Jonah Watch (20 page)

You never know—even after years you can never decide—if what you do is right. Everything happens so fast. If I didn't detest Wert so much, I would have listened to him. Maybe saved Case.

What happened is that I did what I'd been told. I grabbed the helm and threw it hard to port. The boat edged away from the rock. It handled sluggish, already sinking from the lick it took on the rocks. Forward of the wheel a red light burned in the little cabin. I was supposed to get the kid, and so I went down there. Old coats, old blankets, slickers and boots. A gush of water through the ruptured hull. No kid. I must have wasted half a minute. I turned back to the deck just as a searchlight from the cutter swept us, and just as the forty's engines started howling.

It all happened in slow motion, or that's the way it seems. The madman stood above Case, and the madman howled almost like the engines. He had both hands raised high together, holding one of those long, thin stakes that lobstermen use to pin fish in their traps. The forty roared someplace real close. I heard a bow wave, but you never hear a bow wave—not like that—unless it's pointed right at you. Case yelled something, tried to throw something at the madman, but you can't throw much when you're on your knees. I dived over Case, trying to tackle the madman. There was a shock, the lobster boat driven sideways, a crash of timbers; and a fish smell came off the deck as I rolled. Something, a lobster trap maybe, clipped me alongside the head. Then I was in water that is death-dealing cold, struggling to stay up.

The boat crew from the cutter took us aboard, dried us out and gave us clothes. At first I didn't remember much. I sat for a long time on the messdeck shivering and drinking coffee. Didn't see Tommy. Figured they were working on him. Didn't see Case. Saw Wert. He sat at a table facing me, sullen, wearing his own clothes. He'd got his feet wet, and he put them on a bench, rubbing his legs and rolling up the wet part of his dungarees so they came to his calf.

"There wasn't no kid. I told you. They beached what was left of that boat and there wasn't hide nor hair."

"What happened?" I couldn't remember anything. Then I started to remember a little.

"Tom lost his head and rammed you. Dumped you all in the water, then jumped in to pull you out. The forty's back there now, high and dry and cut wide open."

It was coming back now. "Case?"

Wert just plain looked sick. "Guy stabbed him. Tommy rammed you because he was trying to keep the guy from stabbing Case."

"The madman?"

"Jumped back and got himself killed when the bow of the forty pinched him."

And that's when the memory came clear of Wert's white face rising like a pale moon above the rail, the vacant look, the struggle and noise at my back and the roar of engines.

"Where were you?" I was getting cold again.

He had his story down pat. Like a first-grader reciting about Mary and the lamb. "We were about to jump, and the engines went rough. Case said to check it out because we couldn't afford to lose power. I checked, but before I could jump Tommy kicked it ahead." He turned his back to me, swinging away, and propped his leg up to inspect his toes.

They pulled me off of him, somebody did. Then their chief bosun sent me to wait it out on the fantail. Probably because I had shoes on and Wert didn't.

I went to the fantail figuring that things couldn't get any worse, and they got a million times worse right away.

Bodies are always stored on the fantail. I sat beside Case after I found which one he was. Kind of patted the old blanket he was wrapped in. I couldn't figure out why the best man I knew had to be dead. Wasn't thinking very straight.

Then I did start thinking straight, thinking about what I'd seen when I checked to see which one he was. Case was pretty tore up, but mostly just mangled. There was only one wound above the waist, and that was way above the heart, nearly in the left shoulder. That madman had not stabbed Case to death.

I'd always trusted Tommy. Tommy was my friend. He had taught me a lot. But, Tommy was the one who killed Case while trying to save him.

You never know if what you do is right, and that's especially true when you are young. You operate on the basis of what you know.

One thing I knew was that the local coroner was a lazy old drunk. Twice, while on Shore Patrol, we'd taken bodies to that coroner. He dumped them in a stainless steel tub, cut away the clothes, and said something like "This pore old buster drank hisself to death." I knew that coroner would do no autopsy.

If he saw a wound over the heart he would blame the madman. He'd not say a word about Tommy.

I pulled out my claspknife. It carried a marlinespike, about the same diameter as a stake that runs through lobster traps. Even today I can't believe my courage and ignorance. I stabbed Case, stabbed a dead man, right where the heart would be. It was just a little blue hole that did not bleed, but, what with arterial damage and salt water, none of the other wounds were bleeding.

I remember vaguely wondering how much jail time you could get for stabbing a dead man.

═

Years pass, but memory is relentless. Such an act wears on a man's soul. Sometimes the memory lies faded and dull among brighter memories of youth. At the same time, the memory never leaves. Maybe I did Tommy a favor, maybe not. The police filed no civil charges, and the court martial found him innocent. The court concluded that, although unable to save Case, he may well have saved me. The court did not like the destruction of an expensive boat.

Tommy came to a bad end. He started boozing when on liberty. We saw his tall frame and black hair bent over too many glasses of beer in too many sailor dives. He went awol for a month, was reclaimed from a drunk tank.

In those days the Coast Guard was a small and personal outfit. Our Cap tried to save Tommy by transferring him to a weather cutter. The Cap figured, since the cutter stayed on station for a month at a time, Tommy would have to stay sober in thirty-day stretches. Tommy slipped overboard one night as the cutter passed the Portland Lightship. The investigating board called it an accident.

And Wert came to an even more macabre end. On a night of no wind he wandered among buoys in the buoy yard. The buoys stood silent, the giant whistles, the lighted bells, the racks of nuns. Some were barnacled, waiting to be sand-blasted and red-leaded. For no reason, and against known laws of physics, a lighted bell rolled on flat ground. It weighed maybe a ton, and it crushed Wert against the pavement of the storage area. There was not a breath of wind, but men on cutters swore they heard the bell toll, and clank, and toll.

When my hitch was up I did not reenlist, but fled from salt water. The next few years were dreary; odd jobs and bad jobs through the middlewest. I attended college at night, got married, finally graduated from college, got divorced. Nothing seemed to go exactly right. It came to me—in, of all places—the bus station in Peoria, that this awful incident of youth kept me from my true calling, the sea. I traded my bus ticket to Chicago for a ticket to Seattle. From Seattle I went to Ketchikan, fished salmon, then finally found a permanent berth on a tug hauling barges from Seattle to Anchorage. After many years I rose to master of my own vessel.

A lot of downeast sailors, mostly fishermen, drift into Seattle and Ketchikan and Sitka. On a snowy January afternoon in Sitka, forty years after the event, I heard stories from a couple of Maine men who vowed never again to enter Portland harbor. There was enough illumination in their drunken talk to convince me it was time to come to terms with the past. I booked a flight to Portland.

Through the years certain questions haunted that incident of youth. I thought about them on the plane. What happened to the child? What did Tommy see as he kicked the forty footer ahead? What, for that matter, did I see? I am old now, and am well acquainted with the way the mind manufactures illusions. What did Wert see? What caused a puritanical lobsterman to suddenly sink into the depths of insanity; for the lobstermen of Maine are usually stern and steady fellows.

After checking into a Portland hotel I went to the newspaper office and was extended every courtesy. The report from so many years ago seemed sketchy, but it did contain the names of men and the name of the child. The child, it was reported, had been taken away by her grandmother before the ugly murder.

So much time had passed it was unlikely the grandmother still lived. I searched the phone book. The grandmother was not listed, but the child's name was. Of course, she would now be a middleaged woman. I phoned, made clumsy explanations, and she agreed to meet me for lunch.

To an aging man, the woman who met me in the hotel lobby seemed to shine with both dignity and beauty. The coast of Maine is hard on men, but often even harder on women. This slim lady's face was weathered, crow's-feet around bright gray eyes, and her hands showed that she was not afraid of work. Long, dark hair displayed streaks of gray, and her conservative gray dress fell well below the knee.

"It's a jigsaw puzzle," she told me once we were seated for lunch. "You must remember that I was little more than a baby."

"I wonder what is happening in the harbor," I said. "The newspaper plays this for laughs." Beyond the windows, banks of piled snow lined streets that are asphalt now, but in my day were brick. Sun glistened on patches of ice, and the thermometer stood at zero.

"I know exactly," she told me. "I own a ship chandlery. The story comes together in bits and pieces. Men talk even when they want to keep quiet."

Men heard more than they saw. In winter darkness of early mornings, when ice fog covered the channel, fishermen reported the low sound of diesels. There would be a nearly hysterical cry of, "Left rudder. Left rudder." When that happened men became terrified, and minded their own craft. A radar screen may be completely blank, but no sailor trusts the things, and no sailor fails to react when his vision is muffled by fog.

The sound of engines would then rise to a roar, as men blindly threw their helms over to get away. Then would come a great rip and tearing of metal and wood; and then silence. Into the silence a voice would speak: "A sailor's pay. A sailor's pay."

Men reported the voice as unworldly, or as worldly as the voice of the sea. They then heard the diminishing struggle of men overboard.

"I'll tell what my grandmother told," the woman said. She smiled as if distracted. "The people of Maine have a reputation for being taciturn, but among themselves they chatter like jays." She hesitated, and then made a whispered confession. "I never married. Old-fashioned, maybe, and partly superstitious. My father was insane, my mother no better."

"If this is too difficult for you ... ."

"I never really knew them," she reminded me, "but my grandmother was my best friend."

Beyond the windows bright colors of automobiles contrasted with piled snow and sun-glazed streets. Tall buildings rose to cast dark shadows beside the busy docks.

"Maine used to resemble Alaska," the woman said. "In Alaska people still know each other."

She was right about that. There is still, in Alaska, the feeling that 'we are all in this together'. When Alaskans meet in improbable places, say Indiana or Australia, they either know each other, or find that they have mutual friends. It's a big state with a small population.

"This was an incident of war," she told me. "Or, maybe it was an incident of youth. The sailor named Tommy came to visit my grandmother on two occasions. He knew my father. During the war they both sailed from this port. My father served aboard a freighter. Tommy sought forgiveness for my father's death."

Old memories stirred. At last there seemed to be some sense to all of this.

Her father, it developed, was one of the survivors from the torpedoing when Tommy followed that fateful order to drop depth charges. Her father was concussed, suffering what must have been awful brain damage. Her mother, who had a reputation for being fey, met his changed condition by sinking into a virulent brand of New England religion. She played the role of saint to his role of hapless sinner before an avenging God. It proved the wrong approach.

"I don't forgive my father," she said. "I don't even excuse him. There is no excuse for murder."

She was correct, of course. No one worth a dime resorts to murder, no matter how crazy he gets. Still, most murders come from situations and passions.

"Tommy believed himself doomed," the woman told me. "He felt that fate pushed him into a world where he was forced to kill my father. The depth charges failed, and it was terrible for him to think that he was forced to kill a man after failing to kill him the first time." She smiled, but the smile was small and tight. "Don't be fooled. If the roles were reversed my father might have done the same thing, and reacted in the same way."

The woman prepared to leave, returning to her everyday work and everyday life. "Try to think about the minds of the men," she said. "And think about the sea, because the incident is only that, an incident."

I saw that she did not know more than she told, but that she thought more than she would say.

"Darkness tries to kill light," she murmured. "That is the business of darkness." As I helped her into her coat she added: "Remember that all of you were very young. My father was twenty-five, and Tommy could have been little more."

═

I thought of the immemorial voice of the sea as I sought to rent a boat. The sea speaks with the sounds of thunder, or it is susurrus, or it hisses, or it murmurs. It is nearly as ancient as the earth. The sea has swallowed men who have spoken a thousand different languages: it has taken into its restless maw Persians, Phoenicians, Romans, Spaniards and Englishmen.

And I thought of Maine and of Portland Harbor while checking the engine of a rented workboat, that, like myself, neared the end of its working life. A thousand vessels have died in these harsh waters, while on land people erected crosses facing the sea. Many of the graves of Maine are invested only by memories.

And I thought of youth, and of the great passions and inarticulateness of youth. I did not wonder why Tommy felt the need to strike out. It is clear that he was quiet because he was too young to mobilize words and alter his confusion. Little wonder he felt doomed.