Time and Tide

by Thomas Fleming

  Commander George Tombs, the damage control officer, appeared out of the smoke, as blackened and bloody as Homewood. Under his direction, they lugged wooden beams and bedding and steel plates forward to the danger zone. There, shipfitters and machinists were frantically welding the plates against the menaced bulkheads to reinforce them. Flanagan could see the steel bulge as the sea surged against it. Water spurted through jagged holes to starboard and port. They used bedding, rags, to plug these leaks, then smeared them with caulking. For one aggressive rivulet, Homewood stripped off his pants and shirt and demanded Flanagan's. "If we're gonna feed the fishes, we might as well go bare-assed," he said.

  On the bridge, the big worry was whether the Jefferson City might capsize at any moment. Her bottom compartments were flooded up to the forward engine room. The drifting bow had gashed a big hole on the starboard beam below the waterline and ripped off a propeller as it spun past, carrying at least forty men to their deaths. Captain McKay spent the night conferring with George Tombs and Oz Bradley shifting fuel oil and water from the center of the ship aft to stabilize her. Meanwhile, Navigator Marse Lee managed to plot a course on the scorched bridge.

  Dawn found them off the mouth of Tulagi Harbor. They eased up the narrow channel before the astonished gaze of Marine sentries and the crews of a half dozen motor torpedo boats. McKay walked out on the wing of the bridge as a Marine called to someone on the deck below him. "Hey, what happened to your bow?"

  "Termites," bellowed a voice that had to belong to Boatswain's Mate First Class Ernest Homewood.

  It was the rough tough bravado of the Old Navy. Suddenly Arthur McKay loved it. He turned to smile at his haggard executive officer. Even Daniel Boone Parker became almost tolerable. "You know," he said, "I think we're going to win this goddamn war."

  Two days later he was not so sure. In his cabin, he stared into the haughty astonished face of Captain George Bass, Admiral Standish's chief of staff. "You mean to say you don't agree with this report? Every captain in the task force has endorsed it. Your own executive officer supports it."

  "I don't give a goddamn if you've got the Archangel Michael for an eyewitness. We did not sink four ships and damage four others. We hit one ship, and I'm not even sure if we sank her."

  "Captain, your conduct in this battle is open to a certain amount of criticism. Your failure to open fire when ordered, for instance."

  "I don't believe in firing until my gunnery officer has a target. I see no point in lighting up the sky like those idiots on the Honolulu. All they did was illuminate us for another spread of torpedoes."

  "I'll note your exception to the report, Captain. Good day."

  Good riddance, Arthur McKay thought. For a brief, beautiful moment, the ferocity of his contempt for Admiral Standish and Captain Bass united him with Win Kemble in his exile in Panama. He sat down at his desk and wrote a letter to Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations.

  Dear Admiral King:

  I am sitting in Tulagi Harbor with the bow of my ship blown off. The Minneapolis and the New Orleans followed me in here a few hours later in similar condition. The Brockton has gone down with all hands and the Pensacola is limping for home with most of her guts missing because we were paraded like a procession of targets in a fleet exercise for a Japanese destroyer flotilla. For God's sake, will you find an admiral who knows something about how to handle destroyers and cruisers? I have never seen anything like the collection of bunglers you have sent out here. If I didn't know you better, I'd swear you were trying to lose this war. We're winning it, but the price is a lot higher than it should be. On behalf of my men and what's left of my ship, I feel compelled to tell you that I consider this a disgrace.

  It was amazing, how much good a man could do — or at least try to do — once he abandoned all hope or desire for promotion.

  Survivors

  Frank Flanagan stood on the platform outside main forward watching the wall of water surge toward them. It smashed into the Jefferson City's prowless jaw with a cannonlike boom. The ship shuddered like a used-up boxer who could do nothing but absorb punches. "Jesus," Jack Peterson said, "a couple more like that will finish us."

  There was nothing in sight but miles of foaming, heaving gray-blue water and slate-gray sky. The Coral Sea had given up all pretense of living up to its name. Occasionally the destroyer escorting them would bob to the top of one of these killer waves and slide into the gulf behind it. Flanagan re-examined the knots on his life jacket. Everyone wore one constantly. Some sailors even wore them while trying to sleep.

  For the first three days of their voyage to Australia, Flanagan had lain in his rocking bunk shivering and shaking with a fever of 103. Every ten minutes, so it seemed, he had to dash to a head which was crowded with fellow sufferers of dysentery. They had caught it on the vile island of Tulagi while they toiled in that stinking jungle, cutting down trees that the ship's carpenters carved into a stubby wooden bow for the Jefferson City.

  The sick bay had been wrecked by the explosion and fire. There was no place to put sick men — and besides, there were too many of them. The pharmacist's mates roamed the ship dispensing some sort of sulfa drug which made many men sicker. Boats Homewood finally banned the medics from F Division and undertook his own cure, which combined bourbon, hot soup and tea.

  The illness had left Flanagan drained and depressed. He did not respond to his shipmates' gallows humor or attempts at optimism.

  "It's funny,"' Jack Peterson said, as another wave churned toward them. "I don't feature drownin'. I never worried about gettin' blown up, but I don't feature drownin'."

  "We're gonna make it," Homewood said. "This kinda weather's the best break we could get. We don't have to worry about submarines. Believe me, this old baby's got a lot of life in her yet."

  Life? Flanagan wondered. He had begun to associate the Jefferson City with death and more death. On Tulagi, they had buried forty men they had pried out of the blasted interior of turret one and the handling rooms beneath it. The chaplain had urged them to remember the other forty shipmates who had vanished in the amputated bow. For those who had friends among them, he offered the consolation that they had not suffered, nor had the men in turret one. They had all been killed instantly by the concussion when the forward magazine exploded.

  Rigor mortis had set in by the time they took the men out of turret one. They were all frozen in the position assigned to them at General Quarters. The range finder had his hands spread out, adjusting his lenses. The rammer-men leaned forward, arms outstretched to slam shut the breeches. Many had odd smiles on their faces, as if they welcomed death when it came so swiftly, so painlessly.

  "I'd give a million bucks to get off this goddamn thing," Flanagan said.

  "What the hell are you talkin' about?" Homewood said. "You saved this old lady from goin' under. You got a stake in her now. You're part of her, she's part of your life."

  "You'll feel better when we get to Sydney, kid. That's one of the great liberty towns," Jack Peterson said.

  Boats Homewood grinned. "Yeah. I was there in 'twenty-five. Them Aussies were the only guys I ever met who could outdrink me in them days."

  "I hear the dames are just as wild as the guys. And horny as hell," Peterson said. "All the guys've been fightin' in Egypt for the last two years."

  "Good Christ, look what's coming now," Flanagan said. They stared at the biggest moving mountain of water yet.

  In his cabin, Chaplain Emerson Bushnell shuddered as the sound and shock of the wave surged through the ship. He was going through the personal effects of the men who had died in the turret and in the lost bow. He had almost a hundred letters to write, to grieving parents, wives, sisters or brothers. He picked up the wallet of a gunner's mate who had been in the Navy over ten years. Inside it was a worn envelope on which was scrawled "To be sent to my wife."

  Bushnell opened the envelope and read: "Beloved, if anything should happen to me, I want you to know you have
always been my sweetheart. There has never been any one else. I thank God every night for you and the children. Kiss Bobby and Jennie for me and remember I love you. Not even death can us part."

  In the wallet of another veteran of the Old Navy, a boatswain's mate second class, was a frayed clipping of a poem entitled "Mother" pasted to the back of a snapshot of a gray-haired woman standing on the steps of a small farmhouse. Other wallets had more predictable material. Snapshots of sailors on liberty raising glasses of beer, or posing with an ersatz Hawaiian beauty in a photography parlor on River Street in Honolulu.

  Remnants of lives he had never touched, lives he had allowed to vanish into the void without achieving a sacred moment, or even a comradely one. As a chaplain, he was a walking fraud. Did the men know it? Few even tried to approach him. The Catholic boy from the Bronx, Flanagan, was the only one with whom he had achieved a shred of intimacy.

  Chaplain Bushnell struggled against an overwhelming despair. It was the simplicity of these lives that stupefied him. Was the gunner's mate's devotion to his wife what it seemed — a wholehearted love? Or had he left this letter as an act of repentance? Was the letter a lie? What about the boatswain's mate who loved his mother? He was from the same division as the man who had hanged himself. Had he participated in that tragedy? Had he merely watched it unfold, uncaring, contemptuous?

  Opaque, their lives were all opaque to Chaplain. Bushnell. Where he hungered for clarity, the visible details told him nothing. Yet he yearned to bless this crew, this ship. In his deepest self, at the core of his doubt-racked soul, he was a priest. He was the carrier of American faith, generation after generation, since the first believers stepped ashore on New England's inhospitable coast to pledge their covenants with the warrior God Jehovah.

  Emerson Bushnell no longer believed in that tribal god. But he could testify to an awareness of an incomprehensible, superhuman presence beyond and within this stupendous universe. He wanted to ask this unknown God to banish the evil that was haunting the Jefferson City. But he could not do it; he could not summon any priestly power within himself, much less from heaven, without that moral clarity, that perception of mutual anguish and hope, which he still dreamt of achieving.

  Perhaps the captain was his only chance. If he could achieve genuine communion with him, he might discover in himself the power to bless the ship. He thought he had achieved that communion with Captain Winfield Scott Schley Kemble. But something had been fatally flawed in their encounter. Perhaps Arthur McKay could tell him what had gone wrong. Perhaps he was the man who could restore hope to his soul, meaning to his priesthood.

  On the bridge, Captain McKay braced himself for the shock of another wave. It struck them hard and high, sending foam up over the useless guns of turret one. "Captain," said the talker, "Damage Control says that one busted a bulkhead."

  The storm had hit them on their second day out of Tulagi, and its unrelenting fury had begun to acquire a malevolent cast — as if there really was a curse on them.

  McKay studied the ugly sea. "What do you think of backing into it, Mr. West?"

  "Why not? It can't be any worse than the beating we're taking now," Officer of the Deck Montgomery West said.

  West's admiration for this shy laconic man kept growing. The way the captain had dealt with West's spasm of cowardice was not the only reason. Since they sailed from Tulagi five nights ago, the captain had not left the bridge. Several people urged him to get some sleep in his sea cabin, but he preferred to doze in his bridge chair.

  Like the other officers of the deck, West was almost as exhausted by the strain of trying to keep the Jefferson City on course with only three propellers. She kept falling off to the starboard and required a correction every five minutes. Navigator Marse Lee had not yet recovered from their going 250 miles off course on the night of their departure from Tulagi. It had not been his fault. Lieutenant MacComber had had the deck and had allowed it to happen.

  As far as West was concerned, there was no longer any doubt where he stood in the brawl between the exec and the captain. McKay's competence, his ability as a ship-handler and a leader were winning his allegiance. He watched now as the captain gave the helmsman and the engine room orders that brought the Jefferson City about in the tumultuous sea, and they began backing their way to Australia.

  "Maybe that will confuse the evil spirits," McKay said when they had completed the maneuver.

  "You don't really believe in them, do you, Captain?"

  "One night when my friend Win Kemble was navigator on the Saratoga, he had to bring Bill Halsey back from a party and park him in his stateroom. Win helped the admiral empty his pockets before he collapsed in his bunk. The number of good luck charms Halsey carried around with him was amazing. They ranged from a four leaf clover to a miraculous medal."

  "I just don't buy the idea that you can change what's going to happen by some ritual or charm, Captain."

  "Maybe it's just a sailor's way of admitting we can't control something as huge as an ocean, as unpredictable as the wind. We're really reciting the Navy Hymn."

  "I hate to admit it, Captain, but I don't know the words."

  A foaming mountain of water crashed over the fantail of the Jefferson City, sending another cannonlike boom through the ship. The captain steadied himself on a stanchion and recited in his quiet casual voice.

  "Eternal Father, strong to save,

  Whose arm cloth bind the restless wave,

  Who bid'st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep,

  0 hear us when we cry to thee For those in peril on the sea."

  For a moment Montgomery West could barely breathe. He sensed he was in the presence of something authentic. The captain was not praying for the Jefferson City. They were not yet in the sort of peril that warranted prayer. But he took the words seriously. They were part of a tradition, a past, to which he belonged. He was confessing their weakness, their frailty in the face of this ferocious sea, this immensity smashing so savagely at them. But it was a confession tinged with pride, with a kind of confidence.

  "That makes me almost glad I joined the Navy," West said. "Every so often I feel the same way. Almost glad," Captain McKay said.

  Around midnight, the wind died away and the sea subsided. Captain McKay turned the Jefferson City around and resumed the journey to Australia bow-first. He decided he could risk a retreat to his sea cabin. He had barely put his head on the pillow when the Marine sentry tapped on the door. "Captain, Chaplain Bushnell would like to see you."

  "Come in," he said.

  In a moment Bushnell was sitting beside his bed. He looked spectral in the glow of the dim lamp. "Captain," he said, "I don't know what to do with the effects of those dead men. I can't bear to read another letter, to look at another picture. I'm — I'm overwhelmed."

  "We all get overwhelmed occasionally, Chaplain. Maybe it was a mistake to go through so many of them. Write the condolence letters in small batches, a few each day."

  "Could you help me? I don't know what to say."

  Sometimes exhaustion diffuses the ego, letting the mind's eye see things with extraordinary objectivity. Arthur McKay saw that Emerson Bushnell was trying to draw him into the anguish of grieving, of mourning these men and their meaningless deaths. No one could remain a commander in a war if he yielded to that temptation.

  "I wish I could help, Chaplain. I told you — I didn't envy you your job."

  Bushnell seemed to crumple in the chair. He began to sob. "My whole life, my whole life, has been a failure."

  "I'm sure that isn't true either. Pour yourself a stiff drink from someone's bottle, if you haven't got your own, and try to get some sleep."

  With almost miraculous swiftness, Chaplain Bushnell stopped crying. He stalked out of the cabin, his face as blank as a corpse.

  Captain McKay's head fell back on the pillow. For a moment he wondered if he had just made an enemy. He was too tired to care.

  In the executive officer's cabin, Supply Officer
Leroy Tompkins gazed in dismay at Daniel Boone Parker. "Dan, for Christ's sake, get a grip on yourself."

  "No good, Tommy. No good. I'm gone. We're gone. Bastard's got us."

  They had killed most of a bottle of Scotch. Tompkins's bulbous nose was turning red, he was sure of it. It always turned red when he drank too much. He could not understand what was wrong with his old friend. Gone was his swagger, his fuck-'em-all-we'll-get-ours style that had made him the only hero in Leroy Tompkins's forlorn life. Dan Parker had gotten him into the Navy back in the early 1930s, when the Depression had washed away every job in sight. He had sent him into Supply, and they had been a great team, for most of the past ten years. They had been able to laugh up quite a few profitable sleeves at the Annapolis bastards with their fat gold rings on their arrogant fingers.

  "What're you talkin' about? How's he got us? He'll never figure out those books. You got to be a CPA to figure out those books the way I got them cooked. We got nothin' to worry about, Dan. For Christ's sake, he's the one who got the fuckin' bow blown off his ship. They ain't gonna like that in Washington."

  Commander Parker was not listening. He stared past Tompkins at a picture of himself on the wall escorting some admiral around London. He started to sob. It was unbelievable. Dan Parker on a crying jag. "Got us," he said. "He knows it. He can make his move anytime. Knows it."

  Panic lapped around Supply Officer Tompkins's ears. It was almost as bad as the night they were torpedoed. "I don't get it, Dan. I just don't get it. What the fuck's been happenin' on that bridge?"

  Toward dawn, a damp cold fog engulfed the Jefferson City. For another day they groped through murk.

  "I feel as if I've died and I'm on my way to heaven," Flanagan said.

  "Or hell," Daley said, reminding Flanagan of the mortal sins he had on his soul.

  "We couldn't get a better break," Homewood said.

  "The Japs've got subs all around the Australian coast. We'd be an easy shot for any one of them. Christ, we can't even zigzag."

  All through the following night the fog persisted. It was uncanny. Were they really in God's sheltering hand? Flanagan wondered. Why? Why did the Jefferson City deserve His protection while the Atlanta sank, riddled by two dozen direct hits, the Juneau vanished in one stupendous explosion? Why was F Division spared and half of Deck Division One, the men who manned the guns in turret one, dead?