Джек Кейди - The Jonah Watch

You never know—even after years you can never decide—if what you do is right. Everything happens so fast. If I didn’t detest Wert so much, I would have listened to him. Maybe saved Case.

What happened is that I did what I’d been told. I grabbed the helm and threw it hard to port. The boat edged away from the rock. It handled sluggish, already sinking from the lick it took on the rocks. Forward of the wheel a red light burned in the little cabin. I was supposed to get the kid, and so I went down there. Old coats, old blankets, slickers and boots. A gush of water through the ruptured hull. No kid. I must have wasted half a minute. I turned back to the deck just as a searchlight from the cutter swept us, and just as the forty’s engines started howling.

It all happened in slow motion, or that’s the way it seems. The madman stood above Case, and the madman howled almost like the engines. He had both hands raised high together, holding one of those long, thin stakes that lobstermen use to pin fish in their traps. The forty roared someplace real close. I heard a bow wave, but you never hear a bow wave—not like that—unless it’s pointed right at you. Case yelled something, tried to throw something at the madman, but you can’t throw much when you’re on your knees. I dived over Case, trying to tackle the madman. There was a shock, the lobster boat driven sideways, a crash of timbers; and a fish smell came off the deck as I rolled. Something, a lobster trap maybe, clipped me alongside the head. Then I was in water that is death-dealing cold, struggling to stay up.

The boat crew from the cutter took us aboard, dried us out and gave us clothes. At first I didn’t remember much. I sat for a long time on the messdeck shivering and drinking coffee. Didn’t see Tommy. Figured they were working on him. Didn’t see Case. Saw Wert. He sat at a table facing me, sullen, wearing his own clothes. He’d got his feet wet, and he put them on a bench, rubbing his legs and rolling up the wet part of his dungarees so they came to his calf.

“There wasn’t no kid. I told you. They beached what was left of that boat and there wasn’t hide nor hair.”

“What happened?” I couldn’t remember anything. Then I started to remember a little.

“Tom lost his head and rammed you. Dumped you all in the water, then jumped in to pull you out. The forty’s back there now, high and dry and cut wide open.”

It was coming back now. “Case?”

Wert just plain looked sick. “Guy stabbed him. Tommy rammed you because he was trying to keep the guy from stabbing Case.”

“The madman?”

“Jumped back and got himself killed when the bow of the forty pinched him.”

And that’s when the memory came clear of Wert’s white face rising like a pale moon above the rail, the vacant look, the struggle and noise at my back and the roar of engines.

“Where were you?” I was getting cold again.

He had his story down pat. Like a first-grader reciting about Mary and the lamb. “We were about to jump, and the engines went rough. Case said to check it out because we couldn’t afford to lose power. I checked, but before I could jump Tommy kicked it ahead.” He turned his back to me, swinging away, and propped his leg up to inspect his toes.

They pulled me off of him, somebody did. Then their chief bosun sent me to wait it out on the fantail. Probably because I had shoes on and Wert didn’t.

I went to the fantail figuring that things couldn’t get any worse, and they got a million times worse right away.

Bodies are always stored on the fantail. I sat beside Case after I found which one he was. Kind of patted the old blanket he was wrapped in. I couldn’t figure out why the best man I knew had to be dead. Wasn’t thinking very straight.

Then I did start thinking straight, thinking about what I’d seen when I checked to see which one he was. Case was pretty tore up, but mostly just mangled. There was only one wound above the waist, and that was way above the heart, nearly in the left shoulder. That madman had not stabbed Case to death.

I’d always trusted Tommy. Tommy was my friend. He had taught me a lot. But, Tommy was the one who killed Case while trying to save him.

You never know if what you do is right, and that’s especially true when you are young. You operate on the basis of what you know.

One thing I knew was that the local coroner was a lazy old drunk. Twice, while on Shore Patrol, we’d taken bodies to that coroner. He dumped them in a stainless steel tub, cut away the clothes, and said something like “This pore old buster drank hisself to death.” I knew that coroner would do no autopsy.

If he saw a wound over the heart he would blame the madman. He’d not say a word about Tommy.

I pulled out my claspknife. It carried a marlinespike, about the same diameter as a stake that runs through lobster traps. Even today I can’t believe my courage and ignorance. I stabbed Case, stabbed a dead man, right where the heart would be. It was just a little blue hole that did not bleed, but, what with arterial damage and salt water, none of the other wounds were bleeding.

I remember vaguely wondering how much jail time you could get for stabbing a dead man.

Years pass, but memory is relentless. Such an act wears on a man’s soul. Sometimes the memory lies faded and dull among brighter memories of youth. At the same time, the memory never leaves. Maybe I did Tommy a favor, maybe not. The police filed no civil charges, and the court martial found him innocent. The court concluded that, although unable to save Case, he may well have saved me. The court did not like the destruction of an expensive boat.

Tommy came to a bad end. He started boozing when on liberty. We saw his tall frame and black hair bent over too many glasses of beer in too many sailor dives. He went awol for a month, was reclaimed from a drunk tank.

In those days the Coast Guard was a small and personal outfit. Our Cap tried to save Tommy by transferring him to a weather cutter. The Cap figured, since the cutter stayed on station for a month at a time, Tommy would have to stay sober in thirty-day stretches. Tommy slipped overboard one night as the cutter passed the Portland Lightship. The investigating board called it an accident.

And Wert came to an even more macabre end. On a night of no wind he wandered among buoys in the buoy yard. The buoys stood silent, the giant whistles, the lighted bells, the racks of nuns. Some were barnacled, waiting to be sand-blasted and red-leaded. For no reason, and against known laws of physics, a lighted bell rolled on flat ground. It weighed maybe a ton, and it crushed Wert against the pavement of the storage area. There was not a breath of wind, but men on cutters swore they heard the bell toll, and clank, and toll.

When my hitch was up I did not reenlist, but fled from salt water. The next few years were dreary; odd jobs and bad jobs through the middlewest. I attended college at night, got married, finally graduated from college, got divorced. Nothing seemed to go exactly right. It came to me—in, of all places—the bus station in Peoria, that this awful incident of youth kept me from my true calling, the sea. I traded my bus ticket to Chicago for a ticket to Seattle. From Seattle I went to Ketchikan, fished salmon, then finally found a permanent berth on a tug hauling barges from Seattle to Anchorage. After many years I rose to master of my own vessel.

A lot of downeast sailors, mostly fishermen, drift into Seattle and Ketchikan and Sitka. On a snowy January afternoon in Sitka, forty years after the event, I heard stories from a couple of Maine men who vowed never again to enter Portland harbor. There was enough illumination in their drunken talk to convince me it was time to come to terms with the past. I booked a flight to Portland.