Emancipation Day Read Free

Force songs, Off we go, into the wild blue yonder , but what was wilder or bluer than the sea? Not the sky, not here in Newfoundland, it wasn’t, it might be wild but it sure wasn’t blue. Battleship grey when it wasn’t pitch black.
    Well, he wasn’t rolling home now, he was freezing his balls off on a parade square in HMCS Avalon in St. John’s bloody Newfoundland with the rest of the Navy Band, and these poor devils waiting behind them to be marched down to their ship. Crew change for one of the destroyer escorts, he guessed. They did this every day, two sometimes three times a day, not usually this early, not usually in the dark, but always this many. In the four months he’d been here, the band must have sent ten thousand men off on convoy duty. A lot of them never came back. He no longer looked at their faces. The band played something rousing to lift the men’s spirits as they marched them down Prince of Wales, past the warehouses and the few flag-waving citizens who still showed up, over to the Navy docks, saw them onto their ships to their likely deaths, then turned around and marched themselves back to headquarters where the next condemned crew was waiting for the same treatment.
    When the Chief finally marched them out, it was close to oh seven hundred, still too dark to see the music on their lyres. They played from memory, Sousa’s “Salvation Army,” which he’d been playing since Sea Cadets. Rain beaded on his horn andfroze, collected on his cap and ran down his neck. Thank God he could play the trombone with gloves on, and that he’d coated it with cold cream to keep the rain off the brass. A handful of locals maybe walking to work stopped to wave or shout a word of encouragement. School kids ran along the sidewalk beside them, throwing pebbles at the bass drum.
    When they reached the Navy docks, something broke in the routine. Instead of splitting them into two parallel lines so the band could play as the men continued up and onto the ship, the Chief marched the band straight up the gangway and onto the foredeck, where they looked about them like a bunch of cats that had just been dumped out of a sack. HMCS Assiniboine . Destroyer escort, like he’d thought, but what the fuck were they doing on it? The band was formed into six lines and stood at ease, feet twelve inches apart, instruments ready at their sides.
    “We’re going to sea,” someone behind him said quietly. Sounded like Seddidge.
    “No we’re not,” Frank said. “Some bigwig just wants a show.”
    “We are.”
    “We can’t be,” Jack said.
    “Why the fuck not?”
    “Because that’s why I joined the band, so I wouldn’t have to go to sea.”
    There were sniggers among the ranks, but Jack was serious. The Chief turned and glared. A low rumbling sound, like kettle drums tuned to E, and tremors coming up from the metal deckthrough the soles of their boots. The ship’s engines had started; the deck crew was getting ready to cast off. Jesus, they hadn’t prepared him for active duty. A few fire drills in the Armouries in Toronto, a lecture on chain of command. If a gunnery rating tells you to get out of the fucking way, get out of the fucking way. If a ranking officer tells you to get out of the fucking way, jump overboard. Officers wore caps with scrambled egg on their visors: salute it. The Chief was a non-commissioned officer, promoted from the ranks, one of the boys. Don’t salute him and don’t call him sir. Ordinary seamen were nothing, useful for holding hoses and clearing clogged scuppers. Four ways you could be killed in the Navy: aircraft from above, U-boat from below, destroyer from in front, cowardice from within. What about stupidity? Stupidity was cowardice. Ignorance, ditto. And how many ways to make it out alive? One: luck. And if you were a bandsman standing on the deck of a ship in wartime in the snow in the dark holding a frozen trombone, you were one unlucky son of a bitch.
    Except it wasn’t completely