Fo'castle Waltz

There was no question the crew was worried, not only Mush—with his lugubrious mug dragging on the deck with that "all is lost, Mother" expression. It seemed to me every time we rode high and our propeller whipped the air, of course, everybody's heart jumped up into his throat, and as we settled back into the water, we swallowed in unison. But Mush's heart must have bounded higher than that, because I'm sure I saw his popeyes pushed out into space until I could see the intricate red muscular structure that held his eyeballs in their sockets— a definite indication of palpitating pressure from within, and it wasn't only the wind that lifted his hat.

Then there was Perry, his eyes crossing and recrossing with rage as he was banged around on the heaving deck for the few minutes he did any work—the A.B.'s were back on watch, their regular stall.

He would mutter his bitter chant through a corner of his tight lips—on the lousy miserable asininity of the lousy brass-polishin' Mate, etc.—and "just wait till we hit port."

There was another audible contributor to our general misery—the fat Sailing Man who, now that we were out at sea, was his old, bellowing, sloppy self again. We day men had found the easiest and quickest way to move gear around that ship was to load, drape, and hang the various units (such as coils of cable, line, block and fall, etc.) on the old Sailing Man as he stood scowling and viciously cursing the Swede Mate. When he was all loaded down like a fat, double-trunked Christmas tree, he'd shuffle stiffly off with the rest of us holding up the loose ends so they wouldn't catch on the deck and throw him—our tangled ambulating Maypole, with a calliope attachment.

The officers standing on the upper decks heard him, but he was never ordered to pipe down. Maybe his loud-mouthed critical survey of their incompetence was just. I wasn't enough of a seaman to know, and their consciences wouldn't permit them to clamp down on him. But I didn't understand how they permitted his descriptive adjectives, participles and such attribute compliments!

Midships was worried too. Time and again we could see all three Mates (when two of them at least should have been off watch and asleep) up on the open bridge in consultation with Captain Brandt—and old One-Ton, the Chief Engineer, would be up there with them too, with his broken arm in a sling. I can't imagine how he made it. He had enough difficulty when he had two arms to help him negotiate those ladders. Maybe one of his ingenious black gang had rigged up an individual elevator in the form of an immense Bos'n's chair and hoisted him up through the fidley.

They stood up on that bridge and when the ship rolled they'd all not only have themselves to keep upright but they'd all make a wild scramble for One-Ton. His one puny good arm clinging to the rail wasn't enough to keep him from crashing up on that bridge deck.

They were very fussy about keeping things clean up there, and I'm sure it was not their solicitude for the Chief so much as that fussiness which impelled them. Blood doesn't wash out of a bleached deck like that very easily. They couldn't let him dirty up the place with shreds of his squashed blubber and bashed brains.

Evenings in the fo'castle were dreary. We couldn't sit around talking very comfortably since the roll of the ship kept knocking us about and tumbling the benches we sat on. Then again, back there when the noise of the propeller became again the big ominous coffee grinder and then the crash as our stem settled back in the water, we all wished we were someplace else.

Up forward in our own cabin it was not much better, but I was nearer to my own life jacket racked up over my bunk.

I had given myself a few private life-saving drills (to be used when saving my own life) while our ship lay calmly tied up to the security of that steel pier in Ingeniero—after Philip had brought us the no-cargo, no-ballast news.

The first drill was the Sunday afternoon after our bon voyage party, when we hadn't enough wine to get drunk and tried to make up for the lack of it by helling around telling stories. Those that I had told (I had quite a repertoire in those days) were received quietly with polite smiles. Subtlety didn't count in that bull session. The stuff that earned the roarin', helpless belly laughs was the obvious raw tripe that I had heard when I sat around under carbon street lamps some summer evenings a long time ago, listening with guilty delight to some older kids whose voices were changing hoarsely whisper the facts of life and recount those archaic vulgarities they had heard from their older brothers.

Joe hadn't come back to the ship that night. Sometime Sunday morning he'd climbed aboard and gone to sleep for a few hours. At noon he dressed and sought me out to invite me to go ashore and have dinner with him—his treat and he ordered the best.