On small ships, as watch follows watch, and as the sea continues through shocks to search for loose gear, and, finding none, seeks to loosen gear to fling it, daily work on the ship ceases. Men who are not yet reduced to walking on bulkheads are still unable to trust their tools, their sustained balance, even their intent.
Amon, who suffers in the first hours of large movement, lies huddled beneath a table of the messdeck in Asiatic contemplation, from which, like Lazarus, he will in a few hours rise wide-eyed and knowledgeable from the explored depths of a great mystery.
“If he’d just quit fighting it and puke, he’d be all right. I keep telling him.” Lamp, who is smart about the galley in his heavy-shanked way, builds, constructs, fusses over half-filled vats of soup and regiments of sandwiches, the most that can be claimed from this kind of sea.
Men off watch sit on the messdeck, or sack out in jerkily plunging bunks. The Indian Conally roams the slick upper decks in communion with wind and water, ostensibly checking against things adrift that may crash or vanish. Heat swirls through the grates of the fiddley, where Howard, in time, passing forward to the bridge, sniffs, as if he expects sulphur to rise from the hot depths in which Snow, like a small brown bird, perches beside the engine-order-telegraph and before the great bank of dully gleaming gauges, dials and valves that look like waving, plunging sculpture.
Howard stands arrested, silenced, emptied, in foreboding, in heart-shocking horror; watching a stance he has seen so often in excursions across this fiddley—the wide-legged, hunch-shouldered concentration of the drowned Cecil Jensen standing on oily plates beside the port engine; a wiping rag dangling from a hip pocket, another rag dangling from one hand. The stance is a collection of tallness compacted to bulk, only a little less unique than a thumbprint.
Howard shudders, reduces a yell, a scream, back into his instinctive interior, and stands in dispraise of his eyes which have fooled him.
It is only Brace standing there, timid, alert, entranced among the heavy voices of the engines.
On the bridge, Dane stands like a brick mortared between loran and radio. He looks seaward, squinty-eyed and thin-mouthed, unimpressed by the hook of Rodgers’s body that dangles headless from the rubber mask over the radar scope. Glass twirls the helm to meet the sea, twirls back, the gyro repeater dances, swings. Levere mutters over the plot. James fiddles with log sheets, waits.
“How’s the set?”
“Sea return, Cap. We could miss a freight train.” Rodgers backs from the radar mask, blinking, a man reconnected.
“Eyes, chief. Call watchstanders.”
The radio pops, blanks.
“Abner calling.”
“We’ll take the seaward leg.”
The ships drop their mutual course; Abner climbs the chart to the northwest while Adrian, advancing under the spinning, kicky helm in the hands of the watchful Glass, beats to the southeast.
Chapter 10
Watches changed, darkness approached, and the gray sea turned black, marked by luminous and crashing runs of opalescent foam. Men carrying binoculars moved from the wings to the flying bridge, thrust into a netherland of increasing wind, and separated from the interfering, dull red lights below. Adrian paced back and forth across sixty-nine degrees latitude in a search across a line. Phosphorescence spun from the bow. The muted stack rumbled, whispered. As temperatures skidded, lookouts on watch wrapped mufflers across their mouths, turned from a defensive oblique that put the wind most often on their covered ears and raw cheeks, facing with greater frequency into the wind so that their breath would not fog the glasses. Each man searched his sector, silent, occasionally stomping feet against the deck and listening to the deepening tone and quality of the wind which worked across the vibrating strings of the halyards.
“Report everything,” Conally instructed Brace.
“You can’t see anything.”
“Them rafts are yellow,” Conally said. “Water will be washing around them. Sometimes they have flares.”
“The trouble is, I think I see something and then it goes away.”
“Don’t stare. Look to one side. Look away, then look back.”
“Why don’t they all have flares?”
“They all do. Guys get scared and use them up. They get too cold and drop them.”
Brace, as if chewing the information, stood hunched into an old foul weather jacket that was in need of overhaul. “Planes have been flying over all day.”
“Planes… couldn’t spot a whale on a dinner plate.”
On the bridge, Dane hunkered before the radar mask, he, too, now seemingly headless, thus less bulky, almost thin. He was less threatening as his face appeared to begin and end between flared nose and chin. Bosun striker Joyce, haggard not from fatigue but from proximity to Dane, spun the helm to meet a sea, spun it back. Levere, captain, who had been on the bridge for twelve hours and who would remain until the flyers were a clear fatality, slouched in a tall bridge chair. As the hours passed, and as Levere’s experience combined with intuition in his communion with wind and water, the westward leg lengthened.
No one (nor would any have dared ask) knew how Levere—trusted at the time, and trusted without question afterward—managed his conscience over the drowning of Jensen. If Levere was of the cynical French, he was also of New England, and he was the captain. In that past winter of piling seas that saw Jensen under, Levere remained as remote from the crew as ever. After Jensen’s death, exhausted men saw that Levere was increasingly reluctant to break off any search. He stayed on the grounds, mutely answering the cold and killing sea, or answering his conscience. Adrian’s crew took a more reasonable view, holding that Jensen had tugged his final problem into his own spaces, and then slammed the hatch.
Yeoman Howard, who in Lamp’s opinion “made too much of things,” thought long and carefully about the matter. Howard had a special advantage. His occupation made him resemble a knitting needle. While Amon was a constantly running thread tying galley to messdeck to wardroom, Howard’s job forced him into a skein of movement that covered the ship. In his busy way he was obnoxious, like a thin-minded bureaucrat, declaiming under law the divine right to distribute the largess of misery tendered by a loving government.
If, as Howard was often forced to point out, he must show Levere a constant watch list of the least tired men, that did not mean that he enjoyed it. He was scrupulous in scheduling his own watchstanding—the single reason why a sometimes driven crew managed to put up with him at all.
After Jensen’s death, Howard muttered privately to Conally that the old man was taking it hard. Levere was prone to inactivity and silence.
“Like he’s brooding,” Howard told Conally.
“What’s to brood about? We done our best.”
“That’s not the point.”
Now, in another season, the point began to reassert itself.
Your large ship, suffering a thirty degree roll, finds the matter so monstrous that the event is entered in the log. Adrian (and electrician Wysczknowski swore this each time the rolling ship tripped his generator off the line) would toss its heart out on a duck pond. As the night drifted slowly past in spume, sharp shocks and breaking waves, the constant battering combined with the fact of too few watchstanders. Fatigue common to a night sweep at sea descended. Watches changed, then changed again, then changed again. The gale faltered, renewed, seemed trying to decide whether to tuck it in, or change over and become a full storm. In heavy, blanketing dark that was penetrated by the thin skim of a wary-seeming dawn, Lamp shushed and cautioned and troubled over Amon’s health.