5 Perfume on the Cook’s Feet and Hair on My Chest — What of It?
As I grew up, strong and healthy, I had three very simple ambitions in life: to be able to hand, reef and steer; to spit as far as any Swede could; and to get as much food, if not more, than anyone else. On sailing ships the food is portioned out in what is called “whack;” that is, so many ounces of food per week is allotted to each person. There was no way of definitely estimating the exact number of days a trip would take, as we depended entirely on winds to blow us to our destination.
We carried no fancy foods—there wasn’t room for anything except plain necessities in the storerooms. Lentils, rice, salt beef pickled in barrels of brine, dried codfish, powdered milk, dried prunes and apricots for desserts on holidays, and lime juice. The stores were stowed in an after-hold and were kept under lock and key. Only the Jap cook and my father had keys to that sanctum of grub and they guarded them relentlessly. The locked storeroom made life a bit difficult for me. I never seemed to get enough to eat. For instance, breakfast consisted of a big dish of cooked oats, dry bread and coffee. When the cabin-boy rang the breakfast bell it had the effect of a fire alarm and we all stampeded to the dining saloon. The first one that got to the table grabbed the bowl of mush and scraped off a big pile on his plate. I soon learned to grab the quickest. I developed in me the ability to take care of myself. Once a week, on Thursday, we had duff pudding. Duff day at sea was always an occasion. The cook prepared a sticky, glutinous mess of steamed suet and flour and put a few raisins in it. Plum duff it was called, but I always thought the cook put the pudding at the top mast and tossed plums at it, always missing, for I never could find any fruit in it. Weeks became important to me because of the plum duff pudding, and instead of saying of the future, “next week,” I always calculated next duff day, or two duff days ago. Frequently the salt horse, as the pickled beef was nicknamed, stank so that I couldn’t eat it, and neither could the sailors without drowning out the smell with mustard pickles, and holding their breath as they swallowed it. Sometimes by way of variety of menu, the bread took on the appearance of raisin bread, but the raisins were unfortunate cockroaches that had dived into the dough when the cook was kneading it. Little fresh meat additions like that never killed our appetites.
The final blow to my father’s æsthetic sense came one day at lunch time. Father bit into a crust of bread and then his face became livid with anger.
“Slops!” he yelled at the cabin-boy. We had a new boy every trip. “What kind of so and so does the cook call this bread? It stinks of perfume like some barmaid.”
“I don’t know, sir. The cook just baked that bread fresh this morning,” answered Slops. There was never any love lost between the cabin-boy and the cook and I think that Slops was enjoying the prospects that confronted his enemy.
I tasted the bread. It tasted of perfume, or rather of bay rum, the stuff the Jap cook always smelled of, but I couldn’t figure out how it had got into the bread.
Father left the table and hurried forward to the galley, with me in his wake.
“Yamashita! Come out of your rat hole.” The cook, trembling in fear, looked up from where he was sitting on the edge of the bunk.
“Yes sir?” he asked, as he continued washing his feet.
“Let me see the pan you mixed this bread in.”
Yamashita looked up at Father in all innocence and replied, “This pan, Captain. This pan I wash my feet in!” Father let a snort of rage out and grabbed at the cook. He shook him within an inch of his life, and would have hit him if the cook had been anywhere near his size. I beat it aft to get out of the fight, for the cook was my friend.
Every time I got a chance to sneak forward to his galley I did so, and would sit on his lap listening to his stories of Japan. I would tolerate his tales, just so he would let me sit on him and smell his bay rum. The odor of it was exquisite to me, for everyone else on the ship smelled of rope and tobacco. I often measured a person’s worth by the smell of him. One day an American consul’s wife came aboard, and she smelled of some delicious powder. When I got a good sniff of it I said to her:
“You don’t stink like men do, do you?” I intended it for a compliment, but the woman took umbrage and left in great haste, mumbling something about the uncouth persons that lived on ships!
No two days at sea were ever alike. Even in the monotonous trade winds, with the breeze so steady that the wheel could be lashed down and the ship would keep on her course alone, something would happen. It was on such a day as that that John McLean, an able-bodied seaman, won my heart. He was a huge, lumbering sailor with more muscle than brain, and was so crabby that the other sailors were afraid of him. He was always friendly with me in his rough sort of way because I would sit by the hour at his feet and admire him. On his chest, which was covered with hairs, he had a tattooed, full-rigged ship under sail that was one of my prize sights. If he was in a good humor he would undo his shirt and let me see that ship, then wiggle his chest so that the ship looked as if it were in a storm. Then he would bulge out his chest muscles and the ship looked as if it were under sail in a fair wind, or else he relaxed his chest and it looked becalmed in a lifeless sea.
“Gee, McLean,” I exclaimed, “do you think I could ever have a ship on my chest?”
He moved his wad of tobacco to the other side of his cheek, looked at me scornfully and then condescended to answer:
“Naw, can’t be tattooed like me unless you got hair on your chest.”
That finished me, for my chest was as smooth as a piece of silk. But I wasn’t to be outdone. I went to my father and asked him what made hair grow on people’s chest. That question played right into his hand because he replied:
“Hair on your chest, Joan? Well, let me see. I warrant if you was to eat your pea soup every meal that would grow hair on your chest.”
And I hated pea soup, but if it was necessary to cause a growth on my chest like McLean’s, I would endure it. So for weeks I ate the pea soup with the secret consolation that some morning I would awake with a thick crop of hair on my chest. We arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, and still no hair on my chest. I was worried for fear I would probably never be able to grow any, so I went to McLean who was in the hold of the ship unloading copra.
“McLean,” I confided, “I’ve looked every morning for nine weeks and there isn’t any hairs on me yet—not even any fuzz. What shall I do?”
He grinned, one of his rare indulgences, and said:
“Hey, Skipper, is the Old Man aboard?”
“No, he isn’t. He’s up at the American Consul’s office this morning.”
McLean continued to grin for a moment, then said:
“All right, Skipper. We got an hour to knock off at noon, and I’ll take you up to be tattooed.”
“Really, McLean? You’re not filling me with wind?” I could hardly believe my ears.
“Sure. I know the best tattooer this side of Tokio. He’s just a quarter of a mile from here, back of the fish store and ship chandler’s.”
I was elated. I was to be like a real sailor, tattoo and everything! McLean had offered to take me and have it done because in his inarticulate way he liked me, and in his own mind he was being very generous to pay for me to be tattooed. It never occurred to a deep sea sailor like him that girls are not tattooed.
At noon time I was ready, waiting for him at the gangway. I had put on my sailor cap which was an old mate’s cap elaborately embroidered with anchors and little ships and fish by the sailors. McLean kept his promise to meet me, and hand in hand we walked up the dock. My feet hardly touched the ground, I was so happy. We plotted what we would have put on me. I decided I wanted a naked lady in red tattooed on my forearm, a full-rigged ship on my breast and an American flag on the bottom of my foot so I could stick it out of the porthole and make it look as though I was waving a flag. If I was to be tattooed I was going to do it up right!
As we walked up the dock I saw Father standing by the warehouse talking to the boss stevedore. I was so exultant that I let my enthusiasm get the best of my discretion and I yelled at him:
“Ain’t I swell? I’m going to be tattooed all over like a sailor.”
Like a shot he wheeled around and said, “What?”
“I said I’m going to have a naked lady tattooed on my arm near my elbow so I can move my arm and wiggle her stomach like she was dancing.”
A murderous look came on his face. I turned around and saw McLean hotfooting it down the dock back to the ship! I followed him in haste, for Father grabbed me by the seat of my pants and the nape of my neck and propelled me along the dock at double speed.
“I can’t leave you for five minutes but that you get into some kind of deviltry, so now I’ll teach you how to behave.”
He took me up on the poop deck and tied me to the wheel in full sight of the sailors. My heart was broken with disappointment, but no tears for mine. I stood there and swore all the words that I knew, and at that age my vocabulary included enough adjectives to keep me swearing two minutes without repeating a word.
As if it wasn’t humiliation enough to be tied up like a bad puppy, the mate came aft and heard me swearing. I started all over again when he came near and looked at me. I could have murdered him for laughing at me. He listened to me going it and then scratched his head and said:
“I’ll forfeit my grub if you can’t cuss as good as if you had hair on your chest.”
Oh, the music of his words! I pulled my jumper closer together so that he couldn’t see if I had hairs or not, but having him think I did have hair on my chest was almost as good as really having it, so the day wasn’t lost after all.
boy sitting with feet in a tub
man holding a box