Vestbø

The morning he left home, the sea was a line without weather at the far end of his father's fields.

He was eighteen years and two months and had been dressed since before the light. The wooden chest at the foot of his bed held the clothing his father's sister had made for him the winter before — two shirts of undyed wool, a pair of trousers with the cuffs left long for growth that he had not done, a seaman's cap she had bought from a chandler at Stavanger because she did not know how such caps were made. The chest held also a set of sailor's needles in a leather roll, a small Bible his father had given him at confirmation, and the knife with the bone handle that his brother Peder had given him the night before. The knife had been Peder's. Peder had cried when he gave it. Olav had not said the thing he meant to say when the knife came across the table, and he knew now, shutting the lid, that it would not be said. A younger brother did not receive that kind of speech from an older one. A boy leaving home did not turn back to say it from the door.

His father came up the stair and stood in the doorway, stooping under the beam.

"The boat is ready," Jens Hestby said. "Lars has come down for us."

"I am ready also."

"Put your cap on before we go out."

He put the cap on. His father watched him do it and said nothing more, and together they carried the chest down the stair between them, Olav at the lower end, and out into the yard. Peder stood at the barn door in his working shirt with a pitchfork in his hand as if he had paused in the middle of a task, though Olav could see the hay had not yet been cut. The boy was fifteen and a half and his eyes were red. He lifted one hand from the pitchfork in a small motion at shoulder-height and did not come closer. Olav returned the motion. They went on to the landing below the fields, where the boatman Lars was waiting in his twelve-oar with the sail up and slack. They put the chest in amidships and covered it with a tarpaulin against the spray. His father stepped down into the boat. Olav turned to the yard one last time and saw that Peder had gone inside.

The crossing to Stavanger took all of the forenoon.

The wind was steady from the north and Lars did not need to tack. Olav sat in the stern with his hand beside Lars's on the tiller, because Lars had said it was good for a boy going to sea to know how a boat wanted to go, and the boy said nothing. He watched the shore of Finnøy sink down behind him. After a while he saw the cluster of white-painted houses that was the city, and the forest of masts in its harbor that was larger than any forest he had seen on land. There were perhaps a hundred ships at anchor or at the piers. His father, who had been a sailor himself in his younger days and had taken a bad blow to the knee at Newcastle in the year before he married, stood up in the boat once as they came into the fjord and pointed with his cane. That is the one, he said. Olav looked where the cane pointed and saw a brig at the outer end of the pier, her hull a dark green below a band of white, and the name Sigrid painted in gold on her counter.

"She is handsome," Olav said.

"She will do," his father said.

They came into the pier near where the Sigrid lay, and Lars handed the painter up to a boy who was standing there waiting for it, and Olav carried one end of the chest and his father the other, and they went up the plank in the order of boy-then-father because it had been agreed on the boat that this was how it would be done. At the top of the plank a man in a blue coat was waiting. He held his hand out, first to Jens Hestby and then to Olav.

"Captain Rasmus Dahl," he said. "I sailed with your father's cousin in the Vestbø boats. I am told you make a man's coffee."

"I can make a man's coffee."

"You will be the cook of this ship until Christmas. After that we shall see what else you can make. Come down to the office with me; we will sign the articles; then you may go forward and take your place." He turned to Jens. "You will drink a glass of something with us after."

"I will," Jens said.

The office of registry stood at the inner end of the pier in a building of cut stone that had been painted white a long time ago and was now a grey that the Stavanger weather had given it. Inside, the light fell on a dark wooden counter behind which sat a man in spectacles who had the ship's book open in front of him at a fresh page. Captain Dahl stood aside for Olav. Olav stepped up and gave his full name and the day and the year of his baptism and the place of his baptism, which was Hesby church on Finnøy, and the man wrote these down in a hand that was neater than Olav had ever seen. He signed his name below the last line. The pen was heavier than he expected and his hand shook a little, and his name on the paper looked like a boy's name. He did not mind. He was a boy. He gave the pen back.

Olav Hestby of the farm Vestbø, Finnøy, in the parish of Hesby, the first day of April in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven. Cook, term of the voyage not to exceed one calendar year. Wage of eight kroner per month, with an advance of four kroner paid on the day of signing.

The man read it out in the clerkly voice and the captain nodded and Olav nodded, and the captain laid the four kroner in silver on the counter and the man slid it across to Olav, and Olav put the coins in his father's hand without looking at his father, because he had promised himself on the crossing that he would not look at his father at this moment. His father did not speak. The captain walked out first. In the doorway his father put one of the silver coins back into Olav's hand and closed his fingers over it.

"For a pipe," he said. "A man has a pipe."

"I have not learned to smoke a pipe."

"You will learn."

They drank the glass of aquavit with Captain Dahl in a back room that smelled of old wood and new bread, three of them standing around a small round table too tall to sit at. The aquavit was hot in the throat and Olav did not like it, but he drank it without showing his face, because Captain Dahl was watching to see if he would show his face, and he would not. Captain Dahl wished his father a safe journey back to Finnøy and went out. Then Olav and his father were alone in the back room and the innkeeper was coming with three more glasses and his father put a hand up to stop him and told him they would not take another, and the innkeeper went away again with the glasses on his tray.

"Do not spend it foolishly."

"I will not."

"Write to Peder. He will not say so but he waits for the letter."

"I will write."

"A man who learns his trade at sea learns a great deal more than the trade. Learn both. The sea is a hard school and a good one, and what it gives it does not take back." Jens looked at him then and Olav saw with some surprise that his father's eyes were wet, which he had not seen before. "Go on, boy. The tide is turning and they will want to drop down with it."

He went out first because his father wanted to be left alone in the back room for a minute. He walked along the pier to the Sigrid with his hands in his coat and his head down against the wind, and the sounds of the harbor were like the inside of a church on a feast-day — the bells of the ships, men shouting in three dialects of Norwegian and one other he did not recognize. When he came up the plank he did not look back.

The forecastle of the Sigrid was under the foredeck and was dark and smelled of old tar and tobacco and the close air of six men who had been sleeping in a small room. There were eight bunks built into the walls, four on a side, and a narrow wooden table fastened to the forward bulkhead, and an oil-lamp hanging above the table on a chain. A man stood just inside the door when Olav came in with his chest, leaning a shoulder against the frame. He turned his head. He was perhaps thirty, heavy-shouldered, with a week's black beard and an eye patched with a clean white cloth over the left side.

"The cook."

"Yes."

"The cook's bunk is the top one there, by the foot of the mast. It is the worst one in any ship I have sailed on. Every step the ship takes in a seaway you will feel in your bones. Put your chest under it."

"Thank you."

"You are young."

"I am eighteen."

The one-eyed man did not say anything else for some time. Olav put the chest under the bunk and climbed up and laid out his blanket and sat on the edge with his legs hanging. The man in the doorway pushed off from the frame.

"Thorvald Kolbrun," he said. "Second mate. I am Danish. I came to tell you where to put your chest; you have done it. Go up and help with the deck. They will want every hand free for the harbor work. You will eat at six bells."

"Olav Hestby."

"Hestby of Vestbø, Finnøy. You will be called Finnøybu on this ship for as long as they have a mind to call you so. Do not mind it."

"I will not mind it."

Thorvald went back up through the scuttle ahead of him.

Olav climbed down and went up through the scuttle into the light. The deck was in motion in the way that a city street is in motion, men going about their separate tasks at their separate speeds and calling to each other in the shorthand of men who had done this work many times together. He stood near the forehatch for a breath, looking for somebody to tell him what to do, and a boy of his own age came past with a coil of rope over his shoulder and said help me lay this out without stopping, and Olav walked after him and helped him lay out the coil along the starboard rail, and that was his first work as a member of the crew of the brig Sigrid of Stavanger in the early summer of eighteen seventy-five.

The opsang — the hauling-song that went out ahead of every Stavanger ship leaving harbor — came at one in the afternoon with the turning of the tide.

There was a man on the forecastle-head whose name Olav never learned, but his voice Olav never forgot. He was the opsang man. He was slender and not young, with a weathered face and an Adam's apple that moved in his throat as if independently of him, and when the captain called for the anchor to be weighed and the watch at the capstan-bars bent to their work, the opsang man stood on the forecastle with one hand on a stay and sang the first line alone. The crew came in on the refrain. The boy who had coiled the rope with Olav sang strongly and without embarrassment. Olav did not know the song and did not sing. He bent at a bar and pushed with his whole weight and the capstan came around slowly against the weight of the anchor-chain, and the chain came up through the hawse with a great wet groaning of links, and the opsang went on, and over his shoulder and between the houses of the city he saw his father standing at the head of the pier with his cane in his hand and his cap off. He lifted one hand but did not wave. His father lifted one hand back. Then the anchor came to the bow, and the topsails broke out white above him with a sound like beaten sheets, and the Sigrid took the wind and began to move.

By the time they were out past the fort at Tungenes there was a ground-swell under them and the deck was lifting and falling in the lazy way Olav had not yet felt with his stomach. He went below to the galley to begin the men's evening meal, which he had been told he must have ready at eight bells whatever the weather did to the ship, and he stood at the stove with the kettle heating and began to peel potatoes with his back against the galley bulkhead to hold him steady, and he was peeling his third potato when he was sick into the potato-basket for the first time in his life. He put the basket aside and cleaned it and put it back and went on peeling. When he was sick the second time he was sick over the washbasin. When he was sick the third time he was sick into the sea through the galley's lee scuttle, because the boy who had coiled the rope with him had come in and shown him how to open it. The boy said nothing about the vomit. He said there is a trick to keeping it down, I will tell you tomorrow. Then he went out again.

The potatoes were peeled by half-past six. The meat was boiling by seven. The mate came in at half-past and tasted the soup off the end of a wooden spoon and said a man's coffee, all right, but you may want to consider your pepper, boy, you have been free with it, and he went out, and Olav looked down at the pepper tin and saw that his hand had been shaking on the tin and the tin had been tipped. He set it down. At eight bells he carried the great copper soup-pot forward to the forecastle himself, up the galley scuttle and along the deck with the pot swinging between his two hands and the ship rolling enough now that he had to set the pot down twice between the galley and the fore-scuttle, and when he came into the forecastle Thorvald the Danish second mate was there already at the table, and looked at him with his one eye, and nodded, and Olav set the pot down in the center of the table and stepped back and stood against the bulkhead while the crew came in.

"Thank you, Finnøybu," Thorvald said.

"You are welcome."

"Now eat. You will feel better when you have eaten."

He did not feel better when he had eaten but he did not feel worse. He ate his bowl of the soup he had made and the bread he had not made, and he drank a cup of the coffee that Thorvald had brewed stronger than his father's coffee ever was, and he listened to the men talk without understanding most of what they said, because their dialects were not his and their references were to voyages he had not made. The boy who had coiled the rope was called Henrik. He was from Stavanger, not Finnøy, and was the son of a rigger at the yard where the Sigrid had been careened last spring. He sat across from Olav and would look at him occasionally and then look away.

The watch changed at eight. Olav's first night aboard he was not on watch, because he was the cook, and the cook took his rest when the officers let him take it. He lay in his top bunk with the oil-lamp turned down low and listened. The timbers of the ship made a deep small creak at the roll, and another at the pitch, and after a time his ear learned to separate them. Somewhere aft a man was singing without words, two notes going down and down, and he thought the man might be the mate whose name he had not yet learned. A deck-beam was working somewhere in the bulkhead and he could not find which one. In the bunk below his, one of the two young men breathed steadily. He did not know whose bunk that was.

He thought of Peder standing at the barn door and of his father lifting his hand on the pier and did not let himself think for very long of either of them, because he had promised himself on the crossing that he would not spend his first night aboard weeping in the dark. He thought instead of the potatoes. He had not seen how many were left in the bin. In the morning he would need to know. He would ask Thorvald. He would make the morning coffee strong because the captain had said he would, and he would be ready at seven bells with the porridge, and by the end of a week he would know this ship and the way its watches turned and the way its stove wanted feeding, and by the end of six months — six months from now was Christmas — he would be coming back up this fjord and his father would be at the pier with his cap off.

He closed his eyes. Outside the forecastle bulkhead the sea went on without him.