Fo'castle Waltz

Those damned lumps of bone broke up our shoes, too. The leather, softened by weeks of soaking, would scrape up against some of those splinters and open up. I used up two pairs of shoes in the bilges: an old pair, which I had used for plaster casting and had brought aboard, were dried up and cracked and didn't last more than a few days in the bilge; then a good pair of heavy work shoes fell to pieces after some two weeks. On the twenty-first day in the bilges, I regretfully climbed into my daily stint of drek wearing my last pair of shoes—my going-ashore shoes.

I was sore that morning. Hell, there was no profit in that job—three pair of shoes in three weeks. We had cleaned up the two holds back aft, number five and number four. The number three hold midships was a small one and I don't remember working it. And on that twenty-first morning we were almost finished with number two up forward. We were only three days away from New York and I was sore.

Here I'd traveled sixty-five hundred miles and got nowheres. Nothing had happened, I'd seen nothing, there'd been no shipwrecks or blood-curdling adventures to tell about to the Turk, Fish or Mish or any of the other guys whose studios I hung around in New York. I'd have nothing to talk about. Where have you been through the summer—the Catskills? No—I've been no place just six thousand five hundred miles away—that's all—and that's all I'd have to say. I might get a book about some salty seafaring yarns and augment my conversation a bit with a few plagiarisms, but most of those guys had library cards too.

Why, I wasn't even tanned. That three weeks in the bilges had bleached all four of us into a sickly, greenish-white color. I had my whiskers, but they too had developed a greenish cast and weren't the nice blond they'd promised to sprout. I was low.

There hadn't been anything interesting up on deck in the evenings outside of a few consoling accidents to the Mate's plans for painting up the ship and making it beautiful, like the sudden quick squalls that washed away the nice gray paint he personally had applied to some sections of the ship. Then there was that pleasant overflow of black fuel oil all over the freshly red-painted officers' deck the night before at suppertime. We all stopped eating the better to hear the Mate roar—in English, Swedish, and German. It's too bad he didn't know Russian. That's a fine strong language for blowing your top.

Talking with my brethren of the bilge about the misery of the Mate didn't ease me any. Along about mid-morning the Bos'n climbed down to visit with us for a minute. He had been painting up on the deck helping to repair the damage done by the fuel oil and he was all smeared with red paint. He told us to buck up—he'd inspected the last hold up forward toward the prow, the number one hold, and it was almost completely dry; we'd be through with bilges right soon, he said.

That news cheered the old fat Sailing Man so, he stuck his dirty face up out of his bilge and gave out with a bellowing chanty. He had a good voice—there was volume to it—and since I didn't know any of the old chanties he sang I never could tell if he was off key or if they should be sung the way he sang them. I found out later he sang them right and now I wish I'd paid more attention to his renditions. Mush and Al shouted him down with one of their Forward for Good Old Illinois Prep school songs, and after they'd succeeded in shushing the old guy, we all joined in singing Hinky Dinky Parley-Voo, improvising a bit to make the Mate the villain of the piece. The Polack guy, dressed in his dry hip boots, who was the A.B. on watch down in the hold to tie on the big pails, added his voice to the chorus and didn't help much.

The acoustics in that empty hold were good, and we sang some more with more attention to close harmony. We were doing a pretty good job on There Was an Indian Maid (or is that called Red Wing?) in its original version, when the Mate leaned over the open hatch and shouted down at us. That fuel-oil accident still rankled in him, I guess. He was crabbier than ever. He kept shouting at us until one by one we quit singing and listened to him howl.

"Shut up, down there. Shut up and get to work."

That ruffled the Fat Guy. He wiggled his gut out of his bilge and stood up in it as he bellowed back at the Mate.

"What d'hell you think we're doing down here—think we're playing baseball?"

"Well, shut up and get to work—"

"A-urr. Go t'hell," came from the Fat Guy. Guess it was loud enough to carry up to the hatch, but his more interesting i mumble as he glowered and bent to his bilge wasn't.