The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

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  FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

  ‘Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.’

  HERMAN MELVILLE

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  In the early years of the twentieth century my father heard that there was good money to be made in Venezuela. He had reliable information – from a Spaniard who knew a cattle-herder who knew the Venezuelan president personally – that more oil seeps had been discovered and that further concessions would soon be granted. Although I was living in Boston and had profitable work as a journalist, I agreed to go with him. His plan was to explore the seeps, obtain concessions and sell them on. ‘A year’s work to make a fortune,’ he said. He also said my wife Olive and two young children could come too. It would be perfectly safe.

  But it was not safe. A month after our arrival my baby son got a fever and a week later he was dead. He was four months old.

  On the morning that he died, the local women came to help my wife dress his tiny body and rub red powder into his cheeks. They placed him gently among flowers and candles. Olive would not let me touch the baby: I had killed him by bringing him here, I had no more rights over him. He stayed where he was for the whole day, and then another. I was not allowed to bury him.

  On the third day, I took Harriet, our six-year-old daughter, to my father’s temporary office – a ramshackle building on stilts a few miles north, along the shore of a swampy, sulphurous asphalt lake. I planned to keep her busy and show her that life went on. We visited nearby seeps, unpacked equipment and spoke to local workers. At dusk we watched lightning dance among the vapours of the lake. The effect was dramatic and unearthly; Harriet squealed and clapped her hands. I was pleased. I wanted her to see that the spark that was no longer in her brother existed elsewhere, that there was energy all around.

  But when we arrived home we saw that the family chickens had been slaughtered in their pens. They lay in the mud featherless and mutilated. Harriet – who had tended these birds, given them names and collected their eggs – slipped her quivering hand into mine.

  As we climbed the stairs we heard rhythmic clapping and the singing of songs in Spanish. I held Harriet’s hand tight and opened the door. The mosquito nets had been removed from the windows and candles placed on the sills. A makeshift altar of taller candles had been built on the floor, around which local women – half a dozen or so, all dressed in white – sat on boxes. When they saw us they sang and clapped louder, rocking back and forth.

  In the centre of the room, on the floor near the altar, sat my wife. Perhaps she had drunk liquor, because she did not seem to notice us.

  Harriet began to cry. At first I did not know why, but then I saw. Her mother was holding thin hemp strings that ran up to the ceiling through a crude system of blocks and pulleys. I followed the strings upwards and there, suspended from the central beam, was the body of my son. He too was dressed in white, and was covered in feathers. Bird wings, still bloody, were attached to his shoulders and they opened and closed as my wife pulled the strings.

  A woman came to Harriet, dabbed at her tears with a rag and said, in faltering English, ‘No tears, no tears – tears wet the wings of the angel, he cannot fly to heaven.’ The woman turned to me: my son was an innocente, she said, an angel baby. His place in heaven was certain, and there could be no greater happiness. No one must cry. The other women clapped and sang. ‘Nada de lagrimas. Nada de lagrimas.’ Olive joined in the clapping, applauding the dead little body creaking on its contraption of strings and pulleys.

  It took only seconds for me to pull it all down. The women screamed; I felt one beating me hard on my back. I ignored them and held the tiny corpse in my arms. At first I was repulsed by this grotesque parody of my son – even after I tore away the feathers and bloodied wings, its strange, deadweight stiffness appalled me. But as I looked into the face I became mesmerised. His eyes were open and he peered out into the world with an unfocused stare, just as he had when he was born, seeming to see everything but nothing: so physically present but so absent too. There is something strange and profound in the gaze of the newly born and the newly dead. They seem able to see two worlds at once.

  Olive tried to retrieve the baby from me but I pushed her away. She slapped me hard across the face and said she would not let me take him from her a second time. There was hot blood in my cheeks and stinging tears in my eyes, but my wife’s face was blank and dry. Not then or ever after did I see her cry for our poor son.

  ‘There is a better way,’ I said, turning from her and carrying the small body outside to be washed by the rain.

  * * *

  I buried him on top of a green and gentle hill overlooking the lake. Harriet stood with me as I did so and said a quick prayer of goodbye. A week later we returned to Boston. Olive refused to speak to me about our son, but I showed her some brief sketches I’d made of him in words: the way his tiny fingers had curled tightly shut when she tickled his palm with her breath, how he was soothed by the smell of orange skins.

  Over the following months I wrote of our son’s life in more detail. I began, even, to extend it a little by envisaging his future. I published a small portrait of him in a Boston magazine in which he grew into a young boy who raced automobiles. Olive read my work, but she never forgave me. I might be able to convey something of a likeness of our son, she said, but I would never be able to show how much she had loved him. That was something beyond words.

  In time I began to write about others who had died – at first, people I’d known personally, but then strangers too. I began to specialise in floods, fires and catastrophes. At the Boston American, where I worked, I became known as the Body Man. If there was a disaster, they would call me. I wrote about the sinking of the General Slocum, the Terra Cotta train wreck, the Great Chelsea Fire, and more. When I tried to report on commerce or politics, my writing lacked – well, the life of my body stories. The city editor said I should stick to what I did best, and so ‘follow the bodies’ became my motto.

  But I want to say at the outset that I was never a ghoul. I respected the dead. I always sought out the truth of how they had died, and when I wrote about them I thought always of my own son and how much I loved him. I wanted to give the poor mangled bodies of this world a voice. I wanted to make them live again. My writing was an act of justice.

  In 1911 I happened to be in New York when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory caught fire, killing nearly a hundred and fifty people, most of them young immigrant women. I saw the Asch Building ablaze at Washington Place and watched the girls jumping from the ninth and tenth floors. I saw five girls leap together from a window, their hair and dresses on fire. I saw another girl hang as long as she could from the brick sill until the flames touched her hands and she let go. I watched another stand at a window, throw out her p
ocket book, hat and coat, and step out into the cool evening air as calmly as if she were boarding a train.

  When the bodies were taken to a ramshackle pier adjacent to the Bellevue Hospital I followed them. They were lined up in neat double rows, either side of the long dock, some in open boxes, others simply laid on the bare planking. I walked up and down. I said sorry on behalf of my country to those poor girls, who stared back at me in open-eyed surprise, and I took notes. In the following weeks, I found out the truth of what happened to them. I told the world how Max Blanck, the factory’s owner, had climbed a ladder to a building next door and left them to die. I brought the girls to life as best I could, publishing stories in Boston, New York and London. Like a courtroom sketch artist, I tried to capture their likenesses in a few finely observed strokes – a phrase here, a sentence there. It worked. People read my little portraits and felt the injustice of it all. They said such a thing must never happen again. At the Boston American the city editor passed a note to his juniors: ‘If there are bodies, call Steadman.’

  So when my telephone rang at two o’clock one Monday morning just over a year later, I knew it would be my newspaper and I knew there would be bodies. I wasn’t disappointed. The duty editor told me an extraordinary thing: the new Titanic had struck ice and been seriously damaged. People may have been killed in the collision. The station at Cape Race had heard the ship calling for help. The duty editor assured me he was perfectly serious; it was not a joke.

  I dressed quickly and walked the mile and a half from my apartment to the Boston American office. The streets were deserted. There was no moon and shreds of cold mist drifted in from the harbour like floating cobwebs. I could smell saltwater. In downtown Boston the North Atlantic always felt close and alive, but at this hour it seemed especially so. I thought about the Titanic out there somewhere, her bow crushed, crewmen caught in the mangled steel. I began to plan how I might get aboard when the ship limped into port.

  When I arrived at the Washington Street office, Krupp, the city editor, was already there, shouting at newsboys and dictating cablegrams. Tickers clattered and telephone bells rang. As soon as he saw me Krupp told me to go downstairs and get hold of someone from White Star in New York on the long-distance line – preferably Philip Franklin himself. But the line was overloaded. The operator could not get me through. I tried instead to call Dan Byrne, my friend at Dow Jones, and then the Associated Press, but the lines were busy.

  ‘Never mind about the telephone then,’ Krupp said, interweaving his fingers so that his hands looked like a mechanical bird trying to take flight. ‘Go down there, to New York, on the first train, and get it all from Franklin direct. There are bodies here, John, I can smell ’em.’ He laughed at his own joke.

  A couple of hours later, as streaks of pale grey began to lie along the horizon and a feeble crescent moon showed itself in the eastern sky, I boarded the train out of Boston for New York. Something told me that Krupp was right: there was a good body story for me here. I felt a tingling energy in my fingers, as though they were already beginning to write it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Herbert Stone tapped his teeth with his fingers as if playing a small piano. He had come from his cabin to the port side of the promenade deck to take his afternoon sun sights, and been surprised to see three large, flat-topped icebergs a mile or so away across the still ocean. They were magnificent things, with lofty cliffs catching the yellows and pinks of early sunset, but Stone was worried. Only last year the Columbia had struck ice off Cape Race and smashed up her hull plates, and this year even more bergs had come sweeping south into the shipping lanes. There would be many more up ahead.

  He lifted his sextant, put in place its shades and took two altitudes of the low sun. He then stepped into the chartroom, a small space squeezed between the captain’s cabin on one side and a bare steel bulkhead on the other, and began to work up his sights. Someone had marked on the chart the ice reported by wireless over past days, and most of it lay to the west, directly across their track. When he plotted the ship’s position he saw that the ice was only about seven hours’ steaming away. They would likely meet it during his watch later that night.

  Stone walked back to the ship’s rail and looked again towards the south. The three icebergs had drifted astern but he could still see them, stately and tall and brilliantly lit. But he knew not all icebergs were like this. Some were low and grey, and tonight there would be no moon. He wondered how, during the dark hours of the midnight watch, he would able to see them.

  * * *

  The SS Californian was an ordinary ship, but that’s what Herbert Stone liked most about her. The glamorous new liners of White Star or Cunard were not for him; this modest vessel was good enough. She was middle-aged, middle-sized, and carried commonplace cargoes. Sometimes she also carried passengers – in nineteen old-style, oak-panelled state-rooms – but there had been no bookings for this trip. Instead she had loaded in London textiles, chemicals, machine parts, clothing and general goods, and waiting for her in Boston were a hundred thousand bushels of wheat and corn, a thousand bales of cotton, fifteen hundred tons of Santo Domingo sugar, and other assorted cargoes.

  Stone had learned during his training that ships could be spiteful, dangerous things. They could part a mooring rope so that its broken end whoop-whooped through the air like a giant scythe, or take a man’s arm off by dragging him into a winch drum, or break his back by sending him sprawling down a cargo hold. But the Californian had done none of these. She was gentle and benign. She had four strong steel masts, and a single slender funnel that glowed salmon-pink and glossy black when the sun shone on it. She rode easy in the Atlantic swells, found her way through the thickest fogs, and her derricks never dropped their cargo. She was a vessel at ease with herself – unpretentious, steady and solid.

  Stone was proud to be her second officer and each day he tried to serve his ship as best he could. He was responsible for the navigation charts, making sure they were correct and up to date, and had charge of the twelve-till-four watch. From midday until four o’clock in the afternoon, and from midnight until four o’clock in the morning, he stood watch on the bridge and had command of the ship. The twelve-till-four shift at night was properly called the middle watch, but most sailors knew it as the midnight watch and Stone liked the name: it gave a touch of magic to those four dark hours when the captain and crew slept below and he alone kept them safe.

  The midnight watch required vigilance, so he tried always to get some good sleep beforehand. While other officers might visit the saloon after dinner to play cards with the off-duty engineers, or even have a shot of whisky, Stone would retire to his cabin. By eight o’clock he’d be in bed reading, and by nine he would be asleep. That gave him almost three hours’ sleep before his watch began.

  But on this cold Sunday night, halfway between London and Boston, he found himself still awake at nine-thirty. He was thinking about the icebergs he’d seen. The lively bounce and throb of his bunk told him that the ship was still steaming at full speed. He thought the captain might have slowed down as darkness fell, given there was ice about, and he was worried they might keep up full speed for the whole night. Stone pictured the men crowded into cramped living quarters low in the ship’s bow – the bosun, the carpenter, the able-bodied seamen, the greasers, trimmers, firemen and donkeymen – lying in their bunks with less than half an inch of steel between their sleeping heads and the black Atlantic hissing past outside.

  He flicked on his reading light and took up his book again – Moby-Dick, a gift from his mother. The novel soothed him. He thought no more about icebergs but instead imagined Starbuck aloft, scanning the horizon, handsome in his excellent-fitting skin, radiant with courage and much loved by a noble captain.

  * * *

  In the wireless room Cyril Evans, a bespectacled twenty-year-old with black hair pasted flat to his head with machine oil, was at work at his equipment. He loved the new technology. He’d been a star pupil at the Marconi
school in London, mastering quickly the dash-dot sequences of Morse code, learning the rhythm first of each letter and then of complete words and sentences. Nowadays he even dreamt in the code.

  Evans had been happy to be appointed to the Californian when her wireless set was installed on the previous voyage, but life on board soon became difficult. Captain Lord, on their first meeting, looked at him as if he were part of the machinery, a box with wires and dials, and had referred to the equipment as ‘an instrument for tittle-tattle and gossip’. The wireless room doubled as Cyril’s sleeping quarters, and within this confined space he worked from seven o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, seven days a week. Whenever he walked on the open deck, sailors laughed at his thin arms and thick glasses. During a lifeboat drill he had been assigned the role of panicking passenger, and when the seamen asked him to sit in the stern and look pretty, and then to put on a lady’s hat and cry for help, he tried to join in the fun, but at the end of it all he was humiliated.

  He learned quickly that he was just the Marconi man and had to look after himself, but he was not entirely alone. Charlie Groves, the third officer, loved the wireless equipment too, and spoke kindly to him, and Evans made friends with Jimmy Gibson, the apprentice officer, who was the same age he was and had also once been the panicking passenger. ‘Don’t worry, Sparks,’ Gibson told him. ‘We all have our turn.’

  Evans was grateful for this encouragement, but he hoped for more than graduation from his role in lifeboat drills. He had grander ambitions. He hoped he might one day be a hero, like Jack Binns, the wireless man on the White Star’s Republic, who only three years earlier had brought ships racing to the rescue when his own vessel had been rammed in thick fog off New York. It was Jack and his Morse key, not the sailors, who had saved all the passengers.