The Jonah Watch

Chapter 13

Mist that carried its own gray chill blanketed October as it covered the lengthening nights, and shrouded and cloaked the mornings. From across the harbor in Portland, a faint glow occasionally reached toward the man on watch as he stared into the cold blanket of night, and the glow which should have seemed warm, was like phosphorescence. The mist played at becoming fog, made atmospheric transubstantiations, rolled in the center of the harbor even when the land was for a few hours free. The fog looked like a band of dark gray gauze, and it hovered low over the channel so that men on watch during the day occasionally saw a masthead floating above the fog, disconnected, as if it had been freed by an axe of medieval justice. The mist swelled from the mudflats at dusk and moved upward about the broken Hester C. The hulk sat in a cauldron of mist. The mist seemed trying to grasp and lift the thing to a steady keel and to a spirit’s float through the wet gray muff of air that pocketed ships and warmed only by contrast, as men hastened their chores on deck and ducked back through hurriedly undogged hatches into the warmth of the ship. As cold daylight gave over to colder night, the mist turned into ice fog so that about the decks slicks appeared in patches. Ladders from decks to bridges were rimed with ice by their separated exposure. The ice lay in the cleats of ladders like an extra coat of paint. In other pockets of cold the mist accumulated, formed drops larger than tears but smaller than eyes. The drops froze into frosty white pebbles like seed pearls and men flicked them from the rails and chains with forefingers, as though they were shooting a game of marbles with the fog.

Cutter Abner received a proceed-and-assist to aid the venerable fishing vessel Enoch, and Abner’s stern melted whitely into the gray, liquefying mist like an old pilgrim accustomed to his treacherous path. Adrian received a proceed-and-assist on Tinker Bell and found it drifting in the veil of mist with sails still set and stiff with ice, as the mist, unimpressed by the frivolity of names, clustered in a nimbus about Tinker Bell’s running lights while an hysterical yachtsman, his hysterical crew, and his voluptuous and also hysterical companion yelled, hollered, bawled, and pledged fealty, ever after, to the sanctuary of Florida’s waters.

Cutter Abner received a proceed-and-assist to carry a mechanic and repair parts to the coastal tanker Asteroid. Abner delivered, and then stood by during the hours of repair. Abner hovered on the gray sea in a light swell, forefoot meeting the rise of water with the deliberately stepping piety of an old desert father among dunes. Adrian received a proceed-and-assist on fishing vessel Ephraim, then, lengthening the tow while men stood at the rail with a stretcher, picked up a heart attack victim from Orrs Island as Adrian returned to harbor. The heart attack man was old, pale and afraid. His face was gaunt and exact and unconfused with his fear. Beneath the red lights of the wardroom, his face was as certain as an icon—although he gasped. Howard did not know what to do for him, and Snow did not know, either; but, when the heart attack man was taken away in an ambulance at the South Portland pier, he was still alive. Howard and Snow breathed more fully, resolved to find out if somewhere there was a book that discussed hearts; and the rest of Adrian’s crew breathed more fully as well.

“It’s a good sign,” Lamp confided to Howard and Racca. “The signs are all mixed, but that’s a good one.”

“You’re mixed, cook,” said Racca. “The only signs I believe in are beer signs.”

“It’s the weather,” Lamp said to Howard. Lamp tossed his head in a sniffy way that dismissed the rude Racca. “All this fog. There should be more wind. By now it should be howlin’.”

“We ought to be getting more wind,” Howard admitted, “but what’s the big deal about fog?”

“I ain’t a kid,” said Lamp. “I knew a guy did duty on the Bear.”

“Sure you did, an’ I knew Big Foot Tilton.”

“Those old-timers knew fog. There’s bad things happen in fog.”

“There’s bad things happen in bars.”

“Puget Sound weather.”

“I never been west of Peoria,” Racca said with malicious contentment. “I don’t even believe in the Mississippi River.”

Cutter Aaron of Boston laid line aboard the fishing vessel Lydia. Cutter Amos of Portsmouth caught a double, towing the Patty L. and the Joy. The lousy cutter Able, of New Bedford, searched for two boys in a dory that had been carried away by the tide. Able sent breathless, flank speed reports for sixty hours until one of the boys was picked up by trawler Victoria twenty miles from Able’s search pattern.

“Kids. A kid.”

“I hate that box.”

“You hate that box? I’m from Massachusetts where we really know how to hate.” Glass, that easy admirer of grand theft, stood in white-faced and speechless helplessness.

In the third week of October, the mist seemed to exert itself in a great piling-on that saturated the air, so that on deck men felt drops and splatters on faces and jackets as the mist spilled in pats of nearly frozen water. The decks were wicked with thin ice. The very sky demonstrated that only so much water could be held in solution with air, and the drops were not rain, but spilled and overflowing mist.

Adrian, groping dead slow among the islands, searched for the overdue lobsterman Hattie, reversed course and moved on whistle, bell, and local knowledge to check a radar contact a hundred yards astern. The contact was a gallon can that had once held dry milk. As Adrian put back around, yells and a thin whistle sounded from the fog where Hattie rode the pick at two hundred yards and made no image on the radar. The fog muffled the radar, and even the islands did not always give a hard contact. The radar was capricious, unworthy, and men stood in the bow and peered into fog and listened above the slow-breaking whisper of the bow wave. At night in fog, a man could not see beyond his eyelids. Conally swore that he was growing a third ear.

“Like the belly of a whale.”

“Blacked out like a raided cathouse.”

“It’d confuse a cat, boys. Even a ship’s cat.”

“Ship’s cat is just an ordinary cat, cook. They ain’t no cat comes with a label saying this’n is a ship’s cat.”

“You don’t know cats,” Lamp said. “If you don’t know a blamed thing about cats, what do you know?”

“Cook’s right,” said Fallon. “I saw a ordinary cat jump off a fishing boat once. Went aboard for the smell, the boat got underway. Cat committed suicide.”

Adrian groped through October. Men began to swear that even wind was better than the continuing, unnatural fog. Brace was as obscure as the weather. Like Amon before him, Brace spent long days in the midst of the crew’s off-time banter. Like Amon, he walked through that center but found himself always on the periphery. He was segregated by his task, remote, isolated from ship’s routine by the dull round of his soap-slopping job. His work began at 0500 and was constant and dull and filled with Lamp’s chatter and with messdeck gossip until 1900. He lived through a banal succession of days in which he heard about fog and mist, but saw it only when he took coffee to the bridge, or when he dumped garbage and washed the cans. He alternated cook’s watch with Lamp, who was religious about supplying watchstander coffee and sandwiches at sea. Brace bore the tedium, and he always looked a bit soapy, a trifle too well washed. He was moody, subject to carping complaint and short-tempered whimsy. Lamp alternately rode him and appeased him.

“It’s tough for a white man,” Lamp told Howard. “But he could be doing lots worse.”

Howard, who was vaguely democratic, wondered to Lamp if it was not tough for a dark man.

“It’s a chicken job,” Lamp said. “Most white guys have big ideas.”

“Amon didn’t?” Howard asked, then wished he had not.

“Amon had ideas. He just had different ideas.” Lamp seemed momentarily withdrawn into private and raw pain. Then he shrugged to dissolve the past. In sporadic, interrupted conversation during the two days it took to find and tow Hattie, Lamp stated his theory of origins. The liberal Howard nodded his head, thought of immense matters, and did not listen at all. Howard was watching Conally, was testing himself, and was wondering if both of them were not mad.

The Indian Conally came from bow watch on the first day of the search for Hattie. He drew coffee, sat on the messdeck, and he looked like an upright burial. Conally seemed to be listening to the faraway whistle of Adrian that echoed from forward like a vibration instead of a sound. Dane tromped to the messdeck. Adrian rode on an even keel over flat, inshore water as it poked about the islands while the bridge gang peered into the radar and mistrusted the rapid, busy clicking of the fathometer. Under conditions of smooth water, ship’s work could be done. Dane tipped his chief’s hat to the back of his head. He flipped mist from his upper lip with the back of his hand, rubbed at his nose with passing enjoyment. Dane stood as squat and certain as a hymn book. Conally sat like a parable.

“You sprain another ankle?”

“No.”

“Messin’ with that Peak’s Island girl?”

“I ain’t caught nothin’.” Conally’s black hair was double-colored with black. Where his watch cap had covered, the dry and stringy hair seemed nearly dull. Where the watch cap did not cover, his hair was glossy and slick with mist.

“If you ain’t got a busted leg, and you ain’t got a dose, then why are you loafin’?” Dane was a man for whom all things were certain. He no more expected moodiness from Conally than he expected a hippopotamus to come strolling across the messdeck.

Conally sipped at the coffee instead of slurping. He did not stand, and he did not move, and he did not give the impression that he was in any hurry to do either. “Caught a chill.” The lie was so clumsy that even Conally did not buy it. Adrian’s whistle vibrated from forward. Conally flushed, high color on his cheeks that denied the rest of his dark face which seemed washed and sick and untribal.

“Old ladies get chills. Poodles get chills.”

“I ain’t a poodle, and not an old lady. Give it a rest.”

Dane, stunned by rebellion from his star bosun, gasped like he had been hit with a dead fish. Then his eyes became squinty and he recognized that Conally really did look unnerved. Dane seemed ready to sit beside Conally, question him. It was not Dane’s nature. Dane grumped. He looked like a troll. “When you get done enjoyin’ your chill, set the gang to cleanup forward.” Dane turned, began to move away, turned back. “I’ll be on the bridge.” It was large sympathy cloaked in small words, and it was the best that Dane could do.

Four hours later Howard returned from bow watch to the messdeck, drew coffee, sipped instead of slurping, and watched his hand tremble so that the heavy mug made a delicate tattoo, a chatter, against his teeth. In the galley Lamp told a long story about the hard-luck icebreaker Eastwind. Brace sat at a messdeck table trying out baseball grips on an onion. He gave dull responses of reluctant admiration on the subject of icebreakers. Wysczknowski laid out a hand of solitaire. From forward the whistle vibrated.

A man who sits and counts pennies in a YMCA room on Saturday night is not as lonely as a man standing watch in mist. Voices of horns, sirens and surf are remote because of the mist. Sounds are velvetly enclosed, obstructed. The ears feel plugged with velvet. Experienced men open their mouths to gather sound, and suffer mist on their tongues, feel absurd with jaws a-dangle, feel vulnerable in their throats as if soft and small and rancid creatures are flying in the mist searching to make a cold nest. The ship’s whistle, making fog signals, intermittently squalls like a prehistoric animal. To say that a man is shrouded is to suggest the easy comfort of the grave, where, after all, there are no questions. In mist the questions assail, whisper, lightly touch the perceptions like fingernails of a frigid lover greeting warm intent with small protest. The shushing, hissing bow wave seems timid with the threat of impotence. Those terms of the sea which cleave and interpenetrate are plain silly in mist, for when the fathometer gives a readout of six feet the readout is only more or less. Winters on the coast of Maine are startling. The previous year’s winter will have caused the chart to become an approximation, even with Notices to Mariners; a partly informed but hopeful opinion. Hulks have shifted position. Rocks have tumbled. Underwater chasms have accumulated the debris of error, and they twist currents with the force of a revised doctrine. In short: mist, and watchstanding in mist, along that rocky coast, are not a shroud of finality. It is the broad and fey fabric of awful possibility.

Howard sat on the messdeck after his watch and shuddered and giggled at the tremble in his hands. He stuck an index finger into the coffee to see if the finger was still alive. Then, like a smart robot who has just discovered originating thought, or like an idiot uncovering a reason for slobbering, Howard took off his foul weather jacket and laid it on the bench beside him. He examined the right shoulder of the jacket with close and minute attention, searched for the impress of awful fingers, the marks of a dead world where air was always mist, and where mist was the supporting surface for weightless feet.

In the bow, anticipating his relief, and with his tongue licking mist from teeth and lips, Howard’s first thought was that Glass silently approached to take the watch. In that unspoken code of men pressed together in close quarters, Glass had never before touched Howard. Glass had firm hands, no doubt, but Howard—who would have been shocked had he ever thought about the matter—would not have concluded that Glass had stern hands. The hand that silently gripped Howard’s shoulder was as unremitting as bone.

Howard turned to complain to Glass, but, of course, there were some codes that even Glass did not break. Howard turned to find that Glass had not yet arrived, nor had anyone else. The mist swirled, the whistle arrowed into the mist like a screech of despair.

Howard looked all around him, saw Glass approaching, and found that a help. Howard managed not to run and shriek. He mumbled to Glass, went below to the messdeck after cowardly telling Glass that all was routine.

Brace slopped at tables with a wet rag. From forward the whistle vibrated. Howard watched Brace, that outlander to the messdeck, and Howard shuddered from fear or premonition, or because it seemed to him that he had never really looked at Brace before. Howard’s teeth ticked and clicked against the coffee mug. Being aboard Adrian was not like being in Illinois. It was not like being in Ohio, either.