But Harlan knew. “You are well,” he said. “Tomorrow you will tell me where to take you.”
At sunrise he ferried Eddie to the West Side docks. A freighter from Brazil was just out of quarantine, hundreds of eager men waiting for the morning shape-up, scratching, smoking, gagging over the river. With Dunellen gone, Eddie no longer knew the hiring boss. It was September 1937.
He hung back, hands in the pockets of the loose-fitting trousers Harlan had bequeathed him, a cap pulled low over his eyes. The Sea Cow’s rusty hull raked the pier like a cur rubbing her scrofulous hide against a tree. A tramp ship with no set route, she grudgingly extruded her cargo of melons and rubber and coconuts. She’d an air of lazy complacency, like an old whore who knew she’d cornered the market. When the morning’s unloading was done, Eddie walked up the gangway as he’d watched any number of criminals and gasheads and dope fiends do over the years, always marveling at what kind of desperation might lead a man to take such a step. His was a shady hire, no articles to sign, and the job was coal passer: lowliest of all engine room positions. But as Eddie descended the slippery ladders into the ship’s broiling nether parts, he counted himself lucky. That was how much he dreaded going home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
* * *
Three days after the convoy scattered—nerve-racking days of cloudless skies and mild seas that required zigzagging day and night until the captain’s frustration roiled throughout the ship—the barometer began, mercifully, to drop. Sparks typed up the daily weather report and brought it to Captain Kittredge in his office. A major storm was predicted. Eddie heard the master’s whoop of celebration all the way from the wheelhouse.
By general quarters, the sky had clouded over, and there was a strong breeze. The captain advised the first mate that they would end the evasive variant of their course, although the storm wasn’t due until early next morning.
“Even with the sea still calm, sir?” the mate asked.
“For exactly that reason,” Kittredge said. “Dirty weather will slow us down again; this is our chance to make up some time.”
During Eddie’s eight-to-midnight watch, the Elizabeth Seaman performed her usual magic, steaming along at twelve knots. The barometer continued to drop, and the doors were closed and dogged to keep swells from breaking into the midship house. Farmingdale relieved Eddie at midnight, along with Roger, the deck cadet, who now stood watches with Farmingdale. Eddie and the first mate had concocted this change; since Cape Town, neither of them trusted the second mate.
By the time Eddie was ready to turn in, the ship was rolling on a rising swell. He climbed to the bridge a last time to check on Roger, who had been seasick and terrified while the Elizabeth Seaman negotiated the Roaring Forties. “I know you don’t like rough seas,” he told the cadet. “Just remember, U-boats don’t, either.”
“I’ve changed,” Roger told him with shy pride. “I’ve my sea legs now, like you said.”
Eddie saw a difference in the cadet—Roger had shaken off his gawky imbalance and looked taller, or perhaps he’d actually grown in the course of this voyage. Eddie stood beside him and looked out. The rising wind had swept away the stratus clouds and was blowing in towers of cumulus. A quarter moon appeared patchily, as if blinking Morse code. Eddie crossed to the port side of the bridge, where Farmingdale was, and felt the second mate stiffen. His palpable discomfort, along with the importunate moon, gave Eddie a feeling of unrest. Farmingdale gazed out, but it was hard to know what—or if—he saw. The binoculars hung at his neck.
“May I have the glasses, Second?”
Farmingdale handed them over. Eddie climbed up to the flying bridge and walked all the way around the smokestack, binoculars pressed to his eyes. The moon vanished behind clouds, and the rolls of ocean were barely touched by light. Two points abaft of the port beam, he saw a straight dark edge. Eddie blinked and lowered the glasses, then raised them again. It was still there: a straightness one didn’t find in nature. It had to be a conning tower—the raised structure of a submarine—yet disbelief plucked at Eddie even as he shouted down the ladder at Roger, “Get the captain. I’ll ring for GQ.”
Captain Kittredge was on the bridge in an instant. He elbowed Farmingdale aside and held the glasses to his eyes. Then he barked at Red, the AB at the helm, “Hard right.” To Eddie, now at the engine room telegraph, he said, “Full speed. Give me all the revolutions you’ve got.”
Eddie communicated the order to the engine room and felt corresponding vibrations under his feet as the engineers opened the throttle. The AB turned the wheel hard. The general quarters alarm had brought everyone on deck, and men hurried to their gun stations in their Mae Wests, as life vests were affectionately known. Using the flying bridge’s sound-powered telephone, Lieutenant Rosen ordered the five-inch stern gun to fire at the conning tower. A blast tore through the windy dark, and the tower submerged unscathed. Still, U-boats could make only seven knots underwater. The Elizabeth Seaman would outrun it easily.
Eddie stood by, ready to operate the telegraph. Suddenly, Roger was yelling into his face. The cadet pointed, and Eddie saw a second conning tower fully exposed, three points off the starboard bow. The hard right had brought them toward it. At that same moment an explosion shook the ship. Hatches blew open, and overhead booms crashed onto the deck. The Elizabeth Seaman shuddered, and her stack disgorged a ball of flame whose orange blaze illuminated everyone on the decks and then floated, crackling like a giant dissolving sun, over the sea. There was a reek of burning oil followed by deep silence as the ship’s engines went still.
Eddie charged down ladders through the dark midship house toward the engine room. The emergency lights on the bulkheads illuminated if you gave them a quarter turn, and he twisted a few of these as he went, oil dust collecting in his mouth. He found smoke pouring from the engine room door. Ochylski, the third engineer, staggered from it, bloody and drenched in oil. “The boiler blew,” he panted.
Eddie pushed past him, sliding down hand rails, his feet hardly touching the ladders. But he couldn’t get to the engine room deck; the flames were too high. No one on watch down there would still be alive. He ran to his stateroom, threw on his Mae West, and seized his abandon-ship package and flashlight. He heard the forward three-inch cannon firing, along with the rear five-inch, and imagined the U-boats diving to evade the blasts and then being churned by the rising sea, unable to fire again. On the boat deck, he tied his bag containing clothing, sextant, cigarettes, brandy, and his How to Abandon Ship pamphlet—inside his own boat, number four. The davits were already swung out, but Eddie hesitated to unlash the boats in gale winds when there was no order yet to abandon ship. As long as the fire was contained belowdecks and the Elizabeth Seaman stable, they would be far safer riding out the storm aboard than in the lifeboats.
The second torpedo seemed to explode against Eddie’s sternum. It must have come from the first U-boat, or possibly a third they hadn’t seen, for it hit below the waterline on the port side, aft of the midship house, between the number four and five holds. It was followed by a juddering rumble deep inside the ship. Eddie had never heard this sound, but he knew it was the noise of the ocean invading the Elizabeth Seaman’s holds. Almost immediately, her after end began to list toward the sea. Captain Kittredge gave the abandon-ship order, and a dreamlike atmosphere ensued, confusion magnified by the darkness and the roll of the sea, which cuffed broadside at the dead ship like a cat trying to rouse an exhausted mouse. Pugh, the ancient third cook, was still at his twenty-millimeter-gun station on the flying bridge. Eddie took the old man’s arm and urged him to his lifeboat, number two—he’d memorized the boat lists. On the bridge deck, he looked in at Sparks, who was stuffing codebooks into the perforated metal suitcases that were supposed to sink them.
“You need to get to your boat,” Eddie said. “Number one.”
“What’s your fucking hurry, Mac?” Sparks asked with a laugh. “None of these arseholes has answered me yet; I’m going to send t
he SOS one more fucking time.” The radio, now on auxiliary power, looked conspicuously alive on the burnt-out ship. Eddie offered to carry the emergency radio to the captain’s boat for Sparks. The radioman kissed his cheek. “Bless your fucking heart, Third,” he said.
Eddie grabbed the bulky emergency radio from the wheelhouse. He felt as if time had fanned open sideways, allowing him to move laterally as well as forward, so that any amount of activity became possible even as the slant of the Elizabeth Seaman’s decks grew more pronounced. On the crowded boat deck, he placed the radio in lifeboat one, the captain’s. Across from it on the port side, the mate’s boat had already launched: two men rowing, the rest crouched at the bottom to stabilize it in the heavy swells, which shoved the boat back against the hull of the ship. The bosun knelt at the tiller, and even through the gale, Eddie heard his bellowed commands and knew that boat two would get away.
Where his own boat should have been, he found Ochylski, his second-in-command, standing by the falls looking down. The boat had been released empty and now bobbed uselessly on the Elizabeth Seaman’s lee side.
“What the hell happened?” Eddie screamed at the third engineer over the wind.
“She just . . . went down,” Ochylski said. His face was deathly white under a sheen of fuel oil, empty-looking without his pipe. He’d gone into shock, Eddie thought—perhaps had released the boat by accident.
“Never mind,” he said, trying to suppress his habitual need to find the guilty party. Double-ender lifeboats were commodious, and there was more than enough room for everyone in the two remaining. Directly across, on the port side, Farmingdale’s boat was being lowered into heavy seas, a gaggle of men preparing to scramble down the falls once she was waterborne. Boat one, the captain’s, was about to be lowered. Eddie stood in the driving rain. He experienced a strange reluctance to leave the Elizabeth Seaman. Through the soles of his feet, he felt underwater explosions as seawater poured down her passageways and struck the hot boiler. In occasional gusts of live ash from her stack, he made out the deck cargo they’d worked so hard to load and secure: the Shermans, the jeeps. So much effort and worry and expense. It seemed like not enough to emerge with just their lives.
A thought came to him: Sparks. The radioman was assigned to boat one, the captain’s, but when Eddie scanned the crowd of men waiting to slide down the falls, he didn’t see him. He ducked back inside the midship house, now tilting at a crazy angle, and climbed to the bridge deck. He found Sparks in his chair, inert as his radio, and yanked him onto his feet.
“Leave me the fuck alone,” Sparks said weakly.
“Come on, you gimpy little shit.” Enraged, Eddie slung Sparks onto his back and hauled him slowly down the ladder to the boat deck.
“Interfering bastard,” Sparks muttered.
All four lifeboats had gone, and the boat deck was empty. Through the downpour, Eddie saw the stern of the Elizabeth Seaman submerged halfway to her mizzenmast, waves breaking over her rear gun tub. On the lee side, a pontoon raft had released automatically from its slide rack and now floated by the deck. Still carrying the radioman on his back, metal leg brace cracking his heels, Eddie fumbled down a ladder to the main deck and began stepping sideways down a grade worthy of San Francisco, taking care not to slip on the slick iron deck. He carried Sparks to where the raft floated, pulled it toward him by its painter rope, and half rolled, half threw Sparks over the gunwale onto its wood lattice. As Eddie was vaulting over the rail onto the raft, he heard a thundering disturbance overhead: cargo was tearing loose from the ship’s nearly vertical bow deck. Tanks and jeeps snapped their chains and tumbled end over end like boulders, crushing booms and masts, caroming over the midship house and smashing onto the after deck in explosions of metal parts, before flinging themselves into the sea. Eddie tried to cut the painter holding the raft to the ship, certain he and Sparks would be crushed by the onslaught. But it was wire rope, and even his bowie knife couldn’t hack through it. The Elizabeth Seaman shrieked and shivered in an agony of tormented steel as Eddie scrambled to retrieve the ax that was secured to each raft. But before he could chop again at the painter, the ship’s doomed bulk discharged an aching, burpy, primordial groan and slid under the sea, pulling their raft down with her. Eddie and Sparks were left in the water. He seized the radioman around the chest and braced himself for the vortex, a body memory of holding boys at Rockaway Beach coming to him suddenly. “Hold your breath,” he shouted to Sparks. But no vortex came. The sea bubbled and frothed where the ship had been, pushing Eddie and Sparks away.
Eddie peered around wildly for the lifeboats, but in rain and darkness and high swells, he couldn’t see any. He made out a cluster of red lights from Mae Wests: another raft, possibly, crowded with men. Holding Sparks around the chest, Eddie lay on his back and kicked to propel them toward it. The radioman was so slight, a birdlike assemblage of bones and flesh without even a coat, much less a life vest. Eddie felt the sea convulsing underneath them as the ship plunged. The surface was covered with oil—he tasted it, felt it in his eyes and nostrils. He kicked and paddled, checking occasionally to see that he was still moving in the right direction. Eventually, someone hauled him out, still clutching Sparks. Eddie lay on the raft, unsure whether Sparks was alive. When at last he opened his eyes, he saw Bogues, a navy gunner, beside him. “You’re a hell of a swimmer,” Bogues said.
Eddie began to retch onto the raft’s latticework timbers. Sparks was retching, too, which presumably meant he’d survived. Even as Eddie heaved up oil-smelling vomit into the oil-smelling sea, his mind was straining, sifting: Bogues had been on Farmingdale’s boat, number three. Why was he on a raft? Had three gone down? The raft was composed of identical nine-by-twelve-foot wood-timbered lattices with steel flotation drums sandwiched in between. Eddie hooked his arm around a timber and held on. The swells were enormous, but the ship’s oil slick kept them from breaking and allowed the raft to slide over their crests. Eddie kept raising his head to look for the ship, but nothing marked the spot where seven thousand tons of welded steel loaded with nine thousand tons of cargo had floated thirty minutes before—not a depression, not even a patch of effervescence, to recall the magical girl who’d carried them halfway ’round the world.
From Bogues, who lay beside him, Eddie gleaned that lifeboat three had been broken against the side of the ship by the swells. Everyone had made it to the raft except the injured engineer, who had disappeared in the waves. “Ochylski went under?” Eddie said in alarm. But the gunner didn’t know his name, and Eddie refused to believe it was Ochylski. He pictured the third engineer holding a bight of lifeline that ran around the perimeter of the raft, smiling sardonically at their predicament. With Eddie and Sparks, there were twenty-nine of them aboard, Bogues said—four more than the raft was built to hold.
Now the storm set upon them in earnest, trying to suck them from the raft as if they were bits of food caught between its teeth. In flashes of lightning, Eddie counted bodies with the cringing hope of a gambler after a roll—four sevens—yes, plus himself: twenty-nine. The raft scaled swells so mountainous that he feared it would be pitched backward end over end, flinging men away and drowning Sparks, whom he’d lashed to the timbers with his belt. Each time, the raft managed to slide over the crest and skid down into the trough to begin another climb. After a while, Eddie stopped counting men and felt for Sparks’s leg brace with his foot. The arm he’d fastened around the planks stiffened as if in rigor mortis. He no longer could tell up from down. At times a tense, fragmentary sleep overcame him. Luminescence flared from the sea: plankton, Eddie knew, having encountered this phenomenon in the Pacific. Now their glow seemed an emanation from the ocean floor: the Elizabeth Seaman and other lost ships, hundreds over centuries, signaling up from the deep.
Morning brought a dirty light on a high confused sea. The worst of the storm had passed. Six of their number had vanished: the first cook; the AB called Red; a gunner; a wiper; a messman; and Pelemonde, a dreamy ordinary who had b
een a favorite with the deck crew. Bogues was still there, along with Farmingdale, the two cadets, and a mix of naval guardsmen, ordinaries, firemen, and Sparks, who had been fixed in place by Eddie’s belt. Pugh, the old salt, had somehow held on. Iron men in wooden boats. For a long time the group hardly spoke, absorbing the loss of their shipmates. For Eddie that included Ochylski, who was nowhere to be found.
Farmingdale was the highest-ranking officer, which put him in command of the raft with Eddie as his second. For all his reservations about the second mate, Eddie was glad to have the ship’s navigating officer on board. Better yet, Sparks reported that his SOS signal had been answered, meaning there was a good chance of rescue when the storm subsided.
At midday, with rain still falling on and off, someone spotted between swells a distant lifeboat riding low—perhaps overcrowded. They broke out the raft’s oars, and Eddie made an oarlock for each by twisting a bight of lifeline around it—a trick he’d learned from his pamphlet. A gunner and a fireman rose onto their knees and took an oar each, men anchoring them fore and aft. When they managed to get close enough to see the boat more clearly, they found it empty and swamped. It must be Eddie’s boat, number four—the one that had gone off prematurely. This was excellent luck. Compared with a pontoon raft, a lifeboat was a palace: 297 cubic feet of shelter, equipment, and supplies, not to mention a sail and a tiller. Eddie’s abandon-ship package would be tied inside, containing a sextant, blankets, and extra waterproof rations. The cigarettes would likely be soaked, but the bottle of South African rum would be more than welcome.
They lashed the raft to the boat, and men took turns boarding and bailing. To Eddie’s confusion, the boat was marked number two—the first mate’s—yet there was a sack tied in the very spot where he’d tied his own. Mystified, he pried open this sack and found it crammed with books bloated by seawater into a sodden mash. With a twitch of fear, he understood: only one man in the world would rescue from a sinking ship a sack containing just books. And he’d last seen the bosun at the tiller of the first mate’s boat, number two, which had gone off first.
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