The Last Ship (48 page)

It had happened so quickly, filtered even so through arriving weather, the sudden realization that the ship was signaling her need for us in her battle with the sea . . . so quickly that only blurred impressions remained as evidence. Said what he had said, stopped there. But I felt I heard it as much as if he had said it directly into my ears. Himself knowing that he did not need to do that in any detail, knowing that a mere signal would suffice; knowing the fact to be long deep as could be in me, buried beyond the reach of any Fathometer, any determination as to the matter lying after all across far seas, thoughts as to it easily postponable, other urgent decisions daily upon one . . . his knowing also, and this the intent of that signal lest by any chance I miss it, that now something vital to it had arrived—we could not do both, not fulfill both obligations, duties. That was what he was saying. The choice as to direction the ship would take for the first time forcing those other competing considerations up into realms of consciousness, terrible and impermissible thoughts, one wanted to scream to them to go away, thoughts not fair to thrust upon any man, least of all upon a ship’s captain who did not want them, a mere mortal, who had crushing in upon him enough other insistences to test all his capabilities, this being the last ever to be one of them. Even the Jesuit, surely morally the bravest of men, pausing as in some sort of cowardice, and of fright, before them, the words unwilling to come off his tongue, managing only those two it seemed everyone was mouthing. Duty. Responsibility. And I knew: His concept of those two words had nothing whatever to do with Chatham’s about going home. God’s will, he might have added—though he seldom used such expressions—if something, the weather or his own fears, had not halted him from saying the other.
We have the means. Who else for sure that we know of does?
I would never have added that codicil of his, having ceased to believe in such words, such expressions as—God; in such phrases as “the higher purpose” I had heard him use, if only once or twice. They were not for me, not any longer; other than that, knowing, and for the first time, that the Jesuit’s unspoken question was in all truth the real question I must now decide; not wives, children, brothers, sisters, at best their corpses perhaps to see, at worst replications of those half-living half-dead beings, creatures, wretches, no nomenclature as yet having been invented for them, their species being so new, first seen on the beaches of Amalfi; our just fate surely not to go see those now on the beaches of Virginia and the Carolinas, of Massachusetts and Maine; not to go back and in some form of suttee, throw ourselves on their funeral pyre. I remembered now that single time, when with a strange, seemingly offhand lightness that later I was to look upon as almost eerie, he had said, “Naturally these men are under my spiritual care . . .” A single beat of a pause: “. . . these women.” From any ship’s captain’s point of view, ship’s company being the correct designation, the last seeming utterly unnecessary, even offensive: Why
these women?
As though some new category, meriting an extra measure of that care; a distinction for the same eternal reason unacceptable. For a moment I forced the matter, despite my tremblings, into direct thought. Phraseology different, coming at it from polarly opposite bearings, Jesuit and myself, our objective: Could it have been more identical? Did it not have to be? The single consideration before which every other purpose, hope or desire had to give way? Was anything else thinkable? Any truth existent other than that nothing on earth be permitted to stand in the way of it, least of all the relatively inconsequential opinions or trifling desires of men that we go this way or that? Standing alone in the night, I knew it for the first time, in a kind of Damascene clarity, forced in that light myself to embrace it as our sole purpose; feeling the pale rain falling on me. And felt an absolute terror. Not believing any longer in God, it was as though I had become God myself. The final decision now almost easily made, as I suppose decisions are for God. I would give Bosworth until Suez, with our own new forthrightness, to tell us something besides gibberish: by that time also the southern shore of the Mediterranean having given us by then its own final answer as to habitability. If negative on both, assemble the men.

I turned out of the rain, passed through the pilot house, exchanged a pleasantry with Lieutenant Sedgwick, the OOD, and made my way below to my bunk; feeling utter calm, falling into instant sleep, the rain heard but as a soothing patter on the weather surfaces of the ship all around me.

I
t all began with the R and R stop.

Now and then we stopped at a beach to get some exercise and to have what was best described simply as an outing. We badly needed outings. We had a certain amount of sports equipment: a half-dozen footballs; three volleyballs, I believe, and a net; a dozen softballs and a half-dozen bats. Touch football was the game of choice, having the virtue of accommodating any number of players and degrees of skill. Lieutenant (jg) Selmon always went ashore first to take his readings and to report back either that the place was unsuitable or that it was good for two to five hours as the case might be.

For some time now, finding a place had not been an easy thing. For a considerable stretch the coastline all along Algeria and Libya had exhibited a prohibitively high reading. I felt we rather desperately needed some R and R and proceeding on our ever-easterly course across the blue void of the Mediterranean we made frequent stops in search of a place for it. Finally down the coast, not too far away now from Tobruk, Selmon came back from one of his forays with the glad tiding that a touch football game of up to four hours would be acceptable on a stretch of white beach which we could see across the water. Vigorous exercise does wonders for sailors long shipbound, especially if it involves fun as opposed to the universally loathed calisthenics. True sailors have astonishingly little need to stop on shore but all need to stop some, after which they are all—I have not known a single exception to this rule—delighted, rather relieved, to get back aboard their ship, their secure home. The boats were quickly lowered away and soon had ferried ashore all but a skeleton crew for this welcome diversion. Before long, goal lines had been emplaced in the form of a derelict and weathered windlass, let go from some long-ago ship, we found on the beach for one, and a large piece of whitened driftwood we found for the other. Two teams were loosely constructed along the general lines that divide a ship’s company: those who work on the weather decks and those, such as the snipes, whose naval lives are spent deep in the ship, out of sight of wind and wave. With certain further arbitrary divisions of those who work between these two, the radiomen and messmen, for example, being assigned to the deck team and the combat information and weapons people to the snipes. Nonplayers constituting the cheering section and cheering section and players alternating from time to time as the desire struck them.

It was a pleasant if barren setting, suffused in peace and quietude, devoid of any evidence of incursions man may have one time made on it. The beach was of an exceptionally soft sand and white as bleached bones. I was struck by its almost immaculate cleanness, its virtual absence of kelp. One way it sloped down into a blue-green water of a particular clarity and, under still heavens, as untroubled as some lagoon. In the other direction it met the great desert; the endless sands unbroken, varied only in the majestic and corrugated dunes that rose to break its awesome and forbidding sameness like high waves breaking across a silent sea. It stretched away beyond us like a mighty sea itself, a sea of sand extending to the farthest horizon, in a solemn and immense loneliness, with a nobility and greatness of its own. The tawny desert sands, an indigo sea, the sky of paler blue: These three constituted entire the universe at this stop in geography, they and our ship standing consolingly off in the near distance. Even the one thought that troubled me whenever I left the ship scarcely touched my mind looking at her now. I had made it a practice not to be long from the ship at a time, out of a vague but always existent fear that some gathering, some quickly arranged cabal might seize her and take her on a destination that differed from that intended by myself, that she might sail off toward the western horizon before my very eyes. Today—feeling because so many of ship’s company, including her CSO, were ashore that such an act was scarcely manageable—that fear lay far away, overwhelmed by a sense of ease I had not felt in weeks.

The afternoon did much to make the cares and concerns that were always with us recede if only for a few hours. The happy shouts of sailors disporting themselves filled the air, joyous yelps ringing out from the water and from the touch-football contest. The final score was an arguable thing, each side claiming the higher figure. It was near 1800 and I was engaged in the dilatory and soothing occupation of observing that remarkable display—one would go far to see it, for it is one of nature’s most sublime profferings—of a huge scarlet sun preparing to set half over sea and half over desert when Lieutenant (jg) Selmon approached me and abruptly said it was time to go. I was startled at how quickly the time had slipped away, and had almost forgotten that there was someone like Selmon around to tell us when we had to break off. “Captain, it’s time” was the phrase he had some time back settled on and employed now. It was as though he were some sort of plenipotentiary timekeeper from whose calls there was no appeal.

We started embarking in the boats to head out for the ship standing about a thousand yards offshore. I was thinking, with gratitude, how the faces of ship’s company appeared more relaxed than I had seen them in some time. How little it took! How little really sailors asked! How little complained when compared with so many of the whining human race. I felt again in me that surge of affection, shielding, paternal. I was waiting to go in the last boat off the beach when I became aware of the imposing figure of Preston, the huge boatswain’s mate, coming toward me. He was wearing cut-off dungarees and nothing else.

Now he stopped and just stood there in a strange silence. Then he said the name once, just that, nothing more, in that quiet, clear-toned voice of his which seemed less a contrast than a complement to his physical impressiveness, as if loudness were always unnecessary and inherently vulgar. Then said it again. I looked beyond him. The sea-desert sunset was commencing its daily act of farewell. Solarly speaking, it would have to be the right time of year to witness that feat and as I watched I was thinking that it was a fine gift, a blessing, perhaps even a favorable omen, that we just happened to have put in here at the right time.

“Yes? What about him?”

“I can’t find him, Captain.”

Instantly, somehow, I thought back on my recent conversation with him when, in the course of my late-hours prowling of the ship, I came across his lone figure standing by the lifeline, looking out across the dark waters at the desert, white in the nightfall; his musing as to whether men, or kings on camels, had crossed it drawn by the star toward Bethlehem—some talk, too, there had been about the future of the ship; but most of all that it had been he who had wanted to articulate the words of home; then suddenly remembering something about Moses wandering in the desert. Hurley his reverent disciple, Preston had been bringing him along for his rating, in that special relationship, both ferocious and loving, in which a Navy man possessed of a special and indispensable knowledge and experience, hard come by over long years at sea, takes on the job of passing all of it along to a young and eager, often apprehensive apprentice. The boatswain’s mate’s words were so perplexing that I believe I did not immediately comprehend him. I must have asked him what he meant.

“Just that, sir. He’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

One would have thought there was nowhere to go at that place. That was what made the word, what Preston was attempting to impart, so strange, almost incomprehensible. I turned and looked across the beach at the last boat, loaded to her gunwales with men, ready to cast off; waiting for me, in fact. I was aware of the men in the boat watching Preston and myself beyond them with expectant and wondering looks, almost as if they had sensed that something had gone wrong. I took a couple of steps closer to the boat and sighted along the faces of the men in it. I turned back to Preston.

“He must have gone in one of the other boats,” I said.

The boatswain’s mate was speaking, trying to explain how this could not be. “Negative, sir . . . We were together at first . . . He’s a good runner . . . I blocked for him . . .” There was a pause before he went on. “He said something about getting in a swim . . . No, sir. He couldn’t have gone. We would have gone in the same boat . . . He . . .” The big boatswain’s mate hesitated . . . “Well, sir, he would have waited for me.”

I looked at him and understood. Of course. Almost a matter of respect, of proper deference. The boy—he was not much more than that—was under the big man’s wing. The word “gone” seemed to hammer at me in its slow-dawning twin meaning. For a moment it held me still, immobile in the initial glimmerings of foreboding. All of this time we were facing in the general direction of the sea and the waiting boat. I think we must have turned at the same moment and looked in the other direction. Then without knowing really how I had commenced doing so, or with any conscious intent or purpose, I found myself walking away from the water, across the beach, coming to the edge of it, stopping, gazing into the boundless waste of the great sands. We stood in silence, transfixed.

The huge scarlet ball started gently to lower itself impartially into both desert and sea, in an epiphany of immolation that stopped the heart, now the bottom half of it already gone, the top half fast disappearing and as it did, spreading a tint of cinnabar scarlet everywhere over that total immensity of desert, sky, and sea, as if bestowing upon the entire universe a queenly benediction. Before our eyes as in some miraculous ritual the desert turned that startling and exquisite color like some gown with which the departing sun rays adorned it for approaching nightfall. The great red ball vanished. Almost instantly a coolness, a chill, entered the air, as suddenly as if some deity charged with regulating desert matters had flicked a switch. With the chill, and the oncoming dark, the desert took on a spectral air, a powerful stillness so transcendent and forbidding, so impenetrable in its ancient air of mystery, that one ceased in awe almost to breathe, much less dare speak; one felt a sense of active menace, as from a violent serenity; fear crept in.

I had come to its edge, refusing to believe any man would simply willfully disappear there, not a sailor, anymore than he would jump overboard from his ship into the sea. We stood gazing far away into it, into its complete hush where now came like a tremor and a lamentation a sudden, a long and mournful sigh as from an actual human voice that sent through one a chill greater than that of the air—a keening breath of wind sweeping as a phantom across that enormous solitude, bent on its business of sculpting the huge and ever changing dunes; then that awesome silence again. Stood until our unwilling eyes were pulled downward to the deep and clear footprints that violated the virgin sand. Footprints naked, unshod. Our eyes came slowly up, in unison, and followed them to where they led inward into the desert.

Without a word we began to pursue them, Preston alongside me in an entire silence, the sand muffling our steps, our eyes looking always downward at the continuing trespassing track, a left-footprint, a pace, a right-foot one, feeling the depths of the sand pulling at our shoes as they plunged into and obliterated the other naked footprints. Then stopped again while our eyes lifted slowly and followed the ungiving line which continued on as far as they would take us. We walked a little more, hoping in our foolishness to see somewhere ahead the end of them, not once speaking, just looking forever downward at the lonely necklace of encroachments. Stopped again; looked up once more; stood once more gazing in a kind of transfixation at the trail of invasive footprints leading on endlessly into that sand vastness otherwise unmarked, chaste, undefiled.

The desert was beginning to darken. I glanced up and saw the evening star make its appearance in the eastern sky. Venus, all lonely and majestic; seeming oversized, overbright, gazing down itself on the great sands, on us, and somewhere out there ahead on another. The whorled dunes sliding westward into the night, reaching up to the multitudes of stars now coming on. We stood motionless in the chill—how astonishingly cold the desert could be when night came on!—surrounded in an absolute hush which we did not break. Listening for a faint sound from beyond, a cry of distress, keeping our peace so as not to miss it. I felt I had never known such a sense of loneliness, no, not even on the most distant sea. Then suddenly loud and piercing yells began to break the stealthy stillness. Our own: which one of us came first I did not know, only that both of us stood there implanted in the sand, our hands cupped as megaphones to our mouths, shouting out his name over and over, first together and then, as if by arrangement, by turn, spelling each other, shouting at the tops of our lungs, until hoarseness began to overtake our voices. Only a vast silence flowed back to us in answer from the desert wastes.

“Why don’t I go see, sir?”

I turned sharply to him. Everything in my captain’s soul was brought to a state of intense alertness by the absurdity I had just heard.

“What? What did you say?”

“I could go look.”

“No, you could not.” I could hear the harshness in my voice, that captain’s sharpness of absolutely forbidding something. “Boats.” I spoke more softly. “There isn’t time. We’re up against our time limit right now. Mr. Selmon.”

“Sir, what if I just . . .”

“Preston,” I said, more sharply still.

I looked up at him in the fading light, at his largeness now taking on a silhouetted aspect which seemed to enhance that very image of vast strength. It radiated from him in an absolute promise of its validity, its availability. I suppose if it had come to such a foolish question as physically restraining him he could have brushed me aside with one blow, and nothing like a full one needed at that, from one of those massive arms. We stood in the sand as if rooted there, gazing into that void; the desert—it must have been the accelerating darkness, hurrying in upon us—seeming increasingly to surround us, its shrouded plain pressing in on us, almost as if to lure us onward, to say, You come along too, as though quite prepared and even hungry to swallow ourselves as well. Something so irresistible one felt oneself fighting against it, some powerful force beckoning us there shot through me, made me fear for ourselves, lest it pull us also into its mystery.