The Crossing

Harlan was sick for three days.

It began in the night after the capes, in the bunk under Lucien’s, with a sound Lucien did not know at first in the dark of the hold, among the three thousand other sounds, the snoring and the creak of the pine and the long groan of the steel; and then did. He leaned over the edge of his bunk and looked down, and Harlan was lying on his back in the dark with his eyes open and his face the colour of the canvas on the Marie-Ange, breathing through his mouth, very carefully, as if the air were something that might go wrong.

“Lucky,” said Harlan, in a whisper. “It’s still doing it.”

“Yes.”

“It’s not going to stop, is it.”

“No.”

Harlan shut his eyes.

“I can’t see what’s doing it,” he said, and then he was over the side of the bunk with his head in the bucket.

He was sick all that night and all the next day and all the night after. So was half the hold. The Second Kansas came from thirty polities and hardly a man in it had been on the sea before, except the boys from New York, and two clam diggers from Rhode Island, and Kerrigan, who had been sick on the Boston ferry and said so, and the ship lifted and fell and lifted, slowly, all day and all night, the long swell coming in under her out of the east, and the hold stank of it, and the buckets went up the steel ladders full and came down empty, and men lay in their bunks four high and groaned and prayed and swore and asked to die, in thirty accents, and Kerrigan said that if this was the sea the British could keep it and the French could have what was left.

Lucien was not sick.

He had not thought he would be. He had been on the lake since he was seven and on the Gulf for an hour when he was twelve, and the lift and fall of the ship was only the lake on a long day with the swell coming in through the passes, bigger, slower, but the same thing; and his feet knew it and his stomach knew it and the back of his neck knew it, and he went up and down the steel ladders with the buckets and fetched water from the tap at the foot of the companionway and was hated for it, the way Achille had written, by everybody in the hold who could lift his head.

He sat on the edge of Harlan’s bunk on the second night.

Harlan was lying on his side with his face to the steel of the hull and his knees drawn up, very still. He had stopped being sick, because there was nothing left; he was only lying there, with his eyes shut, breathing through his mouth, and every time the ship went up his hand closed on the edge of the bunk and every time she came down it closed harder.

Lucien put his hand on the back of Harlan’s neck.

He did it without deciding to. Flat, the way Harlan had put his on the back of Lucien’s neck at the firing point, when he flinched for the twentieth time; the way you put your hand on a horse that was going to bolt. And left it there.

“Breathe out,” he said.

Harlan breathed out.

“Now in. Slow.” The ship went up. “Don’t fight it. Go with it. It’s going to go up and it’s going to come down and you can’t stop it, so let it. Let it take you up. That’s it. Now it’s going to take you down.” It went down. “That’s it. It’s enough. Slow.”

He sat there for an hour, in the dark, with his hand on the back of Harlan’s neck, saying it over, breathe out and now in and let it take you, the way Harlan had said it to him in the gas hut through two masks; until Harlan’s hand on the edge of the bunk stopped closing when the ship went up, and then stopped closing when she went down, and his breathing went long and slow, and he slept.

On the third morning Harlan sat up, and ate a biscuit, and kept it down, and looked round the hold with his patient face as if he had been away somewhere and come back.

“Huh,” he said. “Well, that’s done.”

---

They had an hour on deck a day, by companies.

C Company’s was at nine in the morning. They went up the steel ladders out of the hold and out onto the after well deck, and walked round it, and stood at the rails, and breathed, and looked at the sea, and at the other ships; and at ten the corporal came and they went down again.

The convoy was twelve ships in two lines, and the small grey fast ones going round them, the escort, three of them, low, with high bows, throwing up white water, coming and going, sometimes close enough that you could see the men on their decks in oilskins, and sometimes so far out that they were only a smudge of smoke on the edge of the world. The other ships were like theirs: grey, with numbers, painted in patches and stripes of grey and black and white that made them hard to look at, as if the eye slid off them. Some of them had men at their rails too. Some of them did not; they rode low in the water, and Sol Weintraub said they were full of shells and wheat and mules, and one of them, at the back of the other line, was so deep that the sea came over her well decks in the swell, green, and ran out of her scuppers.

He looked forward, mostly. Along the length of the ship, over the bridge and the funnels and the boats in their davits, to the forward well deck.

The labour battalion had its hour too. Not at nine. At seven, before C Company, and at four in the afternoon, after the last of the Second Kansas had gone down; and Lucien knew this because on the first day he had come up the ladders a little early, before the corporal, and seen them from the after rail, a long way off along the length of the ship, going down off the forward well deck by the forward hatch, the last of them, two by two.

There was no rope. He looked for it. There was no rope across the deck, and no sign, and no sentry. The after well deck was for the Second Kansas and the forward well deck was for the labour battalion and the upper decks between were for the officers and the crew, and there was nothing to say so, nothing written, nothing painted on the steel; and nobody went from one to the other, and nobody had been told not to, and everybody knew.

He thought of the corporal with the voice like a mule at Smoky Hill, who had not needed to say the General. There had only been one he could have meant.

---

They wore the lifebelts from the fourth day.

Cork, in canvas, tied on over the tunic with tapes, so that you looked like a man with a pillow strapped to his chest; and you wore it all the time, on deck and below, at meals, in the bunk, asleep. That was the order. It came on the morning of the fourth day, read out in the hold by a major Lucien had not seen before, the ship’s commandant, a thin man with a cold, who said that they were now in waters where the French submarines worked and that the lifebelt would not leave any man’s body until he was ashore, and that any man found without it would be put in the cells, and that the cells were below the waterline.

They slept in them. You could not sleep on your back in one and you could not sleep on your front, and you lay on your side with the cork under your cheek, and the ship went up and came down, and you listened.

There was nothing to listen to. That was the thing. The convoy went on through the days and the nights with no lights, not a lamp anywhere on any of the twelve ships, and in the hold at night you could hear the engines, and the pine creaking, and the steel, and the sea going past on the other side of the hull, a foot from your face, hissing; and you lay with the cork under your cheek and listened to the sea going past a foot from your face and thought about what else might be in it.

Sol Weintraub talked about the Chesapeake.

He did not mean to. Nobody wanted him to. But it was in all of them, from the first day of the lifebelts, and on the sixth day, at the after rail, in C Company’s hour, with the sea grey and the sky grey and the wind cold now, colder every day, he looked out over the rail at the empty sea to the south and said, quietly, to nobody:

“It was about here. Somewhere. South of here. Off Ireland. The papers had a map.”

Nobody said anything.

“A Tuesday,” said Sol Weintraub. “In the morning. They were at breakfast. My cousin’s wife’s brother was on the list. I never met him.” He looked at the sea. “I keep thinking about the breakfast. What they were eating. I don’t know why.”

Lucien thought about old Tregre on the wharf with L’Abeille, reading it out, slowly, in the June morning, with the lake behind him flat and pale; and the men of the lake shore standing round him in their boots with the shrimp still jumping in the baskets; and Les Français.

He looked south over the rail at the grey sea. There was nothing on it at all. It did not look back.

---

The bell went on the ninth night.

He did not know what time it was. He was asleep, on his side, with the cork under his cheek, and then he was not, and the bell was going, all over the ship, a long hard ringing that came through the steel from everywhere at once, and men were falling out of the bunks four high in the dark onto each other and the corporal was shouting and somebody had a torch and put it out again and was cursed for it, and they went up the steel ladders in the dark, all of them, the whole of the Second Kansas, three thousand men with cork on their chests going up ladders in the pitch dark without a light, to their boat stations.

His was forward.

They had drilled it, every day, from the second morning: every man in the ship had a boat, and a place on the deck by the boat, and you went to it when the bell went and stood there and waited to be told. C Company’s third platoon had boat eleven, on the starboard side of the forward well deck, because there were not enough boats aft for all of the Second Kansas and somebody had had to go forward; and they had drilled it every day, by daylight, at eleven in the morning, when the forward well deck was empty.

It was not empty now.

He came out of the forward companionway onto the well deck in the dark with Harlan behind him and the third platoon behind Harlan, into the wind, and it was cold, very cold, the coldest he had ever been, and black, no moon, no stars, the sea and the sky one black thing with the wind coming out of it; and the deck was full of men. The labour battalion. Their stations were here too. They were standing along the rails in the dark in their lifebelts, by their boats, very quiet, hundreds of them, and the third platoon of C Company came out of the companionway into the middle of them and went to boat eleven, and stood by it, and nobody said anything.

There was a man beside him at the rail. He could not see his face. A man his own height, in a lifebelt, standing very still.

And then, out to the left, across the black water, in the other line, a ship blew up.

---

He saw it before he heard it.

A light. On the water, a long way off, a mile, more, out on the left where the other line of ships was going along in the dark with no lamps; a light, suddenly, low down, red, at the waterline of a ship he could not see; and then the ship was there, all of it, lit from underneath, the whole black length of her and her funnel and her masts standing out against the red, the way a man stands out against a lit window; and then the light went up, all at once, a great sheet of it, yellow and white, up her side and over her decks and up into the sky, higher than her masts, so that the whole sea between was lit, every wave of it, red and gold, and the other ships of the convoy came up out of the dark all round, black on the gold, all twelve, eleven, going on.

Then the sound came.

It came across the water after the light, a long way after, like the thunder after the lightning over the north shore of the lake on a summer night: a deep flat thud that he felt in the deck under his boots and in his chest under the cork before he heard it, and then a long roar, rolling, going on and on, and under it a sound like a kettle, enormous, a hiss and a scream at once, that was the sea going into the fire.

The men along the rail did not move. Nobody moved. Nobody said anything at all.

She burned. She lay over on her side in the red water, burning, from her bows to her stern, and the smoke went up off her into the black, lit from below, red and orange and black, and things on her decks went up one after another in small bright bursts, pop, pop, like the fireworks over the river on the night of the Grand-Duc’s birthday, and the sound of each one came across the water a long time after; and she was the deep one, Lucien thought. The one at the back of the other line, so deep that the sea came over her well decks. Full of shells. Or wheat. Or mules.

He thought: there are men on her.

And the convoy went on.

That was the thing he could not understand, at first. They went on. All the other ships. Nobody stopped. Nobody turned. Their own ship went on through the black water at the same speed, with the same long lift and fall, and the burning ship went past them on the left, a mile off, and then behind them; and one of the small fast grey ones came racing back out of the dark, throwing up white water, across the bows of the convoy towards the fire, and went past it, and there was a sound from somewhere beyond it, out in the dark, a dull heavy thump, and then another, and the sea out there went up in a white column, lit gold by the fire, and came down; and the convoy went on, and the burning ship got smaller, behind, and lower, and redder, and smaller.

“They’re not stopping,” said somebody along the rail, in the dark, in English. A Kansas voice. Very quiet. “They’re not stopping for them.”

“They don’t stop,” said another voice. An older one. From the forward rail, from among the labour battalion. “You stop, they get you too. That’s what the sailors told us. You don’t stop. The little boat goes back. That’s all.”

Nobody said anything else.

Lucien stood at the rail by boat eleven with Harlan behind him and watched the fire go down to a red point on the black water, behind, a long way back, a light like a lantern on a post at the end of a wharf; and then it went out.

---

“Bon Dieu,” said the man beside him at the rail, very low. “Bon Dieu, bon Dieu.”

It was French.

Lucien turned his head. He could not see him. A man in the dark, his own height, in a lifebelt, at the rail, looking back at where the light had been. And the French was the city’s. Not the lake shore’s; not quite. The other French of the city, the one he had heard all his life on the streetcars and in the market and on the levee and in the streets behind the cathedral, with the Creole in it.

“T’es d’en ville?” said Lucien. You’re from the city?

The man went very still.

Then he turned his head too, in the dark, and Lucien could feel him looking, though neither of them could see anything.

“Mo d’en ville,” said the man. I’m from the city. And then, catching himself, the way August Brandt caught himself on ja: “Je suis d’en ville. Du Tremé.” A pause. “Et toi?”

“Du lac. Le bayou Saint-Jean. Les camps.”

The man let his breath out. It was nearly a laugh.

“Un pêcheur,” he said. A fisherman. “Avec les Kansas.”

“Avec les Kansas.”

They stood at the rail in the dark. The bell had stopped. Nobody had told them to go below. The ship went on through the black water, up and down, and behind them where the light had been there was nothing at all, and the wind came out of the dark, very cold.

“Théophile,” said the man. “Glapion. Théo.”

“Lucien. Prudhomme.”

“Prudhomme.” He said it right. Of course he said it right; he said it the way it was said, the way his grandmother said it, with the French in it, the first person who had said it right since the clerk with spectacles on the platform in May, and Lucien had not known until that moment how much he had wanted somebody to. “Prudhomme. Du lac.” A pause. Then, slowly, as if he were looking at something in the dark: “Y a un Prudhomme au quai. Au Quai de la Rue Louisa. Un vieux. Du lac.”

There’s a Prudhomme on the wharf. At the Louisa Street wharf. An old man. From the lake.

Lucien held the rail.

“Octave,” he said.

“Je connais pas son petit nom. Personne le connaît. Il parle pas.” I don’t know his first name. Nobody does. He doesn’t talk. “Un grand, maigre. Les yeux comme ça, gris, qui te regardent comme si t’étais de l’autre bord du lac. Un manteau de toile. Il est arrivé en mai. Il a pas de mains pour le crochet, au commencement, il savait pas; asteur il a des mains.”

A tall one, thin. Eyes like that, grey, that look at you as if you were on the other side of the lake. A canvas coat. He came in May. He didn’t have the hands for the hook, at first, he didn’t know; now he has the hands.

“C’est mon père.”

Théo Glapion was quiet for a while, in the dark.

“Je travaillais à côté de lui,” he said. “Mai, juin, juillet. Dans la même gang. Jusqu’à ce que mon numéro sorte.” I worked beside him. May, June, July. In the same gang. Until my number came up. “Il parle à personne. Mais il parle à son crochet.”

Lucien did not say anything.

“Le matin,” said Théo. “Avant de commencer. Il prend le crochet et il le tient comme ça, dans ses deux mains, et il penche la tête, et il lui dit quelque chose. Tout bas. Tous les matins. On rit de lui, les premiers jours. Après, on rit plus.”

In the morning. Before we start. He takes the hook and holds it like this, in both hands, and bends his head, and says something to it. Very low. Every morning. We laughed at him, the first days. After, we didn’t laugh any more.

“Qu’est-ce qu’il lui dit?” said Lucien. He knew. He asked anyway.

“Je sais pas. J’étais jamais assez proche.” I don’t know. I was never close enough. A pause. “Une fois, je l’ai entendu. Un mot. Allons.”

The ship went up, slowly, and came down.

Lucien stood at the rail in the dark with his hands on it and could not say anything at all. He had the letter in the pocket of his tunic, under the cork, over his heart: ALLONS, in capitals, crooked, going uphill, with the hole at the top of the A where the nib had gone through. He did not take it out. He could not have seen it. He stood with his hand flat on the cork over the pocket, and the sea going past in the dark below, and a stevedore from the Tremé beside him at the rail who had stood in a gang beside his father on the Louisa Street wharf in June, and he thought of his father on the edge of the wharf at five in the morning with the hook in both hands and his head bent over it, saying allons, very low, to a piece of iron, the way he had said it to the boat, the way he had said it to the side of a railway car.

“Asteur,” he said. “Il dit allons, asteur.”

He says come on, now.

Théo Glapion was quiet.

“Ouais,” he said, at last, very softly. “Ça doit être ça.”

Yes. That must be it.

---

The corporal came for them at three. The all-clear; nobody heard it given, but the corporal came along the forward well deck in the dark saying Third Platoon, below, below, and the third platoon went to the forward companionway and down it, and the labour battalion stayed by its boats.

Lucien stopped at the top of the companionway.

He did not know what to say. There was nothing that you said. He stood with his hand on the steel of the hatch coaming and the third platoon going down past him, and looked back along the rail in the dark to where Théo Glapion was.

“Théo,” he said.

“Ouais.”

“Quand t’écris en ville. À ta famille.” When you write to the city. To your family. “Dis-leur. Si quelqu’un voit le vieux au quai. Dis-leur de lui dire que le petit à Octave est sur le même bateau que toi. Et qu’il est pas malade.”

Tell them. If anybody sees the old man at the wharf. Tell them to tell him that Octave’s boy is on the same ship as you. And that he’s not sick.

There was a silence in the dark.

“Je vais leur dire,” said Théo Glapion. I’ll tell them. And then, in English, in a different voice, the voice of the wharves, low and amused and not amused at all: “Go on, fisherman. Before they come looking. They’re not going to come looking for me.”

He went down.

---

He did not see Théo Glapion again on the ship. The forward well deck was empty at eleven in the morning for boat drill, and at seven and at four the after rail was too far to see faces, and he looked anyway, every day, from the after rail, at the men on the forward well deck in their lifebelts walking round it in the cold, a long way off along the length of the ship, and could not tell which one.

The cold came down on them. The sea went from grey to black and the sky went low and white and the wind came out of the north with ice in it, and the ship stopped lifting slowly and began to pitch, short and steep and hard, and Harlan was not sick again, and stood at the after rail in the hour with his collar up and his hands under his arms and looked at it with his patient face.

“This is more like it,” he said. “This is like February.”

They went north. Sol Weintraub said so. Nobody told them, but the sun came up later and went down earlier and went round the sky very low in the south, a pale disc behind the white, and the cold got worse, and on the twelfth day there was land. Islands. On the right, a long way off, black, with cliffs, and the sea going up white at the foot of the cliffs, and no trees on them, nothing, not a house, only the black rock and the white water and the birds, thousands of birds, going round the cliffs like smoke.

“That’s the top of the world,” said the cowboy from Montana, at the rail, with his hat jammed down over his ears.

“It’s the top of Scotland,” said Sol Weintraub.

“Same thing.”

They went round the islands. The ship turned, they could feel it, the wind coming round from the bow to the beam; and the cold went on and the sea went on, black and short and steep, but the direction was different, and on the thirteenth day there were new ships round the convoy, low and fast and grey, more of them than before, six, eight, with flags at their sterns that streamed out in the wind so that you could see them. Some were British. Some were not.

“Those are German,” said Kerrigan.

“They’re ours,” said Sol Weintraub.

“I know they’re ours. I’m saying they’re German.” Kerrigan looked at them going past, close, fast, low, with the men on their decks in their oilskins turning to look across at the troopship, and lifting their hands. “First Germans I ever saw.”

“What do they look like?” said Harlan, interested.

Kerrigan looked at them for a long time.

“Cold,” he said.

---

On the fourteenth night they heard the guns.

C Company was not on deck. Nobody was; it was the middle of the night and the ship was dark and the hold was dark and the Second Kansas was asleep in its bunks four high with the cork under its cheeks. But Lucien woke, at four, because he always would, and lay in the dark with his face a foot from the steel of the hull, and listened, the way he had listened every night for a fortnight to the sea going past on the other side of it.

The sea had changed. It was going past slower. The ship was going slower, much slower, hardly at all.

And under the sound of the sea, a long way off, through the steel, so low he was not sure at first that he heard it or felt it, there was another sound.

He lay and listened to it for a long time.

It was not like anything. It was not like thunder, though it was nearer that than anything else; thunder came and went and this did not. It went on. A low, uneven, continuous sound, a long way off, beyond the hull and the sea and the dark, thudding and rolling and thudding, with no pattern in it, never stopping, the way the lake never stopped on the shell beach at the end of the camps; except that the lake was the most patient sound in the world, and this was not patient at all.

Below him, in the dark, Harlan said, very quietly:

“Lucky.”

“Yes.”

“You hear that?”

“Yes.”

Harlan was quiet for a long while. The ship went on, slowly, through the black water. The sound went on, a long way off, beyond the hull.

“That’s it, isn’t it,” said Harlan.

“That’s it.”

They lay in the dark, one above the other, the way they had lain in hut forty-one on the edge of the grass, and listened to it, and did not say anything else; and the ship went on towards it, slowly, through the last of the night, with the cork under their cheeks and the letters in their tunics, until the light came, grey, through the scuttles at the end of the hold, and the engines stopped.