10 - The Ship Of War And Fish

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter

A Novel

For Andrew

e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter By Corinne Devin Sullivan

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS

Published in the United States of America, in November of 2024.

Chapter 10: THE SHIP OF WAR AND FISH

After responding letters were received, this was mailed in the middle of June, 2005…

Floyd, my friend,

When I saw your stationary I couldn’t move. I was so embarrassed.  I must be in trouble for ripping your heart out in my letter to you last month. I was impressed you sent me any response at all. You are remarkable, my friend. 

That said, I must speak…Thank you, thank you, my good and dear and wonderful friend! Thank you for sending support to my inner spirit. Thank you for being virtuous every day when many others can’t take a minute of virtue. 

I am growing up every day, even though I am going to be thirty in a few years. I hate that about me.  

I am going to sail alongside my father to India. I fly up to Seattle early tomorrow. It’s a military-cargo thing called Sassy. Super sweet name! I admit I am looking forward to working alongside Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade… for the first time in my life. 

I’m planning on making something after I experience this due to the supernatural sequences others have already felt on-board. My movie will be based on this trip, but it will be heavy into character actualization. 

I want you to know that I think I found something to write about that is going to take reality and then hand it back over to the people but with sincere respect. It’s going to be called love… not the kind everyone is writing about. This kind is where sweat mixes with blood BEFORE you take anyone to bed. This is where things are for me, right now, in the art world. I am struggling to walk a line fifty feet above the ground.  

I have something else. I have received a voice recording from Dad’s assistant Baxter. It was made last night. I got to hear a barstool rendition of a shaky ghost tale. I spent last night transcribing it. 

Here you go: a classic tale from Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade!!! 

If you take this anywhere you have got to bring me with you. I can’t bear more stabs in the back. Your friendship can be my only dream now that things went bad with my friends in Hollywood.

With my love,

Fiona

P.S. These days I see how I am now transforming internally into a tough girl and it’s all for the part I am about to play at sea—ya know it!!!

P.P.S. Send letters to my apartment because for the next few weeks I will be out in the middle of the Pacific! It will be like the olden days with no pagers or cell phones. We each can have a cheap radio but unfortunately they are illegal in India so we have to throw them overboard. Otherwise, we all will probably all go to prison or in front of a handgun firing squad.  I don’t suppose the ship will have internet, either. 

What happened to be enclosed with the aforementioned letter was this here print-out…

What happened to be enclosed with the aforementioned email when it was later mailed in the post was this here print-out…

The Sea Story that was told by my dad Chief Engineer Declan Aidan Meade Last Night:

It was 1986. 

A friend of mine had a cabin on Vashon Island inside the Puget Sound. Both are located inside Washington State. You can look at the Puget Sound on a map or I can draw you a picture if I ever can get around to it. 

A ship had been floating vacantly for some time. Anyone on the shores could see it whenever the tides changed dramatically. Everyone there seemed to know about its existence. The owner was far from caring.

It was an old World War II cargo vessel. It had been decommissioned at the end of the war. There were rumors that it had carried fallen war heroes back to the States from the South Pacific during World War II. After that, it was possibly used in a fishing company, but no one cared or knew about that.

This had been going on for some decades. The ship bore its name The Yardarm Knot on its bow. There was a rumor that the owners had been planning to sink it, but Jack, my friend, had found out the truth: the owner was nowhere to be found. 

Jack and his wife had an idea of getting a little shipping company going along the west coast. When they first had met each other, in Alaska, Jack worked as the captain of a fishing vessel. More recently, they both lived in Seattle and were accountants where they punched papers all day long. Jack was only a sailor upon the ten-cent movie theater inside his mind.

Jack had to get something new started. The day came along when he suddenly was able to buy the Yardarm Knot without even trying, Then, Jack’s whole world lit up again.

One year, Jack and his beloved wife Terry went up to the government officials and somehow arranged to buy the discarded vessel cheap. Jack wasn’t certain even which ship he had purchased. He knew the Yardarm Knot had been in the harbor somewhere, for a long time. He was counting on getting a ship he could use but it wasn’t to be the case—not at first, at least. 

He called me one day out of the blue. He told me about the cabin he and his wife took vacations at on Vashon Island. They had watched the old ship go by. 

Jack asked, “Since I don’t have time, Meade, and I’m slow on cash, would you get her located and then inspect whatever I got?”

“I can start her up,” I promised him, after hearing the ship’s story from him. 

I headed to the Port of Tacoma. I could always recognize the ship’s particular build. Someone at a café mentioned seeing the old ship drift by last week when he was on his family’s yacht headed south from Elliot Bay. He believed it was going to be somewhere in the East Passage. 

I recognized the signs of fair play. She was drifting all over the place. Probably, she got tugged away whenever she came too close to a port or someone’s waterfront mansion. 

It would be a challenge because the ship wasn’t anchored down. I needed something to get out on the water. I called my oldest brother, Christopher, who lived thirty minutes away. I was counting on him to have something I could use.

Christopher loaned me a flat-bottomed skiff. It was a single-engine boat. Then my youngest brother, Phineas, offered to help. He had been sitting there, at Christopher’s place, all that day without anything much to do. We met at an old harbor. No one else came close to the place, ever. He helped me get the skiff loaded in. I told him I would probably have to stay the night on-board. Everyone was impressed with my resilience. Christopher carefully instructed me about what to do whenever I had finished with his craft. 

Phineas remained with me. We bid good-bye to Christopher as he drove away. Then we headed out into the Puget Sound. I steered and kept my little brother Phinneas as co-pilot. 

Phinneas said, “Good to have you back, Declan. Don’t you know that I’m newly in the Navy? This is my first Leave in a while.” 

Phinneas, being the youngest in the family, never felt understood. When he came along to assist me I tried to hear everything, as best I could do. I gave him a clap on the arm. He had a huge smile across his face. 

The sun was sinking down pretty fast. I was hauling fast on the light craft. 

Neither of us knew where the hell we were at, but suddenly I spotted the old wreck. She was clear against the horizon. The setting sun outlined her there, in the water.

When we got close enough, we could see that any of the ladders or ropes were all lost a long time ago. Every access point for a gangway, and any open door for entry, had each been blocked by securing the ship completely, long ago. 

It was October, and it was windy as anything. The waves were chopping up. They tried to hack our little vessel into oblivion more than one time.  

I pulled up alongside. We didn’t know what might be on-board. I had to get a better view of the enterprise at hand. The light continued to dim. Phineas wanted to climb the anchor chain up to the hole at the top rather than mess around. The chain was apparently neither tied nor set. It swung when Phinneas came to grab hold of the thing.

Things were really moving. The ship herself was moving. It felt like more and more wind was blowing. Each time I tried to snug close in on Christopher’s skiff, the waves beat us about and pushed us away. 

We should have been heading back. All sorts of water was getting into the skiff.  We were going to begin sinking soon. The water was so cold. If the skiff went in, we wouldn’t be able to swim to shore. 

It was a real trouble of a time. 

Phineas grabbed the anchor chain. He pulled himself up. He got all the way to the top. Then he was grabbing through the chain holes. He seemed to be stuck. He turned, and as he called down to me lights suddenly shone all around us. 

Up on the chain, Phineas was confused. Suddenly, there was a light shining in his eyes. He let go and fell about thirty feet. He landed in the water. 

The Coast Guard had been watching. They threw Phinneas a ring. He saw the thing and grabbed on. The Coast Guard picked us both up. The waves drove Christopher’s skiff about two feet under the water, but they still managed to attach a chain and tow the thing back in.   

The sky was now black as pitch. Phineas was cold and wet. I wasn’t certain of what step to take next.

Phineas big-talked his way out of the entire conglomerate of people manning the Coast Guard that evening. We got off with a lot of thank-you’s instead of having to come back and make restitution for our wrongs. 

What was worse was the long drive to return Phinneas to his room at Christopher’s home and then meeting the oldest son in the family standing there in his driveway. Phinneas spared the difficult transition points. In the end, I had to listen to Christopher tell Phinneas and I what took so long when, of course, he certainly wasn’t there for any of it, to begin with. That was too much for me to take lying down. 

The next day, at lunch, I returned to the Yardarm Knot. I just had to get that ship going. I needed to see if she could start. 

Luckily, the Coast Guard had taken care of the little boat so that Christopher’s skiff still worked. I brought her back out into the East Passage. The waves were calm now. I had hours of daylight. I figured I might as well try. 

I skipped climbing up the anchor’s chain until I understood the fastest approach to enter the Yardarm Knot. For that, I circled the 330-foot vessel a few more times. The morning air was silent. Looking at her, nothing was terribly strange. She seemed dismal like a forgotten woman lying on the ground.  

I spotted there was yet another line hanging next to the anchor’s chain. I found it easily in the daylight. With me, I brought a fifty-foot tweed line in a burlap bag, plus a kit for fishing from the Navy surplus store. Nothing else remained inside the skiff.

I used the anchor and the firmly attached support line to pull myself up the entire way. Finally, I climbed over the edge of the gateway on the side of the vessel. With Christopher’s good intentions in mind, I attached the skiff to the ship for safety’s sake. But when I left I quickly forgot about it. I was too desperate to find the engine room so I could somehow start the ship’s electrical systems. Next would be to pull her back into any port that could accommodate her.   

Walking on the main deck can’t be described though the mental pictures now emblazon themselves into the fabric of my mind. Everywhere it felt dank, musty, and eerie, and there was a silence hard to describe. I felt no entry to the vessel was possible as if a strange barrier closed any entry and yet there was nothing blocking me that I could see. There were empty walkways I dared not walk through. 

I felt at ease with nothing when, in reality, this was merely an abandoned vessel floating mindlessly in the Puget Sound. 

At times, my limbs felt unusually light but such a weight bore down upon the nape of my neck and into my spine that I cannot hardly even talk about it today. It seemed to be the maddening vaporous claws of some ungodly force held me by throat. It came and left me as I walked, trying every door.

Ill to my stomach, I walked through it, like a fine mist. I can’t remember successfully using any doors or ports, but I know that I did touch their handles. I ran my hand along the detailed work of one entry way and then stepped away. Detached somehow from reality, this sailor could not abide time. My watch, nor the sky, felt relevant.  

I fell asleep standing there upon the deck until the next day’s morning light must have appeared. It shined in my eye like the wink of Old Man Sea reflected upon the sunbeam that shone so brightly in my eye. By then, I was bundled in the big sailor’s coat I had been wearing. The autumn weather might have frozen my body’s systems up. But when I awoke, nestled inside a coat like a young boy, I felt a sensation like being warm. I felt as warm as Father Time’s arm draped across my shoulders.  

I got up. I shook the dust from my eyes. I moved my shoulders, and I stomped my feet. 

I was hungry, and so I planned to fish. 

With resolve not to worry about the details of my fainting episode the day before, I strung out salmon eggs from the kit. I used the kit’s hooks, lines and sinker to catch any fish I could. Making a fire on the main deck may be inconsequential in this story but it did alert certain people to my being there, alone on the deck, at sea for another night. The time had passed quickly and I slept like a son in his mother’s coat another time. 

On that second night, sometime before the sun would rise, I got up. I was still looking for the engine room. In my mind, it was an ancient trek, one that I made impossible for success by a trick of my own mind. 

Still, yet, I searched around. I explored. I found the thing I was looking for. The Main Engine was covered in soot. Rust went everywhere, up the floorboards and high into the ceiling. I blazed a fury across the night, then, for I saw a man in the same dress as I.  

I can’t tell you what I said to the person I found in the next morning’s light. I don’t remember it well. And, like a vision in a dream, he was gone even as I realized he could have been a goblin or a ghost. I only thought it was strange how I slept at night, on the ship’s deck, like someone had pulled over a mesh on my very soul.

As he wept in the morning light, again I fell into slumber. I remained asleep for one more full day.  

On the third morning, that was when I found the generator and arrested my deteriorated mental state. It was a turn back to reality. The gear shaft, the pull of the weight of the energy from the energy, remained like kin to this sailor’s soul.

I got the electricity going, somehow. It would require one more day before the engine fully kicked in. All that time, I stayed on-board, ate fish from the ocean that I could catch and clean and cook with my own hands. 

During this, a vapor had surrounded the entire ship. I came to envision this thing as a stranded soul from a long ago battle. It was almost a story he said to me. And I set my chin against my chest without remembering how or why I could pose that way, until I died. 

He was once a man with children. His wife was his completely. Never once did she stray for their love was their gold. His children all still wonder where he dies every morning, because he takes them briefly through the wonder of his life and death, each time, but all in a single second which he can recall but they claim inside their minds that they cannot. It happens after the scare of the lonely night, when the sun is finally filling the dismal dark with its rays. The bullet shatters the brain from the misfired rifle of a friend who stood behind him, every day of his immortal life, ever since the day they both were killed during the war. Now, every morning, he tells his beloved children how he missed being in their lives. He could not make it back home for his fair burial, but rotted away like a champion inside a forgotten chamber. 

As Chief Engineer, the movement of the engine comes with satisfaction each time. And as the machinery of the Yardarm Knot began to churn with life and future promise, I was strong enough to know that this man—this milky mind enshroudment whose thoughts rested across the vapor that was smokey and faint everywhere—this man was not the same as me. 

We both pitied each other for he could not remember his name, and I could not be meaner to him by just ignoring my usual friendly disposition. I could not agree to help him if he could not state clearly his name. Truth be told, I could never help him without it being said clear enough to write upon a paper which I would have kept, for him, in my pocket until I found his bereaved and loving family to tell them all of what he had said. He only wished they understood what he could do and where he had been put, in the end. 

Incredible how it all had happened. 

The Yardarm Knot started okay, though, even after all that time.  

The Coast Guard was watching. After three days, they traveled over to see me, and offered to bring the ship back to the safety of the harbor through the use of their tugboat system. They said they didn’t like how she had kept drifting, with me on board. 

They admitted that, suddenly and like a crack of silent lightning, the electricity was roaring and the Yardarm Knot was lit. She was still functioning. They stood corrected. They wanted to hear the entire thing I said to you tonight. I couldn’t tell them anything strange. Tonight is the first time I have relayed what really happened there.

The boys talked about how they had also recovered Christopher’s boat, a second time. They managed to find it, again, and bring the thing back up. I hadn’t remembered to look out for it after I was on the ship. 

This time, I had to pay to get my brother’s boat cleaned. I also had them put a new engine in it. After that, I was the greatest guy alive, in Christopher’s eyes, because I could have just let the thing go. 

“Phinneas thought the worst, Declan, when no one knew what to do for these long three days.” Christopher told me in his parlor, with his wife steadily bringing us sarsaparilla and spaghetti as a late-day snack.

I told him squarely, “Never finish a grown man’s story, Christopher, else they can’t even tell you what to think when they are dead as the fish in the water.”

These are all the happenings concerning the Yardarm Knot that I care to relay in public.

I took a swig of whiskey. When I turned, the whole damn bar was watching. The room was silent. Hard for them to believe anyone could really become such an adventurer as me. 

WRITTEN AND PUBLISHED BY CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN

ISBN 979-8-9909558-0-6 e-book: “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter”

© Corinne Devin Sullivan. 2024. All rights reserved.

Publication made by: CORINNE DEVIN SULLIVAN BOOKS “The Sound Is The Sailor’s Laughter” Published in the United States of America 2024. First Final EBook. Design by C.D.S. Website: www.corinnedevinsullivan.com