Facing Up

WE WERE out on the foredeck. “What’s the matter, stud, didn’t you never see the sunrise before?” the Second Mate said to me. “Not since I can remember it,” I said, looking at the pink clouds over the Illinois hills.

“Well, you’re not likely to miss a single one from now on,” he said. “Pretty, ain’t, it?”

The other two deckhands on the watch came out on deck pulling on their gloves.

“Shorty, you and Diamond go on out and clean up the rigging on the head of 112,” the Second Mate said. And to me he said, “Come here, stud, I wanna talk to you.”

He sat down on a timberhead and watched the sunrise. He was about thirty-five years old and his face and his Grecian nose were tanned from twenty years of river weather. I liked his blond hair sticking out from under the blue Mate’s cap, and better still his mouth, which seemed much more inclined to smile than to sneer. Evidently things had not yet begun to get him down. He was about six feet of Mate, with shoulders to match, and I wondered how many girls he had on the Upper Mississippi.

The deckhands went out on the barges.

“They’re sending us some strange ones these days under the name of deckhands,” he said, “but up to now we ain’t had no college boys. What the hell’s the matter with you, stud? This job is too rough even for a farm boy.”

“What gives you this college boy idea?” I said. “Why, kid, it was sticking out all over you when you come aboard.”

“I suppose it was. How was it?”

“First you had on a hand-tied bow tie instead of the jazzbow model. Next your short haircut. Last, when I showed you where your bunk was at in the pigpen you says ‘Thanks.’ Now nobody but a college boy would be enough of a fool to say ‘Thanks’ for an introduction to a dirty bunk. You college boys are all the time saying ‘Thanks,’ ‘Thanks a lot,’ ‘Thanks old boy,’ and all that crap. If you would of growled a little bit or maybe cussed the company when you seen your luxurious sleeping accommodations, I wouldn’t of been so sure, in spite of the bow tie.”

“Well,” I said, “I can let my hair grow out easy enough, throw away the bow tie, and eliminate the ‘Thanks old boy.’ ”

“Yeah,” he said. “You ought to do that. That is, if you was going to stay. But you ain’t, stud, you won’t be on here long enough to tell the bow from the stern.”

“Oh yes I will,” I said. “I’ll be around for a while. Anyway long enough for my hair to grow out.”

“No you won’t, kid,” he said. “I hate to tell you, but the truth is, you’ll never even see St. Paul. This here is the craziest life on earth, and for a guy who ain’t use to misery a deckhand’s life is unnecessary torture. You’ll soon see there ain’t no sense to it.”

“I’ll be here when we get to St. Paul,” I said.

“No you won’t. You’ll be all disgusted before we get to Rock Island. By the time we get to Lynxville you’ll get off, if you can crawl by that time.”

“Listen, Mister,” I said, “how about me going out and getting to work with the rest of the watch? If it’s so damn rough I’ll get off, if I like it I’ll stay.”

“Well, you ain’t gonna like it. And on the river you don’t need to call me Mister. My name is Joe.”

“You’re the Mate,” I said. “I better not call you Joe.”

“Listen stud, relax. This ain’t the Queen Mary, just an old Upper Mississippi towboat that needs an engine overhaul. Everybody from Minneapolis to Cairo calls me Joe, so don’t feel it’s a treat.”

“All right,” I said.

“Your problem is gonna be keeping up with the work and trying to get enough sleep to keep alive. If you can hold out for a month without getting discouraged you might make it, if you’re stubborn. If you’re really set on staying here, keep pretty quiet for a while until the other deckhands get used to you. Do your work and keep your mouth shut. If they see you can hold up your end making tow in a rainstorm they’ll soon forget about the college stuff. Don’t try and big talk the other deckhands. Pretty soon you’ll find them giving you a few pointers on the work. Watch what they do. Watch how they pick up a ratchet and set it on their shoulder. This Shorty on your watch is one of the best deckhands on the Upper River. Just study him and do like he does and someday you’ll be a deckhand.” He lit a cigarette and threw the match in the river. “Then you can write the president of that college and tell him the big news.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”

“You can’t do no more than that,” Joe said. “There’s one thing you can do for me, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Show me how to tie one of them god damn bow ties.”

2

THE morning wore along and I followed the other two deckhands around. I found out I didn’t know anything worth knowing. I couldn’t see any sense in most of the things they were doing but I didn’t let on.

Then there was the matter of carrying ratchets.

“Go ahead, let me see you pick it up,” I said to this sawed-off deckhand they called Shorty.

“Well, you just grab her by this here link and up-end her, get your shoulder down a little, toss her on your shoulder and raise up.” Shorty went through all this with beautiful precision and ended up with the ratchet over his shoulder.

“You make that look easy,” I said.

“Aw listen, don’t you worry none, I couldn’t do it neither when I first come onto a steamboat,” he said. ”I use to pick ‘em up by main strength and awkwardness and carry ’em in my arms instead of on the shoulder.”

Shorty’s homely face and crooked grin made you want to laugh. With his shaggy hair and awkward gait he had farmer written all over him. And although he’d been on the river for years he still wore his farm clothes—blue bib overalls, blue chambray shirt, blue denim harvest jacket, and hickory-stripe shop cap. He wasn’t so short, but he was stocky, and the name seemed to fit. And he was a real person, nobody ever laughed at him.

The other deckhand was leaning against the main capstan. He wasn’t giving out any information.

“Now leave me see you pick it up,” Shorty said.

I’d been sitting around the bar at the SixtySix so long about all the muscles I had left were the ones in my fingers from holding onto a glass. Well, I got the ratchet up on my shoulder but I was about through for the day and ready for a rubdown from the effort. A ratchet is a double-end screw jack weighing about the same as Stanislaus Zbyszko.

“I guess you ain’t been workin very hard lately,” Shorty said.

The other deckhand looked like he agreed with this analysis. He said nothing, however.

“Now, when you throw her down, get out of the way as she’s droppin so you don’t get a link on your foot. Duke Robinette off the James W. Good is up at the St. Louie marine hospital right this minute from droppin a ratchet on his foot. I seen the Mate down at Wood River last night and he told me. ‘How did it happen, Blackie?' I says. ‘Why the dumb Peoria bastard dropped a ratchet on his foot, that’s how it happened,’ he says. ‘I never dropped one on my foot yet,’ I says. ‘Turtle Peterson over on the Locke Tarleton, he dropped one on his foot when we was up Cumberland River, two years ago Thanksgiving,’ he says. ‘I ain’t seen Turtle since we was on the Black Diamond together,’ I says. ‘He never dropped no ratchets on the Black Diamond,' I says, ‘because he never had aholt of one. He was layin asleep in the deck room most of the time.’”

“The Black Diamond burned up down on the Ohio,” the other deckhand said.

“Now listen,” Shorty said, “don’t I know the Black Diamond burned up down on the Ohio? Don’t I know it was right below Caseyville? Don’t I know Cat Brown burned up on her? Don’t I know it was on a Christmas Eve and the engineer was drunk? Don’t I . . .”

“All right. All right,” said the other deckhand.

“Listen,” I said, “I gotta learn how to splice. They’ll probably fire me if I don’t learn to splice.”

“Have you got leprosy or third degree cholery?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“Well then, don’t worry about gettin fired,” Shorty said. “Deckhands are so scarce they’re thinkin of importing ‘em from Arkansaw.”

“Why Arkansaw?” I said.

“Well, they claim they didn’t hear about the war yet down there and they say there is plenty of strong boys in the back country that would make deckhands.”

“Did you ever hear that radio station they got down at Blytheville?” the other deckhand said.

“No, I never heard it,” Shorty said.

“They just play and sing and yodel all the time. They don’t have nothing else on the programs. Mostly yodeling and blues.”

“My old man used to know Jimmy Rodgers,” I said. Right away I remembered what Joe had told me and I knew I should never have said that.

The other deckhand decided the time had come to notice that I was here. “You say your old man knew Jimmy Rodgers ? ”

“Yeah,” I said. “He met him once down in Memphis.”

“Can your old man sing blues and yodel?”

“No,” I said. “My old man’s in the whiskey and hootch business.”

“Whiskey and hootch? My lands,” Shorty said.

“Now what do you call those cables there?” I said.

“Them’s the face wires. Never mind them. Do you get whiskey free when you’re at home?” the other deckhand said.

“Why sure,” I said. “And what do you call these cables here? ”

“Them’s the jockey wires,” the other deckhand said. “ My oh my, imagine an old man in the whiskey business.”

“Don’t he sell no wine?” Shorty said.

“Sure,” I said. “Anything you want. Why do you call them the jockey wires?”

“I’m more partial to wine,” Shorty said. “Elderberry wine to my mind is about as good a drink as you’ll find.”

“How come they call these here the jockey wires? ” I said.

“Why man, because that’s their name, that’s why,” Shorty said. “Elderberry wine is mostly homemade, though. I don’t suppose your old man handles it.”

Well, there I was. Joe had told me not an hour before to keep my mouth shut but of course I had to blow off about Papa and Jimmy Rodgers. It was not having any bad results, though. They both seemed to think that I was a little less useless right away.

“Another thing,” I said. “What’s this ’jackknifing’ I hear you talking about?”

“Why that’s when we bust up the barges and nest them up to lock through. You’ll see it soon enough, right up at Saverton lock.”

“I think I better learn to splice. We seem to bust a lot of ropes.”

“Lines, man, lines. We ain’t got no ropes aboard,” Shorty said.

“Well, we ain’t doing nothing much,” the other deckhand said. “Come on down in the hole, you, and I’ll show you an eye splice.”

I figured I was getting along all right.

It was a long trip to St. Paul all the same. I was pretty well worn out and had a smashed-up foot and a couple of mashed fingers. But I thought I would be all right after I could learn to sleep. We worked six hours on and six hours off, week after week. By the time you made the sack and got to sleep you had lost nearly an hour. To eat and make watch time you lost half an hour. That meant that the most sleep you could ever get at one time was four and a half or five hours.

Joe took me uptown in St. Paul while we were waiting for empties. His girl was Irene and she got me a girl and we went out. My girl’s name was Merle. I was surprised she was so good-looking. But I was so beat up I didn’t realize she was actually beautiful until I got to thinking about it later.

“How about a drink?” I said.

“I don’t mind,” she said.

“Whiskey?” I said.

“Whiskey and sour.”

“Want to dance?”

“I s’pose so.”

“This your home town?”

“Uh uh.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Eveleth.”

“That’s up in the iron range.”

“Uh huh.”

“What your folks do up there?”

“My dad’s in the mine.”

“How come you came to St. Paul?”

“Didn’t like it in the sticks.”

“Honey, I don’t blame you. I hate the sticks too.”

“Where d’you get that ‘honey’ stuff?”

“Want a cigarette?”

“I don’t mind.”

Well, that went on until around midnight when we took the girls home. We all did a little high school style loving and then Joe and I went back to the boat much refreshed.

That was my first trip to St. Paul on the Inland Coal with Joe. At first I stayed out of stubbornness. Then I began to forget I had ever lived any other way. Then I began to feel sorry for the people on the bank. When I got that far I was a river man.

3

WE WERE tied up next to a rocky bank in Alton and up at the top of the bank was our grocery order, over a 900-dollar order to load.

“Look at all those spuds,” I said.

“I’ll carry the corn flakes,” Shorty said.

“Chewing it over ain’t going to make it, boys. Let’s get started.” Joe picked up a sack of flour and a case of Carnation and we commenced carrying our food aboard, down the rocks and up the plank, and along the starboard guard, to the galley on the stern.

Captain came out on the bridge beside the pilothouse and leaned over the rail. “What’s the matter with the big Second Mate tonight?” he hollered down. “Joe, you look all beat out.”

“You tell ‘em, I stutter, Cap,” Joe said, coming down the bank with a quarter of beef.

“Why don’t you take after Bill there, Joe? Now Bill he wouldn’t go to work and drink whiskey and smell around none of them town girls, would you, Bill?”

“God forbid, Cap,” I said.

“Now take Diamond. He slept all afternoon and is just ararin to go, ain’t you, Diamond?” Diamond was the other deckhand, the one who had showed me how to splice.

“Yes sir, you bet.” He never went uptown, said he didn’t care to go up and fool his money away and would one of us bring him a carton of Marvels. He was saving to buy some chickens or some such project and there were always copies of the Poultry Journal in his bunk with articles on how to make Buff Orpingtons squirt eggs like a machine gun.

We went on down the guard and Diamond said to me, “Sure, I had a dandy sleep, with them engineers swatting the engines with 20-pound sledge hammers and bouncing 48-inch Slillson wrenches offn them steel decks. Sure, I had a dandy sleep.” He dropped a case of Karo, picked it up again, and it commenced to drip. “That’s right, go ahead and leak,” he said.

Diamond was the well-dressed deckhand. He parted his rather greasy, silent-movie style hair carefully in the middle, and his jeans were always clean. His toes never stuck out of his socks because he did his own darning. He worked just as hard but he never seemed to get all smeared up with grease, coal dust, and red lead like the rest of us. He was about my height (they call me “average”), and he had an expressionless face that you couldn’t remember when you got to thinking about him later on. Diamond seemed to have a master plan all set up and covering his whole life, whereas the rest of us had no plans extending any farther into the future than supper time.

It was a little bit heavy loading the stores, especially the sacks of potatoes, but on the other hand the smells that went with this job were all home smells, not steamboat smells. The smell of the cases made you think at once of the grocery store you went to as a kid with a penny for one of those wax bottles with red syrup in them.

“Oh, you morphadite,” Joe said as the end of a case he was carrying gave way and cans of peas commenced to drop to the deck and roll around. One rolled off into the river, plunk!

Now evening was coming. Captain couldn’t think of any more funny remarks. “Leave me know when you’re ready to get at them loads,” he hollered down to Joe, and went into the pilothouse and started to read Real Detective.

We went on loading. The sun was well down over in Missouri; we were working slow and steady and enjoying ourselves, and feeling the whiskey coming out in our hair. A breeze was coming up, a very light breeze from down below, and the nighthawks were beginning to show up, peeping, swooping, and climbing for those sensational power dives. The last blast of the sun was on the very top of the bluff above us. I suddenly realized that I could do this forever, that I didn’t necessarily have to go back to the gray flannels and cordovan shoes. It was a nice thought for sundown.

4

I WENT out and walked up the guard on the river side of the boat.

“What’s the matter, Bill? You look kinda sad,”Joe said when I got back on the foredeck again.

“Feeling sorry for myself, Joe. Guess I got a hangover,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

Joe sat on the double bitts and rolled a cigarette out of Duke’s Mixture. Diamond sat on the bottom step of the starboard tow knee and looked neutral. Shorty was getting into a life jacket to start making up low.

“I wonder what the stockholders are doing tonight,” Joe said.

“Eating cold lobster, every last one of them,” I said.

“What’s that?” Shorty said.

“Kind of like channel cat only more on the order of wild rabbit,” I said.

“My uncle he won’t cat rabbit,” Shorty said.

“No? Why not?” Joe asked, looking up at the evening sky.

“He don’t like it.”

“Say, that’s quite an interesting story about your uncle,” I said.

Shorty looked pleased. “He don’t eat no tomatoes neither.”

“Don’t like them, neither, I suppose,” Joe said, following a night hawk with his eyes and waiting for him to dive.

“He claims they’re poison,”Shorty said. “My uncle says most of the people that dies dies from tomatoes and don’t know it.”

“Let’s make up the tow,” Diamond said, “and get it over.”

“What’s this uncle’s name, anyways?” Joe said.

“Randolph, Jacob Randolph. I’m named after him. Down at Beardstown they all call me Randolph. Nobody calls me Shorty at home. They all call me Randolph. They always just call me Shorty out here on the boats.”

Joe got up and put on his gauntlets.

“We ain’t gonna cut it this way,” Joe said. “We ain’t making the Inland Barge Line no money setting here.”

“That would just bust my heart if they didn’t make no money offn us for ten minutes,” Shorty said, getting up.

“Bill, you go out on the loads with these guys. I’ll go up and interview Captain James E. Sargent what we’re gonna do with them barges.”

Shorty and Diamond and I trudged along the bank through the cinders and sandburs.

“Ouch! Oh, them useless burs,” Shorty said, stopping to pick them off his blue random-mix socks.

About a hundred yards upstream our eight barges were tied off below the tipple, lying there very quiet and subdued, each loaded with nearly a thousand tons of Central Illinois coal. It was up to us to get behind this dead weight and shove it 640 miles upstream. But first we had to lace our fleet together with chains, cables, and screw ratchets until all eight barges were one solid, integrated, inseparable unit.

There were a couple of big 235-foot Federal barges against the bank, with our barges hanging outside them. We climbed up on the Federals and walked across the deck onto our loads. I looked over the rigging the other watch had left for us. Diamond and Shorty kicked idly at the rigging and argued. Sometimes I got sick of listening to it all. Their conversation and phrasing seemed overripe. I could see some eager student of Americana in a homespun tie and needing the clippers up the neck taking it all down with enthusiasm in a ring-binder notebook.

The river was running down on the outside of the barge fleet—cool in the evening shadows, with a little drift from out of the Illinois River — sticks, bottom-land trash, a split fence post, once in a while a bottle with the label washed off. A lot of that slowly passing river had made the trip down from the Twin Cities, too, and that set me to thinking of the new trip we were about to embark on, and of my steam-heated Cinderella at the end of the line. One afternoon or evening soon, we would creep back into St. Paul past the slaughterhouses, tie off our coal, and that evening I would find myself in an alley or on a rooftop with Merle biting my lower lip. Boys, she was beautiful and passionate and grownup. And love will rule the world.

“Why don’t you guys abandon that comical minstrel show argument and help me straighten out this rigging?” I said.

Joe came across the deck of the Federal. “All right, boys, here’s the way she looks,” he said, concentrating and looking around him at the barges. “They got 108 and 111 all jockeyed up and ready to face up to. Now they got all our rigging right here for us, must of brought the boat alongside and throwed it off. First we make the coupling here between 111 and 16. That’s 112 ahead of 16, and we got to yank her out and set her in here where 30 sets. We’ll let 9 that’s up on the head flop around on the outside of 30, hang the both of them on the head, and we got her made, slick as a Rock Island whore and twice as cheap. Run them ratchets out, boys. St. Paul here we come.”

Making tow can be easy if you have a good mate and a crew working together, or it can be all sweat and hard feelings. Some mates get excited, start hollering at the deckhands, get things all balled up, cuss the pilot throughout the proceedings, and end up with a deckhand in the river, another one ashore to the doctor, and everybody sore. A mate that operates on this schedule can’t keep his deckhands long enough for them to learn to work together and so no improvement is ever forthcoming and life aboard, instead of being a Little Bit o’ Heaven, is more on the order of getting married and going to live with ma and pa so far as peace and harmony is concerned.

Shorty and Diamond and I had worked together long enough to know who wanted the ball for a shot without calling time out for a discussion. And Joe was a mate that made everything easy.

So we labored and it grew dark. Sargent helped us with the searchlight. After about forty minutes we had the barges all shuffled around and laced together with plow steel.

“Now, you bastards,” Joe said, addressing the barges, “don’t let me hear no more outa you until Keokuk lock.”

“I believe we’ve got her,” Diamond said.

“We’ve got her, Cap!” Joe hollered. “Let’s go! Dropping back!”

“OK, Joe,” Sargent called out. “Dropping back.”

We stood on the forward deck as we dropped down to face up to the tow, taking a quick smoke. Then the boat snuggled her blunt bow and tow knees against the barges and we set the face wires. Diamond and I put our backs into the winches. We were facing up. The new trip was ready to begin.

“Leave her go, Cap,” Joe hollered up at the pilothouse, and the Captain gave a single toot on the whistle to Shorty, who was out on the head of the tow 800 feet away. And pretty soon we could hear Shorty’s voice echo down the coal piles: “A-L-L-L G-O-N-E.” We were off to the northland empire. No one saw us go, and there were no baskets of fruit or light novels from Brentano’s on our bunks.

It was night and ahead of us the Mississippi River and the Illinois bluffs had disappeared. We were heading up into a black wall. Now it was up to Mr. Pilot.

“Let him sweat for a while,” Diamond said.

It had been a long, long day.