Part 11

I looked up, and there I saw my mother standing in the doorway. She was wiping her hands on her apron and crying and laughing all at once. My first impression of her was of a round, chubby little woman—round and delicious, like a duff pudding that looked so good I could eat it. Her skin was very white, her eyes as blue as the water in a lagoon, and the wisps of grey hair that fell on her forehead reminded me of white sea spray. I couldn’t take my eyes off her—my mother! I had seen her five years before when she came to a lumber camp in Oregon to see Father, but the memory of her was blurred. Father’s romantic picture of her was more vivid in my mind than my actual recollection. She was so different from any woman I knew. Dressed in a faded blue house dress with a white collar fastened with a shell pink coral brooch—wiping her hands on her apron—always will that picture remain with me. I didn’t know what to say to her. She was expecting her seafarers home, for Father had telephoned her from San Francisco. Was I as much of a surprise to her as she was to me? I expected my mother to be gruff like Father but her voice was gentle—she was all softness.

What did daughters do when they met their mothers?

Father threw his arms around Mother and lifted her from the floor. He hadn’t seen her for five years! I felt a twinge of jealousy at being left out. I had always been most important to Father and Mother was usurping my place. She left Father’s arms and gathered me to her. Her hands were so soft and smooth they felt funny as they petted me. She seemed so weak compared with sailors. Her arms didn’t have as much strength as one of my toes. Physical strength was my ideal and she did not have it. I knew she was somebody wonderful but she was going to have to prove it.

“Speak to your mother,” Father said.

I eyed her up and down, from truck to keel, before I answered:

“Are you going to let me have my seagull and cats here?”

Mother laughed and said:

“You can keep them in the back yard.”

With that compromise settled, I let down my barriers of hostility. I don’t know whether I was thrilled at being in a house that was a home or whether I was terrified. I remember I felt shut in and cramped, and my brothers and sister standing around staring at me as if I were a mirage instead of a real person didn’t put me at my ease.

“Joan, you change your dress because it is dinner time. We have dinner for the boarders at twelve o’clock,” was the next thing Mother said.

“I haven’t got any other dress,” I answered. My voice, attuned to the open sea, boomed like a cannon in that small room.

“Don’t talk so loudly,” cautioned Mother.

My mother, to help make both ends meet, kept boarders from the University of California.

“They are professors, dear. You can sit at the same table with them.”

“Are professors all men?” I wanted to know. Mother said they were men, the ones that lived at that house.

“Because I don’t like women,” I added.

My sister retired from the room. She was a very proper young lady and she didn’t approve of me at all. That noon I met the boarders. They were introduced to me, and then they began firing questions at me from all sides.

I thought they were nice, friendly men who were interested in the sea, until they took sides against me.

“Do you mean to tell us that you _saw_ a native child actually being born?” came the horrified voice of the professor of economics.

“Sure I saw it. You didn’t think she stopped having her baby just because I was there, did you?” I retorted. Those professors thought I was lying. What did they know about the sea, anyway? Then, contradicting another statement I had happened to make, came the retort:

“In our civilized world today there is no such thing as slave trading.” The bewhiskered professor across from me brought his hand down on the table with a smack as he said it. He was trying to show me up and it got under my collar.

“The hell there ain’t,” I cried back at him just as hard and so much louder that he drew back in his shell.

“Sssh! Joan!” It was Mother’s voice from the head of the table. I guess she thought I would drive away her boarders.

“I won’t sssh!” I cried just as loud as ever. “He’s trying to make me out a liar. Ask Father, he’ll tell you.”

“Sure there is slave trading today,” said Father grudgingly. “It’s called blackbirdin’ in the South Seas. Some sea captains on sailin’ ships take cargoes of natives and ‘contract’ them for a pound apiece for five years to the planters in Northern Australia. When the natives have been worked almost to death the planters pay the sea captains to take the natives back to the islands they stole them from. Instead of takin’ them back to their own islands, the captains dump their loads of blacks on the first handy island that lies in their course. That’s why now you hardly ever see a pure breed of native in any tribe—the blackbirders have mixed them up.”

“Astonishing!” was the comment of the learned questioners. “Astonishing!” Mother didn’t tell Father to sssh! They didn’t dare openly dispute Father so they turned back on me. First they asked about storms at sea, adventures on our voyages—then they disbelieved them. The professor of economics was the worst.

“You are a very interesting study, little girl.” He rose from the table leaving me feeling like a germ under a microscope. I could see that navigating wasn’t going to be so easy with those landlubbers.

That night I slept for the first time in my life in a regular bed. The sheets felt so tickly and cool and the mattress was soft, but I couldn’t sleep. The house was so still and it didn’t rock! The stillness made me feel seasick. I couldn’t hear the noise of feet on deck above me. My bird and cats were in the hold, or rather what is called on shore, the cellar of the house. And so I lay awake most of the night pitching and tossing and wishing the house would just rock a little bit so I could go to sleep.

The following morning I was up at daybreak. I dressed quickly and ran through the house calling:

“All hands on deck. It’s four bells!”

Father came out of his room and caught me by the back of the neck.

“Pipe down, you. There’s folks asleep,” he said. It was time to eat breakfast according to ship schedule. The boarders were awakened by my cries. Mother served them their breakfast as soon as she could prepare it. When she called breakfast I dashed to the table and grabbed the biggest portion of scrambled eggs and a stack of pancakes and began scoffing them.

“Where are your manners?” It was Mother speaking as she took my self-helping away from me.

“I got here first,” I protested, “and it’s first come first get!” But Mother just couldn’t understand.

There followed a series of days full of bewildering problems for me. The other children on our block, instead of playing with me as I used to dream children would, drew away from me.

“She swears bad words,” I heard one girl tell another.

“That girl off the ship is too rough, my mother says,” confided her little friend. And so it went. Why didn’t they like me? Here were children my own age and I didn’t know how to play with them. Everything I said or did sent them away from me. My own sister and my brothers found excuses to take them away to their friends, leaving me behind. Running her boarding house kept Mother constantly busy and Father was at the ship all day long. When he came home in the evenings it was Mother he naturally turned to. I seemed forgotten. Oh, how I longed for a storm to arise to blow away the fear and loneliness of the land. I couldn’t stay in the house because it crushed me down and the professors didn’t approve of me. I kept out in the backyard as much as I could. Everything was so different on land. My seagull died the second day I was home. I tried to replace it with love for the chickens Mother kept. But chickens couldn’t fly. They seemed as bound down to the earth as I was, away from the ship. Even the roses in the garden had thorns on them. The lilies in the islands were soft-stemmed and lovely. I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t obey my mother because I knew she wasn’t strong enough to lick me. Every night Father came home from the ship and she would tell him how difficult I was to handle.

“She is your child. You’ll have to handle her,” I heard her tell Father.

“Joan will get used to land ways soon, Mother, don’t you worry about her.”

I heard Father and Mother discussing me.

“You raised her—so perhaps you can discipline her,” Mother said.

“Joan is your daughter. If you try to understand her she’ll steer as easy as a full-rigger in a fair wind,” came back Father.

“She’ll drive all my boarders away. Last night I heard her ask one of the professors if he had ever gone through a shark’s guts with his hands.” Mother was horrified as she related the facts to Father. Instead of finding sympathetic ears for the story of my disgraceful conduct, Mother saw Father laughing.

“As if that wasn’t bad enough Joan said this was a hell of a house because there wasn’t a bedbug or a cockroach in it. I tell you, you’ll have to speak to her.”

I couldn’t understand why Mother thought that I was terrible because I acted as I did. She went on:

“The child insists on practising spitting through a crack in the back fence at the woman next door.”

Poor Mother! At that time I wondered why she was so distressed. Now that the first glamour was gone, I looked upon my sister and brothers as jelly fish because they couldn’t lick me or climb or spit or swear for beans. I had been home, “on land” as I termed it, for three weeks when Father announced that he was going to sail. Mother packed his sea bag. Father never had a suitcase. He always used his own sea “ditty bags.”

A shot of agony went through me when I realized he was leaving, and without me. I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t stay on the land. Unable to contain myself I ran to my father and kicked him in the pants to make him notice me more than he noticed Mother.

“Say, ain’t I going with you?” I pleaded.

Father looked at me in a puzzled way, as if he didn’t know how to answer me, then he said:

“I’m just getting ready to sail, Joan. Thought I’d get my things on board all ready in case we get a fair wind that’ll take us out without any towboat.”

That settled it for me. I’d run away. If he thought he could leave me on land while he sailed off to the South Seas again he’d be mistaken. My sense of navigation came in handy. I remembered how we came from San Francisco to Berkeley. I’d go back to San Francisco the same way, but I didn’t have any money. That night when the house was asleep I sneaked into my father’s room and got his pants. I stole a big silver dollar from them and kept it in my fist all night. It was my price to freedom. The following morning while Mother was busy, and after my brothers and sister had started for work or school, I left home. Without hat or coat I took shore leave from the house with only my four kittens for company and went to San Francisco. I found my way to the dock opposite our schooner which lay at anchorage and I told a fisherman that I belonged on the _Minnie A. Caine_.

“Will you row me out for this much money?” I asked, and I showed him a half dollar in change. The old fisherman grinned and told me to get in his row boat, and he pulled me out to the ship, but he wouldn’t take my money. I climbed on deck and bumped smack into Stitches. The old man’s eyes nearly popped out in joy at seeing me again.

“I knowed the Old Man wouldn’t let you stay ashore. I know he’d bring you back,” he repeated over and over like a chant.

“He didn’t bring me back. I ran away.” I didn’t even ask Stitches not to tell. He hid me in the lazarette in a bed of old canvas. The Jap cook brought me some bread and a big can of soup. Fred Nelson was the only one of the crew who didn’t volunteer to help deceive my father about me. He came down to speak to me, but I guess he forgot what he wanted to say because his only words were:

“It ain’t much company for you, kid, these rats what live down here,” and so saying he turned on his heel and went back on deck. I stayed down in the dark hold all day, but I would have stayed there forever rather than go back to the land where everything I did was wrong. Along about six o’clock I heard Father’s voice on the poop deck above me.

“I’ll break every goddamned one of your necks if you don’t tell me where she is,” he said.

I heard Swede and Stitches and the Jap cook stalling.

“I know she came back here. She wouldn’t go no place else, so out with it. Where is she hiding?” he demanded. I heard each of the crew deny over and over that they knew anything about me, then I heard a scuffle. Father was beating some one of them up. I might just as well give up, I concluded, so I climbed out of the lazarette on deck. I faced an angry father.

“What the hell’s the idea?” he shouted at me, but somehow I didn’t feel he was as mad as he looked.

“If I let you give me a good licking, can I stay?” I asked. I would rather have died on that ship than give up. The crew gave me a look with one accord that seemed to say: “You’ve made liars of us.” But strangely enough, Father didn’t try to punish them.

“Get forrard about your duties. What are you loafin’ around here for?” he roared at them. Father gave me a licking with a rope’s end and I swear it felt good. It was like old times again, but when he had finished he took me ashore. My mother was very silent that night. I ate my supper in the kitchen and went to bed without speaking to her.

I was up at daylight the next morning, but I wasn’t soon enough for Father. He had left for the ship an hour before. I went outside and a strong wind was blowing. The sky was clear and I could see the blue water of the bay from our front porch. In the backyard was a giant eucalyptus tree. I climbed it with as much ease as I could scale the rigging on the ship. The higher I climbed the farther I could see out the Golden Gate. From my perch on the peak of the tree, I saw the ships at anchor in the bay. One of them was my ship. That wind meant Father would set sail. He was going without me! I found myself crying inside-like and I kept saying:

“Don’t leave me on land, Father! Come back and get me! Please, oh, please don’t let me die of loneliness here on land.”

I didn’t take my eyes off the distant harbor. I stared through the cold wind until my eyes burned with pain. I must have been up there for about three hours. I was hoping against hope that Father would hear me calling to him to come back and get me, when through my daze I heard my mother’s voice far below me at the root of the tree calling to me to come down. But I wouldn’t come down. Maybe our ship would sail if I took my eyes off the bay. Maybe I wouldn’t see her go. After a while Mother quit calling and went away.

A loud clanging of bells broke into my spell. Glancing below I saw a big red firewagon in front of the house. Firemen were rigging up two ladders against the tree and three of the men climbed up after me. Mother had called out the fire department, to get me down.

“I won’t come down,” I warned. “Go away and leave me alone.”

Instead of coming down I climbed one branch higher. I would stay there until I dropped. The wind was like a soothing hand to my bewildered mind. Up there it was friendly. Silly little fool that I was, I thought the land was all off its keel and it was really only me. I couldn’t adjust myself to foreign surroundings.

But soon, how soon I don’t remember, I heard my father’s voice bellowing up at me:

“On deck, you!” That was all he called, but I came down the tree like a sailor shaken off the foot ropes in a storm.

“Yes, sir?” I said when I faced him on the ground, surrounded by a frantic group of neighbors who had been attracted by the firewagon. There was great confusion and explanations. I stuck to my story that I thought he was sailing without me. My mother didn’t say anything. She looked as if she was crying inside.

“Take Joan back to the sea. She’ll fret herself away here,” she told Father when we went in the house.

“What makes you think I want her?” Father came back.

“You’ve been delaying sailing for a week. Your cargo is on board; you’ve had fair winds off shore; now you come and tell me your sailors have refused to ship out with you because Joan’s leaving is a bad omen—and yet you didn’t fight about it. If you told the truth to yourself it would be that you don’t want to go without Joan. Take her back with you.”

I could have kissed my mother, and I would have if I hadn’t thought it was too sissy to do it.

Father hotly denied that he had held up sailing on account of me, but he didn’t look mother in the eye when he blustered:

“I’m sailin’ on the flood tide tonight, Mother, and Joan goes with me.”

True to his word Father sailed that night and I was on board. After helping set sail, I climbed to the crosstrees where I watched the receding lights of the harbor disappear into a foggy bank of night. A snorting breeze carried us out the Golden Gate past the Farallone Islands, and beyond the moan of the bell buoy on the shoals. Our bow was pointed due west. The jibboom plunged under rising swells and shook itself free. The ship rolled and groaned as if she were relieved in her freedom from anchorage. I heard six bells ring below, and the watch was set. Nelson was at the wheel, Stitches was singing on the fo’c’s’le head, and the dim glow of Father’s pipe traced his paces from the binnacle to the rail and back, and I, up in the spanker crosstrees thumbed my nose at the land we left far astern.

[Illustration]

15 From the region of floating mountains of ice to the Island of White Natives

“We’ll have to dodge the hurricanes south of the Equator this trip,” said my father to the mate, as we sailed out of Adelaide, South Australia, with a load of salt for the States. “With a dead weight on board of wet salt it’ll be too dangerous to try to outride the storms at this time of the year.”

It was April—just the beginning of tropic winter time. By the time we had sailed south of Tasmania and had circled the South Island of New Zealand, which would take about two months, we would be right in the midst of the worst weather of the year.

“We better get the fog horn out and the riding lights trimmed if you’re going to take that south passage, Captain,” observed the mate. “Them fogs and mists from the Antarctic are mean beggars.”

I was soon to find out why the mate referred to the Antarctic as mean. Father had set a course around to the southward of Tasmania. For three weeks we sailed with fair wind and clear skies, and then the fair wind gradually changed to a stinging sharpness. The skies misted up in a sort of transparent fog, and mirages appeared on the horizon. Mirrored against the indefinite horizon were two islands with tropical foliage seemingly floating in space. The mirage is a dangerous thing to mariners, for it confuses even the most careful navigation.

“Joan, you ain’t much use, you go on the fo’c’s’le head and turn the foghorn, three short blasts a minute, then one long one,” said my father.

“Are you afraid of running into another vessel down here?” I asked.

“Not a chance of sighting even a hunk of driftwood, but the marine law says we have to squawk a foghorn when we get in the iceberg region.”

I had never seen an iceberg, and I was over-eager to be on the lookout on the fo’c’s’le head to sight the first one. Our foghorn was a contraption that looked like a big coffee grinder. It was green with tarnish and thick with rust. I took my position just port of the capstan and ground away. I was rewarded by a rasping grunt. It took all my strength to spin the handle around just to make one blast. In spite of the cold I soon got very warm trying to make the three short and one long blasts come. Father came forward and watched me straining away on it. He grinned at my exhaustion and said he thought that would keep me out of deviltry for a while, or make me so tired that I’d be willing to sleep and give him a respite from watching me.

The noise of the horn began to echo back at me in an eerie tone. I called to Father:

“We must be near land. The echo is coming back at me strong.”

He dashed to the fo’c’s’le head, and peered into the thickening mush of fog. The sea was so still that every sound became magnified. In a few minutes the suck-suck sound of water washing against some bulk came to our ears.