The Jedge and the Fishboat

by E. C. DRAKE

1

WE HAVE made port after eight days of uneventful patrol. It is no event that twenty-eight men who came from factories and colleges, from farms and businesses, from river craft and lake steamers, have slept in four-hour snatches, taut against the ceaseless roll flinging them against iron bunk stanchions, layered in three shelves, so that a man with long feet cannot lie on his back and cross his ankles without kicking the bunk above.

It is no event that twenty-eight men — some of them twenty, some of them forty — have slept and worked for a week without bathing, in unchanged underwear; that they have broken out when the watch changed and stood their share — stood it when every tatter of strength had been retched into the merciless, inescapable whips of sleet.

War is only the moment a gun fires. The tompion canvases have been off twice, but no gun has fired.

Men die here only when the wind that blew southwest yesterday doubles on itself in the night, suddenly showing the helm an impossibly deep trough and, beyond, an impossibly high wall; a trough and wall the cruisers call only a swell. In the Trawler Navy, a swell consumes a rail, a man, a ship.

Two days in, then out again. Two days to phone home, to study the new directives from the Bureaus, to write the reports, clean our ship, the Nora Wilson, collect the accumulation of mail, papers, and magazines. Two days to replace the rail the sea took away; to take on some thousands of gallons of water and fuel; to get the gripe out of the Diesel and the play out of the wheel.

That is the way the war goes for the twentyeight of us. We meet the Nazi in shallow bunks, on four-hour watches, expending fuel, refueling. The tompion canvases do not come off. We are a common lot of men fighting a war in the common way, without drama, without heroes, with work and boredom and discomfort and very modest danger.

I do not suppose there is such a thing as an individual common man anywhere. But when twenty-eight men have arrived in one place more or less by lottery, when they live so together that no more than inside a clock can a movement here be secret, the common strands work out. You see them tying man to man; and when you see how many men are held by a strand, you know how common it is.

These are “our boys”; there is not a boy among us. Between Semmes, the youngest, whom the rest call Junior, and Welles, the captain, there are some twenty years, but each is mature to himself. The characters are bent and, barring a whirlwind that will as well break one as another, the growth can be foreseen. Semmes may become more or less diffident, but diffidence will be in the character; more or less slow-spending — if he ever becomes a gambler it will be through accident and not evolution.

We all know as well as we ever shall the decent from the indecent, what is beautiful in a woman, what is worth doing for a dollar. That each of us knows these things differently does not belittle the maturity. We are the tools, and none that is now case-hardened will become soft, and none that is malleable will become hard, except in the aberrant moments when strength fails or surges beyond prediction in us all.

We are, as we are, the men who make all the wars and all the peaces, and to us adhere the glittering hopes and promises — salvation, the rights of men, the destiny of peoples. It all comes back to twentyeight men such as we, arrived in one place more or less by lottery.

Pity the quick ones who read character on horseback and file away Nora’s captain en route. Misled by his ancient, courtly manner, the smoke of his Churchillian cigars, and the forensic grace of chestnut hair curling unnautically over his shirt collar, they mislabel him as a genial fraud of a river boat cardsharp. They miss a profound and hearty man.

Before the war the captain was a Florida “cotehouse lawyer” — reason enough, without the forensic hair, to be known now as “the Jedge.” The Jedge affects an elderly confusion about the way of ships and men, as once he must have affected confusion about the way of laws and men, when he is in fact about as confused as a fast cat with a slow mouse. The bars of Florida must be littered with pleaders who let their cases idle along at the pace of this amiable yarner, only to see him go to the jury with a disturbing leverage of information and argument.

How many men are there who believe anything of such persistent consequence that it threads the beads of common experience into a chaplet? The captain is one, and it is an odd thing he believes for an amiable cotchouse yarner. He believes in the people.

He believes in the People apostrophized as Bishop Latimer believed in Separatism, and would as certainly stand on the fagots without recanting. It is strange to hear pure Tom Paine, and worse, flow without rancor, calmly as the time of day, in the Jedge’s senatorial periods; stranger still to know that he means what he says.

Bryan repeats a conversation that may tell you something about the Jedge. Bryan is Nora’s lean, bleak, tough, kind coxswain with the hunting walk of a Texan and, as is the case with so many obvious Texans in the services, — or, for that matter, with so many persons obviously anything anywhere, — is something else. Bryan is a man of Pamlico. If the wind is right as we come around Hatteras, Bryan swears he smells the Cyprus broad on the starboard bow — “smale it clear as I can see it. The swamp grass is yalla and clipped like a Dutchman’s hair. The ducks are sittin’ on the Cyprus stumps in the root beer water. I can smale the Cyprus.”

Of the captain Bryan says, “I come on Nora out of boot camp and I was a boot. I knowed the sea but I didn’t know the Navy. I come up to the cabin and stood by the skipper’s door and said, ‘I’m your new deck hand.’ Then I caught on and said, ‘I’m your new deck hand, sir. I always forget to say sir.’ And the skipper says, ‘Sure enough. I always forget not to say it.’ I didn’t know wote in the hail he meant until that night it come on me. Damn’ good man Mr. Welles is. Damn’ good.”

Of Bryan, the Jedge says the same. “ Damn’ good man. Damn’ good.”

It is a significant respect these two accord each other — a respect not for skill or position, but for character. They are men separated by the niceties of society and joined by their view of the men who make it, never friends, but forever allies.

Tonight as colors went down and the liberty party went over the side, the Jedge stood with me on the wing laying out the work schedule, until something said set him to talking. I was satisfied to be talked at, for there are few things that fill time better than the Jedge’s sentences.

“Try to put your finger on a man,” the captain mused, “ and every time, you find his most significant attribute is his potential. Now take us. We are twenty-eight men capable at once of the most sublime and disgraceful conduct. Could you say which of us will be the heroes and which the cowards until an action begins? I was with land troops in the Picardy campaign last war. I tell you frankly, sir, I ran once and I stood once and I was just as plain scared when I stood as when I ran. I concluded that fear had nothing to do with it. What counts is the atmosphere. If things smell like courage around us, we get it into our lungs. If things smell purposeless, we fumble for the exits. For better and for worse, men act up to the fictions that surround them, in preference to their instincts.

“That is the thing about America. We got started with the proper fictions. There is no natural law that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are any more becoming to men than destruction and slavery. If the Germans are right and if all this master-race and knuckle-under claptrap is the operation of natural law and not just another social fiction, well, the law is going to win out in the long run anyhow, same as gravity, and it won’t make much difference how men try to buck it. But buck it they must to save their souls, and buck it they will until they are all dead. By and large, there are always enough men who would a damn’ sight rather die in the image of God according to Jesus Christ and Thomas Jefferson than live in the image of some jack-on-a-string according to Johann Fichte and Adolf Hitler.”

As the Jedge spoke, a figure came along the dock from the gate, wearing the khaki service coat of the last war. It was Reiss, the dock guard.

“There goes my father’s theory of war,” the captain said. “The old gentleman says the time to see what a war is about is when it is over and the returns are in. War is about what happens, not about what is said about it or about its purposes, the old gentleman says. Now the plain reason the last war was fought was to get every man in Florida a khaki overcoat. Wasn’t a man in Florida didn’t have a khaki overcoat after the last war, and that was the only apparent result the old gentleman could see.

“When the coats began to give out after the depression, he said a war was bound to come along soon — the old purposes were worn out. The old gentleman is as sharp a historian as the next fellow. Would you say he was wrong? I don’t altogether agree wit h him — a war never moves in the direction it sets out, but it does break the crust. That is the thing: it does break the crust. When you look only at how it started and how it ended, you don’t always see that. War is the booby bird that looks steadily in the direction it is not going, but it flies nevertheless.

“And another thing,” the Jedge said, returning his attention to the list he held. “This one will be a long time flying. We took a long time to get into it and now a longer time to get on with it. Wonderful thing about war, only the loser seems to learn anything about it. The loser always finds a Hannibal to fight his next one, and the winner always draws Fabius. Until we turn up with Scipio Africanus it may be somewhat more profitable for us to get Nora’s guns cleaned, paint the running lights, draw some recognition signals, and give more attention to the bellum than to the post that does not show many signs of materializing.”

2

Now we are at sea again. The alarm bell pulses in the cabin, and from the crew’s quarters the siren begins to build. Before it reaches scream I have slipped the catch on the stop-watch and swung down to the deck. As I pass the bridge on the way to the lookout deck, the captain puts his head out and says, “Drill.”

Forward on the gun deck, the confusion of six hurrying men on a little platform turns to order as Lordino goes into the pointer’s saddle.

“Range two thousand. Scale five-O,” the Jedge calls.

The gunner repeats, “Range two thousand. Scale five-O,” cranking his dial to bring the sights on, while the gun nods and slowly comes to bear through the chain of gears.

Ammunition moves up, as a medicine ball is passed, until three men stand with shells cradled in their arms.

On the lookout deck Bryan, already belted into the starboard machine gun, does knee bends to test the pivot of the carriage.

“Starboard gun ready.”

Klein comes up the ladder behind me and slips into the second gun belt. He throws the bolt.

“Port gun ready.”

The heavy boxes of machine-gun ammunition are wrestled up while the chief stands by with a tambourine of readies to throw into the first gun that empties.

The vault of the big gun closes. “Ready one!” Sheridan sings.

I stop the watch. “Thirty-one seconds.”

“Thirty-one seconds. Let’s see. Thirty-one seconds. Not bad. Put on the masks. See if the damn’ things work,” the Jedge orders.

The word is passed for gas masks. When the men are snouted Welles makes the rounds to inspect. “Blow out,” he orders Wisser.

The rubber flipper vibrates, indicating a tight mask.

The captain looks toward us. “All tight up there?”

“All tight, captain,” I reply.

“All tight?” he asks Sheridan.

“All tight.”

“Secure from drill. No firing today.”

The men begin to fall out. Schmid kisses the two holy pennies that hang from his neck on the dog tag cord. That is his ritual at General Quarters. So long as the pennies hang from the cord he is assured they will not be placed upon his eyes. He has saved them for a rainy day, and so long as he has them the rain is kept away.

The captain and the quartermaster come up to the lookout deck to feel the wind. Bryan pulls off his mask ; his face is framed with red welts where the rubber sucked tight. “What happens if it isn’t tight?” he asks.

It seems obvious. “If you breathe gas it chokes you.”

“It drowns you,” the quartermaster says. “It breaks up your lungs and the blood fills your chest and drowns you, the same as if you went overboard. Some of it makes blisters in your nose, your mouth gets blisters as big as your tongue, it rots your face away. Satisfied? I saw it in the last war. I’ll see it again in this one.”

Bryan shakes his head. “Men are the commonest thing on this earth. A snake int as common as a man. A man that would put gas on another man —” He shakes his head.

“When I was a boy,” the quartermaster says, “that was a long time ago. I was maybe ten. I had a cousin maybe thirteen, so I had to do what he said. We hung cats. He got a cat and hung him from a tree with a clothes rope. Hung him by the neck. The cat jerked and balled up like a caterpillar jabbed with a pin. Then he stretched out thin and died. It took a long time. My cousin told me to hang a cat. I hung a cat off a sycamore branch. Before the cat was dead my cousin got the stick his mother stirred boiling wash with and hit him like you hit a baseball. I never hung another cat.”

“We used to stay out of school,” Bryan says, “and steal skiffs and go across the sound to Ocra and run cattle and sheep. Just run’em. We run ‘em into the cricks and into the bush and into the ocean on one side and into the sound on the other, stonin’ and stickin’ ‘em and them runnin’ to get away. We was runnin’ sheep one day and I got to runnin’ a lamb away from the others. This lamb was scairt to hail and run for the sound and into the sound, and I watched her swimmin’ away, a little cotton boll floatin’ on the water, right daid out into the sound.

“That was a sorry lamb, goin’ nowhere but daid out into the sound. I felt sorry. That was the first time I ever felt sorry for a lamb I run. I watched her swim till you couldn’t see her no more. Next day at home, what comes swimmin’ up on the beach but a lamb, a baby lamb. I made out to myself it was the Iamb I run into the sound from Ocra, but I knowed deep down it couldn’t be. The sound is twelve mile across. I took in the lamb and raised her and when they slaughtered her I wouldn’t eat none of her. Think of runnin’ lambs just to run ‘em. If a man int the commonest thing on this earth, I don’t know.”

When they are gone the captain says, “No use being down about it. Man is an imperfect animal. He gets better but he never gets perfect and he has to be utilized the way he is. Now you take a man who remembers a long time ago when he ran a baby lamb into the water, and he doesn’t like it. When the moral weather is bad it bothers him like rheumatism for the rest of his life. There’s just enough of that leavening in men everywhere to make them rise, each generation to its job. And damn the tyrants, sir — that’s an old-fashioned word but all the savor is still in it — damn the tyrants, sir, who won’t let the people yeast.”

3

YESTERDAY the captain caught the bus to town and came back with the holiday. We have not been to our home port for mail since last week, so none of us has a letter, a card, or a package to show that it is Christmas. The captain did what he could. He took the ship’s fund to the stores and came back with a tree to run up the mast, holly sprigs for the yardarms, decorations for the galley, and gifts for all hands.

Last night Semmes went aloft with the tree and holly and a jury rig of red and silver ribbons. The eight-knot breeze coming off the beach streamed the ribbons, and there was never a more gallant battle flag than Nora Wilson’s flying tree. We are the only fishboat at the pier with Christmas at the mast, and our men are the proud cocks of the fleet today. If an enemy should try to strike these colors, he would be met with an exalted rage beyond imagination.

Now it is late morning. Each man has his gift: a package containing a tube of tooth paste, a box of writing paper, a tube of shaving cream, a Hershey bar, a pair of black shoelaces, and a bag of peanuts all done in tissue and seals. On the gun deck the bosun is singing carols, picking the chords on his guitar.

“On the ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,” the bosun sings, with a pure North Carolina reed in his throat. That is my carol and I am full of Christmas now.

I mention all this about Christmas only because of the text the captain read this morning after breakfast.

“I take my text this morning from the Congressional Record, December 11, 1941,” the Jedge announced.

Along the galley table that tapered with Nora’s figure the twenty of us who had not drawn the lucky Christmas leaves sat in our blue best. The galley was lighted by boat lamps that cast a soft oil light, satisfactorily homely if you did not question too much the Navy’s premise that a brass lamp is more handsome buffed than green. A white cloth, specially eloroxed for the occasion, covered the table and was overlaid in the center with an admiral’s flag. The flag — two white stars on a blue field — made a splendid centerpiece which could be whipped off and run up a halyard if, as was extremely unlikely, an admiral chose Christmas morning to pay his first respects to Nora in two years.

Blue and gold flag bunting, issued by the bolt to Nora for some forgotten reason (the quartermaster says it is to patch signal flags, but there are in that case many more fathoms of patch than of flag), was garlanded from the overhead and threaded through the undersprings of the bunks that were trussed, bottom out, against the bulkheads behind us.

At the broad end of the table squatted a tree. It was set off-center to clear the ladder to the main deck. The tinsel for the tree had been found inadequate and was first padded out with shredded foil wrappings of electrician’s tape and, this giving out, a spattering of aluminum paint; the effect, in the oil light, was agreeably frosty. From the foot of the table, where it narrows to the prow of the ship, the Jedge looked along two rows of disarrayed wrappings and awkward men.

We were not comfortable. We spoke in the half voices of men attending the funeral of a lodge brother not too well known to them. The galley table is not meant for twenty; our elbows were in each other’s way. Officers were not used to eating with the men, the men were not used to eating with the officers, and after the first effort to convince ourselves that tooth paste and shoelaces made a pretty good Christmas, each of us retired into his own glumness and memory. When the Jedge got up to speak, we gave him our attention politely and without enthusiasm.

“What I have been trying to settle in my mind is what text Jesus is saying about this war if God has quietly rung him in on us again, if he is on earth today undiscovered except perhaps by a dozen of his friends. Levin, your father is a stonemason — that is pretty close to a carpenter — you would not care to say one way or another whether you are involved in this — you follow me?”

The engineer started to talk and it stuck in his throat and he started again, his square face red and skeptical of any humor that may have been in the question. “No, sir. I am not Jesus, sir. All these apostles around here will tell you that. Try Hasely or Schmid. Might be Schmid, sir — his haircut is non-reg.”

At this point the ice, which had begun to crack, was carried away. We began to find elbowroom, and where it did not exist we elbowed it out. And the Jedge, who had made his point, could drive it deeper into our disarmed heads.

“Ah, that might qualify me as well. Well, it is not too important that we imagine Christ is in this galley, but I would like you to imagine that he is on earth, and imagine what he must be saying. It is not difficult if we remember what kind of man he was when he first came among us. They are trying to sell us the idea that the only interest Jesus has in this war is in the medical corps — that he does not fight for anybody, but only comes around when the battle is over and binds up the wounds. That idea of Jesus does not appeal to me.

“I believe the reason people are putting it out is that they have got themselves convinced Jesus was a neighbor-lover and the prince of peace, which he was, but they forget he was also one of the angriest men who ever lived. All the saints were angry men — Moses, Amos, Luther, Francis, Wesley, Knox, Calvin — grousing in the public parks and nailing denunciations up on public buildings. They were angry about specific things and specific people whose names, so to speak, were in the daily papers.

“Do you think they would ever hang up a man from a cross for saying, ‘Love thy neighbor’? That was said a long time before Jesus said it, and the men who said it lived to repeat it until a ripe old age. Jesus was hung up because if he saw something and he did not like it he said so. If they did not do something about it, he had his say again. And if he could not get any action he went into the temple and turned over the moneychangers’ tables personally.

“What you want to remember is that Jesus was interested in the main concern of the people he went among — the high taxes levied by the temple on the poor, and the gaudy, irreligious way it was spent. Our problem is otherwise. We are at war. I ask what Jesus is saying as he sits with his twelve friends. What is he saying that people will be reading as a text some Christmas morning a thousand years from today?”

While the question was digested, the Jedge renewed the fire in his cigar and fitted his horn-rims loosely to his temples. “The text I have taken for this morning is the official text of the United States against Germany.” He read, “Whereas the Government of Germany has formally declared war against the Government and the people of the United States: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress assembled, That the state of war between the United States and the Government of Germany, which has thus been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared.”

The Jedge unhooked his glasses. “I submit,” he Stated, “that is a hell of a text for Christmas and it is not the text as Jesus would talk it. Jesus would be as hard on Nazis as he ever was against what they called in the old language Philistines and Pharisees, but he was not angry at Philistines and Pharisees because of anything they did especially to him, mark you. His anger was about what they did to everybody else. A man could turn on Jesus and Jesus would take it: ‘Forgive him, Father, he does not know what he is doing.’ But if a man was made out of general meanness to everybody, Jesus took him on.

“I do not say we go around loving our neighbors in America — but we do let them alone, and that is as near to God as a man can get and still be human. I say all of us not in the duty section can profitably go up later and hear what the chaplains have to say about Christmas. Maybe the chaplains are right. Maybe Jesus is in the Bed Cross. But I say Jesus is in the Navy, and he was here before we were. Amen.

“Boats, get out that guitar of yours and let’s have a few carols.”