Ironclad

by Daniel Foster

  Garret stood quietly in the doorway. He wanted to go to Fishy, but he knew he should not. Kearsarge had set her steel bulkheads close to Fishy, hemming him in, blocking the outside world away, and Bert was with him.

  Fishy was not alone, and that meant he would make it, hard though it would be. Garret turned quietly and went to find his other friends. He didn’t want to be alone anymore, either.

  W

  “But something had to change,” the Chief said emphatically, slapping his knee and scattering ashes from his pipe all over the deck. “The United States had to rise to what Roosevelt knew it could be. He wouldn’t accept no less. I’m telling you men, we never had a better president than ‘ol Teddy.”

  Garret was lying in his hammock above the snag of charred steel that had once been Nancy. His remaining friends were with him, but none of them would hang their hammock on a hook that had belonged to any of their dead friends. The space around Nancy looked as empty as a Christmas tree with only five ornaments on it.

  As the Chief spun his yarn, Garret thanked God for him. Garret and his friends were worn out, so sleep would come quickly, but without the Chief to distract them as they dozed off, they’d lay there in the semi-dark and think of all the things they didn’t want to think about. The Chief’s fish stories were a living insulation, a buffer of sorts. Sort of like Curtis’s huge presence had been.

  Chief Greely seemed to understand what they needed, without anything being said. So he came and told stories until all of them were out. It took longer than it should have, considering how tired they were.

  “Every mother’s son of ‘em laughed at his Great White Cruise,” the Chief continued. “Everybody from Congress to the newspapers. They said it was the biggest pony show on earth. Not only was it expensive, most said it couldn’t be done. They said the ships would never make it.”

  He stopped and leaned forward. The electric light cast deep shadows under his eyes, making him look older than he was. “And yet we did it. Every single ship. Sixteen steam-powered warships, including this one here,” he reverently laid a hand on Kearsarge’s bulkhead. “You think crossing the Atlantic and the Mediterranean is hard for her? Ha. This is nothing. She’s sailed around the world.

  “Kearsarge and her sister ship were the oldest ships on the Great White Cruise. We worked like the dickens, but she never let us down. No king, no country, no president—nobody had ever done anything like it. It showed the world what America could be, men. It showed ‘em what we are.”

  Garret and his friends listened, but only in the dazed way that a weary man listens to the rain falling on the roof. Except Oscar. He flopped over in his hammock, noisily turning his back on the Chief.

  “Japan had been closed to outsiders for centuries,” the Chief continued. “Our Great White Cruise opened them up for the first time. The Brits, the Germans, the French, everybody sat up and took notice.”

  Greely shook his head. “But they didn’t understand what we did, what it meant. Roosevelt knew, and we knew. Even the rest of our countryfolk didn’t understand. They welcomed us home like heroes, but they still don’t know.”

  Garret was listening more to the sound of Greely’s voice than the words. It was helping ease the headache Garret had had since he’d rang his chimes on a water pipe earlier that day. Burl said Garret had been out cold for almost a minute.

  “Hear what I’m sayin’ to you,” the Chief said earnestly. “America can’t be destroyed from the outside.” He shook his head as if God had decreed it. “Nobody can conquer us. We only fall if we stop doing things like ol’ Teddy’s Great White Cruise. We’re a nation of great big ideas and crazy chances. We never quit. That’s what made us. As long as we believe we can do anything, as long as we believe in ourselves like ol’ Teddy believed in us, we’ll endure.”

  He sat back. “My Granddaddy fought in the war of 1812. You know what he told me? The British had better trained troops. They had more of ‘em. They had better weapons. They had better tactics. They captured town after town, but we kept killing them. They took our homes and still we killed them. They killed our soldiers, and still we killed them. They burned our capital and still we killed them. They eventually gave up and left because they realized we were never going to quit. You can’t beat a country that never quits.”

  Burl, whose face was still bandaged, was watching the Chief intently. The rest of them were paying a little more attention now, though they didn’t look it.

  The injured Kearsarge groaned, and Greely laid a hand on her, but continued talking to them. “As long as you never give up, you can’t lose. Sometimes the struggle’s so bad you can hardly keep going, but as long as you don’t quit, you’ll see the dawn. And someday, whether the Good Lord has come back or not, you’ll understand that it was worth doing. Do you hear me, men?” He leaned forward, hands on his knees. “Your life is worth doing. Everybody’s life is worth doing. Don’t let any lying son of a bitch ever tell you different.”

  The words touched Garret’s heart with a little warmth. Maybe the chief would say more. But the next voice that spoke wasn’t warm, it was harsh. It came from Oscar.

  “Did you even have a great grandfather in the war of 1812, or is that another lie you think we’re stupid enough to believe? Like the north pole having blue spirals on it, right? Or Chief whatever-it-was, ate his own leg after he beat himself over the head with it. The only reason I’d even believe Teddy Roosevelt was president is because I read it in a damn book.”

  The Chief’s face paled as he realized what he’d inadvertently done. “Son,” he said. “Those were just fish stories.”

  “And what is this?” Oscar demanded. “You don’t care about me or Theo! So fuck you and fuck your damn stories!”

  Everybody was awake now. Wide awake. Garret watched in horror as the momentary warmth drained away from all of them.

  Oscar wasn’t done. “You don’t care about anything but this damned ship, so fuck you!”

  His curses rang down the citadel, and despite the dozens of men sleeping around them, it was quiet enough for Garret to hear Bert the cat slink by.

  The Chief could clap Oscar in irons for that kind of insubordination, but they all knew it wouldn’t happen. Nothing would ever be said about it. This wasn’t about rank or respect. The Chief had been giving them something out of the kindness of his heart, and Oscar had just thrown it back in his face. As it usually happened, Garret didn’t appreciate how precious a thing was until he began to feel it slip away.

  Chief Greely stood. It was painful for him. His knees hurt him most of the time, as far as Garret could see. He turned to go, but paused long enough to say one more thing.

  “The sun comes up every morning, men. So that means, as long as you don’t give up, you’ll be there to see it.”

  He went around the blast shield, still pockmarked from Nancy’s explosion, and was gone.

  W

  July 16th, 1914. Twelve days to Vidovdan

  Garret dragged himself up the ship’s ladder to the main deck. He had not slept well after Oscar’s outburst. None of them had. Least of all Oscar. Garret had one more order to deliver, and then would be free of his steward duties for the morning and able to resume his normal duties.

  God, I’m hurrying to get done with work so that I can start working. I hate the Navy.

  What would his duties be today? Cleaning their hopelessly filthy battleship? Resetting and securing the shells that had broken loose during the battle? Maybe their mad captain would suddenly decide that they needed to scrape the barnacles off the hull. But only the ones that were growing on the keel, thirty feet underwater. While the ship was at full speed, of course. He probably wouldn’t give them so much as a straw to breathe through, he’d just tell them to hold their breath.

  Garret didn’t think it was funny. He didn’t think anything was funny. He felt numb and cold. Was it possible to still be shell-shocked days after his friends had died? He didn’t know. He only knew
that because of his friend’s deaths—because of the Captain who had caused them—a dark thing had begun to grow inside Garret, and it frightened him.

  Garret’s childhood had been difficult; he’d felt a lot of things, including hate. Up to this point, though, his hatred had only been reactionary. It had never come to stay. Now it felt as though it had lodged and was growing like a thorn, and he didn’t know how to stop it.

  Three times now Garret had caught himself fantasizing about running into Maxwell when no one else was around. Somewhere, months or years from now, he envisioned them randomly meeting down an alley in Philadelphia, or at a fork in a lonely road outside of Garret’s home town.

  Garret saw himself attacking Maxwell, not killing him, but injuring Maxwell badly, and in the fantasy, it was an intentional act.

  All three times, Garret had shaken the fantasy off as soon as he realized what he was thinking, but it didn’t change the fact that he’d thought it, and that it had satisfied him to think it. The growing depth of his hatred towards Maxwell frightened him. Garret had been angry for so much of his young life, and he’d been made to use lethal force to defend those he loved, but this was different because of the way he felt about it. He’d never before fantasized about injuring someone.

  Even so, when Garret thought about the horrors that Maxwell had proxied upon Garret’s friends, how Maxwell and his insane mission were ultimately responsible for blowing Curtis’s head off, and ripping poor Theo in two, and forcing Charlie to work in the pit of hell until he collapsed and died—when Garret thought about those things, and then about the casual way Maxwell disregarded it all, it enraged Garret almost beyond his control. It made him want to cry and scream and beat Maxwell into a bloody pulp, demanding with each punch that Maxwell look at what he’d done, that he LOOK and SEE what he had done. That he face the fact that he’d used up Garret’s friends as if they were just more bags of black powder on his ship, meant to be fired at the enemy and then thrown away.

  In an odd twist of fate, the final straw which had planted the hatred was not the death of any of his friends. Surely it should have been. After all, Captain Maxwell had killed Twitch—his own son—in cold blood on the floor of his cabin.

  The thing that pushed Garret over the edge would have, to most people, been the most trivial thing of them all. But to Garret it wasn’t. It had happened that very morning, in fact. Burl had taken off his bandages, and Garret had been there to watch. Burl wasn’t supposed to take them off at all, the doctor was supposed to do it. But Burl was anxious, fearful, and he’d said he didn’t want to know what the doctor thought. He wanted to know what his friends thought.

  Garret and his remaining friends had stood there around Nancy’s broken snag as Burl peeled the soiled cloths away from his head with his small hands. The right side of Burl’s face was destroyed. He looked like a monster. A skinny, frightened monster. The right half of his once delicate features was now a twisted mass of charred tissue. His right eye stared sightlessly ahead, white as a marble.

  They’d all reassured him, grabbing him around the shoulders, telling him how sexy scars were. Oscar even came up with a lighthearted joke to blow it all off, his first one in days.

  But Burl, tiny Burl, was ravaged, and it would change his life. Garret had seen it before. People would pretend they didn’t see Burl on the streets. In shops, they would either make awkwardly bright conversation, or ignore him completely. Girls would avoid him.

  Burl was sensitive like Theo. As soon as he was off the ship, away from his friends, away from those who had suffered with him and learned to love him through it all, Burl would be alone. When he stepped back into the world, it would crush him, all because Maxwell had used him like a tool and then cast him aside. Like a candle burned halfway down and covered with its own melted wax. Easier to just grab a new one that wasn’t ugly.

  For what had happened, and what was yet to come, Maxwell was ultimately responsible, and because of that, Garret feared what he might do if the opportunity ever presented itself.

  W

  Andrew ate in silence, as did his Captain. Forks clicked. Andrew’s hand was unsteady, and he accidentally dinged his water glass against his plate as he set it down. Maxwell replaced his in silence. Captains didn’t eat with their officers. They dined alone in their quarters. Except Maxwell, of course.

  The rest of the officers had wolfed their food and gone back to their duties. Given Kearsarge’s current condition and lack of crew, eating was an experience both rare and hurried. Sleep was a thing of the past. Both Andrew and Maxwell had arrived late to the meal. As soon as all the other officers were gone, Maxwell had sent the stewards away, leaving himself and Andrew alone, for which Andrew was grateful.

  The officers’ mess was much like Captain Maxwell’s cabin—a stately panoply of carved wood and finely wrought brass fixtures. Kearsarge may have been old, but she still knew how to host in style. Andrew didn’t notice any of the glamor around him. Nor did he care.

  He forced himself to eat, feeding his skeleton. That’s what it felt like anyway, as if there was nothing left of him but dry bone, as if he was hollowing out, like a rotten log. His appearance hadn’t changed much in the mirror; maybe his eyes looked a little sunken and his cheeks more pallid, but food had become tasteless, and the beautiful blue-green of the Atlantic was lost to him. Everything had become muted grey all the way to the skyline.

  Though, to be honest, Andrew didn’t care if the taste never returned to his food, nor if the color returned to his life. He craved only one thing, and of course it was the one thing he could never have.

  He wanted a dead young man brought back to life.

  Though it would have humiliated Andrew if he’d allowed himself to consciously think it, what Andrew really wanted was curl up beside Maxwell and cry on his knee like a child.

  Andrew knew other XO’s who hated their position. As an XO, a man was required to be the go-between for the Captain and everyone else on the ship. In other words, the chiefs, even the enlisted men came to Andrew for most everything. There was hardly a concern or problem on the ship that didn’t pass his desk, or more often, his ears.

  Andrew loved being an executive officer for precisely that reason: he cared for all the young men under his command. Boys, really, is what they were. Brave and good hearted, but so young. They looked up to him, striving to earn his approval and his respect. He gave both as generously as he could. There were so many of these young men, even on smaller ships, but he did his best to care for them as he knew a big brother should.

  Now he had killed one of them. Andrew had shot a boy. He had snuffed out an innocent life, not just any life, but a young life. Not just any young life, but Captain Maxwell’s own son.

  Twitch had been counting down, squeezing the trigger as he went. If Andrew had not shot him, Maxwell would have died, the mission would have gone awry, and hundreds of thousands of innocent people would have paid the price when war broke out in Europe. Any naval court would have exonerated Andrew, patted him on the back even, told him that he had made not only the difficult choice, but the right choice, indeed the only choice.

  Andrew couldn’t find it in himself to care what a court, or a jury, or anyone else would have told him. What Andrew had done was wrong. He knew it. He had rehashed it in his mind, trying to find what he should have done, where the “right” course had actually lain. He’d come up empty-handed.

  Twitch’s sharp thinking had sunk the Audacious, thereby saving everyone aboard the Kearsarge. Then Andrew had killed him.

  Twitch’s only mistake had been to misunderstand what was happening, or perhaps to understand it too well, and for that, Andrew had killed him.

  Twitch’s only failure had been to be used and manipulated by the people who had adopted him and raised him. So really, Twitch’s only crime had been caring too much for others. For that, Andrew had killed him.

  “Andrew,” Maxwell said. “Stop. What you’re doing to yoursel
f won’t help him, or you, or the mission.”

  Andrew had forgotten his Captain was in the room.

  “I’m sorry, Captain,” Andrew said, resting and elbow on the table, and put his face in his hand. “I’m so sorry about Helen and Lilly. I’m so sorry I… killed your son.”

  “He wasn’t my son, Andrew.” Maxwell released the most grievous sigh Andrew had heard. “I think he may have been my nephew. Only the Admiral would know for certain.”

  “Your nephew,” Andrew repeated. Not that that made it any better. Andrew thought slowly through it. “Your brother, the one in prison?”

  “I think so. He raped several women before he was apprehended. This isn’t your fault, Andrew. I knew I recognized him on the first morning, in the mess hall. I should have seen then what I didn’t see until last night.”

  “You recognized your brother in him?”

  “No,” Maxwell said quietly. “I recognized his mother.”

  Silence passed for a while. The pain continued to claw at Andrew, reveling as it shredded his insides.

  “I’ll never be a captain,” Andrew said quietly. “I can kill enemies over the water, I can run a ship, but I can’t do this.”

  He heard Maxwell’s chair scrape, and his boots on the deck. Then Maxwell pulled out the chair beside Andrew and sat. Maxwell grabbed Andrew’s shoulder in a strong hand. No matter how many times he did that, Andrew was still caught off guard by the power in the man’s grip.

  “You think this is going to break you, Andrew, but it’s not. You think this makes you worthless, but it doesn’t. This pain you’re feeling inside, that is what makes you a captain. The ability to love your men, to lose them, to make terrible choices, to suffer for it, and still to carry on.”

  “And you will carry on,” Maxwell said flatly. “The world is going to need you long after I am gone, Commander Sharpe. Do not try to put your pain away. You will never know if what you did was right or not, but as long as you don’t fear that question, you will come to terms with it, and it will make you better. Forgiveness is for priests, and reasons are for scholars. We are men of the sea. Blood and water is all we have. Now get up and return to your duties, Commander Sharpe. The world needs you.”