Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Right after that Duvey was near the bow when the Ohio caught it aft. It was a sharp blow, like an enormous crunch, and everything loose fell, including Duvey. He thought he was gone. This is what I get for shipping on a tanker, and Ruthie always said I was going to catch trouble for hanging around with bad company. Although Duvey had never been religious, he found the Shma Yisroel going in his head. He guessed he was ready to die a Jew. Then he was rushing aft to help with the hoses. Amazingly the torpedo had not penetrated the oil. They were burning but not yet exploding. He was too busy to notice when the fighters from Malta headed back to refuel.

  They hadn’t been gone half an hour when twenty German Messerschmitts made their attack. They ignored the Ohio blessedly, which was putting out its own smoke screen, but the captain had the engines up and was steaming ahead, taking what evasive action he could with a fire on deck and freighters packed in all around them. The torpedo had taken their steering gear, and they were hand-steering from aft. The convoy was like a river full of smelts struggling to make it upstream to mate and being had by every hungry gull, every fisherman with a line or net, every bigger fish that could get at them. The Clan Ferguson bought it and went up like a fireball, so close to them that Duvey’s cheek was gashed by a bit of flying debris. He was bleeding all over himself, but it wasn’t serious and the fire was.

  At last the damned bloody sun was going down and soon the Germans would have to stop bombing them. Cal called out that another ship had been hit repeatedly and was sinking, one of the merchantmen behind them, but in the smoke nobody could see which one. Finally the Germans ran out of stuff to throw at them and left, but they hadn’t been gone a few minutes when the U-boats were back. This time they got a torpedo into one of the two remaining cruisers, but she stayed afloat and dragged along with them.

  It was clear the Ohio wasn’t going to explode or sink. They had the fire under control and they were still proceeding at seven knots, although they had fallen toward the back of the convoy. Not a great place to be but if they managed to stay with it, they had some kind of a chance. Scuttlebutt had it that the Cormorant, dragging along miles behind the rest of the convoy, had got clobbered while they were under attack and gone down. A boat alone was dead in the water, everyone’s leisurely prey.

  Even though nighttime was the right time to the U-boats, at least it kept the bombers off them. They hoped that they would be less visible against the dark shore as they passed near Tunis. Maybe the U-boats did have trouble seeing them, for they were left alone. Duvey had been awake now for forty-eight hours. Early in the night he slept for a while in his clothes till general quarters sounded. This time they were under attack by torpedo boats from Pantelleria Island, where the Italians had a base. They were small but they were fast and nasty. Again, they too were new to Duvey. He felt if he survived, he would find the North Atlantic run peaceful by comparison, with only the U-boats and the fierce storms to menace them.

  The first ship to be knocked out was the remaining intact cruiser. After that the torpedo boats seemed to pick off ships at random. The attack went on and on and on and on. When Duvey looked at his watch, he could see it by natural light and it was dawn, just before six. Four of the merchant ships had gone down. They picked up what survivors they could. At least the poor bastards had a chance in these warm waters. They wouldn’t die of exposure, anyhow.

  They had company at the straggling end of the convoy now, because another ship loaded with food supplies and machinery had taken two torpedoes but was staying afloat and steaming along with them. They should be within a day of Malta now, one more bleeding day, as Cal said with feeling. Duvey stared at the sun rising in the direction where safety must lie. If they did make it, how in hell would he get back? He decided he was going to love Malta if he got there, he was going to jump ship and shack up with a Maltese girl. Maybe if Maltese cats did not have tails, the girls would, he said to Ziggy. Ziggy said that was Manx cats he was thinking of, not Maltese.

  Cal said, “I hear it’s no vacation being there. They get bombed twice a day on the off days, four times on Sunday.”

  Ziggy said, “Me, all I care about is Maltese pussy. That’s my kind of tail. I bet they’re dark and zaftig. Did I ever tell you about the longshoremen in Murmansk? They’re babes, everyone of them.…”

  There were only seven ships left afloat, and two of them, including theirs, were barely moving. It wasn’t long after daylight that the German bombers and dive bombers found them. The Jerries got the Ply three hits in a row and she went up in a shattering blast of pungent yellow smoke. Explosives, must have been. One dive bomber came roaring down at them, dropped his bomb close enough so that the deck was drenched and then lost control of his dive, or else he was hit. “Oh my God!” Cal screamed.

  Ziggy cried, “Down!” and threw himself on Duvey. Duvey found himself thrown forward and slammed into something hard and metal.

  He came to without attention sometime later. His head ached as if it were cracked open, and his left wrist was broken. Something heavy and wet was lying on top of him. He could not move at first. He could hardly breathe. He was covered with blood, sticky, cooling. Finally he crawled out from under. The something heavy and wet was Ziggy. Duvey could not take it in. He looked around, calling for help. Nobody heard him.

  Every man who could was fighting the fires where the kraut bomber had crashed into them. Half its wreckage was still on the deck and so was what remained of Cal. He recognized Cal from the snake tattoo on his remaining arm, or he wouldn’t have known because he was mostly pulp and smashed bones. Ziggy was drenched in blood and charred, intact except for the top of his head sliced off. His dark hair ended abruptly in a semicircle of smashed bone. He knelt over Ziggy thinking he should touch him, somehow lay him to rest, as a small explosion shook the deck. He heard himself calling Ziggy. If Ziggy hadn’t responded so fast, he’d be dead too. Why should he be alive? He thought he was going to pass out as he tried to walk the deck toward the fire, tying up his broken wrist roughly. It was his left, which was lucky anyhow. They had to get the fires out before anybody could look to get treated.

  Once again they got the fire under control. Duvey didn’t know whether he was on the unluckiest ship or the luckiest. They had been hit twice and they had lost by now a quarter of the crew, with maybe another quarter wounded or badly burned. But a tanker hardly ever survived one hit.

  The German bombers were back. They blasted one ship and then they torpedoed the Ohio and Duvey, who was being patched up, found himself on the floor with the medic on top of him. This time the Jerries had got them where it really hurt, in the engine room, and they were standing still like a fucking dead duck in the middle of a pond just waiting for the planes to come back. They had a lot of company. Two other ships were cripples too and they were all going to die together. The engineer swore he could get them going again, but he couldn’t say when. The captain lined them up and told them they were going to make it because they had to, and he expected everybody wounded or not to pitch in, because they were going to reach Malta and nobody was going to stop them.

  Duvey felt like crying as he watched the three ships that could still make speed draw away and then fade over the horizon. Duvey thought of the brave parade that had steamed out of Clyde, and now what was left around him? Three cripples waiting for the hunters to come back and finish them off.

  By afternoon the engines were going again, although they were slow as a river barge. Then he saw ships coming, and he was damned scared. He’d heard Italian warships were steaming around out here. When Duvey saw it was the four destroyers coming back for them, he wanted to kiss the stiffs in monkey suits on board them.

  Sparks passed the word that the three ships had made it into Valletta, the harbor of Malta, escorted by minesweepers and motor launches. Here they were still at sea and the Jerries were back with more planes. The bombs were falling all around them, but in spite of the Ohio’s slowness, the Jerries kept missing. The sun set lurid and beautiful and the J
erries kept coming. It was hardly light when the dive bombers set at them one after the other, peeling off and coming and coming and coming, till the Pride of Portsmouth was hit and hit and turned in a helpless circle, bombed apart as if with a massive hammer, stroke after stroke. Then the Ohio caught it again right in the engine room.

  This time they had killed the engineer and the guys in the Black Gang, and the engines were scrap metal. Still the Ohio, sloshing full with aviation fuel, did not explode. They were once more adrift, this time without hope of fixing the engines. Nothing would ever fix those engines again. Furthermore the ship was cut almost in two, a great hole separating forward and aft and leaving only a thin net of metal to hold the ship together.

  One of the destroyers was signaling them. She came up alongside and then actually bashed against them, as if nuzzling. The little destroyer was going to try to move them toward Malta by being lashed to the side of the Ohio. Duvey had never heard of such a maneuver, but he wasn’t about to complain. It was nice to feel somebody besides him wanted him to get to Malta. He had never wanted to be anyplace so bad in his life. Two minesweepers came out from Malta to meet them and attached towlines to the smashed bow. Still with all the tiny boats tugging at them, their progress—a heavy tanker loaded with aviation fuel and riding low in the water—was barely visible. The ship with its two sections trying to swing apart and in different directions kept breaking the towlines and almost smashing into the destroyer and the minesweepers. Low in the water, listing, drifting, taking on water, the Ohio or what was left of it was dragged onward.

  The other remaining cripple had got up steam again and was proceeding, escorted by two of the surviving destroyers. Soon she left them behind. All night they crawled forward. There was a strange calm. Duvey slid into a dreamless overheated bog of sleep, suffocating, sweating cold. He woke with his head and wrist throbbing and the bruises he had not noticed black and blue all over his swollen legs and battered shoulders. He could not raise his left arm at all. When he shat, his stool was bloody. It was the first time he had had a moment to take a crap in three days. He found himself weeping and pretended to be barfing to cover his noise.

  He kept seeing Ziggy lying on his face with the top of his head sheared off. He could not mourn him yet. He had a sheared-off feeling himself, something ripped out, missing. He could not mourn Ziggy yet, because the odds were he’d be joining him any moment. For years he’d thought of himself as looking out for Ziggy, then Ziggy had thrown himself on top of him.

  They were wallowing along, barely moving, as the fourteenth dawned. The fighters from Malta came out, but they were told that Malta was so low on fuel for the fighters, that they could barely put up twenty of them. Those twenty acted like eighty. All day the Ohio dawdled forward, almost stationary under a massy brazen sun, as the dogfights swirled over them. The destroyer was still lashed to them, to share their fate, and the minesweepers tugged them forward. All day the planes came at them and all day the Spitfires from Malta fought them off, always outnumbered but always there. Bombs never stopped bracketing them as they lumbered along, big as a factory and almost as stationary, yet nothing hit them.

  All through the night they stayed at their stations. Duvey was seeing and hearing things by now. He saw land. He saw flashes of light out in the sea. He heard Ziggy calling, “Hey, Duvey. Look what I got.” He heard his girlfriend Delora singing a song about, Come on in my kitchen. He heard Mama talking just behind him. He kept smelling something burnt but after a while he figured out that was no hallucination. It was his own hair burnt all off his arms and the back of his head he was smelling. He had a scorched bald spot on the back of his head the size of a grapefruit. He had to doze with his head turned sideways. When he did doze, he kept seeing Ziggy with the top of his head cut off, like a soft-boiled egg. Acid rushed up his throat and he puked, briefly. He was too exhausted even to throw up at length.

  At dawn the minesweepers led them forward still, and the island was visible, finally, Malta with its mountains and its cliffs gleaming darkly out of the blue, blue sea so bright it hurt his sore eyes, with another island to the side. As they made their endless approach, he could see that the narrow entrance to Valletta harbor was defended by an ancient fort with tall stone ramparts, crowded with people as if they had come to see a parade. It was the Ohio they had come to greet and they cheered and waved and called to them, some in English, but some in a language he had never heard. They were throwing things at them, hats, flowers, pieces of paper. They were crying, some of them, with joy to see the half-gutted, blasted, crippled hulk of the tanker dragged into port with its bloody charred decks and its crippled crew.

  Duvey tasted his exhaustion like an industrial poison in his mouth, like lead thickening and tainting his blood. This place looked incredibly old, it looked like the most ancient place he had ever seen, the way he had always imagined Palestine. It looked hot, dusty, dry, sunbaked, poverty-stricken and beautiful climbing up its rocks and tumbling over them and burrowing into them, swarming up the mountain. Everywhere in the port, bomb damage was visible, the wrecks of boats at their moorings, hulls upturned, twisted cranes, smashed walls, roofless buildings. Yet people crowded the quays and brightly painted little boats and passenger ferries crisscrossed the harbor and headed out to sea. He felt in his exhaustion as if Ziggy were looking too, out through his eyes.

  When he disembarked, he was going to get down and kiss the poor stones of Malta. He was going to settle here. Anyplace that looked this old, the people must know a lot about survival. Here they greeted a tanker and the poor slobs aboard like conquering heroes. They must know a thing or two about peace and war and living. Now that he had reached this port, he just wanted to stay. Forever.

  RUTHIE 3

  Of Good Girls and Bad Girls

  Early in August Ruthie got a postcard from the government. The United States Employment Service asked her whether she was interested in factory work, whether she had any experience and when she was available. Ruthie not only filled out the card with her best printing, she brought it to the office and asked to be referred to a factory job. Nothing happened.

  Still she decided to go around to the plants and fill out applications, in case they suddenly did decide to hire women. A number of the employment officers were nasty, and the men there stared as if she were naked and prancing out of a cake. Nonetheless long before Labor Day, Ruthie had a job at Briggs. Morris grew alarmed and treated her to a lecture about how many more factory workers had been maimed and killed the previous year than troops in combat. Ruthie told him he hadn’t given a speech like that to Arty, and that she did not plan to be careless.

  She would be working the graveyard shift, so she immediately switched to day school at Wayne. She would try to take close to a normal load of daytime classes, go home to sleep, then get up to work all night. Women did not like the graveyard shift, because with the dimouts, the streets felt dangerous. However, Ruthie rode to Briggs with Vivian, who had been taken on at the same time. Vivian drove her husband’s 1938 Nash (he was in the Army), picking up three women every night and taking them home at dawn, for sixty cents a week from each.

  Ruthie started out at thirty-eight a week, twice what she’d been making a year ago. She could go to school on that and save for later on and still help her family, who needed the help less than ever because Morris was working overtime and so was Arty, and Mama and Sharon were bringing in money from the nursery. For the first time in Ruthie’s life, everything they owned was paid off. Her parents were actually saving in a bank account, although Rose always kept cash in an old teapot up in the cupboard, in case the bank failed. Also hidden in the teapot were Rose’s amber necklace that had been Bubeh’s, a gold bracelet that had been Morris’s engagement present to her, and eleven silver dollars.

  “If we ever have a fire, if a bomb falls, that’s what you should grab first,” Rose told Ruthie.

  She would grab Naomi first and Boston Blackie, she thought to herself. Then she’d worry about the
teapot. They had buckets of sand and buckets of water in the attic and the basement. Everybody was supposed to do that, but only they did, because Morris was the block air raid warden. Morris liked being air raid warden, for it gave him an excuse to go around to shmooz with the neighbors, and he liked reading through the official notices that came to him. He felt a part of the war effort and a genuine citizen.

  Rose also took the various campaigns seriously, eager to be American and patriotic. She washed empty cans and once a week, Naomi and Ruthie stomped them flat. Rose saved fat and newspapers. Ruthie heard her explaining to Naomi what milkweed looked like, so Naomi could collect pods. The kids insisted that the milkweed silk was used to manufacture parachutes. Even Naomi believed that.

  Ruthie knew better, because her shop steward had told her. Up in Petoskey, a plant was making flight jackets lined with milkweed silk instead of kapok, whose supply had been cut off by the Japanese. He had a brother employed there. He was a big burly Finn and not half so bad as most of the men she worked with. If it wasn’t for the combination of the money and the time to go to school, she would have quit after the first day. She was pinched, she was handled, she was stared at until she felt as if she were a mass of raw bloody tissue. She still could not cross the floor without forty men making lowing noises like besotted cattle or whistling. Some men were always trying to sabotage the women’s work. They seemed terrified women would take jobs permanently.

  “They really know they’ve got a good thing going,” Ruthie said to Vivian on the way to work. “Before the war we worked at those crummy jobs that pay half as much. Of course they don’t want us coming into the factories, because we work harder than they do. We don’t jack off.”

  “I’m just working till my husband comes home,” Mary Lou said, but Vivian said she liked getting out of the house and she sure liked the money.