Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  "A lot of guys who spent time in China do it. Even officers." Semple lay there shivering, the cold clutching him. "We're gonna be at sea a long time, Prettyboy."

  "If you touch me I'll tell the chaplain," Semple whispered. "I'll tell the chaplain and the captain. I'll tell them what you did to that man in Los Angeles."

  "You miserable little cunt!"

  Wilkinson dragged Semple from his rack. A shower of punches and kicks drove him whimpering into a corner. "Get up on deck. I want to see every fuckin' piece of brass forward of turret one so bright by sundown we'll have to put black tape on them so they won't give us away to a fuckin' submarine.”

  He dragged Semple to his feet by the back of his collar. "Let me tell you somethin' else. If you ever say a word about what happened in LA to anybody, you'll be over the side that night. You won't be the first guy I put over. And you won't be able to make a fuckin' sound, because before you go your fuckin' throat will be a lot wider than your mouth."

  A knife with a curving blade was in Wilkinson's hand. Semple felt the steel edge against his throat. He fled to the main deck and began polishing the bright work. Toward sundown, as he labored over the brass knobs on the stanchions on the bow, Wilkinson seemed to materialize behind him.

  "Take a good look at that ocean, Pretty boy," he said. "It's awful deep."

  "Okay, gobs," Jack Peterson announced in the compartment after dinner. "The word's out. We hit Pearl on September thirtieth. It's time to get in the anchor pool."

  Having grown up in the Bronx where betting was a way of life, Flanagan was instantly ready to bite. "First, what is it?" he said. "Second, how much?"

  "You select the hour and minute when we anchor, moor or dock at Pearl. The price is two bucks."

  "Who's running it?"

  "Who runs everything on this tub? Wilkinson and his pal the master at arms, Boffo the Great Nolan."

  "Two crooks," Boats Homewood said. "I once lost a hundred bucks on Nolan when we was on the Pennsylvania and he was fightin' some boon from the California. He took a dive on his own shipmates."

  "Jesus Christ, Boats. How can you rig an anchor pool? Anyone who owns a wristwatch knows if they win it," Peterson said.

  "There's lots of ways. If you're an asshole buddy of the exec like Wilkinson, you got a very good idea of what time we're going to make Pearl. You buy up all the times around that."

  "What do you think, Boats?" Flanagan said.

  "I think we ought to run our own pool."

  "Boats, the winner on this thing will walk away with a thousand bucks," Peterson said.

  "I'll take 0805," Flanagan said. It added up to thirteen, which he considered his lucky number.

  Flanagan rushed to his locker to get his wallet. He shoved his hand through his skivvies to the back corner where he had tucked it after his last liberty. No wallet. He frantically pulled everything out of the locker and piled it on his rack. No wallet.

  "Someone stole my wallet," he said.

  A half dozen other sailors dashed to their lockers.

  "Christ, my watch is gone," one yelled. Another one had a wallet missing. A fourth had lost a silver bracelet that he had bought in Long Beach. All of the losers were new men.

  Boats Homewood paced up and down between the racks. He looked almost as grief-stricken as he had been on the morning they took the bodies out of main plot. "The thief's back. I shoulda warned you. He laid low homeward bound from the Solomons. He's hit us before. I thought I scared him off"

  It was amazing how the lost wallet changed Flanagan's feelings for his shipmates. Suddenly they were no longer friends or potential friends. They were like people in a subway car in New York. Except on this subway, you had to sleep, eat, bathe and work with the passengers.

  "We'll catch the bastard. I got some tricks up my sleeve I learned before you guys were out of diapers," Homewood said. "When I do-“ He balled one enormous fist.

  Flanagan almost felt sorry for the thief.

  Another bugle call blasted over the PA system followed by the inevitable boatswain's pipe. "Now hear this," rasped the PA. "Stand by to abandon ship."

  "Jesus Christ. I hope this time it's for real," Jablonsky yelled as they dashed for the ladders. "Anything to get off this tub."

  "As I see it, Captain, the fundamental question for religion today is this: Is Christ King of the Earthly City or only of the Heavenly City?"

  Captain McKay glanced at the clock above his desk. Unbelievable. It was 2100 hours and Chaplain Emerson Bushnell was still talking. They had finished supper two hours ago. By now he had acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the chaplain's ancestry. He was the fifteenth in an unbroken line of Bushnell preachers who went back to the day the Puritans landed in Massachusetts in 1630. His most famous forebear was his grandfather, Horace Bushnell, who flourished after the Civil War. Horace had written a best-selling book, The Moral Uses of Dark Things, which his grandson reread once a year. Unfortunately, he no longer agreed with it.

  While Bushnell was in Yale Divinity School, his older brother Alcott had volunteered for the infantry in World War I. He had been killed in the battle of the Argonne. A dark anguish had crept into Bushnell's voice as he talked about the impact of this death on his thinking about religion. It had prompted him to begin reading books written by people with long German names and some by a Dane named Kierkegaard, all of whom cast doubt on his grandfather's optimistic thesis that God's love could be understood and even experienced by human beings just what Chaplain Bushnell now believed, McKay was not sure. After listening to him for three hours, he suspected Bushnell was not sure either.

  "I'm afraid I've got quite a bit of reading to do before I turn in, Chaplain. I've enjoyed our conversation. I haven't talked this much religion since I got baptized at fourteen back in Kansas."

  "What exactly is your belief, Captain?"

  "I was raised a Baptist. Lately I've been inclined to agree with Disraeli, who said all sensible men belong to the same religion."

  "What religion is that?" the chaplain asked.

  "Sensible men never say."

  Chaplain Bushnell looked blank. Then he forced a laugh. "Oh, I get it," he said. "Very clever. Essentially, you're an agnostic."

  "What's your impression of the ship, Chaplain?"

  "I haven't seen the poor fellows so worn out since Savo Island," the chaplain said. "They got very little sleep last night while we loaded that ammunition. Then all these drills. I wish you'd given them a day or two of pleasant cruising."

  "They've got to get used to living under pressure. What do you think of the ship's morale, the feeling the men have about her?"

  "For a while I had a church in Jersey City. As you can imagine, there aren't many Congregationalists in a town like that — mostly Irish and Italian and Polish Catholics. I decided I needed to find out more about the city as a whole, the community of believers in which we lived. It wasn't enough merely to minister to my own small flock. I wanted us to be a living cell in the earthly city we are supposed to he perfecting. I sent out a questionnaire asking people to describe the city as they experienced it. Nobody answered."

  "Why not?"

  "They were afraid, Captain. Jersey City is run by one of the most ruthless political bosses in the nation. They were afraid to say anything against him. Jersey City remained opaque to me. I had to fall back on formulas, rote religion."

  "I don't get your point."

  "The ship is opaque to me, Captain. As opaque as Jersey City."

  "Is that because the men are afraid to talk to you?"

  The chaplain's smile was enigmatic. Or was it wary?

  "Perhaps. I sometimes get the feeling everyone in the Navy is afraid. The system is based on fear, wouldn't you say, Captain? It presumes men are fallen creatures who can only be coerced into doing their duty. John Calvin would have approved it completely."

  "If you and John Calvin made that judgment, Chaplain, you'd have to be looking at the Navy — and this ship — from the outside. It may look l
ike the setup's based on fear, on regulations, discipline. But from the inside, there's a lot more to it. If you want a non-theologian's opinion, it's really based on faith."

  "Faith? You mean in the American way, the four freedoms?"

  McKay shook his head. "That's belief, Chaplain. I've always made a distinction between faith and belief. I think Jesus did too, if you read him from a certain perspective. Didn't he describe faith as a rock? Faith is indefinable, Chaplain. When you've got it, you're steady as that rock in the New Testament. When you haven't got it, you can come apart at the most inconvenient moments."

  "But faith resides in something."

  "It's not in a set of ideas. It's in an entity. In a man, a church, a country, a ship — a god. Faith is what leadership is all about. FDR's spent the last eight years trying to create or preserve faith in the country in spite of the Depression. Admiral King sweats about faith in the Navy, in spite of Pearl Harbor and Savo Island. My job is to create faith in this ship. You've got the hardest job —sustaining faith in God. I don't envy you, Chaplain."

  Emerson Bushnell seemed to find that remark very upsetting. He put his coffee cup down on his plate with a clink. "Are you sure you're not a theologian, Captain?" he murmured.

  "Quite sure."

  "I have a different definition of faith. I think it exists only when souls intersect, spiritually, morally, when the opacity that dooms us to our lonely individualism is overcome for a little while. I had that experience with Captain Kemble. It's why I stayed on this ship. To protect his reputation, if I can."

  "Did you advise Captain Kemble to relieve the men from General Quarters just before the shooting started at Savo Island?"

  Suddenly there was a mocking, almost hostile smile on the chaplain's face. "Is that a court-martial offense, Captain?"

  "I doubt it. Did you think it might be when you gave him the advice?"

  "It so happens I did not say a word to him that night. But if he had asked me, I would have given him that advice. The men were in a state of physical and spiritual collapse. I would have approved the course he and Commander Parker chose for this ship."

  “Are you speaking as the navigator or the chaplain now?"

  "The chaplain. On that terrible night, Captain Kemble and Commander Parker made more than a military decision. They made a moral decision. A moral decision that I will never cease to defend, whatever the Navy does to them. Beyond this statement, Captain, my lips are sealed. I will refuse to discuss the subject at any court-martial proceeding you and your superiors convene at Pearl Harbor."

  "Who told you we were going to do that?"

  "It's more or less assumed by everyone, officers and men. In Long Beach, the Navy doesn't control the news. In Pearl Harbor it does."

  The telephone rang. It was Lieutenant Commander Cadwallader. "Captain, I hate to bother you at this hour. But I'm afraid that sailor who was hit by the bow has taken a turn for the worse. If we don't get him to a hospital I doubt he'll last the night."

  "We're almost three hundred miles at sea. How the hell are we going to get him to a hospital?"

  "Can't you radio for a seaplane?"

  "We can't break radio silence. A Japanese submarine could pick up the message."

  "Send him back aboard one of the destroyers?"

  "Those ships are needed in the South Pacific."

  It was infuriating the way Cadwallader dumped the responsibility in his lap when it was his misdiagnosis that was killing the boy.

  McKay led the chaplain down to sick bay. Everything modern medicine could cram onto a ship was here. Surgical instruments gleamed on frays, big sterilizers with roll tops guaranteed antisepsis. Cadwallader motioned them to the rear of the compartment, where the sailor lay on a bottom bunk, a bottle of plasma rigged above him. A pharmacist's mate was giving him a transfusion.

  "His vital signs are not good. There's some sort of internal derangement," Cadwallader said. "For a while I thought there might be a locus of infection somewhere."

  "What do you think?" McKay said, turning to the ship's second physician, the scowling hook-nosed young reservist named Levy.

  "The locus of infection is a medical theory that expired around 1929," Levy said. "He's got a ruptured spleen. There's not much anyone can do about it."

  The sailor was delirious. "Mamma," he mumbled. "I'm sorry I've been bad. I won't be bad any more, I promise you. It's the bosun. He makes us do things to people, Mamma. I knew they were wrong."

  "What's he talking about?" McKay asked the chaplain.

  "I have no idea," Emerson Bushnell said. He seized the boy's hand. "Son," he said, "can you hear me? Can you pray with me? Jesus loves you, son. He wants to help you."

  Listening with an ear attuned to the nuances of sincerity, Captain McKay concluded Chaplain Bushnell did not believe a word he was saying. He was not achieving that intersection of souls that had lifted him and Win Kemble to an encounter with faith. Bushnell sincerely wanted to help the boy. He was trying to console and comfort him as he drifted into the darkness. But all he could offer him was rote religion.

  In the Navy they called that doing things by the book. Had he allowed that mentality to kill this boy? Over the years he had heard Win Kemble condemn this habit of the military mind a hundred times. What had Win done at Savo Island that lifted his soul into precarious contact with the unmilitary, even anti-military soul of Emerson Bushnell?

  Captain McKay went back to his cabin and lay in his bunk staring into the darkness for a long time, while the Jefferson City steamed toward the war at twenty-five knots.

  Chief Steward's Mate Walter Davis was a large, formidable black man. When he appeared in the compartment where the Jefferson City's thirty-eight black stewards slept, people stood up or at least got out of their racks and came to semi-attention as if the captain himself had come down the ladder.

  "Otis. Where the fuck is Otis?" he demanded.

  Willard Otis emerged from a bunk in the rear of the compartment. He was short and very black, with a wide cheerful mouth and loving-cup ears,

  "What the fuck is this?" Davis said.

  He shoved a slip of paper in Otis's face.

  "It's a request, Chief," Otis said. "A request for a transfer to B Division."

  “What the fuck kinda game you playin'?" Davis said, lifting Otis off the deck by the front of his workshirt.

  Buttons popped as Otis struggled to explain. "I'd like to strike for watertender, Chief. Amos Cartwright says he thinks the captain would okay it."

  "What'd I tell you about talkin' to that Philadelphia nigger?" Davis said, banging Otis against the bulkhead for emphasis.

  "I didn't do it, Chief. He talked to me," Otis said. "Heard me gassin' at the movies about the work I done on my car and said if I was interested in engines maybe I oughta try for a transfer."

  "How much you weigh, you stupid little fucker?"

  "Hundred and thirty pounds."

  “Christ almighty. You think it'd be any trouble for one of them Polacks in that division to put you over the side some dark night? They'd do it to that motherfucker from Philadelphia in five seconds if he wasn't as big as he is. If they didn't, what do you think would happen to you in Georgia if you came struttin' down the street with that rate on your arm, talkin' and actin' like that big-mouthed nigger? They'd find you drippin' off a tree next mornin' sure as your name's Otis. They'd be nothin' left of you but a tear in your mamma's eye."

  "Chief," Willard Otis said in a barely audible voice as Davis, his hand now around his throat, banged him against the bulkhead again, "my momma's dead. Maybe I don't have go home t'Georgia no more."

  "Your momma'll be glad she's dead if she could see what'll happen to you if you send me up another chit like this one," Davis said. "We got the best deal on this ship, and I don't want nobody mess in' it up, get me? We're eatin' better, we got better hours, we got better every thing' than these white assholes standin' four on, four off and gettin' fed shit for their trouble. So just cool it, you get me, boy?"


  Various parts of Otis's body including his head banged against the bulkhead again.

  "I got you, Chief," he said.

  Davis threw him against the bulkhead one more time for good measure and departed. Otis's rackmates picked him up and applied first aid to a cut on the back of his head. "I tote you that was goin' to happen," said Cash Johnson, a lanky Floridian.

  "Chief's right about the deal we got though," said Casey Quinn, who was from Charleston. "I don't want no four-on, four-off shit."

  "Only deal the chief's tryin' to protect is the one he's got," Otis said. "You saw how much new furniture we lugged into that house of his in Los Angeles. Musta cost two thousand dollars. Only one place he'd get that kind of money, and it ain't playin' craps."

  Boy, you keep talkin' out loud like that and you will be over the side," Casey Quinn said.

  "So we commend our shipmate Donald's body to the deep and his soul to God," Chaplain Emerson Bushnell said.

  All hands were in ranks on the stern for the burial of the sailor who had been hit by the bow as the Jefferson City got under way from Long Beach. No one in F Division knew him, but everyone agreed with Boats Homewood that it was a bad omen. It suggested that the new captain could not break the jinx which seemed to be permanently attached to the Jefferson City.

  A Marine bugler played taps. A Marine honor guard in dress blues fired a volley over the corpse. At a gesture from the chaplain two deck apes lifted the stretcher on which the body lay, and it slid over the side and vanished beneath the surface. They put a five-inch shell in the shroud to make sure it went down before the sharks could get to it.

  In Flanagan's imagination he saw the sailor spinning down, down in his shroud, refusing to believe in his own death. That was what he would do. He would demand proof that he was dead. He would ask how come. What had he done to deserve death at eighteen?

  That thought reminded him he had a mortal sin on his soul. According to Father Callow and the Catholic Church, he was spiritually dead. Sanctifying grace was absent from his soul and body. But he did not feel dead. Every time he thought of Teresa Brownlow, life leaped in his belly, his heart pounded, his tongue grew thick with desire. Woman, she was woman, with her sweetness, her wildness, her body that made his body as insubstantial as fire.