The Sea Is My Brother: The Lost Novel by Jack Kerouac

Author:Jack Kerouac
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Dorcester (Ship), Seafaring Life, Merchant Marine, General, United States, Merchant Marine - United States, Fiction, Sea Stories
ISBN: 9780306821257
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2012-03-19T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

When Everhart awoke the next day, the first thing he was conscious of was a weird song being chanted from somewhere above. Then he opened his eyes and saw the white steel plates. Of course! . . . The S.S. Westminster: he had signed on a ship. But what of the song?

Everhart vaulted down from the bunk, clad simply in his shorts, and poked his head out of the porthole. It was a hot, hazy day, the sun bearing down in shimmering rays on the mellifluous waters of a steaming harbor.

Bill peered up but could see nothing save the sweeping bulge of the ship’s hull and the underside of a lifeboat. The strange singer was still chanting, perhaps from the next deck, chanting, it seemed to Bill, a song of the Far East—yet definitely not Chinese.

Bill pulled his head in and groaned: he had a big head from drinking too much and arguing too much with Meade the night before. He turned to Eathington, who lay reading the Sunday funnies in his bunk.

“Haven’t you a hangover from last night?” asked Bill with a trace of hopeful anticipation.

“Nah.”

“Who the hell is singing upstairs? It makes my flesh creep . . .”

“Up above,” corrected Eathington.

“Well who is it?”

Eathington folded his paper back: “The third cook.”

“Tell me, haven’t you a headache? You were with us last night!” persisted Bill.

“Nah.”

“Who is the third cook? Is he Korean? Burmese?”

“He’s a Moro,” corrected Eathington. “When he gets mad he throws knives. A Moro tribesman.”

“Throws knives? I don’t believe it!”

“Just wait,” observed the young seaman. “He’s a Moro from the Philippines. They go around with knives between their teeth.” And with this, he went back to his Sunday comics.

Bill dressed leisurely. He went back to the porthole and watched the seagulls swoop above the wharves. The water beneath the dock piles lapped quietly against the cool, mossy timbers. From somewhere in the ship, deep in its vaulted structure, he heard the muffled idling boom of a great engine.

He went down the cool gangway, acrid with the smell of fresh paint, and climbed up to the poop deck. Several seamen were calmly reading the Sunday papers in the shade. The deck was littered with newspapers, great coiled cables of hemp, pillows, abandoned folding chairs, cans of paint, and two or three empty liquor bottles. He knew none of the seamen.

He walked forward along the deck, marveling at the sweep of its superstructure curving toward the bow in a massive coordination of timber. At the bow, he peered down the side at the oily waters far below. Directly beneath him hung a gigantic anchor, drawn to the side of the ship by a super chain leading through an opening in the port bow. The seamen, thought Bill with a smile, were prone to call this huge mass of steel “The hook.”

He strolled aft and gazed up at the bridge: slits in the gray wall peered out from the bridge house, where the captain would direct the voyage to

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