Authors: B. TRAVEN
Death ship; yes, sir. There are several kinds of death ships. In some the carcasses are made inside the hull; in others dead sailors are made outside. And then there are death ships that make fish-fodder everywhere.
Yorikke
made carcasses inside, outside, and everywhere. She was a model of a death ship.
While we were cleaning up the fires, the fireman of the former watch finished his bath. All the time he was washing himself in the bucket, entirely stripped, he was in danger of being burned or scorched either by the poker or by sputtering embers. He did not mind. He felt sure that since he was dead nothing could happen to him. From his face, after he had washed himself, one could see that he was really dead.
His face and body had been washed fairly well with the help of white ashes and sand. But he could not rub the ashes into his eyes, and consequently his face was white while his eyes had big black rings around them. Perhaps this was the reason why he looked like a man with a death skull instead of a face. His cheeks were hollow, his cheek-bones stood out, and they were white and polished like billiard-balls. There seemed to be no flesh in his face.
He put on his pants and his torn shirt. He groaned a deep “Ough,” which he meant perhaps as a good-night. Tired and heavily he climbed up the ladder. When he had reached the landing, I just caught a glimpse of him doing the snake-dance.
Stanislav had meanwhile been busy dragging coal into the stoke-hold to build up a pile for me to have on hand until I had found myself.
When we were breaking up fire number six again, Stanislav came to me and said: “Well, brother, I am sinking now. I can’t do it any longer. I am finished. Guess I have to shuffle off. It’s about half past one. I am on the spot now for almost sixteen hours. At five I have to hop on again and heave ashes with you. It’s a great thing that we have you with us now. I could not have done it any longer. I have to make a confession which I should have made earlier. But you see, bad news is always told too early. It is like this, we are only two coal-drags on this bucket, if I count you in. That means that each of us has two watches with six hours each; and taking in each watch one hour extra for clearing ashes, it makes seven hours,
or, to make it quite clear to you, fourteen hours’ tough work within every twenty-four hours, as long as twenty-four will last. Tomorrow we will have still more extra work. We have to clear the whole deck of the mountains of ashes left there while the can was in port. You know, in port no ashes must be cleared into the water. That’s all left on deck until the can is in the open again. It will cost us another four hours’ extra work.”
“Of course, all these hours more than the regular watch of four hours are overtime, aren’t they?” I asked.
“Yes, buddy,” Stanislav said, “you are right, all this is overtime. But it won’t make you any happier. You may write it down on paper, all the hours you call overtime. Only you mustn’t expect anybody to pay for it.”
“Oh, I settled that with the old man when I signed on,” I said.
“Now look here. Don’t be a sucker. Whatever you settled here when you signed on or after has no value. Only what you have got in your pocket, that’s what you may rely on, as long as it isn’t pinched by somebody in the foc’sle. And don’t you ever think that you get paid here. Not in your life-time. What you get is advances and advances. Just enough to get drunk and get a dame under your legs. Sometimes there is just a bit left to buy a shirt, a pair of pants, or new clogs. You never get enough to buy you a complete outfit. You see, if you look like a respectable citizen, you might get some ideas into your head and walk off and become alive again. Nothing doing. Get the trick now? As long as you haven’t got money, and as long as you are in rags, you cannot get away here. You stay dead. If you try, he orders you arrested for desertion and they keep you in jail until the very minute the
Yorikke
is putting out. Then they bring you aboard, and all the costs for jailing you are cut off your pay. And the old man fines you two or three months’ pay extra for desertion. That’s in the regulations. He can do it. And he does it. Then you go to the old man on your knees and beg for a peseta and you apologize. Because you must have likker. You can’t do without. Or you go all nuts. You need the shots and the dames. Without, you can’t stand it. Believe me, buddy, it’s a lie that the dead has no feeling. You will learn how much a dead one still can suffer before he has become accustomed to it. I won’t wash myself. I cannot lift my hands any more. Good night. All the luck, and I wish that no grate-bars fall out. That costs life-blood, Pippip. Good night.”
I could not answer him. I had no words. My head was humming. I saw him dragging his tired body up to the landing at the middle of the gangway. As in a dream, I saw him doing the snake-dance. For a second it looked as if he had lost his hold and was about to fall below. Then he climbed farther up and disappeared in the dark hole through which I could see a few stars sparkling in the black sky.
“Holy Virgin,
Santisima Madre, Purisima en el cielo
. Thousand holy sons of skunks. Damn the whole —”
The fireman was howling as though bitten by a mad dog. He took a breath, and then he began again to curse whatever came into his mind, which for a long while seemed to be the meeting-place of degenerate individuals and animals with over-animated sex deviations. Nothing was left of the purity of the Heavenly Virgin, or of the holiness of the saints. They all were dragged by him into the gutter. If ever hell had held any horror for him, he now did not care any more. He smashed hell, with a few good words, into an insignificant dung-hole, and he cursed the devils to useless mongrels disrespecting their mothers. He was no longer afraid of anything on earth or in hell. He was in a state where he could not be punished by anybody or by anything. For when I asked: “Hey, fire’m, what is up?” he beat his chest like a jealous gorilla and, with blood shooting into his eyes, he roared savagely: “Hell is upon me, six grate-bars have dropped. Holy alligator-tail and ogress-mouse.”
31
The last word of Stanislav on leaving me had been that it would cost life-blood if grate-bars fell out. He had meant one bar. Now six had dropped.
I soon learned that to put them back into their berth not only cost blood, not alone flesh torn off, large pieces of skin scorched, but cost bleeding sperm, shredded tendons, and painfully twisted entrails. The joints of all limbs cracked like broken wood. The marrow in one’s bones appeared to flow out like hot lava. While we worked like Egyptian slaves to bring the bars in again, the steam was falling and falling. Ahead of this hard work we saw already, crawling upon us, the hard work that was to follow to bring the steam up again to its full pressure. The longer we had to work with the bars, the lower fell the steam. I may justly say, though, that since that night, my first night with grate-bars in the ash-pit, I feel myself standing above the gods. I am free. Unbound. I may do now whatever I wish. I may curse the gods. They cannot punish me any more. No human law, no divine commandments, can any longer influence my doings, because no longer can I be damned. Hell is now paradise. However horrible hell may be, it cannot frighten me any more. There is nothing under heaven or in hell that can be compared with putting back fallen-out grate-bars on the
Yorikke
.
To know what it meant makes anyone understand that the swearing of my fireman was not swearing at all, but in fact only a sweet love-song. His language, rich as it was, could not meet the situation. No language, not even the Chinese, could possibly express in words the feeling any sane person simply had to have when confronted with a problem like setting in dropped grate-bars in the stoke-hold of the
Yorikke
.
Paradise, whatever it may mean, was for the black gang of the
Yorikke
not the opposite of hell, but was simply freedom from the obligation to set in their place dropped grate-bars.
The skipper never came into the stoke-hold; neither did the two mates. I have never heard that one of them ever even went below to the engine-hold. They even avoided passing too closely to the hatchway that led below to the stoke-hold.
The engineers dared enter the stoke-hold only when the
Yorikke
was snugly lying in port and the black gang was wiping and greasing and doing odd jobs about the boilers and the engine. Even then the engineers were soft-footed with the blacks. The firemen and the drags on the
Yorikke
were always, even in port, in a state of exaggerated anger, ready any second to throw at the engineer a hammer or a wrench. Prison, hangman, or the like did not mean a thing to any of the blacks. It would have been only liberation from the grate-bars of the
Yorikke
.
The engine was set up in a hold which was so small that the engineer on watch had to move about carefully to avoid being caught by the engine. Towards starboard there was in the engine-hold a heavy work-bench with tools for emergency work on the engine, the boilers, or the pipes. This bench could not be set up anywhere else. So it had to be in the engine-hold. Between the bench and the engine there was a space hardly two feet wide. On the other side of the engine, toward port, there was a space of only one foot, which had to be sufficient for the engineers when they wanted to go round the engine to look after the greasing. The slightest slip at either side would have been the last of the engineer. He would have fallen into the running engine. Both engineers were hard drinkers. They could get drunk like a Dane at the funeral of his mother-in-law. And they got soaked whenever the
Yorikke
was in port. But I have never seen either of them drunk, at least not in full, the same day or the same night the
Yorikke
was putting out. They knew that being drunk in the engine-hold of the
Yorikke
on high sea meant death surer than by the noose of a lynching party in Kentucky.
There was a good reason why the engine-hold was so narrow. On either side of the engine-hold coal-bunkers had been built in. Coal-bunkers must be. But since they do not carry any payload, they are built in any space that cannot be used for any other thing. At least so it was on the
Yorikke
.
From the stoke-hold, along starboard and along port side, a very low and narrow gangway led to these bunkers alongside the engine-hold. At the back of the boilers, toward starboard, an iron door led into the engine-hold. This door was supposed to be sea-tight to shut off the engine-hold from the stoke-hold in case water should break in. Since nothing was sea-tight on the
Yorikke
, no one expected this door to be tight. And it wasn’t. It was this door that was used by the engineers when they wanted to enter the stoke-hold. When they wanted to go from deck to the engine-hold they had, of course, a separate hatchway.
This gangway was about four feet wide and so low that if you forgot about it you hit your head severely against the iron beams which strengthened the boiler-walls against the ship’s hull. Like everything else aboard the
Yorikke
these gangways were dark like a coal-mine, day and night alike. Since they ran alongside the boilers they were so hot that a Turkish steam-bath seemed to be at freezing-point compared with their permanent heat.
We, the drags, could find our way in these two gangways just as easy as a drunken mole coming home at midnight. Because these gangways played a great part in the tortures that the coal-drags had to undergo on the
Yorikke
. Through these gangways we had to shovel and to haul and to squeeze numberless tons of coal toward the front of the boilers. So it will be understood why these gangways, and the labyrinths of the bunkers next to the engine-hold, held no secrets for us. Other people, among them our two engineers, did not know these gangways so well.
Suppose the steam, for one reason or other, began to fall. Then the engineer had to do something about it, because that was what he was paid for. Now, the first engineer never entered the stoke-hold when the
Yorikke
was on high sea. A broken shoulder would always remind him that the boiler-gang must not be molested when the ship is in the open. But since he had to do something about the falling steam, he went to the hatchway on deck leading to the stoke-hold, and from here he cried: “Steam goes down!” No sooner had he spoken than he fled away from the hatchway like the devil from an open church. From below a yell sprang up: “Damned greaser, go to hell and stay there. Just hop below, reception service is ready.” And right after this a mighty piece of coal was flung upwards toward where his face had been for a second.
No use to preach to the working-man courtesy and politeness when at the same time the working-man is not given working conditions under which he can always stay polite and soft-mannered. One must not expect clean speech from a man compelled to live in filth and always overtired and usually hungry. Well fed, and sitting in a deep soft seat in an Episcopalian church, it is a godly pleasure to listen to a high-powered sermon about the wickedness of an ever unsatisfied working-class. Make all the wicked sailors and restless workers, after a good meal, sit in the same soft church seats, and they will listen with the same joy as do the others to the sermon about the lost proletarians who won’t believe in God or heaven.
The second engineer, the one I thought a pickpocket and a horse-thief, was still rather young. Perhaps thirty-five. He was very ambitious and hoped to be, some day, first engineer on the
Yorikke
. His idea was that he could show his ability to make a good first engineer no better than by chasing the black gang, especially when the
Yorikke
was in port, for then he was in full command of the black gang. I, for one, did not think he had a chance ever to make a good first engineer — a chief, as we would express it properly. He learned very slowly. In fact, he could not learn at all how to get along with the black gang. At least not with a black gang like the one the
Yorikke
had. Maybe most of us were wanted, somewhere or everywhere, for murder, more or less, or the like, or pretty near the like. Who knows? But no matter what we had been before, and no matter for what reason we had come to sign on for the
Yorikke
, the firemen and the drags on the
Yorikke
were workers such as hundreds of decent ships would like to have and would pay real gold to have.