Fo'castle Waltz

I guess he was hurt—he hadn't been picked.

The Bos'n called to us to hurry up. The ship was strangely quiet. Mush worried, "What's the matter? Something wrong? The engine's stopped."

The Fat Man snorted in disgust, the Bos'n smiled, and Al said in a low voice:

"Y' dummy, we're dropping pilot. There's Sandy Hook and the last time you see land for four weeks. Take a good look."

Mush and I looked at each other nervously—I swallowed. There wasn't much chance to linger on this farewell to my native land stuff. We were busy pulling up the ladder the pilot had used to let him down to the little tug that now was taking him back to the security of My America.

We pulled up the ladder—the Bos'n and Al did; the Fat Man, Mush, and I weren't doing much. We seemed to get in each other's way. With the ladder finally lashed down, Mush and I looked back at the rim of land outlined in the setting sun.

"Looks pretty, don't it?" Mush said with a bit of a tremble in his voice.

"Pretty! It's beautiful. Bet it's the most beautiful land in the world." My voice sounded shrill and strange to my ears.

"Look, you guys," Al broke in from the messdeck. (How'd he get up there? The Bos'n and the Fat Man were gone. I guess Mush and I had been leaning on that rail longer than we figured.) "Aren't you gonna wash up before you eat? Come on."

After a silent supper we went back to the fo'castle and sat around a while. The sun had gone down and there was a bit of chill in the air and the calm sea looked lonesome. Some of the men had gone to sleep. They pulled the little canvas curtains suspended along their bunks to shield them from the dim electric light.

We talked quietly as we sat on the edge of a long bench. Al told us that pilots made a lot of money steering ships in and out of the harbor—twenty-five dollars a day or some fantastic sum like that.

A voice from behind one of the curtains mumbled, "Why d'hell don't you guys shut up and let me sleep."

It was that bullet-headed A.B. on the twelve-to-four watch, the Third Mate's watch.

We were reluctant to leave the fo'castle for the isolated splendor of our own cabin up forward. It seemed that much farther away from home, but Al said he was turning in, too, so Mush and I carefully picked our way to the dreary, lonesome cabin. We tossed a penny—I got the upper berth, undressed, doused the light, and lay there, talking. Suddenly there was a shattering crash.

"Gosh! What's that?" said Mush.

"Dunno. We might have brushed a bit of debris, or maybe some flotsam. It couldn't have been jetsam—that's soft stuff."

Again we heard a deafening clatter, soon another, and then another. I was scared. Visions of shipwreck filtered through my mind. How do you get into a life jacket? I should have asked somebody.

Then a roaring smash that almost threw us out of our bunks. That decided it. We tumbled out and, trembling, got into our dungarees and out on deck quick.

The night was still and calm. There was a dim light up in the wheelhouse. We saw the Second Mate silhouetted against the star-sprinkled sky out on the open bridgedeck.

"We must have hit something that ripped the bottom out of us," I ventured.

A voice from the prow said, "What you kids talking about?"

It was the cockeyed guy standing look-out up there.

"Something happened—we must have hit something. Bet we got a hole in her as big as a barn door," Mush whispered cautiously. We didn't want to start a panic.

"What?" Cockeye climbed down quickly and stumbled into the passage that led to our cabin. We all stood still in the darkness for a moment. Then that ripping crash was heard again.

"There it is—I bet we're awash." (I wasn't sure what that meant, but I thought it would do.)

Cockeye snarled his disgust.

"Listen, you kids, you go to sleep. That noise is water slapping up against the hull. And that other noise is some loose paint buckets stored up here."

"Well, we just wanted to do what we could in case—"

"Watsa matter with you guys? What y'noivous about? Didn'cha ever loin to swim?"

"Sure . . ."

"So what you worried about? We're only three miles away from land."

"Three miles away . . . ?"

"Yeh, just three miles." Then he pointed. "Straight down."

He haw-haw'd and hustled back to the prow to look out for real danger. We went back to our cabin and undressed in the darkness.

In spite of the crashing of the cans, the cockeyed guy's assurance had dissipated Mush's fears, and soon he snored. It wasn't so easy for me to get to sleep.

Out on deck the S.S. Hermanita had seemed like a pretty flimsy bit of dry security. Her deck felt thin and frail under my feet, as if those rusty plates floated and buckled directly on the immensity of the black ocean, as if there were no hold underneath. The tremendous vaulting heavens did nothing to help; their scale suggested the futility of individual prayer.