The Last Ship (37 page)

Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

The beautiful, beautiful river,

Gather with the saints at the river

That flows by the throne of God . . .

As the last lines faded away, Selmon looked from his counter to me. “It’s time, Captain.”

We embarked in the boats, a little rapidly, and headed back out to the ship. Everybody seemed to have a good feeling. Preston put it best as we were nearing the ship.

“Captain,” he said, “wasn’t that a nice outing.”

I was sitting next to the soaked chaplain.

“Why, so it was, Boats,” I said. “A very nice outing.”

“By God, if I don’t think I’ll do it myself next time if we have another one. Begging your pardon, Chaplain.”

“Not at all, Boats,” the Jesuit said. “Any time. I shall await your pleasure in the matter.”

“Very good of you, sir,” the boatswain’s mate intoned gravely. “I’d like to think it over a bit.”

“Of course, I offer either sprinkling or immersion, as desired.”

“Very thoughtful of you I’m sure, sir.”

“Immersion’s pretty damned cold if you ask me.” The chaplain had begun to shiver a bit. “Still, the Baptists claim no one ever caught anything from an immersion even if they had to break ice to do it. I trust the record remains unbroken. Sprinkling’s simpler naturally. You can do it shipboard.”

The boatswain’s mate seemed to be pondering these matters of varying religious practices, of manifest choices presented one.

“If I do it I think I’ll go for the full thing,” he said after a moment. “They seemed pretty satisfied with it. Of course, if I decide I don’t know when there’ll be another chance.”

I looked at Preston, mildly shocked by these considerations he was contemplating. Through his partially opened blouse I could see on his chest a segment of Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar. The boatswain’s mate sat in solemn thoughtfulness.

“Boats,” I said, “if you decide to be born again, I’ll stop the ship and have another baptism just for you.”

Restiveness

A
s we pass by Africa’s silent shores, a curious air seems increasingly to permeate the ship. Sailors as they live out their lives on ships are not traditionally a loud or noisy group of human beings. It is as though the lordly and unceasing sound of the sea had taught them that the human voice is a thing not best habitually raised. That tendency now seeming greatly enhanced as they go about their shipboard tasks; an excessive stillness, seeming to speak even in lowered, almost whispered tones, as if to disturb the soundlessness of the universe the least possible amount. A sense oddly almost of peace, approaching serenity. Of peace. Yet a tense quiescence.

Feelings move mysteriously throughout a ship at sea. Not merely from scuttlebutt either. More almost from that remarkable and precise sense sailors have of what is going on around them. It is as though some magnification of insight were granted them, in their own world contained entirely in their ship, an ability to see directly into the minds of their shipmates they know so well from this inescapable twenty-four-hour living with one another, to see even to a considerable degree into the mind of their captain however unrevelatory he may attempt to preserve his demeanor. Sometimes as I move about the decks, I find the eyes of one or more resting solemnly on me, a quiet look, neither hostile nor friendly, rather interrogatory, as if trying to penetrate what is taking place within me; now and then a sudden chill runs down me under those furtive glances. Of course, there is a great deal of all-too-available reality attached to these voiceless questionings. They can figure out for themselves, and no doubt have done so, that the Mediterranean being closed to us thus far, if it continues so, reaching Suez we will have to make one of two irreversible choices, cannot make both. And as the brutal knowledge slowly fills their consciousness, I have become aware of something foreboding in the air, a vague dread borne on fleeting, almost imperceptible signs. One can fear apparitions, fancy ghosts in our circumstances, but its persistence argues something more substantial. A sense of huge danger almost emergent; defining itself unmistakably as that greatest of all imperilments on the open sea: a ship becoming more and more divided against itself. The very stillness contributes to this feeling, giving it that same magnification. A sense of lurking expectancy. Of a grace period—for the ship’s captain, for myself, one with some unspecified, but of a certainty not interminable, time limit. And whichever course chosen, a considerable part of ship’s company by no manner to rest content with it. Though if ours were a society where votes were cast to determine decisions, and the vote taken today, I have little doubt where it would come down. The ship would have to make a 180-degree turn.

As if to help me in making the decision. With the doc, alone in sick bay.

“Could anything have happened to us? To
us?
”

He looked at me. “It’s possible. Personally I don’t think so. But we’re on seas where men have not been, Skipper.”

“Without chart or compass.”

“Yes.”

“There’s only one way to find out?”

“Only one, Skipper.”

I waited, made an abrupt change of course.

“Those ‘intermittent neuroses’ you spoke about. What a term.”

“Isn’t it?” he said rather jauntily, with a disdain for his own jargon. “Not absolutely absent with the women. But again, far more incidence with the men.”

Home

With Girard in my cabin, the door closed. She spoke as morale officer.

“One new thing, Talley tells me. Quite a number have mentioned we’re lucky to be at sea. They’re with the ship more than ever. A good time to have a ship. To be a sailor. They know that. Especially since . . .”

She stopped, not having to say it. The people on the beaches.

“They couldn’t be more right.”

“Home.” The word lingered, isolate. “It’s always been that, I guess. Never so much so as now. The ship is home.” She paused, quietly: “The word has the other meaning, too.”

I waited. “If, when it does happen . . .”

I paused a beat, looking at her; heard her finish it for me.

“It’ll come all at once, I’d say, sir. It may just explode.”

I sat back and made myself relax. “As long as they feel that way about the ship . . . I count on that. The ship: She will hold us together. Most of us anyhow. The others . . . We’ll handle that then, when it happens.” I said again, “What else?”

“Reading way up. Those nine hundred and eighty-five books we brought out. A major blessing, I’d say.”

“What are you reading?”

“Fathers and Sons.”

“I’m going straight through Dickens.
Bleak House
at the moment. How did we happen to bring all of him? Rather hoggish of Dickens.”

“Well, we couldn’t leave Dickens behind.”

The moment passed. I returned to business, to . . .

“What else?”

“They talk about their hometowns. Quite a few do.”

Something strange in the way she said this, picked up by her from my expression.

“No, not in that way. Those that do—as if they were still there. The nice places they’ve always been. Some even talk about going back in one of the small boats.”

I felt something grab at me, the pit of my stomach.

“The others . . . they don’t talk about hometowns at all. Even walk away when someone else starts it.”

Again, “What else?”

“Shanley. EW third. I’m not sure he’s going to make it. He talks about going over the side. The chaplain, the doc, myself—we’ve all talked with him.”

“I’ll talk with him.”

“Thornberg,” she said.

“Thornberg?” She was a lee helmsman, striker for quartermaster. “I haven’t noticed a thing on watch.”

“Not there. In women’s quarters. Cries a lot. She’s coming around.”

“I can see her.”

She paused but a moment. “Not necessary, I think, sir. We’re handling it.”

For some reason the last—the “we” made me look quickly at her; suppress a comment.

“Anyone else in particular?”

“Among the men?” She meant women as well.

“Among anybody, Miss Girard,” I said, a bit sharply.

She looked down at her lap, up at me. “Negative, sir. That’s it.”

I decided I might as well spring it on her. I wanted it handled.

“What’s this about you and Mr. Chatham?”

“That?” She wasn’t thrown for a moment, her voice easy, fluent, her eyes gray and cool, a glint of malice in them. “Of course, personally I sometimes get a feeling of nausea around him but that’s not it. Goes back to a time in the wardroom, some of us shooting the breeze. I mentioned that perhaps we ought to be thinking about jettisoning the missiles—that is, Tomahawk land-attack ones at least, not necessarily anything else. I said something to the effect I couldn’t possibly imagine any use we’d ever have for them now and of course they have a certain danger in themselves. He took it personally I think. Since you mention it, sir, I sometimes get the idea Mr. Chatham rather thinks he owns the missiles.”

“You were out of line, Lieutenant.” My voice was hard enough. “Not because it’s his department, although incidentally he’s the best combat systems officer I’ve ever known. But because it’s
my
department. Anything as important as the question of jettisoning the missiles is not a proper subject for wardroom scuttlebutt. Is that understood?”

“It’s understood, sir.”

“I’ve given him the word. I now give you the same one. I want it knocked off. Both. The thing between you. And any more talk of that kind. The captain will decide what is and what is not to be jettisoned on this ship. I should hate to have to jettison an officer or two. Do you take my meaning, Miss Girard?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

Carrot and Stick

The emotional state of the ship: It varies widely, hand to hand. And even with one individual, it may be quite different at different times. Thinking, brooding, contemplation: I sense that these grow. Only a very few cannot, at least temporarily, stand watches at all. I choose different ways of dealing with these, as I think will work or is merited. Debating first with myself whether to be tough, to charge the man with malingering; or whether to be gentle. The gentleness consists generally in talking with the man quietly for a while, then leaving him alone for a few days while waiting to see what happens. The toughness, as with Yeoman Third Logan, is to come down hard. He had complained simply that he did not feel like working, speaking of vague ills. I had before me the doc’s report. The man faced me sullen, dangerously close to surly. I looked at him and said:

“Why are you different from the rest of us? You think you’re the only one suffering?”

“I’ve got these pains, Captain,” he almost whined.

“We’ve all got pains, Logan. The doc says you’ve got the exact same pains as the rest of us. No more, no less. You should be ashamed of yourself. For God’s sake show a little spine, man.”

With Machinist’s Mate Second Jorgans, more gently, when he complained:

“But back there I have,” he said, “a wife and two kids.”

The present tense. Jorgans broke into tears, a convulsive sobbing. I stepped around him and shut my cabin door. Coming back I placed my hand on his shoulder.

“Rainey,” I said quietly—he is a signalman—“has a wife and four children. . . . He hasn’t missed a watch.”

Somehow these altogether simplistic and direct approaches seem in the main to work. Only two men—Seaman Drexel and Cryptologic Technician Templeton—actually have I relieved, for the time being, of all watch-standing, to give them a chance to recover as from any illness, as a man is allowed to do aboard ship. One week limit on that indulgence. Then I call the man in and tell him quite sternly that he will have to shape up, that every hand must do his share. This also seems to work. So far. So far indeed the men are proving themselves intrepid, yes, gallant, in the main.

The Ship at Night

Previously most had appeared to be employing that remarkable ability of which I have spoken to put their minds on a sort of hold in respect to events and to continue their regular shipboard duties and lives, as if they had come to an agreement with themselves, a sort of solemn inner concordat, to probe into them at some unspecified future date. Now this fortification has to an increasing extent been breached by the disclosures to ship’s company of the French radioman’s report, the report from the Russian submarine commander. One senses a deep, inward contemplation. Pulsing in an unceasing torment through them this question: Are the reports to be believed? A struggle for their souls.

I have taken to prowling the ship at night, as I think through, never really stopping doing so, our choices as to course. I listen to the sea in its polyphony of voices, as if she might whisper some wondrous counsel in my ears; gaze up at the stars which guide us as if that direction might extend to other than navigational matters; as if they in their ageless wisdom might have a word of advice for a ship’s captain, perhaps a suggestion or two, based on the ancient and fond friendship between themselves and seamen. From sea and stars no answers come, other than a seeming reminder concerning on whose shoulders these matters fall.

But mostly I go to be among the men. And for them to see me, to have my accessible presence. Sailors do not approach a ship’s captain lightly—if they feel something genuinely urgent requires his attention they go through chief petty officers, through their division officers. It is my purpose by these coursings of the weather decks to convey a certain opening, enlargement, of the usual channels of command. I go for a further reason which I hardly dare admit to myself. I have never before asked myself such a thing concerning those I commanded, feeling I knew sailors, and especially that I knew, having long ago, on assuming command of this ship, made it my first order of business, those whose sworn duty it is to obey my orders; as much as I thought I understood my ship’s company, I feel increasingly uncertain of the answer to a single question: What are they thinking? What is going on inside them? It is this really that turns me to these noctivagations. I go to attempt to determine whether there be any beginning telltale, any sign, any signal, however oblique, of that most fateful of all the affairs of ships on the ocean seas and before which the strongest captain’s heart may tremble, of revolt beginning to stir in his men. Immense as are his powers, any ship’s captain yet pauses before pitting his will against an authentic rebellion, if it have any basis of validity at all, subscribed to by a large number of his men. While stubbornness may be a virtue in a commander, unreasoning obstinacy may bring the heavens crashing down, take a ship under as surely as the sea herself has done uncounted times. No good captain has any problem distinguishing between the two. He knows the fineness of the line he must trod. He cannot forget that he is alone on that ship with them, cut off from the world. Vastly outnumbered, he has only his will and the ancient law of the sea to back him up, and while it is my business to attend to the first, the latter is now peculiarly vulnerable. I go to learn.

More and more between watches, in the hours of dark, men may be seen topside, sometimes in twos or threes, more often alone, sitting on the bitts or standing by the lifeline, gazing at the empty sea, staring into its immense solitude from the equal solitude of the ship moving through it, over the emptied blue plain of the Mediterranean. Wrapped in those two solitudes, ship and sea, which define our existence. Quite often, as I stand by the lifeline myself, a man will approach and stand by me and we talk. Usually about idle matters, not always. Once Bigelow, a missile technician, standing by me awhile in the darkness, then actually pulling at my sleeve, saying, “I’ve got to go home, Captain.” I put my hand over the one now gripping my arm and held it hard. “Lad, we all want to go home.” We just stood there in the dark, saying nothing. Until his low sobs stopped and I took my hand away. Sometimes I touch the dark shape of a man and move on. Other times I simply pass by, sensing that he does not wish to be disturbed. Sometimes I have a feeling when I come upon a man that he might be thinking about going over the side. Always then I stop and talk with him. Never, of course, about that. But about random things. But making it a point, too, to speak of the future, my purpose being to plant reassurance throughout the crew that there is a future—even possibly a decent future, not just one of survival, of mere existence. Nothing, as I have suggested, is more important than that the captain of a ship preserve at all times a calm presence, to the point even of serenity, and especially in the most trying of times. No matter the turmoils, even torments, that may be underway within himself: He must not fail to suppress them; they must never know it. It is the first commandment of captaincy. So much does a ship’s company take its signal, its tone, its very emotions from its captain, and often augments them: Fear in a ship’s captain can in an instant become panic in a ship’s company; alarm, terror. But so also can fortitude in him find its mirror image in his men: endurance—mental and physical—and without a word of complaint through deprivation and hardship, even horror, that would seem beyond the ability of men to bear, deeds extending to the unhesitating risk of their lives for those of their shipmates: These are almost common virtues among sailors properly led.