The Night

They were called at five, and they came up in the dark without being told twice.

The ship had been on modified watch since the fog, and the fog was still on her, thick and warm, and the deck lights were down, and the men came up the ladders in their coveralls and watch caps and stood in the places their leading petty officers put them, which is a thing a crew can do in the dark with its eyes half shut, the way a herd does it. Three hundred and thirty of them filled the after half of the deck, and the only sounds were the shuffle of their feet on the non-skid and the water going along the hull.

Holloway came up with his division and found himself a place at the break of the deck where he had stood for a good deal longer than most of the men around him had been alive. He had been watching this crew for six weeks the way a farmer watches weather, and he had known since the night the fog came down that the thing that had been building in her was going to arrive, and here it was, arriving, in the dark, at ten past five in the morning, and all he could feel about it was the particular tiredness of an old man who has been right and has got nothing for it.

Forward of the break, the marine guard stood under arms along the port side with their rifles at order and their faces doing nothing. The wardroom was ranged along the starboard side, Ferris at their head, and the surgeon further back where the dark was, and the chaplain in her rain jacket with her collar turned up, standing at the rail away from the rest of them, looking forward into the grey.

And at the break of the quarterdeck, facing forward, with his cap on and his hands behind him, Captain Marston.

He waited until the last man was up and the deck had stopped moving, and then he told them.

He told it short, and he told it without ornament, and there was not one word in it that a lawyer would have had to cross out. He said that the ship's chief petty officer was dead. He said that the man who had struck the blow had been tried in his own cabin, that morning, by a board of three of this ship's officers, under a standing directive of the fleet; that the board had entered a finding and a sentence; that the sentence was death; and that the sentence would be carried into execution at the yardarm at first light, aboard this ship, before the sun.

He did not say the word mutiny, and Holloway, who had been in the Navy since before the captain, noticed that he did not say it, and understood that the leaving-out had been thought about and decided, and did not know whether to call it mercy or judgment.

He did not tell them to keep order. He did not preach. He said that the chief had been committed to the sea in the dark with the honours of his rate, and that the man's body would follow it within the day, and that afterward the ship would go on with her tasking. And then he said:

"That is all I have to tell you. Some of you knew him. All of you know what is going to happen. I am not going to tell you how to feel about it, because it is not a thing a captain has any business telling men. Stand by your divisions."

And he stopped.

And then came the silence.

Holloway had been in the Navy thirty years and had heard everything a ship can do with its voice. What he had never heard, until that morning, was three hundred and thirty men standing in the dark on the deck of a warship and not making one sound at all.

It was not the silence of a library. It was the silence a body makes when it has been hit somewhere it cannot reach. Holloway stood in the middle of it and felt every hair on his old arms stand up.

Then it started -- the low kind of sound that comes up out of a crowd when a crowd has heard something and has not yet decided what to do with it. It began somewhere aft, a muttering, no words in it, and it moved forward through the men the way a swell moves through a mooring, and it was beginning to rise.

The boatswain's mate of the watch, a kid of twenty-two, took the pipe out of his pocket. And that was the moment, and Holloway saw it, and it was the reason he would say afterward that the captain was the strangest man he ever served under and that he was not sure he had ever been wrong about him. Marston, on the quarterdeck, held up one hand -- not a command, nothing like a command, just the flat of his hand held low and still, which the kid read the way every man on that deck read it: not now. And the kid put the whistle back in his pocket and did not blow it.

And the murmur, which had been going to become a shout, did not become one. It went on for a while and then it went down, the way water goes down out of a boat, and what was left when it had gone was the dark deck and three hundred and thirty men looking at the deck under their feet, and that silence was worse than the murmur had been and worse than a shout would have been, because a shout is a thing you can answer.

"Divisions, dismiss," Ferris said, quietly.

And they went, without hurrying, in the order they had come, down the ladders and into the ship, and the ladders took them one at a time the way they always took them, and the sound of three hundred men going below and going back to their racks and their watches was the perfectly ordinary sound of a ship getting on with the morning, which was the worst thing about it.

Holloway did not go below. He stood until the deck was empty and the marine guard dismissed and the officers gone, and watched the captain, who had not moved from the break of the quarterdeck and was looking forward into the fog at nothing, and Holloway knew, because he knew every noise that ship made, exactly where the yardarm was up there in the dark, and he thought about the chief for the first time that morning, and about what a man gets for being right about somebody.

Then he lit a cigarette he was not supposed to have and went and sat down in his deck chair on the boat deck in the dark and waited for the light like everybody else.

They put the irons on him at half past five.

Nobody enjoyed it. That was the thing about that ship, and nobody ever got it into the record: there was no man in her who wanted the job. The chief of the watch came aft with the irons under his arm and the marine stepped out of the way and the door was opened and the three of them stood in the little compartment in the dark, the chief of the watch and the marine and the man, and the chief of the watch said, in a voice that had gone a size too small for him, that he was sorry, that the captain had ordered it, that it was a formality and he hated it.

"It's all right," the foretopman said.

He held his hands out himself. That was the part the chief of the watch told Holloway about the next day, in the passageway, with his voice not all the way back: that the man put his own wrists out into the dark, one after the other, the way a man offers a hand to be shaken, and the irons went on, and the chain made its small sound against the deck, and the man sat back down on the bench with his hands in his lap and said thank you.

They left the light on in the passageway outside the door and turned the one inside it off, and the marine stood on the door, and the ship went on.

Lieutenant Miriam Osgood came at twenty to six with a folding chair and a cup of coffee she did not drink, and the marine let her in and shut the door and she sat down facing him with her hands around the cup and told him the truth.

She was fifty-one years old and had been a civilian hospital chaplain before she was ever in the Navy and she had come to the service late, and she had a face that had stopped being surprised at anything a long time ago and a voice that made people tell her things. She did not begin with God and she did not begin with the sea and she did not begin with any kind of comfort.

"Nolan," she said. "You are going to be killed at first light. In about half an hour. I am not going to tell you that it is God's will, because I do not know whose will it is, and I am not going to tell you it is going to be all right, because it is not. I want you to know that first, before we say anything else, because a great many people in this situation get lied to by a chaplain, and I have never done it and I am not going to start with you."

He looked at her. He was sitting on the bench with his hands in the irons in his lap and his coveralls not clean and his hair still wet, and he looked at her the way he looked at everything, with the whole of his face.

"Okay," he said.

"That is all I have that is certain," she said. "The rest of what I have is this: whatever happens in the next half hour, I will be standing where you can see me. I will not look away. If you look at me I will look back at you. If you would rather I say nothing, I will say nothing. I am not here to make you ready. I am here so that you are not alone, and those are two different jobs, and only one of them is mine."

He thought about that, the way he thought about everything, all the way through. Then he asked her the first of the questions that people ask, and he asked it plainly, because he did not know any other way to ask anything.

"Will it take long."

"I don't know," she said. "I have never watched it. Men who have tell different things. I am not going to make one up for you."

"Does it hurt."

"I don't know that either," she said. "Some say no. I will not tell you I know, because I don't."

"All right," he said.

There was a while then when neither of them said anything. Outside the door the marine's boots moved on the deck plate and the fog stayed on the ship and the ship went on through it at two-thirds speed, and Osgood sat with a cup of cold coffee in her hands and let the quiet be a quiet, because she had learned thirty years before that the worst thing you can do to a man in a room like that is fill it with your own voice.

Then he asked her the question she had been dreading, and it was not any of the ones she had prepared for.

"Do they think I hated him."

She did not answer straight away. She had made a rule with herself about straight away.

"No," she said. "That is not what they think."

"What do they think."

"They think you are the man you are," she said, "and that the man you killed did a thing to you that they cannot see, and that a machine they all live inside came down on you instead of on him, and that there is nothing any of them can do about it, and they are going to have to stand on the deck and watch it and then go back to work." She looked at him. "I am telling you the truth because you asked me, and I want you to hear the whole of it, because the answer to what you are going to lie down with matters and I am not going to hand you a small answer in place of the real one."

He sat with that. And then he said, and it came out of him whole, with no stopping anywhere in it: "Then it's all right."

And that was the moment, Osgood said afterward, that she had to look at the deck plate between her boots; she had sat with a fair number of dying people and had never once been in a room where the man on the way out did the consoling.

"Would you like to pray," she said, when she could.

"I don't know the words," he said.

"The words don't matter."

"I'd rather sing," he said. "If that's all right."

She said it was.

So he sang.

He did not stand up and he did not lift his voice; he sat on the bench with the irons in his lap and he sang the way he had sung on the yardarm and in the lee of the hangar and in the dark for nobody, half under his breath, a hauling song off a working deck, four lines of it, the tune of it plain and slow and made to be sung by a lot of men at once who have to pull on the same beat:

Away, away, and the long swell under, Away, away, and the land astern, and a man goes down with his mates together, and the sea goes over, and the lamps go on.

He sang it twice. The second time he did not get all the way through, and he stopped and sat with his head up, and Osgood, who was not a musical woman, sat with her cold cup and heard the whole ship listening.

The marine outside the door heard it. The two men in the compartment beyond the bulkhead heard it through the vent. And a storekeeper's mate coming aft with a clipboard stopped in the passageway and stood through the whole of the second verse, and did not go on about his errand, and afterward told people what he had heard and could never tell it right, because it was not a performance and not a hymn and was not even sad in the way a song is sad; it was a man who would be dead before the sun, singing the way he sang when he was working and happy, because that was the only way he knew.

And when the watch struck the hour, the sound of it came down through the deck and into the little compartment aft, where the two of them sat on either side of the irons, and neither of them said anything about the bell.

Marston heard it, too. He was in his cabin, and the door was shut, and he had the ship's log open in front of him with the morning's entry begun and stopped in the middle of a line, and he heard the bell and he heard, faintly, at the very edge of hearing, through a bulkhead and a passageway and a door, a voice singing something slow. He did not know what it was. He knew what it had to be; there was only one man in the ship it could be, and the knowledge of that went through him like a wire drawn tight.

He had the record open in front of him: the warrant, the accusation, the objection, the finding, the sentence, all of it in his own hand and in Ferris's and in Banerjee's, four sheets of paper in a ship four hundred miles from anywhere with the link down and the fog on the windows. He had been as exact as a man can be. He had said every true thing he knew how to say. He had told the board everything and he had told it in order and he had refused nothing that was true, and every word of it was going to be read, in time, by people with clean desks, and every word of it was going to hold.

And none of it had the boy in it.

The chart stood rolled in the corner behind the door where somebody had put it, and he thought, the way he had thought a hundred times in his life, of the fix: the small cross in pencil, taken by hand that morning with a sextant and a stopwatch and an almanac, arithmetic laid over a guess, the last true position of the ship before the fog shut her down. He had always been able to take a fix. That was the whole of his pride, that and the writing; that he could find where he was, by himself, with no help, in any weather, and write it down, and be right.

He looked at the record. Then he looked at the door where the chart was.

Then he said the name.

He did not say the one on the manning sheet. He said the other one, the one the crew had put on him in the first week, the one that had gone through the ship the way water goes through a screen door, and that he had never once said out loud in six weeks, and that no captain uses.

"Sunny," he said.

And the word went out of him into the cabin and stopped, and there was no other sound in that ship but the machinery and the water and the men standing to a morning they had not asked for, and the fog holding her like a hand. He told me about it himself, eleven years later, on a bench outside a hospital with a coffee going cold in his hand, and he told it the way a man confesses a crime he cannot be charged with.