In those shadowed days when the world was still fabulous, before the rise of clans and explanations before, even, the invention of hulls, the trapped Brace would have been the stuff of legends, of myth, of song. It was certainly a dungeon when Brace became pinned shoulder deep in water beneath a shifting, tangled mire of gear. Brace worked at the task of rigging the pump. In sloshing water beneath the dull glow of emergency lanterns, Adrian’s boarding crew flattened and shored the sea patch aboard Aphrodite. The facts, reconstructed after Howard ran like a skein of snoopiness through memory, the log, and conversations, were largely unornamental and bland. That kid was trapped for days.” Which was, in the creative scope of Lamp’s memory, the truth although it did not precisely match the facts. “The real miracle was,” he would say, “that wind never found us. In the waning days of his usefulness, and with indifference to the ambitions of lesser men who contrived to gain his excellent, shore-going job, it was Lamp’s great luxury to sit garrulous on the messdeck-or, gaze silent, as if he still watched the crash of seas, like a man staring with serene indifference at memory, or at that black gulf which lies beyond all seas. In that large galley, where assistant cooks and stewards ragged and nagged apprentices with dull chores, Lamp was like the director of a small and competent theater. “Brace was only a kid, himself,” Lamp would say. Mother Lamp, who cherished increasingly the wayward souls of seamen, would bustle and tsk and wait until the smartmouth had tacked his short nail of wisdom through the wide, implied fabric of the tale. Always an older voice would snort with contempt, or would curse.
Maybe you shoulda.” Always a young voice would say that.
Sagging laps of flesh hung from his upper arms in that way of formerly robust women who have spent their lives among small cares, small hopes and large ambitions for others-and, of course, in company with brushes and laundry. We were sure of it.” Or so, in later years when cooking at the Base, Lamp would aver.
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