The Last Ship (14 page)

“Why?” I responded.

She gave a mild shrug and smiled. “Something to help keep them occupied. Like the other courses. To acquire a skill.”

She had made it sound so routine, her manner altogether offhand. I could simply think of no reasonable objection I could make, and so, I believe intelligently, made none. I shrugged myself.

“Of course. Why not? We are already gatherers.” I was referring to our scavenging along the shorelines of our course for items that might be useful to our future: wheelbarrows and the like. “We could become hunters. It may come in handy, who can tell?”

“It may,” she said with the same mildness, and a smile. “I’d like to make the instruction in both the .45 and the M-16. If the captain has no objection.”

She said the last as if there could not possibly be any.

“The captain has no objection,” I said.

It—the request, all of it—had seemed at the time altogether innocent. And had seemed so ever since. The astonishing, unexpected—the troubling thing was not the fact of the matter itself but that it should reappear now in my memory, for no discernible reason, nothing I could put my finger on. Perhaps—the mind’s linkages forever a source of mystery—it was simply the wry thought that from teaching women how to use M-16’s she had graduated to being in direct charge of our entire weaponry, from ASROCs to Tomahawks, “in addition to her other duties,” in the Navy phrase; being now combat systems officer, my so designating her as the logical choice after the previous occupant had led his company of men off the ship; though in our present circumstances the position was largely nominal—the last thing we were likely to do was send off more missiles—except for that one aspect of her now holding the key necessary, in addition to my own, to launch the missiles.

From this excursion, whether detour or not I had no idea, my mind returned to course.

A Navy ship’s company rarely confronts its captain with something, and if it ever does, it will be too late. He is alert for half-coded signals: a look, a word, even a gesture, the merest glance, will do it, these things constituting a kind of language of the sea. In that manner I had of late felt, sensed, as a sure fact, that muted perturbation aboard, an amorphous but unmistakable disturbing element, without being in any way certain as to its source. I had thought initially that it could only have been at the awaited decision in respect to the island, this something to be expected. Then it occurred to me as I sat waiting for her that this vague disquietude could have another origin. Forbidden as the subject was, perhaps, I thought, the time had come for a kind of reconnaissance on the perimeters of it, making careful soundings as I went, prepared to stop at the first sign of shallows. This surely could not be harmful; perhaps would give me a helpful signal. Indeed I felt I had no other choice but to proceed.

I heard the knock on my cabin door and glanced at the bell clock. Prompt to the second.

Out the port I could see the island and the green rising from it. The ship at anchor lay in perfect stillness, under wind-free skies; ship, sea, island seeming to stand in a harmonious and fraternal accord, a kind of understanding among themselves, in the peacefulness that held to all horizons.

 *  *  * 

We never talked about it anymore. I was therefore instantly alerted when she brought it up.

“The men,” she said. “They wonder what happened to them.”

It was not even necessary to identify the “them.” I sensed an unaccustomed hesitancy in her, whose method it was never to hold back, especially bad news.

“Come on, Lieutenant,” I said, rather sharply. “Let’s have it.”

“Some wish now they’d gone in the boats, with the others.”

“With the mutineers?” I said harshly.

“They think of them more as shipmates.”

“Don’t quibble over words with me, Miss Girard.”

“Sorry, sir. They think they may have made it home.” She waited a moment, looked directly at me, a curious look. “Do you think they could have? In those open boats? Across five thousand miles of ocean?”

“Oh, yes
.
I think they could have made it home all right,” I said, a certain detached note in my voice. “There were plenty of good seamen in those boats. Starting with Chatham. Chief Quartermaster Hewlitt, a first-class navigator. Yes, I think they could have made it home.”

Again I thought she hesitated. “You don’t have any doubts? I mean about conditions back there?”

The question astonished me. “Jesus Christ, Lieutenant. We went over that a thousand times. Our own failures to raise anything that would have affected the decision. Selmon’s projections. The Russian sub commander. Even that dead French radioman. The evidence couldn’t have been more conclusive. No one agreed with it more than yourself. What the hell’s happening here? Have you just received a telegram from back there? New information you’ve discovered and for some reason arc keeping to yourself?”

She smiled sardonically. “Negative to both, sir. No, I know the facts,” she said more firmly. “I was just trying to convey the thinking of the men. Actually we’re talking about a very few hands. No reason for concern, I’d say, sir. I thought it my duty to mention it.”

“And so it was.” I settled back a bit, seemed almost to speak more to myself than to her. “They were my shipmates, too.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Not a day passes that I don’t wonder what happened to them. And hope they made it, are alive somewhere . . .”

My voice trailed off into the impossibility of it.

“Except for Lieutenant Commander Chatham. Whatever he got he deserved, and a few hells left over.”

I waited a bit, spoke then, quietly, reflectively, yet looking at her with a keen directness she would at once understand.

“I blame myself for what happened. If I’d acted earlier . . . maybe would have stopped it. So something bothers me about this conversation. You’re not suggesting there’s enough discontent among the men to cause something like that again? If so, spit it out, Lieutenant.”

She waited a moment, the words getting through to her all right, careful to frame her response.

“I would, sir. I think you know that. It’s not anything like that, Captain. This is just talk.”

“The other started in
talk.
I want to be kept minutely informed. Is that clear?”

“As always, sir,” she said, a slight rebuke in her voice, as if she had ever done any other.

“Now let’s leave it. What else?”

“Food inventories,” she said promptly. “We’re beating the schedule a little, Captain. We have the fish to thank. Aren’t the men looking better though!”

It was good beyond measure to have such a rare thing happening: something to be actually increasing—we were freezing surplus fish—where all else was in slow, inexorable diminution. Especially those stores: Anyone who has been through it knows that it is not ideals but food that constitutes the thin blue line standing between men and horror. I had seen hunger, real hunger, once in my life and what it did—I mean did morally—to its victims was seared in my memory in a resolve that above all else this should not happen to my ship’s company. I could feel the satisfaction of both of us.

“Any complaints? Of the palate, I mean. From so much of it.”

“None I know of.” Lieutenant Girard spoke now as the ship’s morale officer. “It’s very good fish. Then, of course, there’s Chief Palatti, who works wonders. I haven’t heard, Talley hasn’t heard any grousing beyond the normal. So far anyhow.”

Where Girard’s morale duties were concerned, her enlisted assistant served, I had always felt certain, essentially as the lieutenant’s spy among the crew. I never inquired about this but somehow knew it, and anyhow it was a favorable thing. I seemed now to want to dwell a bit on the unusual favorable turn in our supplies, to take some needful sustenance and comfort from the fact, before moving on to perhaps less promising matters. Also, the truth was, I seemed increasingly in these sessions to desire to keep Lieutenant Girard on a little longer. I felt a pleasure in her company, something that had surprised and to an extent perplexed me, an intellectual, almost esthetic thing—the kind of satisfaction in another human being that can be difficult for a ship’s captain to come by, with the necessary barriers standing sternly between him and ship’s company, so that when available, he tends to seek it out, and to treasure it. Heedful always of the inherent danger: favoritism as between a captain and any individual officer is one of the foremost of that multitude of pitfalls lying constantly in wait for a ship’s captain, perceived and resented quickly by all officers not thus favored, to be avoided at all costs. Nevertheless, bearing that proscribed thing constantly in mind, I could proceed within limits. Even a ship’s captain must relax, come down now and then and be a normal human being for a bit, a matter almost of mental balance.

“I’m not surprised. Once when I was sixteen, I put in a summer as a dragger fisherman off Cape Cod, out of a place called Wellfleet, Massachusetts.”

“Did you?” she said with a bright air, her eyes lighting up, accommodating herself to her captain’s patent desire for a few moments off all problems. “I went to school in Massachusetts. But I always thought you were an inlander.”

“So I was. But I had an uncle up there. Anyhow I learned that it’s true. I had never had it before—I mean literally never—but I learned. A fish caught the day you ate it: Well, there’s no better food I know of a man can have.”

She looked out the port at the blue, gleaming in the early morning light, that sensuous amalgam of scents, the sea and island vegetation, reaching fragrantly into the cabin.

“So we both were in Massachusetts,” she said, turning back to me, as though that were some newly discovered fact of life.

Her voice had a lightness of inflection, soprano but soft in modulation. Her eyes as she talked bore a remarkable aliveness, a fine luster. Of course I had come to realize long since that that controlled demeanor was an important part of her tactic, of dealing with the world. Behind it a surely potent arsenal of strategem and schemery, held in reserve but quite readily available for skillful use if occasion for its application should arise; to me it issued from there as clear as some pennant of warning hoisted on a ship’s halyards. I liked the quality, so long as it was on my side, or subject to my control and orders. I should not want it arrayed against me.

“Hardly at the same time,” I said. “My time would have been, oh, about three years before you were born.” I unexplainably felt a desire, right at that moment, to remind her of our considerable age difference. “I haven’t had occasion to check your fitness reports and service record just lately, with all their facts and opinions about you, but I expect it would figure out at about that.”

Eighteen years, I thought. The ascending sun sent a shimmering path of white across the lagoon and lancing softly into the cabin.

“Facts and opinions,” she said, and a sort of mauve smile passed across her face. “Well, to save you the trouble of looking it up, sir, it’s twenty-seven.”

Fifteen years, I thought, and for some reason felt better.

“Well, I hadn’t really planned to look it up.”

Having started, my mind fled back across the years and fetched up at the precise moment: when I heard for the first time that low majestic roar like none other, that voice of deep waters. A boy, a long way from home, farther still from what life had thus far presented him—though that had been only a good thing, a thing he liked, still treasured: the Indian country of Oklahoma, his list of important matters measured in cow ponies, in his only friends the Cherokee children of his father’s parishioners (his best friend, Ralph Walkingstick, later going to Dartmouth while he went to Annapolis, both seeming so infinitely far away worlds, both, unimaginably different from ours); now, never so much as having seen ocean before, standing in the dragger’s bow watching in awe and wonder the mighty incoming line of waves, having completed their journey of three thousand miles from Europe’s littorals, striking the wild desolation of Peaked Hill Bars, there forming a plain of foaming white as far as eye could see, up and down that wilderness strand. One wave succeeding another, endlessly, coming home, as the waves would forever. He had seen, heard, nothing like it; had not so much as imagined the overpowering intensity of its existence, the consuming magnificence. It was like the light recounted in the Acts of the Apostles appearing suddenly on the road to Damascus, the boy a young Saul of Tarsus. Suddenly, the sea speaking to him in private conversation, the thing happening and in an instant of time that was to chart the boy’s course forever. Summoning him: It was on the order of what my preacher forebears termed getting the call. My father, who had brought the good news of the Gospel to the Cherokees, had wanted another missionary to carry forward what he had started. But, loving his son, he was not a man to do battle with a thing he could see was so settled. After all—I remember his soft, faintly mocking smile—had it not happened on the road to Damascus?

She was asking—real interest I felt, not mere politeness—some question about the boats, how they worked.

“Very simple. You go along at about four knots, dragging the net behind you. Mouth held open by buoys, weights and boards. That’s all there was to it.”

“How big—the boats?”

“About the size of our gig. Forty-footers or a bit more. The Province-town draggers. Came back in every day—those big Boston trawlers could stay out a lot longer. We’d come in, if we were lucky, with a load of, say, yellow-tail flounder, which doesn’t run often so carries a fancy price tag, caught that day, and there’d be those big refrigerated semis on the pier ready to take them straight off the dragger and overnight to New York. Fulton Fish Market. So that a Boston fish may have been two weeks old even though it was right off the boat, a Provincetown fish you knew came out of the sea just a few hours before. That was why it brought a premium at Fulton. Nice. We worked on shares.”

I paused, caught and held in memory’s grip, painful and joyous.

“Those dragger boats off the Cape. It was the first time and that was all it took. That was when I knew it had to be the sea . . . Nothing else mattered.”