells you to get out of the fucking way, get out of the fucking way. If a ranking officer tells you to get out of the fucking way, jump overboard. Officers wore caps with scrambled egg on their visors: salute it. The Chief was a non-commissioned officer, promoted from the ranks, one of the boys. Don’t salute him and don’t call him sir. Ordinary seamen were nothing, useful for holding hoses and clearing clogged scuppers. Four ways you could be killed in the Navy: aircraft from above, U-boat from below, destroyer from in front, cowardice from within. What about stupidity? Stupidity was cowardice. Ignorance, ditto. And how many ways to make it out alive? One: luck. And if you were a bandsman standing on the deck of a ship in wartime in the snow in the dark holding a frozen trombone, you were one unlucky son of a bitch.

Except it wasn’t completely dark anymore. Jack could see across the
Assiniboine
’s foredeck to the harbour, where a dozen other ships lay at anchor. Two huge grey hulks crawling with ants: troopships. Some of the names on the warships he could make out through the rain. HMCS
Shawinigan
, corvette. HMCS
Esquimalt
, HMCS
Clayoquot
, minesweepers. Half a dozen merchant vessels: M/V
Bay D’Espoir
. M/V
Connaught
. Fucking escort duty, then. Maybe they’d be escorting the merchantmen to Halifax, two days each way, or possibly to New York, a week.
They’d lost three ships to U-boats on that run last month. You didn’t notice the empty bunks in the barracks anymore, except you did. Above the ships’ radar antennas the black headland of Cape Spear, a thin line of white froth barely swelling at its base, shielded them from the open sea. Beyond that was nothing, water, black and cold and unimaginably deep, with lots of corpses in uniform at the bottom of it.

When the ship cleared the harbour gates the Chief dismissed them and the boson piped them below to the mess deck. Their kitbags were already there, neatly stowed beside their instrument cases and a pile of curious-looking cloth batons that turned out to be rolled-up hammocks. Twelve men to a mess, one mess for each of the trades: signalmen, firemen, gunnery mates, stokers. Jack, Frank and some of the other bandsmen fell in with the gunnery mates. They slung their micks over steam pipes, vent housings, odd hooks, wherever they could find a billet. Below them, metal tables and lockers were bolted to the decks and the bulkheads. Nothing was made of wood. When a torpedo struck, one of the gunnery mates told them, wood splintered and flew through the air, killing more ratings than compression or drowning. Metal just buckled and melted. “Fucking slave ship,” Frank muttered. Jack laughed, but his hands were shaking and they’d barely left port. He looked for a porthole but there wasn’t one, they must be below the waterline, a half inch of steel between them and oblivion. Knowing he was underwater made him feel as though he were drowning. Over the intercom they were ordered to bring their
instruments to the forward hold, D Deck, to be stowed under rope netting until needed. Soft, red light in the passageways, couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. “Blacker than Toby’s arse down here,” Jack said. You had to claw your way back up the gangway to C Deck for chow. By then, the ship was well underway. The tremor he’d felt earlier became a full-fledged shudder as they listed slightly into the open sea, the engines rising to maybe F-sharp. Standing in line for chow he could see the flat, grey, foam-flecked ocean and smell fresh air through an open scuttle. He took in huge draughts of it, as though he’d been holding his breath against a smell. A dozen merchant ships through one scuttle, another dozen through the next. A huge convoy.

Frank came back from a reconnaissance mission among the regular sailors ahead of them in line.

“We’re not going to Halifax,” he said. “We’re on the Derry Run, escort duty across the North Atlantic. Fifty ships. We hand the merchantmen over to the British at the MOMP, the Mid-Ocean Meeting Point, somewhere off Iceland. Then it’s R and R,” he said, grinning.

“Oh good, rest and relaxation.”

“No, refuel and return. Three fucking weeks at sea. Maybe longer.”

Jack’s stomach tightened and his ears buzzed. “Why us? We’re not combat, we’re bandsmen.”

“They send us to sea every six months to dry us out.”

“What, no rum on board?”

“I didn’t pack any, did you?”

“Fucking hell.”

The crew worked four-hour watches: the first from oh eight hundred to twelve hundred hours; the middle watch, twelve to sixteen hundred; and the morning watch, sixteen to twenty hundred, then the first again. A day was four hours on, eight hours off, then four on and eight off. Everything done by bells. Goddamned bells rang every half-hour: one bell, two bells, up to eight bells, change of watch. Jack pulled the twelve-to-sixteen-hundred and midnight-to-oh-four-hundred: hell’s bells. He spent his first noon watch on the boat deck, manning Fire Station H, portside boat deck, with petty officer second-class Spoonerman or Spoonerson, and two other ordinary seamen, Trilling and Sinclair, neither of them bandsmen. Salt water freezing to the rails. He could already feel the beginnings of seasickness, the slight dizziness, the weakness in the knees. He’d sometimes felt light-headed on the Detroit ferry, but that trip lasted only half an hour, and he’d put it down mostly to booze. This was something else. This went deeper.