“Maybe you should of lost him, cook. Maybe you shoulda.” Always a young voice would say that. Always an older voice would snort with contempt, or would curse.
Mother Lamp, who cherished increasingly the wayward souls of seamen, would bustle and tsk and wait until the smartmouth had tacked his short nail of wisdom through the wide, implied fabric of the tale.
“It wasn’t that way, sonny. You’re listenin’ with your mouth.”
“He’s a red-blooded American punk, cook. Don’t pay him any mind.”
“Brace was only a kid, himself,” Lamp would say. “For awhile there he was a goner.”
In that large galley, where assistant cooks and stewards ragged and nagged apprentices with dull chores, Lamp was like the director of a small and competent theater. In the waning days of his usefulness, and with indifference to the ambitions of lesser men who contrived to gain his excellent, shore-going job, it was Lamp’s great luxury to sit garrulous on the messdeck—or, gaze silent, as if he still watched the crash of seas, like a man staring with serene indifference at memory, or at that black gulf which lies beyond all seas.
“The real miracle was,” he would say, “that wind never found us. And it was huntin’. That kid was trapped for days.” Which was, in the creative scope of Lamp’s memory, the truth; although it did not precisely match the facts.
The facts, reconstructed after Howard ran like a skein of snoopiness through memory, the log, and conversations, were largely unornamental and bland.
In sloshing water beneath the dull glow of emergency lanterns, Adrian’s boarding crew flattened and shored the sea patch aboard Aphrodite. Brace worked at the task of rigging the pump. The compartment was narrow, awash, dark. It was certainly a dungeon when Brace became pinned shoulder deep in water beneath a shifting, tangled mire of gear.
“Like Floyd Collins, boys. Stuck at the bottom of a mine.”
In those shadowed days when the world was still fabulous, before the rise of clans and explanations; before, even, the invention of hulls, the trapped Brace would have been the stuff of legends, of myth, of song. Before the race became old with knowledge, and thus voluntarily stupid, Brace would have courted and won a place among heroic tales told before dying fires. But… in fact, he was only a terribly frightened youngster who was trapped in the forward compartment of Aphrodite.
“Scared crazy,” Glass told Howard on the following day as Adrian steamed slowly toward Boston, escorting Aphrodite which still ran heeled to port. “Of drowning. Dane smacked him around some.”
“We were all scared crazy,” Howard said, and he seemed to be hearing echoes. “Brace’s name came up in conversation.”
“Snow finally got him quiet,” Glass said. “It took an hour to cut him loose.”
“It was a tough hour aboard this ship.”
The tough hour began when yeoman Howard, having seen the patch set into the heavy suction of the leak aboard Aphrodite, and having spoken honorably and well to Wilson, turned from the thinly iced main deck toward the after hatch. Above him on the boat deck the small sounds of a man working were as unconcerned and unapologetic as the movement of mice. Then the sounds stopped as the man realized that someone else was present. The pale face of bosun striker Joyce looked down, saw Howard, and Joyce released a huff of frozen breath. He steadied himself against a chain. Adrian swooped down a long swell.
“You come topside for a minute?” Joyce’s voice seemed more frozen, less mobile than his breath.
Howard walked aft, mounted the after ladder and moved across the familiar deck. He was arrested by a lifeline.
“In case the weather gets back up,” Joyce said.
“You need help?”
“I already got the fantail rigged.” Joyce pulled a wool mitten from one hand with his teeth, mumbled, used the freed hand to throw a turn and two half hitches. He looked like he was trying to warm his tongue. He mumbled, retrieved the mitten, pulled it back onto his hand. “Levere ought to know,” he said. “This whole ship’s awake. Guys are talking.” He leaned on the line, jogged it, grabbed with mittened hands to rock back and forth with all his weight to test the line. “I don’t need help,” he said apologetically. He looked at the dark sea, turned to look forward, looked upward where the masthead floated and tipped, as though the mast were a string that danced and dangled the puppet ship Adrian.
“Racca claims he’s got the gangrene,” Joyce said.
“In his head. That was a clean break.”
“I wish Dane was here. I wish Snow was.” Joyce gave a final bounce against the line. “I don’t want to be on deck with Jensen around,” he said, “and I don’t want to go below. Racca’s crazy.”
“I was scared,” Howard told him. “Then Lamp said something. This is Jensen’s crew. Jensen wouldn’t do anything to hurt this crew.”
The mast tipped forward like an ancient weapon wielded to exorcise demons. Water fountained from the bow, white flowers of foam. The stack rumbled as positive as an introit. “I never thought of that,” Joyce said. “That’s good. You can’t be scared when you think that.” He twanged the taut line, grabbed it to enjoy the vibration through the mitten. For a moment he was nearly jubilant. Then, a man struck by an awareness of situation, he became a mourner. “Everybody’s sorry about Wilson,” he said. “Everybody’s talking.”
“I’m not.” Howard, who was occasionally known to have a happy fight with French or English sailors, looked down at his clenched fists. “This time,” he said, “this time you can find out who to kill.”
“Guys say Wilson is what the sign was about.” Joyce paused, for a moment at least, in the presence of murderous intent. “Maybe Wilson made a mistake,” he murmured. “He maybe did it to himself.”
“He was a country boy,” said Howard, “but he wasn’t that much of a country boy.”
“Not me,” said Joyce. “I’m from Philadelphia.”
“Let’s get below. Get warm.”
Joyce twanged the line. He looked aft at the wake tossed and spread by the sea. He mumbled.
“You coming below?” Howard turned, walked toward the after ladder.
“Howard.”
“Yes.”
“I know what you mean about Philadelphia. But it’s home, sorta. A guy can’t help where home is.”
Ice lay in the cleats of the ladder. Thin silverings of ice lay on the taut lifelines stretched across the fantail. Howard went through the after hatch, crossed the fiddley and looked down to see McClean standing on the plates. Fallon stood at the board. His keglike shape was grouped into itself, like a caged bear held by invisible bars. Fallon looked up, saw Howard, motioned with a thick hand. McClean saw Fallon’s motion, looked up into the darkness of the fiddley. McClean stood in the bright lights of the engine room like a tired man pinned to a landscape by intense sunlight. His nearly tan face was sweaty from engine heat and seemed radiant with light and sweat.
Howard fumbled down the always almost-slick ladder. He arrived on the plates.
“Lamp did a number on Masters,” Fallon said. “You were there.”
“He had it coming.” Howard was surprised. “Guys on the messdeck heard it?”
“A mouse can’t poot aboard this ship without.” McClean stood easily on the plates, and his weight moved with the forward-running, wave-smacking motion of Adrian. “Masters ain’t going to ‘fess getting licked by a cook.”