He began kicking madly in his stocking feet, pumping his arms and reaching toward what he prayed would be air, but it was water, still water, until he thought he must have swum the wrong way by mistake. His heart slowed and his legs grew heavy as unconsciousness groped him with its blunt, furred touch. At last he broke through, gasping weakly. It was then he came closest to drowning, for he’d no strength left. He lay on his back under a yellowish night sky, moving his hands like fins to keep afloat. He breathed and breathed, and the buoyant salt water saved him.
It was a long time before he’d enough strength to look for a shore. It wasn’t Brooklyn. He began to swim, a soft edge of summer still in the water. Eddie swam long after his last resources had been spent, like scooping at an empty container in hopes that more would somehow be inside, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, and miraculously, there was just enough each time for one more stroke.
He washed up on the southern shore of Staten Island, near a small dock. A fisherman had stayed out longer than usual chasing a school of bass, which was why there was enough light for him to see a man’s body left by the tide in the muddy shallows. He assumed it was a corpse and dreaded the long walk to the nearest telephone to report it, but when he tied up his boat and looked again, he saw that the body was shaking.
His wife drew a bath and added boiling water until the temperature was barely warm. They lowered Eddie in, and the man held him under the armpits while his wife heated kettles and warmed the bath gradually, over hours, until it verged upon hot. When at last Eddie stopped trembling and color returned to his cheeks, they dried him, greased him with lanolin, swaddled him in feather blankets, and laid him on a pallet in front of the stove. The fisherman pressed his ear to Eddie’s heart and found its rhythm stronger, more regular, than before.
Eddie woke into a fever, looked for a familiar face, but saw only a woman with a gray stripe at the parting of her hair. Sometimes there was a man whose fish-smelling hands touched Eddie’s forehead and chest. Eddie raved at these two—they’d stolen his pocket watch. They spoke of bringing him to a hospital. No, he murmured. No! And forced himself not to mention the pocket watch again.
When the fever broke, he sat upright on a kitchen chair, wrapped in a blanket made of feathers. Harlan, the fisherman, poured each of them a glass of clear spirit that tasted like rye bread. His grandson did schoolwork at the table by the stove. Harlan was Norwegian, born here. As a boy, he’d fished with his father to supply the lobster palaces, Rector’s and Café Martin, Shanley’s, the fishermen entertaining one another with gossip about the outsize appetites of Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell: fourteen lobsters between them one night, and the lady had to remove her corset. Eddie listened with his own story ready—I fell off a ship—but the question of why he’d been in the harbor never came. He understood. Knowing another man’s trouble made it yours, and Harlan was barely getting by, fishing to feed his family and trade with his neighbors for eggs and apples and milk.
With each new day, Eddie felt the mounting pressure of his life, so nearby. His mind was too weak to fathom what should happen next. They would have to flee New York—but go where? To Agnes’s people in Minnesota, who disdained him? He would perish in that muddy land of bawling animals hundreds of miles from the sea. To some place where they knew no one? Eddie found himself clinging to the forms of convalescence, closing his eyes and trying to sleep.
But Harlan knew. “You are well,” he said. “Tomorrow you will tell me where to take you.”
At sunrise he ferried Eddie to the West Side docks. A freighter from Brazil was just out of quarantine, hundreds of eager men waiting for the morning shape-up, scratching, smoking, gagging over the river. With Dunellen gone, Eddie no longer knew the hiring boss. It was September 1937.
He hung back, hands in the pockets of the loose-fitting trousers Harlan had bequeathed him, a cap pulled low over his eyes. The Sea Cow’s rusty hull raked the pier like a cur rubbing her scrofulous hide against a tree. A tramp ship with no set route, she grudgingly extruded her cargo of melons and rubber and coconuts. She’d an air of lazy complacency, like an old whore who knew she’d cornered the market. When the morning’s unloading was done, Eddie walked up the gangway as he’d watched any number of criminals and gasheads and dope fiends do over the years, always marveling at what kind of desperation might lead a man to take such a step. His was a shady hire, no articles to sign, and the job was coal passer: lowliest of all engine room positions. But as Eddie descended the slippery ladders into the ship’s broiling nether parts, he counted himself lucky. That was how much he dreaded going home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
* * *
Three days after the convoy scattered—nerve-racking days of cloudless skies and mild seas that required zigzagging day and night until the captain’s frustration roiled throughout the ship—the barometer began, mercifully, to drop. Sparks typed up the daily weather report and brought it to Captain Kittredge in his office. A major storm was predicted. Eddie heard the master’s whoop of celebration all the way from the wheelhouse.
By general quarters, the sky had clouded over, and there was a strong breeze. The captain advised the first mate that they would end the evasive variant of their course, although the storm wasn’t due until early next morning.
“Even with the sea still calm, sir?” the mate asked.
“For exactly that reason,” Kittredge said. “Dirty weather will slow us down again; this is our chance to make up some time.”
During Eddie’s eight-to-midnight watch, the Elizabeth Seaman performed her usual magic, steaming along at twelve knots. The barometer continued to drop, and the doors were closed and dogged to keep swells from breaking into the midship house. Farmingdale relieved Eddie at midnight, along with Roger, the deck cadet, who now stood watches with Farmingdale. Eddie and the first mate had concocted this change; since Cape Town, neither of them trusted the second mate.
By the time Eddie was ready to turn in, the ship was rolling on a rising swell. He climbed to the bridge a last time to check on Roger, who had been seasick and terrified while the Elizabeth Seaman negotiated the Roaring Forties. “I know you don’t like rough seas,” he told the cadet. “Just remember, U-boats don’t, either.”
“I’ve changed,” Roger told him with shy pride. “I’ve my sea legs now, like you said.”
Eddie saw a difference in the cadet—Roger had shaken off his gawky imbalance and looked taller, or perhaps he’d actually grown in the course of this voyage. Eddie stood beside him and looked out. The rising wind had swept away the stratus clouds and was blowing in towers of cumulus. A quarter moon appeared patchily, as if blinking Morse code. Eddie crossed to the port side of the bridge, where Farmingdale was, and felt the second mate stiffen. His palpable discomfort, along with the importunate moon, gave Eddie a feeling of unrest. Farmingdale gazed out, but it was hard to know what—or if—he saw. The binoculars hung at his neck.