Emancipation Day Read Free Page B

bell, two bells, up to eight bells, change of watch. Jack pulled the twelve-to-sixteen-hundred and midnight-to-oh-four-hundred: hell’s bells. He spent his first noon watch on the boat deck, manning Fire Station H, portside boat deck, with petty officer second-class Spoonerman or Spoonerson, and two other ordinary seamen, Trilling and Sinclair, neither of them bandsmen. Salt water freezing to the rails. He could already feel the beginnings of seasickness, the slight dizziness, the weakness in the knees. He’d sometimes felt light-headed on the Detroit ferry, but that trip lasted only half an hour, and he’d put it down mostly to booze. This was something else. This went deeper.
    The four of them spent the watch either sitting on the hose locker or standing in the lee of a lifeboat, smoking and telling lies about the girls they’d left behind. They called the women “parties.” Jack thought about Vivian. He’d phone her when he got back, but she’d probably have someone else by then. Sweet little party like that, it was a wonder some officer hadn’t got hishooks into her already. What did she see in a guy like him? He held on to the ship’s rail with one hand, keeping the other in the pocket of his greatcoat, staring out at the ocean, unable to go forward, afraid to go back.
    His stomach began to feel worse when they lost sight of land. He spent the eight hours between watches lying in his hammock, trying not to throw up. He thought he’d be all right as long as he didn’t eat, but at twelve hundred hours he went above decks, emerging from the blood-red light into the sudden, silent starlight, and was sick. It was like being drunk, only all the time.
    One relatively calm night, Spoonerson told them about taking his survivor’s leave in Ireland after the Ottawa , a sister destroyer escort, went down. He’d been billeted in a castle beside a pub and had fucked a barmaid named Cathleen every night for two weeks, or so he said. When his leave was up she tried to cut her wrists with a broken wineglass. Jack leaned his elbows on the taffrail and watched the way the moon lit up the spit left behind by the props. This was all bullshit, he thought. Who would be fool enough to kill herself over Spoonerson?
    “The Ottawa was a beautiful destroyer, though,” Spoonerson said after a while. “Went down right about where we are now, thirty-two merchantmen in the ring, except it was a Sunday and not so fucking cold. Thirteenth of September, 1942. Out on a hunt, wolfpack caught her. Sixty-five survivors from a crew of a hundred and seventy-eight.” Spoonerson leaned over the rail and spat into the propwash, a tribute to all drowned seamen. “First torpedo came through the fo’c’sle on the port side, intothe signalmen’s mess where thirty men were sleeping. Rudder smashed all to shit, and when the sub’s commander saw she couldn’t manoeuvre, he angled off and torpedoed her again, this time hitting her amidships on the starboard side, right in the boilers. She went down like a stone, captain with her. Me and a few others was picked up by the Arvida , took us all the way to Londonderry.”
    Jack looked at Spoonerson’s ribbons. He might have been telling the truth. But then why was he still a second-class PO doing fire duty? No one was who they said they were.
    On his fourth day out he was worse but thought if he tried to eat something he would get his sea legs, so just before noon he climbed up to the mess for chow. The sea had become rougher if anything, not stormy exactly but moody, as though on a slow burn, biding its time, and the clouds on the horizon were always low and dark. Someone said they were over the Grand Banks, where the water was shallow and easily rucked. As soon as he entered the mess, the smell of frying sausages sent him running for the side. After that, all he could think of was the ship’s heaving, the deck slowly rising under him, and just when he thought the ship was about to flip over it would