The Jonah Watch

Small Ships—Hurry Up Jobs—Lousy Weather—Even the Oldtimers Get Green Around the Gills —by Jack Cady, YN2

A searchlight bounces off a rolling pitching trawler. The white coil of heaving line stretches into her rigging. Towing hawser hisses out. A course is set for Portland, Boston, New York, Norfolk. Another notch is cut into the wheel.

Nearly every Coast Guard vessel passes a line to someone in distress over the period of a year, the major portion of the lifesaving end of the service is borne by small vessels ranging from 64 to 165 feet, including the larger WAT class tug. The duty is good from the liberty standpoint most of the time. The duty underway can be, and usually is, a bitch. Suffice it to say that men coming aboard from weather duty are certain they won’t get sick. They nearly always do. Time and experience are only partial insurance. Men with 18 to 20 years’ service walk around giving phony belches on a bad day.

Still, the job is what counts and the little ones can do the job. How much of a job they do and how often they have to do it can best be given by the example of one of them. She is the CGC Yankton, 110 feet, based at Portland, Maine, where she is currently pulling Able or patrol status one week out of three. The running to be described occurred between April, 1953, and April, 1954, a year taken from 18 months I served aboard her.

The first few jobs were routine tows. Sometimes we were undermanned and ran, at least once, standing four on and two off. Towing watch, wheel watch, sack time and return. Very good, but very tiring experience. As summer came more men were assigned.

The first big one was in June when Able status paid off for 11 men on the sinking trawler Vandal. The call came over 2670 around 2200 and the Yankton was underway in less than 10 minutes. The sinking vessel was about seven miles off the Portland Lightship and the sea, for once, was slick. As the Yankton approached the trawler, it could be seen going fast. When the pumps went aboard she had less than a foot of freeboard. The submersible and handy billy gained on the water until she was safe to two alongside. Fifteen degrees right rudder kept the course.

We logged a run to Rockland with the Jeanne D’Arc in tow and a week or so later picked up Charles Holderness from the fishing vessel Thomas D. Holderness had made the near fatal mistake of leaning over a winch with a strain on it. When the cable parted, it slashed him from temple to temple and knocked out some front teeth. We had a corpsman from Base South Portland. The only space for him to work was the table in the mess deck. No one was hungry that day.

Ever go boarding? The entire crew is in undress blues and only line handlers are at the rail. There are usually women in the yachts and some of them don’t really seem to care about much. One we will always remember fondly was wearing a yellow blouse open in front, and with nothing on underneath. Disheartening in a sense, because what can you do?

Late summer and we caught a job on Charlie 12. No one ever catches one on Charlie. That’s the status you take the wife and kids driving, go to church, get drunk; depending on your inclinations. Still we got one and went out with two seamen, three enginemen and the captain. The seamen laid out the tow, stood the wheel watches out, passed the line, and retrieved it when we came in. We had a tough captain but he took the wheel all the way back with the tow. We wondered if perhaps we had him pegged wrong after all. Later developments proved that we had.

The scalloper Black Diamond went high and dry on Clapboard Island Ledge and we shored and towed for two high tides before she was refloated. The inadvisability of running a six-foot draft through three feet of water was pointed out to the crew.

Ever drag a body? No one really wants to find it.

September, and the first real heller of the year whooshed out of the NE. A tug lost her tow of another tug off Alden’s Rock on the Maine coast. The rock is the size of a hotel and is coiled off Portland Head and down the coast ready to kill anything that touches it.

The dead tug with the two men aboard was drifting down on the rock as we overhauled her. The line was passed three times into the teeth of a 40-to-50-knot wind. First the messenger parted. The next time the line was aboard and the men on the tug were unable to secure it because of the weight. We recovered the line and with a touchy bit of seamanship, the Yankton was put alongside the tug in the heavy swell. The line was virtually handed aboard. The tug was snatched off just in time.

We towed the Mary Rose to Southwest Harbor, water breaking against the bridge ports. Two miles good in four hours.

Fire! More fire than the Portland fireboat and fire department could handle. Yankton returned from a run to Rockland to fight it. The Acushnet pumped hundreds of thousands of gallons. The Cowslip fought the fire alongside the cg-5004-d from Base South Portland. For two days the blaze continued at the Pocahontas coal wharf, Portland, in freezing January weather. Ice formed on the wharf and on the ships. Ice formed on the men’s jackets. After it was whipped everyone settled back and congratulated each other. They had the right.

The Yankton wound up the year breaking ice in the Penobscot River, guiding coastwise tankers to berth and keeping river traffic moving. Her propeller was bent by the ice and until yard time in the spring she swam like a ruptured duck.

So it was a good busy year. Counting the three men we brought in after a two-day search in dense fog, we had saved 15 lives for sure and had some probables. We had towed more than 20 vessels. We had worked the coast, and off shore, from Southwest Harbor, Maine, to New Bedford, Maine. The Yankton was a tough one to cut sometimes, but she was a tougher one to beat. They never sent her on a job that she didn’t do. At least I don’t know of one.

Editor’s note. The Yankton was named after a Native American tribe, one of the seven primary divisions of the Dakota. Built by Ira S Bushey & Sons, out of Brooklyn, New York, she was launched on April 29th, 1943. A 110’ cutter, she was commissioned on January 26th, 1944 and served out of Philadelphia as part of the 4th Naval District. After World War II, she was transferred to Portland, Maine, where she served until 1984 when she was finally decommissioned.

Sold to a commercial operation, she went through several names (Russell Jr and Roger Stahl, to name two) before becoming the M/V Cetus as part of Constellation Tugs’ fleet. Foss Maritime acquired Constellation in the mid-2000s. Yankton became the Mike Azzolino when she was sold to Vinik Marine. Apparently still in service, but Vinik’s website is a bit outdated.

A Sailor’s Pay

Only the sea remains the same. The city of Portland grasps its way toward the surrounding hills of Maine where once stood the cold green of conifers. The port hums with offloading of goods from container ships where once floated only trawlers and lobster boats. I return to a place where darkness is old, if not ancient. I carry a worn claspknife, one blade broken, but with a small marlinespike that is still intact.

The past compels me to deal with shades. Curious matters are reported in the press. I am the last man alive who understands them.

And, the coast of Maine is no wrong place to look for specters. Ships have passed the Portland Head for three hundred and fifty years. This harbor has recorded a thousand wrecks, but it has not recorded wrecks that happened in darkness when the sea swallowed hulls in one enormous gulp. At Portland Head the sea builds during northeast storms. Waves vacuum the bottom.

Expiation is played out in hideous resurrection. A Coastguardsman named Tommy pilots a steel hulled forty footer, twin diesels screaming wide at twenty-two hundred rpm. An engineman named Case dies horribly. A seaman named Alley fails a task, and an engineman named Wert turns coward; while a madman howls.

The newspaper reports that fishermen report ghosts. It does so tongue-in-cheek, inferring that the fishermen are drunk. I’ll allow they may be drunk, but that doesn’t mean their vision is unclear.

My name is Victor Alley. Immediately after WWII, I was stationed here, doing harbor patrols from the Coast Guard base in South Portland. I was a very young man, and this is a young man’s story.

When you are young, and when the world asks you to go into action, mistakes happen. Unseasoned men ride the great urgency of action and emotion, responding to feelings of duty and feelings of guilt. They do not have words or balance in emergencies. Sometimes people die in order for young men to learn how to handle themselves. Two days after my 19th birthday our story went like this:

Winter darkness shrouded the inshore islands, and enclosed the harbor and channel and buoy yard at the Coast Guard Base in South Portland. I shot pool in the barracks and hoped my girlfriend would phone. We had already made our evening harbor patrol. The boats were secured. When the call came over the p.a. to proceed with our boat I did not even rack my cue. Just laid it on the table and ran. Our Cap got fussy when those boats didn’t move quick.

As I grabbed foul weather gear, Wert still searched for his. Then he followed, trotting, not running. His rating called him a third class engineman, but nobody ever saw him get his hands dirty. He was football-player big, with a moon face.

Case, our first class engineman, had the engines cracking and stuttering as I made it to the boat basin. Beneath the floodlights of the boat basin the forty footer seemed more like a tiny ship than a big boat. It was painted white as snow on mountains, and it carried a high bow, a real wave buster. It sported low rails and plenty of working room aft. When we jumped aboard, and I cast off, our bosun mate, Tommy, sapped it hard.

Those engines could scream like animals. The stern grabbed deep, digging in with the twin roar of diesels as the boat moved out. Those engines were still cold. Tommy knew better. He cleared the end of the pier and cut through shallow water, crosscutting flooded tideflats to the channel. Spray rose luminescent in the darkness. I climbed up beside Tom. He was hitting it just way too hard.

“You’ll drag the bottom out,” I yelled. I could feel fingers of rock reaching toward the hull. Tommy looked kind of crazy. Tall and skinny with thick black hair like a Portuguese. Just crazy. He muttered a name. He stood at the helm totally concentrated, and motioned me away.

I stepped aft. The engine ran at least two-thirds. Tom pushed it that way until we made the channel, and then he ran the engines full. They screamed in overspeed, the bow high and rock steady in the hard hand of the water. Case tapped my shoulder, and we both moved forward to be away from the scream of engines. We did not know that Wert tagged along behind us.

“The Portland cops called. We’re after a boat,” Case told me. “Guy who stole it killed his old lady with a knife. He’s got their kid in the boat with him. They think.”

“Who thinks?”

“The cops didn’t find a kid’s body. The kid and all of her clothes are missing.”

Tommy did not let up. He held it wide open in the middle of the channel, heading seaward. Distant lights of Portland and South Portland started looking fuzzy, the way they do just before winter fog arrives.

Wert interrupted us. The All-American Boy. His voice practically bubbled with excitement. “This beats towing in broken down fishing boats. A murderer.”

“Get back to those engines,” Case told him. “Don’t take your eyes off that oil pressure for a second.”

“If we’re going to have a murderer, we’d ought to have a gun.” Wert acted conversational.

“You want a gun, join the Army,” I told him.

Wert just asked for it, leaving those engines at those rpms, and then refusing to hurry when Case gave an order.

“You done it this time,” Case told Wert. He literally turned Wert around and gave him a shove aft. Then he turned back to me. “He lies better than I tell the truth. Waste of ink to put him on report.” Case was tense, and that was unusual. He was mostly easy going, a guy without enemies. Wert even liked him. He was the kindest man I ever knew. I’d learned a lot from him. Case had broad shoulders, broad face, a nice smile and not much of a beer belly.

“I gotta talk to him.” Case motioned at Tommy.

“The engines?”

“Sure,” Case said, “and some other stuff.”

I figured the engines were either okay, or wrecked by now. “What are we doing?” I asked Case.

“We’re hurrying to put the cork in the bottle. We’re blocking the seaward side. The killer can’t escape through the harbor mouth. At least that’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?”

Case looked like he wondered if I would understand. “Tommy’s acting weird,” Case said. “He sorta gets his beanie unscrewed in emergencies. This ain’t just about some nut and a stole boat.”

I almost understood. I knew the story. During the war Tommy served on a cutter escorting convoys. On a dark night a freighter was torpedoed. There were survivors in the water. Tommy had the deck on the fantail because the gunnery officer was forward.

It was an awful story. Tommy spotted the survivors, and sonar picked up the German sub at the same time. The sub hovered a hundred feet down, directly below the freighter’s surviving crew. The captain of the cutter made a command decision. He depth charged the sub. Men struggling in the water turned to bloody pulp. A few survivors on the outskirts of the explosions did not die. The captain made the decision, but Tommy gave the order to drop the charges. It was one of those things that nobody talks about, and everybody seems to know about.

“Tell him not to get too weird.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“C’mon,” Case said, “let’s talk that poor fella out of wrecking those engines.”

I followed Case, and he climbed up beside Tommy who leaned way out around the spray shield. The engines screamed, and the bow rode so high at this speed that he could not see a thing. Case put one hand on Tommy’s shoulder, grinned at Tom like Tom had just told a pretty good joke, and then Case eased the controls. Speed came off, the bow dropped, and the boat skidded a little sideways. We’d come far enough that we could see the lighthouse at Portland Head.

“Take a strain,” Case said. “Guy with a wild hair crossways can’t figure anything out.”

“The police boat is out checking the islands,” Tommy said. “If that guy gets in behind the islands we’ve lost him.” He did not even hear Case.

“Get it figured,” Case said. “What you’re doing ain’t working.” He paused as he figured the next move. He looked toward the misty lights that told of fog. “At best we’ve got an hour. Go up to the Head along the edge of the channel, then double back along the other side. He won’t be riding the middle of the channel.”

“I want a piece of that clown.” Tommy’s voice sounded in control, but it still sounded a little crazy.

It came to me, watching him, that Tommy had been quiet for too long. Been holding everything in. I figure he didn’t care about the murderer. He just wanted to hit something that needed hitting.

“Cruise it slow,” Case said. “Use the searchlight, because he’ll be running without lights.”

It’s a big harbor, nearly as big as Boston. You could hide two hundred lobster boats in this harbor, and the odds on finding even a dozen of them would be pretty long.

“Because the guy’s crazy,” Case said. “He’s runnin’, but I doubt he’s going to hide. If he hides we won’t find him.”

The radio crackled. Then the crackle blanked as one of the cutters gave its departure message. I could not figure out why headquarters decided to send a cutter. That cutter would do no good out here. It drew maybe twelve feet of water, and where we were going there was only wading room. Maybe the radar on the cutter would help.

We cruised the starboard side of the channel as far as Portland Head, then turned around and cruised the other side coming back. Fog gathered. An occasional horn or whistle sounded. Fog settled from above until it finally pressed against the water. It was thick above, thinner at the waterline.

A thousand-to-one shot, but there seemed nothing else to do except search the islands. Dull, freezing work. As the ice fog gathered the searchlight became useless. The fog did not lift after nearly five hours. It looked like it was going to be another one of those cold and futile nights.

Wert’s teeth chattered. “It’s cold.”

“It’s November.”

“Take us home, Tommy.”

“Go sit on an engine.”

We traded off watch—standing in the bow. Tommy kept the engines barely turning. He searched along the beaches of the dark islands. Didn’t use the searchlight. We just stood in the bow and listened, hoping to hear the sound of a lobster boat’s engine. It was about 0330 when the cutter called, reporting a target on its radar. A small boat moved along the South Portland side of the channel.

“Got him,” Tommy said. “Let’s get him good.” Tommy had sort of settled down, but now he started to get all ruffled up again.

We were all tired, cold, and we had taken some spray five hours back. Nobody was wet, but nobody was exactly dry. Tommy shoved the rpms ahead, then lowered them a little as he realized he was being stupid. That boat was forty feet of steel hull. Not something to shove through fog at high speed.

The cutter talked us across the harbor and through the fog. We moved too quick, taking radar readings from the cutter. I don’t trust radar, and I sure don’t trust a set I’m not looking at. I always trusted Tommy.

As we overhauled the cutter we could see its searchlights swallowed by fog. Just beyond the lights, right on the edge of the lights, the lobster boat looked like a little ghost. It was weaving in and out past the rocks.

It’s a cliff along there. High-walled and granite and straight up. The lobster boat made its way toward a notch not big enough to be a tiny cove. It was just a place where the rock face was broken away and guys moored sometimes. We ran past the cutter, taking off speed, and coasted alongside the lobster boat. We were maybe twenty feet away.

The guy was hard to see in the dark and fog lying beneath that rock face. This close in our searchlight helped. I ran it over the boat and the numbers checked. This was the man.

The guy stood behind the wheel. He turned when our light hit him. He shook his fist and yelled, maybe daring us to come in. The lobster boat edged nearer the rock. I did not believe the guy was insane. He ran the boat too well, discounting the fact that he was where you shouldn’t run a boat.

Then he turned his face full to mine, and I believed it. He was like an abandoned beast, like a dog that’s been run over and is not yet numb in its dying. The guy’s eyes didn’t seem like eyes; just sockets; deep, empty, vacant.

Tommy moved in closer, maybe six or eight feet away. The old lobster boat kept chugging. We were so close I could see blistered paint in the glow of our running lights. The madman started howling.

“Can’t head him off,” Tommy said. “He’ll beach that thing. There’s nothing but rock in there.”

“Beach him,” Wert said. “That kid ain’t on that boat.”

“Get back to those engines.”

“If he’d swiped the kid in that kind of hurry, you think he’d have time to pack her clothes?”

“Move it aft,” Case told Wert. “Get back to those engines.” He paused, like he was thinking about what Wert had said. I couldn’t figure if Wert was right or not. He sort of seemed right. “When we figure what we’re going to do,” Case told Wert, “I’ll come and let you know.”

Wert laid aft.

“We’ll use three of us,” Case said. He laid it out. Tommy was to bring the boat close alongside. Three of us would jump. I was to go forward and get the kid, who had to be in the wheelhouse. Wert would kill the engine on the lobster boat. Then Wert was supposed to help Case with the madman.

“And Tommy,” Case said, “you hold steady. Because man, if he puts that thing on the rocks we’re going to need you.”

“He’s got a knife.”

“Yep,” Case said, “and I got myself one hell of a big crescent wrench.” He turned aft, yelling at Wert who stood beside the engines looking determined. Wert rubbed a fist into the open palm of his other hand.

When Tommy closed I jumped. The lobster boat ran in the shadow of the rock face. It loomed over me, darker than the rest of the dark. As I hit I felt the lobster boat shudder and rub the rock someplace deep. I lost my balance. We were so close-in that I actually shoved back to my feet by pushing on the rock face; while somewhere behind me Tommy yelled, “Left rudder. Left rudder.”

I came from the bow, around the starboard side of the dinky wheelhouse. The madman stepped from the wheel to meet me. I was scared. Couldn’t think of what to do, but my legs just ran me into him. Hit him like I was a fullback. He stumbled aft against Case who was on his knees. I think maybe Case sprained or broke an ankle. That lobster boat was just trash, the decks full of junk and gear. Tommy was still yelling, “left rudder, left rudder.” I heard the forty’s engines dig in as Tommy cut to port to give us running room. As the forty’s stern slid past I looked up and across, into the pale moon face of Wert. He stood motionless. The guy looked frozen with fear, wide eyes staring. He hadn’t jumped.

You never know—even after years you can never decide—if what you do is right. Everything happens so fast. If I didn’t detest Wert so much, I would have listened to him. Maybe saved Case.

What happened is that I did what I’d been told. I grabbed the helm and threw it hard to port. The boat edged away from the rock. It handled sluggish, already sinking from the lick it took on the rocks. Forward of the wheel a red light burned in the little cabin. I was supposed to get the kid, and so I went down there. Old coats, old blankets, slickers and boots. A gush of water through the ruptured hull. No kid. I must have wasted half a minute. I turned back to the deck just as a searchlight from the cutter swept us, and just as the forty’s engines started howling.

It all happened in slow motion, or that’s the way it seems. The madman stood above Case, and the madman howled almost like the engines. He had both hands raised high together, holding one of those long, thin stakes that lobstermen use to pin fish in their traps. The forty roared someplace real close. I heard a bow wave, but you never hear a bow wave—not like that—unless it’s pointed right at you. Case yelled something, tried to throw something at the madman, but you can’t throw much when you’re on your knees. I dived over Case, trying to tackle the madman. There was a shock, the lobster boat driven sideways, a crash of timbers; and a fish smell came off the deck as I rolled. Something, a lobster trap maybe, clipped me alongside the head. Then I was in water that is death-dealing cold, struggling to stay up.

The boat crew from the cutter took us aboard, dried us out and gave us clothes. At first I didn’t remember much. I sat for a long time on the messdeck shivering and drinking coffee. Didn’t see Tommy. Figured they were working on him. Didn’t see Case. Saw Wert. He sat at a table facing me, sullen, wearing his own clothes. He’d got his feet wet, and he put them on a bench, rubbing his legs and rolling up the wet part of his dungarees so they came to his calf.

“There wasn’t no kid. I told you. They beached what was left of that boat and there wasn’t hide nor hair.”

“What happened?” I couldn’t remember anything. Then I started to remember a little.

“Tom lost his head and rammed you. Dumped you all in the water, then jumped in to pull you out. The forty’s back there now, high and dry and cut wide open.”

It was coming back now. “Case?”

Wert just plain looked sick. “Guy stabbed him. Tommy rammed you because he was trying to keep the guy from stabbing Case.”

“The madman?”

“Jumped back and got himself killed when the bow of the forty pinched him.”

And that’s when the memory came clear of Wert’s white face rising like a pale moon above the rail, the vacant look, the struggle and noise at my back and the roar of engines.

“Where were you?” I was getting cold again.

He had his story down pat. Like a first-grader reciting about Mary and the lamb. “We were about to jump, and the engines went rough. Case said to check it out because we couldn’t afford to lose power. I checked, but before I could jump Tommy kicked it ahead.” He turned his back to me, swinging away, and propped his leg up to inspect his toes.

They pulled me off of him, somebody did. Then their chief bosun sent me to wait it out on the fantail. Probably because I had shoes on and Wert didn’t.

I went to the fantail figuring that things couldn’t get any worse, and they got a million times worse right away.

Bodies are always stored on the fantail. I sat beside Case after I found which one he was. Kind of patted the old blanket he was wrapped in. I couldn’t figure out why the best man I knew had to be dead. Wasn’t thinking very straight.

Then I did start thinking straight, thinking about what I’d seen when I checked to see which one he was. Case was pretty tore up, but mostly just mangled. There was only one wound above the waist, and that was way above the heart, nearly in the left shoulder. That madman had not stabbed Case to death.

I’d always trusted Tommy. Tommy was my friend. He had taught me a lot. But, Tommy was the one who killed Case while trying to save him.

You never know if what you do is right, and that’s especially true when you are young. You operate on the basis of what you know.

One thing I knew was that the local coroner was a lazy old drunk. Twice, while on Shore Patrol, we’d taken bodies to that coroner. He dumped them in a stainless steel tub, cut away the clothes, and said something like “This pore old buster drank hisself to death.” I knew that coroner would do no autopsy.

If he saw a wound over the heart he would blame the madman. He’d not say a word about Tommy.

I pulled out my claspknife. It carried a marlinespike, about the same diameter as a stake that runs through lobster traps. Even today I can’t believe my courage and ignorance. I stabbed Case, stabbed a dead man, right where the heart would be. It was just a little blue hole that did not bleed, but, what with arterial damage and salt water, none of the other wounds were bleeding.

I remember vaguely wondering how much jail time you could get for stabbing a dead man.

Years pass, but memory is relentless. Such an act wears on a man’s soul. Sometimes the memory lies faded and dull among brighter memories of youth. At the same time, the memory never leaves. Maybe I did Tommy a favor, maybe not. The police filed no civil charges, and the court martial found him innocent. The court concluded that, although unable to save Case, he may well have saved me. The court did not like the destruction of an expensive boat.

Tommy came to a bad end. He started boozing when on liberty. We saw his tall frame and black hair bent over too many glasses of beer in too many sailor dives. He went awol for a month, was reclaimed from a drunk tank.

In those days the Coast Guard was a small and personal outfit. Our Cap tried to save Tommy by transferring him to a weather cutter. The Cap figured, since the cutter stayed on station for a month at a time, Tommy would have to stay sober in thirty-day stretches. Tommy slipped overboard one night as the cutter passed the Portland Lightship. The investigating board called it an accident.

And Wert came to an even more macabre end. On a night of no wind he wandered among buoys in the buoy yard. The buoys stood silent, the giant whistles, the lighted bells, the racks of nuns. Some were barnacled, waiting to be sand-blasted and red-leaded. For no reason, and against known laws of physics, a lighted bell rolled on flat ground. It weighed maybe a ton, and it crushed Wert against the pavement of the storage area. There was not a breath of wind, but men on cutters swore they heard the bell toll, and clank, and toll.

When my hitch was up I did not reenlist, but fled from salt water. The next few years were dreary; odd jobs and bad jobs through the middlewest. I attended college at night, got married, finally graduated from college, got divorced. Nothing seemed to go exactly right. It came to me—in, of all places—the bus station in Peoria, that this awful incident of youth kept me from my true calling, the sea. I traded my bus ticket to Chicago for a ticket to Seattle. From Seattle I went to Ketchikan, fished salmon, then finally found a permanent berth on a tug hauling barges from Seattle to Anchorage. After many years I rose to master of my own vessel.

A lot of downeast sailors, mostly fishermen, drift into Seattle and Ketchikan and Sitka. On a snowy January afternoon in Sitka, forty years after the event, I heard stories from a couple of Maine men who vowed never again to enter Portland harbor. There was enough illumination in their drunken talk to convince me it was time to come to terms with the past. I booked a flight to Portland.

Through the years certain questions haunted that incident of youth. I thought about them on the plane. What happened to the child? What did Tommy see as he kicked the forty footer ahead? What, for that matter, did I see? I am old now, and am well acquainted with the way the mind manufactures illusions. What did Wert see? What caused a puritanical lobsterman to suddenly sink into the depths of insanity; for the lobstermen of Maine are usually stern and steady fellows.

After checking into a Portland hotel I went to the newspaper office and was extended every courtesy. The report from so many years ago seemed sketchy, but it did contain the names of men and the name of the child. The child, it was reported, had been taken away by her grandmother before the ugly murder.

So much time had passed it was unlikely the grandmother still lived. I searched the phone book. The grandmother was not listed, but the child’s name was. Of course, she would now be a middleaged woman. I phoned, made clumsy explanations, and she agreed to meet me for lunch.

To an aging man, the woman who met me in the hotel lobby seemed to shine with both dignity and beauty. The coast of Maine is hard on men, but often even harder on women. This slim lady’s face was weathered, crow’s-feet around bright gray eyes, and her hands showed that she was not afraid of work. Long, dark hair displayed streaks of gray, and her conservative gray dress fell well below the knee.

“It’s a jigsaw puzzle,” she told me once we were seated for lunch. “You must remember that I was little more than a baby.”

“I wonder what is happening in the harbor,” I said. “The newspaper plays this for laughs.” Beyond the windows, banks of piled snow lined streets that are asphalt now, but in my day were brick. Sun glistened on patches of ice, and the thermometer stood at zero.

“I know exactly,” she told me. “I own a ship chandlery. The story comes together in bits and pieces. Men talk even when they want to keep quiet.”

Men heard more than they saw. In winter darkness of early mornings, when ice fog covered the channel, fishermen reported the low sound of diesels. There would be a nearly hysterical cry of, “Left rudder. Left rudder.” When that happened men became terrified, and minded their own craft. A radar screen may be completely blank, but no sailor trusts the things, and no sailor fails to react when his vision is muffled by fog.

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.

The man laughed, his voice casting strokes of anguish through muffling fog. He motioned toward me, beckoning me to follow him. His boat began to rock. With the engine running low there was not enough power to keep the boat’s head pointed toward the sea.

The bow of the forty footer appeared, sliding whitely through mist. It was as insubstantial as the lobster boat was substantial. The forty footer wavered, more ghostly than the surrounding fog. Were it not for the solid sound of engines the forty would be vague as a cloud. I watched the drama unfold; watched ghostly forms of men huddling in quick conversation as the forty swept past, made a turn toward the channel, and eased back toward the lobsterman.

The forty made its turn, then eased toward the cliffs, closing alongside the lobster boat. I could see Tommy clearly. His black hair glowed above a face only slightly less visible than darkness. For moments his face seemed only surreal as he concentrated on laying the forty alongside. Case and Wert—and a vague shape like an echo of me—stood at the rail. Two figures jumped, and to his credit, Wert tried. His shoulders moved forward, but his feet did not follow. He fumbled, fell against the low rail, regained his feet.

I watched us make mistakes, as young men in action almost always make mistakes. The few minutes of action aboard that lobster boat stretched toward timelessness. A slow motion movie.

Case fell and rolled. My own vague form hesitated, finding its feet, as the madman stepped from the wheelhouse. The madman carried no weapon, and he raised his arms. As the form ran into him, I could see he only tried to shield his face. The madman fell against the wheelhouse, then rose slowly back to his feet. My form disappeared into the wheelhouse where it would port the helm, then search for a child who was not there. Case slowly stood, his left hand holding a wrench, and his right hand clasped to his left shoulder. His wound came from falling against a spike or a tool.

The madman howled and slowly retreated to the bow. He screamed, “Stay back, stay back, stay back.” Then he screamed, “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy.”

Case followed him as the forty made a tight sweep away and turned back toward us. Case should have waited for help. That madman was no threat. As the madman pulled a stake from a lobster trap, Case stumbled. He was on his knees, trying to throw the wrench, when my shade appeared from the wheelhouse. The two men were so close that my dive at the madman actually carried me over Case’s back; and I, watching my own ghost, saw that the madman tried to stab no one but himself. The sound of the forty’s engines rose.

How much did Tommy see? He saw it all. How much did Wert see? Practically none. Wert stood in the stern beside the engines.

And so it was that madness covered Tommy’s face, and that in this time of torment two madmen sacrificed themselves on the altars of their guilt.

Tommy, who had killed with depth charges, now drove toward the rocks in a last and frantic display that may—or may not—have had the least thing to do with saving Case; a man who did not need saving. The madman stood facing the huge blade that was the forty’s bow, and he screamed in exaltation or expiation, waving his arms toward him as if to attract the bow against his chest.

When the forty hit rock it stumbled, then drove its bow onto the beach, the tearing of steel striking showers of sparks as it crumpled against rocks. Wert tumbled against the engine house as water flooded the stern. Tommy cut the engines, ran aft where the lobster boat lay rolled on its side in shallow water. The bow was sheared away, and beneath the hull extended legs in sea boots; legs of the lobsterman, twisted and torn. Case lay against a crumpled rail with blood draining in arterial spurts, while my faint form lay halfway in shallow water, my head resting on a rock like a young boy nestled against a pillow. Tommy did not dive in, he fell in as he hurried first toward Case, then toward me.

I do not know whether it was my voice—although I think it was-or the voice of the sea that called forth: “A sailor’s pay. A sailor’s pay.”

They gathered about me, the spirits of those four men, as I drew up the anchor and began working the boat back toward moorings in the city. The pale, moon face of Wert lived faintly in the mist. It silently protested, explained, attempted to find language that would in some way speak inexpressible thoughts.

Case stood beside me at the helm—the wan form of Case, the kind face of Case—a man who had made his own young mistakes. He did not bare his chest, did not display his wounds. If anything he seemed proud that I had raised a knife to help a friend.

These were my comrades. In many ways they were closer to me than the living crew of my Alaskan vessel.

Tommy and the lobsterman seemed no more than tendrils of fog that intermixed, that somehow bonded together for the present, and perhaps for eternity. It came to me that all of us, or parts of us, are doomed to strut our roles on that obscure stage during all nights when ice fog lies across the harbor. The lobsterman will endure his earned portion of hell, and we, the crew of that forty footer, will inflict our errors on him.

I now understand that Tommy’s silence was the silence of madness. When he could not speak he took action, perhaps even trying to do the right thing; but I know now that no one could protect him from the knowledge that he had killed Case. I also know that Tommy protected me, for he had to have figured out my share of our mistakes. From that weather cutter to which our Cap transferred him, he slipped overboard in search of silence. He knew that, sooner or later in his drunkenness, the story would get abroad.

Tommy was heroic in his way. Darkness reached for him twice, the first time with depth charges, the second time with the grounding of the forty. He fought against darkness in the only way he could. He sought the eternal silence of death.

Darkness tries to kill light. I pulled the old claspknife from my pocket. Wert seemed only confused, while Case smiled. The interleaving forms of the lobsterman and Tommy appeared to express only sadness. Perhaps the knife should have been thrown overboard.

But, it still rests in my pocket, to be carried until death, and perhaps carried to the grave. This knife is all I have of youth, because I know now that the part of me that remains on that cold coast is the ghost of my youth, forever tied to the rising scream of diesels.

The men disappeared into mist as I groped the final approach to moorage. There is little left to say. I will return to Alaska, and will make three more trips from Anchorage, maybe four. Then I will retire and find a small apartment near the docks. Although I will never finish my business with my comrades and the sea, I think perhaps they have finished their business with me. We, who were never really at war, have somehow still discovered peace. I think that between all of us, all has been forgiven.

Handsprings in the Sea