A launch drifted by, softly puttering, beaded with lights, and someone cursed just a hand’s-breadth away, it seemed. “Dammit, when you gonna hand me that line, boy, next week?” Water gurgled, the launch puttered away, and then the same old harbor silence in the summernight.
The Westminster was leaving in two days. Longshoremen suddenly swarmed all over her with paint buckets and blowtorches and cables. Booms were brought into play to load on great supplies of lumber, barrels of oil, T.N.T., and all kinds of construction equipment. The waterfront slammed and roared all day with tremendous activity.
Peter knew he had time to go back to Galloway and say goodbye to his family, but suddenly he just wanted to leave. The possibility that he might never come back was a deep, joyful, even pleasant thought at times, full of dark heroism and wonder, a magnificent thought of death itself. He clung to it grimly with a touch of horrified realization that it might be stupidly true.
Yet his dreams aboard ship as they prepared to sail were all eerie and haunted with awful guilts. He dreamed that his mother and father were standing beneath a sky demented and dark, holding out their arms to him, crying: “Oh, Petey, what have you done to us!” And it seemed that he should never have done this to them.
Alex Panos came to Boston to see Peter off. They met at the pierside lunchcart.
“But suppose you never come back!” Alex cried in desperation. “Don’t you realize, Peter, that they’re torpedoing ships by the scores and that thousands of seamen have drowned! Couldn’t I go along with you? All I’d have to do is get papers and scramble through red-tape for a day or two, and we’d be shipmates! Peter,” he added solemnly, “I have seen death-flowers in the eyes of your shipmates. Honest I have.…”
“But it’s nothing like that,” scoffed Peter. “A lot of ships are going through—most of them make it, this old tub’ll make it. Look at her! She’ll have no trouble. I have a feeling …” He gazed ruminantly.
“I know that feeling of yours—I know it in reverse, old friend. But if you want to go on alone, it’s all right with me.” Alexander lit a cigarette with a distant melancholy air.
“And why the hell do you think I joined the merchant marine?”
“I know—we all feel that terrible sadness now, about Tommy and all the others. And I know your mind is made up. You want to get away from my influence, as you call it. All right, all right. In this filthy little lunchcart on the Boston waterfront maybe we’re seeing each other for the last time.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“This is the way it will eventually end.…”
“When I get back I’ll get you drunk on a hundred dollars’ worth of champagne, how’s that sound? I’ll be rich, man, full of money!”
“Good-bye, Peter. I really have to catch my train now.”
“Can I meet you tomorrow somewheres—before we sail? After that I can’t get off the ship.…”
“This is the way it will eventually end.” And, mysteriously, Alex walked away for the first time in their friendship with absentminded sorrow. The gods that had whispered in his ear were neither deceiving, nor playful. It was the last time they ever saw each other.
That night Peter went ashore with some of his shipmates. They went to South Boston in a raucous gang, drank enormous quantities of beer and whiskey, got in red-eyed fights for no reason at all, ran yelling through the streets jubilant with doom, howled for some legendary madam beneath a window and were showered with a bucketful of hot water, slept sprawled in doorways, came straggling back to the waterfront just as red dawn was breaking over the masts of fishing smacks along Mystic Avenue, and slept a fitful hour before Glory came into the foc’sle moaning:
“Seven o’clock, an’ not a soul in de galley. GIT UP! Git up, you drinkin’ boys! You done laid down yore hipe las’ night an’ now you all want to go to heaven and git paid, but you doan want to work, you doan want NAWTHIN’ A-TALL! Not a soul peelin’ them potatoes an’ onions an’ washin’ them pots ’n’ pans!”
Peter had innocently signed on as a scullion, this was his first day’s work in the galley. In the steaming heat of a July morning amid odors of hot swilled dishwater, rotten slop in the scuppers, grease and lard and bilgey slime in the galley drains, Peter, bleary-eyed and disheveled and sick, was weighed down with the thought of all life as one tale of disgust and dirty toil.
He managed the day’s work with fatigued wonder and went to bed early. And during the night a passenger train was shuttled into the great wharf-shed and five hundred construction workers boarded the ship with their tools and gear. Everything was made ready, security was clamped down, men moved around in the engine-room firing the boilers and on deck in the smoky dawn hauling in some of the lines.
In the morning, as a cool, almost autumnal wind blew across the harbor making the waters chop and dance, he woke up to the tremendous vast shuddering “BAWWW!” of the steam whistle. It was the Westminster’s cry of departure. He hurried to the porthole to see the dock slipping by slowly and silently, the longshoremen standing idle by the bits, smoking and smiling, yelling “Come back home!” and “Take it easy now!” Great pistons began to rumble in the ship’s bowels, the ship trembled, and they were moving. He realized as if for the first time that this great ship could actually move.
Away from the mournful tangle of his young life, and his sorrows and guilts, his parents and friends and Alexander and his sad dreams, out to the cool windswept sea on a bright winey morning. It was incredible and wonderful, like a happy dream. The mighty thrumming pistons backed the ship out into the bay, and the rudder was set around in a churning roar of water that smelled of oil and kelp, and the nose of the ship turned ponderously to face the sea, and slipped on with slow mounting power through the mine nets, past the last two lighthouses at the entrance of Boston harbor.
Far ahead of the Westminster and her sister ship, the Latham, two destroyers prowled the horizon like lowslung tawny seacats, their guns pointing like bristles up and down and every way, as the slender hulls heeled and pitched in the sea. On the Westminster itself soldiers monstrous with earphones and orange lifebelts suddenly appeared at the gun stations. They stood almost motionless, as though listening at once for the sounds of the war.
With an unknown fear Peter began to feel the big ship beneath him rock deeply in sea-swells. A powerful wind blew from the north over the capering waves. On the flying bridge stood the captain of the ship, a stout man, scanning his own ocean-world to which Peter now felt suddenly and irredeemably delivered. He was scared, for the first time, more scared than he would ever be again on the sea. He looked aft for Boston receding in a thin smoky line. There was no turning back now from the unknowable.
Down in the galley, as bright morning sunshine poured in the portholes, there were turmoils of activity Peter had never believed possible. All kinds of cooks and helpers had miraculously appeared for the sailing, wearing fantastic cook’s caps and white aprons, slamming pots, waving ladles and great knives, shouting to one another in Spanish and Chinese and whooping Harlemese. Two little cooks with wrinkled necks jabbered away in a secret terrifying Morro tongue. They were frying hundreds of eggs and thousands of bacon-strips at the great ranges, roaring with talk and laughter in the confusion of steam, cooking-smoke, clattering dishes, clanking pans. And in the midst of all this noise, Glory walked calmly about his kitchen with the dignity and vast acumen of Chief Cook.
At sunset, after raucous suppers in the messhall among hundreds of seamen and construction workers, Peter put on a peacoat and went up on deck. There was no land in sight now, just a long sash of bloodred sun laning to the ship. It was keen and cold, with shagginess in the great sky, a cold grandeur in the air, an intimation of October in the sea.
“We’re meeting an explorer ship off Cape Farewell, Greenland,” Peter had heard someone say in the messhall. “Then it’s any place in the North, I guess.…”
“What’re we doin’ up there?”
“We’re going to build an airbase som
ewhere in the Arctic, that’s all.…”
Beyond the wild red sunset, around the horizon towards the north, the sea stretched a seething field that grew darker as it merged with the lowering unknown sky. Somewhere up there was the Arctic Sea. Peter stood on the bow in the powerful headwinds gazing that way with an inexpressible sense of amazement and expectation, full of confoundment that in that direction, to which they slowly pushed, there could be no warm light and comfort and no friend, only the North, the far White North as ruthless and indifferent as the ocean’s own overlowering night.
He made his way below through crowded alleyways to the big messhall. The men, hundreds of them, had cleared all the tables and spread blankets over them and started big crap games and card games. They were drinking coffee and talking excitedly in buzzing groups. Most of them were fantastically attired in boots and jackets and mackinaws, many of them wore beards. Most of them were already drunk and there was much coming and going among the construction workers from the messhall to the rooms above where the drinking took place more or less unofficially. The dice-players snapped their fingers and whooped and yelled, everybody crowded up money-in-hand, the card games puffed up smoke, a heavy sullen curiosity sometimes suddenly brooded throughout the hall. The seamen, sheathed with knives, were in the middle of everything with their rolls of money; a barefooted deckhand held the floor with an amazing run of throws that raised uproars of excitement. Even the Chief Mate and some other officers were watching curiously from the staircase. Old Glory sat in a corner with a few of his cronies, puffing on a corncob pipe, watching everything with his great brown mournful eyes. Someone sitting on the stairs was strumming a guitar. Only half of the men wore their lifebelts, the other half did not seem to care.
Everywhere throughout the great ship there were men—in the barber shop topsides where the supply of shaving lotion would be drunk in a month’s time, down in the bowels of the ship in the engine-room, and in the foc’sle, and men gambling in the messhall, men eating in the galley pantry, men talking in the staterooms, officers conferring on the bridge, kid seamen playing cards and reading in bunks, soldiers at the guns or in their quarters playing records, captains and mates convoking over maps, men brooding in their bunks alone, men on deck staring at the darkness. It was a whole world of men, eight hundred of them, talking and gambling and smoking and reading and drinking as the great dark ship pitched through the night, towards the furious North. The Latham, the sister ship, likewise a glittering infolded world of eight hundred men moved a mile alongside in the darkening sea.
Day after day the ships went further north, past the coasts of Maine, Nova Scotia, Labrador, Newfoundland, through the fogs, over the ghostly Grand Banks, out into the ocean-spaces. The air grew colder and the winds stronger, something hoary and gray came into the sea, the water in the scuppers became ice-cold, the sunsets lowered fabulously in icy fierce colors. Finally they were sailing the waters off Greenland, off Cape Farewell. Another escort ship joined them—and they plowed on up beyond Iceland, up into the Arctic Sea and the tremendous storms off the rocky sawtooth coast of Central Greenland.
It was the immense, lovely, cloud-sashed Arctic sunset at midnight, the icebergs as big as hills a mile off, with waters crashing slowly and ponderously upon them, the porpoises with their Mona Lisa smiles disporting and diving in formations, and bitter cold, and north pole grayness ahead. It was the fantastic North of men’s souls, the place of unbelievable desolation and final solitude, the place of Thor and the Ice Kings and monarchial coasts, the place of whales and polar birds, of craggy rocks washed by forlorn waters thousands of miles from man, the last place.
They turned in towards the coasts of Greenland finally, in August. One morning Peter got up and looked out the porthole and saw sheer brown cliffs of the summer North rising steeply not thirty feet from where he stood. They were going up a fjord, fifty miles inland among stillnesses, crags, Northern lights, sudden eskimos in kyaks drifting by with grins of tender idiot welcome, fifty miles nearer the three thousand miles of vast inland snow, fifty miles underneath the mighty mountain ranges that brooded unseen by man and bare of life forever.
He gaped. It was all so far from what he had expected of the “adventure of the sea,” so far from archipelagoes and Polynesias, the coral pearls and encantadoes of the sea, the wreath and the horn, the lost capes, the impossible lagoons and gardens of the South. It was this instead.
He thought of Galloway with a smile.
The ship stayed in Arctic Greenland almost four months, inland upon the fjord waters, while the workmen unloaded trucks and small cranes and power engines from a freighter and towed them ashore, and blasted rock, and leveled primordial ground, and piled up the lumber and spawned a small raw town in the rocky wastes. They measured off a vast rocky level for an airfield, and started blasting straight off. Meanwhile the Westminster and the Latham sat at anchor and fed and bedded the workers until they had built and appointed their own kitchens and messhalls and dormitories ashore.
It was an amazing and well-coordinated subjugation of the wilderness of rock at the ends of desolate earth, full of foresight, vigor and determination, typically American in dispatch, although no one seemed to think much of it. The workers were too absorbed to think, and the idle seamen were too bored to care after going ashore once or twice during the first days to explore the empty shore.
For a while there was absurd trading with the eskimos. Fish-spears and harpoons and stinking furs were exchanged for a handful of oranges or an oiler’s cap. Peter acquired a harpoon in exchange for the sweater he had worn on the football team at Pine Hall, gleeful that an eskimo would be rushing around wearing the famous Number Two of the Class of ’Forty. Eventually everybody got bored with trading too, with everything, and refused to be interested in anything.
Months went by on the ships, everybody played cards and read, and ate and slept, and talked and argued, and yawned, and stared into space, and did what little work there was, and yawned again.
“Hey, Kenny! I just thought of something. Were you ever up a flagpole?”
“What?”
“A flagpole—did you ever climb a flagpole?”
“Listen to him, listen to him.…”
“Because if you did you should have stayed there, you’d make a damn nice flag with your big flap.…”
The snows came. The men rowed back and forth between the two transports and visited and gambled and gab-fested interminably. On the Latham they sat around drinking coffee, bearded and bored, and someone said, “Well, I don’t care what you guys say but I’m telling you we’re not going home, we’re going to England to load on, direct from here, and on up to Archangel, Russia, and then back to U.K. to load on just in time for the invasion armada to Japan, the big blowoff in the Spring. Around Good Hope and over to Australia then up to Japan, thousands o’ ships—”
“Ah, you’re crazy.”
“No, not Japan, Turkey! Go bowlin’ right through the Med fleets to Turkey, then the armies will push north, and, my fine lads, it’ll be a lucky day when you get home again. That’s what they’re sayin’ now, go ahead and worry and figure it up and down but it won’t do you no good, it’ll be a pretty far day when you get home again—”
“What I figure is, if not Turkey, if not Turkey see—”
“Yeah, if not Turkey, chicken.”
Four thousand unknown miles away from home, they were all haunted, lost in premonitions of never returning, delivered to the nothingness of the earth, forsaken among rocks in the rim of the world, forgotten in the homelands of snow, as-if-doomed within the gates of a misnamed impossible continent. And where was home? And their grievous families? and the soft, sweet summer-lands they had left behind it seemed forever? They all felt this and none of them could speak of it.
Sometimes Peter dreamed of the entire Arctic Ocean as an estuary; all Greenland a grounds, a park; every mountain a knoll, every jagged fjord a brook; and all the round warring world a sweet fatherland.
&nbs
p; They started home, finally, in November, raising the great anchor and chain, pointing ponderously around to the mouths of Greenland and the seas again, gliding between forlorn mountains, passing the washed rocks of eternity, and out upon the black waves.
One night, in pitch darkness, Peter was in his bunk dozing when the alarm bells rang janglingly and the buzzers whined and terror gripped all their hearts.
Filled with dreamy disbelief of the moment, expecting it all to stop somehow, Peter waited, and listened to the sudden booming of depth charges, and the wild scramble of running feet on the deck overhead. “Why are they all running about, the idiots!” he scoffed in the darkness, and turned over.
Suddenly his mirror on the locker door fell on the deck. “What am I doing down here?” he thought, sitting up. A vast sustained roar, far off, and wails and cries directly overhead sent him running topside with his lifebelt. “Please, God! please, God!” he thought. There, in the ocean-night, a mile away, the Latham was burning and sinking in the icy sea. They all huddled together, staring at the evil red glow on the waters that seemed to burn so calm there.
“They got the Latham! They got the dynamite!”
“She’s going down!”
“Hey, Chuck! Where are you, Chuck?”
“Is this boat number five? Hey, is this boat number five?”
“Everybody take it easy! Stand by! Easy! For God’s sake …”
The red smoke flared up slowly far off.
“Look at her!”
“Somebody cut a raft down, we lost a raft!”
“Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord …”
“She’s going down!”
It was all terror, a nightmare, an evil dream, they all huddled together in the pit of night and said “Who is this?” and wandered around stumbling on the deck and folded their arms over their beating hearts and prayed.