Bright Work

Ellis Wren

A United States Navy destroyer, running silent in the Western Pacific, hails a sealed-lift ship and takes one of her crew: a foretopman named Nolan Hollis, a foundling with no people and no paper, whom the ship calls Sunny. He is the best-loved man aboard, with a voice that stops a working deck and one defect: a stammer that seizes him only under pressure. To the ship's discipline chief, Master-at-Arms Orrin Gale, that unresentful beauty is an accusation he cannot answer, and he hates it as envy dressed in duty. Gale baits him with mutiny money, folded twenties offered at a rail in the fog by a stranger; Hollis refuses in a panic and, unable to imagine anyone means him harm, does not report it. Then, in the captain's cabin, Gale accuses him of mutiny before Captain Eli Marston, an austere officer who admires the young sailor and trusts the chief. Marston will not act on a charge spoken behind a man's back, and has it repeated to his face. Struck dumb, Hollis strikes out and kills him with one blow. Marston alone believes the blow was not born of malice, and still lets only the letter of the law judge it. Out of contact with any higher authority, he convenes a board of three of his own officers. It convicts. Hollis is hanged at the yardarm at dawn, and the crew, who loved him, go quietly back to work. The medical officer is asked why the body did not jerk with the rope, and does not answer. A command investigation and a reporter's article later make the foretopman a mutineer and the chief a murdered guardian of order. That version becomes the record. Only the men who were there remember him, and they keep a length of the halyard and polish it until the lettering thins.

Adapted from Herman Melville's novel Billy Budd, Foretopman (1924). Published by TalesReborn.