The Sea

The train went east for three days and he did not sleep much in any of them.

It was a troop train, the whole of it, twenty cars, and the Second Kansas filled four of them, and there were other trains in front and behind, the whole division going east on the one line a few hours apart, like the boats of the lake shore going out of the bayou mouth one after another in the dark. They sat on wooden benches, two to a side, facing, with their packs in the racks and their rifles between their knees, and ate out of tins, and slept sitting up with their heads against the window or against each other, and the train stopped and started and stopped again, all day and all night, in sidings, in the middle of nowhere, for an hour, for two, for no reason anybody was told, while other trains went past the other way full of cattle and coal and once, for a whole hour in the night, wheat, car after car of it, going west.

Harlan had the window. He had asked for it. He sat with his long legs folded under the bench and his face against the glass and looked at everything, the way he had looked at the slats of Lucien’s bunk on the first afternoon, with patient interest, as if it were weather, and did not say much, and Lucien sat beside him and looked past him at it.

The prairie went first. It went slowly, all of the first day. The grass got shorter, and then there were fences, and then fields, and then more fences than fields, and trees along the creeks, and then trees not along the creeks, and towns, closer and closer together; and by the evening they were in Kansas City in the dark, in a yard full of trains and steam and lamps and men shouting, and when they came out of it the other side there was no prairie at all, and Harlan sat back from the window for the first time and looked at his hands.

“That’s the last of it,” he said. “Till I come back.”

Lucien did not say anything. He thought of the lake from the window of the train in May, the river and the cane and the swamp, and then not the river any more.

---

He woke at four on the second morning, because he always would.

He did not know where they were. The train was stopped, and then moving, slowly, and there was a grey light in the window, and Harlan asleep against it with his mouth open; and there was a noise under the train that he did not know at first and then did, because he had heard it all his life without knowing he had: the sound a train makes on a bridge over water, hollow, with the water under it.

He leaned across Harlan and looked out.

It was the river.

He knew it at once. He would have known it anywhere, in the dark, in his sleep. Wide and brown and fast, going away under the bridge in the grey light, a mile of it, more, with the mist lying on it in long strips and a city on the bank behind them, smoke and spires and the sheds of wharves; and the current going under the train the way it went past the levee at home, heavy, folded, the colour of strong coffee with the milk in it, carrying whole trees down it, a branch, a barrel, the whole middle of the continent, south.

South. To the city. To the wharves, the long sheds a mile long, two miles, where the ships tied up three deep and were grey and had numbers instead of names. To a man with a hook and a brass tag on a string, standing on the edge of a wharf at five in the morning in his canvas coat with the sleeves rolled.

He did not know how long it took. A week. Ten days. He did not know how fast a river went. He looked down at the brown water going under the bridge and thought: this, this water, this here, under me now, will go past him. Some morning. He will be standing on the wharf with the hook and it will go past him and he will not know.

He did not know what you did with a thing like that. He sat with his hand on the window ledge and watched it go.

Harlan woke up. He blinked at the window, and then he sat up, all at once, the way he did, and looked.

“That’s the Mississippi,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s yours.”

“Yes.”

Harlan looked at it for a long time, at the mile of brown water going under the bridge in the mist, and his face did the thing it did when he looked at good earth.

“That’s bigger than the Platte,” he said, at last.

“It is the Platte,” said Lucien. “Some of it.”

Harlan turned his head and looked at him.

“The Platte goes into the Missouri,” said Lucien. “And the Missouri comes in up there, above the city. A little way. You can see where, if it’s light enough, the colour changes. My father says the Missouri is the muddy one.” He looked at the water. “So some of that is the Platte. From your place.”

Harlan looked back at the river.

He looked at it all the way across, until the bridge ended and the railway yards began on the far side and the brown water went out of sight behind the sheds; and he did not say anything for a long time, and then, when it had gone, he said, very quietly, to the window:

“Huh. Then some of it’s been past our place.”

“And it’s going past mine.”

“Huh,” said Harlan again. And then, after a while, with the yards going past, the sidings and the coal tips and the backs of the houses: “That’s a hell of a thing to know about a river.”

---

They went across the middle of the Realm in a day and a night.

Through towns. A great many towns, and all of them the same town, Lucien thought, after the first dozen: a station of red brick with a name on a board, and a grain elevator, and a water tower, and a main street going away from the station with a bank on the corner and a church at the end of it, and trees. At some of them the train stopped, for water or for coal or for no reason, and at some of those there were people.

At a town in Indiana there were women on the platform, a long row of them, in aprons, at trestle tables, with coffee in urns and doughnuts in baskets and apples, and they came along the train and handed them up through the windows, and would not take any money, and a girl of about twelve gave Sol Weintraub a paper flag on a stick and he did not know what to do with it and held it all the way to Ohio. At a town in Ohio there was a band, a small one, a school band, playing something that might have been the march of the Second Kansas or might have been anything, very loud and not together, while the engine took on water; and Lieutenant Whitcomb, who was from Ohio, leaned out of the window of the officers’ car and waved, and nobody on the platform knew him.

At other towns there was nobody. The train stopped and there was the station of red brick and the name on the board and the grain elevator, and a man in a cap on a cart with mailbags, who looked at the train and did not wave, and went on with the mailbags. Lucien thought that those were the towns where somebody had already gone, and the train with him; and then he thought that he did not know that, and that it might only be a Thursday.

Kerrigan slept through Indiana. He slept with his head on the cowboy from Montana’s shoulder and his mouth open and his red hair on end, and the cowboy let him, and looked out of the window over his head with his hat over his eyes, and said, once, somewhere in Ohio, to nobody, I’ve seen more trees today than in my whole life put together and I don’t care for one of them.

---

Then mountains.

Harlan had never seen one. Lucien had never seen one either. There were no mountains on the lake shore; the highest thing in the whole of Orleans parish was the levee, and after that the cathedral. They woke on the third morning and the train was going slowly, very slowly, up, round curves so tight that you could see the engine from the window of the fourth car, going away ahead of them round the side of a hill; and the hills went up on both sides of the line, steep, all trees, red and yellow and brown in the autumn, so close and so steep that you had to put your face against the glass and look up to see the sky at all.

Harlan looked up at them for a long time.

“I don’t like it,” he said, at last.

“No.”

“You can’t see anything. You can’t see where anything’s coming from.” He looked at the hill going up beside the train, a few yards from the window, all trees. “How do they know what the weather’s doing?”

“Maybe they don’t.”

“Huh.” He looked at it a while longer, and then sat back from the window and folded his arms. “Well, I’ve seen one now. That’ll do.”

They went through the mountains all day, in and out of tunnels, round curves, over rivers in gorges with the water white over the rocks far below, and up, and then down; and in the afternoon the hills got lower and further apart and the light came back into the cars, and in the evening there was flat country again, green, with tobacco in the fields and old brick houses with white columns at the ends of long avenues of trees, and black earth, and Black men and women in the fields who straightened up and watched the train go by with their hands on their backs, and did not wave, and did not look away.

And then, in the dark, he smelled it.

He was half asleep. The window was down a little on its strap, for the air, because the car stank of forty men and three days, and something came in through it, cold, on the wind, in the dark, and he sat up.

Salt.

Not much. Not like the Gulf. The way the lake smelled when the wind had been in the south for a week and pushed the Gulf in through the passes, so that the water at the bayou mouth went from half salt to more than half. Salt and mud, and something under it, rot and weed and tar. He knew it the way he knew his father’s step on the gallery. He had not smelled it for four months and he had not known how much he had missed it until it came in through the window of a troop train in the dark in a polity he had never seen, and he sat up and put his face to the gap at the top of the window and breathed it in, all the way down to his feet.

Harlan, beside him, woke up and looked at him.

“What,” he said.

“Smell.”

Harlan sat up and smelled. He put his long red face to the gap at the top of the window beside Lucien’s and breathed, slowly, the way he breathed out on the range before he squeezed. He did it three times.

“That’s it?” he said.

“That’s the start of it.”

Harlan breathed in again. He held it a moment.

“It’s not like an oyster,” he said.

“It’s not the sea yet. It’s mud. It’s the edge.”

“Huh.” He breathed it in once more, very carefully, as if he were memorising it, the way he might have memorised the smell of a field in April to know when to plant. “Well, it’s the edge, then. That’s further than I’ve been.”

---

The embarkation camp was tents.

Thousands of them, in rows, on flat sandy ground outside a town of wharves and shipyards and cranes, with duckboards between them because the ground was wet, and the rain coming in off the water in the dark when they got down from the train at eleven at night and were marched to them by a corporal with a lantern, through mud, to a tent with eight cots in it and the canvas dripping. Nobody undressed. They lay down on the cots in their wet tunics with their packs for pillows and slept the way men sleep after three days on a bench, all at once, like stones going into water.

He woke at four.

He lay on the cot in the dark and listened. The rain had stopped. The canvas was dripping, slowly, a drop and then another. And under it, a long way off and not so far, a sound he knew: water. Not a river. Water lapping, on something, on posts or on a shore, in the dark, slap, and pause, and slap, the way it slapped at the posts under the floor of the front room at home every night of his life.

He got up. He put his boots on. He shook Harlan by the shoulder.

Harlan opened his eyes at once, the way he did, all of him awake at once.

“Come on,” said Lucien.

---

They went down through the rows of tents in the dark, past a sentry who was asleep on his feet under a lamp and did not see them, along the duckboards and then off them onto sand, and through a fence that had a gap in it, and down a bank of rough grass and shells, to the water.

It was getting light. A grey light, coming up in the east, over the water, very slowly, the way it came up over the lake at half past five in the morning, colourless and then not. And the water in front of them was wide, very wide, flat, grey, going away from them into the half-dark to a line of low shore a long way off, with lights on it, and on the water, all over it, everywhere, ships. Grey ones, dozens of them, at anchor, with their lights out and their shapes coming up out of the dark one after another as the light grew, funnels and masts and the long low lines of hulls, and small boats going between them with lanterns, and the sound of a bell somewhere, and gulls.

Harlan stood at the edge of it, on the shells, and looked.

He looked for a long time. Lucien did not say anything. He stood beside him and let him look.

“Is that it?” said Harlan, at last.

Lucien looked at the water. At the colour of it, coming up grey-green and brown in the first light. At the way it lay, flat, with the wind just ruffling it. At the low shore on the far side, with the lights. He crouched and put his hand in it, at the edge, and put his fingers to his mouth.

“No,” he said.

Harlan looked down at him.

“It’s the bay,” said Lucien. “Like the lake. Look at the colour. It’s half and half. The river comes into it at the top and the sea comes into it at the bottom and it’s half of each.” He stood up. “It’s like home. It’s like the lake, only bigger. The sea’s out there.” He pointed, past the ships, east, to where the light was coming up. “Past the end. There’s a gap. You go out through the gap and then it’s the sea.”

Harlan looked east, at the light.

“Huh,” he said. He did not sound disappointed. He sounded the way he had sounded at the window of the train with the smell coming in: as if he were putting a thing away carefully in the right place. “So it’s the edge again.”

“Yes.”

“What’s it called? The bay?”

Lucien did not know. There was an old man coming along the shore below them, a Black man with a bucket and a rake, bent, in a coat with the collar up, walking along the edge of the water at the tide line the way the old men of the lake shore walked the shell beach at the end of the camps after a blow, looking for what had come in. Lucien called to him, and asked him, in English, and the old man stopped and looked at the two of them, the two soldiers in their wet tunics at four in the morning on the shells, and then at the water, as if he had to look at it to be sure.

“That’s Hampton Roads, son,” he said. “And the whole of it up there behind is the Chesapeake.”

He went on along the shore with his bucket.

Harlan looked at the water for a long time.

“Like the ship,” he said.

“Like the ship.”

They stood on the shells and watched the light come up over the water where the bay went out to the sea, and the grey ships come up out of the dark one after another all over it, more of them than there were boats on the whole of Lake Pontchartrain, waiting.

---

He bought the oysters on the Sunday.

They had passes, the whole company, from noon to six, into the town; and the town was wharves and shipyards and cranes and bars, and soldiers everywhere, and sailors, and girls standing in doorways who looked at Kerrigan and laughed when he looked back. Lucien walked past all of it to the water. He did not decide to. His feet took him, the way his father’s took him down the steps under the gallery at four in the morning.

There was a man on the waterfront, at the end of a wooden pier, with a barrow of oysters on ice and a knife. A Black man, young, with a cap on the back of his head and an apron, shucking, very fast, the knife going in at the hinge and turning and the top shell coming off and going over his shoulder into a basket in one movement, over and over, the way the women of the lake shore had shucked at the oyster boats at the end of the camps in the winter when Lucien was small. He looked up when Lucien stopped at the barrow, and saw the uniform, and then something in Lucien’s face, and stopped shucking.

“A dozen,” said Lucien.

“Fourpence,” said the oyster man.

Lucien gave him the fourpence. The oyster man opened them, twelve, onto a tin plate, on the ice, in their own water, very fast, and slid the plate across the barrow. Lucien took one up. Harlan stood beside him, very tall, and looked down at the plate with an expression of extreme suspicion.

“You hold it like this,” said Lucien. “The flat side up. The water’s the best part. Don’t spill it.” He tipped the shell to his mouth and took the oyster and the water together, all at once, and the taste went into him, cold, salt, the inside of the sea, the oyster boats at the end of the camps in the winter and his mother, who had died in the yellow fever, laughing at him on the planks when he was four and spat his first one out.

He swallowed. He stood on the end of the pier in Newport News with the empty shell in his hand and shut his eyes for a moment.

“Well,” said Harlan, after a while.

Lucien opened his eyes. He held the plate out.

Harlan took one. He held it the way Lucien had shown him, flat side up, very carefully, in his huge fingers, as if it might do something, and looked at it for a long time.

“Which end,” he said.

“The wide end. Tip it. All at once. Don’t chew it much.”

Harlan tipped it.

His face did a number of things, one after another, slowly. The oyster man had stopped shucking altogether and was watching him with the knife in his hand. Harlan swallowed. He stood on the end of the pier with the shell in his hand and looked out at the water of Hampton Roads, grey-green and brown, with the grey ships on it.

“Huh,” he said.

“Well?”

“It’s like the inside of an oyster,” said Harlan, gravely.

The oyster man laughed. He laughed out loud, all at once, with his head back, and slapped the barrow with the flat of his knife, and Lucien laughed too, for the first time, he thought, since the gas hut, and Harlan stood between them on the end of the pier with the empty shell in his fingers and looked from one to the other with his patient face and did not see what was funny, and took another one.

He ate six. He said he would not eat the seventh and ate it.

“Where you from?” said the oyster man to Lucien, when they were done and he was taking the plate back. He said it with his eyes on Lucien’s face. “You eat them like you know.”

“New Orleans,” said Lucien. “The lake. The Bayou Saint-Jean.”

The oyster man looked at him a moment longer.

“Thought so,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of you all came up through here last week. Going over. Not your colour.” He put the plate on the ice. “Stevedores. Labour battalion. Couple of them from New Orleans, talking that French. They came down here on their pass and ate them like you, like they knew. Said they was going over to load ships.” He picked up the knife again, and an oyster, and looked at it. “Said they’d been loading ships all their lives already and they didn’t see why they had to go all that way to do it.”

He put the knife in at the hinge and turned it.

---

They went aboard on the Monday.

The ship was grey, with a number, the way the ships at the wharves at home had been grey since the declaration; she had had a name, once, painted out on her bows and her stern, and you could still see the shape of the letters under the grey if you looked, the way you could see the shape of the name on the Marie-Ange under the canvas on the shell beach at the end of the camps. She had been a liner. There were still brass rails on her upper decks, and a staircase with carved wood, and the second-class dining saloon had a ceiling painted with clouds; and below that she was holds, fitted with bunks four high, of raw pine, like the huts at Smoky Hill, and the Second Kansas went down into them by companies, with their packs and their rifles, in the afternoon, by a gangway on the after well deck.

There was another gangway forward.

He saw it from the deck, before he went below, waiting with C Company in the line for the after gangway with his pack on. A column going up it, two by two, in uniform, with packs, Black men, a battalion of them, a long column on the wharf going up the forward gangway and into the forward holds and not coming out again. Nobody was shouting at them. Nobody was doing anything to them at all. They went up the forward gangway because that was the gangway they had been sent to, and the Second Kansas went up the after one, and nobody had written down anywhere why; and he stood in the line with his pack on and watched the long column go up into the forward holds of the ship, and thought of the wharves at home, the gangs of twenty with their hooks and their trucks, and his father with the brass tag on a string among them, and the oyster man with his knife.

Somewhere in the column, going up, a man laughed and said something to the man beside him, and Lucien heard it across the well deck, and it was French.

Then C Company was moving, and he went down the after gangway into the hold, into the bunks four high, and did not see where the man had gone.

---

They sailed at four in the afternoon.

He was on deck. They had been told they could be, for an hour, by companies, before dark, and C Company’s hour was the first; and he went up with Harlan by the steel ladders out of the hold and came out on the after well deck into the wind, and went to the rail.

The ship was moving. Slowly. Out through the ships at anchor, the grey ones, one after another, past their bows and their sterns, with men at their rails too, looking across; and then past the last of them, into the open water of the Roads, grey-green and brown under a high grey sky, with the low shore going past on both sides, the town and the cranes and the sand and the shells, getting further and lower; and the other ships coming with them, eleven, twelve, in two lines, and small grey ships going round them, fast, low, with high bows, throwing up white water.

Harlan stood at the rail beside him and did not say anything.

The shore went away on both sides. The bay opened. And then, ahead, at the end, there was the gap: two low points of land, a long way apart, with a lighthouse on one of them, and between them nothing; and the ship went towards it, steadily, with the low sun behind her and her shadow going out ahead on the water, long, and the water under the shadow began to change.

Lucien saw it. He put his hand on Harlan’s arm.

“There,” he said. “Look.”

A line. On the water. Ahead of the bows, between the capes, right across the gap from one point to the other, as if somebody had drawn it with a finger: on this side the water brown and green, the bay, half and half; on the other side the water green, a clear hard green, and beyond that, further out, going away to the edge of the world under the grey sky, a blue that he had seen once in his life, for an hour, from his father’s boat at the mouth of the river when he was twelve. Darker than the sky.

“That’s where the brown stops,” said Lucien.

The ship went over the line.

He felt it before he saw it. They both did. It came up under them through the deck, through their boots and their legs, slowly, from a long way down: the whole ship lifting. Not rolling. Lifting, all of her, the whole great grey length of her with three thousand men in her, going up, slowly, as if something enormous had put its hand under her keel and raised her; and then going down, as slowly, into a long smooth hollow; and then up again. And there was nothing to see that was doing it. The water was smooth. There were no waves. There was only the long slow lift and fall, coming in under the ship out of the east, from a long way off, from a storm that nobody on the ship would ever see, going on past them to the shore behind.

Harlan’s hand closed on the rail.

He stood at the rail with both his hands on it, very tall, with the wind in his fair hair and his long red-burned face turned to the east, to the blue going away to the edge of the world; and the ship went up, slowly, and came down, and went up; and he did not say anything at all for a long time.

Lucien did not say anything either. He stood beside him and let him look.

“I can’t see what’s doing it,” said Harlan, at last.

His voice was very quiet.

“No.”

“You said I wouldn’t.”

“I said my father said.”

Harlan nodded slowly, with his eyes on the sea. The ship lifted under them. The capes went past on both sides, the lighthouse on the right with its light just coming on, and then they were behind, and there was no land ahead at all, nothing, only the blue going away to the edge of everything with the light going out of the sky over it, and the grey ships in their two lines, and the small fast ones going round them throwing up white water.

“It’s like the prairie,” said Harlan.

Lucien looked at him.

“Not to look at,” said Harlan. “To look at it’s nothing like. It’s like the prairie the other way.” He was quiet for a moment, finding it, the way Lucien found English. “On the prairie there’s nothing on it and it’s all underneath you, solid, all the way down. This, there’s nothing on it either. And there’s nothing underneath.” He looked down over the rail at the water going past the ship’s side, blue-black, very deep, lifting. “There’s nothing underneath it at all.”

The ship went up, and came down.

“Huh,” said Harlan, very softly, to the sea.

They stood at the rail until the corporal came along the well deck and said C Company’s hour was up, and then a little longer, until he came back and said it again in a different voice; and then they went below, down the steel ladders into the hold and the bunks four high and the smell of three thousand men, and lay down, Harlan in the bunk under Lucien’s the way he had been since the first afternoon in hut forty-one; and all night, through the pine and the steel and the dark, the ship lifted, slowly, under them, and came down.