Chapter 19

Shmuel, Tomasio, and Mikovski were aboard the USS Leviathan, bound for Scapa Flow, the Bay of the Long Isthmus, where American troops would serve with the British Grand Fleet. The third night out, Shmuel relieved Tomasio on watch. They craned their necks at the cold, clear sky, marvelling at the sight of more stars than either thought possible growing up in the city.

“What’s that line in your bible?” Tomasio laughed sheepishly. “My mom beaned me good when I had to repeat catechism class twice. I wish I’d taken that stuff more seriously now.”

“God promises Abraham, the first Jew, to make his offspring as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the sands on the shore.” Shmuel now understood the enormity of that pledge. He’d seen grains of sand on the beach, clumped together. There was something about seeing the stars, each emitting its own light in the firmament, that brought home the idea of multitudes.

“Either God doesn’t keep His promises or He takes His own sweet time about it. Your people aren’t too numerous.” Tomasio glanced at Shmuel. “No offense meant, book boy.”

“None taken.” Shmuel smiled up into the dark. Tomasio’s irreverence reminded him of Dev’s recent defiance of their mother. He wondered if she’d ever have the nerve to challenge their father. “When you talk about my people … I’d rather the others not know I’m Jewish.”

“Not afraid, are you? You proved you can hold your own. Unless you’re ashamed?”

“Neither.” Shmuel swallowed, grateful for the dark. “It’s easier, that’s all. One less reason for someone to pick a fight. Allows me to focus on the real battle.”

“Not self, but country?” Tomasio quoted the Navy’s unofficial motto.

“That’s it.” Shmuel hoped Tomasio could see his smile of gratitude in the starlight. They saluted each other and Shmuel climbed up to the crow’s nest, testing every inch of rope with his quaking hands. After the stillness on deck, he welcomed the stinging wind that whipped his hair, grown long again, into his eyes. It felt like a punishment he deserved, for sins too vague and abundant to enumerate. Two months of sun and sea had turned his hair nearly white, and made it thick and coarse. It hid his strawberry mark better than payess, yet tonight the stain pulsated as insistently as the stars above. The ugly flaw reminded him that he didn’t control his fate. He could run away, but only the Almighty knew where, if ever, he would eventually settle.

By the time his watch ended near dawn, Shmuel was ready to leave the cold vastness of the heavens above for the warm galley below. He sought out the mess table where Hamble Weir, a British sailor assigned to help the American destroyer navigate the mined water of the Atlantic, was regaling the sailors with tales of the engagements he’d already survived. Though barely twenty-one, he’d been in the war for four years, almost from the beginning. He too had lied about his age to enlist, but unlike Shmuel, he’d done it with his family’s knowledge and consent.

“I was at Jutland when the Gerries sank the Lutzow,” Hamble was saying when Shmuel sat down with a breakfast tray of pancakes and ham. “The first tin fish struck direct on her prow. Blighty amazing hit, considering we were zigzagging and belching black smoke to protect the merchant ships.” He described how the explosion made timbers splinter into matchsticks, glass shatter like icicles pelted by snowballs, and steel girders groan as they were wrenched apart.

Mikovski, across the table, said he’d heard that the boilers had withstood the blow.

“Righto. They were two decks below and the compartment was automatically sealed off when the water rushed in. The electricity stayed on too. Eerie how the lights lit up the men dying around us, but the twenty-seven down in the boiler room were spared.”

Mikovski breathed a sigh of relief, as if he too were spared, until Hamble leaned forward.

“Except they were trapped inside. Eventually, the pressure got to be too much, the seals gave way, and the boilers exploded. I’ll never forget the sickening hiss of steam escaping.”

“They die of smoke inhalation?” a sailor asked.

Hamble shook his head. “Burned to death. No remains left to identify.”

The scrape of forks ceased; men gulped air, not coffee. Mikovski looked ready to lose his flapjacks. Shmuel, still puzzling over why the lieutenant had left the fire drill rather than staying to gloat over making him run last, now understood. For Mikovski, drowning was like dying at home. Fire was alien turf. It terrified him.

Hamble continued. “The ship convulsed and settled on her port side, submerging the gun turret. Anything not tied down slithered down the boards into the sea. Radio wires curled up like ringlets in the flames and shredded flags fluttered from the mast.” He painted a ghastly scene of the Lutzow’s deck littered with bodies, some in uniform, others naked as the day they were born.

The galley clock said 0800 hours. Mikovksi rose and ordered the men to the next rotation, but the Lieutenant Commander overrode him and said they could wait until Hamble was finished. Most looked like they would have preferred to leave. Mikovski remained standing.

“How did you survive?” Shmuel asked Hamble.

“Kicked off my boots and put on a life belt. The two lifeboats that cleared the explosion were full, so I fastened a rope to the sturdiest timber at hand and shinnied down the ship’s side.”

“Wasn’t the water cold?” Tomasio hugged himself. Others clutched their balls.

“Warmer than I expected, heated by the fire. The dark was worse than the cold. After the boilers exploded, the only light came from enemy fire. I’m not much of a swimmer ...”

“How did you pass Navy boot camp?” someone asked, “or whatever you Brits call it.”

“Same as you,” Tomasio teased. “Doing the breast stroke and floating like a dead man between laps when the instructor wasn’t looking.”

Laughter broke the tension. Hamble joined in until Mikovski’s cough silenced everyone.

Hamble resumed. “When I couldn’t get away, I was afraid the ship would topple over on me. Either that or I’d be sucked down the tunnel created when water rushed into the hold. That’s what happened to the chaplain after the boilers exploded. A minute later, he was vomited back out, minus his oilskin, but otherwise none the worse for wear.”

“Better to drown than be burned alive, right?” said the galley chief, looking to Mikovski to agree. The lieutenant blinked once, saying nothing, but Shmuel could have answered for him.

“I held my breath a long time, but when I got desperate for air, I swallowed a mouthful of the North Sea. It was like drinking the last tears of the dead men bobbing around me.”

The sailors squirmed. Tomasio asked Hamble how he’d finally been rescued.

He’d been picked up on a raft barely big enough for three, but holding six. Around them, floating men sang Nearer My God to Thee. “Drifting away from the flames, the water got chilly,” Hamble recalled. “A white light appeared in the distance. One man had a torch, what you call a flashlight. It was waterlogged, but it worked. He signalled in Morse code and the searchlight from a rescue ship answered that they’d pick us up. After a long wait, it pulled alongside and dropped a rope ladder. Two men came down and heaved us onboard.”

There was a loud exhalation of air. Only Mikovski was silent. Hamble’s rescue seemed of little interest to him. He was lost with the men incinerated in the boiler room.

“They wiped us down with rough towels, gave us each a bowl of soup and a basin of whiskey, and after we thawed out, they directed us to a wide berth with plenty of blankets.”

“How long did you sleep?”

“I didn’t at first.”

“Afraid of nightmares?”

“Afraid of the silence.”

“After the awful noise of battle, I’d expect a man to welcome the quiet of sleep.”

“During the battle, you get used to the loud guns, the ship’s throbbing engines, and the swish of water. Otherwise, it’s eerily still. I needed to hear the men around me breathing.”

The sailors held their own breath until, at last, they were dismissed. Hamble stood slowly with them. “I’ll tell you, mates, if humans want to see hell on earth, all they need to do is board a destroyer being blown to pieces and taking brave young men down to Davey Jones’s locker.”

Shmuel lingered after the others left. Coming off night watch, his next rotation was inside his hammock. “Is it easier to sleep now?” he asked Hamble.

“Swimming’s gotten easier. Sleep always comes hard.”

***

The Brit’s words proved prophetic. That night, even the gentle rocking of his hammock failed to quiet Shmuel’s mind. Rescued from a life adrift, he had no sense of who he was now. His body wasn’t that of a boy from the Lower East Side, his mind was full of learning absent in books, and his spirit had abandoned the faith of his youth. Like the shaken survivors of the Lutzow, Shmuel was afraid, only his fear wasn’t rooted in the past, but streaming toward an unknown future.

His fingers slid inside his shirt and traced the letters on his ID tag. “S-A-M L-O-R-D.” At last he began nodding off to the lullaby of the ship’s engines. He knew that when he awoke, Sam Lord would no longer be a made-up name. It would henceforth be his real one.