The Jonah Watch

Chapter 2

“Boys, boys…” in later years, when he ran the mess at the South Portland Base, the cook, Reeser Lamp, would claim that he was the first man to see Brace come aboard; and he would believe it. Lamp claimed the credit as he would claim every other minor miracle during those years when he cooked aboard the cutter Adrian.

Lamp was a man with a propensity for miracles. On the most tedious day, he would still feel charged to understand every opaque reasoning of divinity. Nothing happened that was without meaning—if only a body could figure the meaning—and Reeser Lamp was the man with the answers. He would have made an annoying preacher or a successful spiritualist. After a lifetime spent musing on the fortunate aspects of his birth, he has now had a chance to test the final miracle. He was a good cook.

In Lamp’s memory, Brace arrived on a day loaded with mixed portents. The summer with its clear and unoppressive light made the Gulf of Maine a sort of giant pond where yachtsmen flourished and lobstermen went about with their usual grumbles. Trawlers bearing the names of saints and wives and other martyrs churned beside Portland Head and the lightship. Their business was cod and their office was Georges Bank. From the moorings in South Portland it was possible to distinguish several of the thousands of islands on that rocky coast. The buoy yard smelled of barnacles and kelp and red lead: the nun buoys lay in red and black rows like components of artillery, and the lighted bells and whistles lay on tubby, slanted bases, immobile and silent like abandoned buildings. It was an easy day, and summer is a routine time for cutters assigned to search and rescue. Adrian and its twin, Abner, were moored at the pier like tired laborers slumbering.

Still, in Lamp’s imagination (packed as it was with as many signs and symbols as a flag locker), there was something peculiar about the appearance of Ernie Brace on an easy day in sunlight. In those later years, cooking at the Base, Lamp would interrupt his interminable reminiscence of a tour of duty in the Far East to draw one more moral from the advent of Brace.

“Boys,” he would say, “Boys, boys…,” and shake his red-blond-haired head that was small above his great belly and heavy shanks. “Be double-dog-damn if I knew what I was feeling. Only somehow the luck was backward.” A tawny, lionlike head; but small, like a cat’s head placed over the girth of an aging rhinoceros.

A new voice would always ask the same question, and there were always plenty of new voices. The mess at that base was casual with transient sailors, ambulatories from the Marine hospital, and visitors attached to the First District offices.

“Did you know he was a Jonah, cook?”

“The luck had been bad but it was turnin’. That was that bad winter…,” Lamp would pause, shake the small, leonine head slowly and with genuine sorrow. Adrian had lost a man that winter. Cecil Jensen, an engineman, at sea and the body unrecovered. Lost with the fishing vessel Louise.

“Maybe it was somebody else, cook. You already were a-tough’n it.”

“Backward. Not good, not bad, just backward. I be double-dog-damn if I knew what I was feeling.”

By then Lamp had trouble with his legs. He did not move with the lumbering, seagoing accuracy of former days when he would prop himself against the face of the oven, or the hot bulkhead by the stove. Adrian was a tough sea boat, but it was a masterpiece neither of comfort nor design. It had been battered too often, was stretched toward age like fraying cable. It was reengined after each war. The original blueprints, mute beneath stacks of outdated charts in the lower drawer of the chartbox, called for auxiliary sail.

“Did the luck change right away?”

“It didn’t work that way, boys.”

“I don’t believe in Jonahs, cook. I don’t hardly believe in admirals.”

“I believe in broken legs.” (This from a man wearing a cast.)

“Me, I believe in women.”

“Sure now, and I believe in payday.”

Cooks generally talk too much, and it is their fate to be razzed and raspberried. On these occasions Lamp would retreat to his galley where it is said that he prayed for the souls of degenerate sailors…

“Mother Lamp,” seaman Glass explained to apprentice seaman Brace, as Brace unpacked the stiff, new seabag. “Howard—he’s the yeoman—Howard gave him that name and it stuck.” Glass turned as the small sunlight that penetrated to the crew’s compartment was blocked by a silhouette. “That’s Howard.”

Yeoman Howard, hangover intact, was approaching with Brace’s watchkeeping assignment.

“I want a transfer,” Brace muttered into the mouth of the seabag. His voice was soft and still trembling from the attack by Dane. “Everybody said that it was different when you got a ship.”

“Me, too,” Glass said. “I want a transfer. To that Adam cutter in L.A. Champagne. Movie stars.”

Brace rummaged deep in the bag, found a framed photograph of a young woman, looked at Glass and Howard. He dropped the photograph back into the bag.

“He’s in our section,” Howard told Glass.

“That gets me off the four-to-eight,” Glass said. “You’re a true shipmate, chum.”

Brace stood looking about the shadowed interior of the crew’s compartment. The odor of polished wax nearly obscured the smell of work clothes in need of washing. Bunks tiered three-deep ran the portside length of the compartment; layers of canvas, cotton and wool, pressing so close that the intimacy of other feet and butts, of sweat and beer farts and snores, was a flat statement. Brace shivered and unrolled bedding. He wrinkled his rather long but nondescript nose that was as unpimpled, unlined, and bland as his forehead.

“Seamen bunk forward,” Howard told him. “You get a better ride.”

“Take an upper,” Glass said kindly. “Don’t hardly anybody ever vomit, but why take chances?” He turned to Howard. “You was seen last night with a very evil lady.”

“Is he always that way?” Brace stood holding new blankets draped over one arm. He seemed for an instant very close to tears.

“She’s shy,” said Howard. “Like me.”

“Me, too,” Glass said. “I’m shy. I got a fine mind, but it always takes ten seconds…”

“Because if he is,” Brace said, “then this is a zoo.”

“We were just talkin’ about that,” Glass told him.

“This is the cutter Adrian,” Howard said. “The captain is Phil Levere, mustang. The chief bosun is Roy Dane. You are apprentice seaman Brace.”

“He means that the old man must be slipping,” Glass explained. “The District almost always sends us seamen.”

“Do what you can with him,” Howard told Glass. He turned away.

“A zoo… an absolute zoo…”

“Terrible man,” Glass was saying as Howard disappeared up the ladder. “No consideration of us working class. Get squared away and I’ll take you on a tour…”

If the ship was not a masterpiece of design, the same could not be said of the crew, although when Brace joined, he would find a crew that had indeed been tough’n it. Mother Lamp had good reason to cluck and worry.

After a winter of continued shock, the crew walked through the sunlight like invalids given new hope. The memory of the drowned Cecil Jensen was strong. On the messdeck men still avoided sitting in what had been Jensen’s customary place. In the engine room, his handwritten watch-standing orders maintained his presence. An engineman first class with six years aboard a vessel is not easily erased.

The crew went ashore like men with storm warnings still flying in their souls. Their hair was freshly shorn, but their heads were not light; as though the thick ruff of fur grown for a downeast winter still bowed them trembling into their foulweather gear.

Good men. As strong and certain as the heavy-shanked and moral-headed Lamp. They appear in groups of two or three, or singly with a face poked into the mask of an antique and rickety radar, like a submariner before a periscope as Adrian staggers beneath blows that bring green water crashing to the bridge. They stand solid on the heaving fantail or lean against the shock of the sea, grasping with numb fingers as breaking water washes the deck to push them like arrows about to be twanged from the lifelines. Their eyebrows and watch caps glisten with ice. Like spectres they appear in the low moan of dying winds, and they amble the decks and shout and laugh. A North Atlantic mosaic of winter. A perpetual rattle of coffee mug in the galley, the blown, delicate curve of carefully rigged lines, and the six-inch towing hawser sagging astern and shaking water from its tons, to appear three hundred yards away snugged to the bows of a distressed vessel.

Simple men and true. No better than their predecessors; no better than their successors, perhaps. A sailor takes what he finds and learns to make it work—and, of course, a red stripe on your bow does not sail the ship…

When you are young, as Brace was young, the day can arrive exalted like the cadenced thunder of Kipling on his red ladder of dawn—or the dawn can mutter across the earth in an orange mist of confusion. The way you experience dawn may depend on something as simple as whether you catch the midwatch or the four-to-eight.

Dawn comes early in Maine summers. While your crew lies sleeping, you stand watch in exhilarating solitude. Dreaming—as we old men recall—of romance and the love of distant friends. The 25-amp radio crackles indifferently on the watch frequency of 2670, the globed nightlights are red and shadow-casting through the dark ship, and the harbor is a placid canvas carrying a tracery of light, a network, a web, the silent and lighted waterfront of cities. As the dawn arrives, the duty engineman appears on the main deck, stretches, gaps, yawns and sniffs the salt- and petroleum-smelling air. He scratches, as if the boredom of a cold-iron watch was palpable in his armpit and could be rubbed away. Gulls slide by in the darkness. Water pops and slushes between the hull and the pier. Across the harbor sound yells of stevedores coming to work, and distantly, the putting of a small boat carrying stores bound for a Greek or Panamanian ship swinging in quarantine. There is a rattle of pans from the galley as Lamp bustles about with thick whispers and exhortations to the Hawaiian steward Amon, who is still sleepy-eyed, who will be brewing the cup of tea that gives him strength to load the huge coffee urn. With the movement of your fellows the confusion returns.

“…B-race…”

“Get crackin’.”

Dane, knowing on the brute level of the sea that there is desperately much to learn and that summer is short, pressed Brace to the limit. He cursed, scorned, saved back filthy and bone-cracking jobs.

Amazed Dane. Stupefied Dane. Electric over ignorance. Crude even among sailors, and like all sailors—as with other cynical forms of life—possessed of rough compassion.

“If you ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever a-bloody-gin step inside a line I will have your rotting guts for neckties…,” for, if Brace did step between line and rail, the sea would do the tearing.

Perturbed Dane. Red-faced. Melancholy—for at the end of three weeks it became clear that this young one was aboard to stay. If he was sometimes surly, he was also quiet and hard-working. The crew began to trust his beginner’s job. The crew’s acceptance meant that the old man would keep Brace. Captain Levere, mustang, kept his men. Since it was foolish to expect sense from the District, the crew assumed that to the south in the bustling offices which represented official mercy at sea, Levere commanded respect.

Seaman Glass took apprentice seaman Brace ashore and got him drunk on dime glasses of beer. It was a great success, and the next day Dane lovingly put Brace and his throbbing head to chipping paint on the bow; blazing sun heating the steel deck like a blowtorch.

“He don’t respond to girls,” Glass worried.

“…your kind of girls.” Because of his tour of duty in the Far East, Lamp lived easily beside the oriental convictions of his steward, Amon; assuming that Amon had convictions, but Lamp worried over Jewishness and circumcision. Lamp cruelly rejected Glass’s concern and supposed privately to yeoman Howard that Glass’s pursuit of Portland bar girls had overtones of the occult, of dark deeds.

Yeoman Howard, dark, glandular and slim, who pursued constantly and with average success, once more mentioned to Lamp that he, Howard, already had a mother. Lamp clucked and fussed and mentioned to yeoman Howard that there would be a day of reckoning.

But then, Lamp clucked over all of them, those hard-ridden men who blinked in the summer sun and gradually returned to life and vigor. Except for Jensen who of course remained dead.