Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  On the topic of what constituted a gentleman: “A gentleman don’t necessarily have to own a necktie or shave every day. There’s some ruffians around this town that don’t wash too much and might get drunk on Saturday night that I would call gentlemen. On the other hand there are some stiff-collared, nondrinking, church-going, clean-necked folks I wouldn’t trust as far as you can sling an ox. A gentleman is what the word means, a gentle man.”

  The Old Man never held forth much on formal religion. He said he reckoned a man knew best what his own God was and how to work with Him, and he was never much of a reformer. He said he reckoned Somebody, no matter what name you called Him, was responsible for sun, moon, mountains, sea, stars, heat, cold, seasons, animals, birds, fish, and food—”even small boys, although that may have been a basic mistake”—and whether you called him God, Allah, Jehovah, or Mug-Mug didn’t make much difference as long as you believed in Him.

  On the sexes: “Man is a simple creature—a very small boy who wants to be patted on the head and told he’s a good boy and a nice boy and a smart boy. You can lead him anywhere. But as for women, I don’t know. They got a sort of contrary, different chemistry of brain and action from men, which makes them unruly and subject to strange fits. My only advice on women is to stay out of the house when they’re cleaning and don’t say yes too often.”

  The young people who are exploding forth from the citadels of knowledge in any lovely month of June will have a tremendous heap of exhortation flung at them, and they will be told, in varying terms, that the world’s future rests on their stanch shoulders. They will feel, possibly, that this has not occurred before. But I can think they might do worse than heed some of the Old Man’s advice.

  I had no bad conscience that night more than a quarter-century ago, when the three R’s inhaled a little home-brew while we sweated through the platform rhetoric. After all, the work of education had been finished and we were entitled to a little fun before we plunged into the future. I went to work that same week and have been steadily at it since. But it has not been work unleavened with fun. And I have heeded the old gentleman’s advice as well as I have been able. At least, I haven’t been noble, and so far I haven’t managed to wreck the country.

  3—Uncle Rob Had Humphrey Bogart Beat a Mile

  The world of a boy who lives beside a river is limitless in scope, if the boy is blessed with imagination and there is some older, romantic head around to encourage the boy in what some grown-ups dismiss as tomfool daydreaming.

  We lived by a river, and the river rolled snaking out to sea. It was a broad, broad vista, seen by a boy’s eyes, and the Old Man’s tales about what might lie on the other side drove me into a frenzy of youthful torment. My people were born of the river and of the sea, and they spoke a language which fed more from seafaring English than Southern drawl. We drank strong black tea and ate raisin duff; the surnames of St. George and Newton, Adkins and Guthrie, Davis and Morse were only a jump removed from another Southport in England. My relatives ran the river, and some of them had strode the seas. My imagination surpassed them, until Samarkand and Far Cathay were at my beck.

  All of this was fetched sharply home a few years ago when somebody steered me onto a moving picture called The African Queen, which had to do with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart running a wild African river on a dilapidated old scow called “The African Queen.”

  All through the picture something kept bothering me, and it wasn’t the fact that the director, John Huston, opened the action with Bogart’s belly rumbling as some missionaries were leading the wretched heathen to the light. Nor, exactly, was it the anguished look on Bogart’s face when Miss Hepburn threw all the gin over the side and Bogart watched each square-faced bottle as it disappeared to eternity in the “Queen’s” bubbling wake.

  What struck the basic reminiscent note was Bogart using his foot to kick the ramshackledy old engine into life and his primitive means of preventing the boilers from exploding. Whiskers and all, Mr. Bogart, now gathered to a land where the woodbine twineth around free gin bottles, drew me back to my Uncle Rob and some voyages I made with him when he was chief—and only—engineer of an old passenger tub called, I think, “The Steamer Wilmington.” I could be wrong about the name as it was something more than thirty-five years ago.

  Uncle Rob was my favorite relative, apart from the Old Man, but Rob was kind of a raffish relative, somewhat given to profanity and occasionally to strong waters. Not until later years was he addicted to steady work. Not that he was triflin’—far from it. Rob was a man of far horizons, but limited opportunity to reach them.

  Uncle Rob, from young manhood until the day he died, looked like a whisker-shorn Scotch terrier, with a terrier’s temper. He was a man of motion. When Rob was a boy his father would hitch up the buggy, and cart Rob off to some boarding school (his father was what was known in those days as well-to-do), and Rob would generally take a punch at the headmaster and beat the old man home, sometimes a distance of a couple of hundred miles. Rob did not lean kindly toward education, and education, did not consider Rob a likely candidate for distinction.

  But there was very little Rob could not do with his hands. They were strong, callused hands, with square-tipped fingers and nails that always wore a clean rim of grease, because Rob’s hands were always plunged deep in the guts of an engine. He would tinker, and tinker, and if the cussed thing wouldn’t go he would haul off and fetch her a kick. The motor would catch and settle down to a steady hum. They said Rob had “a knowing foot,” and so he did.

  Rob was blunt with a Scotsman’s bluntness, which some-times lost him friends. He had a habit of saying what he thought, regardless of consequence. On one occasion, when Aunt May had trapped him into going to church, he glanced down the prayerful aisles to a female relative who was some-what lacking in beauty.

  “Damn, that’s an ugly woman,” Rob muttered.

  “Shhh, Rob,” Aunt May said. “The poor thing can’t help it if she’s ugly.”

  “No, she can’t help it if she’s ugly,” Rob muttered back, “but God dammit, she could stay home.”

  Rob eventually turned highly respectable, and worked many years as chief engineer of government dredge boats on the Mississippi and elsewhere, and seldom jeopardized his professional standing on the strong waters without by his old fondness for the strong waters within—within Rob, that is. He kind of settled down after one bout with John Barleycorn caused him to lurch into a Christmas tree, scattering the burning candles and nearly setting the house afire.

  “Goddamn Santa Claus,” Uncle Rob muttered, and tottered off with something other than sugarplums dancing through his head. What pounded through his skull next day was a withering hangover and the combined censure of the steadier element of yuletide celebrants.

  But somewhere in his earlier days of sketchy employment Uncle Rob enjoyed a brief span as engineer of this hand-knit passenger liner, the “Wilmington,” and as his favorite nephew I was allowed to go voyaging occasionally with Uncle Rob. Thereby opened the vistas of far places, which have caused me trouble ever since.

  I had some seagoing experience—as unpaid supercargo on the Coast Guard rumchasers and on the fertilizer-fish boat, the old “Vanessa,” that the Old Man skippered from time to time in the pogy season. But I reckon my trip from Southport to Wilmington on the Cape Fear River was my first experience with a vessel on which people actually paid passage, and certainly it was my first run on the river.

  I can clearly remember the thrill of being in the cabin (the cabin!) of the “Wilmington,” and hearing the pulsing of the engines, and knowing that my Uncle Rob, greasy to the ears, was one-half of the human forces which kept us afloat. I was not concerned with the captain and the deck hand. The Cape Fear was wide enough to accommodate ocean-going freighters and needed little skill in the steering. What intrigued me most was that teakettle below decks, which kept me from the gaping maws of the imaginary hippos and crocodiles which undoubtedly thronged the river.


  That first voyage was notable for the fact that I was deep in the vitals of Tarzan of the Apes, possibly the most fascinating book ever written for young or old. (I read it again with vast satisfaction the other day, and it loses nothing with time.)

  In this instance the “Wilmington” had been renamed the barque “Fuwalda,” by me, and I was John Clayton, Lord Grey-stoke, about to swim through the croc-ridden waters to the forbidding African shores. As a matter of fact there probably were a few sharks in the Cape Fear, and, as the water changed from salt to brackish to fresh, the odd alligator lurking in the rice marshes.

  Uncle Rob cursed steadily and feverishly in the stinking heat of the engine room, and kicked the engine into sputtering life when its dying gasp was imminent, so I did not have to swim through the crocodiles and hippos into the waiting arms of shrieking savages and fierce beasts. And thus, with one of my first impressions of man against the sea, was born an abiding respect for anybody who could do anything with his hands which would make a piece of dumb machinery respond sufficiently to conquer the elements.

  A trip down the river was quite a sight in those days. She is a strong brown river, the Cape Fear, roily with filth, and subject to whimsical current. The entry from the ocean, between the islands of Baldhead and Caswell, was jagged and marked by sand bars, to a point where the big foreign ships had to hang off the light and wait for the pilot boat to chug out, board a pilot, and then answer the pilot’s con in the wheelhouse or on the flying bridge, as she ran the river to the discharge-and-loading port of Wilmington.

  You would see the big ships, sea-weary and rust-scabbed, their stacks salt-grimed and their paint scaly, butting down the river. Their high poop decks bore their names in rusty gold, magical port names, “Hamburg” and “Liverpool,” “Bremen” and “Antwerp,” “Marseilles” and “Rotterdam.” Wilmington was on the North Atlantic run, which touched Jacksonville, Savannah, and Charleston, all names that were nearly as foreign to me then as the Rotterdams and the Bremens.

  It was a powerful thrill, then, treading the quarter-deck of the stanch ship “Wilmington” to know that blood kin was driving the engine which throbbed and rattled beneath your feet, and that the guiding hand at the helm of the big, ocean-battered freighters that passed you belonged to another blood relative, Uncle Walker or Uncle Tommy or the Old Man himself, with a whole dynasty of younger blood relatives—someday, perhaps even me—coming up to guide the big ships and perhaps to sail away to the far places as master or man.

  The entirely ersatz Africa of Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan then seemed no more distant than the duck-tremulous rice fields of the fabulous Orton Plantation, with its moss-dripping live oaks and stately white-columned main house. A river is just as broad as a sea to a boy, and limitless depths of the ocean no more peril-fraught than a greasy, rolling brown river, which can wreck a big ship and has yielded its toll of bloated drowned men, just as dead as if they were swept ashore off Hatteras, the ships just as wrecked as if they were tolled to doom by the decoying lanterns of the wreckers at Nags Head.

  My Uncle Rob—my Uncles Tommy and Walker, the Old Man, and me—were all part of what was a most exciting state, if only a boy realized it at the time. Blackbeard the Pirate was no stranger to our off-coast sea islands. British troops knew the old town of Wilmington, and old Fort Fisher had seen a power of Rhett Butlers running blockades. We had our own lost Indian tribe of Roanoke; we still had the Croatans upriver; and a solid reservation of half-naked blanket, bownarrer Cherokees upstate in the mountains.

  Rumrunners used our coastal coves to dump their cargo, and our Coast Guard had a cutter, the “Modoc,” which called Wilmington a home port. Baldhead and Caswell had its Coast Guard stations, from which beach patrol, surfboat patrol, and rumchasers operated. It was not unusual to see apprehended rum being smashed in the street in front of the Customs House, and I can remember the sight of one drunk dabbing the wasting rivulets of good whisky with a handkerchief and wringing out the booze-soaked cloth in his mouth.

  Deeper, farther in the swamps, a few counties away, we had a strange race of people called Brass Ankles, a mixture of Indian, white, and Negro, who were as handy with knives as some of their relatives amongst the Croatans of the Lumberton area.

  Not too far away, close to a township called Waccamaw, we had the Green Swamp, big enough and impenetrable enough to be called abysmal. On some islands in this vast sea of tangled growth were clumps and clusters of humanity who had escaped first from the French Revolution to Haiti, thence from Haiti to Wilmington, thence from Wilmington inland to sanctuary in the swamps. Some were inbred and idiotic from isolation. Nearly all had French names and spoke a French patois not unlike the Haitian creole. In that swamp, the Green Swamp, there were panthers and bears and alligators, wild hogs and wild cats.

  All of these riches, these excitements stretched before a small boy whose uncle drove the craft on which he strode the waters, whose other relatives piloted ships from far-distant places, ships whose crews gabbled in strange tongues and whose captains often gave the pilots a gold-foiled bottle of strange liquor or a sandalwood chest to take home as a souvenir of the trip down the river.

  Yet for some reason, some obscure reason, only a handful of men from this area had been abroad, in the sense of having seen the Mississippi or the phosphate-loading port of Fernandina in Florida. They shrimped and they fertilizer-fished and they piloted other people’s ships on the river, but they stayed home. One man named Lockwood built a boat on a big creek with some inchoate urge to take it down to the sea, but he built the boat too big for the bridge, her draft too deep for the channel. The locality is still called Lockwood’s Folly, as an admonition to stay home and not go off mingling with the furriners.

  My own people had been away and had mingled with furriners, but they had come home. Home was a salt-rimed fishing village, whose oak grove was called simply “The Grove,” and any voyage to the post office or the store was called “going up the street.” Even Wilmington, thirty miles away, was a foreign country, whose people spoke a different language, lived different fives, and were regarded with scorn as city people, freshwater catfish.

  Some of this must have rubbed off on me as I made my first run as a river-boat man with my Uncle Rob. Some of it must have bitten deeply as I breasted the bar with the “Penton,” the pilot boat, went fish-chasing on the “Vanessa,” or fingered the cold-greasy guns on the cutter “Modoc.” Some of it must have itched and burned as we danced on the treacherous edges of Frying Pan shoals, sailing perilously close after bluefish and mackerel, within easy view of the lightship, a floating lighthouse, with its mournful bellow to keep the big ships away from Frying Pan.

  All this, I suppose, came surging home when Humphrey Bogart kicked the engine alive in the moving picture The African Queen, reposing partially in the memory of Uncle Rob, who finally conquered a bigger river than Humphrey Bogart vanquished—a river leading to a considerably larger body of water.

  But I will say another thing for Uncle Rob over Humphrey Bogart. Uncle Rob would not have stood idly by to watch Katharine Hepburn dump a case of gin over the side for the crocodiles to puzzle over. If Uncle Rob had been engineer of “The African Queen” Miss Hepburn would have joined the gin.

  4—The Old Man Paid My Passage

  The waves crashed against the bow of the ship, spreading sheets of water over the foc’sle head. The old Hog Islander was running bow on into the gale. As she plunged she suffered and creaked amidships, and when she buried her prow in a sea her screws came clear of the following waves and thrashed painfully half out of the water.

  The night was blacker than the water and as cold as the Arctic that supplied the sea on this northern passage to Liver-pool. The night watchman was braced against the anchor chains as they stretched taut from the chain locker to crimp round the winch. The night watchman was really two people—the Number Two Ordinary Seaman and the cadet. They each worked an eight-hour shift, from eight bells to eight bells, or from 8 P.M
. to 8 A.M.—two hours on lookout, two hours stand-by, two hours lookout, two hours stand-by, seven bitter-cold nights a week, each week.

  The night watchman wore smelly long drawers, two pairs of pants, two wool shirts, two sweaters, a sheepskin coat, oilskins, a knitted cap pulled down over his ears under the sou’wester, two pairs of socks, and hip boots. The sheets of water hit him full in the face, streamed back over the iced foc’sle head, and went cascading over the deck cargo of lashed-down logs, chained tautly to the hatch and bulkhead and tightened by turn-buckles.

  The Ordinary Seaman, who was paid ten dollars a week, no overtime, who stood eight-hour watches at sea, who shortly would begin to rot his hands in a mixture of lye and water called suji-muji with which he cleaned the whitework, who helped shift the ship at night from dock to dock on his own time, who painted over the side in port, who swept the remains of sheep manure and phosphate rock and sulphur from the holds, who cleaned the stinking bilges in the deep tanks, who helped batten down open hatches in company-timesaving defiance of maritime law when the ship was already at sea, who was part of the poop-deck gang when the ship tied up or cast off, who had been shot at by strikers in Antwerp (strikers who had rifles and who climbed grain elevators for better aiming vantage), who ate biscuits from which cockroaches were knocked, who worked under a Danish bosun named Svendsen who hated him and was doubly hated in return, who lived with seven other men in one room under the poop next the grinding of the steering engine, who shared one toilet with the same seven men and washed out of a bucket into which a steampipe had been turned to heat the water, and who had been forced to fight half the men on the ship to defend his right to be a former college boy at sea during the great depression—this ordinary seaman walked into the crew mess and bled a cup of overboiled coffee out of the huge zinc urn in the corner, sat down on a bench by the mess table, observed that the “night lunch” had already been eaten, and lit a cigarette. Hungry, he cursed again—cursing ships and men and the sea and the spirit of high adventure that had gotten him into this mess.