The Last Ship (41 page)

He did the strange thing of touching my arm lightly, a lenitive gesture, his unseen hand coming out of the darkness. He was not one to go around touching people. I was not one to invite it. The touch may have had something to do with what happened next—unleashing it. I spoke, abruptly, in the way one sometimes does, not knowing you are going to say something until you hear it yourself; the words seeming to break through the dark mantle of the night toward his unseen being, perhaps without this merciful tempting opaqueness, never to have been uttered.

“Father . . .” I rarely called him that. “I have the responsibility of 305 souls. Their security, their welfare, their survival. Do you imagine I ever stop thinking about that?”

Darkness or not, I wished instantly I had not said it. It sounded a weakness, as though I were soliciting solace, pimping for sympathy. My voice over-earnest, even to myself, in it almost a pleading tone that I loathed. It was true that there was no one else aboard to whom I could speak my thoughts, and this not the first time I had spoken frankly with him; all the same there was a vast difference now. Previous times had concerned such matters as problems of one or another of ship’s company, mine never among them. Sometimes concerned ideas in general, far from the Navy. Here now for the first time I seemed to have stepped squarely myself into his confession box. I was immediately anxious to get out of it, and as alacritously as possible. Then I became aware with a shock that I was returning the touch he had given me; but where his had been gentle, almost brushing, my hand was pressing hard into the flesh of his arm—hard enough another man would have cried out. I had not even realized what I was doing. I instantly let my hand drop limply on the lifeline. Then his very next words made me regret again, almost alarmingly so, that I had given voice to my personal anguish. The last thing we had time or maneuvering room for was the slightest shred of self-pity; certainly not from the officers; least of all from the captain.

“A heavy burden . . . Sometimes . . .” His voice emerged from the night as from gentle, inward origins; hesitated as though carefully framing words. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s too much of a burden for any one man. I mean now . . .”

I turned sharply; looked at him—his dark shape; and he stopped again. Now and then I caught myself perhaps too vigilant for any sign, not of disloyalty so much, but of even the appearance of questioning, any remote or imagined intimation that in present circumstances there might be another and better way than the long-established one of a sovereign captain. For a moment I felt we had moved, all ahead full this time, into the most perilous of waters: the possibility of doubtings abroad on the ship. But no, he was speaking only in sympathy, in compassion; responding to my expressed need. He meant nothing directed at my leadership, my command. Of that I felt certain. He was not one to pussyfoot. If he had something to say he said it. Would do so even in that extreme matter, if ever it came to that. No one, not even his captain, could intimidate him, silence him, where he felt it his duty to speak. All the same I wanted to ask,
Have you heard anything in that place of yours, that confession box, concerning that subject?
Heard . . . dangerous unrest, even the stirrings of insurgence . . . anything close to these? I leaned toward his shape in the dark. Aware of the intenseness of listening there just by me; and of my own, alert for a murmur, a word from him. And heard only the hoarse sea, the ululant wind, no sound otherwise, not a whisper, only the hush from the waiting shipmate alongside. Then finally heard the words come from his lips, barely audible above the sounds of the elements.

“God will show us a way.” He waited then, that declaration a mere litany to me, a recessional signaling parting, little more than a noise, falling scarcely heard upon the ear.

Felt certain, I said, that he was not calling into question a system itself, a captain’s suzerainty. No, that is not quite the full truth. Doubt, thin slivers of it, remained . . .

I looked across the sea, unmistakably asserting itself now, ready yet again, lest, chatting away, we tend to take it for granted, to remind us of its regnant presence, its utter freedom to do as it pleased, our bodies now rising and falling as the ship, quick to take heed, began to meet her, sea and ship commencing once again their ancient and zealous fray. To attend this oncoming display, a fine obscuring mist, carrying with it a decided chill, began to impregnate the air. I had the feeling that there was something more clamoring to be said; from him; perhaps from myself. Waiting for him, should he so decide, I glanced forward to the bridge—all okay, the dim light of the ship’s lights upon the deck house and rigging seemed to certify; back into the black void where the sea lay. Suddenly: “When we get where we are going. Wherever that is to be . . .” His voice faded off, swallowed up in the rising sound of sea and wind. I thought perhaps there were words following that I had missed, obliterated by the voice of the elements. I started to ask; did not; lost on the sea, the wind.

I looked up into the tenebrous firmament, seeming to rest like a weight on the ship’s mainmast, the running lights now barely visible, the turgid hold of the night now complete; again turned toward where I knew him to be. In the enclosing opacity of the night, our chilled bodies beginning to feel the vibration of the ship as she pitched into the ascending sea, only two disembodied voices lowered to a barely audible quietude yet somehow full of every urgency, every doubt: words seeming dangerous, words seeming our sole hope. I felt a hush even within the climbing sounds of the elements, a corner of silence in which we stood all anticipant. I could feel the sea now riding hard under me, heard the undertone . . . as though another spoke, of my own voice, “. . . where we are going. If we are to be saved.”

Then heard only the firmness and the gentleness, the duties of the office now paramount: there are times when even a captain can be given instruction.

“Tom, I do not have on my collar. But let us remember that not to hope is a sin.”

I spoke almost brutally. “Then I stand without sin. I am hope itself.”

“You are. For us all. Under God.”

“God?” I said. It was as though the very word irritated, almost angered me. “Is He still around?”

“Deus absconditus,”
he said gently, countering the anger. “At the most.”

“What?”

“The God who went missing. Perhaps He went away for a while. If so, I feel confident He’ll be back.”

The fog-mist had enveloped the ship so that we were no longer able even to see the waters, only to hear their gathering roar and the smart flapping of the halyards before a freshening wind; feel the ship confidently penetrating this blind vale, leading us, all-trusting, believing above all else in the ship, with her into the night. Could scarcely see even the shape of each other, though standing but a foot apart. The deck coming up strongly now under our feet; one had to steady oneself. Gazing into blackness, as if undertaking to determine what might lie beyond it, we seemed to pierce through it with one of those single thoughts that can occur in ways we know not. Quite naturally, almost offhand, I heard myself to say, “What do you think, Father?” and his voice, equally soft and clear through a moment’s pause in that duet of sea and wind, “There are others. There have to be others.” “But surely not back there—not back home,” I said, half-statement, half-question. The duet resumed: If he made answer, I did not hear it.

I could see the first wave come surging out of the mists and, breaking hard across the bow, board the ship, the ship responding with a plunging pitch a quantum deeper than anything before, throwing us with a certain force against each other. It was somewhere in that coming physically together that it came, or seemed to come. I thought, startling me, I heard him say—could not be sure because he normally no more would ask me a direct question about such a matter than I would him about what was said in his confession box—not sure, either, because of that clamor of the elements—seeming to come more a murmur than a question, “Have you decided the course?” And thought myself to respond, for the third time in a form of address I rarely used with him, “Yes, Father, I have.”

We brought ourselves apart. Then distinctly, the words this time deliberately unmistakable, as though to get with all alacrity away from that abruptly touched-on matter: “We’re in for some weather,” I said. “I best have a look on the bridge.”

I disappeared into the mist forward, guided only by the pale glow of the running lights and the sure knowledge of a seaman for his ship. Then I knew. I had been in his confession box myself, all along. Feeling clinging to me fresh doubts, presentiments undefined, something in me still uneasy less at what he had said than what he had chosen to leave unsaid; myself, too; for if he had secrets I did as well; yet there seeming no choice for now but that brutal and merciless one of leaving the air filled with unspoken and unspeakable thoughts. I recalled his words: “When we get where we are going. Wherever that is to be . . .” They seemed to ring in the night, herald of all that was ominous, unknown, to hover above the ship, over the last soul aboard, like a dark following cloud not to be shaken off however far the ship penetrated the night, clinging cruelly to her, and to demand something more: not to stop there . . .

The voice of the sea had assumed a deeper, more commanding tone and now another joined in: the rolling of distant thunder, hanging long beyond the veiled sky; now coming closer in, low and elongated, marching hard upon us; then an immense coruscation of lightning, scarring the heavens from zenith to sea, the following thunder breaking shatteringly almost directly on top of us, the ship trembling under it; once more a staccato series of lightning displays that seemed to illumine as day the entire vastness of the sea naked to the farthest horizon save for a lone and spectral ship riding through its cresting waves, bound only her captain coming to know where, and even so only were he permitted the rights of his command position, only if the men came along with his decision, his intentions for ship and ship’s company. The relumined heavens lighting my way up the ladder to the bridge, I seemed to reach down into the utmost ends of my soul to see what fortitude of my own, what will and resolve, might be found there. The storm was coming on.

I
t was as though my nights of prowling, of making myself accessible, had at last paid off; not in the way I would have chosen; finding not what I had hoped to find, though half-expected to; rather, what I dreaded most.

At least I am made aware, alerted. That is something.

All that day long we had glassed the beach. Not a sign of life. Not a human being. Not an animal. Nothing even worth picking up in our scavenging, not so much as a second wheelbarrow—an item, incidentally, almost obsessively desired by Delaney. “Very few things more important than a wheelbarrow, sir,” the gunner’s mate–farmer had informed me in his arcane way. A brief foray in the boat by Selmon showed prohibitive readings for any stay.

Then on this another of my nights of roaming with the intent of making myself available to all, I found myself standing along the lifeline next to Lieutenant Commander Chatham. No random encounter: I felt clearly, from the first, that he had sought me out here, having taken note of what was by now a nightly custom; having picked his moment. None about, due both to the lateness and to a gathering weather that hung heavy in a somehow portentous darkness; more of that heavy weather that seemed increasingly to come suddenly down on us in great contrast to the earlier prevailing stilled heavens, stilled seas.

We were without stars. Emerging from an opaque cloud cover a mild wind had come up, and one could feel under one’s feet the slow preludial pitch of the ship, these life signs of sea and elements almost a welcome thing after the long silences over mirroring waters. The ship seemed to like the change, riding eagerly through the shallow troughs. Characteristically for Chatham, never one for small talk, he came right to the point.

“Captain, I had a little chat the other day with the engineering officer.”

“Yes, Mr. Chatham?”

“We started talking how by cutting speed to, say, eight knots, we would take considerably less off our remaining available cruising time; it started me thinking about the idea of going just there and back.”

I was instantly alerted. Normally I would have spoken sharply concerning the circumspection of a Navy officer’s staying out of matters that were not his province, and in that area to await his captain’s request as to an opinion. These days I gave a wider rein. I was not so stupid as to attempt to control men’s thoughts, or even their talking with one another. After all, the amount of running time we had remaining was hardly confidential information. The very fact that he had spoken to such a matter was itself startling enough, unsolicited advice to her captain by subordinate officers a distinctly unusual thing on a man-of-war. Much more so was the possibility, coming immediately to mind, that he was speaking not just for himself, the likelihood even that had to be considered that he would not have done so unless he had a fair number of the crew behind him. This was the very last thing I should ask him. If true, it would certify his unauthorized role of spokesman for, leadership of, a part—how many?—of ship’s company, with a particular right to be heard; an inadmissible thing, none more so aboard ship. I must not grant him that. And it was by no means certain. Chatham was capable of speaking only for Chatham. Even so, he must have had to work up a certain boldness to broach the subject. Caution set in. I remained noncommittal. If he so wished, let him push on. No help in that respect would he get from me. He waited as if gathering his inner resources to do so, then began to speak. Normally with a rather rasping timbre to it, his voice now came also with a certain growing insistence that I did not like. “. . . And if we came straight back . . .”

“We would still have lost propulsion time.” I finished that sentence for him with a sharpness I had not intended. Certainly no one knew the figures more precisely than did I, the fuel loss at various speeds having been calculated with the greatest precision. “Valuable time. Perhaps crucial time. We’ve been over all this, Mr. Chatham. You have spoken with the engineering officer. Have you also spoken with Girard?”

“Why, no, sir, I have not.”

“Since you have started these inquiries, you might wish to do so.” I could not conceal all the sternness at what he was doing and I heard it now in my voice. “You might ask for the figures on the time remaining—I mean pursuing the course you refer to—we would have in her department. I’m talking about eating days, Mr. Chatham.”

“Captain, I was only . . .” In his voice was something much less of apology than a kind of resentful defensiveness, the barest touch even of truculence.

“I know, Mr. Chatham.” I tried to speak more softly. I could not see his features in the dark but I knew that he was quite aware that he had ventured into the most fragile of waters.

“Mr. Chatham,” I said . . . and then waited.

Far off the night’s first thunder rolled across the sky, merged with the sea’s ascendant tone. Abruptly I had a sense of something projected from the body alongside me into my own, shortcutting the avenues of speech or even conscious thought. Something clearly menacing, drawn near; I stood in new environs, overt questioning, hanging in the air a sense of machination, of maneuverance, touching on complicity. Then, as suddenly and in complete contradiction, perhaps because the verifiable ground for such thoughts were of the thinnest, I wondered if what I was really hearing from within him was a cry of private distress, a supplication for help. An officer taken in a moment with a malady which came without either warning or symptoms. Presented with an untoward manifestation from any of ship’s company, an occurrence of growing frequency to the point it had ceased to be a phenomenon, one’s mind stretched these days to include the widest spectrum of utterly opposing causes before settling on one or on none at all, cause remaining irremediably shrouded. The thing then disappearing as quickly as it had emerged. In this manner for a strange moment I felt in myself a disorientation, not knowing whether I was dealing with the rebellious, or, quite the opposite, with someone in some desperate need that he was incapable of articulating directly. Or with some unknown third or fourth thing.

Great columns of that soundless night lightning that we had been experiencing began to play hugely over the southern sky to starboard, altogether marvelous and continuing; revealing the commencement of long rolling waves across the naked seascape, a blossoming of whitecaps on the blackness of the waters, the distant desert to starboard in its undulating geometry. I wished extremely to turn and look him square in the face in its light but did not, fearful of the stark obviousness of such a thing. I looked across the ship’s bow. It was beginning to plunge more deeply into the troughs, slower in coming up. A sudden pitch threw us for a moment unexpectedly against each other. An absolutely unexperienced sensation shot through me—the contact of his body against mine seemed an unpleasant thing, one almost of distaste, this feeling itself so astonishing to me in respect to a shipmate that it seemed at once to constitute a warning, as of some dangerous bias toward a particular officer when there was nothing of any real substance, other than words, I could lay against him.

Perhaps in consideration of these speculations, ambivalences, a softer tone was the response called for. Certainly he had identified an amount of hostility in me toward his approach, likely to enhance rather than pacify the air of disquiet. Fearful of suspecting what was not there, I decided to reprimand him no further, not to build up alienation: To come through we would need not that but brotherhood. We had no more deadly enemy than divisiveness: true always of a ship, with its closely lived existence, in our circumstance greatly compounded. Men had a right to know they would be told, and presently. Surely they had sensed that anyway, indeed informed so by myself. But let him spread the word afresh. He seemed to have become adept at that. I spoke with quiet clarity, not untempered with firmness, striving for a balance between not diminishing him and yet squaring him away.

“Mr. Chatham,” I said, “
we cannot do both.
Do you understand that?”

“I understand what you say, sir.”

I fought back the flash of anger, at the obstinacy, the impertinence, of this answer. I had heard enough. It was not the time to get into it, nor would any time be with a single officer. When the moment came, it would be a thing to be shared with the last and lowliest rating in ship’s company, all equals at that point. To discuss it further in this privacy was not only unseemly behavior for a captain, not the way to do things; it would also only confer on the CSO a special authority that I had not the slightest intention of recognizing. It should be stopped at once. This time I spoke with a manifest severity. Even so I went further than a captain normally did, or ought to do, to accommodate, in such a revelation to himself alone; along with some home truths.

“Mr. Chatham, here is the straight dope. The answer to what you’re wondering is that I have not as yet made up my mind. I have neither resolved upon nor ruled out the course you suggest,” going that far even. “When I come to a decision, I’ll let you—and all hands—know. It will be soon. Is all that understood?”

“Yes, sir. It’s understood.” Still a slightly sullen note. Never mind. He had got the word. Then, just as I had thought the matter finished, it hit me squarely in the face.

“Captain, we want to participate in the decision.”

I turned on him in as strong an anger as I had ever felt, or shown, since becoming a ship’s captain.

“‘Participate’? ‘We’?”

So it had gone this far. I waited a moment for the thing to settle in me, that inward hardness which, long since, entirely reflexive by now, had become my armament in extreme confrontation, every idea of indulgence toward this officer vanished.

“Listen well, Mr. Chatham.” I could hear my own voice, quiet, cold, in the sudden hush, the deadly taut atmosphere, as if even the sea herself, always curious as to such developments in her domain, had paused to listen. “I intend for there to be not the slightest misunderstanding. As to ‘participate.’ This ship will continue to have a captain. He will reach his decisions as Navy ship’s captains do. With such counsel from ship’s officers as he feels needed, receiving it in the way it is always offered: when he asks for it. As to the ‘we’: I do not wish to know their names. But you may take that word back to them. The affairs of the ship will continue to be conducted in the manner just described. If all that is clear then let us speak no more of it. Do you understand me?”

Out of the dark the simply monotonic, the voice of the subordinate returned, still sounding no more than the requisite. “As you say, sir. I understand you.”

“Good night, Mr. Chatham.”

“Good night, Captain.”

Dismissed, he disappeared into the darkness forward.

 *  *  * 

I stayed awhile, the extra heartbeat receding before the assurance of the ship under me taking on the rising waters. Now the elements began to unfold for my pleasure a modest, unthreatening display of weather, nothing for her to worry about, the ship dipping into the deepening valleys of the sea, each time with a faint shudder that moved up through her keel, up through the spaces of the ship to the weather decks, up through my legs, my body. I could hear above and forward the wind slapping the halyards and see the glow of the running lights leading us on into the night. The rhythmic sound of the ship’s foghorn reaching down from the bridge—the routineness of the precaution, as if beyond the mists there was another ship closing on us, stabbing me like a physical pain. And suddenly I knew. Knew as surely as I stood there looking at the throbbing, lightning-illuminated sea, that Chatham was implicated. Deceit has almost a scent to it. No, not just that. Factiousness. Even the Jesuit had hinted as much. And putting all the signals together, an immense foreboding seized me; some disturbing and threatening element had come aboard, involving the CSO in some inexplicable manner. And the further thought, sending an icy chill crawling up and down my spine: If Chatham had been bold enough to approach me thus, argue with me as to the possibility of the impossible, what had he been saying to the others? Implanting hope for a place where all hope was gone? Prodding their thinking and their desires toward the most perilous and heartbreaking of expectations concerning their very home? Cruel this was.

Big foaming seas had begun to come out of the blackness, the ship responding each time with a tremor, readily conforming, adjusting, my face wetted by the salt spray, seeming to clear my mind to see into the truth of things in this solipsistic darkness: the ship more and more becoming split into opposing camps; the shores of the Mediterranean continuing to signal us their refusal to offer safe habitation, the hard consequent fact that, barring still possible changes in that respect, at Suez we would have to commit ourselves, never looking back, to one of the two choices available as to course; despite anything that Chatham had put about or that any others of ship’s company might have led themselves independently to believe, that we were compelled to do one, fuel and food supplies dictating we could not do both—any seaman apprentice who used his head could figure that one out. Those who could not were simply identifying wish with fact: This tendency I accepted as natural in men and was one reason, among others, that it had never occurred to me seriously to consider any such notion as putting the matter to a vote.

I had long since come to terms with the possibility, even probability, that in the case of one of the two courses, should I decide on it, the loyalty to myself of the most faithful and unswerving of men might well be put to the severest test. Refusal, if I should issue it despite whatever opposition, to obey a lawful order. An effort even to take the ship. Nothing could be ruled out. In my mind I could even understand it, told the awful finality of what the men would have to be told. Men informed they would never see home again: Who could predict how it would take them? An understanding which did not for one moment admit the possibility of allowing it to succeed. My resolve lay in the confidence in my ability to control it well before it reached any such state; to reason, to persuade, drawing on the trust I felt resided in them toward their captain; the decision set forth to them in that firm mastery which traditionally had brought obedience from sailors in the direst of circumstances, ships being able to function in no other known manner; yet knowing that simply to command, to give an order, was no longer enough. I must compel belief from them by what came down to an absolute moral assurance on my part (the Jesuit was right in that): my way at least offering hope, if against odds; the other guaranteeing disaster, no odds at all. Our fate had always seemed to me to rest absolutely on our remaining united, a band of brothers. Nothing in my thinking took into account that the lines would be rigidly drawn, certainly not to the extent of either group having a leader, and he an officer. That brought a sense of authentic fear, of a foreboding greatly enhanced that it should be this particular officer; the last officer I should wish to discover at that work, for the simple reason that, as I have remarked, short only of the captain he is the most powerful officer aboard. Combat systems officer. As such, the most potentially dangerous of officers in circumstances, if remote, still not at all hard to imagine as possibilities in our near future. I was allowed to hope that the admonitions just delivered would have effect, stop in its tracks a movement already clearly underway; I would be an idiot to count on it.