Matters of Chance

by Jeannette Haien

  “How long might the loading take?” Morgan asked.

  “Five, maybe six days, by my calculation.”

  “Good,” Morgan said, adding by way of explanation: “My crew will all be new men to me. I have a hunch I’ll need every minute with them before we leave.”

  “It’s your command, Shurtliff. You see to the guns, and I’ll see to the ship.” The captain looked at his wrist-watch. “I’ll show you to your quarters—” and, as they moved off together: “I know from your papers you’ve not served on a Liberty ship before.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Are you aware that Liberty ships are regularly named after American patriots?”

  “I am now.”

  “This one’s named after a colonel who fought against Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777…. John T. Stubbins…. It’s a very sturdy sounding name, don’t you think?”

  “Very.”

  Now that his attention was directed on matters pertaining to his ship, the captain seemed more relaxed, more willing (Morgan felt) to expose himself to be liked. He slowed his steps and said: “I haven’t been able to find out what the ‘T’ stands for…Thomas, maybe.”

  “That would fit,” Morgan replied.

  “Thomas was my father’s Christian name,” the captain jogged on. “He died two weeks after I was born. Struck down by lightning while he was raking leaves in the backyard. My mother saw it happen from the kitchen window. If he’d lived, he’d be seventy-six today.”

  Arrested, Morgan asked: “Today, sir?” then turned the question into a statement: “Today’s his birthday, you mean.”

  The captain nodded: “I guess that’s why the name ‘Thomas’ is particularly on my mind.”

  “I understand…. If I had the proper stuff in hand, I’d offer a toast to his memory.”

  A first full smile lit the captain’s face: “That’s good of you to say, Shurtliff…. Here we are.” They stood in a narrow passageway before the open door of a stateroom. “It’s small, but it’s all yours.”

  Morgan glanced inside. “It looks fine.”

  Then the captain said the revealing thing: “I like to know about people, especially ones I’m going on a long voyage with. When I was asking you about yourself, I didn’t mean to give the impression I was just idly prying.” He gave Morgan no chance to reply. “Settle yourself in, then have a look around the ship. I’ll see you at lunch.” He turned, and with his rolling walk, swung off.

  Since that seemingly ancient day back in July of 1941 when Morgan had been sworn into the Naval Reserve, he had served on three other ships: the first, a training vessel, the USS Argosy—an old, sturdy, broad-beamed tub of a boat on which, as an able-bodied seaman, he’d spent a month “cruising” from New York down to Cuba and back; the second (after he’d been commissioned as ensign), the light cruiser USS Minneapolis, on which he’d remained from early October through Christmas week of 1941, patrolling the waters between Maine and Florida. On December 7, 1941—the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—the Minneapolis was off the Virginia coast. As the captain announced the news of the attack to the assembled crew, Morgan thought of his father: that the “deciding provocation” (Ansel Shurtliff’s phrase spoken the previous April) had come at last: that, now, the battle would be joined in earnest.

  His third ship had been the SS Myddleton, a fine heavy-duty freighter built in the mid-1930s. He took up duty on her as gunnery officer (second in command) on Tuesday, April 7, 1942, five days after he’d completed a three-month training course at the gunnery school in San Diego, California. The Myddleton first made a fast run from San Francisco to the Hawaiian Islands and back, which voyage, undertaken in the relatively new circumstance of war, comprised his initiation into the unearthly disquietudes of fear…. Next, the Myddleton, carrying a tightly packed cargo of army vehicles (jeeps, ambulances, trucks) set off, solo, on the long Pacific voyage to Brisbane, Australia, and from Brisbane, via Melbourne, to Wellington, New Zealand; from Wellington back to San Francisco Bay, in which safe waters, she dropped anchor on Saturday, October 24, 1942. When, then, he put foot ashore, he learned he had been made a lieutenant (j.g.). “Mirabile dictu!”—he wrote his father of this promotion.

  Among the books he brought aboard the Stubbins was a small but excellent atlas. Spanning pages three and four, under the heading “Elliptical Equal-Area Projection,” the world was shown. With his thumbnail, he traced the voyage ahead: (from Puget Sound, south to Panama; from Panama further south, down the length of South America, around Cape Horn, then east across the South Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa; from Cape Town further east, into the Indian Ocean, then north, to the crown colony of Aden; from Aden, through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to, finally, Port Said).

  He chose a quiet moment to put to the captain his question: “Might I ask, sir, how long you think it will take?”

  The one-sentence answer came without hesitation: “Three to three and a half months, depending on how much zig-zagging we’re forced to do.”

  …Even before they embarked from Puget Sound, it had been his conviction that the crew knew where they were headed. All it would have taken to inform them was a piecing together of certain gleanings picked up and shared by a couple of savvy, old-hand merchant seamen: a slipped remark, overheard, made between dock workers, the remark added to the fact of the Stubbins’s cargo (tanks and lumber), that fact linked to the latest rumor about the geographical location of the war’s most current hot-spot (the African campaign against the Germans)—and scuttlebutt would have done the rest…. He never had any solid proof that the crew knew: his certainty was based solely on the feeling he had when he engaged their eyes, that the strain of his own knowledge was fully met.

  On Friday morning, November 13, 1942, the Stubbins sailed from Puget Sound. The day was sunless and blustery and cuttingly cold.

  “Dearest,” (he wrote to Maud that night): “We made our departure early this morning. You will note the date. After being in port for a while it seems strange to feel the roll of the sea again. As I write, I imagine you and Caroline and Julia and Tessa several hours closer to dawn than I am, but all still asleep in our quiet house. I wonder what your night is like, if it is clear, if there are stars, if there is a frost. I remember how lovely it is this time of year when the cold begins to set in in earnest and you bring out the winter blankets from summer storage, and how the wool smells of lemon verbena. I am the very soul of a home-sick, longing husband. As I always do when we are under way, I’ll add a line or two to this letter each day.”

  He capped his pen, stood up, stretched, then took to his berth, where, prone, he saw himself as might an imaginative stranger: as looking like an effigy of a knight-crusader sculpted to fit in the niche of a remote European church: hands crossed over his chest, feet upright on their heels, eyes closed, lips compressed in a line of death-like resignation.

  …Loneliness: about which, before the war, he thought he had some knowledge, learned initially at the time of his mother’s death and enlarged upon two years later by the thorny period of his first bleak, miserable days of “adjustment” at boarding-school when he had wondered if by jumping out the window of his second-floor room above the house-master’s quarters, he would be killed in the fall or merely injured, just enough to require being sent home, there to be warmly, lengthily nursed to full recovery; and farther on in time, to his seventeenth year, after he had sweated through the heat of a first passion with one Margaret (called “Mudge”), a sloe-eyed, slightly older, russet-haired, sexually vivacious chameleon who, after several summer weeks of steamy encouragement, had finally “squared” with him—she didn’t, after all, care for him—leaving him denied and trembling at the end of a stone-strewn path that dropped abruptly down into the murky shallows of a stale pond; and still farther on in time to his university and law-school years—to all the confident conceits of young manhood honed to a fine edge among a secure group of friends whose deathless energy in combine with a Gargantuan appetite for free-wheelin
g parlance, inspired an alpine consciousness of Self, which consciousness, in rare moments of solitude, he had construed as being that brand of Ultimate Interior Isolation which is the authentic, verifying mark of Maturity…. In a word, bunk…. Now, simply and terribly, he knew loneliness as a starving man knows hunger.

  Behind closed eyes, he considered a further strew of feelings and adjustments having to do with life as he had known it over the previous months: the men he had worked with: the admirable ones who would be recalled as having performed their diverse, difficult jobs with dignity (a few, even with style and wit); and the opposite, the onerous ones, impossible to deal with: the belchers and bullies and foul-mouthed braggarts—to name but a few traits whose ways tried one’s tolerance. It always struck him as miraculous that in the crowded, confined circumstance of shipboard life, day after day could go by without murder being committed by one man (upon another) who had been rubbed by one of his fellows just once too often, the wrong way…. In all truth, it could be said that among the rag, tag, and bob-tail of an all-male crew cast together by chance on a wartime ark, there were but two, in common, abiding concerns: Fear—about which no word was ever exchanged—and Boredom, the cud of which was chewed around the clock, though for all the mock and blasphemy heaped upon it, secretly valued: to be bored was to be safe.

  …And yet, and yet—what of that singular happening aboard the Myddleton which, by its radiant properties, had united the crew in so complete a way as to cause all to forget their individual enmities and, for a moment, to behave as one—…. The drama, for such of a sort it had been, had taken place on the long-awaited day when, after weeks at sea, the Myddleton was due to make her port of destination: Brisbane, Australia…. For the two previous days and nights, a teeming rain had fallen, pounding down with the sound of castanets onto the Myddleton’s decks, lashing the faces of the men at their stations, blinding the lookouts, sharpening tempers to a knife’s edge. At the third dawn, though, the downpour abated, but the sky remained black and the sea continued to run in long, sullen, sickening swells…. The noon meal had few takers…. Still, as scuttlebutt would have it, they were nearing their destination, and among the ship’s company, a tension of anticipation set in, and with it the animations of pride: by luck and sweat, the Myddleton’s cargo was virtually delivered. By mid-afternoon, every man whose duties permitted was topside, standing or sitting on whatever free deck space was available. Surely, soon, there would be some evidence of imminent landfall: beneath the dark clouds, a shorebird would show itself in flight, or a tree branch with its green leaves still on it would drift into view…. Wait, as Noah had waited; so too, Job….

  And then, as happens in that part of the world—with a terrific, flushing suddenness—the sun came out, and tandem with its exploded brilliance, a blast of yeasty wind blew in from the Myddleton’s port side and sang its elate way through her rigging—all, as at the same unbelievable instant, land was sighted, forward, afar, rising fabulously, leviathan-like out of the sea; and, briefly, as one, the crew went crazy. A great cheer went up. Hats were sent aloft, forever away. There was a collective spasm of in-place, March-hare jumping; ear-splitting whistles; the lurid howl of Tarzan’s jungle yodel, in response to which the galley utility man became a lewd Jane—sprang onto the hood of a lashed-down ambulance, and from that stage, with his red hair ablaze in the sun, performed a rapturously obscene belly-dance…. Yet even in the midst of that galvanizing dance, it was the risen land that dominated consciousness, and as the reel of exuberance wound down, all eyes turned toward it with moist celebration…. For himself, Morgan, agog, had been filled with the insane sense that it was being momently created: that he was witnessing the borning of Eden…. Even now, these months later, he could not think of the episode without a feeling of spiritual elation; and what he could never understand was the why of the memory’s soothing effects: that its balm could still relieve the tortures of loneliness and fear, yet at the time of the memory’s making, all had been bedlam and din.

  …To recall that experience was to think, too, of Zenobia Sly: it had been in a letter to her that he had given a full account of it…. Over the last eighteen months, he had written six letters to her. From her, he had received five—the last three sent to the Armed Forces Headquarters, Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay, California—the envelopes addressed in her distinctly large, looped handwriting, the enclosed pages conversational in tone and reflective of his last communication to her…. He knew she wrote to him against all the scruples of her professional ethics; that, at some large, searching moment, she had made her decision to waive her rule about remaining in personal touch with a Tilden-Herne adoptive parent: what had decided her, of course, was the greater reality of the war. He knew too that once the war was over, given survival and his return home, what was now active between them would quickly cease, and with tacit understanding, they would again distance themselves and become but silent rememberers of this time when they had been close. This shared knowledge of a curtailed future lent to the present-tense of their relationship a peculiar vitality…. “Dear Mr. Shurtliff” (she used his rank only on envelopes); “Dear Miss Sly…” She was a kind of human safe in whose locked interior were already housed so many confessions and left-over artifacts of dislodged and dislocated lives that he felt free to add to the accumulation the baggage of his own thoughts and feelings, no matter how flawed or of what order of strangeness, which now, almost hourly, his wartime existence gave rise to…. And there was something more; something other: in a removed, credulous region of his mind, and for the quirkiest of unexamined reasons, she was enthroned as the earthly, overseeing goddess of his luck.

  Her most recent letter was a typical ramble and typically surprising:

  You write of your difficulty in getting to sleep. It is a misery I understand, having inherited the tendency from my father who was a great insomniac. I offer you the following mental twister which is more entertaining than counting sheep. My father taught it to me a very long time ago. To my regret, I did not think to ask him during his lifetime how, when, or where he came by it. He was a witty, imaginative man, so I suppose he might have made it up. Out of sentiment and anxiety that overuse might dilute its power, I have been chary about sharing it. It pleasures me to pass it on to you now. You must first memorize it, then, as you lie in bed, say it over and over to yourself, and the next thing you know, it will be time to get up! Or so it works for me. I do so hope it will prove as effective for you. Here it is:

  One good hen

  Two ducks

  Three cackling geese

  Four plump partridges

  Five Limerick oysters

  Six pairs of Don Alphonso tweezers

  Seven hundred Macedonian horseman dressed in full battle array

  Eight sympathetic, apathetic, diabetic old men on crutches

  Nine brass monkeys from the Sacred Sepulchres of Ancient Egypt

  Ten lyrical, spherical heliotropes from the Iliad Missionary Institute

  He had duly memorized the incantation, his mind, as he did so, filled with endearingly witchy images of Miss Sly…. In the safety of Tacoma’s harbor, it had worked to perfection: the dust and noise and grandeur of the seven hundred Macedonian horsemen had so addled his senses he had closed his eyes on the scene and fallen instantly to sleep.

  The passage down to Panama went smoothly. They drew a certain dim comfort from an occasional friendly plane that flew over, and had the further solace of sighting on the horizon, at widely spaced intervals, three ships of their own kind. At the oil-depot in Panama there was a back-up of vessels waiting to be refueled. The Stubbins took her place in line: her turn came some twenty-three hours later; to those hours was added the seven required to fill her tanks. The crew passed the time in its various ridding ways: on-going games of poker were played with a greater vehemence; books changed hands; some beards that had been grown were shaved off; one man set himself the homely task of mending his clothes—a button here, a seam there—then volun
teered his skill with the needle for the benefit of a few chosen mates. Two gunners, Climson and Vodapec, teamed up on the guitar and accordion, and for a while “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anybody Else but Me,” “Kiss Me Once, and Kiss Me Twice, and Kiss Me Once Again,” “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo,” “Run, Rabbit, Run,” and songs of other such familiar ilk, echoed throughout the ship…. The purser gave out word that letters would be collected for mailing; in addition to his daily extended one to Maud, Morgan handed in two to his father, one to Geoffrey Barrows and one to Miss Sly in which he first thanked her for sharing with him the palliative power of her father’s Morphean incantation and secondly, described to her the performance of a school of whales that had sported one morning in close formation alongside the ship. To her, he called them “finned pachyderms.” One of them had come very close to the Stubbins, and, blowing, had thrown itself out of the green surf in a vaulted arc, ousting a geyser of white, creamy froth, a cool spoonful of which had fallen on his cheek. For a moment, he had seen the black gleam of its whole body. Then, nose-aimed and powered for China, it dove, immensely down, and was seen no more….

  At ten knots, the Stubbins inched her way down the length of South America. There were daily “Abandon-Ship” drills. Awake or asleep, life jackets were worn. The faces of the three radio officers, in feature so unalike, began to bear a resemblance each to the other, the gaining resemblance composed of that kind of crazed, haunted, listening look associated with madness or martyrdom.

  Off the coast of Chile, far out at sea, they were hit by a savage storm that slowed them to a near standstill: against the terrific seas, the Stubbins’s engine was cut to minimum revolutions. With his gut in his mouth, from behind a bridge window, Morgan watched an endless train of immense waves (“rollers,” the captain called them) advance upon the Stubbins, and heard with an awed, admiring ear the captain’s cajoling orders given calmly to the wheelman: