Men stopped work. Waited. Whispered and chuckled. On the boat deck, one of the seamen bounced on his heels like an ape, rolled his eyes to heaven, gurgled a poor imitation of a death rattle. Brace stood confused and unsuspecting. Dane approached as surely as the tide.
He was toadlike with rheumatism, Dane, and he stood in that crew like a minor god when the sun shone, like Jehovah, Itself, during gale. In this crucial matter of saving life and property at sea, it was known that when the wind blew black from the northeast, Dane’s rheumatism went before it. In the winter just past, a frozen and nearly whipped deck gang had watched Dane balance on a pitching rail and put a heaving line accurately into the teeth of a forty-knot blow. He was hated by some, respected by all, and he was secretly loved—as those who are unreligious may still think kindly of the Madonna.
Water slapped the pier. Gulls squawked. Brace reported.
“Another tailwagger.” Dane reached for the thin service record which was as stiff and new between its covers as Brace’s seabag. Dane fanned himself with the record and puffed. He stood erect for a moment, then slumped back to the demands of rheumatism. He was a blockish sort. A troll. Short and heavy with thin lips, thick forearms, thick waist. He sniffed as if he sensed the presence of a garbage scow. He seemed to be listening to the gulls and the silence about the decks.
“Where you from, puppy?”
Brace admitted that he hailed from southern Illinois. Timid. Tremulous. A low voice from a boy who seemed unsure whether he was under attack. Wonderment crossed his smooth face. He was pained like a newsboy who is refused payment because his journal carries wrong-headed editorials.
Dane gazed with scorn. He managed to say with his manner that he had always expected somewhat more of southern Illinois. The broad, thin-lipped toad mouth was flat with disapproval. His hunched shoulders flexed. Threatening. One hand held the service record, the other flicked horny-handed to make dents in the new covers. His thick shoulders hunched and his hands seemed scarcely restrained from tearing Brace to fragments. On the boat deck a man sniggered.
Brace stepped backward, bumped the gangway with his foot, stumbled.
“Stand,” Dane told him. “Stay… sit… roll over… play dead.”
“Sir?”
“Jump through hoops… waggle your butt… say sir to officers but not to your betters… slather… chase your tail ’til you rupture… and shed those raggedy blues and get into dungarees.”
Brace moved to pick up his seabag.
“Stand. Did I say pick that up—no—I-did-not-say-pick-that-up…,” and the harangue began. Did Brace have a mother? Was she proud? Why? A father? How could Brace be sure? A woman? Mona? What kind of a cornfield name was Mona? Dane warmed to his task and Brace, slow to understand, became monosyllabic and shocked.
No doubt it was the sun. The sun warmed Dane’s rheumatism, and he rose joyfully to intimidation that appalled all of his previous efforts in that line. He swarmed over Brace. His words were as hot as fire in a cargo of raw sulphur. This god-blessed blankety son of a plowshare and a mule… his voice rose, ran the scale of sound and pitch and volume. His face became red and apoplectic. Across the pier, the crew on the cutter Abner stopped work and listened and whooped to encourage his raving. Dane fumed, fizzled, spat, walked heavenward through curses, while Brace first became red with anger and then redder with shame as the whoops from Abner centered on him like a spotlight. Dane moved easily through a cloud of metaphor and returned to the basics of Brace’s high school locker room. Brace turned from fear and anger to fury. His face was white.
It was the result Dane wanted. It made him pleased. He stopped midsentence, looked at the pale, tense face and trembling hands that were not able to stay unclenched. Brace was within two seconds of forgetting the consequences of attempting murder. Dane smiled, and it was a smile like a grandfather bequeathing his gold watch to an ambitious posterity.
“You pass,” Dane said. “And welcome aboard.”
He turned from Brace to display the back of his neck as he bent forward to rub his knee. He hollered for Glass, seaman, and Glass tumbled down the ladder from the bridge in a panting, red-faced, hysteric scramble; as if doom had just cracked and he had a few things to attend to before the end of the world. From the boat deck came the sound of someone choking with laughter, while another man beat fists helplessly against a rolled canvas in an agony of entertainment. Glass skidded to a stop, wild-eyed, saw that the play was ended and resumed his composure. Glass was a tall, teacherly-looking Jew from the Boston slums who read detective stories and dreamed of being a professional criminal.
“It’s the way we do it here,” Glass said to Brace. “You can get used to almost anything,” and he led the trembling Brace below decks like a nurse leading a patient who suffers from tottering old age.
Chapter 2
“Boys, boys…” in later years, when he ran the mess at the South Portland Base, the cook, Reeser Lamp, would claim that he was the first man to see Brace come aboard; and he would believe it. Lamp claimed the credit as he would claim every other minor miracle during those years when he cooked aboard the cutter Adrian.
Lamp was a man with a propensity for miracles. On the most tedious day, he would still feel charged to understand every opaque reasoning of divinity. Nothing happened that was without meaning—if only a body could figure the meaning—and Reeser Lamp was the man with the answers. He would have made an annoying preacher or a successful spiritualist. After a lifetime spent musing on the fortunate aspects of his birth, he has now had a chance to test the final miracle. He was a good cook.
In Lamp’s memory, Brace arrived on a day loaded with mixed portents. The summer with its clear and unoppressive light made the Gulf of Maine a sort of giant pond where yachtsmen flourished and lobstermen went about with their usual grumbles. Trawlers bearing the names of saints and wives and other martyrs churned beside Portland Head and the lightship. Their business was cod and their office was Georges Bank. From the moorings in South Portland it was possible to distinguish several of the thousands of islands on that rocky coast. The buoy yard smelled of barnacles and kelp and red lead: the nun buoys lay in red and black rows like components of artillery, and the lighted bells and whistles lay on tubby, slanted bases, immobile and silent like abandoned buildings. It was an easy day, and summer is a routine time for cutters assigned to search and rescue. Adrian and its twin, Abner, were moored at the pier like tired laborers slumbering.
Still, in Lamp’s imagination (packed as it was with as many signs and symbols as a flag locker), there was something peculiar about the appearance of Ernie Brace on an easy day in sunlight. In those later years, cooking at the Base, Lamp would interrupt his interminable reminiscence of a tour of duty in the Far East to draw one more moral from the advent of Brace.
“Boys,” he would say, “Boys, boys…,” and shake his red-blond-haired head that was small above his great belly and heavy shanks. “Be double-dog-damn if I knew what I was feeling. Only somehow the luck was backward.” A tawny, lionlike head; but small, like a cat’s head placed over the girth of an aging rhinoceros.