Pigboats

by Ellsberg, Edward

  The hammering stopped, Pete dropped the sledge, seized a wrench, held the head of the bolt in the next hole while the riveter above backed off the nut, and knocked the bolt through. It bounded through the scaffolding and vanished in the dark hold below.

  Pete looked up through the port side where, perched on the gaunt deck beams, his heater boy poked the rivets nestling in his glowing forge.

  “C’mon, boy!” he shouted. Another flaming rivet shot down like a meteor, was deftly caught, pushed through the waiting hole, driven home by Pete’s sledge. The rat-tat-tat of the rivet gun broke out afresh.

  Leaning heavily against his gun, Tom Knowles played the flying die around the edge of the rivet while he drove it down to fill the hole, bracing his hundred and eighty pounds’ weight to resist the impact of the throbbing pneumatic hammer. Streams of sweat cut furrows through the grime on his cheeks as he bore down, straining hard against the rapidly cooling iron. He finished off the rivet with a final bang, released his grip on the trigger, dropped the gun to the deck, and rested a moment on one knee.

  A red-hot point poked up in the next hole, jiggled a second, then suddenly became rigid as Pete below jammed his sledge against it. Knowles reached over, seized his rivet gun, steadied it against his knee, pressed the trigger. At the first blow, the gun kicked out of his slippery grip, shot the die across the deck.

  Tom swore, crawled over, retrieved his smoking die, shoved it back into the rivet gun. He looked at his gloves, soaked with sweat, slippery. Leaning down, he rubbed the sweat-soaked leather palms in the rust and dirt covering the steel deck, then, picking up his gun, took a firm grip on the handle and banged away at the dull red point. The rivet was getting cold, he worked feverishly to flush it off before it grew black, ran his die around the edge to calk it firmly into the countersink, then threw down his gun and rose a little stiffly.

  “That’s enough, Pete,” he called to his holder-on. “We’ve driven up four hundred, and this seam’s finished.” He waved to the heater boy above. “Dump the fire, Mike. We’re through.”

  Tom jerked off his soaked leather gloves, reached down, and helped pull Pete up from the scaffold underneath to a place on the deck alongside him. Around them lay scattered a confusion of nuts and washers, dotting the rusty deck plates, while a neat double row of smooth black points, shining against the steel plates, marked out their day’s work.

  Tom mopped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve, gazed up through the network of steel girders in the craneway to the overcast evening sky.

  “It’ll be snowing tomorrow, Pete.”

  “Divil a bit I care,” announced Pete. “Let ’er snow. ’Tis meself’s been lookin’ fer some time fer a chanct to be buyin’ a silk shirt.”

  “A silk shoit!” piped up Mike, “listen to the bye! A holder-on wid a silk shoit!”

  “Shure, an’ why not? Here we be makin’ twinty-four dollars a day fer the gang, an’ me gettin’ nine of it.”

  “Lay off, Mike,” advised Tom. “If Pete wants to swell out in a silk shirt at the movies, instead of wearing flannel, that’s his business. Who’s the new girl, Pete?”

  “Shure, an’ it’s the same ould one. Maggie’s promised she’ll be Missus Mullaney come next June.”

  “Maybe, Pete,” answered Tom, “but by the looks of things you’d better not wait till June. We’ll be fighting the Germans long before then.”

  “Ye’re right, worse luck,” moaned Pete. “Last night the Post said there’s no holding ’em back in Congress. They’re rarin’ fer war. ’Tis a shame fer a good Irishman to contemplate. Shure an’ it’s the English we should be fightin’.”

  Knowles threw the rivet gun into his tool box, tossed his gloves in on top of it, locked the box, and started across the deck.

  “No use coming in tomorrow. I’ll see you Monday, boys.”

  A shrill whistle blew at the head of the ways. Quitting time. Like magic, hundreds of workmen popped into the open from a dozen hatchways, swarmed over the side of the hull and down the long incline to the ground. Tom joined them, jostled his way to the gate, shifted his check on the board as he passed out of the shipyard into the town of Quincy, walked slowly toward the courthouse square.

  Two years had gone by since he had lost the C-3. Tough years, too. For months he had knocked around before the mast on tramps, from Yokohama to Shanghai, from Melbourne to Hawaii, trying to forget himself, haunted always by visions of Baker, of his crushed shipmates. Drunk all the time in port, shipping again only when he was broke. A hard life and it had hardened him. Lieutenant Thomas Knowlton was long since gone, Annapolis and its training faded out. Instead, Tom Knowles, able seaman, bronzed, moustached, seamed, as rough in speech and manner as the toughest, sailed the seas in merchantmen, wondering when the war might end, hoping for the day when German warships would once more be found in any port, when he might have a chance again to meet Herr Lieutenant Hans Erhardt, to make him pay for his dead shipmates, for the death of Lieutenant Thomas Knowlton.

  But on the other side of the world the war dragged wearily through 1915 into 1916. Except for submarines in the North Sea and around England, German ships on the high seas were conspicuous by their absence. Knowles grew sick of the East, drifted back to America. Ashore in Boston, he heard of the fabulous wages paid in the shipyards. He decided to try that for a change, applied to the Fore River yard at Quincy. The demand for riveters was strong; his physique appealed to the employment manager at the yard; he found himself promptly assigned in the plate shop to a riveting gang and, after a few days of intensive instruction, he was turned loose with a gun of his own, Pete and Mike for helpers. A battle cruiser, whose steel frame was just starting to take shape on the ways, became the scene of his activities.

  There Tom had toiled through the winter, watched the ship grow, piece by piece, as the shipfitters erected bulkheads, faired up the frames, swung into place the steel plates which formed the decks. And steadily he and his gang had followed in the wake of the fitters, the drillers, and the bolters-up, hammering home the endless rows of rivets which made of the innumerable pieces of steel, one solid whole, a ship.

  Through the first hard weeks, his hands had blistered, his shoulders had ached, his ears had throbbed, bucking hour after hour the kick of the gun as it pounded down the heavy rivets. But soon he hardened to his task and took a fierce delight in his work, watching the red-hot rivets give Way under his blows, flatten down smoothly, or shape themselves into buttonheads as he willed.

  Tom was in luck. Riveters were scarce, piece-work rates were jumping, and he soon found himself making twelve dollars a day and spending it as fast as he got it.

  It was an easier job to spend the money than to make it, in the crowd of ironworkers he travelled with. They worked with hard steel, bending it to their will; it worked on them, making them as tough. It was a hard-fighting, hard-swearing, hard-drinking crowd that Tom rubbed elbows with.

  The winter drifted along, notes protesting the activities of German submarines flew back and forth across the Atlantic. More ships were sunk; the shipyards hummed replacing them. Prices of tonnage jumped, wages soared; the care-free riveters lived on the fat of the land. And the tension between America and Germany increased as, one after another, American ships were fired on by submarines, torpedoed, Americans on passenger ships sunk without warning. Tom followed the news perfunctorily; it was too bad, but what of it? Let the President write more notes if he pleased. The Germans were certainly booming the ship market. Why should he go to sea again, with Boston nearby for a spree, and Fore River a gold mine for a riveter?

  And then one day, late in 1916, the picture changed. A German submarine, the U-38, arrived off Newport, sailed in to pay a brief courtesy call on the Commandant there, hurriedly steamed out several miles, and sank half a dozen Allied ships in a few hours. American destroyers picked up the survivors, brought them into Newport. Headlines blazoned the news; pictures of the U-38, of her captain, of her victims, covered the front page.

/>   Tom looked at them with the professional interest of an old submarine man. He didn’t agree with attacks on defenceless merchantmen. Still the U-38’s voyage from Germany across the Atlantic was quite a feat; her skipper had done an expeditious job in cleaning up all the Allied ships off Montauk and getting clear in a few hours before any British cruisers could arrive from anywhere. Tom looked casually at the picture of the German skipper paying his respects to the admiral. He started. No mistake. The skipper of the U-38 was Herr Lieutenant Erhardt! The old rage instantly flared white hot in Tom’s heart. Just two years ago! Tom wished he had commanded one of those destroyers which had stood by to pick up survivors while the U-38 sank its victims. Erhardt! One torpedo and he would have gone to join the C-3. Neutrality be damned!

  The U-38 was gone. The war in Europe raged on. Tom took a deep interest in the diplomatic notes, secretly began to hope that they would fail. He quit drinking, took a fierce delight in clinching rivets, hardening himself for the coming fray. Erhardt on the U-38! If we got into the war, Tom Knowles was going out for a billet on a destroyer, hunting submarines.

  Winter passed, spring came. His day’s work was over. As he walked slowly toward the courthouse, Tom was sunk in thought. War was imminent — at the most only a matter of hours now. And his old classmates would soon be in the war zone, gold stripes glistening on their sleeves. Instinctively, Tom looked at the soiled sleeves of his working coat. Rings of dirt encircled them where the cuffs of his riveting gloves had rubbed the cloth. With a jerk he took his gaze away.

  “No more stripes for me,” he muttered.

  But as he walked, he pondered the problem. War across the sea. That meant ships. The Navy would go first and Erhardt was on the U-38, fair game for any destroyer.

  He hesitated. Dare he ship again in the Navy? A court had held him guilty of culpable negligence in losing a ship, but they thought him dead. Still, if the Navy got its hands on him, no matter when, it would always make him pay. He had, already; more punishment didn’t matter. But if they sent him to Portsmouth prison, his chance at Erhardt would go glimmering.

  Mechanically he saw he was passing a haberdashery. He stopped, surveyed himself in the mirrored window, laughed, reassured. Lieutenant Knowlton was dead. Even his old shipmates would never recognize him in the rough workman reflected from that mirror.

  He made up his mind, swung aboard a car for Boston.

  In thirty minutes, he was facing a recruiting officer. Any experience? Sure, two years on merchantmen. And so great was the scarcity of recruits who had ever seen a ship, that when Knowles emerged an hour later, once more in the Navy, he found to his astonishment that they had rated him a quartermaster, second class.

  CHAPTER IV

  The morning of May 4, 1917.

  A squadron of six destroyers steamed swiftly past Kinsale Head, their grey hulls standing sharply out from the green hills of Ireland in the background. A break appeared in the rocky cliff, the leading destroyer turned sharply to port and headed for the cleft in the rocks. In a moment the squadron was passing between the steep hills that enclosed Queenstown. The slopes were black with people. As the ships swept into the harbour and sighted the town ahead with its houses rising, terrace above terrace, against the farther hill, a roar of welcome burst out from the crowds on every side.

  The Wadsworth, flagship of the squadron, answered by breaking out her largest colours.

  On board the Walton, second in the line, Tom Knowles, watching the flagship, jerked the halliards. A small ball of bunting at the masthead burst and the Stars and Stripes floated proudly over his head.

  The column of destroyers swung in past Haulbowline, headed up parallel to the quay, and then, on signal from the Wadsworth, dropped anchor and backed full speed.

  From freighters in the harbour, from British warships at the dockyard, the blowing of whistles and the boom of saluting guns mingled with the cheers of crowds on shore. To a nation with its back to the wall, its ships being sunk by hundreds, its food supplies choked off by the submarine blockade, starvation and defeat but a matter of a few short months unless the German submarines were thwarted, the sudden appearance at Queenstown of this advance force of our Navy seemed like a life buoy to a drowning man.

  To the minds of the British nation, the Mayflower had returned.

  CHAPTER V

  “That’s a swell pair of shiners you’ve got there, Pete. Where’d you get ’em?” Tom Knowles, leaning carelessly against a string of depth charges, regarded his friend’s swollen eyes critically.

  “In Cork, an’ ye know it well enough. Nobody but another harp could’a done that,” answered Pete. He pulled the hood of his windbreaker farther down to protect his battered features from the flying spray which swept over the Walton’s stern, shifted his position a trifle to straddle the ashcans on the depth charge rack more comfortably, and tried to search the waves on their windward quarter, but he had to turn his face away.

  “I’m ruint complately fer a lookout, Tom. Take a look fer me.”

  Tom scanned the grey mass of billows on the port side. The Walton rolled lazily along at fifteen knots, rising gently to the long waves sweeping down on their port bow. For months now, that monotonous vista of grey waves had met his eyes. Nothing in sight. Tom turned to his shipmate.

  “Not a periscope. You’d think the ocean was full of ’em from all the ships that have been sunk, but here we’ve been patrolling this square for five months by now, I can call every wave by name, but as for fighting U-boats — ” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Talkin’ o’ fightin’, it wuzn’t in Ireland I thought I’d be findin’ a fight when ye got me to ship. Fer all the fightin’ with the Huns I’ve seen, I cud just as well stayed home an’ got these in Boston.” He rubbed his eyes tenderly. “Wud ye believe it, who should I meet in Cork yisterday noon but me Maggie’s sister Rose!” He heaved a sigh. “Here ’tis Siptimber an’ I might’a bin married to Maggie since June! Well, y’understan’, I wuz so excited when I sees ’er, I grabs her in both arms an’ gives her a hug. An’ as she kisses me fer her sister’s sake, some Mick grabs me by the shoulder. ‘Ye drunken loafer,’ sez he, ‘ye shud be fightin’ the Germans, not kissin’ me gurl,’ and he belts me with a shillaley. An’ that’s the only fightin’ I bin in since I wint to war.”

  “How’d it end, Pete?” asked his friend sympathetically. “A little too soon,” muttered Pete through his swollen lips. “He wuz still able to crawl whin the bobbies an’ the P.O.’s on shore patrol dragged me away. I’d busted his shillaley over his head an’ wuz jist gettin’ in some rale licks whin it’s all over, an’ the patrol’s got me on a train pullin’ out fer Queenstown. Shure, an’ they didn’t even give me time to apologize to Rose fer hurtin’ her frien’. But I saved the shillaley!” He slacked the section of halliard that held his windbreaker tightly in at the waist, drew out from beneath it a broken blackthorn stick about a foot long, knarled and knobby, exhibited it proudly. “There’s enough lift,” he added, “fer miny a scrap yet.”

  “Not in Cork, anyway,” commented the quartermaster. “Take a look at the bulletin board when you go below. There’s an order there saying that ‘Because of many disturbances between the citizens and the sailors of this flotilla, culminating in a riot on the streets of Cork yesterday, no further permission to visit Cork will be granted.’ Say, Pete, are you sure that’s all there was to the fight?”

  “Come to think o’ it, there might’a been some other gobs an’ some more Cork lads mixin’ it too, but divil a riot. Why it wuz nothin’ but a friendly fight.”

  “Yeh,” laughed Tom. “I suppose those shiners are where Rose kissed you for her sister’s sake.” He looked out again at the waste of tumbling seas. “Well, no more liberties in Cork for us. Lucky I got a chance to kiss the Blarney stone before this happened.” He fingered the depth mechanism on the ashcan alongside, watched the wake churn up beneath the propeller guards.

  Six bells struck.

  “Sorry, Pete, but I�
�ll have to leave you. My trick at the wheel. Keep your eyes open now.” Knowles slid off the depth charge, started up the slippery steel deck past the after deckhouse, the torpedo tubes, and the galley, to the narrow ladder leading to the bridge.

  He moved to the wheel, gripped it.

  “Course 315, second leg on zigzag A,” he repeated to the departing helmsman, then glued his eyes to the compass card in front of him. The ship had a little tendency to yaw as she took the quartering seas, and he was kept busy manoeuvring the wheel to hold her within a degree of the course, anticipating the swings and meeting each one with the rudder.

  In the starboard wing of the bridge, hooded in a windbreaker suit like the rest of the crew, Tom saw his skipper, Commander Ritchie, working over a chart. The quartermaster smiled. He knew that square by heart; he had zigzagged across it in every possible manner.

  They had worn out a dozen charts, plotting their course over that thirty mile square southwest of Ireland. Knowles leaned over a little, looked past the captain’s shoulder. A new chart, fresh and clean, with a single broken pencil line starting across it from the northeast corner. Ritchie noticed his glance, grinned at him.

  “Good-looking chart, now, isn’t it, Knowles? By the time we’ve done our five day patrol out here, it’ll look like a crazy quilt.” He finished laying out the leg of the zigzag, and closed his parallel rulers. Raising his binoculars, he looked across the waves ahead, then moved over to the wheel.

  “Say, Knowles, I heard from the Shore Patrol that my crew had licked half the bobbies in Cork yesterday. Come to check up, all I can find is that your friend Mullaney’s been in a fight. What sort of a Samson is he anyway?”

  “Mullaney was my holder-on when I was riveting at Fore River, captain. He can just about drive a rivet through a steel plate with his fist. Those cops were crazy to mix it with him; these iron workers are tougher’n hell. You need a sledge hammer to nuke an impression on ’em.”