Captain Brandt would never have lived down the stigma— his fifty years of excellent seamanship blotted out with this one blunder, flooding the holds the way he did, aided and abetted by those two canawlers, the Mate and the Chief Engineer.
Why, the crew couldn't do that to me. Not after what I'd done for them. When I stood up to the Mate it wasn't for myself alone—it was for all of them. When I fought for the right to smoke and sing, it wasn't only for my right I was fighting—it was the right of all of us. And when the Mate howled me down it wasn't only at me he directed his blasphemy—I just happened to be nearest. And finally when they put me in irons and threw me into the brig, it wasn't only I that had suffered that indignity—they all were being handcuffed (at least two more of them would have easily fit into that first pair of shackles). It wasn't that I had developed a Messiah complex; by an accident of Fate I was chosen to serve all and I did—cheerfully, almost joyously. But here I just ask this guy Mush to just do a little thing for me—get my shoes and that volume of Emerson—
Emerson—there's a fine one to have with you when you're locked up for fighting intolerance, man's inhumanity to man. Thoreau was more my kind of a guy. He, too, was locked up and was privileged to serve his fellow man with martyrdom— something about water taxes or something—and where was this guy Waldo Emerson then? On the outside looking in, according to accounts I've read. What do you there within that prison? said Waldo. What do you there without? replied Henry. (They were both well-bred, profoundly educated men of the period— naturally, their English was perfect.) He gave Abe Lincoln enough trouble with his poisonous pen too, when Abe was putting up his fight to free the slaves. Yeah, Waldo wrote that Abe was a big vulgar jackanapes or something equally Back Bay. Maybe he'd have thought I was a short, crude, bean pot—with just as little reason.
So, Nuts to him, too. And I flung that copy of Emerson's Essays—Second Series which didn't contain the dissertation on "Heroism" out the porthole. It landed on the hatch with a bang.
The Mate had just come out of the officers' mess and stood on the upper deck picking his teeth when that book landed out on the hatch and lay there with its leaves fluttering in the sun; he squinted toward my porthole and turned abruptly and went back into the passage.
What for? To get a cat-o'-nine-tails I bet. Anything could happen aboard this lousy tramp.
There hadn't been much talk that I could remember about mutiny. It seems I recall just a vague reference—something about six years in Federal prison (or was it sixteen?) for mutiny on the high seas. Somehow the crew had avoided that subject in the thousand and one discussions we'd had on everything.
As far as I was concerned, mutiny was something with blood and cutlasses in it—the next thing to piracy. And who could have known that a harmless dispute about a pair of cheap shoes would degenerate into mutiny—irons and brigs, and now, maybe cat-o'-nine-tails?
But it hadn't—not yet. The Mate came out on the upper deck holding a covered tray, and he juggled it down the ladder and up the forward deck toward me.
It was dinnertime. ... I was getting room service!
30. Freedom of the Seas
THE BRASS KEY RATTLED IN THE LOCK and the mate's arm shoved open my door just far enough to set his burden down on the deck. He whipped off the clean napkin.
"There's your dinner."
The unveiling had revealed two warped slices of white bread and a heavy China pitcher arranged (with no attempt at pattern) on a large tin pie plate. The pitcher was half full of water—that's all. That was my dinner—no salt, pepper, or condiments of any kind.
The Mate watched me out of a corner of his eye to see how I'd take it. This was a moment for decision. The plastic arts train the reflexes to react quickly. Doing water colors, for example, with the trigger judgment the work develops—such as controlling an overflowing cerulean sky to keep it from dripping down over the horizon and gumming up a well-indicated chrome yellow barn so that it becomes an unpleasant brown one—has prepared me to make capital of accidents of Fate and recognize and grasp immediately the unpremeditated contributions such discords may add to a plastic expression or to reject them. Shall I permit a bit of momentary exuberance— obviously hatched by ennui—which had been responsible for that little unpleasantness and those harsh words early in the day to ruin completely the cordial relation that has always existed between the Mate and me?
Should a paltry three pairs of shoes, a dispute on musical values, and his probable concern for my health (I was still a growing boy and one knows what nicotine does to rabbits) destroy that gracious esteem we have had for one another? And finally, was it fair to the Mate with all the things he had on his mind, obviously piled up like an inverted pyramid necessitated by its infinitesimal breadth, to reduce him to the level of a bread-and-water-serving bus boy?
And as the Mate stood there waiting for me to settle down to sample the main course and tell him if the bread was dry enough, or would I prefer it more sec, since I couldn't depend upon the true-blue of my mangy shipmates, with a quick swirl of my mental brush I blotted up that dripping cerulean and extricated myself from this mixture of brown I was getting into.
"I'm willing to turn to."
"Huh—what you said?"
"All right—I'll go back to work."
"Now? Wait, I'll have to call the Skipper."
And he locked me up again and skipped oil to call the Skipper.
I nibbled on one of those slices of old bread. I don't like that kind of bread even when it's young, and there are a hundred million Americans like me. Yet that cartel responsible for those soft, brick-shaped, rubbery white loaves of that kind of bread, in spite of the moans of the millions—health authorities and stomach specialists—keep turning them out by the billions, sealing their indigestible tasty goodness in unpleasant, stamped, waxed paper—influencing such innocents as our Filipino Chef in the belief we relish them more than Marie Antoinette's cakes and we delight to ruin our stomachs with it even out at sea. Our Chef counterfeited that bread as well as he could, and the soggy loaves he created were a fair facsimile. The texture was accurate, but the corners just a mite too sharp. They had all the qualities of those I refuse to buy in grocery stores, preferring the crusty rye bread of my forebears.
I gave up gnawing that slice of the staff of life—decidedly the lowest slice of its rubber tip—and tried the liquid accompaniment to my dinner. That water was warm and had a taste to it. The Chef couldn't be blamed for that—it might have been the sun.
The porthole framed the Mate talking to Captain Brandt up on the officers' deck. They seemed in no hurry to come forward. I might have been impatient; I'd slipped out of my handcuffs right after the Mate had locked me in again. No use wearing them now. I'd decided that the he-who-fights-and-runs-away theory might be applied to fights for a principle as well as ordinary brawls—a strategic withdrawal with spiritual reservations, of course.
Captain Brandt nodded his head once or twice as the Mate talked, and gestured toward me in the prow. The Captain was trying to button his coat over his pot belly, but it kept busting open, and after a number of tries he settled for only the two over the pot—compromise seemed to be the order of the day— and he shuffled down the ladder to the forward deck followed by his Mate. That buttoned coat suggested this was going to be an official visit. Maybe he was going to make a short speech welcoming me back into the free world of meek seamen who turned to and jumped in and out of bilges like trained poodles at the bark of Swede First Mates.