The Last Ship: A Novel

by William Brinkley

  It was nearing 1200 when I looked and saw a figure waddling over the ridge. Chief Palatti was followed by a retinue of six hands carrying sacks. The chief stood panting from his exertions, his belly retrenched from formerly but still proudly protruding and going like a bellows.

  “Chow down,” he got out.

  “Any word from Silva, Chief?” I asked. I had sent him and his crew seaward before first light to seek fish.

  “Still not back, Captain.”

  Chief Palatti could do things even with processed-meat sandwiches. Mainly it was probably the fresh-baked bread. He had brought a cold lemonade kind of drink and the men sat cross-legged under the trees and had their chow. As I ate I tried to remember how much of the meat was left aboard, and how much of the flour. I could not have a meal without this awareness of our diminishing stores, a concern slightly abated by looking out over our meadow where now long rows of turned earth counted for about a fourth of the plateau, the soil rich-looking and pungent against the long grass yet unturned, its scent mingling with the scent of the sea in an almost erotic, comforting alchemy.

  “A good morning’s work, Captain,” Delaney, sitting by me, said.

  “Yes, Gunner. A good morning. Who would have thought sailors would make such farmers?”

  “Well, it works the other way, don’t it, sir?”

  “That it does.”

  Gunner’s Mate Delaney. Added to all his other knowledge of naval gunnery, he knew as much about missiles and their launching as the Navy could put into a man: a VLS (Vertical Launch System) gunner’s mate, graduate both of the Martin Marietta training unit and the guided missile school at Virginia Beach, an elite 0981 classification. He was square and sturdy, emanating an almost planted look, and of an unhurried countenance. It may be the first requirement of a good seaman that he not have a low flash point. A ship, and especially a destroyer, is simply too intimate a place to have room for such a being. The trait itself represents danger. Considering his direct role in any missile launching, this most particularly stood true of Delaney. From the time our lives came together, I made it an especial point to know him. The quietness of the gunner’s mate’s personality somehow seemed to certify his dependability, his resolve.

  I thought about the time, not that long ago, when I had summoned Delaney to my cabin and asked if he could start a vegetable garden on the ship. He selected the missile launcher maintenance shop, which we cleared out and refitted with wooden racks made by Noisy Travis to hold the plants; plants dug gently from the land along the sea-lanes of our odyssey in our incessant scrounging and placed in cut-down cans from the galley. The compartment had been chosen because it led conveniently by ladder to the after part of the weather deck and to the 61-cell vertical launch system which made an ideal setting for the plants to absorb the needed sunlight, protected there as they were by the fact that the salt spray which chronically blows down the length of the ship underway would have been relatively dissipated by the time it reached this area; the plants customarily remaining topside on the VLS except when inclement weather or seas prompted the gunner to stash them below. “Delaney’s Garden,” it was soon called. It was a popular attraction aboard ship. The men would stop by and look at it thoughtfully as at a botanical garden of rare flowers, though these were plain, even scrubby things with now and then timid green shoots beginning to sprout. Then the sailors, those of them not come from the farm, with expressions as if the growing of vegetables was a sacred mystery to which only Delaney held the key, would watch intently as the gunner’s mate did his fussy sorcery, taking a single bean for example and causing it to germinate, watering the plants, when the time came employing a small trowel fashioned by Molder First Class A. J. Phayme to transplant the seedlings into larger pots, turning the seedlings daily to correct the sun’s leaning effect and make for straight stems; finally when the plant bore, taking its multiple seeds and planting them in the five-inch casings, both abbreviated by and holes to allow water seepage drilled in their bottoms by Phayme, which the gunner’s mate had discovered to be the exact size required. We even fired a considerable number of rounds at nothing to obtain the casings. I was one of the most frequent visitors, for I knew nothing of these things, and was keenly aware of my appalling ignorance of how the first essential to man’s survival operated. Now, of course, knowing the urgency represented in those jury-rig flowerings, I was eager and anxious to make up for this neglect. I studied Delaney and his rituals and questioned him closely, for instance about such matters as growing seasons and time to maturation for different vegetables, as he went about his ceremonies with a mighty simplicity of purpose and that certain zeallike brightness in his eyes. Soon I had relieved the gunner’s mate of all other shipboard duties, so that he might devote himself full-time to “Delaney’s Garden.”

  Some of the men had finished lunch and the smokers among them were having one of their new ration, inhaling deeply, smoking the butts to the very end. Some shared a cigarette.

  “It’s going to be good soil, Captain,” Delaney was saying. He sipped his lemonade drink. I could feel like a field of force the quiet exultation in him, of one happy to be back at the work he was born to, or perhaps exultant more from what he saw happening here, and mostly his handiwork it was, going back to that shipboard garden.

  As we were finishing chow, the island’s daily rain began to fall, thin and gentle, virtually soundless. Just started, without advance notice. Some of the men got up from under the trees and stood out in it, clothes and all, letting the rain cool and wash their bodies. Now and then the men turned their faces up to the falling misty water as one does in a shower. In almost exactly twenty minutes the rain stopped as if shut off by a spigot. Now you could smell even more strongly the rich fructuousness of the soil. I heard Delaney’s quiet voice beside me.

  “Captain, I been studying on it. You know what’s going to make the difference here? It’s this rain. Every day. It’s like irrigation. It’s what the Lord give this place to make sure things’ll grow.”

  The gunner’s mate paused a moment. “Yes, sir, it’s this rain every day that makes this island so you could live on it.”

  I was startled, as though he had read my thoughts, knew. But no. His face said nothing of that. He was speaking only of agricultural matters. He spoke again, in a tone of somber conviction, looking out over the meadow.

  “Aye, sir. I believe it’s going to work, Captain. The Farm.”

  “The Farm,” I repeated, looking at our meager beginnings on the plateau.

  And after that, that is what we called it. The Farm.

  The men began fetching the trays into the fields and under Delaney’s meticulous management carefully removed the plants and commenced to imbed them down the laid-out rows, then with their hands spreading earth around them as he showed them. Also implanting the seeds which Delaney had brought along in bags.

  “Gentle, mates,” he kept saying, moving up and down the rows. “Sharp lookout where you walk.”

  A row of squash. Another of peas, black-eyed. Several of beans—navy, pinto, lima. Several of potatoes. Corn, onions, cabbage, lettuce. We would see what worked, what grew, and concentrate on those.

  Plowing and planting. Boatswain’s mates, enginemen, firemen, seamen; electrician’s mates, electronic technicians; signalmen, sonarmen; torpedomen, missile technicians; radiomen, quartermasters. Deck men, engineroom men. All labored, all sweated. The ridge might have been a ship, one that needed certain attentions, ministrations, and from all hands, and right now, to make her do what she was supposed to do. All the afternoon under the violent sunshine, an incandescent ball blazing down mercilessly on the bent bodies of seagoing men. At 1700 I called a halt to it.

  The sailors raised up in the fields, and for a moment did not move but stood strangely there in the earth in a tableaulike statuary, as if themselves planted. Then in curious, almost balletlike motions their bodies began to sway this way and that: to assuage sorenesses, stiffnesses, muscles not used by shipboard labor
s but called forth by pulling plows—by stoop labor. I knew now. The hardest kind of work in the world. Then they all stood silent and motionless, dirt-streaked, bathed in sweat, looking at the field they had half transformed. No need even to murmur a well done. But what an immense pride I felt in them! A kind of wonder and innocence was on their faces as they gazed around them now at the reclamation they had wrought, their own pride shining as from some fierce inner light through the brutal physical exhaustion.

  “Let’s go home, men,” I said.

  Facing the ship, Signalman Bixby stood on the edge of the cliff with her portable light and signaled the message I gave her, a letter at a time.

  STANDING DOWN FROM THE FARM SEND BOATS TO BEACH RENDEZVOUS FARM LOOKS GOOD CAPTAIN

  I read the letters the ship’s blinker sent back in white bickerings across the water.

  BOATS UNDERWAY SILVA BACK WITH FINE CATCH ENOUGH FOR ALL HANDS SILVA SAYS FISH AS GOOD AS CAPE COD SO MUST BE SOMETHING SINCE SILVA SAYS THAT’S WHERE GOD WAS BORN

  I felt the surge of an immense relief. I had Bixby send this:

  WELL DONE TO SILVA AND CREW PROCEED TO GRILL FISH CAPTAIN

  I glassed the destroyer and could see three boats move out from her and proceed toward shore. We prepared to descend.

  “Captain,” Delaney said, “do you reckon it would be all right to leave the gear here? Seems a lot of trouble to fetch it all back and forth every day. I been studying on it and I don’t know who’s going to steal it.”

  I looked around at the great solitude of the island and smiled a moment.

  “Permission granted, Gunner.”

  So we stacked the gear—grappling irons now plows, entrenching tools now shovels, and the rest of it—neatly beneath the cover of the trees. Then, a company of seventy or so sailors, we started over the ridge. We went around the creek, along the cleared path, came out on the beach, and walked up it. Even before we got there we could see up ahead the boats beaching. The men looked bone-tired. They looked good, as though to say, we are seamen but if need be can learn land’s ways. As we went up the beach Porterfield, the helmsman, got out his harmonica and began playing. It had always been one of his favorite songs.

  Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you,

  Away, you rolling river,

  Shenandoah, I can’t get near you,

  Away, away, I’m bound away

  ’Cross the wide Missouri . . .

  Some of the crew took up the words, singing as we went along, the lilting haunting strains of the men’s and women’s voices drifting out over the motionless lagoon . . .

  Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter,

  Away, you rolling river,

  For her, I’ve crossed the stormy water,

  Away, away, I’m bound away

  ’Cross the wide Missouri . . .

  I looked back at the long trail of our footprints in the sand. By tomorrow they would be gone with the tide and we would make fresh ones. We got in the boats and headed out. I think we were all looking forward to Palatti’s chow; hungry from God’s hard labor. Stoop labor. Surely of all work done by men He must look with special mercy on those thus engaged since only the most needful of men do it. As we neared the ship, the sun which we had seen emerge from the sea that morning now was moving swiftly back into the same stilled waters. Then we could begin to see the lights of the ship come on and cast their glow across the sea, welcoming sailors home.

  4

  The Other Side of the Island

  For my inspection of the other side of the island I chose the boat that had Coxswain Meyer and Seaman Apprentice Billy Barker for its crew. She was our best boat handler and we might, in coming in close as I intended, be in tricky waters, for I had no notion of what was around there. I wanted to see. Of the three boats one was assigned permanently now to Silva and his fishing detail. The other two and a lifeboat towed behind one took the men into the Farm in the morning, and returned to the ship. Fishing and farming, both got started quite early, fishing at about 0400 and farming an hour later, that is, the boats shoving off for the island then, the early start meant to beat the heat a little. We cast off immediately after Coxswain Meyer had returned from taking our farm crew in. It was a little after 0530, with a certain pleasant, not coolness but lightness of air. From island and sea came the first fresh scents of morning.

  We headed south, keeping fairly inshore, Coxswain Meyer, perched at the console amidships, standing easy and alert with her hand on the wheel, Barker, the boat hook, keeping a watch forward for any shoals or bars, and myself standing aft—no problem in a sea so polished we glided over it—scrutinizing the shoreline and the island, sometimes with the naked eye, sometimes with the 7x50 binoculars I had slung around my neck. My field of vision moved to the ship standing off and receding for a last glimpse before we should make the turn for the other side. Contemplating her, I was taken again with that troubling wonderment I had each time she was about to leave my sight, as to whether she would be there when I got back. A silly foreboding, surely, and yet what a constant temptation it was and what a small party of hands it would take to accomplish the deed. It could be done while so many of ship’s company were at the Farm and to sea fishing, while her captain was off, let us say, on a reconnoitering of the island’s far side . . . If I had had plans for the ship, why should I think others would not? I put the thought down; realities were enough to deal with. I had no time for imaginings. But not before I found myself, hardly knowing I was doing so, lifting the binoculars and glassing the ship stern to stern and observing identifiable members of ship’s company going about their normal shipboard tasks. Then I lowered the glasses quickly, feeling foolish and a bit embarrassed with myself over requiring this reassurance.

  We came to the end of the island and looked up toward the plateau where we could see the small figures of our shipmates working the Farm. We waved and could make out their waves back. We began to round the island. Then, as we came about its southernmost end and veered on a northwesterly course, suddenly the boat was kicked up in the waters, the bow thrown high to starboard. I could see the sky above it from where I was flung against the gunwale, the sea crashing over the boat and myself. Forward I saw Barker pitched to the deck. Meyer had both hands grasping the wheel, coolly bringing the boat back to port while letting her ride through it. Then, as suddenly, we were in gentle waters. It had lasted a half minute, dampened Barker and myself considerably, and that was it. We had just learned that a tide rip separated the two sides of the island. I looked at Meyer riding steady at her perch.

  “Nice job, Coxswain,” I said.

  “No problem, sir.”

  She took us on around. The sun dried us all, crew and boat, fast enough and we proceeded on our N. by N.W. bearing. Up ahead I could see a big bulge where the island fattened out around its midriff, so that presently we had to steer slightly more northwesterly, my having told the coxswain to keep us a half mile offshore at all times. I had not expected to find the island so wide. As a guess, I would have said seven or eight miles at that fat point, though a more exact measurement awaited a future land crossing. Then, as we moved over a composed sea, we were presented with further intelligences and surprises.

  The aspect of the western side of the island could not have been more different from the eastern side where we had gone ashore and above which had started the Farm. We should have had much more difficulty doing so here. Just getting ashore, for one. The eastern side, with its unbroken beach of powdery sand and with the sea touching shore like a caress, and with that sunny silky-grassed plateau above it, was by comparison a place of welcome and invitation. Here was its opposite. All was forbidding, inhospitable; all said beware, especially to seamen. A shoreline continuously rocky, high jagged rocks, ascending in long stretches to cliff height, rising straight out of the sea, with waves slapping sharply against them, with no beach whatever save for an occasional tiny apron of sand indented in that rocky countenance. But it had a fierce beauty of its own. Rocks and cliff were o
f a granitic appearance, of a Pompeiian-red hue, lovely with a kind of warriorlike defiance in the morning sunlight that played off them, altogether formidable and saying so. The range of rock coast and cliffs stretched northwest as far as I could make out. As I minutely glassed this barrier, my first thought was that if storms came to the island it would be a far safer place to be. On two counts. First, as I have mentioned, the prevailing winds of the latitude were southeasterly, making the other side of the island the windward side: storms would bring the high winds and the big waves to attack that shore unopposed. Provided he could get established ashore here, the western part, being on the leeward side, would afford far more safety for man. The eastern side might look more inviting. The truth was, heavy enough weather, certainly anything resembling a hurricane, would almost surely sweep away everything present of a man-made character. Further, even if the odd westerly blow came, the rocks and cliffs on this side would present an ungiving fortress against which sea and wind could beat and break as long as they pleased.