Fo'castle Waltz

All that afternoon we worked shoving things around in a seemingly meaningless pattern. The men grouched—this goddam Swede Mate is a goddam, brass-polishing yacht's captain (something he never lived down during the whole trip). The fancy sailor kept up die pace he had set when he first came aboard. As the hot afternoon wore on, the sultry heat wore into him, too—he became as grimy with sweat and dust as the rest of the crew and he slowed down a bit, but he never seemed to be dragging his bottom along the deck as we did.

We knocked off, crawled out of our clothes, now so caked with a paste of grease and dust your dungarees didn't sag and flop when you threw them in a comer. They stood there, then stiffly folded over and slowly sank to the deck as if they, too, were tired. We washed and went up to eat. Supper was cheerful, though the food was a repetition of the greasy mess we'd eaten before. I noticed the sailor wasn't talking much and that the men had got over their resentment at his working so hard and were friendly.

We all gathered on the poopdeck. Some of the men had been washing clothes, and they hung them on lines stretched from the stanchions. The river looked pretty narrow, and the poops of many ships alongside with clotheslines strung on them gave you the feeling of sitting in some back yard on a late Monday afternoon.

The men talked quietly, some wrote letters—I began writing to some dame and just about the time the sun began to sink behind the chimneys on the New York side I finished.

As I looked up, I found myself surrounded by a group of four or five little brown men. I blinked (a touch of liver perhaps—maybe the food was making me bilious). Then I remembered Al had said the ship's mess was all Filipino. This evidently was it. All about the same size, all with the same broad, round, golden-brown faces that seemed to float in front of their slender necks like masks. They were so much alike there seemed more of them than there were because of the repetitious similarity.

They soberly studied me with expressionless black eyes. I tried a grin, but no dice—none of them responded.

Slowly, they sauntered away from me and surrounded another guy, reading a newspaper on a coil of rope. They gave him the same going over they had me and continued their slow tour of inspection of everyone on the poopdeck.

Talk had died down. Each man who had gone through the ordeal would turn his head and watch them give it to the next one, until they quietly circled the poop and without having spoken one word among themselves, or to any of the men, they silently climbed down and left us.

It seemed now that either the Filipinos or the sun dipping behind the horizon had cooled us off, and the mumble of talk that started up again was somber and subdued—and stayed that way for a long time until it became quite dark and someone yawned and said he was going to turn in.

That cheered me. I'd been waiting for someone to start down the fo'castle so I could try out my bunk, since this was the first night I'd sleep in a bunk aboard a ship (I didn't count those spent in the brown-varnished cabins on those Hudson River sidewheelers).

Frankly, I was anxious to get started but did not want to appear too eager.

After a few false starts, we all got down off the poop and I climbed into my bunk, lit a cigarette, and stretched out.

Well, this was it. A bunk on a freighter out on the North Atlantic! I grant there were a few flaws in that, since our ship was not floating in the ocean. We were tied up in the East River, but that is a misnomer. It's not really a river; it's a strait between Long Island Sound and the bay. The water is salt, but since our ship was propped up in drydock, there was no water under us except a few puddles. Well, there it was, anyway— my first night aboard a good seaworthy ship. . . .

"I wouldn't ship on this lousy tub if it were the only lousy ship in the lousy harbor."

That Phi Beta Kappa's brother was sounding off again. He lay in one of the upper bunks, flicking his cigarette ash over the side as he talked to some old guy from the black gang sitting on an unoccupied lower.

I looked around the fo'castle and was surprised to see how few there were sleeping aboard. Seems a lot of the old bums had risked their necks climbing down that long ladder to the dock to sleep ashore. Those who remained had all chosen upper bunks. Only one lower was occupied—the messy one under me by the old fat Sailing Man.

"And foidermore, if I wasn't gettin' cured at the Seaman's Hospital, I wouldn't be here now."

"She ain't a bad ship," said the old guy from the black gang through his mustaches. "She's tight—pretty good engines— sure there ain't much to her, only some five thousand ton. . . ."

"Only five thousand. Yeah! An' she's booked for the Argentine, ain't she? And she won't be comin' back till September or thereabouts—in d'hurricane season. A fine chance this old can will have in a blow. Didja look over dem lifeboats she carries :