by Peter Bowen
I had many hours to wait. When I could see the wall of the typhoon coming on I threw out the sea anchor and buttoned up the canvas top over me and I lay there waiting to die. I didn’t figure my chances were any good a-tall. Not even a little bit, but better than going down in the bigger ship after it disintegrated.
The Irish fisherman has a saying: the sea has some mercy but the rocks have none. I wondered how far I was from islands or shoal water.
When death comes to sit on your shoulder it can be a very peaceful feeling. Things are over soon and it has all been decided. I lay back in the tarry-smelling darkness and offered up a prayer to a God I don’t think exists but my mother does and it don’t hurt to be polite.
The boat began to toss. I started whistling, though I couldn’t tell if I was on key or not.
I will never know how long I was there in that little boat. It was just small enough to not attract too much attention from the storm. The canvas cover was tight and it shipped almost no water. I was bruised from being tossed around to the ribs and planking, and slammed into a seat hard enough to knock me out, and I don’t know how long for. Could have been fifteen minutes or two days. When the storm’s bellers died I cautiously unbuttoned one corner of the canvas and stuck my head out. I could smell land nearby, the smell of green things and earth. Other than the landsmell, I hadn’t the foggiest damn idea what time it was other than it was pitch black night, or where I was give or take ten thousand miles.
When dawn come up I could see land over to the west of me. A fairly substantial island, with mountains cut off by a fleece of clouds. The boat was drifting toward the island at a slow pace, so I unbuttoned the top all round and folded the tarpaulin and put the oars in the locks. I drank some water and ate a can of beans and a ship’s biscuit and ran my fingers over a bone-deep gash that ran from my forehead to the crown of my skull. The kit in the boat had a mirror for signaling passing ships, and I bathed the cut with seawater and found it warn’t as bad as it felt. I sewed the cut up with a straightened fishhook and some light cotton fishing line. Then I rigged a drip for it and let it run saltwater on the cut. Infection could still kill me in a matter of a couple of days. I had lost good friends to the blood poisoning, and one of them had no more of a wound than a single thorn scratch by the corner of his mouth. (It was Bill Pentz, the rancher, and in two days he was one huge running sore and a fever of 109.)
The island come closer and closer and I kept an anxious eye peeled for the surf. I could use a nice sandy beach right now. I thought it would be a real shame after having survived that damned typhoon to die pounded to a pulp on the rocks.
By and by I could see the surf breaking on a black sand beach.
I kept the prow of the boat pointed toward the island and began to row. The swells gained as I got close. When I felt the keel begin to ground I jumped out with a line in my hand and got plastered down into the sand by a wave, jumped up, and sloshed up past the surf line and began hauling my boat up. I could barely drag it, but I got it above the surf line, though I would have to bring it farther by high tide.
A freak wave hit just then—I could see the seas drawing out quite a bit farther than they had. So when it come in I was ready, and I hauled hard on the line and the boat come up well beyond the tideline.
I had no sooner sat down to rest a bit than I heard a ship’s horn, and one of Her Majesty’s frigates hove into view from behind the headland. I peeled off my shirt and waved, and they put a longboat down with dispatch and the tars rowed in for me. I dived through the breaking surf and swam hard as I could, so they wouldn’t have to beach their boat.
A couple of brawny sailors pulled me over the gunwales and the longboat turned to right smart.
When I got to the top of the rope ladder I felt suddenly weak and sick—I hadn’t eaten in a long time. I fainted on the deck and was carried off to the infirmary. I slept for twenty hours or so, and when I woke it was just coming on dawn. I got up and went forward to where the lookout stood and asked a couple questions. The swabbie was full of news, though he didn’t take his eyes off the sea ahead for even a second.
Having been more or less away from the papers for the last four months I was gratified that things had gone on as senselessly and bloodily as usual so the world still swung in its miserable and lethal orbit. Perhaps the harrowing events of the last few days had soured me. There was a rising rebellion in China, the Heavenly Fists (Boxers) who were hoping to drive all the foreign devils out. To this end a number of missionaries had been killed and various gunboats belonging to one batch of foreign devils or another was steaming up and down the Yangtze or the Yellow River loosing off an occasional round.
The British had for more than a century pursued the opium trade in China, often carried by ships owned by old American names. Britain did not want a strong China—she had quite enough difficulties with Russia—and so the poppies of Burma and India became smoke to cripple the Chinese dragon.
The Sirdar, Kitchener, had taken Khartoum and killed tens of thousands of the followers of the Mahdi. The Boers were about to go to war with the British. I had some experience of the Boers. I wished the British luck. The guerrillas in the Philippines who had been fighting the Spanish for forty years had took two deep breaths when the Americans replaced the Spanish and then had started in on the Americans. Since there was seven thousand islands in the Philippines, I figured that could go on as long as anyone had a bullet left.
I thought I might go back to the United States and quiet-like sneak up to the Thousand Islands country and set on a porch and smoke the odd seegar and stay good and hid. Take up building little ships inside bottles or tying salmon flies or maybe needlepoint or something. I had an adventurous life. Adventures clustered around me like stink on shit and I was damned tired of it.
After a few days we come nigh on to Ceylon and the ship went into Colombo’s harbor. I was able to cable my bankers from there. Since the good ship Arthose paused for over a week I was able to get some actual gold money, which I hate leaving home without.
I stopped in at the U.S. consul’s and had him cable Washington and New York that I was alive and well. This was a very bad mistake. Should have just let my friends wonder.
For the next morning the consul was at my hotel with a cable from I suppose I do not have to tell you, Teethadore, delighted that I had surfaced, all the best, and the ordering me to proceed to Southern Africa there to observe the budding war between the Boers and the Brits.
I tried to bribe the consul but the son of a bitch was one of those rich bastards can’t be bought, so there I was, a valued associate of that damned Dutch dwarf again.
Jaysus Kayrist, Kelly, I says, long life and no friends to your wake.
I cabled Teethadore saying I’d see what I could do.
He cabled back a message to the effect that the statute of limitations did not apply to everything.
Well, I kept my temper. I bade a fond farewell to my shipmates—and waited a decent interval before taking ship on an American tramp steamer that would make Cape Town but not in any great hurry. I knew Cape Town would be safe—anyplace in reach of England’s naval guns was automatically very peaceful—and perhaps I could weasel my way into a billet with a crack cavalry regiment, since they presented a fast and moving target, and they had chefs instead of cooks.
In about a week the tramp freighter was loaded down and outward bound and I stood at the bows and looked off across the Indian Ocean toward the east coast of Africa. In the twenty years I’d been away I wondered what had become of the Zulus I had known, and of Marieke, the hell-for-leather Boer girl who loved me. Ever since my young wife died at the foot of the Wind River Mountains I never stayed long with one woman or by any choice of mine more than a couple months in one place.
I could tell a few days later that we weren’t far from the east coast of Africa because of the numbers of huge great white sharks that sailed in our wake. One of them et the ship’s log, trailing as it was on a cable. The bright brass ca
ught the shark’s eye.
When the wind was from the west I could smell the smell of Africa, sandalwood and decay, some greenstuff smell, but mostly a smell of death this time, faint and far, but none the less a stench of honey on rotten fish.
We passed the bloated bodies of two whales, covered in gulls with sharks thick as flies in the water. I saw sharks so frenzied that they were biting each other, and I didn’t know that there were other animals besides humans would stoop to such behavior. It saddened me. I had such hopes.
The little steamer first put in to the Portuguese harbor town of Delagoa Bay. I had never been there and it wasn’t much to look at—the Shanganes had burnt it flat at regular intervals damn near since the first Portagees landed there. It was originally a watering and vegetable depot for Portuguese traders heading for the Spice Islands or coming back with loads of spices that made the bland European diet at least bearable. For a time, there had been a lot of slaving out of Delagoa Bay, but not for a couple of centuries. The air still reeked of human misery.
It would be a couple of days before the steamer went on to Durban and Cape Town, so I stomped down the gangway and damn near fell over—I had my sea legs and the land didn’t move sufficiently. Shortly I would have my land legs back, which meant a sentence of seasickness. I hate the ocean.
There was some sort of parade going on up the ways there, a lot of cheering and such, and I was bored enough to go on up and find out what in the hell was the cause of all the fuss.
There was someone speaking in a hesitant and stammering voice, but the sun was behind him and I couldn’t quite make the features out. The speech was a fairly fat, self-aggrandizing muddle of words, and then a heartrending appeal for help against the vicious and evil Boers. The speaker had a lisp. It stuck in my mind. I had heard that lisp before some time back but I couldn’t quite place it.
“Who is that?” I says to a monocled Brit standing near me.
I was informed that it was young Winston Churchill, having escaped gallantly from the odious Boers, he now felt compelled to tell us about it.
“Buzzard shit!” I said to the monocle, and I ambled away from the scene, but not fast enough.
“Luther! I say! Luther Kelly! What good fortune! Kelly! Kelly!” yelled young Churchill to my rapidly retreating back. I was picking up my boots and reaching out with them right smart.
“Luther!” that last seemed to be gaining on me so I broke into a flat out run. That little bastard was pure and unadulterated trouble; he hadn’t enough wit to fear anything, and I knew sure as hell that if I didn’t shake him in forty-eight hours there would be a telegram hand-delivered to me from Teethadore bidding me stand as close as possible to young Winston and watch him, by the by reminding me that there were some crimes not subject to the statute of limitations, etc., etc., etc.
Luther Kelly, a Legend in His Own Time, was running in abject fear from a fat little lisping limey bastard whose sole redeeming feature was his beautiful and ferociously intelligent mother.
Churchill always wanted to be a Great Man. I have had smaller ambitions, like being an Old Man, and them as wishes to give me medals are wasting their time. I have never done one damn thing out of bravery. If I fought like hell it was only because there warn’t nowhere to run.
I finally stepped in a large deposit of elephant dung left by a tame elephant worked in a lumber yard. My feet shot out from under me, I cracked my head on the cobbles, and Winston overtook me, summoned help, and bore me to the British consulate, where a sawbones stitched up my head and gave me morphine.
I opened my eyes late the next afternoon and of course young Winston was waving the telegram from Teethadore, the usual “die nobly.” I should have turned Mormon and gone into the prophecy business.
I called Winston a lot of names of the sort bullwhackers use when an axle breaks or an ox stands on their foot or they look down in the trace chains and one of their fingers is in there.
Churchill just nodded happily and complimented me on the variations and music of my words.
I couldn’t remember when I had been so damn happy.
7
YOUNG WINSTON PROCEEDED TO make my life miserable as quickly as he could find an unsettling routine and stick to it. For one thing, he wasn’t there in the British Army, he was there as a correspondent. This meant that we could not rely, as I so often have, on sheer military incompetence to keep us far I from maims and horrible wounds. Winston knew beyond any doubt that he was destined for great things, which had not yet happened, and he was therefore in no danger from anything at all.
I wake up shivering in the night sometimes at the mere thought of an artillery barrage or a sniper out there somewhere who is as good with a rifle as I am.
The British, among their other peculiar habits, dislike change of any sort. They were the last European power to surrender their muzzle-loading bronze cannon. The British leapt to meet the Boer threat of 1899 with an Army outfitted and trained for fighting the Russians in the Crimean War of 1853. Other inventions which had come upon the art of war were repeating rifles, machine guns, improved long-range artillery shells, and barbed wire. The day of the horse cavalry was gone—about all I could think for them to do was dress out their horses and fry up the meat for the infantry.
These were some of the sour remarks I made to young Winston. He beamed and said he could not agree more. He waved another telegram at me. It was from his mother. She had outfitted, largely with American funds, a hospital ship. She awaited Winston in Cape Town. Do come.
On the twenty-first of December many stout Britons armed to their horsey teeth marched us down to the Royal Mail ship Induna, and they gave us three cheers whilst I, at least, amused myself by making obscene gestures with my hands high in the air. No one noticed.
The news of the war was everywhere bad—if you cared who won. Me, I did not much care, as long as I was not called upon to give my life’s blood or a single drop of the damned stuff for perfidious Albion. I have never wanted any glory. Just the money, thank you.
Ladysmith was surrounded, so was Kimberley, so was Mafeking. Winston’s aunt, Lady Sarah Wilson, was in Mafeking holding afternoon teas and bezique games in a whitewashed bunker over which floated an enormous Union Jack. It looked to be such a jolly little war. They all look jolly at the beginning. Them boys of sixteen and seventeen and so forth march off to battle whistling. They don’t come back whistling. When they come back, if they do, they are looking out of old eyes. It can happen in a single morning, or afternoon. The look is something you never forget. They are young when they come back, still, but after that morning, they believe in death.
The Boers wasn’t professional soldiers but they were a warrior people. They had to fight the natives, and when the fighting was done they went back home and took to farming again. They elected their officers from the best fighters.
A couple of them actually read books, which is frowned upon by the British as the ruination of good soldierly qualities and leads to quarrels with yer superiors. (I always quarrel with my superiors.)
By the time I landed in Delagoa Bay, near on to Christmas of 1899, the Brits had been routed, defeated, surrounded, outfoxed (no special effort or intelligence was required for that), and made to look generally like damned fools.
“Who is commanding this sorry effort,” I says to Winston.
“Redvers Buller.”
“OH, NO,” I yelled, clapping a hand to a clammy forehead.
I knew the good Sir Redvers Buller. He was as brave as a lion and just about as smart. He was a splendid leader of men if the men were in range of his voice. In any Army I ran he would be my first choice for captain and the dead last for general. He was, uh, hem, haw, cough, wheeze ... stupid.
The Induna clanked out her anchor chain in Cape Town’s harbor, and all manner of pleasure craft gathered round to hurrah Winston. Nothing like having a young patrician hero to lionize at a time when the soldiers of the Queen was getting their blocky little heads knocked off every ch
ance the Boers got to do it. (If you read much history and notice things you’ll find that if the weapons and numbers on each side are equal, that a citizen’s army will beat a professional army all hollow.)
We didn’t even get ashore right away. Winston’s mother, the lovely and ferocious Jennie, sent a boat for us and hauled us to the hospital ship Maine, named after the battleship lost in Havana harbor. You will notice that while many mothers worried about their offspring getting hurt in this war, Jennie was the only one who just commissioned a ship and went to the war, and had a floating hospital just waiting should either of her boys have bad luck. And all paid for by her many, uh, friends.
The boat tied up to a long folding staircase hung down from the Maine, and Winston and I clambered up and there at the top of the stairs was the lovely Jennie. She was one of those grand beauties who stop folks in the street—when young because they are so lovely and as they age because their strength shows through; they are still lovely.
Jennie was also the pure quill. She was nursing wounded soldiers, emptying bedpans, changing dressings, assisting at amputations, bathing those wounded men who were delirious with fever—and she did that seventy hours a week.
She kissed Winston lightly on the cheek.
“Winston,” she said, in that throaty purr I’ll never forget, “is this the famous Kelly?” I thought of asking smartly if she’d forgot bedding me at Blenheim Palace—three times.
Winston made introductions. I bowed. Actually, Jennie and me was as close as friends can get, but I thought perhaps I would not bring that up at just this particular moment, since she didn’t seem to wish to.