The Jonah Watch

Chapter 25

We old men, those of us who are not sandpapered flat, as we pontificate from the depths of comfortable chairs, are apt to lie, pretending that chance, youth, dreams and fortitude are bold matters of understood intent. The truth is elsewhere. We fumbled, we puzzled, and if we found any great meanings, the discoveries, like as not, were by plain luck.

Adrian returned to piling seas. As engineman Fallon had done the winter before, taking over from the senior Jensen, now the Indian Conally walked the decks for Dane. Conally resembled a blunt hammer as he pounded a new deck gang into shape.

District offices, frustrated in the appointment of Dane, retained Aaron’s captain aboard Aaron. District sent Aaron’s chief bosun, freshly transformed to mustang, to Adrian. The new captain was Ed Chaney. He was an easygoing spendthrift ashore, a tough and unsleeping sailor the moment that the ship found deep water. He did not suit Conally, exactly; and he did not suit Howard, exactly; but each man had to admit that in any world of fools, Chaney was not going to qualify for merit badges.

Through piling seas Adrian towed Mirabelle, Eben, Lorna Ann, Catspaw, Vicky R. and Knight Ethelred… a manly yacht.

From south came news that the decommissioned cutter Ajax, rusting on the scrap pile in Boston, was sold to a man who planned to turn it into a small and intimate seaside restaurant.

Cutter Adrian fought a fire at the coal yards in Portland. Ice once more formed in the bow, and ice sprinkled as drops fell skidded across the decks from the high arcs of water, while men and fought to stay afoot and in command of the heaving, pulsing hoses. The fire was red and gold against the backdrop of the whitened city, and black smoke rose to distribute the miserable smell of sulphur through the ship.

Seaman apprentice Brace refused sick leave, having nowhere to go, and he hung around the Base as an ambulatory patient—but he resembled, in his anxiety to “get on with it,” a blind pup in a sausage factory. Conally spoke to Chaney, and Chaney read Levere’s comments in Brace’s service record. Brace became a full seaman, albeit a seaman with a temporarily unusable arm.

Cutter Adrian towed Daniel, Misty, and, on a day of glory, met cutter Abner at sea as Abner was returning home. Adrian and Abner closed, men waved, and then the two ships kicked apart on diverging courses to search for the overdue Dominick which was found two days later by dune pounders as the disabled vessel swung at the pick in shoal water.

Adrian towed Violet, Pride Of The Banks, Obadiah.

Abner, in an excess of family feeling, towed Sister Sue, Seven Sisters, The Brothers.

Able towed Erasmus.

Word from south spread through the fleet, and the word said that cutter Able was “takin’ a turn” and “lookin’ good.” Able towed Jacqueline, Prester John II, Rockrose. Able searched and found the overdue and written-off Maiden Of Mist, adrift with a starving crew that had been reduced to its next to last bottle of booze.

A thirty-six foot lifeboat was declared excess by the Base. It was invoiced as a gift to a troop of sea scouts. From north came radio gossip which hoped for the early breakup of the ice.

Adrian towed Whisper, Fife, Excalibur.

Brace, healed and moving silently, slipped into the valued position that had once been held by Glass. Conally confided to Howard that Brace was “gettin’ to be dependable.” Brace, as mum as the library from which he withdrew books, spent his off-watch time on the messdeck. He read thrillers, mostly fiction, but thrillers, certainly.

Adrian towed Adrienne, a possibly incestuous project, which, as Lamp gloomily observed, “just sooner or later had to happen.” During the time of that tow, the State of Maine turned toward the glorious state of spring.

In Maine in spring, the interminable days of March disappear with a kind of final vengeance, a well-delivered backhand of wind and sleet and rain. April offers a cold cacophony of rain. Rain runs in the brick streets, and it pounds into the plowed facades and banks and pillars and stockades of snow. The piled snow is like a fort besieged, gradually giving way and breaking down before the blows of an inexorable invader. Crud and dirt, grime, soot from wood fires, bleeds darkly from roofs, washes into the streets, and disappears toward the harbor. Old men stretch, yawn, interrupt their yarning to look through wet windows at the dismal weather. The old men read the “sign.” Young men hunger and begin to laugh, and the young men are unamazed by tales.

Yeoman Howard, who had looked forward to blowing his reenlistment bonus on bountiful women and a dandy hotel room, found instead that he was groping. He was still young, but he did not feel at all young anymore. With a desperation that he could not then understand, he threw himself at work, gave over to work, and thus, soon ran out of work. The days rolled past, boring, incomplete. Howard, for the first time ever, thought of the future. He decided to change his rate, take a one-grade bust and reenlist as a junior quartermaster. As spring arrived in green splashes, and as liberty was granted, Howard went ashore. Drinking.

The beer tasted just elegant, but it no longer held the alcoholic bite of perfectly inferred freedom. In the bars the jukeboxes blared, and the women seemed to laugh louder and longer at dull jokes. Dane’s shack job, Flossie, sat every night at a table beside a chief damage controlman. The silken, stitched tiger on the rolled sleeve of Howard’s tailormades was slightly frayed.

The women laughed, haw, haw.

Howard typed his reenlistment papers, signed them, tucked them in his desk. He went ashore, got drunk, really drunk, falling-on-his-face-in-it drunk. Conally dragged him back to the ship. Howard slept, woke, showered, muzzled coffee beneath the protective and concerned eyes of Lamp. In two days, when Howard was sure he was sober, truly certain, he opened the desk drawer and tore up the reenlistment.

YMCAs, where young lads run naked and screaming through the hallways as they snap each other on the butts with wet towels, are the curse of the forlorn, the lost, the wanderer; and any YMCA can eventually cure most men of inambition. Howard nosily visited YMCAs, a grand tour of Y’s in Boston, New York, Winston-Salem. He toured the coast, saw cutter Abner on one occasion, cutter Able on another. He visited Fairhaven, Newport News. He decided that he must leave the coast. He thought that if he left the coast he might feel young again; return to youth.

He toured the heartland, was revolted. The cow colleges, the house trailers, the daft certainty. Like a man intent on suicide, he pressed on to California. He drank, but he did not get so drunk that he could not find the bus station in L.A. He fled back east, wandered along the docks. He fished for a season, thought of going for a purser’s ticket in the merchant marine; dismissed the thought.

He seemed nudged by a hand that momentarily extended from the invisible world, touching his shoulder, returning him to Boston.

It was in Boston, he told himself, that he would have to “make or break,” and, although he did not understand why, he still did understand that awful proposition that is not a myth, but true. Because it was in Boston—no matter how bloody and wrongheaded and fire filled the history might be—it was in Boston that the primer had been written. It was in Boston that he gained a sense, a first and original taste of a new kind of youth. He discovered that, after all, he was not a man who made history, but a man who studied history. In an excess of redeemed youth, and of beautiful and certain ignorance, he began his work.

He worked well during his thirties, mastering the facts, sweeping instinctively with the flow, feeling intuitively that the slowly rolling wheel of events would someday, and soon, make mists of confusion flow away as before a night wind. He got married, the first time to a singer, the second time to a librarian; but, in spite of his attentions, the women became bored, somehow. They found other and more clever companionship.

In his early forties, he found himself pondering matters over which other heads—and better, doubtless—had already pondered. He added to the matters a small touch here, an addition there. His accomplishments, if they were accomplishments, produced works that better heads in the future might ponder, use, if only to disprove. He again married, a fellow historian, and that woman chose to stay beside him.

In his late forties he enjoyed a flurry of hope, good will, and he worked well. He believed, with some justice, that he had an original notion. He thought, studied, worked, turned fifty.

Through the pages of the past, and all about him in the present, messiahs spoke with thrilling commands. Politicians and generals spoke in warm, even-heated, thrilling commands—of national honor and pride as they dealt in disgrace. Teachers, scholars, the businessmen… who spoke in thrilling commands… the notion faltered; and suddenly, Howard, who made too much of things, one day discovered that he was becoming old.

He was affrighted, returned to thought, and emerged from the fright with a sort of low joy. Age, at least, meant that you did not have to put up with it much longer. If asked about “it,” he would have replied with all certainty that history’s greatest gift was that you did not have to take “it” with you.

And then, while walking less than sprightly through a wet autumn in Boston, Howard momentarily stood before the window of a well-groomed, middle-aged and average restaurant.

At a table which faced the street, a familiar face chewed, as if the chewer thought of other years and other matters. Brace, that aging Jonah, with his face lined like a walnut, weathered like an old barn, sat in a well-blocked but ancient uniform that bore the worn, dull rings of a lieutenant. Brace stared, half rose from his seat, seemed momentarily joyful. He beckoned.

Howard, with a hot heart and cold feet, entered the restaurant.

They spoke at first of predestination, or at least they spoke of vicissitudes. They shook hands, clapped shoulders, ordered wine so expensive that the restaurant owner was compelled to hold a long search in the dusty basement he called a cellar. They chortled like mature fools, and about them people sat, watched, smiled with the genuineness of small contempt. In short bursts of conversation men were resurrected, thrust back into the earth—or the sea… “Lost overboard up north… would of ever thought that a guy from Mississippi would die in ice?”

“…dead, of course… bad circulation… good cook, tho’… James the same, just always kind of frail… Levere retired, Snow retired—heard he went back to England… Conally—charge of a buoy snatcher, Joyce, charge of a snatcher… Fallon—engineer on that new west coast icebreaker… more’n enough to do on that ship….”

“The rest?”

“I don’t know. They come’n go.”

“Yourself?”

“It’s all different,” said Brace. “More money, newer ships, air support.” He stared at his wine glass, then looked down at his sleeve. “The world’s oldest lieutenant,” he said. “Never got off of search and rescue.”

“It makes you the last of a kind,” said Howard, who, in a vague way, had managed to persuade himself that he had “kept up”—who in a vague way felt that he was asked for endorsement, or asked to accept an apology.

“One of the last. Levere was like that. Chaney. All different now, of course.” Brace rubbed at the two dull gold stripes. “It means, at least, that you always have a command.”

Wet automobiles passed in the street, and along the sidewalks people moved through a haze that promised winter, a rain so light and dull that it was scarcely even rain. Thick mist, perhaps.

“Married,” Brace told Howard. “Nearly fifteen years. The first time didn’t take.”

“I think… another bottle?”

“Can’t think of a single reason why not… I just remembered. Glass has the deck on a Morgenthau class… never made the Mafia… presume that things kept coming up.”

“I certainly remember Glass.”

Young girls huddled in raincoats, walked beneath umbrellas to protect their hair. A gray-haired woman passed, then two young sailors, then a businessman who strode brisk and grayly. In the streets cars glistened, dull hazed with a sheen of water. Brace and Howard talked, measured—from the lofty view of experience—how much the other drank, matched but did not exceed the amount.

“…had to leave,” said Howard. “Figured it all out later. A lot later. When Dane died, I gave out. It was as if I had become unpropped.”

Brace, about to light a cigarette, paused. Even before he spoke, before his voice gave other inflections, his face showed that he had dropped the gossipy conversation. He thumbed a lighter. It flared. He lit the smoke, and he slurped smoke with a sort of gratitude for the momentary pause that smoking grants. His thin, narrow nose, below the heavily wrinkled forehead, beside cheeks that were furrowed, running with seams—his nose made him look hawklike. He did not look like Levere had looked, but he looked like a man emigrated from the boundaries of Levere’s country, the inshore sea.

“I wanted to be a musician once,” said Brace. “Once I was a pretty good musician, for a kid. My father, who was not a musician—” He again drew smoke, this time slowly, and smoke curled around the lines etched above and beneath his eyes— “taught me not to be a musician. Now, I am not exactly certain what that means, but I am willing to talk about Dane.”

“We were spooked,” said Howard. “Conally and I. I tried to get Dane to take me, instead of you. Maybe I didn’t mistrust you. Maybe I just mistrusted everyone but myself.”

Brace sipped at his wine, drank deeply, again sipped. Beyond the window a young couple stood in mild argument about the restaurant. They made a decision, walked on.

“The whole crew was spooked,” Brace said, “but I’ll be double-dog-damn if they weren’t good men.” He sat, staring through the window into the gray, misting rain. “I’ve seen strange things since, even stranger than that. The sea sends strange things.”

“We thought,” said Howard, “that we had received an omen. We believed we understood the omen.” He felt in his pocket, found an empty package. Brace pushed his pack of smokes across the table.

“A lot of that crew saw something,” Brace said, “but I don’t recall that anyone made comparisons. We’ll never know if each of those men saw the same thing.” He leaned across the table to light Howard’s smoke. “I haven’t thought about it in a long time,” said Brace, “but I did think about it for a long time. Years ago—”

“Dane didn’t trust me,” said Howard. “I don’t know how he knew that I was a short timer.”

“—and I thought until I got it figured out,” said Brace. “Dane was not a complicated man. He was trying to teach me something.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought he was trying to kill me,” said Brace. “Either that, or I thought we were in some kind of battle.” He touched his worn sleeve. “I was afraid to go with him.”

“Now I really don’t understand.”

“Why should you?” Brace said. “I was young and making wrong guesses. Something was going on that you didn’t know about.”

“You thought he was not a simple man?”

“I hit him,” said Brace. “When I was trapped belowdecks on that yacht. I was a kid. I was so scared. I had one foot propped on something that kept trying to roll away, and the water was on my neck. I can still feel it. I had nothing to lose.”

“Glass never said… no one ever said anything about that.”

“I asked them not to,” said Brace. “Dane smacked me. I had nothing to lose. I smacked him back. Twice. I laid it on. I bruised everything on that ox except his appetite.”

Two nuns walked past the restaurant, women, who, if not vowed to silence, knew at least some of the great meanings of silence.

“Snow and Dane were both down there,” said Brace. “I learned one thing, but I learned both sides of it.”

The world’s oldest lieutenant sat beside a man who had so far done but yeoman service in the cause of history. One man dangled the yarns of a life spent saving occasional sparks from the quenching sea, the other mulled catastrophes which had severed the lives of millions. Strangely, perhaps, and perhaps for only a moment, they understood the grand cynicism that ruled them; the knowledge that in this world’s hopes and dreams and illusions, in its facades and romantic encumbrances, in the seeming pleasures and devotions of easy belief, of national feeling culled from gutters by their betters, of gods most hopelessly cracked, most disgraced and hopelessly cracked, there are few seas.

“You’ll remember,” Brace said after a long pause, “how Lamp used to talk. He was always this and that, never before, never behind, just mostly between.” He brushed at a worn sleeve that carried its worn and tarnished insignia. The small Coast Guard shield was like a golden, unblinking eye.

“I knew him better,” said Howard.

“It is a zoo,” said Brace, “but we were wrong about Jonah. And Lamp, so was he. We only had one ghost.”

“I wonder if I understand.”

“Why should you?” said Brace. “You didn’t have one.” His face momentarily held a touch of young, potato-peeling wisdom, mast-painting wisdom.

“What didn’t I have?”

Brace’s face changed, the furrows deepening, and he seemed to own the wisdom of Reeser Lamp, or Levere. He looked into the darkening gray street where automobile headlights were now beginning to glow as if attempting to burn through the mist. “Our fathers,” Brace said. “No matter what shape it took, we have only ever had that one ghost. I thought and thought about this.”

And Howard, a son only of history, understood with a glad and rushing, sudden opening that there was at least one small history which contained no madness; as Snow had insisted, and which only he, Howard, could tell. Howard asked himself a question, and answered the question while he was asking. When God fails what does Jonah do? Howard finished his drink. He shook hands, made vague promise to meet. He drew on his coat, he backwardly waved, and left.