Chapter Eight #2
Don’t worry about me, he wrote in a letter that arrived just before Christmas. We aren’t in anything heavy, it usually took around a month for them to arrive.
But they were sometimes so chilly that they were hard to read.
Not chilly—impersonal, even though they were addressed to her, saluted her at the beginning, and were signed off to her with love.
Not that her own letters were any warmer.
He’d taken a liking to Fig Newtons, he wrote—that letter, the most personal one he’d written in months, took seven weeks to reach her.
Just in case she was thinking about putting together another care package anytime soon, would she mind throwing in a couple boxes of those, if she could find them?
Also, some king’s crowns from Luzzo’s, if they were still making them? And some licorice?
He’d hated licorice before the war. Living on a ship seemed to have altered his taste buds.
The biggest surprise, though, was his request for cigarettes.
Winstons. As many packs as she could fit into the care package; what he didn’t smoke, he’d trade, though he’d probably smoke them all.
Sorry, he wrote. She didn’t smoke, so she probably didn’t want him smoking, but he admitted he’d been doing it almost from the day he first stepped onto the ship.
Just about everyone smoked on the Teague, and it helped pass the time.
She could imagine. He smoked along with the rest of them while he was spending thirty consecutive hours supervising the unloading of a shipment of cargo.
He smoked alone. He probably smoked when he had no intention of smoking, because someone he was talking to struck a match, lit up, then offered him the flame.
He was unaware, however, of the dwindling supply of cigarettes in the States.
For months, they’d been hard to come by—precisely because the government was having them sent directly from manufacturers to all the men and women in the armed services who wanted to smoke.
But Ruth and Agnes, Margaret noticed, never seemed to be without cigarettes.
They put her in touch with their black market source—not a shady character in an overcoat, as Margaret had pictured, but the elderly man who owned the office supply store on Jones Street.
He seemed amused when she requested a specific brand.
He had Viceroys, he said, and Lucky Strikes. She bought a carton of Lucky Strikes.
She also bought Fig Newtons, and licorice, and some Sen-Sens, and Goetze’s Caramel Creams. She couldn’t find the king’s crowns but doubted they would have survived the journey. Love you and miss you, she wrote on the note she included. She drew a heart, added X’s and O’s, and threw in some taffy.
—
By 1945, his presence had all but dropped out of his letters. He rarely had the need for “I” anymore, because it was always “we” and “the ship,” the same sort of company jargon he’d always used when he spoke of Tuck & Sons. It didn’t, however, make some of his accounts any less harrowing.
One letter began with a description of dehydrated carrots and potatoes (the carrots were like wet sand, he said, the potatoes mysteriously black), but it went on to tell her they’d joined a convoy several days ago and a squadron of torpedo bombers had come down on them—going for the destroyer, not the Teague.
One of the torpedoes hit the destroyer’s port side and must have gone right into the boiler, because the boiler blew, and, soon after, the depth charges the ship was carrying detonated.
He’d been on deck, felt the impact across his ribs.
In less than nine minutes, the ship was on its side.
Felix watched through his binoculars—specs, he called them—as men jumped over the side, down into the fiery water.
Five lifeboats made it away, men covered in oil hanging on to the sides.
There were men aft, too, but they didn’t stand a chance.
One more depth charge and the ship went under, nothing left but debris and a giant ring of fire.