The Last Ship (13 page)

“That creek,” I said.

“Sir?” Barker said.

“The creek. Below the Farm. This is where that creek comes from. That stream must go clear across the island.”

We stood there in mute examination of it, for myself a catalogue of cold hard appraisals and facts rushing in a tumble through my head. The valley, the fall, the pool, the stream, the trees. I cannot say for how long. Suddenly up through the treetops I felt the declining light. I looked at my watch. I was startled at how late it was. It would not do for darkness to overtake us at sea. Especially after that tide rip—we might have to negotiate another on the island’s northern passage. One tended to forget how fast night came on in these latitudes.

“We’d best get on,” I said.

We went back through the forest, passing through occasional clearings, caught in the softly oblique luminescence of a descending sun. I think each of us was afraid to talk, wanting to absorb the strange feelings filling us, to digest these visual invasions rushing in from all sides on our contemplations. My own thoughts raced ahead into time and my mind’s eye saw: habitations, built from those sturdy guardsman trees under the supervision of Noisy Travis; built in those clearings, these being far enough back so that, leaving standing those parts of the forest which stood between them and the sea, the habitations would have the added protection of the trees themselves, security entire; all the fresh water needed just at hand; even a more salubrious temperature, given that gentle westerly wind, than on the island’s other side . . .

We reached the cliff and from the pie plate looked down at the boat, tucked in securely between her twin moorings.

We went around the cliff and started down, tree to tree on the deep descent, much faster this time, and came out on the apron beach. I told Meyer to get in, she hauled in the anchor, and with her at the wheel Barker and I, wading, pushed the boat out carefully from between the rocks, then pulled ourselves in over the gunwales. Meyer backed off until we stood well clear. We idled for a few moments, looking up across the darkening water at the cliff of Pompeiian red, fixed in a mystic beauty in the light of the fading afternoon sun. Seeming, to me, ancient and solid, a place of protection, a haven of serenity—of security. I saw again in vision what was behind that cliff. A great sense of stillness filled me. And suddenly I knew: I had found what I was looking for.

“Coxswain,” I said, “let’s go home.”

“Home it is, sir,” she said, with a bright air exceptional for her, and brought the boat sharply to port and bore off northwesterly. Soon up ahead we could see the end of the island. We went around it—in smooth waters, no tide rip on this end—and then were on the eastern side and it was as if it were a different island. The long beach stretched unbroken and the land lay gently beyond it. Then I could see the ship far off, standing in resplendent and rather haughty solitude on the blue, and felt an unaccountable relief that she was still there. We followed down the beach, still our half-mile offshore, Meyer at the wheel, Barker and I parked in the stern sheets near her. The sun was headed down the western sky, the huge hot ball hastening to reach the cooling sea.

“Just imagine, Captain,” Meyer said from her coxswain pulpit. “A waterfall.” She spoke as if still in the grip of a reverie, her voice soft, all a girl. “I can’t remember that I ever saw a waterfall before. No, definitely not.” And said it again, as if it were some holy wonder of nature. “A waterfall.”

“Wasn’t it a pretty place, though?” Barker said. His face was alight. “Who would ever have thought?”

We could see the ship coming closer.

“I can’t wait to tell,” Meyer said.

“I’m sure everybody would like to hear about it,” I said.

 *  *  * 

I need now to record, sadly, that about this time we lost a member of ship’s company. Most regrettably of all, a woman. Her name was Emily Austin. She was on the farm detail, having been the daughter of a dirt farmer from eastern Tennessee. She had literally run away to that sea which she had never seen—“Have you ever chopped cotton for ten hours, Captain?” was the rather jaunty explanation she once gave me. She was religious without being proselytizing. There was an attractive, authentic gaiety to her personality; one, however, I could feel being eaten away at during our passage through the dark and the cold. She apparently slipped away from the Farm one day. Neither Delaney nor any others of the detail missed her at first, not until quitting time near twilight. Next day we knocked off everything and made a thorough search of the island. Nothing. She was bright as a tack, as anyone in her rating of operations specialist had to be. She was one of the air trackers who, sitting at their consoles, monitored our missiles to their destinations at Orel.

We had a service for her on the fantail. The Jesuit read one of the Psalms and Porterfield led ship’s company in the singing of “Majestic Sweetness Sits Enthroned,” a favorite hymn of hers.

D
aily I inspected the Farm; some days, the fishing grounds as well. These were the normal duties of any ship’s captain to determine the progress of important work. But they had an added purpose, which was to see how the men themselves were faring, apart from their work. As I have said, it is in the nature of seamen: the setting of a purpose and the accomplishing of it, with often little more in the way of tools than their ingenuity and single-mindedness. But there was something beyond the expected coping that I felt that morning, carefully scrutinizing these of my ship’s company in the field. In their brutal labor under that violent sun, bathed in dirt-streaked sweat, spread out across that acreage above the sea, bodies bent to the earth so that only the tops of their white hats marked their movements, they seemed near obsessed in a determination to subdue the soil and bring sustenance from it by their sheer unceasing endeavor, and by their very will, which would permit of no other result. Even I could not have foreseen the fanaticism with which these bluejackets toiled. We were paying the expected price: three men thus far victims of prostration, confined to sick bay, their places taken by ready volunteers. The furrowed soil now stretched in long black rows to the cliffside and the blue beyond, neat Bristol-fashion rows considering that both plowmen and mules had been men of the sea; rows harboring carefully imbedded seeds and plants which we had reason to believe were flourishing, helped along immeasurably by the island’s daily twenty-minute rain quota provided as if on standing watch order by some angel in charge of agriculture, or perhaps of sailors. Besides the promise of food, all of this went to further what I devoutly desired, a stake on the part of ship’s company in the island itself.

I started down through the trees. It was a day of luminous serenity, the sunlight shimmering through the branches, a very sweetness in the island’s air. Soon below I could hear the pleasing, now-familiar sound of the creek that flowed along the bottom of the ridge below the Farm, the creek that I now felt certain originated far across the island in that forest atop the cliffs. I began to feel borne upward in spirit, having just viewed the men so zealous at their labors; a sense of well-being filled me, seeing how the work was going—how the promise grew; I felt an increasing confidence that I could bring them along with me in that most final of all steps. Working my way down the hill I glimpsed, just visible through the trees, something that drew me up. Two sailors were kneeling at the brook, their mouths to the running water. There was nothing unusual about this. The sailor-farmers often came down off the ridge to drink of that cold water, its fresh pure taste a splendid and reviving thing after the hard going above. I was about to go on when a voice, rising faintly upward through the trees, caught my ear. Something in it made me wait.

It was a girl’s voice, which also was not unusual—a few women sailors, I have said, worked on the Farm—but there was something in the timbre and tone of it. Then I heard a certain lilting laughter. I looked through the trees, feeling uncomfortably like a voyeur spying on my own people. Their heads were now raised, but they stayed on their knees and I saw them look at each other for a moment. Regarded one way, it was a charming tableau, a girl and a boy kneeling at a brook, their faces wet from the tasting of it. (Of course I knew their names.) Nothing whatsoever happened. But there was a quality in the scene itself, in the very configurations of their facing genuflected forms, a sense of something like intimacy, that made something terrible strike at my heart. I moved quickly on, wanting to get away from it. Surely it was nothing. But whether it was or not, for the present I did not wish to know, cowardly perhaps, and I certainly didn’t want to get the information in that clandestine manner, spying through trees. I cleared the woods, faster than usual, and walked up the beach to my boat waiting on the sand. I decided to put the matter out of my mind as the meaningless thing it in all likelihood was.

I told Coxswain Meyer to take me out to the fishing grounds, today, I knew, on the western side of the island which Silva also had discovered and found that the fish more often than not ran better there than on the eastern. “Fish like rocks,” he said, and I had cautioned him about these, never to venture inshore without a close bow lookout. Our boat began to round the island. By now we knew well to make that transit farther out so as to avoid the rather vicious tide rip that formed closer inshore where the currents coming from the two sides of the island met. I had carefully warned Silva and his fishermen about that, too. Having brought us smartly around the island’s tip, Meyer gave the wheel over to Barker while she monitored him closely and now and then furnished him a brisk pointer on boat handling, bringing him along in his Navy trade.

From the cloudless azure vault of sky sunlight fell on the cliffs that rose, majestic fortresses boldly confronting the sea, the light playing across their Pompeiian red, the water a polished mirror all the way in until it met the patient rocks and threw up now splashes, now fountains of white spume. My mind seldom left those cliffs, and now that they were in sight turned to what lay unseen just beyond them: that verdant forest of the guardsman trees, the good timber at hand, the sweet clearings in the forest bed, the fall of eternal fresh water. It put itself together to form a place I had never ceased, since first I saw it, to think of as surely God-given for our purposes, and if there was an angel of agriculture perhaps there was also an angel of housing and he had brought us, wandering seamen, here. To get a second opinion after the angel’s, it now occurred to me that I might take Noisy Travis there tomorrow for a professional look at those trees.

A burst of laughter from aft startled me from these reveries. Youthful laughter that fell like a clear-striking ship’s bell on the still morning and out across the silent sea. It was nothing at all, only that I had not heard it before between them. The relationship between the coxswain and the seaman as I had observed it was that strictly of a fine craftsman and one in the apprenticeship of that craft, and no nonsense. But now the laughter was curiously like that I had heard from the brook: that particular and special laughter of youth, girl and boy, the secret language of the young, something that in the right circumstances would have been pleasing and brought a tolerant smile in an older hearer. I looked back and saw them standing close alongside each other, chatting. Then the laughter again. Perhaps, with my constant use of this boat, they had become accustomed to their captain’s presence and went about their business as they did in my absence. Nonetheless a ripple of foreboding as to whether it might be speaking of something new between them shot through me. This time I at least had the decent sense immediately to wonder, not as to whether it was already beginning to happen in my ship’s company, but whether it was happening only in the mind of a prurient, voyeuristic captain, possibly too alert for signs of what he so deeply feared. We bore more to seaward and soon up ahead could see Silva’s boat, motionless on the mirroring waters. As we came nearer we could see the men seize the large net, fling it back and skyward in a parabola, and then cast it wide and flowing into the sea where it fell gently as a tern’s feather before settling to gather in its harvest. It was a lovely sight, full of skill and grace, an artistry almost moving in it, the modern nuclear sailors mastering the art as done in the days of Galilee. As if man, having moved forever forward into time, now had come about, 180 degrees so, and was setting a course backward through the ages of time and across ancient seas; as if progress the other way had after all been too hurried and haven lay where he had come from.

“Ahoy, Silva,” I called as we drew near. “How goes the catch?”

Back came his exultant shout. “Captain, come see for yourself.”

“Heave to, Coxswain,” I spoke back to Meyer, who had retaken the wheel.

“Aye, aye, sir,” she sang out. Coxswain Meyer had a voice clear and clean as a bird’s call. Then came the snap in it.

“Barker! Stand by with the lines!”

The sailor leapt to her command. This time I felt a smile on my lips.

 *  *  * 

As far back as I can remember, on unnumbered waters of the world and in all manifestations of the sea’s unending repertory of moods, whether placid as some inland lake or stormy enough to roll one’s body back and forth, port and starboard, with the ship herself while one clutched hard the volume, I have read a half hour before bed, sitting up in my bunk, before marking my place and reaching up and snapping off the overhead light. I have often wondered how anyone who does not read, by which I mean daily, having some book going all the time, can make it through life. Indeed if I were required to make a sharp division in the very nature of people, I would be tempted to make it there: readers and nonreaders of books. (The second would be seamen and landsmen.) It is astonishing how the presence or absence of this habit so consistently characterizes an individual in other respects; it is as though it were a kind of barometer of temperament, of personality, even of character. Aside from that, for me it constituted something like sanity insurance. I made it a point, in that half hour, that what I read should have nothing whatever to do with my duties as a naval officer, or, now, ship’s captain, but would bear me away into other realms, kingdoms of the mind and spirit, accessible only between bindings. That night the book happened to be
The Kreutzer Sonata,
one of the 985 we had brought out as I had discovered in the inventory of our possessions with Lieutenant Girard—how immeasurably grateful I was for these! I could feel the cloaking night around me, the stillness of the ship. Then, reading, my mind unaccustomedly kept slipping off, making its own steerageway, as if perversely determined to take away the one half hour of the day I felt I could call my own and forget every worry and concern, the whole agenda of anxiety. Until it fetched me up, like a fast-reverse, freeze-frame film, and displayed again to its unwilling viewer the twin sights: the two sailors by the brook; the two sailors in the whaleboat.

Then I pushed it back, locked it up again, as I had long since learned to do, as a matter of personal survival, with it and its great company of other problems, matters to be confronted, dealt with, in the broad light of day. As the book absorbed me and went into me and became a part of me, so that it was something I would always have, I began only to possess the book, and the book to possess me. Until at last I reluctantly marked my place in
The Kreutzer Sonata,
thanked Mr. Tolstoy, and reached up and snapped off the overhead light. Falling asleep thinking, what might the Jesuit know. Or Girard.

 *  *  * 

Before Lieutenant Girard came to me today I sat in my cabin, renewedly disturbed, if but faintly so, more nagging than acute, from a cause undetermined, imprecise in nature, a captain’s sense of recent origin of a certain restiveness abroad on the ship; giving rise in turn to an apprehension, if still not one of major force, or unduly pressing, seeming to intensify as the days went by, and thought suddenly of a conversation of three months or so ago, on another sea. It was I who in these sessions on stores and morale—her twin responsibilities as an officer—generally put the questions. But on that occasion in the Mediterranean which I now sat bringing back in reflective recall, she came up with a question—a request—after we had finished up our routine daily matters, one that caught me totally offguard.

Looked at one way, the request was not all that unusual, presented as it was as being but an addition to a program we had already commenced. In fact it was Girard herself, acting as morale officer, who had suggested the program to me in the first place. I thought it an excellent idea, promptly okayed it, and in her fashion, she had begun at once and with characteristic efficiency and thoroughness to implement it. This while we continued to search for a place. A program to occupy the crew in various pursuits both educatory and enjoyable, the unstated purpose being to keep their minds off other things, to give them something of interest and stimulation on which to fasten their thoughts, and to have a little fun while doing it. While none of it was compulsory, there was scarcely a member of ship’s company who did not enroll in one or another of the classes, and quite a number who enrolled in two or three. The eclectic curriculum included, on the physical side, boxing lessons taught by the Jesuit, a onetime Georgetown varsity boxer; fencing lessons offered by Sedgwick, who had been on the Academy fencing team (he had actually brought foils along to keep his hand in, and even a brace of épées, his specialty); Selmon providing a rudimentary course in gymnastics on some makeshift rings and bars; on the intellectual, Girard herself teaching a course in English literature (the nineteenth century, which had been her college major); Thurlow, a French class; Porterfield giving guitar lessons; myself a course in celestial navigation and shiphandling (student body principally women . . .). Some of the courses were purposefully designed to master skills we should urgently need in any future life: Delaney’s course in farming methods fell in that category. There were two or three others. The crew’s forthright eagerness for this impromptu school surprised me. Soon some were themselves suggesting new courses. It was my observation, and Girard’s, that the program already had been of considerable worth. These activities and studies appeared to have a relaxing effect on the men, and to lift them out of a certain brooding which had reached a level that had begun to concern me. The new item that day was presented more or less in the context of an addition to this program.

I think I may have mentioned somewhere that Girard came to us fully qualified in gunnery, but due to her sex had been denied the billet at sea; indeed in her absolute determination concerning sea duty she then became a supply officer. That day, as we were finishing up, she asked me mildly if she might instruct the women in small-arms use. I remembered that I felt—nothing that could be called a suspicion—only a certain surprise.