A Tidewater Morning Read Online Free Page A

of setting loose the behemoth into its natural element—of freeing from its uterine dry dock into the strife-torn seas the “biggest, most complex and costly movable object made by human hands” (my father’s words). It had required nine hours, this monstrous parturition, set into motion long before dawn by gangs of floodlit chanting Negroes swinging oak battering rams that knocked down, at precisely timed intervals, one after another of the scores of telephone pole—sized pilings that for months had held in equipoise thousands of tons of inert steel. “A marvel of technology!” said my father. I was enraptured by this sight: the sweating black figures sang in a rhythmic chorus, wild, scary, African. It was controlled bedlam, and it was also splendidly dangerous. Now and then a pole would split apart nastily, or topple the wrong way, and the Negroes would drop the ram with a thunderous noise and scatter for their lives (unprotected to any degree, I might add, by collective bargaining). Their labor ended at the stroke of noon, when two events took place almost together. First, in an act of godlike finality, Mr. Gresham, an engineer colleague of my father’s , hunched down deep in a pit beneath the hull, pressed a button that detonated a dynamite cap, blowing off the top of the single upright that remained. “Imagine such a delicate balance!” my father whispered, or rather shouted above the crowd’s roar as the mass of gray steel, bunting-bedecked, began to slip ever so gently toward the muddy James. What a sight—this new sweetheart of the seas being birthed, lubricated in its passage down the ways by dirty white masses of tallow as high as snowdrifts. The tallow slithered out from beneath the keel in gigantic curlicues and sent afloat to the festive onlookers a smell of rancid mutton. At nearly the same instant that Mr. Gresham pushed his button, I heard Mrs. Herbert Hoover warble: “I christen thee Ranger!” I noticed that her slip was showing, and then she went clunk with the bottle, clunk again at the prow sliding away from her before she solidly connected, showering the Ranger and herself with a purple sacrament of Prohibition grape juice. A week or two later, in one of the newsreels, I actually caught a blurred half-second glimpse of myself, gaping up at my father adoringly.
    But there is something else you forgot, I thought, as I sat in Halloran’s cabin and felt the bourbon warming me, making my lips grow numb. You forgot your father’s voice on the ride homeward: “Someday planes will fly off that ship and bomb the Japanese.” You believed your father as you believed—then—in God, but did not believe this, believed only that it was a joke he was making about war. War was in the movies, war was not something that ever happened, not to Americans …
    “I had this pal in Shanghai then,” I heard Halloran say. “A Marine gunner named Willie Weldon. He was a little older than I was, an old China hand who’d been with Rupertus’s battalion back in the mid-1930s, when the Japs were kicking up their usual shit.” I suddenly realized that I had let my Halloran switch go to the On position, and I nodded and smiled again, half-listening. “Well. Willie Weldon was one of the biggest swordsmen that ever came down the pike. The rank of gunner really fit him. This guy was absolutely crazy for gash. Anyway, I told Willie I’d introduce him to this friend of Svetlana’s . A gal named Ludmilla, a really good-looking stacked White Russian broad who lived in a great flat right off Bubbling Well Road.” He paused and scratched his chin. “No, it was near the Nanking Road, I remember, because Bubbling Well had been blocked off to traffic—”
    You’re losing me, Colonel, I thought, ready to drift away again. Un raconteur de tongues histoires, I wanted to tell him, must be direct, linear, must not encumber his tales with the distracting names of thoroughfares, above all must be deft and relevant, relevant: