“In case the weather gets back up,” Joyce said. Howard walked aft, mounted the after ladder and moved across the familiar deck. “You come topside for a minute?” Joyce’s voice seemed more frozen, less mobile than his breath. The pale face of bosun striker Joyce looked down, saw Howard, and Joyce released a huff of frozen breath. Then the sounds stopped as the man realized that someone else was present. Above him on the boat deck the small sounds of a man working were as unconcerned and unapologetic as the movement of mice.
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The tough hour began when yeoman Howard, having seen the patch set into the heavy suction of the leak aboard Aphrodite, and having spoken honorably and well to Wilson, turned from the thinly iced main deck toward the after hatch. “Snow finally got him quiet,” Glass said. “We were all scared crazy,” Howard said, and he seemed to be hearing echoes. “Scared crazy,” Glass told Howard on the following day as Adrian steamed slowly toward Boston, escorting Aphrodite which still ran heeled to port. But… in fact, he was only a terribly frightened youngster who was trapped in the forward compartment of Aphrodite. Before the race became old with knowledge, and thus voluntarily stupid, Brace would have courted and won a place among heroic tales told before dying fires. In those shadowed days when the world was still fabulous, before the rise of clans and explanations before, even, the invention of hulls, the trapped Brace would have been the stuff of legends, of myth, of song. It was certainly a dungeon when Brace became pinned shoulder deep in water beneath a shifting, tangled mire of gear.
Brace worked at the task of rigging the pump. In sloshing water beneath the dull glow of emergency lanterns, Adrian’s boarding crew flattened and shored the sea patch aboard Aphrodite. The facts, reconstructed after Howard ran like a skein of snoopiness through memory, the log, and conversations, were largely unornamental and bland. That kid was trapped for days.” Which was, in the creative scope of Lamp’s memory, the truth although it did not precisely match the facts. “The real miracle was,” he would say, “that wind never found us.
In the waning days of his usefulness, and with indifference to the ambitions of lesser men who contrived to gain his excellent, shore-going job, it was Lamp’s great luxury to sit garrulous on the messdeck-or, gaze silent, as if he still watched the crash of seas, like a man staring with serene indifference at memory, or at that black gulf which lies beyond all seas. In that large galley, where assistant cooks and stewards ragged and nagged apprentices with dull chores, Lamp was like the director of a small and competent theater. “Brace was only a kid, himself,” Lamp would say. Mother Lamp, who cherished increasingly the wayward souls of seamen, would bustle and tsk and wait until the smartmouth had tacked his short nail of wisdom through the wide, implied fabric of the tale. Always an older voice would snort with contempt, or would curse. Maybe you shoulda.” Always a young voice would say that. Sagging laps of flesh hung from his upper arms in that way of formerly robust women who have spent their lives among small cares, small hopes and large ambitions for others-and, of course, in company with brushes and laundry.
We were sure of it.” Or so, in later years when cooking at the Base, Lamp would aver.
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