Andrew Stewart: We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep

THE PEAL RESOUNDS through the boat, through the frame of my bunk. I feel it in my jaw, my teeth. Reverberation.

And again.

Brother Silas, knocking the rusty-headed mallet against the hull.

The boat is a bell.

Three deep, resonating tolls. Thong. Thong and thong . Waver and fade.

Call to Matins. The Night Office.

The compartment pitches downward. Weight shifts. Cold toes tingle, alive. The deepest dive of the day. One hundred fathoms.

Bodies turn, roused from first sleep. Old metal springs plink . Sleepy shapes roll languidly from their bunks. I know them all, even in the dimness. Lazlo, lean and short, but strong. Caleb, mousy and frail. St. John with his large knobby head, and tall, soft-padding Ephraim. Stifled coughs. No talking. Silence is observed. Must be.

I follow, though my belly aches to move. More than hunger, I worry, for I know those pangs as I know my hands. Something else. A two-day malady thus far. But I move, climb down from my bunk, stacked third highest. My toes know their purchase. Salt-corroded frames. Grit-grated deck. We don our gunnysack robes in this perennial dusk. One sculpin-oil lamp hangs at a tilt from the forward berthing bulkhead. Fat-gummed glass. Sputter and fishy reek. In a line, we work our way aft, up the main corridor at a slant.

No speaking. But we will sing, yes.

I commence warming up our voices. My ear tells my throat how to find the key. I always find it. This is one of the reasons why I’m the Cantor. The anchoring line. With pitch rooted, the other voices meet it. Step up, step down. Two steps up, two steps down, and back to the middle.

Our collective hum joins the unending chorus of loud pinging, knocking, clanging.

These sounds aren’t coming from Brother Silas’s hammer, nor the submarine’s many machines, which sing their own unending chorus as they work to keep us alive, keep the boat moving.

This is pressure. The weight of the dark sea squeezing the old welds and joints and seals, against valves and piping.

Our vessel, the Leviathan .

Its crew, the last of the penitent men on this wicked, ruined earth.

We scale aft through the mess, through the galley. No victuals. Not until later. Hunger reminds us. Of where we came from, that poisoned, wicked world above. Of our salvation.

Up, past missile control and the radio room, we join the exodus of brothers leaving their stations, follow them through the hatchway, ducking, descending corroded ladders until, at last, we gather in the missile compartment.

Our chapel.

The largest single space on the Leviathan . We file down to the lower deck, between the bases of the great red columns. Sixteen of them. Eight spaced parallel on either side. Each is forty feet tall, reaching from the lowest recesses of the boat to the top deck. Each is wide. Like the pillars I’ve imagined, reading the Book of Judges, of Samson, and how, though his hair was shorn from his head by the betrayer, and though he was powerless and blinded, he still toppled the temple of Dagon.

They once held His fire, these pillars. Each one. And, when He spoke, Caplain listened. Unleashed each. Those first days of tribulation.

One remains.

One missile.

The Last Judgment.

The chamber, the whole vessel, levels. A litany of bright, high rings toll from the brass bell hanging on the main level above. We are at depth. One hundred fathoms.

Almost all attend the office. We Choristers, our fellow brothers, the eight elders. The crew of the Leviathan . Those manning the helm, the watch, the radar are exempt. Otherwise, when the bell tolls, you abandon your duties, whatever they may be, and there are many: working the bilge pumps, harvesting the mushrooms from the evaporators, mending the nets, pulling in the nets and culling the haul, sick fish from the good fish—less good fish these days—rendering the fats for unguent and fuel, cleaning the battery terminals, draining away the corrosive acid, monitoring the oxygen generator, the CO 2levels, and, of course, tending the heart of this beast, the reactor, which always requires a watchful eye, pressure and heat contained in mere piping, poison behind it all. God’s light.

Those who tend the reactor—the Forgotten—do not come forward for prayers or song either. They are not seen again once they are sent back through the tunnel. They serve their purpose, those forsaken.

And we serve ours. We Choristers. The five of us who remain. Who have not succumbed to sickness. Whose voices have not broken. Whose voices still reach the highest, loftiest of ranges.

We sing. Lift the hearts of our brothers.

We find God. We call out to him from these depths, and he answers.

Spoonful of rancid oil. Choke it down.

For our throats. These divine instruments.

Elders—most bent, mottled skin, toothless—stand forward, but the younger, broader-backed brothers space themselves along the walls, between and behind the pillars, against the machinery, against the electronic consoles that are dead and scavenged for parts long ago.

We Choristers, we the young, we the ones cut in order to preserve pure voice, gather in the narrow cella. Before dais and altar and psalter.

Caplain Amita normally leads Matins—Caplain with his stooped frame, his round chin, his eyes that always seem to be closed, even when they are open—but he has been absent this past week. Ill. His skin was a yellow grey last I saw him—scant more illumination here, in the chapel. Skin thin as Bible pages. Limbs turned inward. Stiff, like the already-dead.

Ex-Oh Marston officiates today, steps up to the dais.

Tall. Too tall for a submariner, some have said of him, which seems to be a truth. Has a hunch, for all the years of ducking through hatches. Of the original crew, decades ago. Head shorn, like all of us. Pate speckled like an egg. I’ve seen speckled eggs once. Blues and pinks and browns. Dented, his. Face gaunt, gaunt. Scared by some battle done or some ill deed done to him. Look of driftwood.

Merciless with the strop, Ex-Oh.

Especially when it comes to the Choristers.

We deserve it.

We come from wickedness, from Topside. Rescued. Given purpose. A chance to redeem our souls. We aren’t the only ones who have been saved—there are those brothers who were taken aboard as children who could not sing but were strong, able, and needed to serve on the crew.

Like us, they had to earn their place. Many have gone on to take the vows of the Brotherhood. Brother Silas. Brother Callum.

But many have not.

There cannot be any question of faith.

No faltering in our resolve.

We must be ready for the day. For it is coming. And coming soon. That is what Ex-Oh says. What Caplain says.

And when the end has finally come, and He has deemed the days of tribulation done, we will launch His Last Judgment. And then we shall journey to the very bottom of the great abyss. To the lowest fathom. And we shall sing a song into that deep, on that last day, and the sea shall finally give up her dead. And we, with them, shall ascend into the light. As below, so above!

A raised, slender, yellow-nailed hand brings all to order.

“ Deus, in adiutorium meum intende, ” Ex-Oh intones, thin nose angled up to the deck. Flat. Reverent. Monotonous.

“ Domine, ad adiumandun me fastina, ” we respond in equal monotony.

This vessel, this Leviathan, often so hollow, is full now. Brimming with voice. Sound pressing against the hull, fighting against the darkness that presses in.