Old salts were men who had sailed on wooden ships in their youth—sailed, in other words, when “sailing” meant actually sailing. “Is he still around?” Eddie asked.
“Been a couple of years since I’ve seen him, come to think of it,” the second mate said.
“They’re disappearing,” Eddie said. “The old salts.”
Five years ago, there had been one or two aboard most ships—palm wax, needle, and twine in their pockets. Eddie suspected that the War Shipping Administration was weeding them out.
“We’ve one here,” Farmingdale said. “Pugh, third cook.”
“Say, that’s good luck!”
Farmingdale inclined his head noncommittally. He was aloof and unreadable even when sober; Eddie couldn’t like him. But the presence of an old salt aboard the Elizabeth Seaman was profoundly reassuring. “Iron men in wooden boats,” they were called, as opposed to the wooden men in iron boats of today, like Kittredge, Farmingdale, and Eddie himself. Old salts partook of an origin myth, being close to the root of all things, including language. Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from “keeled over” to “learning the ropes” to “catching the drift” to “freeloader” to “gripe” to “brace up” to “taken aback” to “leeway” to “low profile” to “the bitter end,” or the very last link on a chain. Using these expressions in a practical way made him feel close to something fundamental—a deeper truth whose contours he believed he’d sensed, allegorically, even while still on land. Being at sea had brought Eddie nearer that truth. And the old salts were nearer still.
He left Farmingdale on the bridge and entered the notes of his watch in the logbook: their course was 170 with a fresh breeze and a moderate following sea. He stopped in the wardroom for his “night lunch,” a cold-cut sandwich and coffee, then filled a cup with milk for Sparks, the radioman, whose metal leg brace (polio, Eddie presumed) gave him trouble on the ladders. Eddie had fallen into the habit of visiting Sparks after his watch, as a way of putting off his solitary stateroom.
“What a lovely fucking thing to do, Third,” Sparks said, taking the cup of milk.
Eddie checked to make sure the blackout screen was fully closed before lighting their cigarettes. Sparks was near fifty, elfin and slight, lashes invisible on his hooded eyes. “I’m part newt—my tail comes off and grows directly back,” he’d told Eddie in his spectral Irish accent. He was homosexual—Eddie knew this without knowing how he knew. Sparks had grown up in New Orleans and gone to sea in his twenties. He was a teetotaler, unusual in an Irishman. “Ah, but I dream of this stuff,” he said, gazing into the cup of milk before downing it in a cascade of voluptuous gulps. “I’ll crawl across broken glass for a cup of milk like an opium addict for a pipe.”
“You might like opium better.”
Sparks snorted. “It’s bad enough needing food and sleep and cigarettes, having to drag this fucking leg around. I can’t afford a habit like that.”
“I’ve seen cripples in opium dens.”
“Sure you have—trying to forget they’re cripples! How’s that for smarts—you’ve got a brace on your fucking leg and a monkey on your fucking back, and you think you’ve solved your fucking problem when all you’ve really done is stuck your head up your arse.”
As Sparks shook the cup to catch the last drops of milk, Eddie was stricken with sympathy. To be a deviant and a cripple, without good looks or fortune or physical strength—how had Sparks managed to endure such a life? Yet he’d more than endured; he was ever cheerful.
“Your mother must have loved you, Sparks,” Eddie said.
“What on God’s green earth makes you say such a thing?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Well, you’d best be taking those hunches of yours and stuffing them in your ear. My ma was the ward’s chief lush. She once puked in my bed trying to give me a good-night kiss! Holy mother of Christ, she was a pig, my ma, an absolute pig.”
“It’s bad luck,” Eddie said. “Talking that way about your mother.”
“The bad luck was having such a mother,” Sparks said. “There was no living with her. Pa had to put her in a home. I did have a lovely sister, though. Lily. She used to call me her little dandelion—don’t you fucking laugh or I’ll nail you to the wall, you fucker.” But Sparks was laughing—he was always laughing. Only the BAMS, the broadcasting for Allied merchant ships, silenced him. It came at set hours each day, Greenwich time—which was designated by the second hour hand on his radio clock. At 0300, Sparks turned the receiver from five hundred kilocycles to a higher frequency and began listening through earphones for the Elizabeth Seaman’s call numbers. Because Allied merchant ships maintained radio silence, the whole of Sparks’s job was to listen. He went utterly still, his body inclined toward the transmitter as if he himself, or perhaps the metal leg brace, were the instrument of reception.
Eddie left him there and brought the empty cup back down to the galley. Still reluctant to turn in, he stepped outside the door by his stateroom. The night was calm, clouds muffling a moon whose diffuse glow fluttered like thousands of moths over shifting points of sea. The ship’s roll was a welcome and soothing respite from the hard intractability of land. Eddie felt nearer that empty awareness that had sustained him during his years of jungle runs from San Francisco to China, Indonesia, and Burma via Honolulu and Manila. Above the port of Shanghai, on shaded streets, he’d listened to sounds of daily life outside walled courtyards: crying babies, clanging pots. Occasionally, through an open door, he’d glimpsed a woman walking on shrunken feet with the stiff, halting poise of a flamingo.
The world’s mysteries. He’d never believed they were real. Had thought they existed only in books read aloud by charitable ladies.
At last he returned to his stateroom. Without the ballast of bunkmates, he felt unmoored. Aimlessly, he opened the drawer to his desk and was startled to discover the envelope he’d placed there after signing articles on his first day. He’d forgotten it. He’d forgotten Ingrid—could hardly picture her anymore. Faraway things became theoretical, then imaginary, then hard to imagine. They ceased to exist.
Now, in the small light by his sack, Eddie opened the letter—his first in over five years at sea.