The Last Ship (10 page)

The beach party picked up the gear and our company of sailors started off. Instead of cutting through the island with its tangled growth, which could trip a man carrying a tray of seedlings, we went straight down the beach, the sailors bearing the plants grouped in a body and the forty-odd shipmates behind and to each side, as though convoying them. Signalman Third Alice Bixby walked alongside me toting the portable signal light with which we could keep contact with the ship and they with us for any emergency or peril that might arise on sea or land. (As for the latter there had been murmurings among the crew, not entirely frivolous ones, that there might be eyes watching us from within the island’s deep growth. I could only reassure them that if so, there was nothing we could do about it but hope that they were more curious than hostile, since I was not about to mount a land campaign to sweep the island of imaginary unfriendlies. We were too in a hurry to have time for that.) Southerly we moved until we came to a path opening from the beach, cleared by a crew a couple of days back, in accordance with Delaney’s unstinting foresight, of the brush that blockaded the approach to the ridge. We went into it single file. Soon we were cutting around the clear-running stream where we could see the pebbles glistening on the bottom. We started up the hill and between the trees in the sweet early morning light, which nonetheless spoke of a cruder sun to come, and finally came out on the meadowlike plateau with its long silky lime-green grass, stirring ever so slightly now in a wisp of breeze coming over the duny cliff from the sea just beyond. There we could see our destroyer standing out, gray and motionless, the solitary mark on the endless ocean blue. Under a grove of green trees on ground which Delaney’s men, on the preparatory mission two days back, had cleared and leveled for the purpose, the gunner’s mate directed the men to place the trays gently down and soon they rested there, clusters in the shade of the trees. Their sailor-bearers sighed as if glad at last to be relieved of a fearsome responsibility. The seedlings stood safe and waiting alongside the soil which we hoped earnestly would accept them.

With the exactitude we might render to any naval operation, Delaney had planned this one. He took charge now, radiating a knowledge of farming as conclusively as he might, in another context, of naval gunnery, of nuclear missiles. The sailors, as sailors always are, seemed glad to follow a man who knew what he was doing. His instructions came with a crisp precision; under his superintendence the men turned to with a will.

First he made up four plowing teams, each astutely constituted. A pair of the biggest and strongest men in ship’s company, previously chosen, were hitched to a grapnel plow fashioned to Delaney’s specifications, navigated behind in each instance by a farm boy the gunner’s mate had found among the crew. The heart of the rig was a pair of strong boards, essentially two-by-fours, cut by Noisy Travis, one laid across the backs, at waist level, of the pulling men, the other attached to the grappling iron itself; connecting the two, Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Singer, who was a master of marlinspike seamanship, of moorings and hitches of all kind, secured and lashed lines around the pulling team’s hips and shoulders thence to the plow. The big sailors in the hitches stood patiently for Singer’s rigging, somber and curious as to their new employment. One of them was Boatswain’s Mate First Class Preston, imposing as a Santa Gertrudis bull. Machinist’s Mate First Class Andrew Brewster, an engine-room man as opposed to Preston’s weather-deck domain, stood by him as his plowmate. Both were thirty-year Navy men. I felt quite certain neither had ever seen a farm, certainly not seen one worked.

“I’ll be watching close to see that you pull your weight, Boats,” Brewster said to his partner in the hitch. “Below decks, Preston, we know what to do with a man that caulks off.”

Preston gave his shipmate a benign look. He was perhaps an inch taller. In weight and visible strength they could have been a matched pair.

“I will pull like a mule,” Preston said gently. “Looking at you, Brewster, I won’t find it hard to imagine I’m hitched with one.”

Waiting behind the improvised plow as Singer proceeded with his complex ritual of lashings and knots stood Jerome Hardy, a mere seaman apprentice and a farm boy who would be their driver. He was not much more than half the size of either man in his two-man hitch. None of this stopped him from putting in his word.

“Now, men,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I’m going to permit you men in the ranks to talk. Might interfere with your pulling power. A little discipline here, if you please. Chief?”

“Yep?” the gunner said, hardly hearing any of this, engaged as he was with getting the operation underway. “What is it, Hardy?”

“In Georgia, if mules don’t pop along proper, we give them a little tap on the hind end with a stick or switch. I take it we can do the same here. Only if necessary of course.”

Preston and Brewster turned and looked balefully at Hardy, rather like real mules in harness rotating their heads to regard the human being behind them, to size up whether he knew what he was doing, and above all whether he knew about mules.

“We not anywhere near Georgia, son,” Preston said. “Pay heed you remember that.”

Singer was finished with his hitch.

“All right, men,” Hardy said with loud authority. “Mind your rudder. Let’s look alive there.” And they were off.

The team started forward, Hardy skillfully dug in his grapnel plow, the soil under the willowy grass turned, and the first smell of parturience leapt from the earth. It was like attar. A distance away the same thing happened with the second team; then with the other two. Meanwhile Delaney, wasting no time, had put other men to following the plows, carrying off the grass, leveling the earth with their entrenching tools, used like hoes now, working backward so as not to trample the soil, the men bent over under the climbing sun. The stoop labor had begun.

Those sailors stripped to the waist, showing even more how much their bodies were weakened and wasted, their white hats perched at jaunty angles, some inverted in protection against the sun, their bodies pouring sweat as they moved slowly down the meadow, turning up the soil, and rearranging it: they seemed to me actually to be enjoying these labors, almost exuberant in the chance to commit their bodies to a useful purpose after the months of being cooped up on the ship, though as the day wore on enjoyment became determination; exuberance, doggedness. Some were farm boys and some city boys who knew almost nothing of how food was brought into being, but whichever, to a man they seemed eager to do their share, the only difference being that Delaney had to show what and how to the latter group. Some of these seemed if anything more zealous than their farm-boy shipmates. It was killing work. The figures of the seamen stooped repeatedly. Now and then a man would pause to mop the drenching sweat from his face, with a handkerchief, his hand, or his sailor’s hat. Farm boys and city boys, I said. Meaning as well, of course, farm girls and city girls, for a half dozen of these were out there among the farming detail, men and women all, volunteers. No complaints rose from the field, even the cherished sailor’s bitching missing. It would surely come later. At one point I was standing at the end of a row when the Preston-Brewster mule team approached before making a turn. As they strained and struggled forward, I could make out on one Nelson at Trafalgar, the tattooed sea wet as with waves real; on the other, an equivalent sweat gleaming from that majestic black chest; Preston from the deck crew, Brewster from the engineroom: they seemed determined to outdo each other in effort as their mighty bent bodies moved down the rows and the grappling iron behind them turned earth. As the sun climbed the sky, and burned brutally over the plateau, I had the men spell each other, rest in the shade of the trees, and sent them down to the clear stream below the ridge to refresh themselves. That cold running water was our gift from the Lord, our balm in Gilead; we would not have made it without. The morning went on, the transformation of the plateau proceeding, the proportion of turned earth increasing as that of the willowy grass diminished.

It was nearing 1200 when I looked and saw a figure waddling over the ridge. Chief Palatti was followed by a retinue of six hands carrying sacks. The chief stood panting from his exertions, his belly retrenched from formerly but still proudly protruding and going like a bellows.

“Chow down,” he got out.

“Any word from Silva, Chief?” I asked. I had sent him and his crew seaward before first light to seek fish.

“Still not back, Captain.”

Chief Palatti could do things even with processed-meat sandwiches. Mainly it was probably the fresh-baked bread. He had brought a cold lemonade kind of drink and the men sat cross-legged under the trees and had their chow. As I ate I tried to remember how much of the meat was left aboard, and how much of the flour. I could not have a meal without this awareness of our diminishing stores, a concern slightly abated by looking out over our meadow where now long rows of turned earth counted for about a fourth of the plateau, the soil rich-looking and pungent against the long grass yet unturned, its scent mingling with the scent of the sea in an almost erotic, comforting alchemy.

“A good morning’s work, Captain,” Delaney, sitting by me, said.

“Yes, Gunner. A good morning. Who would have thought sailors would make such farmers?”

“Well, it works the other way, don’t it, sir?”

“That it does.”

Gunner’s Mate Delaney. Added to all his other knowledge of naval gunnery, he knew as much about missiles and their launching as the Navy could put into a man: a VLS (Vertical Launch System) gunner’s mate, graduate both of the Martin Marietta training unit and the guided missile school at Virginia Beach, an elite 0981 classification. He was square and sturdy, emanating an almost planted look, and of an unhurried countenance. It may be the first requirement of a good seaman that he not have a low flash point. A ship, and especially a destroyer, is simply too intimate a place to have room for such a being. The trait itself represents danger. Considering his direct role in any missile launching, this most particularly stood true of Delaney. From the time our lives came together, I made it an especial point to know him. The quietness of the gunner’s mate’s personality somehow seemed to certify his dependability, his resolve.

I thought about the time, not that long ago, when I had summoned Delaney to my cabin and asked if he could start a vegetable garden on the ship. He selected the missile launcher maintenance shop, which we cleared out and refitted with wooden racks made by Noisy Travis to hold the plants; plants dug gently from the land along the sea-lanes of our odyssey in our incessant scrounging and placed in cut-down cans from the galley. The compartment had been chosen because it led conveniently by ladder to the after part of the weather deck and to the 61-cell vertical launch system which made an ideal setting for the plants to absorb the needed sunlight, protected there as they were by the fact that the salt spray which chronically blows down the length of the ship underway would have been relatively dissipated by the time it reached this area; the plants customarily remaining topside on the VLS except when inclement weather or seas prompted the gunner to stash them below. “Delaney’s Garden,” it was soon called. It was a popular attraction aboard ship. The men would stop by and look at it thoughtfully as at a botanical garden of rare flowers, though these were plain, even scrubby things with now and then timid green shoots beginning to sprout. Then the sailors, those of them not come from the farm, with expressions as if the growing of vegetables was a sacred mystery to which only Delaney held the key, would watch intently as the gunner’s mate did his fussy sorcery, taking a single bean for example and causing it to germinate, watering the plants, when the time came employing a small trowel fashioned by Molder First Class A. J. Phayme to transplant the seedlings into larger pots, turning the seedlings daily to correct the sun’s leaning effect and make for straight stems; finally when the plant bore, taking its multiple seeds and planting them in the five-inch casings, both abbreviated by and holes to allow water seepage drilled in their bottoms by Phayme, which the gunner’s mate had discovered to be the exact size required. We even fired a considerable number of rounds at nothing to obtain the casings. I was one of the most frequent visitors, for I knew nothing of these things, and was keenly aware of my appalling ignorance of how the first essential to man’s survival operated. Now, of course, knowing the urgency represented in those jury-rig flowerings, I was eager and anxious to make up for this neglect. I studied Delaney and his rituals and questioned him closely, for instance about such matters as growing seasons and time to maturation for different vegetables, as he went about his ceremonies with a mighty simplicity of purpose and that certain zeallike brightness in his eyes. Soon I had relieved the gunner’s mate of all other shipboard duties, so that he might devote himself full-time to “Delaney’s Garden.”

Some of the men had finished lunch and the smokers among them were having one of their new ration, inhaling deeply, smoking the butts to the very end. Some shared a cigarette.

“It’s going to be good soil, Captain,” Delaney was saying. He sipped his lemonade drink. I could feel like a field of force the quiet exultation in him, of one happy to be back at the work he was born to, or perhaps exultant more from what he saw happening here, and mostly his handiwork it was, going back to that shipboard garden.

As we were finishing chow, the island’s daily rain began to fall, thin and gentle, virtually soundless. Just started, without advance notice. Some of the men got up from under the trees and stood out in it, clothes and all, letting the rain cool and wash their bodies. Now and then the men turned their faces up to the falling misty water as one does in a shower. In almost exactly twenty minutes the rain stopped as if shut off by a spigot. Now you could smell even more strongly the rich fructuousness of the soil. I heard Delaney’s quiet voice beside me.