The Jonah Watch

Chapter 3

He had not been a fool, this dead man who would shortly become the nemesis of Ernie Brace. Jensen was an idealist with occasional poor judgment, and now he was a drowned idealist. In that past winter of treacherous seas there were occasional days of alarming calm. Downeasters know such days, when the North Atlantic seems gathering its forces to crack holes in the planet.

“Crazy?” In later days at the Base it would always be a young voice asking that. Only the young needed to ask.

“No,” Lamp would say, and always he was serious. “Jensen was motivated. Very much. Also religious and good.” By the time Lamp would tell the tale in its hundredth version, the figure of Cecil Jensen acquired the stature of major saint on Lamp’s calendar.

“Poor judgment?”

“He might have made it.”

That was true. At the time no one doubted that he would make it, and Jensen (who was not religious, but who may have been good) most likely died while losing a bet with himself.

A day of calm saw him under. Those calms are, in their way, as treacherous as ice on superstructure. In some men they bring out the underlying romance, for seaman cynics are secretly romantic; believing the tradition of “you have to go out, you don’t have to come back”… and let us say—for a chance—that the tradition is not a myth, but true.

Let us suppose that the weight of belief makes that awful proposition real and—although it will not here be held—that when the earth was railed by horizon, and flat to seamen’s perceptions, that their belief made it flat—but in matters of the abstract. Well, then; true, no doubt, and if old men still believe the proposition, perhaps that is only because it is easy to believe from the depths of a comfortable chair.

Still, in some minds there is a difference between life and property. Jensen carried a submersible pump aboard Adrian’s ancient acquaintance, the fishing vessel Louise, on the day it sprang the last of its legendary leaks.

Adrian received the distress call while homeward bound from Rockland during one of those weeks God makes for drownings. Souls of the coast would remember that week as the week of the Redstart.

It was a terrible storm. Fishermen, lighthouse tenders, seamen and fishermen’s wives from Newfoundland to Boston hovered helpless and voiceless and tense, with radio transmitters idle in their hands, as a nearly laconic voice from Redstart gave its last loran readings and was cut off in midsentence. Somewhere a cartographer placed a small red x on a chart. Cutter Abner beat a hopeless box search, struggling to stay alive, scaling the waves like a small white toy indifferently tossed into a riptide. On the coast, nine more crosses were planted along the cliffs, bearing the world’s most lonely legend.

The storm was abating as cutter Adrian cleared the Rockland jetty. Enough weather remained to supply a sleigh ride. Rockland fell below the horizon at noon on a day when the gray light was absorbed into the gray sea so that only white spume blown from the tops of waves suggested the seam between wind and water. The voice from Redstart still echoed in the ears of the bridge gang. The trawler Mary Rose was now safe in Rockland, but it was little comfort that one crew was drying its socks while another crew was under.

Adrian skidded before a quartering sea, the steep swells piling and breaking with a rush on the fantail. The superstructure began to ice. Stanchions bulged with rime like stubby posts, and chains stretched between them as thick as dismembered arms linked in futility against the sea. The covered winch swelled with ice, bulking in the stern like a great dog huddled against the wind. Cold smoked from the sea, as if the waves were dry ice. It circulated through the ship and stretched even through the grates of the fiddley and into the engine room. Portside hatches were lashed partly open so that ice would not immobilize them.

Lamp fretted, made coffee and hot sandwiches, muttered either prayers or spells. The crew cursed with fatigue… a comfortable cursing because they knew the ship and this was not desperate weather. On the bridge Levere stood like a slumped, hawk-faced monument. He stood watch on watch as his ship added weight. Adrian had no steam hoses, but it had fire axes and hammers. As the storm blew itself out, the crew hacked ice. Then the radio popped, crackled, and through the heavy static the heavier voice of terror from the Louise. Adrian put the helm to port and headed into the sea.

That Louise was an abomination. It was a crate, a bucket, a ragtag of rust and frayed cable and wine dregs in the hold that could pickle an ocean or a wilderness or a nation of cod. From Gloucester to Portland it was scorned, sneered at, called the “Stinky Louise.” Adrian had towed it three times in eighteen months. The thick-liquored voice of terror on the radio belonged to its Portuguese skipper who should have been in prison—and would have been had he not fled New Bedford. What crimes he committed ashore were not a seagoing concern. His crime against the Louise was astounding, for in three years he had taken a competent trawler and turned it into a rusting arcade of junk.

Louise’s worn pumps were beginning to lose suction, the myriad leaks beginning to take on the authority of a policeman-executioner, and the liquored Portuguese and his liquored crew were imprisoned on the face of the sea.

Adrian’s fourteen knots of flank speed were respectable in those waters. As the storm blew out and the speed rose, so did the anguished howling from the radio. The man was in a continuing seizure of fear, although if he had to take to his boats he was not in much trouble. The wind died, the swells began to knock down, and at worst he looked forward to an ugly night.

Of course, if his boats leaked worse than his trawler, the lot of them were dead. Adrian’s task was to make knots. The Portuguese’s task was to pump and pray. It seemed a shame if he died, since he was going about the matter so badly.

They were a crew of sober men in the morning light. The sea was flat like a lake, and winter sun oiled its surface with a thin, red glow. The trim trawler silhouette changed from a high-riding, high-bowed sea boat before the morning sun. It looked like a pile of clutter on the horizon, like a barge on which spare parts of trawlers were randomly stacked. The bow was down, the stern riding low but enough exposed to make the wretched old crate look like a cigar butt wallowing in a gutter. Louise’s boats were tied alongside, and, as Adrian closed, the Portuguese and his crew took to them. They waved and hollered and wept. They shrieked until Adrian was within a hundred yards, coasting off the way, reversing screws so easily that not enough turbulence entered the calm water to as much as rock the boats.

The deck gang hauled them aboard. They came like rats, but without the sleekness of rats. A thin, urchin-like Spaniard babbled his mother’s name and wept. An Italian, teeth chattering with cold, was pulled aboard and collapsed, uttering small puffs of shrieks. A beer tub of a German, leather-jacketed and swarthy, blubbered between thick lips. They smelled raw with booze, musty from sleeping for a week in their clothes. They stank like trash fish which someone had forgotten to throw to the gulls. They hugged icy stanchions, bundled onto the mess-deck to warm hands on coffee mugs and burn gullets with heavy slurping. Lamp tsked, served out food, crooned sympathy, and was obviously and thoroughly disgusted.

The abominable Portuguese would see the captain. Property was at stake. He climbed the ladder to the bridge, in a nervous state because he could not carry his coffee mug and still wring his hands. The Portuguese was thick, medium colored and of medium height. His entire sea ability was in the cut of his whiskers, which were as well greased as his pumps were not. Levere dismissed him to the main deck. The Portuguese rolled his eyes, gasped, incoherently babbled about seagoing codes. He stamped his feet like a child. He whined like a dog. He prayed to the Virgin and the devil.

Louise stood on the thin red water with gunnels still a foot above the surface. No decision was correct. Adrian’s flotation would not support the trawler. If Levere came alongside and tied on, and if Louise slid, Adrian would be dragged over. Either that, or breaking lines might kill a man.

Yet, legally, Levere could not just allow the thing to die. It hovered on the sea, bowed like a tired workman, old and disgraced and unworthy. It had once been a strong, downeast work boat before the coming of the Portuguese. Now, in that romance of the seaman, it seemed that Louise wanted to die. The rusting winch and rusting cable lay in a last small chaos of despair. The rails were pocked deep, bleeding rust, and the thin pipe of the stack was disfigured where rust had flaked away and eaten out the top. Oil surrounded the gunnels to make the trawler a small blot on the rust-colored sea.

There was a hurried conference on the bridge, men muttering in the red dawn, casting pale shadows. Dane, Levere, Jensen. Howard jogged the dead helm and watched the drift. A quartermaster stood ready by the engine room telegraph and watched Louise.

“Not enough freeboard—submersible is ready—yes, well, but we must—of course—,” they murmured, unsecretly hoping that Louise would take the decision from them. “A snipe—no, I’ll go myself—life jacket—sure, sure, yes chum—back down after you’re aboard, ‘twill give you room—take a line—’twould foul surely—I mean carry the thing. Don’t tie on—”

The crew silently stood at the rail, and silently aided Jensen. The Portuguese swore blessings, cried in the name of the pope. Louise shuddered but rode no lower.

That Jensen loved not life but living. In later days Lamp would say that he was spiritual, but spiritlike is how he looked. He made two trips, moved quickly, lithe in the bulky life vest, walking soft across Louise’s tumbled deck like a man treading on sharp pebbles. The submersible pump and the portable engine were heavy. He swung sideways. He was like a dancer portraying a crippled dream. His shadow was a wisp, faded and thin in the red light.

He approached the ladder that led below, looked about him, suspicious. Adrian was backing dead slow, the screw barely turning. Jensen shoved the submersible into the hatch, sat back on his heels, began to rig.

Dane descended from the bridge, tapped two seamen, and the three climbed into one of Louise’s boats. They shoved off and hovered between the two vessels. Adrian’s crew stood like a silent crowd along the rail. The Portuguese moaned.

Jensen rocked forward in his crouch, cursed, and with one smooth movement disappeared down the ladder. Dane’s yell was blanked out by Adrian’s whistle. Levere’s voice followed, stern, sad and urgent. The sounds were like sparks over the eternal hush of the sea.

Jensen was what? A fool? No one knew what Jensen saw, what problem he faced that allowed him to make that decision. A discharge line snagged below Louise’s tumbled deck? In that dark space his voice echoed as he cursed the pump. Thumps, movement and his distant voice swearing… and then a shiver through the old trawler and it shifted deeper, hesitated, and then it was gulped.

It made a rapid hole in the sea as it slid. The rusted stack tipped slightly aft. There was a motion, a last movement; an attempt to retrieve life at the hatch… like the fluttering of a Mother Carey’s chicken. The sea closed over the hole and the small boat carrying Dane and the seamen jumped and bucked. Adrian heeled. Waves splashed white, turned to ripples, fell back to red; and Dane—stony-eyed and unbelieving—returned to the ship and began systematically to kill the Portuguese. Levere and the deck gang pulled him off and locked the man in the safety of the lazarette. The Portuguese lived to make wine-soaked threats in the bars of Gloucester.