Williams had been sent running back to the sick bay for the first-aid bag, both he and Doctor Claremont forgetting, in their inexperience, the first-aid box fixed to the outside of the gun mount, and when he returned McNulty had rushed on board from the dock. He held Stud in his arms like a child, cradling his head in the curve of his shoulder, while with his other hand he tried vainly to hold together the gaping stomach wound. "Oh, hold on, boy," McNulty was saying. His voice was grating and raw with the passion of his grief. Stud Clancy lay in his arms without expression, looking up into McNulty's face with his blue eyes faded to a lighter blue by the sun, searching McNulty's face as a child might search the face of his mother, looking there for the recognition of his being. "It hurts, Boats," he said. His voice was light and clear; the words hung in the air like an echo.
Bullitt was there then; he was applying a tourniquet to the stump of Harris's severed leg. Williams helped Doctor Claremont with Butler. And McNulty stayed with Stud Clancy, for whom nothing could be done. "Oh, hold on, boy," he said. "Oh, God, please hold on."
"I didn't never tell you neither, Boats," Stud said, still in the same voice, light and clear, still searching the face of McNulty with his faded, fading eyes. "I didn't never tell you neither how much I loved you. I wanted to be a man like you." And then his head fell to one side, and he died, and McNulty, with a hoarse, choked cry, pressed his head to his chest.
The men from the base were on board —the bearers with their stretchers, the station-based doctor. They took Harris to the ambulance waiting on the dock, and Butler after that, his flesh wounds bound. The dead did not have to leave with such haste. The body of Pawling was placed on one stretcher, the remains of Lieutenant Palazzo on another, covered with a blanket, and the dead Stud Clancy was taken from McNulty's arms.
It was when he saw Stud's body placed on the stretcher that Williams lost his control. He was a man who despised willful violence. He had rarely lost his temper in his maturity, but now a consuming rage swept through him like a fire burning long suppressed, and, bursting forth, it blinded him, cutting off the calm, inner voice of his rational intelligence. Scarcely conscious of what he was doing, he threw himself at Bullitt. Grasping him by either shoulder, he began to shake him, not as one would shake a child, but as if for added emphasis to his words, to jolt him into hearing. "You killed them!" he shouted. "It was Pawling's hand! You killed them!" And throwing Bullitt from him, he began to hit him in the face with his right fist and his left fist, again and again, as if by his violence he could relieve himself of his own secret feeling of shared guilt; as if by destroying Bullitt he could still the voice of conscience within himself.
When hands from behind held Williams and pulled him back, Bullitt, trancelike, turned and walked away. He wore a blank, stunned look, and the men parted in silence to let him pass. Williams, freed from restraint, went for a moment to the rail, under watching eyes. He could see nothing, and his mind was so filled with confusion that his reason had temporarily deserted him. In a moment he went to the sick bay. Like an automaton, he filled a pail with water from the tap at the sink. He picked up a scrub brush, and then he went back to the deck; he got down on his knees and began to wash away the blood.
Chapter 10
SHORTLY before dusk of the same day, the Ajax made its way to the dock assigned to it at Norfolk. A funereal hush hung over the ship. When they had secured, Captain Thompson summoned to a conference in his cabin Lieutenant Commander Gould —his executive officer, — Doctor Claremont, Chief Kronsky and Yeoman Sullivan. There were many sad and inevitable complications ahead. A report would have to be prepared. There would be an investigation. The godlike position of authority enjoyed, or occupied, by the captain of a ship exacts its own conditions. Full responsibility for any untoward event that happens on board must be borne by the captain alone, and Captain Thompson was deeply depressed and distressed. Not only did he mourn the death of his first lieutenant and his crewmen; he was also gravely troubled and saddened by the blot on the record of his ship, the ineradicable stain. He was not a superstitious man, except in the ways that all seamen are superstitious, but the accident seemed to him an ill omen, a presage of misfortune to come.
Captain Thompson was accustomed to thinking in the traditional terms of his calling, and in his mind now he was saying that his "team" had been broken up. The men would have to be replaced, and just when he had begun to feel that they were on their way to becoming a good fighting ship. Lieutenant Palazzo, for example, had his limitations, as all men did, but he had been a good first lieutenant and gunnery officer, and on the eve of action this key position would not be so easy to fill with a strange officer, no matter how competent he was. Harris and Pawling had been, for all practical purposes, almost supernumerary members of the crew, but Butler had been a fair cook, and Stud Clancy's loss was far greater than might seem apparent from his role, for by his very nature he had been a symbol to the crew of what a good young sailor could and should be. The door of the captain's cabin was closed for a long and silent time on the gravity of the meeting behind it.
Williams went numbly ahead with the task of gathering together the personal belongings of the departed men. He asked Brown to assist him, the new, reformed Stewart Brown, whose quality of responsibility, which had brought him to the attention of the captain in the first place, had finally won out over his vanity. Together, in silence, they went to the storeroom below, where the hammocks and empty sea bags of the men were kept, and found, from the names stenciled on the canvas, those they were looking for. In the crew's quarters they emptied the contents of the lockers of Harris, Pawling, Clancy and Butler onto their bunks. Then, as Williams checked against the official printed list, Brown packed the bags.
There was a certain precedent, learned from experience, in doing this. The dress shoes and rolled blues went in first, the undress whites on top of that, the skivvie shirts, underpants, socks and handkerchiefs next, and the folded peacoat and flat hat on top. More intimate possessions —letters, photographs, toilet articles, souvenirs — were tucked here and there wherever they would fit (The unopened letter from Stud Clancy's mother was put into the front of his copy of The Bluejackets' Manual, where he had written on the flyleaf, in his irregular, boyish hand, "Timothy Clancy, Apprentice Seaman. His book.")
When the drawstring of the sea bag was pulled shut and tied, the knot was secured with the lock from the door of the man's locker. When this had been done, the man's hammock was stretched out on the deck. His mattress pad and blankets were placed on that, the sea bag on top, and the whole rolled up and secured tightly by the clews of the hammock. These bundles would be sent to the hospital. The possessions of Harris and Butler would find their way to them where they were, while the sea bags of Pawling and Clancy would eventually be shipped back to their homes, preceded by that dread official form which began: The personal possessions of your deceased (blank to be filled in with either husband or son) have been shipped to you.
Williams and Brown worked at this task while the Ajax made its way from Swamp Creek to Norfolk, and when they had finished they carried the bundles up to the quarter-deck. When Williams took the lists into the sick bay, Doctor Claremont was there, alone, closing out the health records of the men who had been removed. He, too, needed to keep busy. He did not want to think of Lieutenant Palazzo, but seeing the lists he was reminded that he would have to perform this same last ritual for his friend.