The Lifeboat: A Novel

by Charlotte Rogan

  That morning, it finally began to rain. At first, the drops were small and fine as mist, and the amount anyone was able to catch and drink would hardly have filled a thimble, but the drops grew steadily larger and soon we were all soaked to the bone. It was this rain I was reminded of the day in Boston when Mr. Reichmann called me insane. Around me, people turned their faces up to catch the water. Mary Ann continued to prove herself troublesome by refusing to open her mouth, so Hannah had to slap her and hold her nose until she did. Mr. Hardie pointed into the distance to something that no one else could see and said that the weather was about to go to hell and that we would too if we didn’t face our situation squarely. We were already so wet and cold that it was hard for us to have any clear sense of what he meant.

  Mrs. Cook came back from where she had been sleeping in the dormitory and tapped my shoulder. “Be sure to pull the canvas cover over you so the blankets don’t get soaked through,” she said. I didn’t think it was my turn again already, but no one protested, so I made my way forward and burrowed into the musty blankets, where I experienced something that wasn’t sleep so much as a sort of natural drifting even further into my inward-turned state. Inside were pockets of warmth—not memories, exactly, but places where the parameters of life were less stark and unyielding. Perhaps this thinking only of myself was willful, but I could not think of myself, then, as possessing a will. I had only a body. I did what I was told almost automatically, as if I had entered the trancelike state I had observed in Mrs. Cook. My smallest sensation was apparent to me, a matter of intense interest; but what was going on with the others made very little impression on me at all. When Mary Ann came to shake me out of my stupor and take my place on the blankets, I returned to my place to find that while I was sleeping, Mrs. Cook had sacrificed herself to the sea. I felt nothing, only a mild curiosity about why she had done it. “Orders from Hardie,” whispered Hannah, and Greta said, “You know how Mrs. Cook would do whatever she was told.” It frightened me to think that the same could be said of me.

  I can neither confirm nor deny Hardie’s involvement in Mrs. Cook’s death. My lawyers questioned me over and over on this point, but I could only say that I had been asleep. Apparently Hannah said in her statement that my turn to sleep had come earlier in the day, that no one was allowed to take extra turns on the blankets unless they were sick, and that I had not been in the dormitory during the incident at all. Mrs. Cook, who could have testified to tapping my shoulder and sending me forward, and Mary Ann, who later took my place in the forward crease, are both dead, and apparently no one else remembers my small part in the incident. I don’t know what it would have proved even if I had been awake, which I wasn’t. Mr. Reichmann said the lawyers for Hannah and Mrs. Grant were trying to establish that we had a reason to fear Mr. Hardie, that the incident with Mrs. Cook had given us a valid motive for what happened later; but no matter how Mr. Reichmann peppered me with questions, I said that when it came my turn to testify, I would state truthfully that I harbored no such motive in my heart and that I had not been present to hear anything Mr. Hardie might have said to Mrs. Cook.

  In any case, when I emerged from under the dripping canvas cover, Mrs. Hewitt, the hotel proprietress, was wringing her hands and shuddering in great dry heaves. She said she had been the last to speak to Mrs. Cook, and I had no reason to doubt her until some of the others whispered it about that Mr. Hardie had talked to her after that. Mr. Hardie did not make a habit of talking individually to the women, so I thought that maybe the story had changed in the telling or that Hannah and Greta had exaggerated or even lied. But since I had witnessed none of it, I did not offer an opinion on what had transpired. Although Mrs. McCain had been Mrs. Cook’s traveling companion, she refused to show any emotion at all. “There’s naught I can do about it now, is there?” she said.

  The rain abated and the morning passed. I have little memory of it, except that sometime before noon, Mr. Hardie pointed to a distant line where the texture and color of the water abruptly changed and said, “Squall.” A minute passed before he added, “We have until it reaches us to decide what we want to do.” I looked around me at the remaining thirty-six of us, then blinked at the water sloshing around my ankles before turning to watch the far-off line of wind-whipped water with a kind of detached trepidation, as if I were remembering it rather than living it for the first time. When Mr. Hardie spoke up to inform us it was fifteen minutes away, his bottomless eyes finally met mine. “We’re in your hands,” I tried to tell him with a look. “Just tell us what to do.” His gaze rested on me for a long roll of the boat. I was thrilled by it, buoyed up. For the first time in days I felt warm. I knew Mr. Hardie would save us if he could.

  So many waves were now breaking over the gunwale that such occurrences were unremarkable, but the sky had turned a greenish-yellow color that we had never seen before. Hardie said, “Say yer prayers, mates,” and my hopes of the moment before were immediately dashed. Around me the bailers worked with furious and futile activity. “Oh, give it up!” I cried, for the level of the water was clearly rising in the boat despite their best efforts to stop it. “We’re going to drown!” I could see no possible alternative. I squeezed my arms about the airless room of my chest. “There’s no way out,” I shouted to the others or maybe only to Mary Ann. “Don’t you see that we’re going to die?”

  “Why, of course there’s a way,” said Mr. Hoffman reasonably. “We’ve talked about it before. Some of us can go over the side to lighten the load.” He paused to let the words sink in, then added, “It’s our only option.” I looked at Hardie to gauge his reaction, but he was glaring at the squall line with a fixed expression. Colonel Marsh shouted, “Is it true, Mr. Hardie?” and the beam of Hardie’s gaze swept across our upturned faces like a searchlight. “Aye, it’s true enough, unless ye all prefer to drown.” His words were like opening the door to a caged beast, and once it was loose among us, I could breathe again. “Of course,” I said, coldly calm. My fear had disappeared completely. I felt like a man rationally assessing his investment options based on a ledger full of numbers and probabilities.

  Mary Ann looked horror-stricken. “Jump over?” she asked. “On purpose?”

  “Of course on purpose!” I hadn’t meant to shout at her, but suddenly, it did not seem to me that this course of action involved death, but life. It did not occur to me that I might have to sacrifice myself. Until my father’s misfortunes, doors had been opened for me, dinners served to me by pretty young women like Mary Ann. She must have sensed this, and it caused her face to stretch out over her bones with fear and loathing.

  It seemed to me that someone weak like Mary Ann or Maria would be the obvious choice, but when one of the men—was it Mr. Nilsson?—pointed out that men were more useful than women in these circumstances and that if anyone should be sacrificed, it should be a woman, I was horrified; yet on some level, I agreed with him. Maybe we fought so hard against this idea because it was true. When Mary Ann cowered against me in a near-faint, I pushed her hair away from her ear and whispered, “Why not, Mary Ann? You’d save yourself a lot of suffering by flinging yourself into the sea. You’re going to die anyway, and I’ve heard drowning is far more pleasant than dying of starvation or thirst.”

  Am I to be blamed for this? We do not ask certain ideas to enter our heads and demand that others stay away. I believe that a person is accountable for his actions but not for the contents of his mind, so perhaps I am culpable for occasionally letting those thoughts turn themselves into words. I can only say that I had to sit next to Mary Ann. I was the first one to whom she turned with her whining and complaints. In any case, when she came to her senses, she said she had had a vivid dream where she had saved us all by throwing herself into the sea.

  “Ten minutes!” shouted Mr. Hardie. I counted out sixty seconds and said, “Nine,” more to myself than to Mary Ann. Mr. Preston became highly agitated. “The men!” he screamed. “All of the men should gather back here.”

  �
��What for?” asked Mr. Nilsson, and Mrs. Grant said, “I’m sure there’s another way.” But then she fell silent and busied herself with a bailer she wrested from someone else.

  “Hardie’s right! We men must draw lots to see who goes over,” said Mr. Preston, his voice high-pitched and quivering, just as Hardie said, “Eight.” A sudden terror seethed through my entire being, but it only remotely belonged to me. I was able to examine it the way I had examined my chattering teeth, the barrage of raindrops that hit my face, the steady trickle of water that found its way inside my collar and down my neck, the arrhythmic flutter of my heart.

  Nilsson said, “Why the men? Why only the men?”

  Mary Ann asked, “What about the women? Are they still thinking of sending one of us?”

  “Of course not,” I said, “what do you think? But I doubt they would stop a woman if she volunteered.” I did not notice then how we both believed in the concept of “they,” of omniscient decision-makers who occupied a place in the power structure above us—a “they” who made the decisions and took the spoils or suffered the consequences of being wrong. I did notice, however, that Mary Ann was greatly relieved to hear that no one would call on her to be heroic, and she put her useless little hand trustingly inside of mine.

  Hardie held up a fistful of tiny splinters of wood that seemed to appear for the purpose by magic. “Only the men,” he stated. “Two straws are short, six are long. The short straws lose.” I don’t know why we thought two people fewer would make the difference between life and death, but we didn’t question it. If Hardie said two was the magic number, then it was two. We assumed that Hardie knew.

  A minute or so passed. The black line of rough water was now only about twenty-five or thirty boat lengths away. In the distance forks of lightning ripped through the livid sky.

  “I’m not forcing anybody,” Hardie said. Then he himself drew one of the splinters. He looked at it without much interest, but I could tell by the faces of the people sitting near him it was a long one. Mr. Nilsson drew next, and from the glazed vacancy of his eyes, I had the sense that he wasn’t entirely aware of what he was doing.

  Colonel Marsh was stoic and remote as he took his turn, but Michael Turner made a joke of it, saying, “If I win this lottery, it will be the first thing I’ve ever won in my life.” He was one of the ones who had never had a life vest, which made him appear even thinner and less substantial than he was. No sooner had he taken his turn than he stood up, laughed crazily, and leapt out of the boat. There were four straws left, and one of them was short. I watched Mr. Preston draw and heave a sigh of relief, but the deacon looked panic-stricken as he crawled aft to take his turn. Only he, Sinclair, and Hoffman were left of the men. Hoffman merely shrugged and drew, all the while regarding Hardie with narrowed eyes; again I had the sense that some secret was crossing the air between them. “God help us,” said the deacon. He knelt in the bottom of the boat facing Hardie, his back toward the rest of us, his clenched hands upraised to the violent sky. “O Lord,” he wailed, “I’m willing to sacrifice myself for these dear children of yours, but why is it so hard to do?” He looked wretchedly out at the waves, a quivering incarnation of fear and maybe the dawning realization that “dear children” was not an apt description of his companions in the boat. I blocked my ears to the sound of him and clung harder than ever to Mary Ann. The bare bones of our natures were showing. None of us were worth a spit. We were stripped of all decency. I couldn’t see that there was anything good or noble left once food and shelter were taken away.

  The deacon looked with infinite sorrow in Mr. Sinclair’s direction, then took both of the remaining splinters. “I wonder if this counts as suicide,” I heard him say. “I wonder if paradise is forever lost.” He reached around to pat Mr. Sinclair on the back and laid the two splinters out in his open hand, where they were immediately caught by the wind and blown into the sea. The deacon rose slowly to his feet, saying, “The Lord bless you and preserve you.” Then he removed his life vest, which he tossed to Mr. Hardie, and dove into the water and immediately vanished. Mr. Sinclair shouted after him, “Come back! That was to have been mine!” but no one paid him any attention; and when Mr. Sinclair pulled himself up with his extraordinary arms and hauled himself to the boat’s rail, no attempt was made to stop him. The saddest thing about the sacrifice was that it was being made for people such as we. I thought these things imperfectly. Anyway, I was immediately distracted, for it was then that the squall line hit.

  Day Ten, Afternoon

  NOW I KNEW why Mr. Hardie had said that the wind up until that point had been nothing but a breeze, but I think even he was unprepared for its force. The little boat was thrown like a nutshell by waves the size of ocean liners. I thought of the deacon and Mr. Sinclair, and how Hardie could have avoided becoming a murderer—yes, that is the word I used—for it seemed to me that the exact number of people in the boat mattered little if at all. We would all die in seconds anyway, and what I regretted most was that I was not to die with my view of human nature intact. I had been allowed to believe in man’s innate goodness for the twenty-two years of my life, and I had hoped to carry the belief with me to my grave. I wanted to think that all people could have what they wanted, that there was no inherent conflict between competing interests, and that, if tragedies had to happen, they were not something mere human beings could control.

  I thought these things, but not, that afternoon, in any coherent way. The boat pitched and rolled as it alternately climbed the foamy heights of the waves and then descended into hellish troughs so that we were surrounded on four sides by walls of black water. It was terrifying to see. Mr. Hardie and Mr. Nilsson took up one oar each while the Colonel and Mr. Hoffman struggled with a third. Together they made a valiant effort to keep our nose to the wind, for we could only hope to ride it out, and we grasped at one another the way I grasped at the shreds of my beliefs. Mrs. Grant and Mr. Preston did what they could with the last of the oars, but they were no match for the fury of the storm. Still, I was grateful for their efforts and admired the way they wrestled with the long blades. Despite their lack of effectiveness, neither one of them gave up. With one hand I gripped the seat so as not to be thrown from it like the rider of a wild horse, and with the other I held on to Mary Ann, who was sitting next to me and clutching at me with both hands as though I were the buoyant plank that would save her.

  Adding to our distress were the torrential rain that battered us from above and the jagged lightning that split the sky. We could hardly see the length of the boat, so if I were to say that the waves rose to twenty feet or thirty, it would be mere speculation on my part. Hardie later told us that they had reached at least forty feet, but how he knew this I cannot say. Sometimes the boat would crest a wave and hang for an instant before pitching downward from that height like a sled down an icy slope. Our stomachs lurched and heaved when this happened, but sometimes we weren’t so lucky, and the wave would slam into our shoulders and fill the boat with even more water, which was now almost to our knees, but still the little cutter did not sink.

  In the minutes before the squall hit, Mr. Hardie ordered a change of oarsmen and passed the empty hardtack tins to Hannah and Isabelle, who immediately started bailing furiously with them. Then he ripped the tops off two of the casks he had been guarding as jealously as if they still held water, and Colonel Marsh and Mr. Hoffman struggled to hold on to the slippery wood as they filled them and emptied them into the ocean. All the while, Hardie made a valiant effort to keep the prow of the boat pointed into the waves while the other oarsmen did their best to help him. The boat was pitching with such fury that only one in five attempts to empty the barrels over the side was successful, but they kept at it, insanely, heroically, and I wondered what we would have done without those five strong men. What if Colonel Marsh had drawn the short straw, or Mr. Nilsson or Hardie himself? Michael Turner had been the oldest of the men by far, and the deacon had been thin and weak; and while Mr. Sinclair had had impre
ssive muscles in his arms, he could not move about the boat or use his legs at all. With a shudder of horror, I realized that it could not be luck that had arranged it so, even if I had not noticed the sleight of hand by which this result had been accomplished. Hardie had left nothing to chance, but had chosen who would live and who would die. I could not rid my mind of the idea that there was evil in that little boat, that it was the devil himself who was keeping me alive.

  Not too much time passed before Mr. Hoffman lost hold of his barrel, and it immediately disappeared in the maelstrom. Hardie said not a word, but thrust his oar at Hoffman and tore the covering off the third and last of the containers. This time he kept it for himself, thrusting it into the water and hauling it over the side, but only after I had seen that it contained no rainwater at all, only a small box that Hardie hastily stuffed inside his jacket. This made no impression on me at the time. I thought only that Hardie had done well to make the supply of water last as long as it did.

  Only one other event stands out against the background of horror of that terrible storm. The dark day turned into an even darker night. The rain was relentless. It was as if the sea and sky had merged. Still, the boat rose up and either plummeted down or crashed into the crests of the waves as they broke. Despite the sickening feeling of falling into a bottomless void, I thanked God and Mr. Hardie every time we were spared a deluge of water upon our heads.

  I was giving thanks for another safe slide down when there was a resounding thud against the hull of the boat and a burst of unintelligible shouting from those sitting on the starboard rail. Hardie stopped bailing for a moment to inquire what the fuss was about. “We’ve hit something!” came the answer, or “Something has hit us!”—not that the exact words matter in the least. Whether it was the lost barrel or debris from the Empress Alexandra or something placed there by God for our destruction, we couldn’t know.