The Disturbed Peace of Mr. Hu

 
For some fifteen years I made my living serving as a designated driver for the communities of Morro Bay and Cayucos, California.
 
There was no taxi service, and there was very strict and not always fair enforcement of drunk driving and drunk in public laws, so I performed a valuable public service.  I kept people from driving drunk, thereby keeping them out of jail and over those fifteen years perhaps saving a life or two.
 
The Morro Bay police always liked me for running this service; but the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's department did not, and harassed me extensively; and finally, in the end, the Sheriff framed me on a false drunk driving charge and put me out of business.
 
My passengers to a large extent were commercial fishermen, hard drinking and hard working, so we got along just fine.
 
I would often ask drag fishermen, those who worked on boats that dragged a net along the ocean bottom, if they had ever pulled up interesting things.  Some told me of bringing up large ancient Chinese pottery jugs, which had apparently been been used as food or water containers on Chinese ships that visited the West Coast long before the first Spanish ships came.
 
It was one of these fishermen who told me the story of The Disturbed Peace of Mr. Hu.
 
He said he was fishing aboard a boat called  the Eleanor Gay, out of Moss Point, California, and they were working off the coast of Oregon.
 
One day their net brought up a coffin, not an ancient coffin but a new coffin of shiny polished metal, an event that sent a chill through the four-man crew.
 
The skipper of the Eleanor Gay radioed the Coast Guard about the coffin and was told to check to see if there was a seal on it, which would identify it as a legal burial at sea.  The skipper checked and found there was.  Then the Coast Guard told him to just drop the coffin overboard.
 
Now, the crew of the Eleanor Gay should have done that, but after some discussion and hemming and hawing they broke the seal and opened the coffin, and there they saw a perfectly preserved, perfectly dry body of an elderly Chinese man.
 
Curiosity satisfied, an act of group impetuosity immediately regretted, a chill passed through all four men because they had all, after all, violated a grave.
 
Then, as if in eerie confirmation of the chilling feeling, a sudden rogue wave, not a monster but big enough, broke over the port rail of the Eleanor Gay and soaked the four fishermen and the corpse of the Chinese; then four curious gulls landed atop the pilot house, not uncommon but oddly foreboding under the weird circumstances, and looked down at the scene on the deck, the four men looking into a coffin, peeping toms in queer violation.
 
"Who do you think he is?", one asked all but no one is particular.
 
"Who?  Who? I don't give a damn," said the skipper, "Let's close it up and put it over the side."
 
Suddenly they were all very nervous, and grave robber-pall bearers that they were they closed the coffin and carried it to the starboard rail and dropped it with a splash into the Pacific, and horrified but not knowing why they were so horrified, they watched the coffin turn over and sink upside down.
 
The Eleanor Gay was never the same again.
 
Over the coming months one man fell overboard and nearly drowned; and then the skipper, high on cocaine, got wrapped up in the net as it was being wound in on the huge iron spool at the stern, and was crushed to death; and after a time the Eleanor Gay had such a bad reputation only desperate drunks and unknowing kids would sign on.
 
It got so no one even wanted their boats tied up next to the Eleanor Gay, thinking the curse might transfer from deck to deck, and in the Golden Bear bar where the fishermen drank she was talked about like she was a whore in a nunnery.
 
Finally the Eleanor Gay ran up on some rocks south of Big Sur and sank; and up north in Moss Point there was sadness that the crew had been lost (but they should have known better than to go out on a cursed boat) and as for the Eleanor Gay, the general mood was good riddance.