"What did you do in civilian life?" Doctor Claremont asked Williams one day, as if seeing him for the first time. When Williams said that he had been an English instructor Doctor Claremont seemed startled, as if Williams had unexpectedly assumed an identity for him. After that they talked now and again about reading; Williams felt an enormous sense of relief at having broken through, so to speak, to Doctor Claremont. If he could establish some sort of reasonable rapport with him, if Doctor Claremont was, indeed, going to rise to his position, then everything might be changed. At such moments his quandary about Bullitt, below in his bunk, seemed less acute.
And so the days passed. When the smoking lamp was lighted, the off-duty crew members would sit on the fantail and carry on their own seemingly desultory conversations. They talked about the liberty they would have in Norfolk. They talked about the future. "After the war" was a phrase that came often into their conversation. But, pointedly, there was no discussion of the war itself. It lay almost immediately ahead of them now, and they were trained but —most of them —untried. They still had a while to wait, and in the meantime it was best to avoid any discussion of the war if they possibly could. They were rather in the position of a boxer before a match, high-keyed and high-strung, with a nervous tension that would not be dispelled until the signal for battle had sounded.
But first, before Norfolk, they were to stop at the ammunition depot at Swamp Creek to replenish the ammunition they had expended during their practice maneuvers.
The installation at Swamp Creek lay south of Norfolk, in an isolated location as chillingly bleak and dismal as its name sounded. The ammunition depot had been placed there so that in case of enemy bombing or any natural disaster an explosion would not wreak havoc on a community. Herons and cranes stood like sentinels in the reeds of the dredged creek. Out of the brackish water rose ghostly trees, many of them dead, smothered by the Spanish moss which their bleached branches had harbored. The silence of the swamp was broken only by the distant cawing of crows and, as the Ajax moved slowly up the channel, water snakes darted back into the reeds.
It was early morning. Muster had been held on deck under a gray and windless sky, breakfast had been eaten and the watch changed, and now the free members of the crew, Williams among them, stood at the rail. There was always an atmosphere of tension on board ship on the day ammunition was loaded. The men were silent; they smoked a last cigarette, knowing that smoking would be forbidden when they reached the dock.
During the loading of ammunition all hands would turn to, to finish the job as quickly as possible. With McNulty on the dock. Lieutenant Palazzo and Chief Kronsky directing operations on deck, human chains would be formed to pass the ammunition on board, to stock the handling and storage rooms. Only Williams would slip away. A pharmacist's mate was not permitted to take a place in the chain of ammunition handlers; and so, because he did not wish to call attention to his special status unduly, Williams would leave the rail when the ship approached the dock.
It was always a pleasure to watch the proficiency with which McNulty and his boys dropped the hempen fenders and handled the lines on docking; Williams liked the expectation of that moment when across the narrowing strip of water between ship and dock, swirling from the stern, the mooring line was cast to a waiting seaman on the dock. The deck crew of the Ajax were proud of Captain Thompson's skill in bringing the ship alongside a dock. This was the mark of a good skipper. The paint of the Ajax had never been marked by pilings; no dock had ever groaned against its weight; the ship was eased alongside in a manner which gave meaning to that word, and Captain Thompson's skill in directing the crew evoked a responsive skill in themselves.
But today Williams denied himself this pleasure. He went to the sick bay, oppressed with an expectation of a very different kind, which had been growing in him during the uneventful days of their journey back. What if orders did not wait for Bullitt? Somewhere, he realized, he had crossed a line in his feelings about the chief, possibly on that night ashore in Cuba, or at that moment when he had brought him back to the Ajax, soddenly drunk, in the small boat. It had taken him some time to acknowledge it to himself, but he had rejected Bullitt, he had turned his back on him completely. He could no longer accept him on any terms at all, and the thought of going into action with him, under him, was intolerable. But, in the meanwhile, until he learned whether or not orders actually did wait for Bullitt, he must try to occupy himself.
Doctor Claremont was in the sick bay before him. From outside they could hear the sound of the gangway being lowered into place; they heard the feet of the men on deck, the trucks wheeling into place on the dock with ammunition, the voices of Lieutenant Palazzo and Chief Kronsky, calling to or answering McNulty on the dock.
At last all settled into order, and the unique silence, which was the special atmosphere of this operation, descended over the ship, for during the loading of ammunition even the customary joking and horseplay were suspended.
The shells for the twenty- and forty-millimeter guns came in magazines; the five-inch shells were handled separately, passed from hand to hand up the gangway and along the deck and stacked at the base of the gun mounts. From there they could be passed inside through the access door and down to the handling rooms below.
When a considerable number of shells had been placed at the base of the number-three-gun mount, aft of the torpedo tubes and the sick bay. Lieutenant Palazzo selected at random a working party to pass the shells inside. Kerensky and two gunner's mate strikers were inside the mount; Harris and Stud Clancy were on deck. But had Doctor Claremont or Williams been there, he would have been horrified to see who had been chosen as the other member of the working party, and where he had placed himself: for Pawling stood outside the access door of the gun mount, to pass the shells inside. Or had even McNulty been on board, he would certainly have seen to it in some way that his boy. Stud, was not subjected to being a part of the same working party with Pawling, whose unseamanlike ways were such an affront to him; he might even have remembered Pawling's hand, and the injury, which presumably did not, in Pawling's mind, constitute a hazard. But Lieutenant Palazzo, for whom the personalities and weaknesses and conflicts of the crew did not exist, had chosen the members of the working party, and they had no choice but to obey.
It is almost impossible to detonate a five-inch shell merely by dropping it. It must be imperfect in its mechanism to begin with, and, even so, it must be dropped in precisely a certain way; but the comedy of errors which was Pawling's life had reserved for itself a tragic climax. As he stood at the access door, grasping a shell with his faulty hand, it slipped and fell to the deck. Instantly the tension, the silence, the dreamlike quality of the gray and windless day were shattered by an echoing roar.
Afterward, Williams could remember little in detailed sequence from the confusion of the scene that met him when he and Doctor Claremont reached the deck. In the shocked silence that followed the explosion, one voice rang out. It was Kerensky, standing inside the door of the gun mount. "Oh, my God," he said. "Pawling let it fall." Then there was a quick disorder of running, the sound of sirens from the shore station as the ambulance came, the stench of hot metal and burned flesh, the cries of anguish and the calls of command. Lieutenant Palazzo lay dead on the deck, unrecognizably mutilated; Pawling was dead; Butler, who had been passing nearby, had been hit by shrapnel; Harris had his right leg torn away; and Stud Clancy lay in his own blood, hideously wounded in the stomach.