The Last Ship (38 page)

Iowa

She was a young pony of a girl, the sailor’s dungarees, sailor’s hat seeming but to accentuate the fresh radiance of her mind and body, a naturalness, a spontaneity about her that echoed within oneself. She could have been my daughter; nineteen. The fact that at that age she had already made signalman third vouched for her brightness. I remembered her once telling me with mock solemnity as of a great distinction that she was from Odebolt, Iowa, “the popcorn capital of the world.”

“Isn’t it a pretty night, Captain?”

“Yes, Bixby. A lovely night.”

High and glittering stood the stars guiding us eastward. Swarming in the heavens they looked down on a sea untroubled to the far horizon, the fullness of moon, riding a cloudless sky, joining them to light the waters and fashion a wide and radiant stream of white which followed us with mathematical precision; the dazzling stillness in command everywhere save for that steady low-pitched duet, the whisper of the sea, the heartbeat of the ship. We stood by the lifeline.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “It’s the moonlight. I always figured you should never waste a full moon on sleep.”

I felt my own silence would best encourage the softness, tenderness of that voice. Her eyes traced a pattern from the zenith to the waters stretching endlessly away.

“I can’t make up my mind whether it looks prettier over the sea or over wheat fields. A full moon.” She paused as before a difficult choice; looked across to the beam horizon. “The way that path of light follows us. We move and it doesn’t. I can never get over that. You don’t get that in the wheat fields. Naturally, because you’re not moving yourself. Mostly you’re on a porch.”

“Wheat fields? I thought it was corn, Bixby. In the song. Tall corn.”

She laughed a little, a girlish laugh that fell like a small jewel into the quiet of the night. “Well, sir, we had that, too. But in our family,
our
farm, it was mostly wheat. Iowa.”

She said the word as if to herself, somehow the three tiny syllables, the single word, full of the deepest meaning. I looked across the shimmering seascape, the very stars above seeming to hover attendant, eavesdropping on our conversation. Only at sea, the horizons unblocked by ridges of land, can the stars be seen in all their teeming multitudes, all their glory. Lately it seemed I had begun to hear increasing talk of a certain pattern; nothing of any directness, but a passing reference, the name of a state dropped into a conversation, of a town, of the many states and towns from which ship’s company came; the names of home, their immense variety spanning augustness, pride, charm, and even comedy to form a mighty nomenclature, full of every meaning, everything held dear; almost, too, this stabbing into one, twisting like a knife, as if they stood there across the seas as untouched and beckoning as ever. As I pondered my decision, it seemed almost that they were being invoked like some ominous litany, swelling and merciless, that had begun to repeat itself over and over in my ears, rising at times to something like throbbing. The word “Iowa” fell into the silence and seemed to hover there for a moment, as if asserting its claim and its strength, before she went on. I almost feared the question, and from a signalman third, but if it had been on her mind to ask she turned away from it, with a relief so considerable on my part as itself to disturb me. I was aware somehow of the flurry of curls on the nape of her neck under her sailor’s hat, the peacefulness of her youthful figure: the peace of the night seeming to envelop us, make whispers of our voices.

“But,” she said with girlish firmness, “I think I’ve decided it looks prettier over the sea.” The brief, young laugh again. “I guess it’s a good thing I went in the Navy. I was going to be a veterinarian. Is it true that the earth is two-thirds ocean?”

“A bit more, I think. Seven-tenths.”

“Seven-tenths sea!” She paused a beat, her voice quizzical, gentle as a note of music. “There must have been a reason for that. By God—or whoever,” she added, seeming not to want to sound particularly religious.

“I think someone wrote long ago that the reason had to be that God—or whoever—had a preference for sailors. Probably a sailor wrote that.”

I could sense the smile. Mixed with the salt-air smell of the sea was the elusive scent of her perfume, her femininity, where she stood beside me, motionless in the moonlight. We fell into a silence, listening to the reiterant wash of the sea, shipmates. At one point I thought she looked up high on the mainmast at our communications antennas. She may have been looking only at stars.

After a bit, she said quietly, “Good night, Captain.” She turned to go below to women’s quarters.

“Good night, Bixby.”

The Navy, or the Iowa farm, or both, had given a girl now called Bixby—not Alice—something. I lingered under the stars; something unaccountable and strong I felt, communicated without speech from her to myself: There was something indomitable in her. A special gentleness seemed to come through—and a good toughness. Sometimes the comfort, the reassurance, went the other way. She was with the ship. And yet: Iowa.

Moses

Under Arabian stars, their silhouettes heavily lighted, we stood along the starboard lifeline studying the dunes, spectral and undulating, foreboding, magisterial, across the few miles of resting sea. We had been running a parallel course. With me a seaman apprentice, James Hurley, a striker for coxswain, being brought along by Preston. He is from a small town called Dundee, Florida. He started telling me about the citrus groves. Then:

“It looks very bare over there, doesn’t it, sir?”

“It should. It’s all desert.”

“I wonder what the desert’s like. Just sand, I guess.”

“They say it can be very beautiful, too.”

“Didn’t someone cross the desert following the star to see the baby Jesus when he was born?”

“I think so. I’m not sure about the desert part. But yes, I believe so.”

The low, short laugh. “On a camel, of course.”

We waited, watching sea and desert beyond go by; the sea seeming a familiar friend; the desert strange and phantasmal, somehow menacing, as though watching us with suspicion across the water; sea and desert yet combining to form an engulfing solitude, lessened a bit, I felt, by our sharing of it. We had stood for so long in the luminescent stillness of the night, in a kind of voiceless communion.

“Also there was something about Moses.”

“Moses?”

“Wandering in the desert. Forty years if I remember.”

Something in the voice made me turn sharply toward him. Then I dismissed it. Too alert for signs.

“Yes. That part I know,” I said. “I think the Ten Commandments came along not much after that.”

Sweetness

In the afternoon it had rained but now the rain had gone, leaving behind a low mist lying over the sea. He had just come off the first watch and must have seen me standing there in the dark. He joined me and we stood awhile, mostly silent, as much so as the night itself, a mute sea, the air drugged into utter windlessness; now and then a word or two.

Lieutenant Thurlow, the navigator, would have won any contest we should have had aboard having to do with being a dedicated “womanizer,” a fact established conclusively years back on visits to various port cities on two continents. It was beyond me how he had ever ended up in the Navy. Some latent intense love of the science of navigation, I felt, in a pure sense; finding himself most happy doing things connected with navigation, when not doing things connected with women. The first must have won out over the second in a close contest. Ship life certainly gave him all the opportunity to drench himself in the former, though limiting the latter to those shore excursions. We both looked up. A few stars had broken through the cover.

“Sometimes I’m sorry things like loran even came along,” he said. “Any idiot can do it. Rather glad it’s gone now. Star-shooting, dead reckoning—more fun. And serves the purpose.”

I was really becoming rather fond of him. For one thing, his enduringly untroubled air, seeming little altered by events. He seemed to come down on the side of harmony, the lessening of tensions, a welcome gift. When not engaged in his profession, where his exactness as to degrees, minutes, seconds, of latitude, longitude; as to star-sights; as to anything dealing with the present course or position of the ship you could take as gospel, no verification required—away from all that, a kind of splendid carelessness about him. Despite this, in some ways I looked upon him as our most vulnerable officer. His voice often took on an extraordinary sweetness as he talked, as now, and said, startling me:

“One thing, in the Pacific, I’d get to see the Southern Cross. I’d like to do that sometime before I check out.”

It was spoken casually, lightly, not thinking of decisions; of immense choices; only of the stars he loved. The silence held again, a pleasant absence of compulsion. Then, before we both turned to go below, his quiet murmur of a voice, the words falling like inevitability itself, full of poignancy and an unspeakable heartbreak, though spoken offhandedly, carelessly, upon the stillness of the night.

“Actually, I don’t have anybody back there anyhow,” the words piercing my soul. Paused a beat. Then:

“I’ll go where the ship goes. That’s my preference.”

Orel

Tonight standing by the lifeline with young Ensign Jennings, a junior OOD, the youngest officer aboard by a considerable margin. He suddenly said to me:

“Captain, those three hundred and eleven thousand people—that was the figure, wasn’t it, sir?”

It would have been no use pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Something like that,” I said.

“That’s about a thousand per man in ship’s company,” he said.

I waited in the abrupt tension. Then: “Do you believe in hell, Captain?”

“I don’t know that I believe in hell for anything. And I certainly don’t believe in it for what we have done.” I waited a moment. Then said quietly, “Leave it, lad.”

Dominoes

He had recently started his Garden.

“You liked farming, didn’t you, Chief?”

The predicate seemed too mild.

“Oh, yes, sir. Delaneys have been farmers in those hills—well, just about forever, I reckon. Aye, sir. I liked it all right. I guess you like anything you grew up with. Most times, anyhow.”

“I suppose you do. Then why the sea?”

“Five boys, sir. Somebody had to go. It wasn’t that big a farm. We drew lots for it.”

I turned and looked at him. “You drew lots?”

“Actually we each drew a down domino after my dad had shuffled them.” He laughed shortly. “On the kitchen table. One night after supper.”

I thought, my God, dominoes. I asked: “Then why the Navy? After you drew the one domino.”

“Two was the lowest.”

He paused then, to make sure, I think, that he was answering his captain with a scrupulous accuracy, just as he had about the domino; or perhaps to sort out himself a rather complex question. He spoke in his quiet manner.

“Well, sir.” He paused again. “I’ve not studied on it too much. But I guess it was kind of this way. I had a mind there were maybe two things a man could get close to: worth a man’s putting his life into. I’d had one. It was the other. I didn’t know the first thing about it. I’d never even seen the sea. Never even been out of Missouri. Cricks was about all the water I’d ever seen. So I don’t know where the idea came from. Anyhow that’s the way I figured it. The land or the sea. I don’t put it real well, sir.”

“You put it all right. Would you go back—given the chance?”

The question seemed almost to shock him. “Oh, no sir. I like both, but negative, sir. I’d never go back. One time I might of. Boot camp I might of. But now . . . That farm thing. I guess it’ll always be there. But to go back. Not now.” He paused and said, as if that said it all: “I guess I’m a sailor now.”

“Yes, I guess you are.”

Crew of Number 2 Boat

Two entirely separate conversations, an hour or so apart on the same night; neither, I was certain, realizing the other had spoken to me.

“What a pretty night, sir. Better than the Barents.”

He stood tall and loose-limbed over me, hovering it seemed.

“Aye, Billy. What sea isn’t.”

Barker gave his boyish laugh. “Yes, sir.” A pause. “Both a long way from Bronte, Texas.”

“Interesting name. There were two pretty well-known English novelists by that name.”

“Yes, sir. Ours was named for Charlotte. Wrote
The Professor, Shirley, Villette.
And, of course,
Jane Eyre.”

I looked at him in astonishment.

“Naturally the town library had everything written by the lady it was named for. Incidentally, there’s a tradition in Texas of naming towns for ladies. Don’t know why. Bronte’s only got nine hundred and eighty-seven people. I’d like you to see it sometime, sir. It’s a pretty little town.”

“I’d like that,” I said.
How we always speak in the present tense,
I thought.
Even I do it.
I could hear his voice going on, seeming not much beyond a choirboy’s.

“About as small as a town can come, I reckon. Mom used to tell people visiting us the first time, relatives from off somewhere needing to be told how to get there, that we lived just beyond Resume Speed.”

I laughed. “Sometimes I think everybody in the Navy came from a farm or a small town. I don’t know why. It just seems I almost never meet a Navy man from a big city. You like it?”

“Like what, sir?”

“The Navy. You like being in the Navy?”

“That I do, sir. I don’t know why either.”

We both laughed softly at that. Suddenly I made a decision. I figured it might help my thoughts. I turned a little toward him, looking upward.

“Billy. I want a straight answer on something.”

“I’ll sure try to give you one, sir.”

“Where do you really want to go?”

“Want to go?” As though the question was such a strange one to him.

“Want to go?” he repeated it. “Why, wherever the ship goes, sir. Doesn’t make that much difference really. Wherever the ship goes will be four-oh with me, sir.”

Just like Thurlow, I thought; but for what a different reason. I had found out something. We were silent then, comfortable in watching the sea.