Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  As stewards often do at sea, they sailed together in sin, battling for the attentions of the innocent young cookboys, despised by the randy deck force, ignored by the motormen, and cultivated by the officers for whom they cooked and served special meals. In the latter half of the voyage, Lydia was put to work in the galleys. At first Harvey and Dave resented her so intemperately that she moved in between them and took command, improving the cuisine ad infinitum and raising morale among the boys forever under tables peeling or slicing, forever subject to lascivious pinches from above. They came alive in Lydia’s presence, turning from sallow candle-fleshed morons to bright apple-cheeked prodigies. Lydia lay with Marshall in their narrow bed, silvery clouds racing past the porthole on warm southern air, and delighted as he recounted her praise. At her table, the rough and insolent deck force was completely tame. “Tell me more,” she said. “I feel like the daughter of the regiment.”

  And then Marshall would repeat what had been said: “This puddings better than me mum’s.” “Does your missus give receipts?” “Hell’s bells governor, I’ve never tasted such great lima beans.” When she appeared in the mess one evening, they broke into spontaneous applause. And every night she would tell Marshall about her day in the “kitchen,” as she insisted upon calling it.

  Dave and Harvey were upset and did not speak for a week, except once when Dave was rustling a big basket of fried potatoes and Harvey was slicing cabbages. One of the cabbages rolled off the block and into Dave’s cauldron of sizzling fat. Dave looked at Harvey for the first time in days, and said, “You little devil!”

  To finish their tour of the 600-foot bulk carrier, Marshall and Lydia struggled across the deck to the forecastle. Clinging to handles on the anchor winches, they resolved to climb the mast. Marshall loved many things about Lydia apart from the indefinable main elements of their affection. One of these was her willingness to explore. Side by side they had swum raging inlets, roamed the mountains, and pushed through disgusting mushfooted swamps. And she had always remained ready to go. The crow’s nest was sixty feet above the deck—no laughing matter in a hurricane. The spikes by which they ascended were short enough, it seemed, to be stubble on a beard. In wind and rain they went upward into darkness. Because the Royal George was a modern ship, its crow’s nest was well appointed. Enclosed, heated, and carpeted, it was more like an apartment than an observation post. They were comfortable there, bobbing up and down high above a tumultuous killer sea. Swabbed with iodine-colored light and stretching from side to side, the bridge seemed like a wide rectangular eye. The sea was curly and white. Now and then a high part of it struck the ship, a storm within a storm. “This is just like Die Fledermaus said Marshall, “in which a woman suddenly calls for music even though music has been playing for an hour. And when it begins, its as if there has been silence.” Every eighth or ninth wave covered the part of the ship they had crossed to reach the bows. They made note of this in regard to getting back, and realized that it had been only by chance that they hadn’t been swept overboard on the way up.

  3

  LITTLE LOVE was lost between the crew and the Bosun, flown into Norfolk because his predecessor had vanished mysteriously somewhere off the Bahamas. The Bosun had one eye, wore a bright green hat, and was the toughest-looking bugger anyone on the ship had ever seen. “He beats up the plumbing at Dartmoor,” they said. To show who was boss, he had eaten his glass, plate, and fork at the hurricane dinner. He hated the crew, and they hated him. He was a fearsome character, and they were a tough bunch. They hated him because he tried to make them work in the storm. He hated them because they were a unique set of work-shirking duds who hadn’t done a day’s labor in their lives. But they did have a case, because the ship was fully automated. A war smoldered in the spray of the hurricane.

  At 3 A.M. the Captain sent an order to the helm. They were to steam south and loop around the storm—which seemed likely to hang about for weeks—traversing the Sargasso Sea in an unexpected penetration of tropical latitudes, during which the ship would stop at least once (against company policy, but the Captain was not a company man) for swimming and diving. When Marshall heard the Bosun at his door (“Get up, ye dirty little Yankee fucker”), he dressed, went to breakfast, and, with the rest of the crew, made his way to the main deck. There, a light rain beat steadily; like Charleston in late February it was cold without a hint of warmth but not as cold as the same rain in the North, even if only for the memory of recent balmy days and anticipation of those soon to come. It was a rain of the palms, promising somehow not to betray and kill them with a desertion into unremitting cold.

  Twelve men lined up. The Bosun paced before them with a mean look in his eye. His fists were clenched and they beat against his thighs like drumsticks. “Who’s the shop steward?” he asked the first man.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Who’s the shop steward?” he asked the second man.

  “Fuck you.”

  He went to the third, fourth, and fifth men, and asked, “Who’s the shop steward?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck you,” they answered.

  The Bosun turned away for a moment, and then pivoted around, saying, “Okay boys, today were going to paint the crossbuckle plates. You,” he said, pointing to the first man, an enormous sailor named Roberts, “go get the paint.”

  “You get the paint,” answered Roberts, “you silly one-eyed bastard.”

  The Bosun sizzled. “What’s your name?” he demanded. Roberts was silent. “I’m going to dock your pay and put you off the ship. What’s your name?” He took out a little notebook.

  “Bellchicken.”

  “What?”

  “Bellchicken’s my name,” said Roberts. “Wonderful Bellchicken.”

  “Bellchicken, eh. We’ll see about that. What’s his name?” he asked Marshall, who, because of a sudden adjustment in the line, was standing next in the row.

  Marshall replied, “Bellchicken’s his name, Wonderful Bellchicken.”

  “What’s your name?” the Bosun asked Marshall. The next man jabbed Marshall in the ribs.

  “Van Mushtif,” answered Marshall. “Cock Van Mushtif.” They twittered, and the Bosun felt as if he were beginning to lose control.

  He said, “You British bastards! I’m putting every one of you on report. I don’t know who you are, but I will. Give me your names!” He moved to the man next to Marshall, a Cardiff giant of nearly seven feet, with a frightening black beard and piercing eyes.

  “Name!”

  In a deep boomament of near-Welsh, the giant said, “My name is Weeny, Weeny Allison.” He blew a kiss and mimed a curtsy.

  The Bosun wrote in his book and moved on. “And you?” he inquired of the next man.

  “Brutus, sir.”

  “And you?” he asked a frail buck-toothed Scotsman.

  “Pale Horse.”

  “You bastard.” The Bosun stepped to the next man. “And you?”

  “Pale Rider.”

  At the point of giving up, the Bosun came to a middle-aged Londoner whose real name was Greylock Oceanard, and he did give up, throwing his notebook over the side and leaving the deck force until the afternoon, when he found them huddled on the hawsers in the forecastle, exchanging stories and shivering as the ship made for the south. Roberts was telling of the time when he was chased from a theater for yelling slogans, and in his dash to escape had not looked to check traffic. A bakery van loaded with dough had been barreling down the street, and had been forced to stop short at forty-five mph. The wet dough hurtled from the rear and pressed the. driver against the windshield. He was all right, but when they pulled him out they discovered that he had cut quite a cookie, and people from miles around came to see.

  The Bosun entered the forecastle. “To work, boys,” he said, and they obliged only because they wanted exercise.

  Lieutenant Buff-Wibbin came to direct the cleaning of Hold Two. Some of the men went single file down a set of
steel rungs, while others slid down ropes to the floorplates sixty feet below (about twenty feet under the water line) and stood in an open-roofed steel cavern as big as a playing field. The sides sloped to nests of perforated beams and arches hidden in darkness, holding innumerable warrens, landings, and plateaus. Everything was covered with grain dry enough not to rot, and wet enough to smell like the first days in the creation of whisky. In addition to the grain, wooden beams and planks were scattered about, the remnants of dunnage placed to retard undo shifting of cargo.

  Lieutenant Buff-Wibbin smoked a pipe and was regarded as a fool. He was lowered in the big iron vessel into which they would dump grain and planks. The chain was not quite long enough, leaving the vessel and Lieutenant Buff-Wibbin swaying to and fro several feet above the floor. He remained inside, surveying his crew of skeptics. Not only did they lack faith in him, but they had taken on the glazed, ward-of-the-state, vacant look they always had directly before the assignation of tasks. Buff-Wibbin was quite familiar with this. Swinging in his steel bucket, he began to throw out brushes and brooms, crying, “The thuds will wake the duds.” They took the tools and ran up the steep sides, often as not sliding back. But after a dozen tries they all made it into the darkness, where they found comfortable places amid the beams.

  “Aren’t we going to work?” asked Marshall.

  “We are working,” someone replied, “and working bloody hard, I might add.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not only that, but were getting danger pay.”

  “Danger pay?”

  “That’s right. It’s dangerous here, especially in a storm. So, we get danger pay.”

  “Even if we don’t move?”

  “Who’s to know?”

  “If there’s not a kernel of grain in the bucket, Buff-Wibbin will know.”

  “The bucket will be full in two hours.”

  “We are going to work.”

  “Certainly not. Buff-Wibbin will do it.”

  Sure enough, when Marshall peered out, there was Buff-Wibbin, shirt off, sweating, frantically throwing boards into the bucket, and sweeping great piles of grain. “Are you active up there?” he called out. “I know you’re not working,” he said. “I know it as surely as I know that Mozart was an Italian!” Eventually he visited each perch, where his men huddled like thatch-makers in a hay shortage.

  “Our eyes are adjusting to the darkness,” they said.

  “Well, get on with it,” snapped Buff-Wibbin, indignantly showing them how. They made token movements of their brushes and brooms, passing them back and forth in the air a few times as if to expel the curse of activity. Buff-Wibbin swept out all the grain in three minutes. Then he moved across a beam to another group, and Marshall heard the pitter-patter of wheat pouring over the rusted plates fronting the abyss.

  When Buff-Wibbin had just about finished loading the bucket, an old Cockney stepped out of the shadows and bellowed, “It’s tea toime! As union members, we demand our roite to tea toime! I’ve been on the sea for most of me loif. No upper-class fairy is going to take away my tea!”

  “All right, all right,” said Buff-Wibbin, “come down for tea.”

  But first they had to dump the grain overboard. When they came up on deck they saw that the weather had changed. The sea was high and white; waves crashed; but the sky was clear blue and no longer a jungle steambath. The bow wave of the Royal George was like an unloosed bale of pure white cotton. Near the horizon a destroyer took water over its decks as it plowed east on patrol. Tracers of foam covered even the deep troughs as the sea seemed to cast up energy.

  They guided the bucket over the rail and watched as the golden grain flew in a shower down to the agitated waters. The heavy planks blew like chaff. Suddenly, Buff-Wibbin called out, “Cable!” as the bucket began to fall. Every man snatched the cable, and strained with bare hands to keep it from being lost. It was extremely heavy, and there was not enough slack for belaying. It gradually pulled them across the deck, until the lead man, Roberts (or Bellchicken), was pushed against the rail. Like a tug team at Darbydale Fair, they pulled rhythmically until their muscles seemed to be on fire. They succeeded in holding it. Sweating and inflamed in the middle of the line, Marshall heard the Captain on the P.A. system. Marshall had never seen the Captain, who must have been as quick as lightning, for in no time he had directed thirty men to the cable.

  But just before they arrived, the bucket had touched the sea and taken on some water. The more water it took the more it closed on the waves and took water. The thirty of them cut their hands and smarted. For many minutes they held, dripping wet despite the cold wind, hearts beating like fast engines. The skin on the soles of their feet began to blister from tension against the deck. Breathless and white, Bellchicken was crushed on the rail, and the bucket was about to sink like a stone. But none thought to give up. Buff-Wibbin had rigged a splice, and calmly asked if they could move the cable a few feet so that he could join it to the broken end from the winch.

  The Cockney counted to three, and they all pulled so hard that their faces got red and purple, and snakelike veins stood out at their temples. The bucket rose a few feet, Buff-Wibbin and the carpenter looped the ends and bolted them fast, and the Chief Officer started the winch. They hauled it up. It was half full of sparkling ice-cold sea water. They put their hands in it and some even tasted it. Then they started for the showers. Tired as athletes, their blood pounding and their muscles hard and taut from half an hour’s agony, they went to change for tea—to which, as union members, they were indisputably entitled.

  4

  AFTER A few days, they outran the storm’s southern foot. No longer did they feel the lash of waves, roll between water cliffs, or take shocked coronets of spray. But hour by hour they went steadily into the tropics and motored over the pastel beauty of the sea.

  As if they were on a cruising yacht, the officers opened bridge windows and stood in the light winds. Never quite used to such easy passage, sailors congregated on deck to enjoy the spring of it, the feeling of faraway fires in an island forest, the light blue of the sky south of Bermuda where the waters were not vexed. Lydia felt linked by her femininity to the quiet colors of the sea. Like a dog in a car approaching home, Marshall grew excited because something in him could feel the inner breezes and timeless clock of Jamaica. Just beyond the horizon, it seemed, were the island valleys. There, was a place where dying came painlessly, where heat and magic made even indifferent lives worthwhile. Marshall realized that he had never told Lydia about Jamaica. She thought that she knew, because of Charleston, where the sun also beat down, but there was a difference, which Marshall easily illustrated in his tale of Rica Vista—where time moved in an intoxicating circle. When Lydia closed her eyes and lay back in imagination of island ease, she saw the red earth, ice-cold streams, and an infinity of baking green. But Jamaica was too far southwest, and they gave themselves over to the pull of their voyage.

  Ships are either living or dead. Those living seem to be as small and agile as ponies, linked with the wishes of their passengers, somewhat afraid of the night, alive for the first time. The Royal George moved toward the center of the sea. On the chart it was a wide blue belly. Even the Captain, experienced and disciplined as he was, lusted for the unmarked blue, trackless and magnetic, an open space in the cells of the world, as flat and easy as a savanna.

  The pressure to continue an evasionary course was strong, moving upward from the ranks until the officers might have been crushed between the power of their Captain and the weight of their crew. But the Captains eyes were clear, and (at the cost of $10,000 a day) he went considerably farther south of the storm than was necessary—not just for an excursion, but because he was always driven to explore silent places where no others went and from which merchants withheld the throb of their traffic. Lying off the trade routes, the center of the sea was not frequented. On old maps it held cherubim with faces and bodies reddened as if from tropical sun. It was an unnecessary place—caught wit
h weed, slow, pointless, diversionary.

  The Royal George pushed south by day, and by night as well when soft stars emerged brightening the velvet. The bow wave had become so smooth that it rolled like a geometrician’s perfect wheel, or the exact traveling helix of Teferides. Marshall remembered how in their process across the sky starry nights were linked to the raucous geared lines of machines. Cosmas Indicopleustes had seen the perfect crystal box, and Marshall had a nagging and persistent vision of star tracks scratched parallel, forever, and completely, across its top. This etching cannot be described and far surpassed the deepest gravure on Achilles’s silver shield; for it was not images, but the soft clear sticks of language arranged in magical pattern, which mind drew from eye like buckets from a well.

  Late one afternoon the Captain strode onto the bridge. To his attentive officers he commanded: “Full stop.” Then he said, “We shall halt until further notice. I want complete radio silence: the radio officer will disconnect his equipment, lock his doors, and neglect his log. Engines and auxiliary power will be shut down. No work of any kind will be done. The stewards will put up sandwiches and such for several days. No music will be played. Lock the beer locker. The smoking lamp will be out. Discord among the crew will be met with severe discipline. These are orders, gentlemen. Carry them out.”

  After half an hour the ship went dead in the water, and they discovered that the breeze and the waves had been their own creation. For without the ships motion the sea was an endless smooth turquoise with only an occasional touch of wind. Though weakening, the sun was strong enough to burn, and the crew got all rosy. By order, there was no work.

  Instead, the Captain sent out the boats to reconnoiter a circle of ten miles around the ship. Heavy launches and forty-foot lifeboats were lowered with great caution and ceremony. Lifejacketed, Marshall, Lydia, and the crew manned them with the intent to explore. In a near-nitrogen rapture, they pulled apart from the mother ship. The heat and the green met at the horizon in waves of air and light. In a motor launch with the stewards, who (except for Dave) were virtually midgets, Marshall and his bride skimmed over the sea until the Royal George was only a small block on the blue prairie.