I overheard Mrs. Cook telling Mrs. McCain that she had witnessed an altercation between Mr. Hardie and Captain Sutter on the day we set sail. She hadn’t then known who Mr. Hardie was and only put it together afterwards, she said, but Mr. Hardie seemed to be on the verge of being sacked. The incident ended with Mr. Hardie apparently agreeing to some condition the captain had laid down and the captain calling after him, “And if you don’t abide by that, I’ll throw you overboard myself.” The two women spent an entire afternoon speculating on the significance of the incident, as if it had some great meaning, as if it would explain anything about Hardie that could not be fully accounted for by the events we all witnessed in the boat. Days later, when I was resting on the blankets near Mrs. Cook, she told the same story to me, but by then she had added details to it. It was after Mr. Hardie had told us more about the man named Blake, and she now determined that Mr. Blake was the person Hardie and the captain were arguing about. She also added the usual retrospective judgment, saying, “There was no doubt in my mind even then that our paths would cross again.”
Colonel Marsh whispered to various people that he had once seen Mr. Hardie give up a bottle of whiskey to one of the officers without so much as a snarl. Could it have been Blake? Did Blake hold some sort of power over Hardie? Were the two men in cahoots regarding some underhanded enterprise? Were they bitter rivals? The stories went round and round the boat, prompting others to come up with their own recollections, all of which, taken together, proved to them that Mr. Hardie had a black and mysterious past. The stories about Hardie were the most prized and worried-over stories of all, but they had to be treated carefully as it wouldn’t do for him to know he was being talked about. Each whispered revelation or fabrication was put together with the other story fragments and obsessively discussed and interpreted, as if the resulting narrative would finally explain why we found ourselves adrift on that vast and lonely sea.
On the very first day, Mr. Preston, who was a stickler for numerical details, told Mr. Sinclair that he had befriended the ship’s purser and found out that the owner of the ship had fallen deeply into debt. This caused Mr. Preston to wonder if the ship had been in ill repair as a result of the owner’s financial state and if the hasty departure had left some necessary item of maintenance undone. Eventually this story was transformed into one where the owner of the Empress Alexandra had arranged for the destruction of his ship in order to profit through insurance. After Mr. Hardie told the story of how the ship had been sold to someone who was able to turn a better profit, Mr. Preston brought up the purser’s remarks again. Of all the people on the boat, Mr. Preston was the least subtle. It never occurred to him that there were nuances and layers of discourse, and I never saw him bending his head discreetly or talking in low tones. If he wanted to say something, he said it straight out, and that night he remarked loudly to the Colonel, “I thought the Empress Alexandra had been sold to an owner who was able to turn a profit! Do you think Mr. Hardie might have made the part about a new owner up?” Mr. Hardie, who of course overheard him, threw the bailer he was using straight at Mr. Preston and snapped, “You wouldn’t find the likes o’ me workin’ for the tight-fisted weasel who used to own ’er. I gave that bastard enough o’ my blood!” If this were not proof enough for Mr. Preston, he didn’t dare say.
I can’t be too critical of the way others used stories to pass the time, regardless of the accuracy of what they were saying, for sometimes Mary Ann and I did the same thing. I would tell her about the day I had first seen Henry, and I would embellish the details for hours: what he had been wearing, how he had drawn up to the establishment where he worked in a sleek motorcar, how he had emerged one inch at a time, slowly revealing himself like a portrait taking shape on a canvas. I could make that part of the story take ten minutes—or longer if Mary Ann was in a mood to ask me questions about details I left out, which she often was. I had lost the heel of my shoe and was hobbling along the pavement, and Henry gallantly searched up and down the gutter and across the street; and when he couldn’t find it, he escorted me home in his motorcar. “Just like Cinderella!” cried Mary Ann. It was one of the few times I ever laughed in the lifeboat, for the image was more apt than she knew. I didn’t tell her that the day on the sidewalk beneath the marble steps of the bank was not really the first time I had ever seen Henry, any more than the ball was the first time Cinderella or her stepsisters had heard of the handsome prince, but I liked to think of it that way. For one thing, it was the first time Henry had set his blue eyes on me, and for another, it made a nicer story. I didn’t like to think about the week I had spent watching him and figuring out his daily itinerary or the day I had waited for him until evening, lopsided in my broken shoe, and he had failed to appear.
For her part, Mary Ann would tell me about shopping for her trousseau in Paris and about her fiancé Robert and how she had allowed him to take her virginity in a lovely wooded glade filled with singing birds and the scent of honeysuckle. It was the weekend before she and her mother had set sail for Europe, and Robert had come to their country house in order to say good-bye.
“He didn’t take your virginity!” I cried, only at the last second remembering to keep my voice low to protect her privacy. “You gave it to him as a gift.” After a bit of thought I added that in my experience, people who gave gifts were very likely to get something of equal or greater value in return, but Mary Ann was terrified she might be pregnant and also that she might not have a chance to make her sin right before God if she perished at sea, although maybe she deserved to die, she didn’t know. She asked my opinion about it, and I was surprised how fervent she was in her desire to know the exact boundaries between what constituted sin and what didn’t, as if there were some watertight membrane a person could step across and through which the sinfulness could not pass. She confessed that her worry was more of a practical nature than of a spiritual one, and in her mind, that fact compounded the original sin severalfold and sent her into a spiral of remorse. “Shouldn’t I be sorry for God’s sake alone?” she asked me. “But I think I am the most worried for my own account, for how it will look if I am pregnant at the wedding and unable to fit into my dress, or how it will look if Robert leaves me and then I give birth to an illegitimate child.”
As I listened, I became convinced that Mary Ann didn’t know very much about how a person might become pregnant and how she would know if she were not, but I tried to reassure her. “The wedding dress is lost, isn’t it? So you can console yourself on the first concern right away. When you marry Robert, you will have to buy a new one. Alternatively, you can do what Henry and I did—a quick legality, no frills, no fuss. Not that I wouldn’t have liked a pretty dress and a big ceremony, but sometimes expediency prevails over romance. And as for your second concern, there are people who can help you with that sort of thing should the need arise.” I told her that she must cross that bridge when she came to it and not before. “There is nothing else to be done.” But Mary Ann would not let herself off the hook so easily and went on to suggest that the ordeal in the lifeboat was God’s way of punishing her.
“That makes no sense at all! Why would God be punishing the rest of us for something you have done?” She looked at me in a way that suggested that I would be able to answer that question better than she, while I tried to tell her it was my view that she hadn’t committed a sin at all, that I myself had had relations with Henry before our trip to the magistrate and that the idea of transgressing had added spice to the adventure; but my words were hardly a match for millennia of Christian teaching. The moon was bathing the boat in silver light when Mary Ann crept over to the little deacon and put her face next to his ear and poured out the entire wrenching story. I watched as the deacon put his hands on either side of her narrow face and used his thumb to make the sign of the cross on her forehead, first dipping his hand over the gunwale as if the ocean were only a basin of holy water, conveniently placed at his elbow for just this moment of need. After that, Mary Ann see
med more peaceful, and a day or two later she had physical proof that she wasn’t pregnant after all.
With so many women in the lifeboat, some of them must have had to deal with the problem of bleeding, but if so, they were quiet and said nothing about it. I wondered if the shock of our circumstances and the dehydration that was affecting our salivary glands might also be inhibiting the flow of blood. In any case, when Mary Ann tugged at my elbow and whispered to me that she was bleeding, I was not sure what to tell her. I used the occasion to attract Hannah’s attention, and she gave me several pieces of cloth, ripped from an old petticoat, that Mary Ann was able to adapt for her purposes. After Mary Ann was settled, I signaled my thanks to Hannah. For the second time on our journey, our eyes locked for longer than was necessary. Her half smile, which at first seemed to be a friendly welcome to my thanks, faded and turned into a different expression altogether, almost as if she had been startled by something she had seen in my face or over my shoulder, and my first instinct was to turn around and protect myself from whatever was behind me. But I didn’t want to break the contact, which was as thrilling as it was disturbing, so in the end, Hannah was the first one to look away when Mrs. Grant called her name and asked her to hand over the satchel she carried with her, which had contained the pieces of cloth.
That night, our fifth in the boat, the question the men kept coming back to was whether or not the owner of the Empress Alexandra had kept her in good repair. Mr. Preston insisted that this was a crucial fact. He couldn’t understand the views of a vocal minority that it mattered not at all. Not now. Not when there was nothing that could be done about it. In an attempt to prove this point, Mr. Sinclair asked us to engage in what he called a thought experiment. “Suppose we replace the word ‘ship’ in this discussion with the word ‘world.’ What if the world were kept in ill repair, but we could not know this? Furthermore, the idea would never even occur to us. Would it matter?” He paused to give us a chance to consider this before going on to say, “And now suppose we somehow find out that yes, the world has been shamelessly neglected by whoever is responsible for its upkeep. Does that change things? Does it change how we live our lives on earth? I contend that in the case of the world and also in the case of the Empress Alexandra, we are faced with the here and now of our situation and that the irreversible and unknowable events that brought us to this time and place not only cease to be important, they cease to matter at all.”
Isabelle asked who was responsible for the world—if Mr. Sinclair was talking about God, he should come right out and say so. But if people were responsible, then of course they could always recognize their mistakes and change their ways. I instinctively looked over at the deacon, certain that he would have something to say about this, but he was staring moodily over the gunwale, and whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself. Instead, it was Hardie who spoke up. “It all depends on whether or not ye’re to meet the bastard in the future. For my part, if I ever have a chance to meet my maker face-to-face, I’ll bloody well have a few things to say about the way things here on earth are run.”
Day Six
IN THOSE FIRST days we looked at Hardie as a kind of oracle. His sort of encouragement was neither glib nor plentiful, so when his first predictions failed to come true (we were not immediately rescued and the fine weather continued to hold), we were not overly alarmed. What happened, though, was that certain people began to pump him for more particulars: “Is the wind from the west or the southwest? Is that a good sign or not?” or “What is it they say about a red sky at dawn?” or “What is the significance of a pinkish-yellow halo around the moon?”
“It means a change in the weather,” replied Hardie, and indeed, on the sixth day, the blue sky gave way to a layer of ragged clouds, which only now and then parted to show an angry sun. The wind had subsided overnight, but now it stirred the surface of the sea, which changed color dramatically depending on whether or not the sun broke through. It was no longer green and glassy or cobalt and opaque, but a dark and fathomless color that was neither gray nor blue. Little waves crested and broke over the rail of the boat, prompting Mr. Hardie to give up the tin cups he kept under his seat and to set two more of us to bailing, despite Mr. Nilsson’s warning that this would contaminate our drinking water with salt. He made us memorize a detailed roster of duties: in addition to the five bailers and the four people sitting along the rail who were to keep watch for signs of approaching ships, two others were appointed to keep tabs on the lifeboat that still bobbed in the distance, and four people at a time manned the oars and were charged with keeping the prow of the boat headed into the waves to prevent them from breaking over the side. Six women were assigned to scan the water for signs of fish, but its corrugated surface foiled our efforts. At one point a thin woman named Joan startled everyone by calling out, “I see one!” but it was only Mr. Hardie’s fish, which he had secured to the side of the boat to preserve its meat in the cool ocean water. Every hour, the Colonel called out “Time!” and we switched jobs or rested in our seats or went forward in pairs or threes to sleep on the piles of damp blankets that could not be kept dry despite the canvas boat cover we tucked in over them. Mr. Hardie made a great production of mealtime, even though our water ration had been severely reduced and we received only a piece of fish or a bite-sized square of hardtack. Twice a day the deacon was called upon to say grace, and that evening, Hardie held up the second fish for a blessing from the sky.
Hannah was ill-tempered that day. She kicked Mary Ann’s foot when it encroached on what she perceived as her territory, causing Mary Ann to weep quietly into her sleeve; and as we were eating breakfast, she said, “If we’re going to get rescued soon, what are you starving us for?” Perhaps it was inevitable that Hardie would be blamed for our hunger and maybe for our plight, but I had the sense Hannah didn’t really blame him herself. Instead, she was, in a roundabout way, encouraging this sentiment in others, for she seemed to suppress a grim smile and nod in Mrs. Grant’s direction when others started to grumble and echo her complaint. I, too, had been eyeing the fish and the barrels of water and wondering what Hardie was saving them for.
Despite his edict that no one change seats without permission, Hannah said, in a loud and provocative voice, “Come now, Mary Ann, stop sniveling. I’m going to change places with you,” and she squeezed herself in beside Mrs. Grant, abruptly displacing Mary Ann, who shot Hardie a fleeting look of injury; but Hannah stared right back at him in what seemed to me an open challenge, and he remained silent. I think Hardie might have lost some of his authority that day. He should have commanded Hannah to regain her original position, but he didn’t, and then it was too late.
Unaided, Mary Ann was not able to withstand Hannah’s determination and eventually moved to a vacant spot on the rail, so that she was sitting on the other side of Mr. Preston from me. Then Hannah bent her head close to Mrs. Grant’s, and by dinnertime, most of the others were grumbling too, but about what, it wasn’t entirely clear.
The wind had increased steadily over the course of the day, and just when Hannah and two of the other women left their seats to approach Hardie with a demand that the dinner rations be increased, a large wave crashed over the side of the boat, drenching everyone on the port side and knocking one of the standing women overboard. Hannah only saved herself by clutching on to Mrs. Hewitt, a large, silent woman, who screamed and was knocked into the bottom of the boat. I heard someone shout out the name of Rebecca Frost, who had been an employee on the Empress Alexandra and who had sat, until now, quietly in her seat at the back of the boat. While I had never spoken to Rebecca, I had seen her glancing admiringly at Hannah and Hannah smiling at her in return; but now Rebecca was flailing about in the water behind the boat before disappearing inside a cresting wave. A second wave broke over her head, but again she rose from the blue-black water, and I remember her pitiful eyes staring, I thought, directly into mine. “Do something!” I yelled. In her sworn statement, Hannah insisted she and Mrs. McCain wer
e the ones who exhorted Hardie to action and that I was only idly looking on, which goes to show that Hannah was not aware of as much as she claims.
Mr. Hardie was standing in the aft of the boat. Behind him the clouds were made livid by the half-obscured sun. Dark water had engulfed Rebecca up to her nostrils. Strands of hair streamed over her face like black eels, and her white, beseeching hands clutched the air. “Sit down!” barked Hardie, and Hannah, after her near miss, sat down and was quiet for once, while I shouted out, “Isn’t anyone going to help her?” Two of the men got up then and made as if to throw the life ring to Rebecca. The boat was rocking to and fro with the redistribution of weight, and each time it rocked, more water slopped in over the side.
“Bailers!” shouted Hardie. “Who are my bailers? Stop gawking and get to work!” As he said it, he grabbed the life ring away from whoever was holding it. Mrs. Grant shouted, “She’s over there,” and pointed to where Rebecca was frantically waving her hands at the sky and gurgling with watery attempts at speech. Her dress billowed around her, her cap was tied tightly over her ears, and while her life vest was serving to keep her head above water, it was not keeping the waves from rolling over her or the current from increasing the distance between her and us. Her expression was more surprised than horrified, and I thought I heard her call, “Over here, Mr. Hardie, over here,” almost politely. She was sure of being rescued, just as we were all, still, sure. The sea was rougher than it had been, and the level of water in the bottom of the boat was rising. Hardie spent precious minutes redirecting the bailers to their task, for everyone was either watching Rebecca or trying to keep from slipping off their seats in the pitching boat, during which time it began to occur to me that Rebecca’s rescue was by no means a certain thing.
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