Fo'castle Waltz

LIKE A GANG OF BEAUTICIANS WE ROUGED THE UPPER DECKS, golden-buffed the masts and booms, french-grayed the trim, whitened the superstructure, and blackened the main deck with glistening fish oil. Like a gang of beauticians? More like a gang of morticians, for she was an empty, dead ship, though none of us knew that until we dropped anchor in the boneyard along the Jersey coast. And the S.S. Hermanita looked prettier as she lay in her grave than she ever did in life.

The Mate was desperate those last three days. He had every hand he could commandeer swinging brushes and paint buckets. The crew knew that since this was his first hitch with the Universal Tropical Line he wanted to make a good impression on the home office with a beautifully painted, clean ship. They did what they could to bitch it up for him in their quiet way. Steady hands developed palsy as they wiggled the lines of her trim, gaping holidays were left up on the mast, and the Bos'n's chair was rigged again to patch up. Red deck paint slopped over on the clean gray bulkhead, white spattered the buff, black fish oil blurred white paintwork. Everything had to be gone over again and a few times more.

Up on the boat deck where we day men were painting the white lifeboats with more white—adding another coat to the crust that already covered the unworkable davits and the rest of the gear—we could see the crew spotted all over the ship with their little pails and brushes, like a bunch of busy little gnomes on an old Hammacher and Schlemmer advertisement. I'll bet that the Mate had missed us day men when we were lost down in the bilges. He couldn't get the work out of his A.B.'s he'd get out of us. I don't know what deal he'd arranged with Joe, Slim, the Polack, and Perry to get those guys out on deck smearing paint for him. It was the Third Mate's watch and that gang were off. He might have stood watch for them, as he was doing that afternoon for the Third Mate, taking the wheel himself while those guys slept peacefully through the night. The Third Mate was out with a bucket and brush too; so was the Bos'n.

The red-headed Second grumped around up on the boat deck with us. He wasn't working—he was supervising. He was jumpy as a cat as he paced that deck. It seems that as the navigator, through the weather charts and stuff that was available to him, he knew better than anyone aboard, except the Captain I suppose, that our ship riding blithely through the hurricane belt with her empty hull just kissing the crest of the waves was as safe as a kid's torn paper boat in a whirlpool comes the first bit of a blow—and he worried.

If I'd have known what I know now, from reading the newspapers in recent years about the hurricanes that swept the Atlantic seaboard and bashed almost everybody's summer cottage to bits from Florida to Maine—to say nothing of completely ruining their gardens—or if the Second had confided in me and shown me those ominous potentialities on his charts, I might have worried with him. But I was blissfully ignorant of the horror that could happen to a gaily painted ship like ours, and she did look pretty in an abstract way, with the varied patches of paint spotting her from stem to stern. So I thought, as I dipped my brush and again got down to dab at the bottom of the lifeboat I was working on.

As far as I was concerned it was a fine bright day; the water was a wonderful blue-green, and that ship felt solid enough for me as she bobbed and sailed over the bounding main—over the bounding main—B-A-M!

"Choke off your goddam whistling, you goddam Jonah!"

I made a wild grab at a line that dribbled off that lifeboat and saved myself from going over side into the wonderful blue-green sea with its millions of bounding waves. It seems I had with my natural exuberance not only been thinking of the bounding main—I'd been whistling the tune, high and shrill. And that bloody red-headed Mate had kicked me in the tail and darn near sent me out to join the fishes. I'd been blowing for a breeze—piping up a blow or whistling up a squall—I can't remember which, but it was one of those three. A silly superstition, prevalent among the illiterate seafarers. And as I righted myself and my spilt paint bucket, I sneered up at that sputtering purple-faced red-head. I said, calmly:

"Yeah—and you a college man."

"Pipe down, you—you—" and he went off into a scream of hysterical epithets which would take up a couple of paragraphs—on my genealogy, person, and intellect. I've not recorded them for this text, since there was neither truth nor fancy in any of his mouthings.