It was almost a habit of his to be both wise and perceptive, and, most important, to the point, without the numbing verbosity that sometimes afflicted the newer breed of holy people, and concerning the men I consulted him often. Not of course as to what explicit confessions they might have made to him in line of his duties, since even to the Navy that was a privileged matter, but as to their overall state of being, leaving to him any comments, even suggestions, he might choose to offer either in general or in any individual cases. He felt free to raise with me matters that another officer might not. In this respect he stood to me somewhat as did the doc, perhaps rather more so. A captain is well advised to establish this relationship with these special billets aboard his ship, and to give them quite a loose rein in discourse. Not to do so would simply be willfully, and to my mind stupidly, to deprive himself of two rich sources, available in none others aboard, concerning the welfare and thinking of his men. Sailors will say to priests and to doctors what they will not say to their other officers, much less their captain.
Lieutenant Commander Thomas Cavendish embodied those two institutions perhaps of all earthly ones not born yesterday: He was as versed in the ways of the Navy as in those of the Jesuits, no small feat itself, each having its own unswerving and labyrinthine complexities and insistences, rubrics forever baffling to outsiders, sometimes even to insiders, both aged in time and trial. He was a learned man, in the old, almost forgotten sense of the word, in matters both secular and clerical, though one could go years without fully realizing the extent of the first since, not being a professional intellectual, he did not push it off on you. Most of our dialogues concerned ship’s company, problems one or more might have. But sometimes they concerned nothing at all; sometimes we spoke of matters far distant from the Navy, spoke about ideas; intellectual nourishment I suppose you would call it. For a captain who feels need of it, sometimes in his loneliness starved for it as from absence of food, difficult always to find, immutable barriers intervening; lucky there, too, to have the Jesuit aboard. I really had nothing like that with any other on the ship. Girard had offered some of it of late, but was still a distant second; so that I had reason to cherish him personally. Ship’s company liked him to a noteworthy degree, with a clear fondness undiluted by their knowledge that he could be as firm as a rock with them if a matter he deemed in his jurisdiction so warranted. So that in the latter area his personal popularity was complemented by a considerable influence among the crew, not without its element of fear of invisible punishments at his command, as restraining in their way as the visible ones available to a ship’s captain.
He was six feet two or thereabouts, as an undergraduate had been a boxer with the Georgetown varsity, light-heavyweight division, and remained as lean and fit as he would have had to have been then. Kept himself so by boxing still, with a few of the crew interested in this sport. He had hair of rich abundance and striking in its raven blackness above a delicate, pale face chiseled with strong, distinctly boned features. He had an almost unwilling animal magnetism of a kind one suspected would be curiously beckoning, even hypnotic, to women of lustful inclinations; the startling physical looks actually, I was sure, an important handicap in his profession, if not at present only because of the location of his post. It was easy for one to imagine that in his pre-Navy years this attribute had given him problems with the occasional female parishioner and equally easy to conclude that, being above all else a man who knew himself—Jesuits more than most—as much as any man can at a given stage of his life, he would have been aware of the faculty, and would have long since mastered, as a necessity of his vocation, the ritual of turning away any such probings with a skilled gentleness that doubtless only increased the ardor while at the same time keeping it firmly at bay. I had even wondered once or twice whether such possibilities had something to do with his presence aboard, his having actually sought duty in then womanless ships in part at least to escape the devil’s persistent temptation: yes, a sea captain is at times as subject to bizarre fancy, in those recurrent mentally unoccupied moments coursing the endless deep, as is any other man who follows the sea.
He was the only soul aboard with whom I could speak openly, in an absolute sense; for that matter, he to me the same. We were locked together in an indissoluble embrace, its nature the most simple and straightforward first principle: that no hurt should reach the men that we could prohibit. All secrets of a surety were safe with the priest. But I had never explicitly raised the matter even with him. We had had only a general discussion, I certainly, and, I felt quite sure, he as well deliberately orbiting the matter, both of us making short, covert forays into it and then each stepping back, as if in fear of pronouncement, myself becoming almost as much of a Jesuit as was he. On my part I felt the first intimations of a future chasm arising between us, a parting of ways, a coming even of overt battle I wished to avoid—I did not hesitate to judge I preferred him greatly as ally over foe. In either role he would be a formidable force. He had made a glancing reference, even so unusual for him since he looked upon piety as a matter the articulation of which profaned and even invalidated it, to the question of God’s grace, as something—this at least was my understanding of what he was saying—obviously given to us for reasons and purposes unknown (but surely later to be revealed) and therefore obliging us to be deserving, worthy, of it. He had spoken, without aggression, of the men being under his “spiritual care,” paused and added, “and these women”; immediately the brief smile, disarming, surely meant to be so, “How pompous that sounds. I meant only the office, with such ability as I possess,” which I loosely interpreted to mean we both were stuck with our responsibilities; had spoken, with somewhat more firmness and rather to my astonishment, of what he called “the necessity of moral survival.” I had had in mind to say, “Try that on hungry and deprived men, Father.” Instead I had kept my peace, perhaps making a murmured, almost dismissive, “Of course, Chaplain.” Two could play this game.
Even so, he had not really come at me, nothing on the order of laying down limits beyond which we dared not venture. The approach was characteristically oblique, almost as if he were speaking home truths on the assumption that I of course would agree with him—and with them. In any event I was not prepared, at the moment, to take on heavy seas from that quarter. Later, if it came to that, I would face the matter and deal with it as I had dealt with other turbulences. Concerned with ever-pressing ones, I had not the luxury of handling problems until they overtly rose and insisted on prompt answers. They must get in line. I had my own firm and sustaining guide, and one which never varied, inflexible, single-minded, my one sure compass, viewing but one matter truly urgent: to bring my ship’s company through, by whatever means might prove necessary. Nothing else really entered. As regards him, I intended, of course, to have my way, as with any other force or person that might stand between myself and my objective. If the Jesuit was responsible to the Almighty, he also was responsible to me. I counted that he would not forget that—if he did, I was prepared to remind him of the fact—and that it would be his part, not mine, if the occasion arose, to work out any seeming conflict in allegiance to his twin deities. He was, after all, a Jesuit.
And now the moment had come.
* * *
The rain, holding off as though by a direct meteorological intervention of Providence just long enough for the completion of religious services, started just as he entered my cabin. Not the island’s regular twenty-minute daily shower but a real rain. After the ever-recurrent days of solemn and unrelenting heat, it was a welcome visitor. We stood at the ports watching its sibilant fall. Then as the rain grew and became an opaque curtain falling between us and the island, lashing the ship and entering the cabin, I battened down the ports and we sat awhile more hearing the rain drill the ship. It was a pleasant, invigorating thing after the long sullen calm of the island. Sailors like weather. I was just as glad it was the Sabbath, which we continued to observe as a day of rest so that the men were not a
t the Farm or at sea fishing. My only concern was the crops, but the rain, while lively, did not seem virile enough to do them real harm—anyhow they were not at present at such a vulnerable stage as to make that a likely worry, Gunner’s Mate Delaney had assured me in his arcane and deliberative way when we had discussed the matter while contemplating the rain’s approach high and far away in darkening skies.
He sat, his lanky body seeming almost awkwardly too much for any chair, waiting in an invulnerable serenity for whatever it was I had summoned him to say. If some men are all men and some men, the best (and strongest) I have always felt, both—mostly man, but part woman—then he belonged to the latter category. A strangely compelling inner force emanated from him. His method was to let you render the thought, idea, or concern in fullness, not to jigger it along. If you stumbled, he did not rush in. He waited, with no sense of hurry or impatience, for you to collect yourself and proceed. I think it was his way of making sure it came to him wholly uncontaminated, even by himself. It was a neat trick, remarkably efficacious in its simplicity. It had the effect of making you meticulously conscious of what you were saying. It had as well a certain devilish quality. It permitted your own words to turn on you, since no others were being said. So while he sat in silence, regarding me with those thoughtful, introspective eyes, with a listening so acutely active as to make me aware of it, I carefully described to him the site I had found on the far side of the island, atop the red cliffs. Why, first of all, it was the place of choice for us because of the way the winds flowed here, the island vulnerable on this side, shielded on that lee shore from the high Beauforts and hurricanes sure to attack it in time. For he was a sailor, too. Of its favorable aspects otherwise. The water supply. The tall trees, timber for habitations. The existent clearings for these.
The purpose of this rather punctilious explication was not to seek his imprimatur. It was rather to give the idea its final test. If he did not come down on it, it would not necessarily mean that it had his fullest blessing; he did not judge it his province to go around bestowing that with any promiscuity on his captain nor did I go around seeking it out before making a captain’s decisions. But it would mean that an intelligent man saw no active objection to the proposed course. When I had finished, he waited a few moments, merely, I think, to make certain that I had no more to say.
“So it’s to be here,” he said simply. “This island.”
“At least for now.”
“Just for now?”
“It will give us a place,” I said, not answering his question directly. “An abode. A favorable setting for habitations, for living—for life. At the worst, a fallback position. If things change, we reassess. If we hear anything, pick up any viable, valid transmission, we evaluate. We still have the ship. Meantime, we have a place. Who knows, Chaplain,” I said cunningly, “maybe God led us to it.”
“Maybe He did. We’ll find out soon enough.”
That was blessing enough. We both waited in a rather long and meditative silence, only the rain commanding any sound at all. It reached us as a kind of symphony rainstorm concert, Beethovenish, with its varying wind-aided volumes and tonalities, now lashing at the ship, now coming straight down on it in a steady drumbeat, now slackening into an arpeggio of that poignant sound that occurs when rain and sea meet; silent we sat, taken with something I could not have said what, perhaps, now that it was upon us, simply the sense of the quite possibly irreversible step at last about to be taken, with its heartstruckness and its forebodings. The thing that comes after a long search, the acute awareness of . . . well, the beginning of a beginning. We had been through it all together. For so long our ship’s company had been—the priest had been quite apt about that—as the Israelites of the Old Testament, seeking a home—the difference being that they knew where theirs was and had only to seize it, ancient in their blood, whereas we had to discover ours somewhere on all the lands of the earth, something new and alien to us, unknown in entirety. His head was tilted slightly downward, almost bowed, in that visible inward assessment which seemed like a graven part of him but was in no way forbidding: On the contrary it suggested a mind concentrated to the exclusion of all else on the needs of the one now before him, ready to receive them and perhaps to point out dangerous shoals, like some sonar man of the spirit.
I listened to the rain come down, a staccato cadence at present. My decision in respect to the habitations was by now a firm, even inflexible one. Its promise only grew: in the last week I had taken Noisy Travis to that far side of the island and the taciturn and not easily impressed shipfitter, after meticulous examination, applying his ax freely to one of those stately trees, had certified the building material as being acceptable; indeed, when pressed, of the first class. Yes, we would build. Now I had that one other matter, one that had come more and more to appear as the very cornerstone of the one we had just been about. I waited for the resolved issue to finish its movement in the mind, only the variant sounds of the rain violating the cabin’s poised stillness. The matter seemed no longer willing to rest patiently within me, submerged, unspoken. Restless, it demanded release from the solitary confinement of my very soul; somehow using a form of address rare in our dialogues.
“Father,” I said.
He looked up at me. His eyes were his most inescapable feature. Large and grave, meditative, of an anthracitic cast, deep-set in an embrasure of salient cheekbones. All the tribulations of man seemed to rest like a chosen burden in their deep pools, in their lustrous blackness, as if they had seen everything that could happen to that creation of God’s, his sins, pains, woes, imperfections, turpitudes, follies beyond imagination, and been led by them to one unshakable and all-guiding belief that formed the answer to all, to every single question and to all questions: Were these not what made up, constituted man, were his very essence? And was he still not God’s creation? It followed that it was God’s wish that man be as he was, full of frailties and impairments, invested with every malice, executant of iniquities endless in their variety, routinely activist of appalling transgressions, evildoings beyond comprehension—so why should these ever surprise us and who were we to quarrel with God’s obvious intent as to man’s nature? He alone disturbs the planet’s intrinsic equanimity, balance. He alone is not wanted here—except by God, who has not seen fit either to tell us why or to alter him. Is not that enough? I sometimes thought how identically he and the doc viewed the creature man in his endless fallibility, but from what different ends of the telescope! The eyes waited, ready now in their profound heedfulness to see one more. An interlude faint, andante, came in the rain’s progression. I went on, rather softly.
“I think I know real trouble when I see it. I don’t think we are there, in any immediate sense.”
The long-established habit of our talks, as opposed to the asking of direct questions, was rather to give him openings into which he could move or not, as he deemed fit. Our drill required that I not seem vulgarly to be probing his confession box. This served the purpose of permitting his own readings and exclusive sources of intelligence to be made available to his captain, always only to the extent he chose, without compromising his religious vows in respect to the sanctity of the revelations of his sailor flock. On this occasion he chose silence as a reply—he was a virtuoso of silence; a very tool of his, I felt. I moved on.
“But it has come over the horizon.”
I waited again, heard the rain’s acceleration. “It’s going to happen,” I said quietly. “The fact is, I believe it’s already begun.”
In this fashion I had just voiced a seeking of confirmation, but a readiness—more, an eagerness—to embrace the opposite if that be the fact. All of this he would know, and what we, captain and priest, were about here. If he felt surprise or trepidation it was concealed. But he was a professional at that, a master of concealment—or rather, a master at preserving his own concealments whilst penetrating those of another. He did not even ask me why I thought so. Simply acceptance of a palpable fact
. Reality, consisting principally of man’s unchanging and unchangeable, seemingly compulsive agitation of things and fellow men around him, man forever determined not to let good things be, obliged by his essence to stir them up, beheld harmony but a stimulant to create disharmony, was a thing neither to be argued with nor lamented over—that was work for a fool—only to be leavened, if possible controlled, guided, steered as by a clever helmsman, by hands both gentle and rock-firm, along God’s ways and routes. Perhaps he had seen the evidence also, or sensed, heard—this was a clear probability—through those confessional devices possessed only by himself. Though these he could not pass along directly even to me, his silence was confirmation enough. Then I became aware of something strange: he had not seemed all that disturbed at the development. I heard a faint, distant rumble of thunder. I decided to try something.
“We are like a Noah’s Ark. Except that Noah possessed the foresight to board one female for every male. Given the choice, I would have followed that biblical sailor’s example, at least on present knowledge. Do you think it ever occurred to the Navy to take that balance into account?”
“Knowing the Navy, I doubt it, Captain. The Navy would have been quite critical of that Ark; probably found everything about it unacceptable. Starting with seaworthiness. Never make it.”
So he was deflecting that matter of mathematics, simply declining to reconnoiter it, turning it back on me. I waited a moment, then spoke against the rain.
“It’s begun. And I know this. We can’t just stand by, let happen what might happen, what would happen. Pretend it isn’t there. It would blow us out of the water.” I waited, hearing the crescendoing downpour. “I had given thought to this—I’ve given thought to a lot as you may imagine: to keep the women on the ship, put the men in the habitations ashore.”
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 15