Downeasters know these days, when the sky raises in the northeast and sunlight flashes, flares, floods, bursts, shatters.
Temperatures drop, drop further, suddenly plunge. The clear air is filled with sparkle. Moisture in the air freezes and pops with sudden brilliant transubstantiation into miniature flakes of ice. The moderate sea foams thickly at the bow. Salt water arcs cream-colored and stiffening toward rails and chains where it freezes, or it falls pebbled into the sea as drops change to pearls of ice in a three- or four-foot travel. The ship becomes a warm cave lined with ice. Brass frames of portholes telegraph the cold. Inside the ship, condensation freezes thick and frosty on the frames. Men sit warm (playing cards, yarning) beneath dull, vanilla halos of ice.
On deck, when a man is unlucky enough to have an errand, breath comes hard through a wool-mufflered nose. The air freezes moisture in the breath. Nose hair is a mat, a clogged and frozen filter through which breath is sucked. Teeth ache from mouthfuls of cold. The thickest and best homemade mittens, of the kind that only Maine women make, seem like thin paper shells. Feet are not stomped. The thickest boots with the thickest liners are only just thick enough. The sparkle and glitter and dance in the air are pinpricks of light; hitting the eyes, making the mind groggy as if the head suffered the aftermath of a blow.
Rigged lifelines are stiff with ice, like coated steel rods. The deck becomes a glaze that would knock the feet from under a cat. Where heaving lines once hung on the rails, there is now empty space. Conally has taken the lines and hung them in Howard’s office where they will stay dry. A man cannot heave a frozen coil.
Cutter Adrian returned to sea as Lamp’s calendar, aplot with menus, flipped to December. Thanksgiving, which Snow thought one of the larger advantages of the New World, lay like a subdued burp in the memory; and Lamp, still in combat with the invisible, confided to Howard, Brace and Conally that Christmas was going to make Thanksgiving look like “pale pink puddin’.”
“We been a long time away,” Conally mourned. “Our ladies will have found other guys.”
Lamp held to the opinion that Conally’s “kind of ladies” had waited no longer than fifteen minutes.
“There’s nice girls at the Salvation Army.”
“I don’t want to meet somebody who’s Salvation Army nice,” said Brace.
“They have a brass band,” Howard explained to no one in particular.
On these days of lapse between storms, the coastal waters flourish with traffic. Boats move between ports, shift moorings, make brief dashes toward wintered-in islands. The harbors freeze. Tugs with icebreaker bows plow the narrow road of the channel. Buoy snatchers break off replacement and salvage among wrecked aids to navigation. The snatchers make fast trips to resupply the lighthouses. Men listen to radio Boston, gauge the weather, and the men take thin sniffs at the air, judge the “signs.” Sometimes the men take chances.
The ill-prepared and lousy double-ended auto ferry Islander, three hundred feet long and taller than a house, en route from Canada to its startling new port of Seattle, ran empty along the coast. It carried a working crew of six men for bringing it through the Panama Canal. In the inshore water, spray mounted the forward end of the low car deck. The thing became like a skating rink—or—the vast, open car deck was like a frozen playing field. As wind arrived, spray ran the length of the car deck. The deck, stanchions, bulkheads became coated. Islander resembled a floating tunnel of ice.
Aboard Adrian, Brace peeled apples while men sat at tables telling lies about liberties in Boston. Images of eager and easily satisfied women seemed to hover kibitzing above a poker game that, because it was the wrong side of payday, had a nickel limit. In the wardroom, Dane and Levere sat with as much ease as they had ever displayed at sea. They spoke in low tones that Howard, no matter his acute and nosily trained hearing, could not decipher. From forward the engines were as smooth and certain as the low and easy swell beneath Adrian’s keel. The ship moved with the rich, studied regularity of a cruise liner peopled by touristing millionaires.
The cracker Bascomb hollered the up cards as he dealt five-card stud. Conally, it seemed, looked at two tens showing. Conally bet two cents, was called. The cards slapped around. Conally dragged a pot worth sixty cents. If Howard had not known Conally well, he would have sworn that Conally was no different than ever.
Lamp appeared in the office doorway and blocked the view of the messdeck. He handed Howard a short list of galley items for the quarterly requisition. Lamp pretended to be all business, and he was not. His red-blond-haired red-faced head tipped slaunchwise over huge shoulders, and his head seemed like a teacup precariously perched on a cabinet.
“I got something to say,” he whispered. “Come forward.”
“Where?”
“I think maybe the boat deck,” Lamp whispered. “There won’t be anybody on the boat deck.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Boat deck,” Lamp insisted. He turned and was clearly headed forward to get his gear. Howard stood, plucked his jacket from a hook, kicked off his shoes and began to pull on his boots. He looked up, saw Conally watching. Conally stood, raked in his change. He walked across the messdeck.
“Boat deck,” Howard whispered. “Don’t ask why.”
“I guess I know.”
“We don’t want a parade.”
“There won’t be no parade,” Conally whispered. “It’s gettin’ on toward thirty below up there.”
In Maine, in December, and with a lot of fat, a lot of thrashing and more luck than comes with loaded dice, a man can live in the water for five minutes. Most men die immediately of shock.
Conally followed Howard. The two men walked across the fiddley, unclogged a forward hatch, stepped onto the port side of the main deck. A lifeline angled from a stanchion and forward into the bow. The line was as stiff and hard as cable. Conally reached with a mittened hand, attempted to twang the line. The line creaked. Shatters of ice were like brilliant rain in the sunlight. Thin ice formed on the house, so that the ship momentarily seemed made of mother of pearl. Wind of Adrian’s passage was light, sharp as an assault by needle points. The men turned their backs to the wind. Conally dogged the hatch.
“This better be about something.”
“Nobody said you had to come.”
“You an’ me,” said Conally. “Now we know better.”
“Levere knows something he isn’t telling,” said Howard. “Maybe Dane knows.”
“You mean New Bedford?”
“I know how District works. I figure Abner to New Bedford, and Able comes up here. I figure we ride herd on Able.”
“If it ain’t no worse than that,” said Conally, “then I reckon I could stand it.”
“What could be worse?”
Conally looked at the light swell that ran beneath brilliant sunshine. He hunched his shoulders and faced aft.
“Dane’s going to take mustang grade,” Conally said in a voice of misery. “District is gonna give him Able.” Conally conjectured with the certainty of an accused man before a hanging judge. He looked upward at the boat deck, where, leaning against the stack, Lamp stood red-faced and waiting.
“Dane’s different,” Conally said. “All last month.” Conally turned toward the ladder and the boat deck.
Howard followed, shocked with the awful fear that Conally was correct. In his worst imaginings, Howard had never imagined a thing so terrible.
The main deck served as a funnel for ice, and where water splashed and ran toward the scuppers, ice lay in ridges. Close to the house the ice was thin. The two men held rails that were welded to the house. They walked closely and kicked their boots into the angle formed by house and deck.