The sound of engines would then rise to a roar, as men blindly threw their helms over to get away. Then would come a great rip and tearing of metal and wood; and then silence. Into the silence a voice would speak: “A sailor’s pay. A sailor’s pay.”
Men reported the voice as unworldly, or as worldly as the voice of the sea. They then heard the diminishing struggle of men overboard.
“I’ll tell what my grandmother told,” the woman said. She smiled as if distracted. “The people of Maine have a reputation for being taciturn, but among themselves they chatter like jays.” She hesitated, and then made a whispered confession. “I never married. Old-fashioned, maybe, and partly superstitious. My father was insane, my mother no better.”
“If this is too difficult for you….”
“I never really knew them,” she reminded me, “but my grandmother was my best friend.”
Beyond the windows bright colors of automobiles contrasted with piled snow and sun-glazed streets. Tall buildings rose to cast dark shadows beside the busy docks.
“Maine used to resemble Alaska,” the woman said. “In Alaska people still know each other.”
She was right about that. There is still, in Alaska, the feeling that ‘we are all in this together’. When Alaskans meet in improbable places, say Indiana or Australia, they either know each other, or find that they have mutual friends. It’s a big state with a small population.
“This was an incident of war,” she told me. “Or, maybe it was an incident of youth. The sailor named Tommy came to visit my grandmother on two occasions. He knew my father. During the war they both sailed from this port. My father served aboard a freighter. Tommy sought forgiveness for my father’s death.”
Old memories stirred. At last there seemed to be some sense to all of this.
Her father, it developed, was one of the survivors from the torpedoing when Tommy followed that fateful order to drop depth charges. Her father was concussed, suffering what must have been awful brain damage. Her mother, who had a reputation for being fey, met his changed condition by sinking into a virulent brand of New England religion. She played the role of saint to his role of hapless sinner before an avenging God. It proved the wrong approach.
“I don’t forgive my father,” she said. “I don’t even excuse him. There is no excuse for murder.”
She was correct, of course. No one worth a dime resorts to murder, no matter how crazy he gets. Still, most murders come from situations and passions.
“Tommy believed himself doomed,” the woman told me. “He felt that fate pushed him into a world where he was forced to kill my father. The depth charges failed, and it was terrible for him to think that he was forced to kill a man after failing to kill him the first time.” She smiled, but the smile was small and tight. “Don’t be fooled. If the roles were reversed my father might have done the same thing, and reacted in the same way.”
The woman prepared to leave, returning to her everyday work and everyday life. “Try to think about the minds of the men,” she said. “And think about the sea, because the incident is only that, an incident.”
I saw that she did not know more than she told, but that she thought more than she would say.
“Darkness tries to kill light,” she murmured. “That is the business of darkness.” As I helped her into her coat she added: “Remember that all of you were very young. My father was twenty-five, and Tommy could have been little more.”
I thought of the immemorial voice of the sea as I sought to rent a boat. The sea speaks with the sounds of thunder, or it is susurrus, or it hisses, or it murmurs. It is nearly as ancient as the earth. The sea has swallowed men who have spoken a thousand different languages: it has taken into its restless maw Persians, Phoenicians, Romans, Spaniards and Englishmen.
And I thought of Maine and of Portland Harbor while checking the engine of a rented workboat, that, like myself, neared the end of its working life. A thousand vessels have died in these harsh waters, while on land people erected crosses facing the sea. Many of the graves of Maine are invested only by memories.
And I thought of youth, and of the great passions and inarticulateness of youth. I did not wonder why Tommy felt the need to strike out. It is clear that he was quiet because he was too young to mobilize words and alter his confusion. Little wonder he felt doomed.
And, as ice fog began to settle over the harbor around midnight, I thought of Wert. If the sea would not forgive Wert, if, in fact, the unforgiving sea had reached ashore for Wert by using a barnacled buoy, I could still understand. He had been a kid confronted by madness, and he had no experience with madness.
Finally, as I got underway, I thought of Case. He still stood in memory as the finest man I’ve known. I wondered if the memory were true.
The old boat ran smoothly enough. The gasoline engine puttered as I traced the starboard shoreline. Fog lay heavy above me, and tendrils of fog began to reach toward the surface of the restless and flowing water. The tide was running. Along the coast of Maine it will rise or drop seventeen feet during winter. I searched my memories, of Case smiling, teaching a young sailor how to bend lines, and of Case coaxing the roughness from an engine, as if the engine were a living thing.
Fog clustered on the rails and deck of the workboat. It froze in whitely glowing frost. Fog glazed the silent nuns which marked the channel. Small pieces of driftwood bobbed away from my low wake as I eased from the channel and toward the cliffs. After forty years it seemed a man would forget his local knowledge of rocks and current. Yet, I had total recall of the shoreline. I arrived at the scene of my worst memories.
When the small anchor held I cut the engine. Low sounds of moving water served as background for the muffled clank of a bell. In the far distance a ship’s horn hooted, and from the shore a police siren wailed faint through the frozen night. Fog covered the water so absolutely that no light from the city penetrated this dark corner. No living man could discover me here. No living man would want to.
Faint and close astern a gasoline engine puttered. It was unmistakably a lobster boat headed toward this anchorage where sheer cliff gave way to broken rock face.
Fear is an old friend. I have known fear in a thousand storms. I have heard fear, and felt it, when my vessel’s radio picked up the terrified voices of doomed men; men giving last Loran positions as their ship took its final dive. Fear always stands near those who go to sea. At first you learn to bear it, then, finding its true nature and depth, you befriend it.
Somewhere in that fog a ghostly forty footer was even now being directed across the channel by radar from a ghostly cutter, a ship by now mothballed or sold for scrap. Somewhere close astern a spectral lobsterman puttered across the restless face of moving waters.
The sound of Tommy’s diesels rose in the fog, as the sound of the lobsterman closed. The sounds converged, and it was then the lobster boat coasted past. It hugged the cliff.
Red light in the cabin, and red from the port running light, made a diabolic mask of the lobsterman’s face. The mask blazed as true madness, not insubstantial apparition. Both man and boat seemed solid as the deck beneath my feet. If anything, it was madness that was spectral.
But, then, I have also known madness at sea. I too, have wielded a knife, if only against a corpse.
The madman cut his engine to a low mutter, then turned to face me as the lobster boat slid past. Torment distorted that face, and it was torment I had never seen. I have seen men die, and seen them live when they wished to die. I have seen victims of hideous burns, and men flayed to pieces when lines or cables parted. Yet, this torment went deeper than physical pain. Forty years were as one hour to this man who had just killed his wife. His face twisted with guilt, and I looked at a man doomed to the perpetual retelling of his story. The face rose from the depths of certain, Puritan hell.