The Sand Pebbles

by Richard McKenna

Burgoyne knuckled his mustache. “When I was a kid we lived in a house once where things come knocking on the door at night,” he said, “it bothered the womenfolk right much. We moved out of that house.”

  “Well hell,” Holman said. “We lack one man for a two-man watch list. How about Harris?”

  “He swears he won’t come down here except for electrical emergencies,” Lynch said. “And don’t look at me like that, either. Take Waxer.”

  “He know anything?”

  “No. But he’ll be company.”

  “I’ll take the midwatch by myself,” Holman said. “If you’ll leave me a clean fire and a coal pile, Frenchy.”

  “I’ll sure do that,” Burgoyne said.

  After supper Holman talked with Farren and Bronson about taking engineers off the topside watch list. They sat at Bronson’s mess table with their watch lists.

  “Why can’t you just let things slide down there, till the coolies come back?” Bronson asked.

  “There’d be no water and the lights’d go out,” Holman said. “You think you get them lights as natural as sunshine?”

  He did not like Bronson. Petty officers who worked on the bridge, close to the officers, often acted as if some of the glory rubbed off on them. Bronson was very much that way. He was a fat, pompous man.

  “Farren’s only losing two,” Bronson said. “That’s all I’ll give you. I’ll give you Perna and Stawski.”

  “I’ll take them and Wilsey too,” Holman said. “You ain’t giving me nothing, Bronson. I’m taking my own men down where they belong.”

  “And I’ll take ’em back,” Bronson said. “You don’t have the right attitude, Holman. I’ve heard the officers worry about you. Why don’t you get wise?”

  “I’m wise to you. Prong you.”

  “Take it easy, Jake,” Farren said.

  “And I’m wise to you,” Bronson said. His face was red. “That coffee pot you started down there. The whole ship knows you rigged things to get Chien killed.”

  “Say that again!” Holman stood up, leaning with his hands on the table. “God damn you, say that again!”

  “That’s the scuttlebutt,” Bronson said defiantly. “You got some pet coolie down there you want to put in Chien’s place.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s just scuttlebutt.”

  “Scuttlebutt travels on words.” Holman’s voice was shaking. “You tell me one man you heard say that, or I’ll beat your fat face in!”

  The other men were gathering around. Bronson had turned pale and it was very quiet in the compartment.

  “Hell, you know how scuttlebutt is, Jake,” Farren said. “It’s just talk, all a joke, what the hell?”

  “Not when it calls me a murderer, it ain’t no joke!” Holman looked at them all. “Any of you guys tell Bronson that?” They all shook their heads. “Somebody has to say a thing for the first time. I think you just done that,” Holman told Bronson. “Now you come with me to the skipper and prove what you just said, or else you take it back!”

  “I was hasty,” Bronson said. “I guess I take it back.”

  “You mean you ain’t sure?” Holman leaned nearer Bronson.

  “I’m sure. I take it back.”

  “Well, see that you stay sure and you keep it back!” Holman stood erect. He was trembling. “If I hear that story again from anybody, I’ll come beat your lying teeth down your throat!”

  He walked back on the fantail, to be alone. Strangely, Stawski came back to reassure him. Holman brushed Stawski off. He didn’t want to have to talk to anybody for a while.

  Wilsey and Burgoyne turned the watch over to Holman at midnight. It was in excellent shape. The steam was up and the fire cleaned and dampered and he would not have to tend the fire for at least an hour. He paced the floorplates restlessly, drifting around and looking at everything in just the way old Chien had used to do. Well, Chien was dead. Dead. The engine room was already looking untidy. Water beaded the oily floorplates around the firemain pump and dirty rags hung here and there. The drip pan under the condensate pump was half full of water and smeared with swabbing oil. Holman began tidying and wiping, to keep his mind busy.

  For some reason he kept remembering old Ed Gard. He had not once thought about old Eddie in many years.

  When he was eight he had a red coaster wagon to fetch the dirty clothes home and to deliver the clean laundry, all over town. Sometimes the nice ladies gave him old clothes for him and his little brothers. They always showed him how strong and good the clothes still were and he was trained to say thank you to the nice ladies. It was hard to be friends with the other kids at school and around, when they laughed at him for wearing their old clothes, and the only friend he had was old Eddie.

  Eddie had a white mustache and bristling eyebrows and he worked with horses at the feedyard on the edge of town, across the road from Jorry Holman’s house. Eddie had been in the Civil War and fought Indians afterward and he had a Pension. It was his plain duty to marry some good, Christian woman and let her take care of him, so that she could have a Widow’s Pension when he died. Jorry’s mother was one of the good women. But Eddie loved only horses and he would not even speak to any woman.

  He lived in the grain room and kept his clothes in a brown canvas warbag. He always wore khaki shirts and blue Levis. Sometimes, when he was working on harness with a bottle beside him, he would sing to himself, and he did not mind Jorry Holman watching and listening. He could not sing very well. One of his songs was:

  Oh, I’m goin’ away to the Filla Pie Neens

  To fight for my country and to live on beans.

  Sometimes it was the Filla Pie Noons and he was going to live on prunes. Jorry Holman hoped he might go too.

  Jorry liked to get old Eddie talking about fighting Indians. He had fought them all over and he had been in a big Indian fight right where Wellco was now, only then it was only sagebrush and a few willows and cottonwoods along the creek. He had taken an arrow through his cheek and the scar still showed. Eddie did not remember how the arrow tasted, but he said it hurt like billy hell when the whisky they gave him ran out through the hole.

  “What did you do with the arrowhead?” Jorry asked. He wanted to see it, and to hold it in his hand.

  “I spit it out,” Eddie said.

  Eddie divided Indians into friendlies and hostiles, but he said they were all hostiles under their plagued red skins. Everybody knew the only good Indian was a dead one, but now they were living off the government up in Duck Valley and breeding like flies, and someday they would try to take the country back again.

  Jorry liked to think about old Eddie when he pulled his red wagon around Wellco with the laundry. He never knew but what right where he was standing maybe old Eddie killed an Indian on that spot before there were any houses in Wellco. One day, out in the sagebrush close behind his house, Jorry found a pure white arrowhead. He kept it and believed it was the very one which had gone through old Eddie’s cheek. After all, Eddie had had to spit it out somewhere nearby.

  The summer Jorry was ten years old Eddie took sick. The good women brought him soup and stuff, but he would not take any of it. His cheeks sank in and his nose sharpened and he looked like a fierce old bird. When he got too weak to go to the toilet, he stopped eating. The other men at the feedyard knew what he wanted and they stopped cursing and kept their voices low and stayed away from the grain room. Only Jorry Holman could go in there, to bring water and mix it with whisky in Eddie’s old tin cup. Eddie lay wrapped in a gray blanket leaning back against the fat-eared, dusty oat sacks. He sipped the whisky and stared all day at a shaft of sunlight that speared in through the high-up little window. It danced and dazzled with bright specks of grain dust. The snuffling and stamping and whickering of horses came through the partition, and Eddie listened to the horses, but he never spoke a word. Jorry thought he lay all night like that, too, his eyes fierce and bright as a hawk’s eyes.

  The good women thought it was a sin and a shame,
but they could not make the men do anything. On the third afternoon Jorry’s mother and two other women forced their way into the grain room. Eddie cursed them in a low, clear voice and they went away, crying and angry. In a little while they came back with two extra women and a preacher. Eddie cursed them again, very terribly. The preacher was half crying and he said, “Brother Edward, you are about to pass into the hands of the Living God. Oh, I beseech you, soften your heart!” They all flopped down beside the oat sacks to pray and Eddie cursed God in a voice dry as a snake rattle. He said what the preacher probably did with the women when he had them alone. They got very angry and his mother ordered Jorry to go home and Jorry told her to go to hell. They went away talking about Judge Mason and the town marshal and Jorry thought they were going to have him and old Eddie both put in jail. But nothing happened. It got dark and there was only enough whisky left to fill two more cups. Eddie spoke again. He said to put it all in one cup and leave out the water.

  “They took a lot out of me, but I’m going to hold on till morning,” he said. “You’re a good kid. You can pull stakes now. Tell ’em the last thing I said was that they could all go piss up a picketrope.”

  Jorry did not go home. He went out into the sagebrush and part of the night he just walked and part of the night he lay on his back looking at the stars. All that night the coyotes howled along the rimrock. He cried some, but mostly he just felt a pain in his throat and belly and the tears ran down his face in silence. After that night he never cried again. When he went home in the morning his mother tried to scold him, and he told her to go piss up a rope.

  Well, back there now in Wellco, Nevada, they were all pissing up ropes, as far as Jake Holman was concerned. He was going to serve out his twenty years in China and retire in China and he was never going to see Wellco, Nevada, again.

  As he paced the floorplates, Holman noticed that he was swinging clear of the L.P. He noticed that whenever he stopped he was putting his back up against something. He had a crawling feeling along his back. Something wanted into his mind. He set his jaw and let it come in.

  It was the memory of Chien’s eyes two inches from his own. The pupils were very dilated, but the eyes were not angry or accusing. They were not concerned about anything. That was how it was when you were dead. You were not concerned about anything.

  I didn’t do it, Holman told his memory of the eyes. All I did wrong was not to be sorry.

  The eyes began to fade.

  I wish the old man didn’t have to die, Holman thought. I didn’t want him hurt. I don’t want anybody hurt.

  He walked over and gripped the handrail and looked down into the crankpit. The crank was on the starboard quarter and it was shadowy down there. Holman spoke in a low voice.

  “Chien, if there’s anything left over of you that can hear me, I want to tell you that I didn’t mean you any harm,” he said. “And I’m going to take the knock out of this L.P. engine. I’m going to do that, old man.”

  He felt silly after he had said it. He felt better, too. Miss Eckert at China Light came pleasantly into his mind. He thought about how surprisingly extensive that mission was and all the things they did there besides church stuff. He wished he might have had a look at the sugar beet machinery that wouldn’t work. He knew the bar he had tried to put up between himself and Miss Eckert was down again. He did not feel any duty to put it back up.

  10

  Lt. William Collins knew his men said of him that he wore gold braid on his pajamas. He did not mind. They said it approvingly and, in the figurative way they meant it, it was quite true. A career naval officer, he felt, had to subordinate his private life to his official life; that was his sacrifice on the altar of his country. Lt. Collins had a private life of sorts, in abeyance now back in the States, and someday he would take it up again, perhaps even marry, although he did not like to think of that part. She would have to be some officer’s daughter, who would know how to be a navy wife. But now it was very good not to have a wife. As soon as he had taken command of San Pablo and realized the potentially desperate situation he faced in Hunan, he had known that his official life was going to take all of his time and energy. That was when he had sewed the figurative gold braid on his pajamas.

  In some ways it was very stimulating and rewarding. A commanding officer went ritually by his ship’s name. “San Pablo leaving … San Pablo passing … San Pablo boarding …” were the various navy regulation hails that accompanied Lt. Collins in his comings and goings. He insisted that they always be made. He had strongly the old navy sense of a ship as a living person. One did not put the before a ship’s personal name and one did not serve on a ship, he served in it. All of the Sand Pebbles were collectively San Pablo, but Lt. Collins looked out the eyes and bore the name. It was his fancy sometimes to say we instead of I, but the referent of both pronouns was San Pablo. He rather enjoyed being San Pablo in his pajamas.

  Now he sat, a slight, dark man in crisp whites, waiting to see Lynch and Holman in his day cabin. It was a small room on the starboard side of the boat deck, with inner doors leading to his bedroom and to the bridge. A red Peking rug covered the deck and his small rolltop desk stood neatly in one corner. He sat facing the door across the round, green-baize-covered table on which the clean cups and saucers sat waiting too. In San Pablo, coffee with the captain was a rare and calculatedly ritual occasion.

  Lynch came in first, snatching his hat off his balding head. Holman followed. He wore clean dungarees, a breach of ritual. At Lt. Collins’ invitation both men sat down, holding their hats in their laps. Lt. Collins studied Holman as Yen-ta came in and poured the coffee and went out again, leaving the silver pot in the center of the table. Holman had the sullen air very strongly. It was a felt thing, because the man’s square face was impassive, as always. Lt. Collins tried to put both men at ease with a few remarks about the accident. They were an unofficial board of inquiry into the cause, he told them.

  “What do you think, Chief?”

  “Well, sir, it was them keys jarred out.”

  “Why did they jar out?”

  Lynch shrugged. “The vibration, sir.”

  “And why the vibration?”

  “From the bearing knock. Chien was going to refit it that night, if we could’ve got into port on it.” Lynch glanced at Holman.

  Always at some point you had to stop asking why, Lt. Collins thought, or you would go all the way back to creation. But a man had died, and some account had to be taken of it.

  “It is normal for an engine with the links in neutral to turn with that much power?” he asked Lynch.

  Lynch began explaining about the vacuum in the condenser and air leaks up the rods. The links were never exactly in neutral, he said, because you had to run the link blocks in or out to balance the engine, and there was no truly neutral position. Lynch warmed up, and something of the practical man’s irritating condescension was coming into his manner. Lt. Collins could not follow the words clearly. He was trying to remember his classwork on marine engines. There was something called a Zeuner diagram in which valve action was translated into neat arcs and angles on a sheet of paper. But a sheet of paper could not kill a man. Lynch talked on. Holman was studying the golden eagle and anchor crest on his coffee cup, apparently not listening.

  “It was just an act of God, Captain,” Lynch finished huskily, at last. He was pleased with himself and he made free to pour himself another cup of coffee.

  “I can’t report this officially, because Chien had no official existence aboard,” Lt. Collins said. “But I don’t want anything like it to happen again. If any personal responsibility can be fixed, I would like to know about it unofficially.”

  Lynch pouted. Lt. Collins looked at Holman.

  “Do you call it an act of God, Holman?”

  Holman started. “I don’t think God’s got much to do with machinery,” he said, sitting upright. “Men are responsible for machinery, and you can always find out who.”

  “All right, who
m do you say?”

  “Whoever should’ve took that knock out of the L.P. when it first started,” Holman said slowly. “And if he couldn’t, he should’ve worried about vibration and inspected things regular and pinned whatever might come loose. That man was Chien. He killed himself.”

  “He worked under supervision.”

  “Not really. We got too many military duties. We can’t spend enough time below.” The man’s sullen aura spread across the table, but his face did not change. “We lose face if we go bilge crawling and get dirty. We’re supposed to stand back cool and clean and military and supervise for a few minutes every day. It won’t work, sir! You have to get right close up and mix yourself with machinery, if you want to know about it and control it.”

  “Well!”

  Lt. Collins drummed his fingertips on the green baize. The man’s whole manner was a sneer at military duty. But not his words. It was probably unconscious. And it was undeniably convenient to blame Chien’s death upon Chien himself, error and correction in the one event. He decided to change the subject.

  “I’ve invited Shing to call on me,” he said. “We will discuss a replacement for Chien. Have you any recommendations, Lynch?”

  “Pai, maybe,” Lynch said. “Or old Ping-wen, the boilermaker. They’re both old timers. I’d settle for either one, sir.”

  “Can I say something?” Holman asked. Lt. Collins nodded. “Most of the work is cleaning work. I never saw a cleaner plant,” Holman said. “But most of the pumps just barely run, and you know about the main engine. Other accidents could easily happen. I’d like to have the new coolie boss run just a cleaning gang and set up another special little gang for nothing but machinery repair.”

  “Good idea,” Lynch said,

  “There’s one coolie named Po-han. He’s different from the rest.” Holman spoke rapidly, as if he feared being cut off. “The other ones learn kind of monkey-see monkey-do, and whatever they know, they know like that, like old Chien. But Po-han sees steam pushing pistons and metal pushing metal and water lifting valves and springs closing them and all like that, the whole plant all of a piece and working together … it’s a kind of picture … and a feeling….” He had outraced his words.