“…B-race…”
“Get crackin’.”
Dane, knowing on the brute level of the sea that there is desperately much to learn and that summer is short, pressed Brace to the limit. He cursed, scorned, saved back filthy and bone-cracking jobs.
Amazed Dane. Stupefied Dane. Electric over ignorance. Crude even among sailors, and like all sailors—as with other cynical forms of life—possessed of rough compassion.
“If you ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever a-bloody-gin step inside a line I will have your rotting guts for neckties…,” for, if Brace did step between line and rail, the sea would do the tearing.
Perturbed Dane. Red-faced. Melancholy—for at the end of three weeks it became clear that this young one was aboard to stay. If he was sometimes surly, he was also quiet and hard-working. The crew began to trust his beginner’s job. The crew’s acceptance meant that the old man would keep Brace. Captain Levere, mustang, kept his men. Since it was foolish to expect sense from the District, the crew assumed that to the south in the bustling offices which represented official mercy at sea, Levere commanded respect.
Seaman Glass took apprentice seaman Brace ashore and got him drunk on dime glasses of beer. It was a great success, and the next day Dane lovingly put Brace and his throbbing head to chipping paint on the bow; blazing sun heating the steel deck like a blowtorch.
“He don’t respond to girls,” Glass worried.
“…your kind of girls.” Because of his tour of duty in the Far East, Lamp lived easily beside the oriental convictions of his steward, Amon; assuming that Amon had convictions, but Lamp worried over Jewishness and circumcision. Lamp cruelly rejected Glass’s concern and supposed privately to yeoman Howard that Glass’s pursuit of Portland bar girls had overtones of the occult, of dark deeds.
Yeoman Howard, dark, glandular and slim, who pursued constantly and with average success, once more mentioned to Lamp that he, Howard, already had a mother. Lamp clucked and fussed and mentioned to yeoman Howard that there would be a day of reckoning.
But then, Lamp clucked over all of them, those hard-ridden men who blinked in the summer sun and gradually returned to life and vigor. Except for Jensen who of course remained dead.
Chapter 3
He had not been a fool, this dead man who would shortly become the nemesis of Ernie Brace. Jensen was an idealist with occasional poor judgment, and now he was a drowned idealist. In that past winter of treacherous seas there were occasional days of alarming calm. Downeasters know such days, when the North Atlantic seems gathering its forces to crack holes in the planet.
“Crazy?” In later days at the Base it would always be a young voice asking that. Only the young needed to ask.
“No,” Lamp would say, and always he was serious. “Jensen was motivated. Very much. Also religious and good.” By the time Lamp would tell the tale in its hundredth version, the figure of Cecil Jensen acquired the stature of major saint on Lamp’s calendar.
“Poor judgment?”
“He might have made it.”
That was true. At the time no one doubted that he would make it, and Jensen (who was not religious, but who may have been good) most likely died while losing a bet with himself.
A day of calm saw him under. Those calms are, in their way, as treacherous as ice on superstructure. In some men they bring out the underlying romance, for seaman cynics are secretly romantic; believing the tradition of “you have to go out, you don’t have to come back”… and let us say—for a chance—that the tradition is not a myth, but true.
Let us suppose that the weight of belief makes that awful proposition real and—although it will not here be held—that when the earth was railed by horizon, and flat to seamen’s perceptions, that their belief made it flat—but in matters of the abstract. Well, then; true, no doubt, and if old men still believe the proposition, perhaps that is only because it is easy to believe from the depths of a comfortable chair.
Still, in some minds there is a difference between life and property. Jensen carried a submersible pump aboard Adrian’s ancient acquaintance, the fishing vessel Louise, on the day it sprang the last of its legendary leaks.
Adrian received the distress call while homeward bound from Rockland during one of those weeks God makes for drownings. Souls of the coast would remember that week as the week of the Redstart.
It was a terrible storm. Fishermen, lighthouse tenders, seamen and fishermen’s wives from Newfoundland to Boston hovered helpless and voiceless and tense, with radio transmitters idle in their hands, as a nearly laconic voice from Redstart gave its last loran readings and was cut off in midsentence. Somewhere a cartographer placed a small red x on a chart. Cutter Abner beat a hopeless box search, struggling to stay alive, scaling the waves like a small white toy indifferently tossed into a riptide. On the coast, nine more crosses were planted along the cliffs, bearing the world’s most lonely legend.
The storm was abating as cutter Adrian cleared the Rockland jetty. Enough weather remained to supply a sleigh ride. Rockland fell below the horizon at noon on a day when the gray light was absorbed into the gray sea so that only white spume blown from the tops of waves suggested the seam between wind and water. The voice from Redstart still echoed in the ears of the bridge gang. The trawler Mary Rose was now safe in Rockland, but it was little comfort that one crew was drying its socks while another crew was under.
Adrian skidded before a quartering sea, the steep swells piling and breaking with a rush on the fantail. The superstructure began to ice. Stanchions bulged with rime like stubby posts, and chains stretched between them as thick as dismembered arms linked in futility against the sea. The covered winch swelled with ice, bulking in the stern like a great dog huddled against the wind. Cold smoked from the sea, as if the waves were dry ice. It circulated through the ship and stretched even through the grates of the fiddley and into the engine room. Portside hatches were lashed partly open so that ice would not immobilize them.
Lamp fretted, made coffee and hot sandwiches, muttered either prayers or spells. The crew cursed with fatigue… a comfortable cursing because they knew the ship and this was not desperate weather. On the bridge Levere stood like a slumped, hawk-faced monument. He stood watch on watch as his ship added weight. Adrian had no steam hoses, but it had fire axes and hammers. As the storm blew itself out, the crew hacked ice. Then the radio popped, crackled, and through the heavy static the heavier voice of terror from the Louise. Adrian put the helm to port and headed into the sea.
That Louise was an abomination. It was a crate, a bucket, a ragtag of rust and frayed cable and wine dregs in the hold that could pickle an ocean or a wilderness or a nation of cod. From Gloucester to Portland it was scorned, sneered at, called the “Stinky Louise.” Adrian had towed it three times in eighteen months. The thick-liquored voice of terror on the radio belonged to its Portuguese skipper who should have been in prison—and would have been had he not fled New Bedford. What crimes he committed ashore were not a seagoing concern. His crime against the Louise was astounding, for in three years he had taken a competent trawler and turned it into a rusting arcade of junk.