CHAPTER 3

       Ship to New York

      THEY MAKE ALL MALES BETWEEN THE ages of eighteen and forty-one step out of the line to be saved for the conscription. I lean up the plank and onto the Teutonic. Men with the choppy language resembling the landlord’s pay taker corral us like cattle. They are stewards, and they are English, and they shove us down the dark stairwells of the ship with swinging oil lamps by their ears.

      “Get along niy, ’urry up niy!” They say with tall ruddy smiles over the rat-haired heads.

      “Slime,” one of them counts the passengers by grabbing them by an arm and pushing them toward the stairwell. “Glad to see y’off. Slime. Glad to see y’off. Slime. Glad to see y’off. Slime . . .”

      Another young official up ahead of him laughs at his wit and throws an echo down the long hall, “At’s a way Currington. Oi Whatley! See ’ow Currington’s countin’ the ’eads ’ere, would yu! Funny innit?”

      “Slime. Glad to see y’off. Slime . . .”

      I too am swung by the elbow toward the stairwell and counted, “Slime!” Behind me I hear a man threaten the officials not to touch him and an affray breaks out with a piercing whistle that summons the meanest in the Anglo stewards. They rap the rebel on the head as he stands his ground with a few wild swings he’d been saving for them. A group of women go to yelping as he is dragged back where from he come and out of sight.

      There is only one entrance and we are funneled like heads of beef from the planks and thin hallways and through tumbling metal stairwells in the dark to the stern dorm. To the back of the big girl. And as we are last to board, we are not split by gender nor age. It’s the size of a ballroom, lacking the ornaments and chairs and tables and musicians and dancers. Steel walls, iron floors and not a single facility in sight save piss pots. Not even a sheet for a woman’s privacy. By the time we fill the hall with some ninety souls there’s nary enough cots for the amount of us and so I go without and sit instead against the great unpronounced tin wall. By placing my ear on it, I can hear the gentle laps of salt water touching off on the opposite side and wonder how loud the sounds will become when far out and into the deep.

      After some great wait, a backfire explodes somewhere below us and toward the bow. I hold the Saint Christopher in my fingers and feel as though my life is in God’s hands as I am such a stranger to this great floating vessel. Little do I know that for the rest of my long life I’d be a stranger in strange places, filled with my green, West Ireland memories of childhood.

      Hidden men yell at one another like apes as they stoke a fire in the belly of her. From somewhere, propellers turn over, kicking off the rust and spinning begrudgingly in the salt. A great horn blows above our blindfolded ears outside with a trembling in my chest. Voices above seem to be sarcastically saluting the people of the land as we lurch backward to our staggering. Mothers filled with the ignorance of the Old World and the superstitions against anything mechanical yelp again at the sudden movement and hold on to each other in their fear. Old men too who’ve never seen yet even an automobile in their long lives, now in the hold of a great and mysterious metal monster about whose whim they haven’t a clue. After some thirty minutes of passengers bogging their strange good-byes outside, we must finally give leave of the shore and head south. The waves at the iron wall behind me now spanking and echoing through the chamber dorm.

      The sea is hidden. And to us, doesn’t exist. The great expanse of it is nothing more than rivets and squares of iron sheets and slats along the whole of the room like the blank canvas of the art of the forgotten. An old highwayman is gumming a potato he’s hidden in his humble packs. Chewing as lines and muscles in his temple and pate flex like iron cords to crush the tuber in his gnawing gate, leaning off his cot with legs wide out and swaying with the expanse of the ship as if he’d made countless journeys like it in his days.

      Eight hours go by, my stomach turns with hunger until a child hardly out of infancy hands me a share of bannock bread, “Me mam says ’tis fer ye,” and runs off among the other steerage crew before even I can thank her. But I say it anyhow for it is only right to give thanks, particularly to those who give when take is in the need.

      By now, the fireman’s castle is ablaze at sea and the iron sheets become too hot to lean on. Devils of men bellow out from somewhere we cannot see. “Feed that bitch!” I hear a man proclaim in the tin distance. “Feed ’er! Feed ’er! She’s a hungry one! Shovel ye’re mightiest boys! Feed that bitch and give’r what she wants for the love of ye!”

      I peel off my coat and wool sweater and yank down my tie in order to free the sweat that accumulates on my back and chest. Not wholly understanding why there is such a great blaze on board, I tremble with the thought of a ship fire at sea and just when I feel we are all to die by the flame, she moans a great sigh through the pulse of the deep in an abyssal ecstasy. So deep and so long you’d think it’s a mother dragon receiving the bulbous, tyrannical cock of a sex-crazed wandering wyvern bullmale from some arcane and wretched lore. I stare ahead with a crazed look upon me, ears dedicated to defining all the cryptic sounds around us.

      Now growing angry, the Teutonic pushes forth through the froth. I can hear the men again feeding and stoking in some mysterious contest, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” We pierce the water at a pace of twenty knots. The width of the sea gulps at us in hopes of devouring our negligible souls for its evil quota. The Atlantic foam sucking at us in its great vaginal drink far worse than could ever be imagined in the old seafaring songs of my peat-fire childhood. Never at rest am I, as the hull of the cruiser staves on, flexing and bobbing and oscillating afloat, incising the folds and rocking through the brine as the ancient deep barely acknowledges our shafting it.

      “T’ink dis here’s bad, do ye?” the man with the potato calls. “Ye’d a try it back den when a clipper’s all ye had. The creakin’ o’ swolled wood and the swayin’ fore an’ aft. T’ink dis here’s bad, do ye? Nar! Hell I’d take dis over a coffinship any day.”

      Listening intently to the water, I try to distinguish the sounds of a U-boat. I hadn’t a single idea what a U-boat would sound like underwater of course, but any sound that comes to mind brings a flash of anxiety to me anyhow. My palms are so wet I wipe them on my thighs and knees so that my pants have the look of being soiled. My jaw sore from grinding, nails raw from biting. An hour later and I see the potato man with his nose to the air, shaking his head.

      “Smell a storm,” says he in my direction.

      Sure as anything, we next hear the crack of the cloaked