Departure (17 page)

Finally, on toward evening, he rang the bell of an apartment. A nice girl answered the door, a healthy, good-looking young girl, and behind her a baby gurgled and the smell of cooking food filled the air.

“Jack Orlaffson?” she said. “What do you want of him?”

“My name is Tom Anderson, and he was my friend.”

“So you're Tom Anderson,” she said, very warmly. “Jack was my father-in-law, and I remember how he used to talk about you, but my goodness, the old man's been dead since before the war.”

With a rush and a roar and a hammer, time descended upon Tom Anderson. For so long, the years had stood still! Now they all descended upon him with a great rush and roar until his head spun and he thought his senses would leave him.

It was not so much the fact of Orlaffson's death, although afterwards that would grieve him a good deal; death he was used to; but it was the way this young girl spoke of his friend, as an old man who belonged to the far, far past. It was the way, all of a sudden, the years fled past that left him so bereft and lonely and unhappy.

The young girl looked at him with sympathy, and asked him wouldn't he come in and have a cup of tea and a piece of cake?

“No,” he said dully—“no, I got to go somewhere else.”

Afterwards, she told her husband about it and remarked, “I felt so sorry for the poor dumb Swede.”

After that, for Anderson, time seemed to race, as if some incredible brake had been removed. The only part that paused, even comparatively, was three months he spent in jail, during the Palmer Raids, when he had been mistaken for an alien because of the slight accent that still lingered. He had been picked up in a saloon with a crowd of workers; it was the first real trouble he ever got into, and when, finally, after three months, he was brought to trial, he got out easily enough. But it added to his old, old mistrust of unions and radicals: reasoning that if not for them and their activities, none of this trouble would have started.

Bad times came, and for two years he had only occasional jobs. It was no longer easy, as it had once been, to take the roughest and dirtiest work and laugh it off. More frequently, his back hurt; more frequently, he woke up with a stiff neck, with every joint throbbing in pain. And now, for the first time, he found himself being passed by while younger men got the jobs.

Still, he was a good worker, and when he landed a job in a paper mill outside of St. Paul, he kept it a full five years. During a part of that time, he lived with a widow who kept a boardinghouse; but he never felt any real closeness to her, and the relationship was one that simply dwindled away. More and more often now, he regretted that he had never learned to read; reading, he felt, could put a brake on time passing; reading might give him something to hold on to. He went to the movies a good deal, but unless the story could be followed without the subtitles, he was confused and disturbed.

There was no itemizing the years. One became very much like another. The paper mill closed down with the crash, and Tom Anderson took to the road again. It seemed only yesterday that there were bad times, but here they were again, such times as no man had ever dreamed of before. The whole world was on the road now, moving, drifting, scrabbling for the bones.

It's one thing to go on the road when you're seventeen or twenty-five years old; it's another thing to go on the road when fifty is just ahead of you. It's one thing to nose out the next man when you can put in two hours to his one; it's another thing for them to tell you,
nothing doing, Pop, nothing doing.

Yet a force drove him. He was a worker; he had always been a worker—why else then had God given him two strong hands? He had to work. If he didn't work, he didn't live. If he didn't work, he might just as well stop living. He might just as well lie down on the earth and breathe out his life.

He lived, without comprehending why; he found jobs here and there, and time passed. He went into a town where a steel mill was opening and he stood a whole day in line until it was his turn, and then they said to him,
nothing doing, Pop.
In Los Angeles, he worked as a cleaning man in a dance hall.

“What do you pay?” he had asked them.

They took one look at the big, dumb Swede and they answered, “Thirty a month and meal at night,” and he took it because he had to live.

He was not old, he tried to tell himself, thinking of all the stories of the old country where a round span of life was eighty, and a hundred was not out of the question. He sat in a moving picture house—better now because the pictures were accompanied by sound—and found himself gauging the age of the actors. So many of them must be as old as he was, and yet there they were, loving women, having adventures and romances, and consistently making fortunes, so they could live in their wonderful palaces. In a way, it gave him heart, but his high spirits always vanished when he came out into the cold air of reality.

After the dance hall, he worked as a male chambermaid in a dirty old flophouse in Denver. He stuck to that for almost a year, hating it and despising himself for being there, but deep-stricken now with the fear of not finding another job and being in the place of the poor, gray-skinned devils who made this their home. Yet eleven months of bitter, senile emasculation was all he could stomach. He was an industrial worker; when he looked at his two hands, still so strong and large, still retaining the form of their old beauty, his heart became sick with remembering the things they had built. He was a worker who built, who drained, who created, who fed the vitals of those great piles called plants; what was he doing here in this awful place?

He rode east to Chicago, where many wheels were turning with the pressure of an approaching war, and in Chicago he went from plant to plant. What couldn't he do? Where had he not worked? Did they want a machinist, a turret operator, a butcher, a stoker, a drop forger, a metal cutter—well, he was each and all of them.

“Maybe you were once, Pop,” they told him, feeling sorry in their hearts, some of them, for the big, shambling man.

When at last he had to eat, he took a job as doorman in one of those magnificent houses that face the lake on the Near North Side. The guts of the struggle gone now, he gave in, and all day long he opened the door and closed it, helped people out of cars and into them, whistled for taxis and carried bundles.

The years fled now. In his room, Tom Anderson tried to cling to those last muttering years; he installed a radio, listened to Munich, heard the rumble of war again and the tale of the invasion of Norway. Most of it he did not understand, any more than he had understood or responded to the great organizational surges of the thirties, when the CIO was born. But war he hated, and he felt himself moved as he had never been moved before. Norwegians he hated too, because when he was a little child, it was thought right that a Swede should hate Norwegians, yet he wept as he listened to the tales out of Norway.

His back pained him more and more, as the days fled. His hair turned white, and the seasons passed while he opened and closed the door. He was an old man. One morning, his back pained him so that he could not rise, and he lay in bed weeping with fear and frustration. Somehow, the next day, he dragged himself to work. He had never been sick before; it was more terrible than he had ever imagined it would be to be a sick old man.

“You got to keep up with the job, Tom,” the superintendent told him, “I know how it is, but you got to keep up with the job,” thinking that perhaps it would be better to get rid of the dumb Swede now instead of later.

“I keep up,” Anderson promised. “I swear I do.”

A great and fearful emptiness had opened within him, and in the black depths of his desperation he recalled that his folks had been Lutheran—and he went to the Lutheran Church one Sunday. But it gave him neither peace nor comfort; he had been too long away and he did not want prayer, but the right to work and the dignity of it.

The war went on and the war finished. Everyone in the house and everyone who visited there knew old Tom Anderson, but no one ever thought of him as a man or as a human fellow with human hopes and woes, but only as another part of the tall, shiny building, like the doors and the elevators and the canopy outside.

Everyone said, “Hello, Tom—what do you know?” But no one cared what he knew.

The pain in his back was worse than ever now. On some days, the pain seemed to permeate his entire body, and it became more and more of a torture to drag himself from bed in the morning. Again, he was away from work for three days, and this time the superintendent really made up his mind to replace him. But after that, for five months, Tom Anderson managed to show up each day, and the superintendent relented a little.

But Tom Anderson knew he could not keep it up long. The strength of his big body was going; he lost flesh, and the pain became worse and worse, until one morning he woke fitfully, the pain coming and going in undulating waves, driving him from consciousness back to unconsciousness. Then he knew he was going to die. Here he was, an old man alone in this furnished room, with no one to call out for and no one to help him, and he was dying.

An anger came to him now that was unlike any anger he had ever experienced before. His life was gone; it had rolled away like a shadow and it was over, and he had nothing, not kith nor kin nor a place he could call his own. All through the years, he had been a good worker, a strong worker, a faithful worker, but no one cared and it mattered to no one. Fury raged all through him, but the fury could not be directed anywhere because he knew of no place or target to direct it upon. He was bereft, yet he knew not of what he was bereft. His old eyes shed tears, but the tears were in vague and hopeless groping for all the roads he had not traveled and would never travel.

And presently, those thoughts became confused and meaningless, and in what remained of his consciousness there was only a flicker of himself as a poor, dumb Swede, whose life was like a formless shadow.

The Gray Ship

W
ITH WORK WELL
done, the gray ship lay in the eastern sunshine and slept. Moored to the dockside with heavy hawsers, fore and aft, she was as immobile as part of the earth, the dock, the rusty, war-weary storage sheds. She had come halfway around the world, her holds stuffed with the food and the teeth of war, her decks piled; she had threaded her way through the islands and atolls of the Pacific, crawled around the belly of Australia, crept lightless and soundless through the tropical night. She was sufficient to herself; when her engines broke down, she hove to and repaired them; when danger threatened, she manned her guns and slewed them belligerently to the part of the horizon which menaced her. She had been a living, vibrating world, rusty and hard; now she was painted over from head to foot, and she lay in the sunshine and slept.

The purser was nervous; big, heavy, his usual smile gone, he stood by the rail, drummed his fingers on the hot metal, and wanted to be away. That nervousness had communicated itself to the whole crew; longing for port, talking port, dreaming it, when it came it was always less than it should have been, and when port time ran over schedule they became restless and uneasy. And this they tried to cover over by pointing out that their pay went on, good pay in this, a danger zone.

“It stinks,” the purser said. He meant it literally; in the basin, the garbage could not be thrown overside; it littered the aft deck, mixed indiscriminately with the dunnage. A ship in port, loading or unloading, isn't clean. Crows screamed and cawed and swooped over the garbage. Flies made a netting over it.

“A dead ship,” the purser said. “She sleeps, she lays on her belly like a whore. I don't like a ship that way.” He begun to hum, “Don't fence me in—give me land.” The chief came up and joined his music; the chief's eyes wandered from the burnished metal skies to the ship, to the crows. Of the crows, he asked, “What are they?” “Crows.” “I don't like crows,” the chief said. “I don't like crows by the hundreds. I liked to hear them way off across the meadows at home, but not like this. What's new?”

The purser said he didn't know what was new, and anyway, what should be new? The chief thought that maybe he had some news on where they were going, but the purser only grunted. But inside, momentarily, he had a quick, wide thought: fifteen thousand miles from stateside, the whole world was theirs, its waters washing motes of land, unimportant land, wretched, hot land: he had a sudden sense of freedom, and he pitied the army guards, seeking shade under the rusty shed, he pitied the natives of the land who were like the trees, rooted to the land.

“I want to hear the turbines,” he said.

“You want to hear the turbines,” the chief muttered. “The rotten noisiest can I ever been on, and you want to hear it. You got bugs in your head.”

“When the engines turn over, she's alive; now she's dead. A ship without power, she's dead.”

“We ought to have a funeral service,” the chief said; but the purser, pouring ample quantities of sweat, drummed with his fingers on the rail and wanted to be away.

The gray ship was a Victory, which meant that whatever her given name, it would be followed by the word “Victory,” as, for instance, the
Arkansas Victory
or the
Burnside Victory.
It also meant that, in a very limited sense, she belonged to an aristocracy; she was meant to survive for the postwar period, provided that no torpedoes ripped out her guts, that no mines caved in her plates, that no shells or bombs smashed her superstructure into scrap; provided all that, she was a little less expendable than the bathtub hulls of the Liberties, a little more expendable than the C1s, the C2s and the C3s.

Her displacement was about ten thousand tons, her length something over four hundred feet. She had a forecastle deck, which gave her a graceful swoop up to the bow, and differentiated her immediately from the unbroken deck line of the Liberty. Amidships, she had a deck housing. Square, ugly, undifferentiated from the gray-painted metal of the rest of the ship, it climbed from the main deck in this fashion: boat deck, which housed the four lifeboats and gave the ship's officers a limited promenade; quarter-deck, bridge, topside and flag deck. One fat sack poked out of the housing, and four king posts surrounded it.