The Last Ship (18 page)

“So it’s to be here,” he said simply. “This island.”

“At least for now.”

“Just for now?”

“It will give us a place,” I said, not answering his question directly. “An abode. A favorable setting for habitations, for living—for life. At the worst, a fallback position. If things change, we reassess. If we hear anything, pick up any viable, valid transmission, we evaluate. We still have the ship. Meantime, we have a
place.
Who knows, Chaplain,” I said cunningly, “maybe God led us to it.”

“Maybe He did. We’ll find out soon enough.”

That was blessing enough. We both waited in a rather long and meditative silence, only the rain commanding any sound at all. It reached us as a kind of symphony rainstorm concert, Beethovenish, with its varying wind-aided volumes and tonalities, now lashing at the ship, now coming straight down on it in a steady drumbeat, now slackening into an arpeggio of that poignant sound that occurs when rain and sea meet; silent we sat, taken with something I could not have said what, perhaps, now that it was upon us, simply the sense of the quite possibly irreversible step at last about to be taken, with its heartstruckness and its forebodings. The thing that comes after a long search, the acute awareness of . . . well, the beginning of a beginning. We had been through it all together. For so long our ship’s company had been—the priest had been quite apt about that—as the Israelites of the Old Testament, seeking a home—the difference being that they knew where theirs was and had only to seize it, ancient in their blood, whereas we had to discover ours somewhere on all the lands of the earth, something new and alien to us, unknown in entirety. His head was tilted slightly downward, almost bowed, in that visible inward assessment which seemed like a graven part of him but was in no way forbidding: On the contrary it suggested a mind concentrated to the exclusion of all else on the needs of the one now before him, ready to receive them and perhaps to point out dangerous shoals, like some sonar man of the spirit.

I listened to the rain come down, a staccato cadence at present. My decision in respect to the habitations was by now a firm, even inflexible one. Its promise only grew: in the last week I had taken Noisy Travis to that far side of the island and the taciturn and not easily impressed shipfitter, after meticulous examination, applying his ax freely to one of those stately trees, had certified the building material as being acceptable; indeed, when pressed, of the first class. Yes, we would build. Now I had that one other matter, one that had come more and more to appear as the very cornerstone of the one we had just been about. I waited for the resolved issue to finish its movement in the mind, only the variant sounds of the rain violating the cabin’s poised stillness. The matter seemed no longer willing to rest patiently within me, submerged, unspoken. Restless, it demanded release from the solitary confinement of my very soul; somehow using a form of address rare in our dialogues.

“Father,” I said.

He looked up at me. His eyes were his most inescapable feature. Large and grave, meditative, of an anthracitic cast, deep-set in an embrasure of salient cheekbones. All the tribulations of man seemed to rest like a chosen burden in their deep pools, in their lustrous blackness, as if they had seen everything that could happen to that creation of God’s, his sins, pains, woes, imperfections, turpitudes, follies beyond imagination, and been led by them to one unshakable and all-guiding belief that formed the answer to all, to every single question and to all questions: Were these not what made up, constituted man, were his very essence? And was he still not God’s creation? It followed that it was God’s wish that man be as he was, full of frailties and impairments, invested with every malice, executant of iniquities endless in their variety, routinely activist of appalling transgressions, evildoings beyond comprehension—so why should these ever surprise us and who were we to quarrel with God’s obvious intent as to man’s nature? He alone disturbs the planet’s intrinsic equanimity, balance. He alone is not wanted here—except by God, who has not seen fit either to tell us why or to alter him. Is not that enough? I sometimes thought how identically he and the doc viewed the creature man in his endless fallibility, but from what different ends of the telescope! The eyes waited, ready now in their profound heedfulness to see one more. An interlude faint, andante, came in the rain’s progression. I went on, rather softly.

“I think I know real trouble when I see it. I don’t think we are there, in any immediate sense.”

The long-established habit of our talks, as opposed to the asking of direct questions, was rather to give him openings into which he could move or not, as he deemed fit. Our drill required that I not seem vulgarly to be probing his confession box. This served the purpose of permitting his own readings and exclusive sources of intelligence to be made available to his captain, always only to the extent he chose, without compromising his religious vows in respect to the sanctity of the revelations of his sailor flock. On this occasion he chose silence as a reply—he was a virtuoso of silence; a very tool of his, I felt. I moved on.

“But it has come over the horizon.”

I waited again, heard the rain’s acceleration. “It’s going to happen,” I said quietly. “The fact is, I believe it’s already begun.”

In this fashion I had just voiced a seeking of confirmation, but a readiness—more, an eagerness—to embrace the opposite if that be the fact. All of this he would know, and what we, captain and priest, were about here. If he felt surprise or trepidation it was concealed. But he was a professional at that, a master of concealment—or rather, a master at preserving his own concealments whilst penetrating those of another. He did not even ask me why I thought so. Simply acceptance of a palpable fact. Reality, consisting principally of man’s unchanging and unchangeable, seemingly compulsive agitation of things and fellow men around him, man forever determined not to let good things be, obliged by his essence to stir them up, beheld harmony but a stimulant to create disharmony, was a thing neither to be argued with nor lamented over—that was work for a fool—only to be leavened, if possible controlled, guided, steered as by a clever helmsman, by hands both gentle and rock-firm, along God’s ways and routes. Perhaps he had seen the evidence also, or sensed, heard—this was a clear probability—through those confessional devices possessed only by himself. Though these he could not pass along directly even to me, his silence was confirmation enough. Then I became aware of something strange: he had not seemed all that disturbed at the development. I heard a faint, distant rumble of thunder. I decided to try something.

“We are like a Noah’s Ark. Except that Noah possessed the foresight to board one female for every male. Given the choice, I would have followed that biblical sailor’s example, at least on present knowledge. Do you think it ever occurred to the Navy to take that balance into account?”

“Knowing the Navy, I doubt it, Captain. The Navy would have been quite critical of that Ark; probably found everything about it unacceptable. Starting with seaworthiness. Never make it.”

So he was deflecting that matter of mathematics, simply declining to reconnoiter it, turning it back on me. I waited a moment, then spoke against the rain.

“It’s begun. And I know this. We can’t just stand by, let happen what might happen, what
would
happen. Pretend it isn’t there. It would blow us out of the water.” I waited, hearing the crescendoing downpour. “I had given thought to this—I’ve given thought to a lot as you may imagine: to keep the women on the ship, put the men in the habitations ashore.”

His thick black eyebrows came up like question marks.

“Rather an idea.”

“A bad one,” I said. “I recognized that. First of all, I don’t think the men would stand for it. Not for any outright separation like that. But much worse . . . the women—well, the women could take the ship away . . .”

“What’s that?” he said. “What are you saying, Captain?”

“Don’t we have a tendency to forget that? Well, if I know these women . . . first-class seamen; also smart, and inventive as hell. Left alone on her, they could take the ship. They could navigate her, handle her underway, conn her . . . just barely but they could do it. I don’t think they would—unless things occurred . . .” I waited for the phrasing, wanting to be Navy-careful with words in such a matter; the Navy, like Jesuits, both interstitially Byzantine, nonetheless values the greatest precision of language when it comes to the point . . . “Unacceptable things, demands made of them they could not endure.” Feeling a certain repugnance at my own words, I hurried on from this. “But they have the skills to do it. It is my judgment that they would have the will if it came to that . . . simply to cast off one propitious day. Maroon the men on the island. The last one of us.”

I think it may have been the first time I had ever seen him show anything like actual startlement; certainly the nearest I had seen him display agitation. A kind of revealed wonder, a glimpse into a hitherto unimagined eventuality—yes, horror, as he obviously saw it, took possession of his face. Against the tattooing rain his air of disturbance—it was that rare a thing—seemed of a sudden to inhabit and fill the cabin.

“So they could,” he said slowly. “Yes. One tends to forget. Then under any circumstance, no. Not to separate them. Not with that risk,” he said, with that unflinching tone he reserved for matters unthinkable, not for a moment to be considered. “No.”

He sat a moment in a reflective pause, as if seeking to comprehend the dimensions of such a catastrophe. I waited, amazed at the extremeness of his reaction, at its abruptness. Taken together with his seeming acceptance over what I—obviously he as well—judged clearly was beginning between the women and the men, it seemed enigmatic; leaving me with a feeling strangely troubling in nature, its cause seeming right here, in this cabin. His sudden laugh then startled me.

“You’re right about them, of course. In respect to the ship. They would not hesitate, given the right conditions—something they didn’t like. They are far sturdier than men. They have much more resolve; tenacity. Men are innocents, children, by comparison. If it comes to it—to their own interests—they are far more brutal.”

The word seemed to constitute such an unexpected turn in our dialogue that I simply in my surprise echoed it.

“More brutal?”

He looked at me, as though from ancient eyes, and as if in surprise himself at my innocence. He smiled distantly.

“Oh, indeed. You must know that, Captain. May I say something?”

“Could I stop you?”

“Just this. You regard women too highly.”

Spoken lightly, with that touch he had, light and almost whimsical, yet never without intent. I gave the same back to him.

“You must forgive my clumsy ignorance in these matters, Chaplain. I’m just a poor homeless sailor. I’ve spent nearly all of my life at sea. I haven’t had much opportunity to regard them one way or the other.”

The Jesuit smiled, continued in those tones of rather spiked humor. “My experience has taught me that few things are more dangerous than overidealizing them. It is a mistake to expect from them the properties of angels.”

“I shall try hard not to do so, Chaplain. Actually I don’t expect to see many angels of any kind until we all get to heaven, as the old Protestant hymn goes.”

“I am reassured to hear you say so.”

“Though perhaps it’s true, what we’ve always been told. About women’s endurance. Resilience.”

“I don’t think there’s any question about it,” he said. “I imagine the Lord saw to that.”

“Then He knew what He was doing.”

“He usually does,” he said dryly. “Emotionally—emotionally they can take so far much more than men. Almost as if they were a different species. One would come to envy them, if envy were not a sin. Short of being—well, physically overpowered, their weapons for dealing with life, especially in its hard-going phases, are altogether the superior ones to anything possessed by us. By men. We see that in present circumstances.”

I felt a certain astonishment listening to this. He was saying something on the surface similar to what the doc had delineated, yet here it came out as something both more and different, vaguely suggestive of some imprecise idea, even resolve, in respect to the women; something absent from the doc’s more casual and clinical commentary. At the same time it seemed unwonted coming from the Jesuit; an uncalled-for discursiveness; a detour away from the explicit I sought. Unlike him. Then, as in an illumination, I felt that this sudden outpouring of lightly spoken philosophy, almost homilies, dangerously close to platitudes, was both a cover and a signal. He was not a man to ramble, to speak in wearying and pronounciatory largenesses; unless perhaps to shield the specific, words being quite often used for that purpose. Even the phrase “physically overpowered” jumped out to stab at me.

It was a remarkable conversation to be having, dissecting the nature of women and their imputable variances; there was something almost anthropological about it. We had never had a discussion anything like it. For the very good reason that the basic assumption held the opposite. That was why they were on this ship. Indeed, it had occurred to me, our problem lay exactly there: Operating hereto—all this I have made clear elsewhere—on the canon that there should not be and could not be differences—those of which we spoke or any others; that we were to treat them infallibly, sedulously, the same: that had been the whole idea. And now, the sudden reassertion that there were not only differences but that they were so vast and fundamental as to constitute our chief difficulty. It was not without a kind of wicked irony, a monstrous joke played on us by some miscreant god; or perhaps by simple nature. And, of course, it was precisely those differences which were not supposed to exist that had everything to do with the decision I had reached. It was time to announce it. My week, as I have said, was up. Especially heedful now to keep out of my voice any taint of the mystical or the abstruse; to make it a straightforward thing, altogether pragmatic, a captain seeking only to make things work.