The Last Ship (17 page)

He looked at me first with surprise, this not a subject normally on our agenda. Then, comprehending, returned a faint smile.

“That would seem to be beyond argument, sir. If it came to that, matters could go on with very few men. If nature rather than the Navy had been doing it, she would just about have reversed our numbers of each.”

This was getting into territory where I did not wish to venture. I waited a moment and then decided to say something that really didn’t need saying. There were a couple of things about Selmon. Ship’s captains adore straight answers and value hugely men who habitually give them. They value also men who keep their mouths shut. He had enough fear of me, I imagine, to take care of that. That was fine. But by nature also he was the last thing from being a peddler of scuttlebutt. Finally, from the beginning there was the recognition that what went on between us behind the closed door of my cabin was to go not a whisper further. In all this I trusted him without question whatever. Nevertheless, given the nature of this newest matter, I decided to say it.

“Mr. Selmon.”

“Sir?”

“You are not to speak of this matter to the crew, any member of it. Do I make myself understood?”

He looked at me in what seemed a special way, speaking the unspoken.

“You make yourself understood, Captain.”

I told the Jesuit I wanted to see him in my cabin the following day, Sunday, immediately after religious services on the fantail.

M
y father, himself a missionary, first taught me, and myself on my own came to believe, that the very best and the very worst men in history have been religious men; the noblest deeds in history performed by the believing; and the vilest. And not just had been: It was still going on. While not about to canonize him, I was prepared, at least thus far, to place my chaplain solidly in the first genus.

There was a mystery of some magnitude to Thomas Cavendish, S.J. Cavendish had all the right, the elegant chips. Georgetown, the American College in Rome, chancellor to the cardinal of one of the great U.S. archdioceses: facts all, gleaned not from him but from his service record. I could not imagine purlieus where he would not have stood with thoughtless ease. I had sometimes idly speculated why he had chosen to enter a service where he would spend his life ministering to the spiritual requirements of 300 men, most of them not even Catholic, surely few of these ripe subjects for conversion to Holy Mother Church—sailors are the most set of men in their ways; and this on a ship spending a fair amount of her time pitching, rolling, fighting the sea, while standing prepared at an instant’s signal from afar to unleash a power of cataclysmic properties, and himself permitted to have no part whatever in any of these purposes; a supernumerary, some might have said. He seemed the last man on earth to be content with letting the days of his life run out so, his gifts seeming vastly to outmatch the job; also his seeming less a contemplative than a man of action. True, he had become as indelibly a blue-water sailor, in the realest sense, as any hand aboard, making it his business to master matters chaplains ordinarily do not: celestial navigation, aspects of ship-handling and the like. But that sea love which had brought me there—brought many others aboard, Girard for example: I never felt that this irresistible star was the thing that lighted his soul. Why was he here? Why was he aboard this ship? But of all questions that is the one never asked a shipmate, and the Jesuit had never so much as volunteered a scrap, talked even remotely in the direction of an answer. Mystery, it seemed, it must remain.

The Navy believes in God. The church pennant, blue cross on white field, hoisted during religious services aboard, is the only flag ever to fly above the Stars and Stripes on a man-of-war, as if to proclaim, One thing, and one only, the Lord God above, is superior to the United States Navy. The Navy is ecumenical, but by logistical necessity. Unable to see its way, from a manpower standpoint, to carrying in a single ship’s company a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, and a Jewish rabbi, the Navy cannily, and with spiritual economy, requires the one chaplain allotted to a ship to be versed in administering the assorted rituals to all faiths. While his ship plows the high seas, a Jewish sailor wearing a black skullcap may find himself seeking Talmudic counsel and solace from a Catholic priest wearing a reverse Roman collar, and, what is more, getting it. But there was something different now, as to the men. While the Jesuit had always conducted services so encompassing that all believers in a Divine Being could participate, normally only Catholics entered his confession box. This had changed dramatically. Of late, a goodly number of Protestants, even two of the four Jews in ship’s company, and a fair number of those professing nothing noticeably of a religious character had discovered this institution. His confession box was crowded. The fact did not escape me; to say it aggrandized his importance was to mention only the beginning of its significance.

It was almost a habit of his to be both wise and perceptive, and, most important, to the point, without the numbing verbosity that sometimes afflicted the newer breed of holy people, and concerning the men I consulted him often. Not of course as to what explicit confessions they might have made to him in line of his duties, since even to the Navy that was a privileged matter, but as to their overall state of being, leaving to him any comments, even suggestions, he might choose to offer either in general or in any individual cases. He felt free to raise with me matters that another officer might not. In this respect he stood to me somewhat as did the doc, perhaps rather more so. A captain is well advised to establish this relationship with these special billets aboard his ship, and to give them quite a loose rein in discourse. Not to do so would simply be willfully, and to my mind stupidly, to deprive himself of two rich sources, available in none others aboard, concerning the welfare and thinking of his men. Sailors will say to priests and to doctors what they will not say to their other officers, much less their captain.

Lieutenant Commander Thomas Cavendish embodied those two institutions perhaps of all earthly ones not born yesterday: He was as versed in the ways of the Navy as in those of the Jesuits, no small feat itself, each having its own unswerving and labyrinthine complexities and insistences, rubrics forever baffling to outsiders, sometimes even to insiders, both aged in time and trial. He was a learned man, in the old, almost forgotten sense of the word, in matters both secular and clerical, though one could go years without fully realizing the extent of the first since, not being a professional intellectual, he did not push it off on you. Most of our dialogues concerned ship’s company, problems one or more might have. But sometimes they concerned nothing at all; sometimes we spoke of matters far distant from the Navy, spoke about ideas; intellectual nourishment I suppose you would call it. For a captain who feels need of it, sometimes in his loneliness starved for it as from absence of food, difficult always to find, immutable barriers intervening; lucky there, too, to have the Jesuit aboard. I really had nothing like that with any other on the ship. Girard had offered some of it of late, but was still a distant second; so that I had reason to cherish him personally. Ship’s company liked him to a noteworthy degree, with a clear fondness undiluted by their knowledge that he could be as firm as a rock with them if a matter he deemed in his jurisdiction so warranted. So that in the latter area his personal popularity was complemented by a considerable influence among the crew, not without its element of fear of invisible punishments at his command, as restraining in their way as the visible ones available to a ship’s captain.

He was six feet two or thereabouts, as an undergraduate had been a boxer with the Georgetown varsity, light-heavyweight division, and remained as lean and fit as he would have had to have been then. Kept himself so by boxing still, with a few of the crew interested in this sport. He had hair of rich abundance and striking in its raven blackness above a delicate, pale face chiseled with strong, distinctly boned features. He had an almost unwilling animal magnetism of a kind one suspected would be curiously beckoning, even hypnotic, to women of lustful inclinations; the startling physical looks actually, I was sure, an important handicap in his profession, if not at present only because of the location of his post. It was easy for one to imagine that in his pre-Navy years this attribute had given him problems with the occasional female parishioner and equally easy to conclude that, being above all else a man who knew himself—Jesuits more than most—as much as any man can at a given stage of his life, he would have been aware of the faculty, and would have long since mastered, as a necessity of his vocation, the ritual of turning away any such probings with a skilled gentleness that doubtless only increased the ardor while at the same time keeping it firmly at bay. I had even wondered once or twice whether such possibilities had something to do with his presence aboard, his having actually sought duty in then womanless ships in part at least to escape the devil’s persistent temptation: yes, a sea captain is at times as subject to bizarre fancy, in those recurrent mentally unoccupied moments coursing the endless deep, as is any other man who follows the sea.

He was the only soul aboard with whom I could speak openly, in an absolute sense; for that matter, he to me the same. We were locked together in an indissoluble embrace, its nature the most simple and straightforward first principle: that no hurt should reach the men that we could prohibit. All secrets of a surety were safe with the priest. But I had never explicitly raised the matter even with him. We had had only a general discussion, I certainly, and, I felt quite sure, he as well deliberately orbiting the matter, both of us making short, covert forays into it and then each stepping back, as if in fear of pronouncement, myself becoming almost as much of a Jesuit as was he. On my part I felt the first intimations of a future chasm arising between us, a parting of ways, a coming even of overt battle I wished to avoid—I did not hesitate to judge I preferred him greatly as ally over foe. In either role he would be a formidable force. He had made a glancing reference, even so unusual for him since he looked upon piety as a matter the articulation of which profaned and even invalidated it, to the question of God’s grace, as something—this at least was my understanding of what he was saying—obviously given to us for reasons and purposes unknown (but surely later to be revealed) and therefore obliging us to be deserving, worthy, of it. He had spoken, without aggression, of the men being under his “spiritual care,” paused and added, “and these women”; immediately the brief smile, disarming, surely meant to be so, “How pompous that sounds. I meant only the office, with such ability as I possess,” which I loosely interpreted to mean we both were stuck with our responsibilities; had spoken, with somewhat more firmness and rather to my astonishment, of what he called “the necessity of moral survival.” I had had in mind to say, “Try that on hungry and deprived men, Father.” Instead I had kept my peace, perhaps making a murmured, almost dismissive, “Of course, Chaplain.” Two could play this game.

Even so, he had not really come at me, nothing on the order of laying down limits beyond which we dared not venture. The approach was characteristically oblique, almost as if he were speaking home truths on the assumption that I of course would agree with him—and with them. In any event I was not prepared, at the moment, to take on heavy seas from that quarter. Later, if it came to that, I would face the matter and deal with it as I had dealt with other turbulences. Concerned with ever-pressing ones, I had not the luxury of handling problems until they overtly rose and insisted on prompt answers. They must get in line. I had my own firm and sustaining guide, and one which never varied, inflexible, single-minded, my one sure compass, viewing but one matter truly urgent: to bring my ship’s company through, by whatever means might prove necessary. Nothing else really entered. As regards him, I intended, of course, to have my way, as with any other force or person that might stand between myself and my objective. If the Jesuit was responsible to the Almighty, he also was responsible to me. I counted that he would not forget that—if he did, I was prepared to remind him of the fact—and that it would be his part, not mine, if the occasion arose, to work out any seeming conflict in allegiance to his twin deities. He was, after all, a Jesuit.

And now the moment had come.

 *  *  * 

The rain, holding off as though by a direct meteorological intervention of Providence just long enough for the completion of religious services, started just as he entered my cabin. Not the island’s regular twenty-minute daily shower but a real rain. After the ever-recurrent days of solemn and unrelenting heat, it was a welcome visitor. We stood at the ports watching its sibilant fall. Then as the rain grew and became an opaque curtain falling between us and the island, lashing the ship and entering the cabin, I battened down the ports and we sat awhile more hearing the rain drill the ship. It was a pleasant, invigorating thing after the long sullen calm of the island. Sailors like weather. I was just as glad it was the Sabbath, which we continued to observe as a day of rest so that the men were not at the Farm or at sea fishing. My only concern was the crops, but the rain, while lively, did not seem virile enough to do them real harm—anyhow they were not at present at such a vulnerable stage as to make that a likely worry, Gunner’s Mate Delaney had assured me in his arcane and deliberative way when we had discussed the matter while contemplating the rain’s approach high and far away in darkening skies.

He sat, his lanky body seeming almost awkwardly too much for any chair, waiting in an invulnerable serenity for whatever it was I had summoned him to say. If some men are all men and some men, the best (and strongest) I have always felt, both—mostly man, but part woman—then he belonged to the latter category. A strangely compelling inner force emanated from him. His method was to let you render the thought, idea, or concern in fullness, not to jigger it along. If you stumbled, he did not rush in. He waited, with no sense of hurry or impatience, for you to collect yourself and proceed. I think it was his way of making sure it came to him wholly uncontaminated, even by himself. It was a neat trick, remarkably efficacious in its simplicity. It had the effect of making you meticulously conscious of what you were saying. It had as well a certain devilish quality. It permitted your own words to turn on you, since no others were being said. So while he sat in silence, regarding me with those thoughtful, introspective eyes, with a listening so acutely active as to make me aware of it, I carefully described to him the site I had found on the far side of the island, atop the red cliffs. Why, first of all, it was the place of choice for us because of the way the winds flowed here, the island vulnerable on this side, shielded on that lee shore from the high Beauforts and hurricanes sure to attack it in time. For he was a sailor, too. Of its favorable aspects otherwise. The water supply. The tall trees, timber for habitations. The existent clearings for these.

The purpose of this rather punctilious explication was not to seek his imprimatur. It was rather to give the idea its final test. If he did not come down on it, it would not necessarily mean that it had his fullest blessing; he did not judge it his province to go around bestowing that with any promiscuity on his captain nor did I go around seeking it out before making a captain’s decisions. But it would mean that an intelligent man saw no active objection to the proposed course. When I had finished, he waited a few moments, merely, I think, to make certain that I had no more to say.