“Men, let’s go back to the ship,” I said.
We came down off the plateau and along the creek, through the trees and brush to the beach, and started along it toward the boat in the distance, sitting intrusively on the naked shoreline. The navigator and I walked a little behind the others, speaking in quiet tones.
“Well, Mr. Thurlow?”
“Favorable climate for it, you’d have to say, sir. Two rainy seasons of about two months apiece. November-December, May-June. Most days in the nonrainy season, just a twenty-minute shower as noted. Usually about thirteen hundred hours. We’ll probably have today’s before we get back.” He looked at his watch. “In fact, almost any moment.”
We stopped and studied the countenance of the island, trying to penetrate it with our minds, to break through its secretive demeanor. I looked north and then across it, where the low ledge of cumulus still preserved unrevealed the far western side. Were there people somewhere in there? I was on the verge of an hallucination. We had become accustomed to, experts in, hallucinations, in chimeras. I looked back to this side, where each way the land curved to form the U-lagoon. To the south the grassy plateau ended in the long ridge which sat like a sea lookout above the beach.
“That ridge,” Thurlow said thoughtfully. “Nothing else but just that. Reminds me a touch of the coastline down toward Carmel. The way it sits up there, I mean, rather cockylike, looking down at the sea. Were you ever in Carmel, Captain?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Thurlow. I was in Carmel.”
We went on. Sure enough Thurlow’s rain came up. Just out of nowhere. We stepped off the beach and stood under some trees and waited for it to finish. And sure enough, only about twenty minutes. A clean, straight fall, virtually soundless, gentle as dew. Then the sun was back out, just as though it had never happened. The island had taken a shower to refresh itself.
“Congratulations, Mr. Thurlow.”
He looked at his watch. We started back up the beach. “Actually I was seven minutes off. Highly irregular, what?” Lieutenant Thurlow was a sort of defrocked Rhodes Scholar, with the distinction, he once told me, not without pride, of being the only grantee ever to be sent down from Oxford. For what transgression he never said. At least he had been there long enough to get fluent Russian out of it, a linguistic talent that had served us well beginning with that astonishing arrangement with the Russian submarine at Gibraltar. It was his conceit, and form of humor, at times to speak in mock British tones, phrases. It was not a type of wit I would ordinarily have appreciated but in Thurlow even I sometimes found it amusing, I never knew why. Maybe it was just Thurlow himself I found amusing, most of the time. He had an undeniable charm: off and on he was by way of being my court jester. No one aboard had been so . . . well, almost blithe about our circumstance; no one seemingly so little changed by it. This acted to give him an edge, an advantage. He was a truly gifted navigator, and, as I have said, knew a great deal concerning the earth’s manifestations other than just stars. Within the limits of his one central interest, he was a sound thinker. If he had a fault, it may have been that when he ventured beyond that interest he sometimes thought too much. He understood things better than people. I had had little choice but to make him executive officer, the ship’s assigned exec having been on emergency leave when we launched in the Barents. Still I would much rather have him than not have him. He had the far-ranging mind, inventive, out there on the frontiers. Qualities we would need, need now and later.
“No problem about showers,” he was saying. “All hands can just strip and stand outside for twenty minutes.”
“I don’t think we can keep looking.” I stopped and picked up a handful of beach. It was uncommonly fine sand, in texture and tint like a woman’s face powder. I looked up to where, considerably down-beach from us now, high above the sea, stood the tableland of the silky grass. “Delaney seemed pretty sure it would give us, stand a good chance of giving us, what we need. Not easily. But nothing will be. Replenishment of stores.” Food, we both understood. For some reason, perhaps because it was the final barrier, one tried not to say the word. “We’re getting too close.” Nor did I mention fuel.
I spoke without looking at him.
“That rainy-season pattern. Planting times in that kind of situation?”
Ignorant as I was of such matters, I imagined I knew that one, just by common sense, but Thurlow would know more.
“Right after the close of one rainy season. The drill is: get them in and out before the next one arrives.”
“Do I understand you correctly? Another such calendar arrangement would not come again for five months?”
“That seems so if these calculations are accurate. And they have to be. My opinion, sir.”
There would be hard work, brutal as work could be, in that sun, of a kind most of the men had never been near, knew nothing whatever of. Stoop labor. The phrase was not hard enough to convey the ferocity of it, especially in these latitudes. The men to endure it. Then the land up there to come through, that dozen acres to harbor a fecundity we in truth could only guess at. The contents of Delaney’s shipboard greenhouse to take to their new home. The necessary luck, the gunner’s mate had educated me, wherever growing things are in venture . . . if all that came together. We needed to be right the first time. The reserves for fail-and-try-again were simply not there.
“So we would have to move fast. Begin right now, in fact?”
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
He stopped there, waiting. There would be no further help from that quarter. But none was really expected. I knew it and he knew it. It was not his part to take responsibility, not this one. He had learned well the old Navy lesson: Never stick your neck out an inch further than is required, lest it get chopped off at the collarbone. Not applicable to ship’s captains, these not being chosen for their ability to avoid hard decisions.
“Then that would seem to settle it. We have no choice.”
We stood silent on the strand. He said nothing but gave me a look that contained a question as to whether there was more. So I offered a little of it. A lie would not do. But vagueness, given things as they were, was acceptable, even imperative. A captain was allowed that in the name of his men’s welfare. It was no time to get the other started as scuttlebutt. It could whip through ship’s company, and as the most disturbing of elements, just when all our powers, physical, mental, emotional, were spoken for by the plain of grass.
“For the time being,” I said. “For our immediate needs. Then we’ll just have to see.” I stopped there. Thurlow, or any other of ship’s company, would get no more for now.
I looked seaward. “And of course out there will have to deliver. If we can trust those birds. Well, we can trust Silva. We’ll know that part by tomorrow.”
I turned and scanned the land again. “It’s a pretty place,” I said finally. I seemed to want to conclude it with an inanity.
This he safely agreed with. “That it is, Captain. A pretty place. When will you tell the others?”
“Soon, Mr. Thurlow. Soon.”
“Oh, Captain?”
“Yes, Mr. Thurlow.”
“The women, sir. Do you plan to bring the women ashore or leave them aboard?”
I turned, facing him. I saw his knowledge that even as he said the words he had gone too far.
“Who said I was planning to bring anybody ashore, Mr. Thurlow?”
I could hear the hardness in my voice, and it must have been in my look as well for I saw the sudden fear in his eyes, fear of me. Well, that was all right, too. If ever exactitude in matters of discipline, than which nothing else can hold a ship together, were demanded, it was in this.
“All I meant, sir, was if just possibly here or somewhere else . . .”
“Mr. Thurlow.”
He stopped, I think truly aghast now that he had ventured there, in such forbidden waters. “Mr. Thurlow,” I said, and heard the cold edge. “When I decide something, and then when I decide it is time to tell you
of my decision, I will do so. Do I make myself clear?”
“Entirely, sir. My fault altogether. I was out of line, sir.”
“Embark the men, Mr. Thurlow.”
We came up to where they were waiting at the boat. They stood in a desultory silence, their eyes ranging slowly back and forth over the island. I looked down the beach at our many footprints, winding away and out of sight, violations of the chaste sand.
“Do you think men have been here before, Captain?”
I turned, somehow startled. It was Barker, seaman apprentice, coxswain striker, only eighteen, a boy from Texas, literally the last hand, joining the ship in Norway straight out of boot camp at Great Lakes; had not, before coming aboard, even set eyes on the sea; lean and supple of body, tall, in any other society but that of sailors to be considered almost wondrously handsome, radiating an exceptional air of innocence. The question was almost as if, had they not been, how could they intend to be here now?
“If they were, it was a long time ago, Billy.” He was the one hand aboard everyone called by his Christian name, seeming that boyish, that young: nonetheless already on his way to becoming a fine seaman. My hand touched his shoulder, dropped. A gesture I would once not have made. “But—maybe it’s us—wherever there’s land somebody has to be first.”
He spoke almost shyly. “Yes, sir. I guess that’s so.”
I followed the men into the boat and we made for the ship. She rose gray and gallant beyond the blue-green lagoon, lean and alert, seeming to strain against the leash of her anchor, as if telling us that she was ready to up anchor on a moment’s notice. It was not so. The most brutal fact of all: so little fuel left. Still, she has done her job, I thought. She had brought us here, nearly a hundred degrees in latitude, from the frigid Barents to tropical seas, to all appearances sound in body and mind, if near, possibly, certain edges. Now I had to do mine.
All the rest of the day long, to the last of dusk, I kept the boats going back and forth from ship to shore, in a kind of series of liberty parties, such as they were, so that all hands could touch down on the island for an hour or so. So that all could feel the spectral, unreal thing 1 had felt: Land under our feet after four months on the oceans with only the decks of the USS Nathan James, DDG 80, guided missile destroyer, first of her class, beneath us. I stood watching the boats; stood looking, studying, in profound concentration, the stranger island, its plaintive scents drifting across to me, as if it should somehow be about to speak some counsel into my ears, saying either “Come and see” or “Stay away from me.” The one or the other. Knowing that it would say neither, holding steadfast to its impregnable air of mystery; knowing that the answer could come only from where answers always must in a ship off soundings—from within a captain’s secret all-lonely soul. Yet feeling surely it must be the former, how could it be otherwise: Remembering that moment when Lieutenant (jg) Selmon, gone ashore all alone with his instruments, staying overlong to make sure beyond all doubt of his findings, had finally returned, climbed the accommodation ladder to the quarterdeck where I stood awaiting him, and spoken in his quiet manner that imprimatur that took us a while even to comprehend before belief set in: “Captain, the island is uncontaminated.”
2
Band of Brothers
I: Morning
The memory so seared in my soul as to have become forever a part of me, as deep scars leave their rubrics upon the body; occasionally coming upon me suddenly, at unexpected times, but coming without fail at night, as ritualistically as the prayers children say on their knees before tumbling into bed; the very act of turning into my bunk presenting me with the terrible vision, clear as on a slide-viewer, of those four boats disappearing over the western horizon, swallowed up by the sea: 109 shipmates, two of these women, in a desperate, yes, in my view, fraudulent attempt to reach home, the mutiny led by an officer who I believed had deceived them. It was as if I had reached a compact with that remembrance to allow it its two minutes or so of daily reenactment if it then would allow me to find sleep; or perhaps a ship’s captain’s special knowledge that to permit it more was to surrender to it yet another victim, making it impossible for me to command. The tenacity of the memory was not altogether a negative thing, for it constituted also a warning that kept forever alert an absolute resolve on my part, exceeding all others, that it should never happen again with this of my ship’s company that remained; the memory rendering the further service of causing me to bear indelibly in mind that grim truth I had so imprudently, in an almost criminal negligence, let slide before: most mutinies are led by officers.
* * *
Nothing is more deadly to a ship’s company’s confidence in its captain than undue hesitation or procrastination. Thus well I knew the urgency of making my initial will concerning the island known, quickly, decisively, for any trepidations could only build and fester if the captain were seen as irresolute. The island’s first reconnoitering had implanted a cautious hope. I felt the prudence of a second appraisal. For that purpose I had sent Gunner’s Mate Delaney off, accompanied by Lieutenant Thurlow, in the early morning for a final assay of the grassy plateau. Since sea as well as land must prove fecund for us, Silva also I sent forth, seaward in a boat long before daybreak. One thing more. I determined that it was insistent that I take an exact and meticulous inventory of the ship as of this our moment of crossover. Delaney and Silva not being due back until noonday or beyond with their findings, I began on this matter.
To assist me in the first part of the task I would require Lieutenant Girard, my supply officer, and the lieutenant’s efficient if somewhat free-mouthed deputy, Storekeeper First Class Talley, and had so alerted them the night before. The three of us started on the task at 0600, when light was just appearing from beyond the east’s horizon, casting its halo of rose over the dark island which sat impassively awaiting our decision. Not until the sun had reached its blazing zenith, six hours later, did we complete the grim labor of tabulating what we had brought out with us, to last us for—how long?
* * *
When the Navy not long ago first commenced assigning a few women to ships, I felt it to be one of those incalculable fundamental errors that seem to be made only by civilizations in decline, a lapse profound and past comprehension in both the most elementary morality and judgment. The idea that we should take these embodiments—harbors, repositories—of all that is gentle and of final value in life, and God and Nature’s chosen instrument for the species’ very survival, and place them where they would be caught up in the ancient rough-and-tumble of shipboard existence, where peril was one’s daily bread, indeed where they might be maimed or slaughtered, and this act based on the concept that equality consisted in women doing exactly what men do: this seemed to me wicked to the point of malignancy, an abomination in the sight of the Lord and of pure reason, and a consummate fraud pulled off on half the human race by their own kind, abetted by a number of men masquerading as their champions. Besides these lofty moral considerations there lay a practical one. To add to the already immensely complex daily burden of operating a fighting ship a required ship’s company mixture of female and male appeared to many of us charged with the task an aberration little short of madness, comparable to putting ammunition stores alongside engine-room boilers. There was even this: any true sailor has learned long since the first lesson of the sea: never trifle with it, lest it turn on you. The sea is a tyrannical place, ruthlessly unforgiving of man’s frailties and miscalculations. I was not at all certain but that it might look upon this novelty—women aboard warships—as some kind of personal affront, a violation of the natural order, an act of hubris, an insolent challenge let loose upon its domain, not to be tolerated: and in its Olympian wrath in some fashion exact the terrible toll it never fails to levy for man’s arrogance toward it.
However, since the deed was struck, I treated females, once they began to come aboard the Nathan James, exactly as I did the men and officers. If equality was what they wanted, equality I would gi
ve them. I was not prepared further to insult them by setting for them standards lower than those I enjoined on my other sailors.
I never changed a particle in my view that the placement of women on men-of-war was a fallacy grave in the extreme. In particular, all my ethical reasons against doing so stood. But, that aside, I must in fairness say that, where practical matters are concerned, it worked out considerably better than I had foreseen. The doom and gloom predicted by many Navy men, myself among them, for ships with “mixed crews” was not forthcoming. Certainly not on my ship, or on any ship of which I had knowledge. For, I believe, a number of reasons. To start with: As it is true, by a process akin to natural selection, that the very best men and officers in the Navy make certain that they go to sea while the worst just as diligently seek out a “dry” career, earnestly managing never to set foot off the land onto blue waters—an odd, forever incomprehensible sort of sailor to my mind—such was true also of the women when the Navy began to send a certain number of these to sea. We got the best.
* * *
Our stores relating to keeping the body well-functioning fell, I calculated, into these groups and in order of importance: first, food, canned, bulked, and refrigerated; second, clothing; third, medical supplies; fourth, toiletries and assorted incidentals. The first, second, and fourth were the charge of Lieutenant Girard, so we dealt with these. Medical stores I would inventory later with the ship’s doctor. It was my feeling that an on-hands inspection might suggest ways to cut down further, to conserve, and tell us more directly where it was urgent we do so.
Hunger: No greater enemy exists. If it was not upon us it clearly had appeared on the horizon. Starting in the reefer deck in the bottom of the ship, we entered the dry provisions storeroom, the large compartment housing our canned and freeze-dried foods. We stood for a few moments in sober contemplation of how little there was left. Then Girard began to call out the item and the number of cases remaining while Talley checked them on her clipboard: lima beans, peas, potatoes, spinach, others. Moving on to flour, sugar, rice, beans, in hundred-pound bags. From that compartment, down the passageway to the bank of chill boxes, these the most diminished of all. Girard sounded forth and Talley registered the few boxes of beef, slabs of bacon, and the rest.
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 3