Chapter 4
1754 Hours
You’re picking up where you left off.
Eddie Brennan went up on deck a little before five, because down below, in Hold No. 4, the smell had become something you could touch, and he'd rather have the cold.
He had thrown up twice since noon. Tommy not once. Tommy had spent the day in his hammock with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his stomach, like a statue on a tomb, and had only opened his eyes for the afternoon alerts, when the ship shuddered and the sergeants yelled at everybody to stay where they were. Eddie didn't know how to stay where he was. That morning, to pass the time and settle his stomach, he had taken out his harmonica and played two songs from home for the platoon and a third one he made up as he went. The guys had pounded on the benches. A lieutenant had come down to see what the racket was and gone back up without a word, which, from a lieutenant, was as good as applause.
“You coming up?” Eddie had said.
“If I move, I die,” Tommy had said.
And then around five-thirty Tommy had come up anyway, because Eddie had come back for him twice and there was no other way to get any peace.
The sun had been down for a while. In the west, right at the waterline, a glow was left, a pale yellow band, almost green, fading from the bottom up. Above it the sky turned gray, then dark blue, and clouds went by fast, driven by a northeast wind off the open sea. You couldn't see the horizon anymore. You could see the sea, blacker than the sky, and on the sea, to the south, lights.
“France,” somebody said.
It was Cherbourg. Yellow points, dozens of them, twinkling, coming on, going out behind the swell and coming back. Eddie had never seen France. He had pictured it bigger. It was just a coast with lights, like Lake Erie from the Cleveland boat, the summer his dad took the two of them, him and Tommy, when they were twelve.
“We're almost there,” Tommy said.
“How long?”
“I don't know. An hour.”
“An hour, and tonight we sleep in a real French bed.”
“Tonight we sleep in a tent.”
“A French tent.”
Tommy didn't answer. He was counting on his fingers, inside the sleeve of his overcoat, the way he did in school when he didn't want anybody to see him counting.
“Back home it's twelve-thirty,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“Five hours earlier. The lieutenant said so, in England, the day the guys wanted to call home.”
“So you worked it out for nothing.”
“Not for nothing. At twelve-thirty she starts the soup. At ten to one she sets the table.”
Eddie didn't say anything. He could see the Malloys' kitchen, the checkered oilcloth, the oak clock that struck too loud, Peggy coming down the stairs and jumping the last step. He had spent as many Sundays in that kitchen as in his own.
“Three plates,” he said.
“Three plates,” Tommy said. “And she puts one away.”
He said it without sadness, the way you give the time. He turned up the collar of his overcoat and went back to looking at France.
The deck was full of men. Hundreds of them, leaning on the rail, sitting against the bulkheads, overcoats buttoned to the chin, helmets on their heads or hooked to their belts. The seasick ones stayed by the rail. The others watched the lights. They'd been told: they'd be docked by evening, they'd go ashore, there'd be coffee. Nobody knew where they'd go after that. Belgium, people said. The front. Nobody wanted to think about it that night.
The ship was still zigzagging. Eddie could feel it under his feet, a slow lean to one side, then the other, and the wind switching cheeks.
A little farther on, toward the bow, some men were singing.
There were fifteen of them, maybe twenty, crowded around one guy who was beating time with his hand like a choir director. They were singing Christmas carols. They sang them badly, some of them off-key, but loud, and the wind carried half the words aft, where other men, who weren't singing, turned their heads to listen. There were deep voices and voices that hadn't finished changing. There was one guy who didn't know the words and sang la la la with total conviction.
Eddie moved closer.
He knew all those carols. He had sung them at St. Vincent's as an altar boy, in a surplice too big for him, next to Tommy, who sang on key and hardly opened his mouth. He had played them on the harmonica in his mother's kitchen every night in December until his father pounded on the ceiling. He wanted to play them. Here, now, on deck, for these guys singing off-key. A harmonica, on a ship's deck, in the dark, on Christmas Eve. People would talk about it.
He felt in his pants pockets.
Left. Right. Both back pockets. He found a handkerchief, an opened pack of chewing gum, a lighter that didn't work anymore, a folded picture of the Kowalski girl he'd never had the heart to throw away.
No harmonica.
He thought back to the morning, the platoon pounding on the benches, the lieutenant going back up. Afterward he had lain back down. He must have left it in the hammock. Under the Black soldier's blanket, or in the fold of the canvas where you tucked your things. He could see it plain as day, lying in the hollow.
“Tommy.”
“No.”
“You don't know what I was going to say.”
“Yes I do.”
“My harmonica's in the hammock.”
“So go get it.”
“If I go down there, I'll puke. You know I will. I puke on the stairs, I puke on a sergeant, they throw me in the stockade the minute we land in France and I spend Christmas in jail with the frogs.”
Tommy looked up at him. He had that look, the one he'd had at seven, at ten, at sixteen, every time Eddie asked him for something he was going to do anyway.
“Tommy,” Eddie said. “Be a pal.”
Tommy sighed. He jammed his hands in his pockets and turned one last time toward the lights of Cherbourg.
“In the hammock.”
“In the hammock. Under the blanket. Or in the fold.”
“If I don't find it, I'm not coming back up. I'm going to sleep.”
“You'll find it. You always find everything.”
Tommy headed for the aft hatch. Eddie followed him with his eyes through the men, his tall shape stooping under the door frame, disappearing into the yellow light of the stairwell. He didn't look back. Tommy never looked back. He had always known where he was going.
It was ten to six.
Eddie joined the singers. He sang with them, off-key too, louder than the others. The la la la guy grinned at him. The one beating time signaled him to keep it down, and Eddie brought it down a notch, no more. He sang without taking his eyes off the hatch. He was thinking: when Tommy comes back up, I'll play, and they'll stop singing to listen.
The wind came around with the ship. The glow in the west was only a line now. A cloud parted on a patch of milky light, high in the sky, and closed over it again. The lights of Cherbourg were sharper. You could make out lines, docks maybe, a row of lamps that had to be a street.
One carol ended. Another one started. The la la la guy knew this one and sang it with real words, very proud of himself.
Eddie turned back toward the hatch. Tommy hadn't come up. He couldn't find it. Or he'd gone back to bed, the bum. He was capable of it, of lying back down and figuring Eddie could come get it himself and it would serve him right. Eddie smiled.
Aft, on the starboard side, somebody shouted.
It wasn't a scream of fear. It was the shout of a man who has seen something and wants to point it out, a shout with an outstretched arm at the end of it. Heads turned. Eddie heard a word, two words, carried off by the wind, and among them a word he only understood afterward, long afterward: “wake.” A man leaning over the rail at the stern was pointing at the sea, to starboard, a pale line on the black water, straighter than the waves, coming on.
The singers had stopped. Not all of them. The la la la guy was still singing.
Eddie looked at the pale line. He didn't know what it was. He thought of a fish. He thought of a dolphin, because somebody had told him there were dolphins in the Channel. For one second, he thought of nothing.
The ship jumped under his feet.
It wasn't a sound. It was a blow, from underneath, from aft, that came up through his legs and into his teeth at the same time and threw him against the man next to him. The whole deck lurched back a step. A column of water, or smoke, or both, went up at the stern and came down like rain on the men. A sharp, chemical smell went by. Helmets rolled. Somebody fell and got up again. Somebody shouted a name.
And then, all at once, they heard something else.
They heard the silence. The beat of the engines, which nobody had been able to hear since nine that morning because it was everywhere, in the bulkheads, in the railings, in your bones, had stopped.