The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  In practice, for a given task I soon ceased to be concerned, or even aware, whether it was a man sailor or a woman sailor doing something I wanted done. They were alike in executing their jobs. Of the other ways in which they were not at all alike, the Navy—which is the least naive of establishments—had naturally been cognizant when it sent the women forth and in its ineffable wisdom promulgated a veritable typhoon of directives dealing with the correct behavior between these two kinds of sailors and further enjoining ship’s captains, under severe penalties, to make certain of such conduct and giving them extraordinary powers to punish infractions. One specific Navy directive, NAVOP 87/249, read, and I quote verbatim now, “Women will not be addressed, either in general, or specifically, as ‘broads,’ ‘fillies,’ ‘dolls,’ ‘girl,’ or like phrases.” (At the time I wondered what the “like phrases” were that the Navy didn’t specify.) Fat chance of any of my men trying on for size any of those terms, considering the breed of women we had received on board, these being spirited to the last woman. They had not got here by being patsies. They got here because they were smart, because they could cope—and, yes, because they were, or had the makings of, first-class seamen.

  Another directive dealt with the sternness of retribution should any “molesting” occur of such sailors. I had not heard that fine old word in that context since my early youth—it was either my mother or my father, I cannot remember which so that perhaps it was both, in separate sessions, to make certain beyond all doubt in a matter of such gravity that Thomas got the point and no mistake, who at the proper age meticulously instructed me that this was something that no boy ever did to any girl—and “molesting” became a court-martial offense (as it would have been for me in the form of a razor strop or worse). CNO directives flowed like the repeated tides of the sea, and were interesting studies in meticulous, to-the-point wording—the Navy has always been uncommonly gifted in the scrupulousness, the precision, of language, necessarily so considering that a misunderstood or ill-expressed command can bring instant disaster to a ship—impossible of any but the most exact interpretation, and yet withal with a certain intuitive delicacy. This one: “Overt displays of affection are out of line and will not be tolerated.” That one: “Men and women on board ship are considered to be on duty at all times. Conduct is expected to meet traditional standards of decorum.” (In other words, any sailor would instantly and correctly interpret, nothing funny off watch or on liberty either.)

  But I do not think it was for the reason of this accumulation of threats dispatched over the frequencies to all fleets that the thing worked. Rather I believe it was the fact that the men and women themselves knew almost primally—as if the sea herself had spoken to them and told them in her stern no-nonsense tones, stronger than bookfuls of Navy Regulations, Navy directives, that it had to be so—the absolute, nonnegotiable imperativeness of this code and of rigorously abiding by it if the ship were not to be torn apart, something no true sailor wants, abhors above all else. Who chooses to upset the house where he lives and make it unlivable— especially if there is no way for him to exit it? In any event we had no difficulties in our normal operations. No sailor called a fellow sailor a doll or a filly and certainly none ventured anything, not on my ship, that could remotely be characterized as “molesting.”

  Sailors are correctly viewed by landsmen as human beings with tendencies to “let go” ashore. The reason they are such on the beach is that they are the exact opposite aboard ship. Shipboard they desire equanimity, discipline, even a certain rigidity, for the simple reason that they know as a first principle of life at sea that their welfare, even their survival, counts on the sure presence of these qualities, these rituals, throughout a ship’s decks. The Navy could do what it wished (though goaded and compelled to it, and against its desires I shall always believe), introduce whatever new, strange, even bizarre ingredients it liked, and the sailors were not about to throw away the elements essential to their well-being and to the very functioning of the ship on which they to a man depended. The women became sailors, too, holding the same verities; sometimes, I had on occasion felt, holding them even more so. Furthermore, it was accomplished with a swiftness that to a landsman would not have seemed possible. Perhaps most important of all, the women became with the men what the latter were already with one another: shipmates.

  All of this had been in the beginning. And it had worked and held fast. And now? Well, so far, so good. Nothing had happened—with that one exception, that derangement. Until now; until this present moment, up to and including it.

  Before heading for my cabin and sleep I looked a final time at the heavens, as a sailor will before turning in. This time I sought out the Cross, standing in white majesty in the heavens. In the south, shimmering against the black sky, stood the Magellanic Clouds, stood constellations unknown to dwellers in the Northern Hemisphere. It was while looking at them that the thought—surely a random synchronism—occurred; seized me by the throat, as it were.

  I thought that I knew men. Or at least men who go to sea. I knew seamen and their ways; a knowledge including, I believed, a reasonably indulgent appreciation of the weaknesses of men. No, I was not so modest but to feel that I had acquired this rather punctilious insight in considerable degree, than which nothing stood me better. But perhaps from being from an early age a sailor—an entire child of the sea, whose ways I had engaged to learn as fully as might be possible, an undertaking demanding an unconditional devotion of a nature little short of the monastic—I was remarkably untutored in women: they seemed to me to carry a secret code I was without either talent or experience to decipher, as labyrinthine as the mysteries of the sea. One cannot devote one’s life to penetrating two of the great mysteries, one needs all of a lifetime to make a breach into one . . . Just because I had spent virtually my entire adult life at sea, I had known few women at all. If the word “known” be enlarged to mean the inner workings of another human being, the inner life, one could come very close to saying I had known none whatsoever. For all purposes I knew nothing about women.

  Somewhere up above, in the vicinity of the bridge, I heard the quick, distant sound of girlish laughter. One hundred and fifty-two men, twenty-seven women, I thought. In the heavy heat of the equatorial night I felt a chill pass through me. I went on up to my cabin to seek sleep.

  * * *

  Standing orders for any deck watch aboard a U.S. Navy ship of the line are to awaken the captain if anything “unusual” occurs, the interpretation of that word being left to the officer of the deck and its latitude, in all my naval experience, being long and wide, but in practice generally interpreted on the side of caution. Any OOD would much rather face the irritation of an awakened captain, unpleasant as that might be, when the object floating two points off the starboard bow in the near distance turns out to be a bundle of used beer cans, than to face a court-martial if it should turn out to be a floating mine. To the general standing orders inherent on any ship I had added a particular one of my own. I was to be awakened if any signal, of whatever nature, even a presumed or possible one, were raised by the twenty-four-hour watch, with continuous transmission by us, I had established in the radio shack. I felt as if the great ape himself had seized me and my eyes came open. In the gleam of the flashlight I recognized the boatswain of the watch.

  “I’m awake, Preston,” I said. “You may stop shaking me. What time is it?”

  The big boatswain’s mate unhanded me. Preston, given his size and his hands, was one of the more aggressive waker-uppers.

  “Sorry, Captain.” The beam moved to my own cabin clock. “Zero two forty-four, sir.”

  “What is it, Boats?”

  “Ears thinks she’s raised something, sir.”

  I was instantly all awake, faculties in full gear.

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Preston was gone and I slid trousers over my skivvies, shoes over my feet, shirt around me, all more or less in one long habitual movement, popped out of my cabin
, and swung down two ladders to the radio shack. An aura of another world here; through it came the sound of Ears tapping out something in Morse code. I put on the spare earphones and listened to the continuous-wave signal.

  The crew called her Ears because Radioman Second Class Amy Walcott had the best pair aboard; a special gift, incalculably valuable to any ship, hearing sounds that others did not. I leaned over her and waited until she had finished her keying. Something faint as the last fading echo off a canyon wall seemed to come through my earphones. She promptly keyed back. We waited again. Then an even fainter sound in return. She keyed back. Silence. Keyed again. Silence. Ten minutes of keying and only silence rolling back to us through the night. We removed our earphones. To better conform with these she kept her hair knotted back, moored by a sailmaker’s splice, serving to emphasize the fragile girlish structure of her face.

  “Was it any stronger earlier?” I asked.

  “The first time, quite a bit stronger, Captain.”

  “A false echo? Atmospheric aberration?”

  “Always possible, sir. But it sounded different.”

  Her whole being seemed calibrated to pick up the most minute nuances of sounds, detecting, separating, and classifying them across a wide and personal spectrum unknown to others, her world.

  “Different?” I repeated.

  “I know. Like those you heard, no code we know. But a different rhythm to it. The beat, even.”

  “Let’s try some more.”

  I stayed with her, another half hour it must have been, while she tried and tried again to raise something out there, if something there was. She sat back in her chair.

  “Sorry to have got you up for nothing, Captain. It came,” she said sardonically, helplessly, “and now it has gone away. For nothing.”

  “No. Nothing might be something sometime. Any chance at all, always awaken me.”

  “Aye, sir.” She cast a wan smile. “Hope you can get back to your dreams.”

  “They were pretty noisy anyhow. Walcott?”

  “Sir?”

  She had always seemed such a slight thing. But of late I felt I sensed something new, a certain frailty coming on, the beginnings of a wearing down from the endless listening hours, and a resolute struggle against it; something of the same concern I had had with a number of others in the crew, wondering, discussing the matter with the doc, whether it could be related to that terrible passage through the dark and the cold.

  “I just want to say I’m mindful of what you’re doing.”

  “Why, thank you, sir. Not at all.”

  She had volunteered, as the best we had, to stand watch and watch, four on and four off, rather than the customary four and eight. It had become an obsession of hers to find, raise, something out there.

  “If it ever gets too much, you’re to let me know, understood? I can’t have you vanishing away from lack of fresh air.”

  “I like this air.” Her head moved to take in the tiny, etheric, portless kingdom where she reigned. For all her slightness she could have a firm, no-nonsense, territorial tone in her voice and I heard it now. “Besides, when it happens I want to be the one.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “When. Those who say if. I know it’ll be when.”

  “Of course. Always wake me.”

  “Oh, I’ll do that, sir.”

  I felt her soft smile, heard her voice. The latter was a thing of exceptional tenderness, a purring of barely audible sound. That way, I think, because listening the long hours was itself a quiet, soft matter, of great intensity and concentration, where loudness would have been an unwelcome, even perilous intruder.

  “Good night, Walcott.”

  But her earphones were back in place and she could not hear me. I stood a moment at the door looking at the small figure in her sailor dungarees, intent, waiting, everlastingly hunched over her wizard’s array of the most sophisticated electronic gear men had been able to devise. As I left I could hear her fingers resume their keying. Twenty-four hours, day and night, never stopping. Her or another operator.

  I went topside, thoughtful. A party of four or five of the men was standing by the lifeline, in a pretense of being out for the night air but actually, both they and I knew, for something else. How swiftly word fled through a ship! I paused a moment, looking at them in the night shadows, at the mute question on their faces. I shook my head and went on by them.

  I went back to my cabin, got down to my skivvies and into my bunk. If a man who follows the sea does not possess the unconditional ability to return to sleep after being jolted awake for various alarms, he will not for long follow it at all. He will crack and land on the beach. Especially a ship’s captain. I had known more than one, some of them friends and two classmates, to whom that had happened. I think the trick was that I had long since mastered the First Commandment for those who would go on ships. Avoid, as you would the greatest of perils from the sea herself, two things: Anger. Irritation. I had further mastered that other counsel of my missionary father’s: Worry is a sin. Or thought I had, though of late I had felt disturbances creeping insidiously into that skill, probing its defenses like the first building onset of heavy seas poised to strike a destroyer’s plunging bow. Then I was asleep, my last conscious thoughts being of the grassy plateau on the stranger island, where lay our hopes and which we would attack on the morrow, sitting high above the blue.

  3

  The Sailors in the Fields

  It was perhaps two hours before first light, that spectral moment when the curtain of opaque cloud which had hid the western part of the island chose to lift itself briefly and to provide me with a surprise and a riddle. Not a rumor of breeze solaced the stifling air; it lay like some palpable weight pressing down on ship and sea. For a few moments I remained in the dimness of the decks, watching the dark recumbent island across the lagoon. How like a sleeping beast it looked, the profound stillness of the night, the unstirring waters in which it lay, that southerly ridge giving it the aspect of a Sphinx of the sea, and like it too in its emanation of mystery. Then, with all abruptness, I felt a land breeze come up from it, seeming almost a gesture of amity, whispering across the water and touching our few grateful figures on the deck like a welcome fan. It was the first true semblance of wind we had felt since coming to this place. I stayed a moment, savoring it and idly examining the stars hanging limply in the heat-hazed western sky. As I watched, the cloud bank below them, given a gentle push by that errant breeze, began to move, the curtain parted, and I beheld on the island’s far side the dim phantasmic shape of what seemed a long spine of land, a surprisingly high, almost mountainous configuration, mountainous certainly for these latitudes. Then the clouds closed in again. It was like a fata morgana. Spirits, we are told, reside in the lofty places of the earth, on craggy heights. Of course it was the eeriness somehow of the night, the brooding island, the hush of the sea, the enigmatic cloudbank, impervious as a watertight door, the quick glimpse as of an apparition and a portent, given and taken away. Nonetheless, it was as though I were being presented a peek and a taunt: if you wish to know more, have a look. I decided on the spot where I would venture tomorrow.

  But this in truth was no sudden decision: The spooky coup d’oeil but hastened the matter, set a date. From the first I had been aware that though our present side of the island appeared docile enough, it lay well open to the prevailing southeasterly winds, and that it was only a matter of time before high gales and even hurricanes would attack it, making it unsuitable to my other intention regarding the island and one I had zealously guarded even from intimation to my men. For that intention I would have to seek a lee shore. Whether the far side of the island provided as well certain other essentials also needed determination.

  But this was for the morrow. This long day was fully spoken for: establishing, on the grassy plateau, the farming beachhead on which so much depended. I took one more look at our Sphinx—no answers, of course—then went on down to the wardroom for coffee.
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  * * *

  If one were called upon to pick an existent body of men best equipped to begin life from nothing on an uninhabited piece of land, one would be hard pressed to come up with any superior to the ship’s company of a U.S. Navy destroyer. In the first place, the destroyer, for its own functioning and operation, carries a complement of basic skills difficult to surpass for versatility. The very designations given to the various Navy ratings attest to this fact. Shipfitter, machinist’s mate, molder, patternmaker, engineman, hospital corpsman; many others. In the second, from the very beginnings men who go to sea have come from every imaginable background. The notion that men who grow up by the sea constitute the principal source of those attracted to it as a livelihood is in error. The actual case is quite the opposite. It is the men who spend boyhood never having laid eyes there who are drawn, so many of them, to the idea of setting forth upon the great oceans. It is as though the call of the sea were heard most clearly not on the shores but on the farms and prairies of Iowa and Wyoming, far from any salt spray. So that in addition to the skills which they acquire in the Navy, sailors ofttimes bring with them other previous skills, not presently used but never forgotten. Of these, farming would be a prize example, and a numerous one. The great Navy fleets are full of farm boys; I never knew why so many turned up sailors and more often than not made very good ones, some of the best. It led one to wonder whether there existed some secret kinship between being a farmer and being a sailor.