The Sand Pebbles

by Richard McKenna

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Stawski said. He was forcing himself to keep his hands in the water. “God damn!” he said. He kept lifting one foot and then the other.

  Holman went to his locker to dress. The compartment had a sour, sweaty stink. Most of the men were too tired and disgusted to take a bath. They had screwed the light bulbs out above their bunks and they were flaked out, still in dungarees stiff with oil and coal dust. They had no razors and they were all sprouting beards. The whole compartment was gritty with ash and coal dust. The pillows were black.

  Stawski came out and sat wearily at the mess table. He laid his hands down palm upward and looked at them. Broken blisters the size of silver dollars overlapped on the balls of his thumbs and along the bases of his fingers. Some shreds of skin were left. Coal dust was embedded in the raw. Holman knew the other men were just as badly off. He could not think of any good thing to say to Stawski.

  “I got the right stuff for them hands, Ski,” Harris said. He had just come in, with a brown quart beer bottle. He set it on the table. “That’s turpentine. It hardens skin,” he said. “Put some on them hands.”

  “You just want to hurt me so you can laugh,” Stawski said.

  “No I don’t. It’s true! It’ll help you!”

  “I don’t trust you. I never ever seen you do one decent thing, Harris,” Stawski said. “To hell with you. They hurt enough when sweat runs down on ’em.”

  Harris insisted. Stawski would not trust him. Harris was standing oiler watch, and he did not have any blisters to prove it on himself. Some of the other men raised up on their elbows to listen. Harris appealed to them. They would not trust him either.

  “I tell you, this is a real old trick. I learned it back when all you punks were still sucking sugartits,” Harris said. “Ski, I’ll give you a hundred dollars if it hurts you. You got the whole crew for witness I said that.”

  Silently, Stawski held out his left hand. Harris poured a puddle of turpentine into it. “It don’t hurt,” Stawski said wonderingly. He spread it delicately with the fingers of his right hand. “It feels cool and good!” he said. “Give me some more!” He held out both hands.

  Stiffly, they all climbed out of their bunks and came over to get turpentine for their hands. They went back to sleep with a strong smell of turpentine masking the stink of their sweaty clothing.

  The passage was a five-day ordeal. The water was low and still dropping. Twice they nudged mud and spent hours getting through. Bordelles and the chiefs heaved on lines and got dirty. They dropped all pretense of drills and salutes and concentrated on getting the ship through. Whatever the emergency, Lt. Collins was there, clean and cold and calm and ready with the right thing to do. He was being captain of his ship as never before in the Sand Pebbles’ memory.

  They were being the crew, and they could not endure it. They could not face up to having no coolies. When they were not too exhausted, they snarled and flared at each other. The living spaces became very foul. The men went filthy and bearded. Each meal seemed worse to them than the last, and they cursed Duckbutt Randall every day until he wept. Harris cursed all night in his sleep.

  Holman did much of the work in the fireroom. By the time they started up the Siang River, the men were hardening. The new skin on their palms was slick and red and hard and sensitive only in the creases. The hills looked homely and familiar. They began to pick up their spirits with the hope of getting more coolies in Changsha. They knew the cook they would get could not possibly be as good as Big Chew. But, as they told each other, neither could he possibly be as bad as Duckbutt Randall. By the time they sighted the sacred mountain and the gray shape of Changsha, they practically had their new cook installed in the galley.

  They anchored in their usual place. Changsha looked much the same, except for the U.S.S. Duarte upriver at a commercial pontoon near the U.S. Consulate. But within minutes demonstrators began gathering on the bund. They waved placards and shouted in unison on signal from uniformed leaders, POISONERS OF CHINA! LEAVE CHANGSHA! one sign screamed.

  “What a hell of a welcome home!” Farren said.

  They were all weary and disgusted. They stayed on the starboard side, so they could not see it. Bordelles in full dress went off to make the courtesy calls on H.M.S. Woodcock and the Japanese gunboat. The Duarte was senior ship in port. Taking Welbeck and Red Dog with him, Lt. Collins went to the Duarte himself.

  They came back after dark with news that flashed through the ship like a bayonet thrust. The worker-peasant council that ran Changsha knew all about the San Pablo’s trouble in Hankow. They did not want her in Changsha. That day they had clamped an absolute boycott on all the gunboats and they would not lift it until the San Pablo went away. It meant no liberty and no fresh provisions. It meant no coolie help and no stores shipments by rail from Hankow. And the San Pablo had brought that on all the other gunboats as well. The Sand Pebbles listened to Red Dog tell about it and they were too crushed even to curse.

  “They got us by the balls. We’ll have to go back to Hankow.”

  “Water’s already too low.”

  “Yeah. We’re stuck for the winter.”

  “No coolies. God damn it, no cook!”

  “Ain’t fair. They hit us enough. What the hell they want?”

  “Skipper’s going to talk to us tomorrow.”

  “He’ll tell us to have moral courage,” Harris said.

  They cursed without spirit. They went dirty to bed with aching bones and without any hope left at all.

  There was no physical reason, Lt. Collins thought, why San Pablo could not winter through. The problem was moral. And morale was a prime command responsibility. And he had, right now, a crisis in morale. He had to act at once.

  He sat at his table with lights out so that no one would disturb him. He had to think it out alone.

  The new weapon did not yet have a name. Moral isolation was as close as one could come to it. In Hankow they had marked San Pablo down for the kill. In Changsha they meant to strike the death blow. San Pablo was at bay. Wrigley yesterday, in Duarte, had scarcely concealed his dismayed resentment that San Pablo had come to Changsha. He had warned that his men would probably pick fights with the Sand Pebbles unless the two crews were kept apart. Bordelles had brought back the same impression from Woodcock and Hiro. No one understood the new weapon yet. San Pablo would have to make her fight alone.

  Americans had faced hardships, none better. Blizzards and wolves and malaria, searing summers and starvation winters, the raw, wild continent. They had faced men. Treacherous Indians, sneaky Mexicans, proud Rebels, insolent Spaniards, the hateful Hun. All dared, all beaten. But this in China was an assault on the spirit, in an area where simple, forthright people did not have any developed defenses. They did not yet know that in Washington. There was that story one heard in all the clubs. “Oh yes, Shanghai,” President Harding had told the man from Shanghai. “I have an aunt who is a missionary out there. Her post office is some little place called Calcutta. Did you ever run into her?”

  Lt. Collins chuckled, without mirth. President Coolidge probably thought the Far East was about the size of Vermont. Very likely he had a missionary aunt. No doubt she wrote him long letters about the greedy businessmen and the wicked gunboats.

  He checked himself. Presidents had human failings, but one must not think such thoughts about the Office. The American people were the power and the glory and the absolute authority that drew to a blinding focus in that Office, from which it fed down through the ranks to power the last, least man in uniform. To question that Office was to welcome chaos into the world.

  He felt chastened. He was himself a small and distant reflection of that blinding focus. That was his solution, grace-given in the night. It was for him simply to be San Pablo. To affirm his paramount value in all the symbolic ways open to him. The Sand Pebbles were good men, professionals, all lesser ties long ago severed. San Pablo was their collective life. And he looked out the eyes of San Pablo. San Pablo, de
spised, rejected, ringed round with enemies, would endure and keep the faith.

  He stood up, filled with calm resolution. He would be able to sleep now.

  He ate breakfast alone in his day cabin, as he would eat all meals henceforward. He was going to intensify his ritual isolation as commanding officer. After breakfast he sent for Bordelles and told him the plan.

  “Tell the chiefs to turn out in their best uniforms,” he said. “When I judge the time right, I will have all hands called aft.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bordelles said stiffly.

  He was responding to his captain’s manner. There was to be no more idle talk. Relations were to be rigidly formal.

  Near ten o’clock a student-led hate demonstration began to shape on the bund opposite the ship. Lt. Collins had all hands mustered aft. He gave them time to assemble and then went aft himself, after a last-minute check of his blue uniform. He faced them, as so often before, with the great wheel at his back and the colors above his head. Bordelles and the chiefs were clean and sprucely uniformed. The men were unshaven in dirty dungarees, slouching in two straggling ranks across the fantail. They were acting out a dumb and anguished protest.

  “Some of us later in life are going to win medals for less heroic action than the passage we have just made from Hankow,” he began dryly. He spoke of the labor and hardship. “I want to say Well done! to every man aboard.”

  It did not touch their sullen faces.

  “Now about this boycott,” he said. “It cannot defeat us physically.” They had enough dry stores aboard to live on, he told them. There was coal ashore already in American hands. “Changsha is our home port,” he said. “We have the right by treaty to be here and to buy what we need of food, materials and labor. For reasons I will not go into, we cannot for the present enforce our rights by armed action. But we are not in the slightest degree going to give up our claim to our rights, as they are trying to force us to do.”

  It deepened their sullen anger. He continued with careful words reviewing what they all knew. He wanted to build their sense of grievance to an intolerable ache.

  “Right here months ago I spoke to you of a new kind of war,” he said. “We are blooded now, in that war. We know that they can hurt us, if we let them. If … we … let … them.” He had all their eyes now. “If we let them control how we feel and act, they will destroy us,” he told the men grimly. “Because they hate our guts. They hate the very linings of our hearts!”

  He said it harshly. He wanted to rasp them raw. He emphasized each pronoun with voice and gesture. He made with both hands a fending gesture for they and an in-gathering for we.

  “Who are they? I’ll tell you who they are. They are more than the simple, ignorant Chinese whom they are using. They are the clever, seeing ones anywhere in the world who fear and envy America. They make the new kind of war. They have singled out San Pablo for destruction, to test and perfect their new weapons. They bribed our boatmen to smuggle opium aboard of us. They stole away our boatmen. They drove us from Hankow.”

  He was drumming the pronoun into them with voice and gesture. Their whiskered lips were beginning to twitch at each repetition. He had them in hand.

  “They are the people who hate America in their hearts,” he said harshly. “They can even be Americans themselves, and those are most devilish of all. We cannot know them by their faces. But we can know them by their words and actions. And there they are!”

  He flung his arm and aimed his finger at the demonstrators on the bund. All the heads turned. Hatred twisted the beard-stubbled faces.

  “Look at them! We laughed at them once. We know better now. They think they are destroying our pride and our courage, our love for and devotion to America. And maybe they can do that, if … we … let … them. Let every man take a moment to remember himself six months ago. They have made the difference in us all!”

  He dropped his arm and paused. All the eyes were back upon him, wide and wondering. The heads were nodding slowly. It was time to lift them.

  “People are still asleep in the States, but we in San Pablo are awake now,” he said. “We know our ship is under siege here, as truly as Wuchang was under siege. They watch us every minute. They gloat over rust streaks down our sides and Irish pendants along our decks. They point out to each other gleefully every sign of military slackness, every slovenly, unshaven man they see aboard of us. They know it is their handiwork. They know that if they can only keep it up San Pablo will fall as Wuchang fell. They expect in the end to haul down Old Glory to shame, disgrace and oblivion.”

  He saw their eyes lift above his head.

  “We will defend that flag,” he said soberly. “With our lifeblood, when the time comes for that. And until then, with the cheerful sacrifice of ease and comfort. They expect it to destroy us. But it is only going to make us stronger!”

  They were coming to attention, faces eager, ranks unconsciously dressing and covering off.

  “We are the same Sand Pebbles we always were,” he told them. “We are awake now. We know that we are defending America. We know about the new weapons and what they can do to a man. We know that Wuchang fell only to treachery inside the walls. And we know that is not going to happen in San Pablo!”

  He shook raised fists to emphasize each pronoun. They snatched off their hats and waved them and cheered. Some of the men had tears on their stubbled cheeks. Their gay, defiant cheering surprised the demonstrators on the bund. They fell silent over there. The tables were turned on them.

  “That is all I have to say,” Lt. Collins resumed, when the cheering ceased. “Take the rest of the morning for a field day in living spaces. This afternoon will be a rope-yarn Sunday.”

  He turned them over to Bordelles and went forward. He knew he had just won a crucial battle.

  Holman, in the engine room, heard the cheering. After a while he went aft to the head, which had been stinking filthy for days. The white tile deck was clean and dry. The water was stopped in the urinal trough, which Crosley was shining. Copper gleamed softly under his busy rag.

  “Hi, Jake,” Crosley said cheerfully. “Lend a hand.”

  “Got the watch,” Holman said.

  Vincent was scrubbing out the showers. In the compartment they were all scrubbing and shining and talking back and forth. The newly-waxed deck had a high red luster. Harris’ stiff gray hair flopped as he stroked with the johnson bar. He wore a cheerful grin on his seamed and craggy face.

  “I’m getting old, Jake,” he said, puffing. “Spell me on this bar.”

  “Take the watch and I will,” Holman said.

  Harris went below and Holman finished the polishing. He was glad to see the men cheerful and the place cleaned up. Lt. Collins had worked some kind of miracle with them.

  In the afternoon they took their dirty clothes aft to scrub them. The engineers scrubbed theirs between their hands in a bucket of soapy water. The deckforce men laid theirs out on deck and scrubbed them with a hand brush.

  “You snipes wear your clothes out faster that way,” Haythorn said.

  “We get our hands clean too, this way,” Wilsey said. “It gets the grease out from around our fingernails.”

  Farren broke out whiteline and Perna strung extra lengths of it above the boilers. The uptakes were filled with scrubbed clothes.

  They all took showers and shaved. Welbeck had been able to get six safety razors and a limited supply of blades and shaving cream from the Duarte canteen yeoman. Each blade had to last a man ten days. Restorff had not shaved himself in ten years, and he was clumsy as a boy. When he finished, his blunt face was spotted with the bits of toilet paper he had plastered over nicks. They all laughed at him and he laughed too. There was no malice in it.

  In the compartment they made up their bunks with clean linen and put on clean blue uniforms. They shined shoes, with polish Welbeck had gotten from the Duarte. They argued happily about the best way to get a real inspection shine. Some held with damp rags and some with spitting on the to
es. Restorff was a damp rag man, and he got the best shine of them all.

  “That makes up for the face the gunner lost shaving,” Red Dog said.

  Restorff touched his patches ruefully and grinned.

  The clothes dried quickly above the boilers. The men brought them back in great, crinkled armloads. They laid them on their bunks and smoothed and folded them and stowed them neatly in their lockers. Bronson held a folded towel to his fat cheek and sniffed.

  “I forgot how good clean clothes smell, when you scrub ’em yourself,” he said.

  They wandered out on deck in twos and threes. A silent knot of coolies on the bund still watched the ship.

  “Them dirty, raggedy-ass, slant-eyed bastards,” someone behind Holman said comfortably.

  They were all feeling good. They walked around wriggling their toes inside clean socks and flexing their arms and smelling the clean smell of themselves. The compartment was filled with the clean smell of wax and brightwork polish and the cheery smell of the pot of coffee Tullio brought in, setting up for supper.

  “I bet this is the first time anybody ever had a rope-yarn Sunday on this old tub,” Restorff said. “By God, I like it!”

  Supper was beans, Vienna sausage and a sticky, lumpy rice pudding. The beans were hard as bullets. It was fodder to keep a man alive, Holman thought, but not much more. For the first time since Hankow, no one griped about it.

  “That pudding ain’t bad,” Harris said. “Hey, Tullio! Can you get seconds on pudding?”

  “Sure.” Tullio picked up the bowl.

  “Tell Duckbutt from me it’s a good chow,” Harris said.

  “Tell him that from all of us,” Farren said.