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is deep," Amon told Howard.
    Brace was deep. Jensen was dead. Jensen's story, it was believed, was told. Brace's tale was only beginning, and Glass, responding to the unlined forehead and occasional petulance of Brace, was shocked and morally twinged to learn that Brace had even a meager kind of history.
    Lamp, in contrast, clucked to the crew over Brace's virtue. He hinted boldly to Dane that Brace would make a fine apprentice cook.
    The crew eased mentally sideways, commented, judged and forgot. Brace's life story was not a sea story, but a small tale of the messdeck where Joyce, Majors and Conally sat to starboard, hunched and chomping, left thumbs—through habit—anchoring trays to table, forks stabbing from right hands with the delicate precision of men accustomed to eating rapidly below wildly skidding decks. The black gang—McClean, Masters, Wysczknowski, Racca and Fallon—chomped to port. At a small table near the ship's office the bridge gang of Rodgers, Chappel, James and Howard were a coffee-muzzling crew. The seamen, firemen, and Adrian 's young pigeon, Brace, sat midships. Lamp stood like a wide-butted archangel wielding the hot sword of his galley fires. Amon was a constantly running thread tying all to the wardroom where Levere and Dane sat solitary.
    The tale, transcribed from the beer-drinking confidences of Brace, through the twinge of Glass, and arranged into a morality play by Lamp, was not human drama until after a great deal of thought.
    Brace had an older cousin—Jim or John, it makes no matter—and perhaps his last name was Smith; but as surely as old ships are reengined between wars, young men must have heroes.
    "A jerk," Glass confided to Lamp. "He'd last five minutes in Boston."
    This Jim or John was a midwestern miracle of a type so common in those parts that the miraculous is the standard of Rotarians. He raised 4-H cattle that won prizes, played basketball for a state university, and was healthy and blond and tanned and modest. He was, in sum, decent; a moral and right-thinking body, who, in the distance of time and miles translated through Brace's memory, was the ideal creature of conduct that Lamp applauded. On the surface, Brace's hero was sinless and guileless, and, if presented with his actual shape, Lamp would not have known what to do with him.
    Brace was not a minister's son, except as all sons of southern Illinois in those days were spiritually sired by ministers. Brace was a son of dusty town squares, gravel roads, fields of corn and pumpkins, soybeans, tomatoes, sugar cane, hay, oats, rye, wheat, and the thin gleaning of daft certainty held by men who own clean barns, bulging red silos, sleek herds, chores, and pitchfork morality. Practically, Brace was the son of the high school bandmaster, a man who breathed the better quality of air, and who produced music that was mechanically sound. The father had a voice like the horns of Joshua. After a night in the bars, Brace claimed that if his old man had not done so much yelling it would have been easier to handle the big, fat, loud mouth of Dane.
    "My pop wanted to be a doctor," Glass said, "but he's a yid. Works in a drugstore. Make a lot of money with a drugstore."
    "At least he don't yell. Right?"
    "He hates drugstores."
    "Mine's a lawyer," a seaman said.
    "A crook. I like you better, now," Glass told him.
    "If you chase enough ambulances, you'll catch a few."
    "Mine's a taxi-driving pimp."
    "Mine's a dope."
    "We didn't have one in our family,'' Howard admitted. "We were too poor."
    "They're all crooks," Brace said knowledgeably into his beer. "I used to didn't know that."
    Your seaman cynic, carrying in his heart that awful tradition that is not a myth, but true, is born of offenses rendered in the invisible world. One must go out, but the tradition does not require you to haul spurious cargo. The tradition is a jealous god. Your seaman cynic, that voluntary Jonah, may be forever offended by all other things, and that suits the