Oar Boat
Christopher Johnson
They were sailing north from Gary, Indiana, and Paul Smith stood in the stern of the iron ore steamship and watched as the steel mills slowly faded into the distance. The mills seemed to drop off the end of the world, and then the Callaghan was surrounded by water that crested and fell like huge sheets dyed indigo. The steamer plowed through the vast waters of Lake Michigan, kicking water from its propellers and shooting it out like entrails expelled from the body of the ship. Paul felt appallingly alone, like a lost soul afloat in a lifeboat in the middle of that gigantic lake. He felt as if all that he knew was gone, all the accustomed roles and assumptions that he had grown up with were dead, and he was entering a world about which he knew absolutely nothing about and for which he had no resources.
Only the week before, he had graduated from high school. His father, a middle manager for the steamship division of the Cleveland Steel Company, had suggested—no, insisted—no, demanded--that Paul spend his summer working on the lakes, on one of the company’s iron ore boats, where he would gain life experience and earn a good chunk of change for college. These were union jobs that paid damned well—and out on the lakes, there was no way to blow the cash. Paul obeyed. He went.
But he felt woefully unprepared for this experience. Unprepared psychologically. Unprepared by life. He had grown up in the sheltered suburbs of Chicago and was insulated even more by an overly protective family. He had never gotten drunk. He had never gotten laid. He had never smoked a cigarette. He studied hard and did his homework, and that certainly counted for something.
And there was something else about Paul--his deep and abiding sense of aloneness. Oh, he had had his group of friends in high school, and he had been liked well enough by his classmates. But from an early age, he had guarded himself from others. He donned the mask of an agreeable guy but kept his interior well-hidden. He wore the protective shield of the introvert, of someone who feared more than anything being hurt by his comrades in the human race. This was the baggage that he stowed on board the Callaghan that summer when he was only seventeen.
The ship frightened him. It frightened the hell out of him. It was a monster of steel. It was two football fields long and was held together by enormous steel beams that buttressed the hold like giant metal ribs. The wide white strip of paint that spread across the front of the ship’s bow looked to him like a malevolent smile. And that smokestack. Terrifying. It spewed out black clouds of soot like an angry fire-breathing dragon. It spat them out over that beautiful violet lake, soiling the water.
Paul was one of four deckhands in the crew of 32 men, and their job was to care for this monstrous ship, keep it sparkling clean, renew it continually and perpetually with paint and ammonia and water to defeat the elements of nature that attacked it. His job, his very first job on the Callaghan, was to carry the hose, which was as thick as an anaconda, for Frank Antonelli, the bosun, who was in charge of the deckhands. Frank had a pot belly and thick arms like axe handles and hands with the veins popping out, and his face hung with jowls and the sun had carved deep lines into his face and burned his skin a deep brown. He had seen it all before and nothing could surprise him. He was in charge of the care and maintenance of this steel behemoth
Paul’s task on that first day was to stand behind Frank and move the hose while Frank sprayed the ore detritus ever closer to the corners of the deck and then out into the water, where it slowly sank like stardust to the bottom of Lake Michigan. The hose streamed water at high pressure and could easily get caught on the corners of the hatches, and Paul’s job was to keep the hose from getting waylaid. He tried his best, but the hose with the water flowing through it was amazingly heavy, and he dropped it twice, and then finally he tripped over the hose and went sprawling on the deck.
Frank looked around sharply at Paul as he lay there on the deck and snapped, “Well, get the hell up and get the hose straightened out!” Paul’s heart traipsed around in his chest with embarrassment, and he struggled to his feet, picked up the segment of hose that lay immediately behind Frank, and planted his feet more widely to try to stay balanced. They hosed down the rest of the deck without incident.
Those next few days on the Callaghan were a blur for Paul. There were a million things to learn--tying knots, absorbing safety procedures, coiling ropes, securing hatches, and seating himself properly on the bosun’s chair as it swung the deckhands onto docks when the ship was making port. And he was learning what seemed like a million new names for things—bulkhead instead of wall, deck instead of floor, head instead of washroom. He roomed with the three other deckhands, all of them in the same tiny cabin, assigned to narrow bunk beds with thin mattresses and coarse wool blankets.
At the end of each eight-hour shift during that first week, Paul was exhausted. He barely interacted with the other deckhands. He ate his supper, went to the recreation room, and, if the Callaghan were close enough to shore to receive a signal, watched television. He held himself apart. He was intimidated by the other deckhands. They were so competent, so mature, and he had no idea how to relate to them, what to say to them.
Frank ordered him to work with Ernie Lundgren, the oldest and most experienced of the deckhands. Ernie had been out on the lakes for 40 years, and for all that time he had been a deckhand, never aspiring to anything higher, never wanting any more responsibility but to be a lifelong deckhand. His eyes were hooded by heavy skin like an eagle’s, and his nose was huge and crooked, and his beard was metallic gray and stubbly, and his chin jutted out and traveled in advance of the rest of his body, and he had thin lips that set themselves in a grim line. He walked with a peculiar rolling gait that carried him from side to side, and he chewed perpetually on a toothpick, which he manipulated back and forth from one side of his mouth to the other. In the galley, Ernie sat a little bit apart from other crew members. He grasped his coffee with hands that had veins like strips of leather stained blue--hands that had coiled ropes and dragged cables on docks and tied up ships at least a million times.
Because Ernie had been out on the lakes so long, Frank paired him up with Paul to teach him the Ways of the Ship. The morning that Paul started working with Ernie, the sun gleamed like a shiny new dime in the brilliant blue sky. Ernie came up to Paul and announced, “Hey, you’re gonna work with me.” After this declaration, he walked ahead of Paul with that rolling gait.
The work they did was simple, but it was crucial because it would stave off the powers of destruction, the air and the water that were constantly attacking the vessel. Ernie explained the work, and as he did so, he referred to the ship as “her,” as if she were a living, breathing thing that had been entrusted to his care. They were going to scrape and paint, scrape and paint, protect the body of the Callaghan from the elements that tried to insinuate their way into the molecules of metal and turn it to rust. Paul followed Ernie to the paint locker, where he barked, “Pick a scraper. Choose your weapon. Make sure it’s sharp.” Paul did as he was told. Ernie led Paul out of the paint locker and up the ladder to the deck. Paul marched dutifully after him, holding his scraper tightly in his right hand like a scepter.
Ernie bent down and showed Paul how to scrape paint loose from the deck. He scraped hard with the relentless determination of a machine, and the flakes of paint soared into the air. Ernie’s forearms were thick with muscle, and he scraped fast and furious until he was done scraping about a square yard. He had chipped away every speck of old paint, revealing the metal skin, which glinted in the sun like a mirror.
Paul put on his spanking new work gloves and goggles and bent down and started to scrape. The tool felt awkward in his hands, but he attacked the paint as best he could. The edge of the tool was exquisitely sharp, and he jammed the gleaming edge underneath the skin of the dried paint and sent flakes of ancient paint shooting into the air. He began to feel more confident, jamming the scraper under the dried paint and sending the specks flying through the dazzling air. He worked fast, and in an hour, he’d scraped away paint from about three square yards.
Ernie was working another spot, about ten yards away, and he was still working laboriously on one small space. Meanwhile Paul had finished three whole yards, and he felt the triumph, the exhilaration of his work! He rested his hands on the scraper and felt the blood pulsing through his arms, and he knew that by the end of the summer he would have well-muscled forearms, which was some faint consolation for being stuck out on the Great Lakes for the summer. Looking down, Paul now saw that he had left some specks of paint covering the metal. He attacked them again with his scraper, but they wouldn’t come loose, they adhered too tightly to the deck of the ship, they were bonded there, they were impossible to get up. He stopped and looked at the primordial specks of paint still clinging to the deck of the ship and thought to himself that he could just paint over the old paint, and it would be fine, just fine.
Then Ernie was standing right behind Paul. He put H
his hands on his hips and stared at the space that Paul had scraped and then pressed his lips together into a straight line while he examined every inch of the work that Paul had done. He shook his head and extracted the ever-present toothpick from his mouth and inspected the toothpick as if it were the most important thing in the world. He put the toothpick back into his mouth.
Then, like a badger, he squatted down fast, grabbed Paul’s scraper from him, and chipped the exact same area that Paul had already scraped. Ernie worked his arms like pistons, and he drove his scraper into the tiny islands of dried paint that Paul had left behind. The flakes of old paint flew into the air and settled back onto the deck like rust-colored snow fallen from the sky. In five minutes, Ernie had scraped away all of those spots of venerable paint that Paul had left behind, and now the naked metal of the deck gleamed. Ernie muttered, “That’s how to do it.” He leaned over the side of the ship and spat. His saliva plummeted down and disappeared into the vast waters of Lake Michigan. He walked back to the spot where he had been scraping and resumed his work there.
Paul glared at Ernie as he walked with that rolling gait and returned to the spot where he was working, and the younger man seethed with white-hot anger. Everything that had accumulated in those first few days gathered together and hit him like a runaway train. Paul looked for another spot to scrape, bent down, gripped the handle of the scraper tightly as if it were Ernie’s neck, and slammed the scraper into the paint, chopped at the paint with a fury that sent the flakes of old paint screaming into the sky. For the rest of that afternoon, he worked at full speed and in deep anger, and sweat poured down his forehead and into his eyes, and he constantly had to wipe the sweat away. He didn’t look at Ernie, and Ernie didn’t look at him.
That evening, at supper, he continued to seethe. He wolfed down his roast beef and potatoes, retreated to the deckhands’ cabin, yanked shut the curtain that was their only source of privacy, and read, or at least tried to read. But in actuality, he continued to rage about Ernie, and in spite of all his father’s plans for him, he intended to escape from that godforsaken bucket of bolts when they reached Duluth and fly back to Chicago and work at McDonald’s for the summer, and if his old man didn’t like it, well, he could take a flying leap.
After an hour or so, he started feeling claustrophobic--felt as if he were smothering from the lack of air in the cabin. It was still early, only about eight o’clock, He whipped himself out of his bunk and walked out onto the deck of the Callaghan. Nobody else was there. The sun was setting over the water, spinning out purple and orange ribbons that wrapped themselves around the waves of the lake. The colors spread across the sky like giant pennants pulled across the heavens by a stupendous eagle, and the entire western sky was ablaze. Paul felt a presence behind him and turned. It was Ernie. He wanted to move away, but before he could, Ernie fished a beer out of the huge back pockets of his dungarees and handed it to Paul, and then he reached inside his dungarees again and extracted another can of beer for himself. Paul said in a cold voice, “I thought you couldn’t have beer out here.”
“We can’t. But once in a while we break the rules,” Ernie answered, and a sliver of a grin turned up the corners of his lips. Ernie leaned on the cable that ran the length of the ship and stared at the sun as it descended gracefully toward the horizon. “She’s a beauty, ain’t she?”
Paul didn’t say a word.
“So you’re pissed.” He paused. “Well, I guess I don’t blame you.”
Paul looked at him.
“I showed you up, and I shouldn’t have done that.”
Instantly Paul felt sheepish, as if he had made so much over such a little thing.
They both stared silently at the setting sun. A moment or two passed, until Ernie turned to Paul and looked him full in the eyes and said, “You need to understand something about us lifers, about us men who have spent our lives out on this lake. We love the water and we love this ship and we’ll do everything we can to make sure that she lasts forever.”
Ernie looked back out on the lake and he watched the sun as it lowered itself in glory toward the horizon like a wayward son returning home, and he let his words work their way into Paul’s mind and roll around. Ernie tapped his beer can against Paul’s and nodded and put on that little sliver of a grin and said, “You’re gonna do OK out here. You just got to learn to keep your head in what you’re doing.” He stared deep into Paul’s eyes as if a curtain had been parted and he could see far into the younger man. He nodded at Paul, the tiny grin creasing the razor-blade lips that split his face, and he said, “Now you have a good night.”
Paul watched him as he walked in that odd rolling way back to the cabin in the stern of the ship. Ernie stopped just in front of the cabin to finish his beer and then disappeared into the cabin, leaving Paul alone on the deck. Paul suddenly became conscious of the stiff breeze created by the forward movement of the Callaghan as it plowed inexorably toward the iron fields of Minnesota, and he felt the air and how bracing and fresh it was against his skin.
Paul had never conceived that a kind of love affair could exist between these men and their ship, but he began to see how deeply that affair ran and that even the simplest of tasks they performed had a kind of nobility. Soon after the incident with Ernie, Frank ordered Paul to clean the head—the john—the shithouse. Larry Sullivan, one of the other deckhands, was going to teach Paul the proper way to clean the head. Larry was in his forties and had a round face and was a bit on the chubby side but what stood out most about him was his tiny, undeveloped left hand. Larry did everything with his right hand, like hosing down and scraping and painting. When Paul had first come on board, the two men had shaken hands, and oh my God Larry’s grip with that good right hand of his had been powerful.
They were in the head with a bucket of steaming water and a mop and a bottle of ammonia, and Larry poured some ammonia into the water, and Paul stood aside and watched Larry attack the toilets and wash basins and showers with a laser-like determination to make them as clean as he could. He manipulated the mop like a magician’s baton, gracefully cleaning in and around the toilet and taking enormous pride in the magic that he wielded with that mop. When he finished, he winked at Paul and said, “That’s it. The thing is done. It’s done the way it should be done.” He carefully put away the mop and ammonia. They would do the whole thing over again tomorrow, only then it would be Paul’s turn and he would be expected to make the head as spotlessly clean and antiseptic as Larry had made it.
Most of the time, Paul worked with Ernie, and gradually he learned. They painted—my God, did they paint! They painted the deck, the bulkheads, the overheads. Paul had to paint detail stuff, portholes and the trim around cabinets and closets, and he found that he gradually fell into a Zen of painting, a trance almost, in which he trained his eyes on the object to be painted, dipped the brush into the can containing the red-rust paint, applied the paint in a glop, spread out the glop with smooth and even strokes into a clean finish, edged around corners, strained to reach hard-to-reach spots. Paul concentrated so hard that he lost track of where they were, lost track of time. Before he knew it, the morning coffee break would come, then lunch time would come, then the afternoon coffee break would come.
At four forty-five, Frank would tell the deckhands to pick up their equipment, take it to the paint locker, clean it, store it, wash up for supper. Shoulders slumped from exhaustion, Paul did as he was told. He dipped his hands into the red-tinged turpentine and cleaned the brushes, and the turpentine seeped beneath his nails and turned them red. He spent 15 minutes cleaning his hands with Lava soap, which scraped away most of the red stain but left his hands raw.
As Paul worked and as he learned, he was slowly being drawn into this tight-knit community that dedicated itself to the love and care of the Callaghan. He learned to play poker, and he learned to drink beer at a pace not to get drunk but to be pleasantly buzzed. Nearly every day, the deckhands played catch with a baseball, with the deckhands placing themselves two hatches apart and practicing their fastballs and curves and knuckleballs. They went through a whole lot of baseballs, as there was no retrieving errant balls that sailed over their heads and landed with quiet kerplunks in the waters of Lake Michigan or Lake Superior.
One of Paul’s mates for playing catch was Andrew Andresen, the fourth deckhand, who was just out of the Marines after two tours of duty in Vietnam. Andrew was 26 years old, with an ultra-neat crew cut and a tattoo on his muscular left bicep of the proud insignia of the United States Marine Corps. Andrew had blue transparent eyes that matched the deep blue of the lake, and like Lake Michigan during calm times, he had this quiet way about him. He drank his coffee jet-black. Paul had never drunk coffee, but he decided that it was time for him to start. He poured half a cup and then filled the rest of the cup with cream and streamed in three spoonfuls of sugar.
Andrew looked at Paul and said, “How’s your cocoa? Man, drinking it black is the only way to go.” So Paul dumped out his sweet coffee and filled the cup with the black unadorned stuff and took a sip and practically spat it out. It was bitter, horrible. Everyone in the galley was looking at him, and he knew that he had to choke down that black coffee. He gulped down some, gulped down some more, and he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Andrew was chuckling.
As the summer passed, Paul took his part in the endless cycles of life aboard a ship, as the Callaghan repeatedly and monotonously sojourned north to Duluth and loaded those millions of clods of rust-red ore from the Mesabi Range and steered its way south through the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie and plowed through those waters and yielded up its load to the giant Hulett shovels at the steel mills of Gary or Chicago or Cleveland, where those millions of clods were melted down and somehow magically transformed into steel.
Paul was an integral part of this cycle. In fact, a kind of complacency had set in, and he felt as if he had just about mastered this deckhand stuff. It was approaching the end of August, and with mixed feelings that surprised him, he told Frank that he needed to get ready for school and would be quitting the Callaghan when they reached Gary.
The Callaghan had just passed through the Soo Locks and was beginning to enter the St. Marys River. Fall was in the air, and the day was overcast, and the clouds sat low and gray and had turned the waters of the river the color of unpainted steel. The crew had taken on supplies, as they typically did at the Soo Locks, and the cook and the two stewards were unloading the foodstuffs that had been delivered on wooden pallets. The engine room had also received supplies, and the wipers and stokers and engineers who worked in the engine room were unloading their supplies. On the deck, near midship, the deckhands were coiling ropes, which had been tied to the cables that had secured the Callaghan as it had moved through the lock.
As Paul and the other deckhands coiled ropes, they suddenly heard a scream from the stern of the Callaghan. It was a scream from hell. It split the air like a sharp crack of thunder. Frank, Ernie, Larry, Andrew, and Paul were working together, and when they heard the scream, they dropped their ropes and rushed toward the stern. The scream came again--a scream of pain and terror.
The screams came from the engine room. Frank and the deckhands raced to the hatch that led down to the engine room, which was one deck down and cradled the beast-like diesel engines that powered the giant propellers of the Callaghan. The five of them looked through the hatch and down the ladder that descended into the engine room. Sprawled on the deck of the engine room, at the bottom of that ladder, was Roy, who worked in the engine room.
Crushing Roy’s midsection and legs was an enormous barrel, a barrel of cleaning oil that weighed at least three hundred pounds. Roy was young, a kid like Paul, a kid going to college for the first time in the fall. He continued screaming as the barrel lay flat on him. Surrounding him as he lay prostrate on the deck were eight other crew members, men who had been helping unload the supplies. The men had been lowering the barrel into the engine room with a cable. For some insane reason that violated every safety regulation and every tenet of common sense, Roy had been on the ladder underneath the barrel, helping to guide it as the cable slowly lowered it. The cable had snapped. The barrel had plummeted down the ladder and caught Roy with the force of a locomotive and carried him down the ladder in an instant and pinned his flimsy body at the base of the ladder.
Paul’s heart raced as he stared at Roy’s face, which was contorted with agony as the men struggled to move the barrel off the young man’s body. Slowly they were able to budge it, bit by bit, until his body was free of the crushing weight of the barrel.
When they removed the barrel, Paul could see what had happened to Roy’s fragile body. The barrel had flattened and smashed Roy’s legs. Blood had saturated the young man’s jeans and was collecting in a pool on the deck. When Paul saw the smashed legs and the gleaming pond of blood, he felt a thick clot of acid at the bottom of his belly. He raced out onto the deck and to the side of the Callaghan and vomited into the waters of the St. Marys River.
The ship was only a few hundreds of yards south of the lock, and the captain had called an ambulance from the local hospital, and Frank yelled for the deckhands to climb into the bosun’s chair and swing over the side and secure the ship with cables to the concrete abutment that extended south of the lock. They did, and in minutes an ambulance arrived.
Frank and one of the mates slammed the ladder over the side of the Callaghan. The paramedics raced up the ladder, carrying a stretcher, and sprinted to the engine room, and Paul climbed back aboard to watch. The paramedics applied painkiller, and bit by bit, Roy’s screaming subsided. Paul could not stop himself from looking at Roy. An engineer named Harold had placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder and was speaking softly to him as the paramedics prepared Roy’s body to transfer him to the stretcher. Roy’s screaming had ceased, but terror and pain distorted his features, and tears streamed down his cheeks, and Harold bent over Roy and continued to speak quietly to him as the paramedics made their preparations.
The paramedics prepared Roy to be lifted out of the engine room. By now, the painkiller had taken hold, but Roy was in shock. His body did not move. He was alive, but his body resembled a corpse’s. Paul watched as the paramedics lifted Roy up the ladder at an agonizingly slow rate and transported him to the ambulance and rushed him to the hospital.
Soon after, the deckhands returned to the dock and lifted the cables from the stiles, and the Callaghan continued south through the river. Suppertime arrived, and the crew members gathered in the galley. Paul took his seat with Frank and Ernie and Larry and Andrew, men to whom he had grown close in the course of that summer, men who formed this community. As they ate their supper, not one of them said a word. Nor did they look at one another. The appalling thing that had happened to Roy hovered like a cloud, a pestilence, over them.
Paul could not wipe away the image of Roy collapsed at the bottom of that ladder and of his face glistening with tears of agony. He kept thinking about it, and as he sat there, he felt a stabbing hatred for the Callaghan, as if the ship itself had been the cause of this horrendous accident, as if the ship itself had joined forces with the Furies to unleash their anger against a fragile member of the tribe of humanity in punishment for the sins of all humankind.
The Callaghan moved slowly through the river and eventually entered Lake Michigan. As they journeyed southward, the captain told the crew members that he had received a report from the doctors tending to Roy, and the signs were good and it looked as though Roy’s legs would be saved, and he would regain full use of them.
Yet even so, the accident burrowed inside Paul and took root there like a poisonous weed. He had feared the ship when he had first boarded it, and the fear had returned in full force. The crew members treated the ship with love and care, but to Paul, this was a delusion—the ship was nothing more than an impersonal conglomeration of metal. The accident had scraped open Paul’s feelings of vulnerability. He had never felt so exposed to the anarchy of the world.
On the night before they were due to reach Gary, Paul could not concentrate on his reading in the deckhands’ cabin. He had already packed his gear and was ready to leave the Callaghan the instant she was tied up. He got up from his bunk and walked out onto the deck. No one else was there. He sat on one of the hatches, and he sat there in silence and felt the movement of the ship as if it were alive. All of a sudden, he saw a shadow, and he looked up, and there stood Ernie, who looked down at him and said, “Mind if I sit down?”
Paul nodded. They sat in silence until finally Paul turned toward Ernie and said, “I don’t understand what happened to Roy. There are rules. What was he doing under the barrel like that?”
“I don’t know,” Ernie said, his voice heavy with the same melancholy that Paul felt. “It was a horrible thing that happened to that boy. I’ve seen many terrible things over the years. I saw a man fall into the hold, land the wrong way, break his neck, and die. I saw a man lose his fingers when his hand got caught between the cable and the stile and the winch tightened. I saw a young deckhand like yourself slip off the dock and into the water, though we managed to rescue him. But this was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”
“Seeing Roy lying there, his legs all broken, it scared the hell out of me.”
“It should have scared you. It scared me, too.”
“What happened to Roy, it made me hate this ship.”
Ernie looked fiercely at Paul. “You mustn’t do that. You must love and care for this ship. If you are out here on the ship, then you must care for it. That is what we do.” As he spoke, his eyes blazed.
Paul returned Ernie’s look, but deep down inside, he didn’t know. He didn’t know if he was ready to believe in the ship the way Ernie did. But as he looked at Ernie, he knew instantly how he felt about this man with the odd walk and the chin that jutted out and the eyes that reminded him of an eagle’s. And because of the strain of what had happened, Paul felt tears sneak like tiny insects into the corners of my eyes. Ernie and he sat there, in silence, and Paul felt the faint vibration that emanated from the engine room and heard the constant hum of the giant diesel engines. Despite the horrendous accident, he knew that he felt connected to this ship, this Callaghan, and he knew that he would carry this ship and these men with him long after he had returned to shore.
The Callaghan reached Gary, and after Paul helped place the cables over the stiles so that the ship was firmly attached to the dock, he officially left the Callaghan. He said his good-byes to Ernie and Frank and Andrew and Larry and the others, and each of them shook his hand with a warmth that surprised him. He climbed down the ladder and turned around, and already the crew members had resumed their appointed tasks, and Paul watched as the enormous Hulett shovels descended into the hold of the ship and began to relieve it of its massive load of iron ore. Paul turned and made his way through the maze of buildings that formed the vast steel mill. He walked steadily toward the train that would carry him to Chicago and home.
Christopher Johnson
They were sailing north from Gary, Indiana, and Paul Smith stood in the stern of the iron ore steamship and watched as the steel mills slowly faded into the distance. The mills seemed to drop off the end of the world, and then the Callaghan was surrounded by water that crested and fell like huge sheets dyed indigo. The steamer plowed through the vast waters of Lake Michigan, kicking water from its propellers and shooting it out like entrails expelled from the body of the ship. Paul felt appallingly alone, like a lost soul afloat in a lifeboat in the middle of that gigantic lake. He felt as if all that he knew was gone, all the accustomed roles and assumptions that he had grown up with were dead, and he was entering a world about which he knew absolutely nothing about and for which he had no resources.
Only the week before, he had graduated from high school. His father, a middle manager for the steamship division of the Cleveland Steel Company, had suggested—no, insisted—no, demanded--that Paul spend his summer working on the lakes, on one of the company’s iron ore boats, where he would gain life experience and earn a good chunk of change for college. These were union jobs that paid damned well—and out on the lakes, there was no way to blow the cash. Paul obeyed. He went.
But he felt woefully unprepared for this experience. Unprepared psychologically. Unprepared by life. He had grown up in the sheltered suburbs of Chicago and was insulated even more by an overly protective family. He had never gotten drunk. He had never gotten laid. He had never smoked a cigarette. He studied hard and did his homework, and that certainly counted for something.
And there was something else about Paul--his deep and abiding sense of aloneness. Oh, he had had his group of friends in high school, and he had been liked well enough by his classmates. But from an early age, he had guarded himself from others. He donned the mask of an agreeable guy but kept his interior well-hidden. He wore the protective shield of the introvert, of someone who feared more than anything being hurt by his comrades in the human race. This was the baggage that he stowed on board the Callaghan that summer when he was only seventeen.
The ship frightened him. It frightened the hell out of him. It was a monster of steel. It was two football fields long and was held together by enormous steel beams that buttressed the hold like giant metal ribs. The wide white strip of paint that spread across the front of the ship’s bow looked to him like a malevolent smile. And that smokestack. Terrifying. It spewed out black clouds of soot like an angry fire-breathing dragon. It spat them out over that beautiful violet lake, soiling the water.
Paul was one of four deckhands in the crew of 32 men, and their job was to care for this monstrous ship, keep it sparkling clean, renew it continually and perpetually with paint and ammonia and water to defeat the elements of nature that attacked it. His job, his very first job on the Callaghan, was to carry the hose, which was as thick as an anaconda, for Frank Antonelli, the bosun, who was in charge of the deckhands. Frank had a pot belly and thick arms like axe handles and hands with the veins popping out, and his face hung with jowls and the sun had carved deep lines into his face and burned his skin a deep brown. He had seen it all before and nothing could surprise him. He was in charge of the care and maintenance of this steel behemoth
Paul’s task on that first day was to stand behind Frank and move the hose while Frank sprayed the ore detritus ever closer to the corners of the deck and then out into the water, where it slowly sank like stardust to the bottom of Lake Michigan. The hose streamed water at high pressure and could easily get caught on the corners of the hatches, and Paul’s job was to keep the hose from getting waylaid. He tried his best, but the hose with the water flowing through it was amazingly heavy, and he dropped it twice, and then finally he tripped over the hose and went sprawling on the deck.
Frank looked around sharply at Paul as he lay there on the deck and snapped, “Well, get the hell up and get the hose straightened out!” Paul’s heart traipsed around in his chest with embarrassment, and he struggled to his feet, picked up the segment of hose that lay immediately behind Frank, and planted his feet more widely to try to stay balanced. They hosed down the rest of the deck without incident.
Those next few days on the Callaghan were a blur for Paul. There were a million things to learn--tying knots, absorbing safety procedures, coiling ropes, securing hatches, and seating himself properly on the bosun’s chair as it swung the deckhands onto docks when the ship was making port. And he was learning what seemed like a million new names for things—bulkhead instead of wall, deck instead of floor, head instead of washroom. He roomed with the three other deckhands, all of them in the same tiny cabin, assigned to narrow bunk beds with thin mattresses and coarse wool blankets.
At the end of each eight-hour shift during that first week, Paul was exhausted. He barely interacted with the other deckhands. He ate his supper, went to the recreation room, and, if the Callaghan were close enough to shore to receive a signal, watched television. He held himself apart. He was intimidated by the other deckhands. They were so competent, so mature, and he had no idea how to relate to them, what to say to them.
Frank ordered him to work with Ernie Lundgren, the oldest and most experienced of the deckhands. Ernie had been out on the lakes for 40 years, and for all that time he had been a deckhand, never aspiring to anything higher, never wanting any more responsibility but to be a lifelong deckhand. His eyes were hooded by heavy skin like an eagle’s, and his nose was huge and crooked, and his beard was metallic gray and stubbly, and his chin jutted out and traveled in advance of the rest of his body, and he had thin lips that set themselves in a grim line. He walked with a peculiar rolling gait that carried him from side to side, and he chewed perpetually on a toothpick, which he manipulated back and forth from one side of his mouth to the other. In the galley, Ernie sat a little bit apart from other crew members. He grasped his coffee with hands that had veins like strips of leather stained blue--hands that had coiled ropes and dragged cables on docks and tied up ships at least a million times.
Because Ernie had been out on the lakes so long, Frank paired him up with Paul to teach him the Ways of the Ship. The morning that Paul started working with Ernie, the sun gleamed like a shiny new dime in the brilliant blue sky. Ernie came up to Paul and announced, “Hey, you’re gonna work with me.” After this declaration, he walked ahead of Paul with that rolling gait.
The work they did was simple, but it was crucial because it would stave off the powers of destruction, the air and the water that were constantly attacking the vessel. Ernie explained the work, and as he did so, he referred to the ship as “her,” as if she were a living, breathing thing that had been entrusted to his care. They were going to scrape and paint, scrape and paint, protect the body of the Callaghan from the elements that tried to insinuate their way into the molecules of metal and turn it to rust. Paul followed Ernie to the paint locker, where he barked, “Pick a scraper. Choose your weapon. Make sure it’s sharp.” Paul did as he was told. Ernie led Paul out of the paint locker and up the ladder to the deck. Paul marched dutifully after him, holding his scraper tightly in his right hand like a scepter.
Ernie bent down and showed Paul how to scrape paint loose from the deck. He scraped hard with the relentless determination of a machine, and the flakes of paint soared into the air. Ernie’s forearms were thick with muscle, and he scraped fast and furious until he was done scraping about a square yard. He had chipped away every speck of old paint, revealing the metal skin, which glinted in the sun like a mirror.
Paul put on his spanking new work gloves and goggles and bent down and started to scrape. The tool felt awkward in his hands, but he attacked the paint as best he could. The edge of the tool was exquisitely sharp, and he jammed the gleaming edge underneath the skin of the dried paint and sent flakes of ancient paint shooting into the air. He began to feel more confident, jamming the scraper under the dried paint and sending the specks flying through the dazzling air. He worked fast, and in an hour, he’d scraped away paint from about three square yards.
Ernie was working another spot, about ten yards away, and he was still working laboriously on one small space. Meanwhile Paul had finished three whole yards, and he felt the triumph, the exhilaration of his work! He rested his hands on the scraper and felt the blood pulsing through his arms, and he knew that by the end of the summer he would have well-muscled forearms, which was some faint consolation for being stuck out on the Great Lakes for the summer. Looking down, Paul now saw that he had left some specks of paint covering the metal. He attacked them again with his scraper, but they wouldn’t come loose, they adhered too tightly to the deck of the ship, they were bonded there, they were impossible to get up. He stopped and looked at the primordial specks of paint still clinging to the deck of the ship and thought to himself that he could just paint over the old paint, and it would be fine, just fine.
Then Ernie was standing right behind Paul. He put H
his hands on his hips and stared at the space that Paul had scraped and then pressed his lips together into a straight line while he examined every inch of the work that Paul had done. He shook his head and extracted the ever-present toothpick from his mouth and inspected the toothpick as if it were the most important thing in the world. He put the toothpick back into his mouth.
Then, like a badger, he squatted down fast, grabbed Paul’s scraper from him, and chipped the exact same area that Paul had already scraped. Ernie worked his arms like pistons, and he drove his scraper into the tiny islands of dried paint that Paul had left behind. The flakes of old paint flew into the air and settled back onto the deck like rust-colored snow fallen from the sky. In five minutes, Ernie had scraped away all of those spots of venerable paint that Paul had left behind, and now the naked metal of the deck gleamed. Ernie muttered, “That’s how to do it.” He leaned over the side of the ship and spat. His saliva plummeted down and disappeared into the vast waters of Lake Michigan. He walked back to the spot where he had been scraping and resumed his work there.
Paul glared at Ernie as he walked with that rolling gait and returned to the spot where he was working, and the younger man seethed with white-hot anger. Everything that had accumulated in those first few days gathered together and hit him like a runaway train. Paul looked for another spot to scrape, bent down, gripped the handle of the scraper tightly as if it were Ernie’s neck, and slammed the scraper into the paint, chopped at the paint with a fury that sent the flakes of old paint screaming into the sky. For the rest of that afternoon, he worked at full speed and in deep anger, and sweat poured down his forehead and into his eyes, and he constantly had to wipe the sweat away. He didn’t look at Ernie, and Ernie didn’t look at him.
That evening, at supper, he continued to seethe. He wolfed down his roast beef and potatoes, retreated to the deckhands’ cabin, yanked shut the curtain that was their only source of privacy, and read, or at least tried to read. But in actuality, he continued to rage about Ernie, and in spite of all his father’s plans for him, he intended to escape from that godforsaken bucket of bolts when they reached Duluth and fly back to Chicago and work at McDonald’s for the summer, and if his old man didn’t like it, well, he could take a flying leap.
After an hour or so, he started feeling claustrophobic--felt as if he were smothering from the lack of air in the cabin. It was still early, only about eight o’clock, He whipped himself out of his bunk and walked out onto the deck of the Callaghan. Nobody else was there. The sun was setting over the water, spinning out purple and orange ribbons that wrapped themselves around the waves of the lake. The colors spread across the sky like giant pennants pulled across the heavens by a stupendous eagle, and the entire western sky was ablaze. Paul felt a presence behind him and turned. It was Ernie. He wanted to move away, but before he could, Ernie fished a beer out of the huge back pockets of his dungarees and handed it to Paul, and then he reached inside his dungarees again and extracted another can of beer for himself. Paul said in a cold voice, “I thought you couldn’t have beer out here.”
“We can’t. But once in a while we break the rules,” Ernie answered, and a sliver of a grin turned up the corners of his lips. Ernie leaned on the cable that ran the length of the ship and stared at the sun as it descended gracefully toward the horizon. “She’s a beauty, ain’t she?”
Paul didn’t say a word.
“So you’re pissed.” He paused. “Well, I guess I don’t blame you.”
Paul looked at him.
“I showed you up, and I shouldn’t have done that.”
Instantly Paul felt sheepish, as if he had made so much over such a little thing.
They both stared silently at the setting sun. A moment or two passed, until Ernie turned to Paul and looked him full in the eyes and said, “You need to understand something about us lifers, about us men who have spent our lives out on this lake. We love the water and we love this ship and we’ll do everything we can to make sure that she lasts forever.”
Ernie looked back out on the lake and he watched the sun as it lowered itself in glory toward the horizon like a wayward son returning home, and he let his words work their way into Paul’s mind and roll around. Ernie tapped his beer can against Paul’s and nodded and put on that little sliver of a grin and said, “You’re gonna do OK out here. You just got to learn to keep your head in what you’re doing.” He stared deep into Paul’s eyes as if a curtain had been parted and he could see far into the younger man. He nodded at Paul, the tiny grin creasing the razor-blade lips that split his face, and he said, “Now you have a good night.”
Paul watched him as he walked in that odd rolling way back to the cabin in the stern of the ship. Ernie stopped just in front of the cabin to finish his beer and then disappeared into the cabin, leaving Paul alone on the deck. Paul suddenly became conscious of the stiff breeze created by the forward movement of the Callaghan as it plowed inexorably toward the iron fields of Minnesota, and he felt the air and how bracing and fresh it was against his skin.
Paul had never conceived that a kind of love affair could exist between these men and their ship, but he began to see how deeply that affair ran and that even the simplest of tasks they performed had a kind of nobility. Soon after the incident with Ernie, Frank ordered Paul to clean the head—the john—the shithouse. Larry Sullivan, one of the other deckhands, was going to teach Paul the proper way to clean the head. Larry was in his forties and had a round face and was a bit on the chubby side but what stood out most about him was his tiny, undeveloped left hand. Larry did everything with his right hand, like hosing down and scraping and painting. When Paul had first come on board, the two men had shaken hands, and oh my God Larry’s grip with that good right hand of his had been powerful.
They were in the head with a bucket of steaming water and a mop and a bottle of ammonia, and Larry poured some ammonia into the water, and Paul stood aside and watched Larry attack the toilets and wash basins and showers with a laser-like determination to make them as clean as he could. He manipulated the mop like a magician’s baton, gracefully cleaning in and around the toilet and taking enormous pride in the magic that he wielded with that mop. When he finished, he winked at Paul and said, “That’s it. The thing is done. It’s done the way it should be done.” He carefully put away the mop and ammonia. They would do the whole thing over again tomorrow, only then it would be Paul’s turn and he would be expected to make the head as spotlessly clean and antiseptic as Larry had made it.
Most of the time, Paul worked with Ernie, and gradually he learned. They painted—my God, did they paint! They painted the deck, the bulkheads, the overheads. Paul had to paint detail stuff, portholes and the trim around cabinets and closets, and he found that he gradually fell into a Zen of painting, a trance almost, in which he trained his eyes on the object to be painted, dipped the brush into the can containing the red-rust paint, applied the paint in a glop, spread out the glop with smooth and even strokes into a clean finish, edged around corners, strained to reach hard-to-reach spots. Paul concentrated so hard that he lost track of where they were, lost track of time. Before he knew it, the morning coffee break would come, then lunch time would come, then the afternoon coffee break would come.
At four forty-five, Frank would tell the deckhands to pick up their equipment, take it to the paint locker, clean it, store it, wash up for supper. Shoulders slumped from exhaustion, Paul did as he was told. He dipped his hands into the red-tinged turpentine and cleaned the brushes, and the turpentine seeped beneath his nails and turned them red. He spent 15 minutes cleaning his hands with Lava soap, which scraped away most of the red stain but left his hands raw.
As Paul worked and as he learned, he was slowly being drawn into this tight-knit community that dedicated itself to the love and care of the Callaghan. He learned to play poker, and he learned to drink beer at a pace not to get drunk but to be pleasantly buzzed. Nearly every day, the deckhands played catch with a baseball, with the deckhands placing themselves two hatches apart and practicing their fastballs and curves and knuckleballs. They went through a whole lot of baseballs, as there was no retrieving errant balls that sailed over their heads and landed with quiet kerplunks in the waters of Lake Michigan or Lake Superior.
One of Paul’s mates for playing catch was Andrew Andresen, the fourth deckhand, who was just out of the Marines after two tours of duty in Vietnam. Andrew was 26 years old, with an ultra-neat crew cut and a tattoo on his muscular left bicep of the proud insignia of the United States Marine Corps. Andrew had blue transparent eyes that matched the deep blue of the lake, and like Lake Michigan during calm times, he had this quiet way about him. He drank his coffee jet-black. Paul had never drunk coffee, but he decided that it was time for him to start. He poured half a cup and then filled the rest of the cup with cream and streamed in three spoonfuls of sugar.
Andrew looked at Paul and said, “How’s your cocoa? Man, drinking it black is the only way to go.” So Paul dumped out his sweet coffee and filled the cup with the black unadorned stuff and took a sip and practically spat it out. It was bitter, horrible. Everyone in the galley was looking at him, and he knew that he had to choke down that black coffee. He gulped down some, gulped down some more, and he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Andrew was chuckling.
As the summer passed, Paul took his part in the endless cycles of life aboard a ship, as the Callaghan repeatedly and monotonously sojourned north to Duluth and loaded those millions of clods of rust-red ore from the Mesabi Range and steered its way south through the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. Marie and plowed through those waters and yielded up its load to the giant Hulett shovels at the steel mills of Gary or Chicago or Cleveland, where those millions of clods were melted down and somehow magically transformed into steel.
Paul was an integral part of this cycle. In fact, a kind of complacency had set in, and he felt as if he had just about mastered this deckhand stuff. It was approaching the end of August, and with mixed feelings that surprised him, he told Frank that he needed to get ready for school and would be quitting the Callaghan when they reached Gary.
The Callaghan had just passed through the Soo Locks and was beginning to enter the St. Marys River. Fall was in the air, and the day was overcast, and the clouds sat low and gray and had turned the waters of the river the color of unpainted steel. The crew had taken on supplies, as they typically did at the Soo Locks, and the cook and the two stewards were unloading the foodstuffs that had been delivered on wooden pallets. The engine room had also received supplies, and the wipers and stokers and engineers who worked in the engine room were unloading their supplies. On the deck, near midship, the deckhands were coiling ropes, which had been tied to the cables that had secured the Callaghan as it had moved through the lock.
As Paul and the other deckhands coiled ropes, they suddenly heard a scream from the stern of the Callaghan. It was a scream from hell. It split the air like a sharp crack of thunder. Frank, Ernie, Larry, Andrew, and Paul were working together, and when they heard the scream, they dropped their ropes and rushed toward the stern. The scream came again--a scream of pain and terror.
The screams came from the engine room. Frank and the deckhands raced to the hatch that led down to the engine room, which was one deck down and cradled the beast-like diesel engines that powered the giant propellers of the Callaghan. The five of them looked through the hatch and down the ladder that descended into the engine room. Sprawled on the deck of the engine room, at the bottom of that ladder, was Roy, who worked in the engine room.
Crushing Roy’s midsection and legs was an enormous barrel, a barrel of cleaning oil that weighed at least three hundred pounds. Roy was young, a kid like Paul, a kid going to college for the first time in the fall. He continued screaming as the barrel lay flat on him. Surrounding him as he lay prostrate on the deck were eight other crew members, men who had been helping unload the supplies. The men had been lowering the barrel into the engine room with a cable. For some insane reason that violated every safety regulation and every tenet of common sense, Roy had been on the ladder underneath the barrel, helping to guide it as the cable slowly lowered it. The cable had snapped. The barrel had plummeted down the ladder and caught Roy with the force of a locomotive and carried him down the ladder in an instant and pinned his flimsy body at the base of the ladder.
Paul’s heart raced as he stared at Roy’s face, which was contorted with agony as the men struggled to move the barrel off the young man’s body. Slowly they were able to budge it, bit by bit, until his body was free of the crushing weight of the barrel.
When they removed the barrel, Paul could see what had happened to Roy’s fragile body. The barrel had flattened and smashed Roy’s legs. Blood had saturated the young man’s jeans and was collecting in a pool on the deck. When Paul saw the smashed legs and the gleaming pond of blood, he felt a thick clot of acid at the bottom of his belly. He raced out onto the deck and to the side of the Callaghan and vomited into the waters of the St. Marys River.
The ship was only a few hundreds of yards south of the lock, and the captain had called an ambulance from the local hospital, and Frank yelled for the deckhands to climb into the bosun’s chair and swing over the side and secure the ship with cables to the concrete abutment that extended south of the lock. They did, and in minutes an ambulance arrived.
Frank and one of the mates slammed the ladder over the side of the Callaghan. The paramedics raced up the ladder, carrying a stretcher, and sprinted to the engine room, and Paul climbed back aboard to watch. The paramedics applied painkiller, and bit by bit, Roy’s screaming subsided. Paul could not stop himself from looking at Roy. An engineer named Harold had placed his hand on the young man’s shoulder and was speaking softly to him as the paramedics prepared Roy’s body to transfer him to the stretcher. Roy’s screaming had ceased, but terror and pain distorted his features, and tears streamed down his cheeks, and Harold bent over Roy and continued to speak quietly to him as the paramedics made their preparations.
The paramedics prepared Roy to be lifted out of the engine room. By now, the painkiller had taken hold, but Roy was in shock. His body did not move. He was alive, but his body resembled a corpse’s. Paul watched as the paramedics lifted Roy up the ladder at an agonizingly slow rate and transported him to the ambulance and rushed him to the hospital.
Soon after, the deckhands returned to the dock and lifted the cables from the stiles, and the Callaghan continued south through the river. Suppertime arrived, and the crew members gathered in the galley. Paul took his seat with Frank and Ernie and Larry and Andrew, men to whom he had grown close in the course of that summer, men who formed this community. As they ate their supper, not one of them said a word. Nor did they look at one another. The appalling thing that had happened to Roy hovered like a cloud, a pestilence, over them.
Paul could not wipe away the image of Roy collapsed at the bottom of that ladder and of his face glistening with tears of agony. He kept thinking about it, and as he sat there, he felt a stabbing hatred for the Callaghan, as if the ship itself had been the cause of this horrendous accident, as if the ship itself had joined forces with the Furies to unleash their anger against a fragile member of the tribe of humanity in punishment for the sins of all humankind.
The Callaghan moved slowly through the river and eventually entered Lake Michigan. As they journeyed southward, the captain told the crew members that he had received a report from the doctors tending to Roy, and the signs were good and it looked as though Roy’s legs would be saved, and he would regain full use of them.
Yet even so, the accident burrowed inside Paul and took root there like a poisonous weed. He had feared the ship when he had first boarded it, and the fear had returned in full force. The crew members treated the ship with love and care, but to Paul, this was a delusion—the ship was nothing more than an impersonal conglomeration of metal. The accident had scraped open Paul’s feelings of vulnerability. He had never felt so exposed to the anarchy of the world.
On the night before they were due to reach Gary, Paul could not concentrate on his reading in the deckhands’ cabin. He had already packed his gear and was ready to leave the Callaghan the instant she was tied up. He got up from his bunk and walked out onto the deck. No one else was there. He sat on one of the hatches, and he sat there in silence and felt the movement of the ship as if it were alive. All of a sudden, he saw a shadow, and he looked up, and there stood Ernie, who looked down at him and said, “Mind if I sit down?”
Paul nodded. They sat in silence until finally Paul turned toward Ernie and said, “I don’t understand what happened to Roy. There are rules. What was he doing under the barrel like that?”
“I don’t know,” Ernie said, his voice heavy with the same melancholy that Paul felt. “It was a horrible thing that happened to that boy. I’ve seen many terrible things over the years. I saw a man fall into the hold, land the wrong way, break his neck, and die. I saw a man lose his fingers when his hand got caught between the cable and the stile and the winch tightened. I saw a young deckhand like yourself slip off the dock and into the water, though we managed to rescue him. But this was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”
“Seeing Roy lying there, his legs all broken, it scared the hell out of me.”
“It should have scared you. It scared me, too.”
“What happened to Roy, it made me hate this ship.”
Ernie looked fiercely at Paul. “You mustn’t do that. You must love and care for this ship. If you are out here on the ship, then you must care for it. That is what we do.” As he spoke, his eyes blazed.
Paul returned Ernie’s look, but deep down inside, he didn’t know. He didn’t know if he was ready to believe in the ship the way Ernie did. But as he looked at Ernie, he knew instantly how he felt about this man with the odd walk and the chin that jutted out and the eyes that reminded him of an eagle’s. And because of the strain of what had happened, Paul felt tears sneak like tiny insects into the corners of my eyes. Ernie and he sat there, in silence, and Paul felt the faint vibration that emanated from the engine room and heard the constant hum of the giant diesel engines. Despite the horrendous accident, he knew that he felt connected to this ship, this Callaghan, and he knew that he would carry this ship and these men with him long after he had returned to shore.
The Callaghan reached Gary, and after Paul helped place the cables over the stiles so that the ship was firmly attached to the dock, he officially left the Callaghan. He said his good-byes to Ernie and Frank and Andrew and Larry and the others, and each of them shook his hand with a warmth that surprised him. He climbed down the ladder and turned around, and already the crew members had resumed their appointed tasks, and Paul watched as the enormous Hulett shovels descended into the hold of the ship and began to relieve it of its massive load of iron ore. Paul turned and made his way through the maze of buildings that formed the vast steel mill. He walked steadily toward the train that would carry him to Chicago and home.