Storm Below. Hugh Garner
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over the side of the hammock and dropped in his stocking feet upon the deck.
“Are you coming right away?” asked the seaman, whom he now recognized as the bosun’s mate of the watch.
He shook the last vestiges of sleep from his eyes. “Sure. Let me get my boots on first. How bad is he hurt?”
“I guess his arm’s broke, and he’s unconscious.”
He pulled on his sea boots and unslung his first-aid bag from its hook on the bulkhead. Then he followed the seaman up the ladder.
CHAPTER TWO
Ransome Shelley Bodley — to give him his complete name, although he never gave it to himself except when sheer necessity compelled — was twenty-two years old, a retail clerk in civilian life, who had joined the navy as a sick berth attendant under the mistaken impression that he would be employed solely in hospitals ashore. It was to his credit that when he had found out the fallacy of such reasoning he had not attempted to back out of going to sea, but had accepted the draft to the Riverford with a sang-froid which was as brave as it was pretentious. Now that he had been a member of the ship’s crew for a year he was glad that things had happened as they had. The mere thought of serving as a pot juggler in a hospital had now lost its allure, and the only time he wanted to visit a hospital was on his infrequent trips to Halifax when he could call on some of his old classmates and let them see what a real sailor looked like.
He was a very handsome young man, was Shelley, with straight white teeth, a mother’s boy complexion, and black oily hair which he arranged in a series of waves by a deft, practised chop of the heel of his hand. He was not effeminate, although some of the more rough-and-ready members of the crew were under the impression that all sick-bay tiffies were.
On the morning when he was so rudely awakened by the bosun’s mate he was attired in his regular sea-going night clothing consisting of two-weeks’-old underdrawers, a pair of regulation heavy serge trousers, a once-white collarless shirt, a hand-knitted blue sleeveless sweater (a donation by the Imperial Order Daughters of The Empire of Quebec City) and a pair of black cotton-and-wool socks. It was his boast that the action station bell would never catch him unprepared, and his affairs were so arranged that it was only necessary to step into his boots and pull his duffle coat over him before he raced for the upper deck.
He followed the bosun’s mate up the slightly weaving ladder, and they crossed the narrow space which lay between the wooden safety door at the top of the companionway, and the steel bulkhead, behind which was the small canteen. They went to starboard, passing the forward food stores, and climbed across the foot-high coping beneath the heavy watertight door which gave access to the seamen’s mess deck. Immediately inside the door was the ship’s refrigerator, and as they passed it they looked inside where the supply rating was struggling with a welter of piled-up meat, trying to retrieve a cellophane-wrapped cottage roll. The bosun’s mate could not resist the opportunity to make a remark about the supposed state of putrefaction of the food which the icebox contained. “Phew!” he exclaimed, so that the supply rating could hear him. “What the hell you got in there!”
“It smells like a bag shanty,” commented the sick berth attendant, playing along with the joke despite his eagerness to get to his patient.
They pushed past the open door of the icebox and entered the mess deck. It was a chamber stretching across the width of the ship at their point of entry, and narrowing towards the bow, where it ended at a watertight door opening on a paint locker. The low deckhead was a maze of pipes, air ducts, and hammock bars sprayed with a cork solution to keep it from sweating. This, however, was hidden at the moment by a false ceiling of undulating hammocks which covered every available inch of space, and narrowed the head room beneath to about five feet. The deadlights were battened down over the portholes, and the only light came from two or three sixty-watt bulbs which tried vainly to shed their light through the close-knit hammocks beneath. The furniture consisted of a pair of wooden cupboards containing some enamel dinnerware, three salt shakers and a pepper shaker, an inadequate amount of cutlery, the remains of a soggy pound of butter, two opened tins of evaporated milk, and a canister of tea-stained sugar. Against the after-bulkhead, between the port and starboard doors, was a heavy, wooden, cattle-stall affair which served while in port as a receptacle for the rolled-up hammocks of the seamen. At the moment it was doing duty as the sleeping place for two men who had been unable to find room to sling their hammocks above. There were three tables bolted to the deck, which served as the eating places for the thirty men who lived there, and along their sides were three narrow benches, also bolted down. Around the sides of the chamber were a tight-packed series of wooden lockers, the tops of which formed a wide shelf upon which was stored accumulated duffle such as bags, boxes, headgear, mitts, photographs in frames, good shoes, dirty socks, and such miscellaneous possessions as could not be safely stored elsewhere. Beneath this shelf, but jutting out from it, were the tops of the clothes lockers which formed a long seat continuing down both sides of the mess. This was covered by a number of long leather cushions used by other members of the crew for sleeping accommodation due to the overcrowding.
The sick berth attendant pushed his way through the small knot of seamen and stokers to where Ordinary Seaman “Knobby” Clark lay upon a table, still attired in boots and duffle coat, his face white and strained under its tan. One of his arms was folded on his chest, while the other lay loose and twisted beside him.
“Clear a gangway there!” shouted the young sub-lieutenant, whom Bodley now noticed for the first time standing at the head of the table. He placed his first-aid bag on the deck, and said, “Let’s get his boots and coat off, fellows.” Two of the seamen pulled at the injured man’s boots which they threw on one of the lockers. The sub-lieutenant and another eased Knobby out of his coat.
Bodley leaned over the table and began feeling the arm which lay along the injured boy’s side. As his fingers followed the bones he was conscious that the others were watching him in silence, showing the respect and awe for medical knowledge which the layman usually does. When his fingers felt the rough, gritty fracture below the elbow he took his hand away and said, “There it is.”
He looked up to find them staring at him, and he thought, what the hell, any of them could have done the same! But the fact that none of them were aware of it gave him a feeling of power; and for the first time in his life he basked in the importance which comes with the respect of one’s fellows.
He was about to open his bag and take out the bandages and splints it contained, when suddenly the surgeon’s instructions during his course returned to him. “Never believe that a patient’s only injuries are the obvious ones.” Trying not to show his indecision, he straightened up again and felt the pulse of the injured man’s good arm. Then he passed his hand over the patient’s forehead. “Take everything off him,” he said to those standing around. It was good to be able to give orders which the sub-lieutenant could not countermand. “Get his blankets out of his hammock and cover him well.” As they began doing this he ran down below to the small medicine cabinet over his locker and returned with a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia.
When the patient was undressed and under the blankets he passed the bottle of ammonia under Knobby’s nose. There was no response. He pulled the blankets down and looked the man over for other injuries, but none were apparent. The crowd in the mess, reinforced now as the next watchkeepers were awakened, were beginning to grumble impatiently. To show them that he knew his job he took out the wooden splints and bandage and with a dexterity he had not known he possessed he pulled the arm into position and applied them. Taking a piece of unbleached cotton from the bag he fashioned a sling and tied it behind the patient’s neck.
“How do you think he is, Bodley?” asked the sub-lieutenant. “I can’t say, sir. His arm is okay for now, but there may be internal injuries.” It elated him to mention such things, although he was ashamed of his elation as soon as he had felt it. Knobby was his first real patient in a year with the exception of several gonorrhea cases, a stoker who almost severed a finger in the heavy washroom door, and ten survivors whom they had picked up off Iceland the previous summer.
The survivors had been a disappointment. They had been floating high and dry in a sea boat for