“We’ve been lucky so far, sir. Chances are we’ll stay so.”
“Right,” the captain replied. Then, simply, “I’ll get back to the bridge.”
Morgan went to his cabin. There, from its keeping place, he removed a small kit, prepared long ago: contents: an initialed, brandy-filled silver flask (a present from another era, from Maud); a Bible, bound in soft leather (given him by his father when he first went off to boarding school); and a tin of sulfa powder—the lot wrapped in oilskin and tied with linen twine, an end length of which he used now for securing the kit to his belt.
He took his time, surprised by his calm. He consulted his watch: 9:01. He drank a glass of water. A mistake. With the last tepid, tank-tasting swallow, by an imperial trick of mind, he was in the meadow behind his house, kneeling beside the creek on a mound of willow-shaded grass, filling his cupped hands with the stream’s clear water, putting his lips to the pleasing chill, his eyes, the while, following the swim of a charming newt…Christ… The past that had risen before him clashed with the present and he stood, frozen by the sudden animal lucidities of fear. The pity of it all!…He suffered through a moment of resentment that took the form of a soundless weeping. And then his anger shifted to himself, and to himself he posed the issue of his manhood’s strength, and thereby, albeit slowly, worked his way back to the south side of a stoic courage. Finally, and for the numbing fact of its being the only next thing he could do, he returned to his duties on deck.
An hour passed, and nearly half of another.
…The first torpedo struck the Stubbins on her port bow. At the rending blow she trembled mightily and, veering, began almost at once to lose way. As much for her as for themselves, her men cried out—a wild plaint of shock and disbelief that came from every quarter and continued at full pitch until, whether by force of will, habit of duty, or the savage compulsions of terror, they recovered their senses and, acting on the “Abandon-Ship” order that came almost at once from the bridge, set about to save themselves. The conduct of most was near automatic: a result of the disciplines practiced and perfected by the relentless drills the captain had insisted on, himself observing each exercise, and timing it, seeing it done, each time, instanter. The blackness of the night, though, confused: and the unrehearsed contingencies of the injured: and the impediments of strong metal and loosened rigging and broken glass and the hindrance of huger objects that shifted in a greased way over the deck as the sea began to pour in through the cavity of the Stubbins’s open wound, flooding her, and causing her to tilt slowly onto her nose. Yet, somehow, and with amazing speed, the four life-boats were released from their chocks and, with each one manned by an inboard officer and two seamen, lowered to the sea’s surface where, launched and holding at a safe distance from the foundering ship, they stood by as the men came down the ropes. For that act, some helped others: Sutter, for one. Holding the wounded Owl, he inched him down the hemp ladder, down the entire cliff of the Stubbins’s side, encouraging him all the way by the charging offense of his language, that he could the fuck make it if he’d try: “Come on, Owl. I won’t drop you. Come on, you lovely shit…” And Kenner helped Williams (whose right arm was a mangled mess) bringing him down, seated, on his shoulders—the success of the carnival stunt made possible by the agile way Williams put his left hand to use during the descent, shifting it swiftly from one hemp vertical to the next, by which action he both lessened his weight on Kenner’s shoulders and kept himself from falling over backwards. Morgan took charge of Anderson, the chief petty-officer (whose left leg was brutally injured) by positioning himself below Anderson on the ladder and guiding Anderson’s good right leg downward, rung by rung. Just before they dropped, Morgan told him: “Take a deep breath…” In a sea thick with the spillage of fuel oil, he retrieved Anderson, and with Anderson gripping his belt, he began to swim. They were fantastically lucky: Garvin—in command of one of the lifeboats—saw the closely paired bob on the water of their life jacket lights, and with Rhode and Tamworth working the oars, instantly came to their rescue.
Incredibly, most of the men were in the water now…. Morgan hauled Hughes into the boat, then with Hughes’s turnabout help, the near-lifeless Owl, and after him the exhausted, still cursing Sutter. They picked up others: Vodapec and Climson and Browne.
The captain, too and last, left the Stubbins, abandoning her after sending the others before him. Three-quarters of the way down the ladder he stopped and turned his body full around and, faced so, away from his stricken ship, he let go his hold on the ropes and jumped, feet first, into the sea.
No more than fifteen minutes elapsed between the strike of the first torpedo and the hit of the second—just time enough for the bastard sub to swing around and take a murderer’s aim and discharge its next blow—delivered to the Stubbins’s starboard side, midship, with a killing accuracy that ruptured the rest of her bunker tanks and set off the deck ammunition. There were, then, explosions of blinding light and scythed concussions of sound, like machine-gun fire, and the greater deafening blasts of the larger shells and a downpour from the sky of debris, and on the sea, spreading rapidly, greater spills of oil. As seen now in the flashes of exploding light, the Stubbins looked as if she were in the grip of some extreme, empowered underwater hand that was pulling her firmly down and under…. There was a chaos of unpatterned waves, two of which came together and formed a single, imposing, crested undulation that poured itself broadside into the captain’s boat (the only one with a motor), casting its occupants back into the sea and—direly—swamped the craft. By the illuminating bursts from the still-exploding ammunition, Morgan and the others in Garvin’s boat saw it happen. Garvin barked out the order to row: “Row. Row!” in the direction of the catastrophe. Rhode and Tamworth strained at the oars, but because of the need to maneuver against the hazard to themselves from another such making wave, their approach was indirect and painfully prolonged. By the time they reached a position relative to the swamped boat, its outcast members, seven in all, including the captain, were widely scattered—calling out—all of them choking from the oil and slippery as eels when it came to handing them into the boat.
At some point during the rescue operation—certainly long before it was completed—the Stubbins’s stern heaved up and out of the sea. She was seen pitched on her nose: doomed. For an eerily long moment she remained so, as if staying herself by her own will: as if she were determined—even odd and tragic as she looked now, with her propeller exposed and her fine, orderly, substantial beauty all undone—to be remembered as resisting her death to the very end.
Those who could kept their eyes on her, watching as all mourners do, with a terrible attention and an opposing prayer that the inevitable come not and that it come fast.
She lurched again, this time with an incalculably immense, dispelling sigh. There was an ear-splitting crash as her masts fell and a storm of ruin racketed down her decks. Some of her men wailed out—“She’s going!”—and even as they gasped, she plunged, and with an unimaginable speed, vanished from their sight, taking with her the strange poetry of their instantly remembered lives aboard her and leaving them in the night’s darkness on a sea thick with oil and the floating wreckage of their lost world.
…In time, the sea regained its calm.
In the lifeboat, Anderson lay under a thwart. Now and again he would moan and Morgan would reach down and touch his hand. Across from him, Sutter held the Owl, now mercifully unconscious. Five men were sprawled on the bottom of the boat. The others simply sat, mutely erect, or slumped forward, holding their heads in their hands, some leaning against one another, clumped so for support. There was a pervasive stink of vomit and oil. In the stern, alone, the captain’s crouched figure had the rigid, hulked, dark look of a chained dog.
For a while this was the way they remained, resting, under the stars.
(…In law school, the course in criminal law had been taught by a much admired legal scholar named John Caddell. Mr. Caddell had a swift mind and
he looked like a gambler on a Mississippi steamboat, which is why generations of law students referred to him as “Blackjack Caddell.” He was a broadly read man and he would often open a class-lecture by quoting from this or that book written by an author or “thinker” deemed worthy of his respect [the leaps in kind could be prodigious, ranging over centuries]. And so one day he had entered the lecture room and, after giving out his usual languid “Good morning to you all,” had turned to the blackboard and written on it the single phrase “the fatal futility of Fact”—after which he had faced back to his audience and in his deep, leading voice said: “Those are Henry James’s words. They appear in his novel The Spoils of Poynton…. Notice that the word fact is capitalized, not by me, by Mr. James…. For a moment, let us delete the word fatal, which leaves us with the pithier ‘the futility of Fact.’” [A weighted pause.] “Now, let us reinsert Mr. James’s qualifier—‘fatal.’”…[Another pause.] Then, briskly: “And now, let us proceed to the case of today’s discussion.”)
It was as they rested that Morgan heard in his mind’s ear Blackjack Caddell’s voice saying again the words of James’s sentence, and began, wearily but genuinely, to ponder which “Fact” of his present circumstance was the mattering one: that of the demising torpedoing of the Stubbins, or the more mysterious, unresolved one of his still being alive, and being so, as yet unwilling to consider a preference for one form of death over another. And it was then, out of a passionate, obedient love of life and loyalty to it, that he prayed to survive, vowing to himself that if he did, he would never make of his continuance an earthly boast.
By midnight, the three life-boats had come together, the raw comfort of the joining made possible by the glow from the stars and the sea’s prevailing calm.
A head-count was taken:
—Eighteen in the boat Morgan was in (commanded now by the captain), (two—the Owl and Anderson, seriously wounded);
—Eighteen in the boat Sarkis had the charge of (one—Williams—injured);
—Sixteen in Pfeiffer’s boat (no physical injuries, but Staines and Norreys in shock).
In each boat, most were suffering from the effects of having swallowed salt water and oil.
Of the vanquished Stubbins’s total complement of fifty-seven men, fifty-two were accounted for; five were dead or missing.
The boats rocked in close proximity and the captain spoke quietly through the dark to his men. He made a kind of sermon out of what he called “our decent chance of making it through.” He gave two reasons for his optimism, the first one being that before the “Abandon-Ship” order was given, Jacks, the radio officer on duty, acting on orders, had transmitted an SOS, giving the Stubbins’s position and the time of the initial torpedoing, so it was logical to assume that friendly ships would conduct a search for survivors; and the second reason—the luck of the weather: the light, steady breeze and the easy seas.
He told what he thought was the best thing to do: that the two boats under the command of Sarkis and Pfeiffer should take immediate advantage of the favoring weather and set sail together for the coast of South Africa (which he calculated to be some ninety miles away); that he and the men in his boat should stand by in the area for the rest of the night on the chance of picking up at dawn any or all of the five missing men, and that then they too would sail for the coast.
He was masterful: he gave shape to hope.
Saturday, March 20, 1943
At around two A.M., the two boats set off. The captain stood up for their departure: “Good luck,” he said into the darkness. From the departing men, good-byes were murmured. As the white sails disappeared into the night, Morgan heard Vodapec’s whispered words to Tamworth: “Now we’re for sure on our own.”
Dawn came slowly. By its first gray light, they looked about with horror at the floating mass of debris and vast extent of the oil slick and—wordlessly—at each other: at their filthy bodies, their weary, fear-ridden faces, at Anderson’s mangled leg and the Owl’s slight breathing…. Rhode was the one who snapped them out of their silence. He had been staring off with a dazed, reclusive look on his face (Morgan thought him in shock) when, without the least change of facial expression, he said: “I think I see a raft.”
The captain was quick: “Where, Rhode?”
Rhode pointed: “Focus on that third streak of oil, sir…the widest one, way beyond the end of it…that black form, sir.”
Against the rising sun, the captain hooded his eyes with his hands. “I don’t see it, Rhode.”
But Browne did. “Something’s there. It’s riding low, sir. It could be a raft with a drogue put out to steady it.”
Most were involved now, straining to see.
The captain sounded desperate: “I can’t pick it up…. You’re sure, Browne? Do you still see it, Rhode?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain sat down. “We’ll row toward it. Guide us, Browne; Rhode.”
Hughes and Magrath manned the oars. The captain told them: “Set a pace and don’t exert beyond it. It won’t do to use up your strength hurrying.”
Certainty set in soon enough: just as Rhode and Browne had said, there was something ahead—a goodly sized object darker by a bit than the sea, riding low and fairly steady on the water. “Keep on as you’re going,” the captain said. And when they’d progressed about half-way to it, he cupped his hands to his lips: “Hello,” he shouted: “Hello!”…There was no answer. To Hughes and Magrath he said: “Say when you want to be relieved. Vodapec and Tamworth can take over.”
Hughes said: “No need yet, sir.”
They went on for a spell in a silence broken only by the rhythmic sloshings of the worked oars. Then the captain tried again: “Hello…Hello.”
In the raft, a figure raised itself. Against the sky, its upright substance looked like a huge bird perched on a floating log, and it stayed so, still, for a long minute. And then, from its sides, not wings, but arms were lifted to shoulder height and extended outward full stretch and commenced moving, up and down, up and down. Like an animated crucifix, Morgan thought. Three other figures lifted themselves to view. Then a shrill sound rent the air—a piercing glissando—and Climson whipped to his feet: “Bowen. That’s Bowen’s girl-whistle…Hey, Bowen!”
“Sit down, Climson,” the captain commanded, not sternly, not—obviously—to squelch Climson’s joy, but for the serious sake of the task at hand. In the strengthening light, Morgan could see his eyes: that they were intensely blue and in concentration hard as steel…. “Hughes, Magrath, go on a bit more, and when I say to, bring the raft’s midship part to windward. We’ll let it drift down on us. Rhode, you get ready to throw a line to it when it’s close enough.” He was in complete control of a conspicuous excitement. “Sutter…. Sutter—”
“Sir?” Sutter’s voice was barely audible.
“We’re going to have to shift you and Malkerson to the other side…. Sutter?”
“I hear you.”
“Browne will hold Malkerson’s feet in place and Shurtliff’ll help you ease him across. I’ll tell you when.” And then, with a direct look at Morgan, the captain made a sign: Easy, it said: Sutter’s on the edge.
Myers.
Fuller.
Bowen.
Underwood.
By turn, each was transferred from the raft to the boat. From the way they let themselves be helped, Morgan got a sense of how spent they were: even Bowen, whose whistle had been so spirited. Fuller was barely recognizable: his blond hair was black with oil, his face and mouth bloody, lips grotesquely swollen, his front teeth gone. When Underwood was handed aboard, he looked into the faces of his mates and at the captain. He said, “Thank you.” Then he began to weep.
Myers told the captain: “We lost Davis, sir.”
In the small boat, crowded together, there were now twenty-two men. They set about to tidy up the boat: cleaned up the vomit; bailed out the water; coiled the lines…. The captain and Morgan went to work on Ande
rson’s leg: on the worst of the open wounds, they sprinkled the sulfa powder from Morgan’s kit and applied a loose wrapping of bandages supplied by the boat’s first-aid kit. About the Owl’s condition, all was mystery: he had no visible injuries, but his pallor was deathly and he breathed with obvious difficulty. Once in a while his eyelids would flutter: when that happened Sutter would speak to him, trying to rouse him, but the Owl did not respond.
…“Breakfast,” (the captain’s wry word), was a leathery concentrate of nourishment described on each packet as “Emergency Issue.” The intake of fluid was a two-ounce-per-man mix of water and orange juice. The captain put Morgan in charge of meting out these rations which would, he said, be dispensed, on his orders, three times to each man, each day.
Then: then they stepped the mast and rigged shrouds and a forestay. The captain reseated them for a better ballast. (Sutter would not be separated from the Owl, and the captain did not force the issue.) Garvin took the tiller. The captain raised his arm and with an arrowed gesture said: “That way.” Vodapec and Hughes hoisted the sail. The breeze took it and winged it out and as the boat spurted forward, Climson began to sing the child’s song:
Old MacDonald had a farm,
Ee-i, ee-i, oh.
And on the farm he had a cow,
Ee-i, ee-i, oh.
His voice was joined: “With a moo-moo here, and a moo-moo there—”
No barnyard creature lacked honoring.
Thus they departed the site of the Stubbins’s grave.
It stayed breezy all day. The sun was warm, but not tropical, so they did not suffer from it. The terribly cramped conditions made for stiff bodies and limbs and induced that kind of large-eyed, resigned lethargy a tethered animal displays. Generally, though, morale was good. There were even intervals that were vaguely lively, vaguely funny, as when a long litany of knock-knock jokes were exchanged, and after that, riddles, and a few dumb stories, all clean enough to tell to your sister. It was as if a kind of shyness had seized them: as if each wanted to be seen in an innocent light. Such constraint applied too in the matter of urination and defecation: in an attempt to bestow privacy, heads were turned away: the attempt mattered more than the fact that no privacy of the least sort was attainable—except of course as one sought and found it in his own thoughts, by which means, for suspended lengths of time, each became his own hermit. Closed eyes and a sealed-off look were the clues to these individual absences.
Matters of Chance Page 10