Joan Ratcliffe The Incessant

The Incessant

joan ratcliffe

Ican still see the sickened look on my father’s face—the twirling madness of the blue eyes unbelieving—when he told me as a teenager that “those two people”—meaning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—should never have gone to the electric chair. And nobody in their family would even step up to adopt their two orphaned children. Dad cursed the U.S. government over and over—there was more going on in his head, appalled at every turn, than he would let out, probably for fear of being called a communist.

One time, sitting in the back seat of the car as we drove through the Dracut woods returning from our grandparent’s house in Methuen, I asked him, “Dad, are you a communist?”

“No, I’m a socialist.”

On the way home that day, we stopped at the Finn’s house to pay a visit, and my parents went in for the first time to meet this family, who a mailman in our neighborhood had said received incriminating mail in brown wrappers. “He shouldn’t be talking like that,” Dad responded, as we passed Brox Farm, the apple orchards of East Dracut, and the entrance to the pond dotted by cabins where we swam with cousins of screen door summers.

Running up the steps into the house to see my schoolmates, I was sent back out to get my parents, who came in smiling—especially my father—to greet these wonderful people who had a bunch of kids—with a great picnic table in the kitchen for the chow hounds who wouldn’t dare miss the dinner bell—the colossal casseroles of their saintly mother gone in a swoop of hands; coming out, my father grinning and finally being asked the question of all questions from his eldest daughter, and incriminating himself irrevocably in my heart, glad.

He had never quite explained how it had happened—and I never understood until later— but he had somehow become the only leftist in his Republican family. But there was one story he liked to tell, which might hold a clue to Dad’s pure paranoia.

During the Second World War he had been hospitalized at the Naval Hospital at Quonset Point, Rhode Island, after receiving his vaccinations to go overseas. The hospitalization went on for a year or more, during which time he had been severely ill and confined to a wheelchair. I’ve never been able to ascertain exactly what disease he had—and he had only a vague idea himself—but he claimed it had been something exotic, and possibly more than one disease. He insisted he had been a “guinea pig” for some experimental vaccine, and “they”—the “bastards”—had purposely given him the disease.

Dad had a postcard of the USS Incessant—an Admiral class, the largest of the minesweepers charged with anti-submarine warfare—on which he had been consigned after recovering sufficiently enough for the government to try to kill him a second

time. He’d point to a tiny window around the middle of the ship and say with a straight face “that’s me in the window peeling potatoes”—his duty for being an incessant pain in everyone’s ass. I still look for him in that window, and one day I’ll see him again if life is not the cruel joke I take it to be.

The Incessant “swept” mines—a phrase that makes it sound like a housekeeping chore— in the harbors of southern France and Italy, in spite of man-made fishes coming at them. Several different types of torpedoes were developed in someone’s killing mind—Dad had a cloth badge showing one of the mines that looked like a round black booby trap bobbing in the water.

The word torpedo comes from the Latin torpere (to stun) and also from a fish called the “electric ray”—(in the order of Torpediniformes). The electric ray has a round body and two organs that can produce an electrical discharge of up to 220 volts. But a man-ray is of another order and form of fish: I refer to the human torpedo, a type of diver propulsion vehicle, which was a secret naval weapon used by the Italians before they came over to the Allied side, and later adopted by the British. Dad saw a lot of these electric man-rays flying through the water in French and Italian waters, an awesome sight with two divers riding astride. When they steered the warhead up to the ship, they would detach the incredible limpet mine and then ride the jig off, presumably as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

My father to me was Billy Budd, a mutiny of one. He claims he spent a lot of time in the “brig” on the Incessant. After incessantly missing port call in Virginia and North Carolina due to drunken, mischievous behavior, my father—who was married at the time and one of the oldest enlisted men on the ship at twenty-two—was awakened one sun-up by the captain and marched to the deck. There he stood at attention in front of a firing squad, the captain’s arm raised—I don’t know if they bothered to wake the bugler—but in that second of a heartbeat passing before glazed, frightened eyes, he prepared to meet his maker.

In the next second, the captain called off the bluff, saying, “I’d like to shoot you, but where we’re going tomorrow, you’ll be dead soon enough.”

My brother has the theory that Dad was being punished by the Captain because he was managing the card games on the ship, which were run by enlisted men so that the officers remained clean—not touching any of the loot. Dad had been recruited to run the officer’s gambling, and he may have crossed someone or been a wise guy of some sort. Or maybe he was dealing bad hands to the Captain. Or maybe my theory is correct: Dad was just an incessant pain in the ass—a boil on the cheeks of authority.

As time would tell, the Captain’s words proved true. The Incessant was employed as a minesweeper escort in the Mediterranean; into Sardinia and Palermo, Sicily, the enlisted men strode to the stares of children with moonful eyes in forever visions of redemption. The 1955 film To Hell and Back brought the invasion of Italy to the war propaganda screen in glory detail, where a slight, underprivileged American soldier, played by Audie Murphy as himself, takes over a burning tank and really gives it to the krauts.

One of Dad’s essential explanations for almost everything was: “that’s propaganda.” In actuality, the Italian Campaign (September 1943 to May 1945) placed Allied troops on the European mainland for the first time, against the Italians and Germans, and it degenerated, history books tell us, into a war of attrition (I’ve seen it described as “a grinding and attritional slog against skillful, determined and well-prepared defenses.”)

Yes, an attritional slog. Give ‘em hell.

On the beach at Salerno, troops were met with a loudspeaker proclaiming in English: “Come on in and give up. We have you covered.” American troops were too thinly spread, and some divisions were completely “vaporized” by German tanks. By December, the conditions on land were terrible: roads had disappeared, bridges had been washed downstream, and artillery had to be pulled by bulldozer through blizzards and snow drifts.

Dad said some of the men had made holes in their boots in the summer so their feet could breathe in the heat, not realizing they wouldn’t get a new pair in the winter. There were many foot amputations over that freezing winter after gangrene set in.

When the bloody campaign in Italy was over, there would be 312,000 Allied deaths and 536,000 German deaths in this theater alone—bad planning, terrible weather conditions and “mistakes by commanders” were blamed for the high death toll. Dad survived this atrocity only to move on with the Incessant to perform air-sea rescue work in the Black Sea, and in the Ukrainian port city of Sevastopol.

After escorting President Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, “The Big Three” conference as it’s now known in history—Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin attended this meeting in February 1945—the USS Incessant returned with two battle stars. Dad told us that all these grown men cried openly when President Roosevelt passed away.

Like a lot of veterans of early wars, my father didn’t talk about his experiences in much detail. He did us a favor by keeping it simple: “I thought every day was my last,” he’d say. It would take another couple of demon-inspired wars for people to realize these men needed help with their grief and night horrors. During the Vietnam era, he would say that it was about time veterans were coming home to counseling and a little empathy, since that sort of behavior had been discouraged in his time.

The Incessant moved on to Pearl Harbor after the war’s end to do “cleanup” work, but by that time my father had returned home, a pacifist—never again to trust the United States government—to pick up the pieces of his young family and wife, who had been put to work in the war factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

In the alleyways between the tenement houses of the poorest of the poor we ran snottynosed, and in the evenings shouted across fences and clotheslines to other kids in other windows. By this time, Dad had become a union leader for the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and held union meetings in our apartment. I remember men sitting around the kitchen table drinking glasses of beer and saying hello to me and my sister as Dad doled out quarters for a movie—and off we’d go across the city bridge to see Frankie and Johnny or Beach Blanket Bingo. This was a delirious time before movie ratings, when you didn’t have to be “this tall” or accompanied by an adult. We saw stuff that went way over our heads, but we filled in the blanks, as kids do, with more blanks.

One day my father talked his brother into going in half on a tiny cabin he found on nearly an acre in Dracut—a suburb of Jack Kerouac’s Lowell where Jack had imagined, and I later read with glee, that the caped Dr. Sax lived in an underground bunker. The price was $500. It was to be a shared summer camp for the two families, but when my aunt got a load of the shotgun shack on the edge of a swamp—where bullfrogs croaked, crickets chirped, and mosquitoes chomped—she was too hoity-toity and would have none of it. So Dad repaid uncle on a time plan, and we spent summers there, although there was no indoor hopper and in August a dry well.

Dracut, on the border of New Hampshire—founded in 1701-1702—got its name from Draycott in England. The Pawtucket Indian name for Dracut was Augumtoocooke, which means “wilderness north of the river”—meaning the Pawtucket River. In the 1650s, Indian land in Augumtoocooke, Pawtucket and Wamesit was bought up for small sums, usually barter—which is interesting in light of what Dad paid for the property from the old man who had lived in the house.

Mom—who was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec—made us a home in the old wilderness sticks of Dracut on the edge of Beaver Brook. She preferred the city—where she could leave us kids with her mother and go off to a movie for a few hours, but like a trooper she went to Dracut. Summers she gave us baths in a fold-up canvas Boy Scout bathtub in the backyard. We ran shirtless in old man Boumil’s cornfield bordering the property on Primrose Hill. In backyard memories, Dad draws love letters in the sand to a crooning voice on the radio, as I peer through the rails of a wooden pen going about my business by myself. I found great freedom in that little, muddy pen.

Dad had one book, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which he read over and over. He had no use or time for any other book, except for a bird book in which he would locate the names of the birds he saw. Over the years he added on two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom, and we learned our first swear words as he learned carpentry. He filled in the swamp one wheelbarrow at a time, and I got many joyous rides on the way back to pick up another load. He talked of many curious pieces of flint coming up—possibly Indian tools—when moving that dirt around.

We eventually moved to the woods of our beloved Dracut year-round, where we escaped landlords and tenement slums and city punks—where we fished and swam and became teenagers asking difficult questions from the back seat—and where we took life one day at a time on a little patch of freedom in a world enslaved by the incessant bonds of war.