With the Townsend at the bottom of the Gulf of California, George knew better. The water there was shallow. Maybe one day somebody would salvage her for scrap metal. Unless someone did, she’d never see the surface again. Neither would the men who’d died aboard her or who hadn’t been able to get off before she went down.
Sam Carsten knew better, too. The captain sometimes talked about how he’d been on the Remembrance when the Japanese sank her. That made George wonder if he’d seen the skipper in the Sandwich Islands.
It seemed logical, but he didn’t think so. The memory, if it was a memory, felt older than his stint there. When he thought of the skipper, he thought of Boston, and not of Boston the way it was now, either: not the Boston he’d occasionally come back to since joining the Navy. When he thought of Sam Carsten, he thought of his home town a long time ago, back in the days when he was a kid.
Sunshine flashing off the gilded dome of the State House, seen from across Boston Common…
When that came back to him, his mouth fell open in amazement. He felt like a man who’d just scratched an itch he’d thought he would never be able to reach. “Son of a bitch!” he said softly. “Son of a bitch!”
Then he wanted to tell the skipper about it. That would have been next to impossible on a battlewagon or an airplane carrier. For an able seaman to get an audience with the captain of a ship like that was like getting an audience with God. It shouldn’t have been that hard on the Josephus Daniels. Sam Carsten was only a two-striper, and a mustang to boot. He should have had-he probably did have-a soft spot for the men from whose ranks he’d risen.
He wasn’t the problem. His exec was. Lieutenant Myron Zwilling seemed convinced God Himself needed to stand in line to see the skipper. As for a mere rating…Well, in Zwilling’s mind the question hardly arose.
But there were ways around the executive officer. The skipper was a gunnery fanatic. He lavished most of his attention on the two four-inch guns that gave the Josephus Daniels what little long-range bite she had, but he didn’t forget the 40mm mounts, either.
Picking a time when Carsten seemed a bit less rushed than usual, George said, “Ask you something, sir?”
“What’s on your mind, Enos?” The captain of a bigger ship wouldn’t have known all his men by name, but Sam Carsten did.
“You’ve been in Boston a good many times, I expect,” George said.
“That’s a fact-I told you so once. Anybody who’s been in the Navy as long as I have, he says he hasn’t been in Boston a lot, he’s a damn liar,” Carsten replied.
“Yes, sir. Do you remember one time when you were out on the Boston Common and you went under a tree to get out of the sun?” George said. “There was a family having a picnic under there-a woman, and a boy, and a girl. This would have been-oh, some time around the start of the Twenties. I was ten, eleven, maybe twelve. Does that ring any kind of bell, sir?”
Sam Carsten’s face went far away as he thought back. “No,” he said, but then, “Wait a minute. Maybe. Damned if it doesn’t. Somebody said something about the Ericsson.” Because of what had happened to the destroyer at the end of the Great War, any Navy man who heard about it was likely to remember.
And, when the skipper remembered that, it brought everything flooding back to George. “I did!” he said. “I told you my father was on her.”
“There was a girl along with you, yeah,” Carsten said slowly. “She was younger than you, I think.”
“My sister Mary Jane,” George said.
Carsten shook his head in slow wonder. “Well, if that doesn’t prove it’s a small world, I’ll be damned if I know what would. I wanted to get under that tree so I wouldn’t burn, and your mother was nice enough to let me share it.”
He was almost as fair as a ghost; George had seen him blotched with zinc-oxide ointment several times, and it wasn’t much paler than his skin. No, he wouldn’t have liked summer sun in Boston, not one bit. And…“My mother was a nice person,” George said.
“Nice-looking, too. I remember that,” the skipper said. Would he have tried to pick her up if he’d met her without her children? Had he tried anyhow, in some way that went over the kids’ heads? If so, he’d had no luck. He eyed George. “You say was? I’m sorry if she’s not living any more.”
“She’s not.” That brought memories back, too, ones George would sooner have left submerged. “She took up with the writer who did the book about how she went and shot the Confederate submersible skipper. Bastard drank. They would fight and make up, you know? Except the last time, they didn’t. He shot her and then he shot himself.”
“Jesus!” the skipper said. “I’m sorry. That must have been hell.”
“It was…pretty bad, sir,” George said. “If he wanted to blow his own brains out, fine, but why did he have to go and do that to her, too?”
Carsten set a hand on his shoulder. “You look for answers to stuff like that, you go crazy. He did it because he went around the bend. What else can you say? If he didn’t go around the bend, he wouldn’t have done anything like that.”
“I guess so.” That wasn’t much different from the conclusion George had reached himself. It made for cold comfort. No-it made for no comfort at all. What he wanted was revenge, and he couldn’t have it. Ernie robbed him of it when he turned the gun on himself.
“Sure as hell, you were right about one thing-I did look familiar.” Sam Carsten tried to steer him away from his gloom. “I wouldn’t have known you in a million years, but you were just a kid then. Damned if I don’t recall that day on the Common, though. How about that?” He walked down the deck shaking his head.
“So you weren’t just blowing stack gas when you said you ran into the Old Man once upon a time,” Petty Officer Third Class Jorgenson said. He still had charge of the 40mm mount. “How about that?”
“Yeah, how about that?” George agreed. “I thought so, but I couldn’t pin it down till now.”
The crew for the gun spent as much time working together as they could. Because of casualties, just about everyone was in a new slot. Till they figured out how to do what they had little practice doing, they would be less efficient than the other gun crews. That could endanger the ship.
Because the skipper was a fiend for good gunnery, he encouraged them and kept their usual bosses from loading extra duty on them. Carsten wanted them to spend as much time at the gun as they could. They steadily got better. Fremont Dalby would have had some pungent things to say about their performance. Jorgenson did have pungent things to say about it. But they improved.
The Josephus Daniels went back to patrolling east of Newfoundland. The men who’d been in her for a while told stories of earlier adventures on that duty. If a quarter of what they said was true, she’d had some lively times. The limeys worked harder at smuggling arms into Canada than the USA did at smuggling them into Ireland. Canada and Newfoundland had a much longer coast than the smaller British isle, which gave the enemy more chances to slip through.
Navy Department doctrine was that stopping the arms smuggling would snuff out the Canadian rebellion. The sailors didn’t believe it. “What? The fucking Canucks can’t find any guns of their own? My ass!” Jorgenson said when the talk got around to the patrol.
Klaxons hooted. That killed a bull session. George and Jorgenson raced toward the bow. They got to their gun in a dead heat. The rest of the crew wasn’t more than a couple of steps behind them. “What’s going on?” asked the new shell-jerker, a big blond kid named Ekberg.