The Jonah Watch

Chapter 1

On those far northern shores where the wind sets north-northeast, and where remote lighthouses are haunted by dark tales of men flung upright from the surf—as if the dead rose through spray like pathetic divines—the summer slides in on the memory of ice. Sunlight polishes the luminous green of the outer islands. Old men unprop their feet from crackling wood stoves. They stop their winter yarning; stretch, turn weathered faces to the sun. Brick streets glisten with melt from high-piled banks and stockades and walls of snow. Young men blink fantastically in the sun. Their downcast, high-bowed vessels no longer plunge doubled up on the moorings. The young men hunger and begin to laugh. They seem strangely unamazed to be alive.

The summer shuffle begins. There is a last-minute rearrangement of crews aboard the trawlers. Nets repaired during winter and deemed “twill do” seem old and fragile in the sun. The ships’ chandlers enjoy a surge of business, dealing almost lustily in the perfume of manila, of tarred marlin, of enameled boxes of electronics designed to aid in the taking of fish. To the east the swells bat down and the North Atlantic settles promissory toward the tranquility of summer. On the white ships, arc welders sputter against winter damage. Here and there a new face appears, a new set of hands, a new body to be groomed and trained and then thrown against the inevitability of September.

Ernie Brace came aboard on a day that surrounded the cutter Adrian with the over-flooding certainty of sunlight. The tide was full and the gangway taut, for the tidal fall in those waters is great. When the tide was at half, the gangway pointed straight across from ship to pier. It gave rattles like the clank of pans being beaten by chains. At full tide the gangway pinged like a drumhead telegraphing the uncertainty of Brace’s steps. He moved like any other seaman deuce sprung high schooled and timid from the fields and small towns of Indiana or Kansas. His fresh seabag was glazed white in the sun. It hung stiff over a narrow shoulder that leaned with its weight. Brace’s slender body was clad in issue blues, like a brushed and newly blocked sack from which popped his unremarkable-appearing, brown-haired head—a head, some supposed, that was stuffed with young arrogance which the man would not lose until he had survived some heavy weather.

He was new to the ship, but he represented nothing new. They come and go, these young ones, like confused cherubs or corn-fed angels ashore in Rome. Plunking untraveled seabags to the quarterdeck, they cause small ripples as they enter the community of the ship, only to soon leave with no trace of a wake. They go to service schools or by draft to weather cutters. They are great requesters of transfers—or were.

Yet, it does not seem long ago. We were all rougher then, as we are certainly smoother now. Those who are not sandpapered flat.

The sea is the same, and the brawling northeastern ports remain. The narrow white Coast Guard ships churn white froth as they appear and disappear like phantoms into shrouds of mist. These new ones are bright with bold red stripes on their bows and with commission pennants snapping from stubby masts; yet, they hold a hint of other ships. They tell a subdued vision of converted subchaser hulls made awkward by high boxlike deckhouses. Short fantails disappear into a winter fog of memory, but yes—the sea is the same. Mist and the sparkle of the sun turned dull on polished bronze, and always, finally, the ice fog and ash-gray light of winter. What seems a tale of the wind is really a tale of ice and the mist.

Brace blinked in that sun and looked at his first assignment. Confused. His mouth was not naturally large and now it was tight. His dark eyes were more fearful than timid. It must have seemed to him that he had been sent to the very belly of chaos.

Beneath his hand a rail twisted away; the round, solid steel grotesquely bent like half a question. Before his eyes, a second rail twisted downward from the boat deck. Foundations, where gear lockers once stood, looked like an erect tumble of steel shrubbery, while the lockers themselves, as Brace would discover, were taking a swim off Georges Bank. Cutter Adrian was poxed with spots of red lead over newly cleaned steel. The house was streaked with rusty slashes of new welds that bled toward the deck. On the boat deck beside twisted and empty davits two seamen stopped their work, nudged each other, laughed; winked like a couple engaged in an extravagant romance. They waited for chief bosun Dane to appear, stubby legged and bawling. On the fantail the yeoman, Howard, nursed a light hangover and checked a requisition of stores. He bit at the end of a yellow pencil and rubbed his aching, dark-haired head. Through the open midship hatch sounded the curse of an engineman and the rattle of chain falls. The radio made desultory pops from the bridge. The steward Amon scampered aft… stopped; his olive Hawaiian face managed to look bland and incredulous at the same time.

“New man?”

“Brace. Where should I go?”

“I make your acquaintance Brace—make it later,” and Amon chugged toward the after hatch bearing news.

Coils of towline hung like wheat-colored festoons along the undamaged areas of rail. The 20-mm guns were shrouded in canvas. They pointed skyward like small, clothed steeples. Brace looked forward, looked aft, moved an indecisive step. The 125-foot length of Adrian seemed a tattered and inchoate jumble. He eased his unspotted seabag onto a small patch of tar, and the cook, Lamp, having received the news of a new mouth and stomach, bumped through the after hatch in time to see bosun Dane appear like a moving gargoyle from forward.

Men stopped work. Waited. Whispered and chuckled. On the boat deck, one of the seamen bounced on his heels like an ape, rolled his eyes to heaven, gurgled a poor imitation of a death rattle. Brace stood confused and unsuspecting. Dane approached as surely as the tide.

He was toadlike with rheumatism, Dane, and he stood in that crew like a minor god when the sun shone, like Jehovah, Itself, during gale. In this crucial matter of saving life and property at sea, it was known that when the wind blew black from the northeast, Dane’s rheumatism went before it. In the winter just past, a frozen and nearly whipped deck gang had watched Dane balance on a pitching rail and put a heaving line accurately into the teeth of a forty-knot blow. He was hated by some, respected by all, and he was secretly loved—as those who are unreligious may still think kindly of the Madonna.

Water slapped the pier. Gulls squawked. Brace reported.

“Another tailwagger.” Dane reached for the thin service record which was as stiff and new between its covers as Brace’s seabag. Dane fanned himself with the record and puffed. He stood erect for a moment, then slumped back to the demands of rheumatism. He was a blockish sort. A troll. Short and heavy with thin lips, thick forearms, thick waist. He sniffed as if he sensed the presence of a garbage scow. He seemed to be listening to the gulls and the silence about the decks.

“Where you from, puppy?”

Brace admitted that he hailed from southern Illinois. Timid. Tremulous. A low voice from a boy who seemed unsure whether he was under attack. Wonderment crossed his smooth face. He was pained like a newsboy who is refused payment because his journal carries wrong-headed editorials.

Dane gazed with scorn. He managed to say with his manner that he had always expected somewhat more of southern Illinois. The broad, thin-lipped toad mouth was flat with disapproval. His hunched shoulders flexed. Threatening. One hand held the service record, the other flicked horny-handed to make dents in the new covers. His thick shoulders hunched and his hands seemed scarcely restrained from tearing Brace to fragments. On the boat deck a man sniggered.

Brace stepped backward, bumped the gangway with his foot, stumbled.

“Stand,” Dane told him. “Stay… sit… roll over… play dead.”

“Sir?”

“Jump through hoops… waggle your butt… say sir to officers but not to your betters… slather… chase your tail ’til you rupture… and shed those raggedy blues and get into dungarees.”

Brace moved to pick up his seabag.

“Stand. Did I say pick that up—no—I-did-not-say-pick-that-up…,” and the harangue began. Did Brace have a mother? Was she proud? Why? A father? How could Brace be sure? A woman? Mona? What kind of a cornfield name was Mona? Dane warmed to his task and Brace, slow to understand, became monosyllabic and shocked.

No doubt it was the sun. The sun warmed Dane’s rheumatism, and he rose joyfully to intimidation that appalled all of his previous efforts in that line. He swarmed over Brace. His words were as hot as fire in a cargo of raw sulphur. This god-blessed blankety son of a plowshare and a mule… his voice rose, ran the scale of sound and pitch and volume. His face became red and apoplectic. Across the pier, the crew on the cutter Abner stopped work and listened and whooped to encourage his raving. Dane fumed, fizzled, spat, walked heavenward through curses, while Brace first became red with anger and then redder with shame as the whoops from Abner centered on him like a spotlight. Dane moved easily through a cloud of metaphor and returned to the basics of Brace’s high school locker room. Brace turned from fear and anger to fury. His face was white.

It was the result Dane wanted. It made him pleased. He stopped midsentence, looked at the pale, tense face and trembling hands that were not able to stay unclenched. Brace was within two seconds of forgetting the consequences of attempting murder. Dane smiled, and it was a smile like a grandfather bequeathing his gold watch to an ambitious posterity.

“You pass,” Dane said. “And welcome aboard.”

He turned from Brace to display the back of his neck as he bent forward to rub his knee. He hollered for Glass, seaman, and Glass tumbled down the ladder from the bridge in a panting, red-faced, hysteric scramble; as if doom had just cracked and he had a few things to attend to before the end of the world. From the boat deck came the sound of someone choking with laughter, while another man beat fists helplessly against a rolled canvas in an agony of entertainment. Glass skidded to a stop, wild-eyed, saw that the play was ended and resumed his composure. Glass was a tall, teacherly-looking Jew from the Boston slums who read detective stories and dreamed of being a professional criminal.

“It’s the way we do it here,” Glass said to Brace. “You can get used to almost anything,” and he led the trembling Brace below decks like a nurse leading a patient who suffers from tottering old age.