As blind men: It was as though they had fallen into some bottomless black pit, the mess deck itself, in which there was no ladder to climb out of. Literally there was and some—overtaken suddenly with who could say what?—tried. I had foreseen this possibility and delegated Preston and Brewster, our two strongest hands—not to station themselves there obviously as guards, itself threatening as emphasizing our prisonlike aspect, but, one or the other, watch and watch, to keep always near that ladder in the event anyone should attempt escape. On one occasion, McPherson, a shipfitter first, himself a man of exceptional strength, moved steadily toward the ladder, Preston stepping athwart it.
“Out of my way, Boats.”
“You don’t want to go up there, mate.” The big boatswain’s mate spoke quietly.
The shipfitter started to move around Preston. The boatswain’s mate shifted his body in exact response to block him. Then it happened. McPherson stepped back and made a charge; a really thunderous charge, quite exactly like a bull at his tormentor in the ring, a bull which could stand no more, straight for Preston. As he reached him, the boatswain’s mate’s enormous hands came over and seized him, lifted his body clean, completely over his head—then simply dropped him to the deck, or rather lowered him, almost softly—not slamming him down—just dropping him. The shipfitter looked up at him; seemingly come to his senses.
“Just an idea, Boats.”
“Sure,” Preston said, yanking him up. “Anybody can have an idea, Mac. I have them all the time myself. Go have a cup of coffee.”
Exceptional coping, yes, valor of a kind, also shining through. Lieutenant Girard spent the greater part of her time in the mess deck, where most of ship’s company kept gathered, generally just quietly talking with one sailor or another. She was tough and she had a strong will—I had long been aware of those qualities, also of her sensibilities. But now this other side of her, this astonishing mansuetude. It was as though a fierce inner-kept obsession had seized her, a determination that we would beat that terrible force that was trying to take us under; putting in long brutal hours, seeming determined to pull this tottering man, that, through by her own sheer force of will, to will them through. Once I came upon her there, her arms around a man crying into her shoulder, her free hand slowly stroking his head until he quietened. One of those who came nearest to full collapse was Girard’s own assistant, probably the person on the ship she was closest to, Storekeeper Talley, who practically worshiped Girard. It was almost as if Girard brought her through, by her love and her strength, and a kind of ferocious insistence to Talley that by God she was going to make it because Girard said so. Her ingenuity, her resourcefulness, in coming up with whatever might remotely assist our struggle. Reading aloud: That was her suggestion. How little one would have imagined that something so simple would have helped so much! Girard bringing books from our library in an astonishing variety, great novelists, poets, simple adventure stories, to all of which the crew would equally listen as intently as children. Readers including herself, the Jesuit, Porterfield.
Speaking of the last-named, speaking of fortitude . . . of valor. Porterfield, as a helmsman. But also: of hymns and poker. Presently he and his guitar (sometimes accompanied by Gunner’s Mate Delaney on his fiddle; the gunner, by the way, being one of the more fortunate hands aboard in having a daily job to do: a plan he had brought to me almost immediately the murk began to form over us—the salvation of our precious storehouse of plants, by removing them from their exposure to outside air to a place deep in the ship, keeping up their lifeblood of photosynthesis through ultraviolet lamps borrowed from sick bay) . . . Porterfield on his guitar, I was saying, leading the men and women in every kind of song anyone had heard of that he could play—the helmsman having an astonishing repertory. A lot of hill songs, folk songs of all kind, but more than anything else hymns. Partly because Porterfield knew so many of them and consequently through long years on the ship so did the men. “How Firm a Foundation,” “In the Garden,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Rock of Ages.” They seemed to have less to do directly with religion as such than with the brotherhood of shipmates, the act of singing together seeming an expression of it, to me little short of a gallant one. At times, stepping into the mess deck, one had the impression there was a permanent choir practice in progress. Not a bad choir, the men’s and women’s voices, the singing soft, curiously soothing, healing; though not infrequently it was something like the rousing “Beulah Land” . . .
I’m living on the mountain,
underneath a cloudless sky,
I’m drinking at the fountain,
that never shall run dry;
O yes! I’m feasting on the manna
from a bountiful supply,
For I am dwelling in Beulah Land.
“I’ll be damned,” the Jesuit said once to me in my cabin when we were going over our morale readings. “I never knew singing those damn hymns would do so much good.”
The men seemed also to find the reading aloud of Scripture from time to time an assuasive thing, and Porterfield had a good reading voice with its soft accent of the hills. Old favorite passages they seemed to want most of all; you might step into the compartment to see his tall, lean figure standing there amid the mess tables, the men looking up at him, listening attentively from the Old Testament . . .
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake . . .
Or from the New . . .
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing . . .
In addition, with my permission, Porterfield brought into the open the poker game which, supposedly clandestinely but actually also with my permission, had long been operating in the remote confines of the steering gear room, leading to other simultaneous poker games as under Porterfield’s tutelage more and more of the crew became interested in this pastime. At these times, stepping into the mess deck, one had the impression one had wandered into a Las Vegas gambling hall. Mostly it was Porterfield himself. Just being around the tall, bone-lean helmsman seemed to act to quiet men; I don’t know why: some assurance he radiated that against all evidence all things would come right; in that respect he was like Girard. Maybe, in his case, those peaceful Kentuckian tones: People somehow felt safe when he was near, a sense of warmth, of security. I wanted to relieve him of his watch duties so that he could devote all his time to these matters. He wouldn’t have it.
“Captain, if I couldn’t take my turn at the wheel, I wouldn’t be good at anything else. I’d probably go around the bend myself.”
Boxing bouts even: the Jesuit taking on his various old sparring partners, and any new ones who cared to try—seeming a curiously efficacious outlet for who knows what emotions.
Even so, these measures were but anodyne; an emollience standing thinly between us and the depths. I felt the men sinking deeper into themselves. Some appeared simply dumbfounded by it all. Sometimes terror in their eyes. Faces liquescent with pain, with incomprehension. Some lapsing into torpor, a numbness of spirit; the first symptoms of aphasia, catatonia, beginning to attack some. A sense of holding back an immense pressure. Occasionally a man stupefied with fear, sobbing convulsively, suddenly breaking out into indecipherable noises—once I had to strike one of them across the face, yes, an officer, young Ensign Woodward, and with the men watching—I had no choice—it would have been dangerous to let him go on in front of them. They had the decency to look away. Once had to shake a woman sailor—Thornberg—by the shoulders, to stop her crying, rising suddenly, approaching hysteria, her collapsing then into my arms, where I held her until the sobbing faded away. One would
come upon a man just sitting in profound reflection, as if trying to figure it all out; another in a deep corner of the crew’s compartment, huddled unto himself, in a kind of white solitude, head bowed, muttering something incomprehensible, low incantations; men knotted over a mess table in attitudes of prayer; men with expressions of vacancy in their faces, sepulchral stares, yet with wary eyes, as if something were about to spring on them; faces in a rictus of agony; plaintive sounds issuing, emanations of repressed anguish, of ruthless misery, unnamable fears; a man counting his rosary beads over and over; now and then a man quietly crying; one’s unintentional glance would trip on a man caught in the motions of nervous trembling, on his face the shock of terror, a touch of lunacy—one would look quickly away—somehow one knew by some kind instinct whether to do that or to go sit by him; a face twitching with the strain, both trembling hands used to raise a cup of coffee to the lips—in a pitiable attempt at some countervailing to these onslaughts, I had put the coffee ration back to two cups daily. Sometimes—and I came to consider this favorable—a bluejacket would simply go into a trance, become oblivious to anything and everything; favorable because it served as a kind of anesthesia to bring him through. We did what we could as one shipmate or another became afflicted. Talking to him if that seemed to help or just sitting close by; myself dropping into a seat alongside one of these, murmuring into his ear something whether useless or helpful I could scarce tell. We helped, or tried to help, yes, I would say with great tenderness helped one another, whichever needed help most at any given moment it came about as we, gathered around him, her, brought that shipmate through, coaxed, willed him through. Men stayed in the mess deck, seeming to huddle close to one another, afraid to go to their bunks, afraid to be alone, finally falling asleep in their emotional exhaustion, heads on mess tables. Not constant these various manifestations. Sometimes whole days of peace, of no one breaking out; but then always their sure recrudescence. Always one felt also the great inner fight underway; men and women who had been through too much to yield now, their immense will to live; holding on to mere existence with clawing hands.
There was one thing, strange as could be, as to which I speculated as operating in our favor, an element of assistance which I could not be certain of even as to its existence much less its degree. The women. Here I am not speaking of any active thing, such as Girard’s labors, but of something else. In some undefinable way I had the feeling that . . . I felt very uncertain as to this until the doc independently in one of our frequent sessions of considering every measure possible, himself basically as sardonic a man as I had known, said something very quietly to me. “My own opinion is that the mere presence of the women is keeping quite a number from going over the edge.” A return to his sharper tone, an indication that he did not wish to pursue this hypothesis. “Don’t ask me to explain it.” If true, and I felt now more and more that such was the case, it was—and remains to me—a mystery.
Still, of all that happened to us since the launching in the Barents, it was the one time I felt we stood on the very brim of the abyss. That deadly poison just outside the bulkheads seeming to enclose us, hug us ever more tightly to itself in a choking embrace, pressing down on us, as if in its fury of frustration that it could not get at our bodies, it would yet get at our minds. Fears real, fears imaginary: It became almost impossible to distinguish the one from the other, which was which—coming to feel dangerously at times that perhaps any distinction didn’t matter. As our ordeal continued, the unknowingness was what got at us; lacking any ability to figure it out, to put together the seemingly endless parts of this demoniac thing, so that we could even combat it, deal with it; lacking any true knowledge as to the fullness of its capabilities. Men deducing that a force that could so facilely alter the very fundamentals of temperature as a mere playful side effect would in time just as carelessly do whatever it needed to do to finish us off by some means it had not yet revealed; in the meantime toying with us as a sadist toys with the sure victim, wanting to prolong its pleasure, our terror. Yes, it was just that, the fact that, monstrous and intolerable, it seemed an uncomfortable apparition: That was the worst part of it. Our ship loaded with an immensity of destructive power, with every conceivable weapon to obliterate any enemy . . . all of this worthless against present foe, reliance on these inconceivably puissant arms becoming as some kind of savage joke played on us. One felt a towering fury at how this could be; how it could have come to happen; worst of all, nothing to vent the fury on. Some came to look upon it as some avenging terror—the matter of guilt, the Jesuit had told me, arising seriously for the first time in these, the quaint and bone-chilling idea that we, the ship’s company, the very ship herself were all reeking with blood and were at last being brought to justice for our contribution to the devastation of mankind. One sensed it more so each day, an unpredictable and terrifying combination of inner rage and total helplessness: The men trembled on the brink.
I knew well that it was only that shipmate brotherhood keeping us from foundering, but even it at times wavered before this onslaught. At times I feared we were but a step away from . . . not mutiny, but something quite different, something worse . . . anarchic extremities; what forms they would take unimaginable but certain to be terrible, merciless, perhaps dissolving, disintegrating us all. Once, as I was passing through the mess deck, a man stood up and blocked my way—Cantwell, a boatswain’s mate and our sailmaker, brawny, muscled, normally as mild as a man could rightly be, almost excessively placid—began what appeared to be a kind of cursing out of me built around the general theme of my having gotten us into this; a breathless hush suddenly hovering in the compartment as the men looked on. I listened in silence to this tirade, looked at him, dead in the eyes, a kind of wildness there, could feel the hair-trigger atmosphere all around me. Waited until he at last wound down. “Are you finished? You’re right about that, Cantwell,” I said. “Well, then. I’ll just have to try to get us out of it, won’t I? You men. Carry on.” Then another, worse time, when I stood on the ladder bringing them yet another of those by now uncounted reports of conditions topside—no change, no break whatsoever in the pall, I had once more to tell them—out of one of those ravaged faces upturned to me came a sullen voice. “Why didn’t you let us go with Mr. Chatham?” followed by a low rumble that sounded like a supporting chorus. I waited, standing what ground I had, the steps of a ladder, a feeling of a certain menacing surge of men toward myself, bringing everything in me to bear not to fling such words back in their faces, or at least not to speak in anger, still hearing a certain edge in my voice. “Let you?” I said. “Who among you was kept from doing so?” Another voice: “Why didn’t you take us back? We couldn’t be any worse off than we are.” “Couldn’t you?” my voice harder. “You’d be dead by now. Would you prefer that?” I stepped on down the ladder. The men stood aside and let me through. The moment passing like that, no assurance it would the next time.
The doc, himself looking benumbed with exhaustion from being at almost continuous watch, brought me frequent reports. Once: “I’ve gone over every member of the crew, Skipper. Let me get across a few physical facts. Pulse rates as high as a hundred seventy-three per minute, as low as twenty-nine—in some, at times almost imperceptible. The action of the heart: That concerns me most of all. In many, it seems to have lost its regulating force. One moment, quick, the next, slow: in the same man. No medical knowledge I possess explains it. We’re in new territory, Skipper. Frankly, I’m scared as hell.”
“You’ve got a great deal of company, Doc.”
“Nobody knows. Cooped up like that. That frigging stuff sitting down on top of us. Oh, I suppose one could supply all the usual textbook words. Paranoia. Hallucinations. Delusions. Everybody seeing things. I’ve seen a few myself. Hysteria now and then. They don’t cover it. I don’t know a word that does. All I can say is . . . they’re perfectly capable of losing control of themselves at any moment . . . they’re hanging on by their teeth, Skipper.”
The fact of the matter is, we all became a little deranged, some more than a little. We never realized it at the time, of course, how close to the crossover we came. One never does at the time. Our minds tottered, as of a ship listing sixty or seventy degrees, on each plunge into tumultuous seas, pushing against the limits of her inclinometer and her ability to right herself before she continued her peril-filled rolls into the deep, capsized; our minds did exactly that. To what degree, in the case of the bridge watches, these attritions were caused by the inroads radiation had made into us, to what degree because of the “living conditions” below decks I cannot say. No one could. But as day followed day, with most of the crew sealed below, as we seemed to go further into these mental rolls, pushing ever further against our emotional inclinometer, I at times had the feeling that the next roll would tumble us on over beyond any possibility of righting ourselves. The doc was right. One and all, they were entirely capable of losing control of themselves before even they knew it. To their immense credit, I could sense, as I have said, the great effort that even the most affected ones were making to control themselves—not to go berserk, not to break out into sudden, unstoppable screaming. If one did it, I felt others might, as in a contagion. That suddenly, in that mess deck, some maelstrom, some loosening horror—the nature and dimensions of which one could scarcely conceive—men suddenly clawing at one another, unspeakable acts—could, set off by the slightest spark, break out beyond any man’s control. Madness beckoned.
Even I. Yes, even my own mind wavered, came closer than I prefer to think. An instance: On the whole the women were bearing up better than the men. I could not understand it. The James and her class were the first vessels laid down and constructed from the beginning by the Navy with the direct intent of carrying “mixed crews.” Present as a plank-owner during her precommissioning days in the Pascagoula shipyard, watching her take shape, I was fascinated, at times sardonically amused, by the manner in which the builders so astutely engineered this capability, fashioning a bulkhead extending from the second deck to the weather deck between the women’s quarters and those of the men so that the former could not be entered save from above or through a secured escape scuttle. The sole normal ingress to the women’s quarters being by a ladder situated just below the pilot house and hence far from hidden. This security seeming to me almost excessive, so I thought watching it being built in. Even had a male sailor had the notion of making the attempt—this itself so ludicrous I could not imagine it—and arrived successfully below in those female purlieus, I used to think humorously . . . well, given the complement of thirty-two sailors, themselves exceptional representatives of their sex, trained in addition in all sorts of arts, not the least being self-defense—I would not choose to be that man. “Lucky to get out of there at all in possession of his balls,” I remember the foreman during the ship’s construction remarking to me.
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 52
