by Peter Geye
“I need a pillow for my back,” Olaf said. “Could you get one?”
Noah went into the bedroom and grabbed one of the down pillows from his father’s bed.
“Here,” he said as he helped his father forward, pushing the lumpy, uncovered pillow down between the chair and his father’s lower back. “Do you want some aspirin or ibuprofen?”
“Nah,” Olaf wheezed.
“A glass of water?”
Olaf looked up at him. “I could use a glass of water.”
Noah brought him the water. “Lift your head,” he said.
When Olaf did, Noah took the afghan from behind him. The old man’s head fell back and rested on the chair again, and the soft, white, wrinkleless flesh of his neck was exposed in the lamplight. Noah stopped and stared at it. He wanted to touch it, to feel it, to confirm that it was as delicate and velvety as it looked.
“What?” Olaf asked, rolling his eyes up to look at Noah.
“Here,” Noah said, handing him the glass of water and putting the afghan over his father’s lap. “How often is that sort of thing happening?”
“Not often,” Olaf said. “Not often at all.” Again he waved his hand. “Grab that book over there.” He pointed at the bottom shelf of the chest-high bookcase next to the sofa.
“Which book?” Noah asked.
“I forget what it’s called. The black one.”
Noah pulled a book from the shelf. “This?”
“Let me see,” Olaf said. He took the book and thumbed through to the back of it. “This is the one, it’s got transcripts of the radio contact between Jan and the Coast Guard and the other boats in the vicinity.”
“Dad, we don’t need to talk about this anymore. I mean, maybe you should get some rest.”
“I’m all right.” He handed the book back to Noah, who opened it to the first transcript, a communiqué between the Ragnarøk and the U.S. Coast Guard station in Gunflint.
“Read that,” Olaf said.
Noah did:
22:15
Captain Vat: Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. All stations, this is SS Ragnarøk, SS Ragnarøk, SS Ragnarøk. Our position is[pause] 48 degrees 10 minutes 7 seconds and 88 degrees 20 minutes 7 seconds. Repeat, 48°10′ 7″ and 88° 20′ 7″. We are in heavy seas, wind gusts up to 78 knots, sustained winds 45 to 65 knots. Wave size variable to 20 feet. Report a major diesel leak in main fuel line. Repeat, major fuel leak in main line. Bearing 268° for Thunder Bay. Wish to alert any vessels in the area and U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards of our situation. Have a crew of 30 men; cargo 12 tons of taconite. This is the SS Ragnarøk, over.
U.S. Coast Guard: SS Ragnarøk, this is U.S. Coast Guard station Gunflint, change to channel 68, over.
Captain Vat: Roger.
Coast Guard: SS Ragnarøk, do you copy?
Captain Vat: Roger, we copy.
Coast Guard: SS Ragnarøk, do you require assistance?
Captain Vat: Negative. I only wanted to make you aware of our situation. The leak is bad, I’ve got a dozen men working on it, and the heavy seas aren’t helping, but we should be okay. We’re heading for Thunder Bay—speed of 7 knots. Should be sheltered by 0:30. Over.
Coast Guard: Roger, SS Ragnarøk. We’ll keep an eye on you.
Captain Vat: Roger that.[Pause] Are there any other vessels in the area?
Coast Guard: Negative, Ragnarøk, you’re alone.
Captain Vat: Roger. Out.
Coast Guard: Out.
Noah saved his page in the book with his thumb. “How far were you from Thunder Bay?”
“The last position I charted we were twenty-four nautical miles from the entrance to Thunder Bay. That’s what, about twenty-eight miles?”
Noah opened the book and scanned the page. “And how fast is seventy-eight knots?”
“Seventy-eight knots?” Olaf closed his eyes to think. “About ninety miles per hour.”
“That’s like a hurricane.”
“It was blowing, no doubt about that.”
Noah shook his head in disbelief. “So you make the pan-pan. Then what?”
“Then Captain Vat made the decision that saved my life. In the chart room behind the wheelhouse, he ordered me and a crew to the stern in order to assist Danny. He told me to take three guys, one of whom he wanted at the phone the minute we got to the engine room. The rest of us were to help out any way we could.”
“Why’d he send you?” Noah asked.
“I was pretty good with mechanical things,” Olaf said. “I guess he thought I could help.”
Noah paused, sure the question he wanted to ask was the most delicate so far. He put himself in the position of being ordered across an icy deck with winds gusting to ninety miles per hour. He thought about Lake Superior exploding across the deck. He thought about getting to the engine room, where thousands of gallons of diesel fuel were smeared across so many combustible engine parts. He thought of the nearly eight hundred feet of water beneath the keel of the ship. And he knew he would have been terrified. “Were you scared?”
Olaf looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t remember being scared, no. But I sure wasn’t excited about what we had to do.”
“Why didn’t you use the tunnels?” Noah asked.
“The Rag didn’t have a tunnel.”
“But you could have just walked on top of the ballast tank.”
Olaf smiled. “I forget how well you knew those boats. The Rag’s ballast tanks didn’t have square tops. They were slanted to meet the bulkhead without any straight angles.
“The object of the design,” Olaf said, “was twofold. First, it was made to make cleaning the cargo hold easier. Without a straight ledge to sweep, we would save a half hour’s labor every time we changed cargos. That adds up over a season. It was also an engineering concept that allowed more of the ballast-tank water—when the ballast tanks were full—to sit lower in the bulkhead, creating a lower center of gravity with less water. This way it would take less time to pump the water out. The idea was a flash in the pan, and no other boats I ever knew were built the same way.
“It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. We got across the deck fine. It’s what we found when we got there that was the problem.
“I stopped in my berth and changed into some dry clothes before I gathered the men to come with me. I stripped out of my damp pants and socks and shirt and put on my union suit and dry pants, fresh socks and a turtleneck. I grabbed my pea jacket, my mittens, and hat, and when I was all bundled up I topped myself off with the raincoat and the orange life preserver that had sat for years in the wooden basket above my desk.
“For some stupid reason I checked the four porthole windows in my cabin,” he said. There was surprise in his voice, like it was a memory that had only come back to him then, all those years later. “I wonder why I did that.
“Whatever the reason, it gave me the minute I needed to remember my watch. Your mother had given it to me the Christmas before. It was on a sterling chain in my desk. I kept it there for safety.
“When she gave it to me she told me it’d bring me luck. I decided I wanted to have it with me when I died. In fact,” Olaf said as he dug into his pocket, “here it is.” He handed it to Noah.
It was beautiful, a tarnished nickel-silver pocket watch with an analemma on its face. The movement was visible behind a rear crystal, and when Noah flipped it open he saw the name of the watch company engraved on the bezel. UTVIKLING URMAKER—KRISTIANIA 1920.
“I’ve never seen this before,” Noah said.
Olaf was settling stiffly back into the chair. “It needs to be polished,” he said.
“So you put the watch in your pocket?” Noah asked.
“I did.”
“And then you went to get the other guys?” he said, handing it back.
Olaf began fingering the clasp with one hand as he tried to remove some of the patina. “It’s a damn strange thing, isn’t it?” he asked. “This flimsy little watch, this soft metal chain.” He looked up at Noah. “A
nd that big old boat. Steel made from the ore of her predecessors, steel they’d made army tanks from. Almost a million rivets, two football fields long, eight thousand tons. One of them made it and the other one didn’t.”
Olaf worked the patina on the watch with his fingers, his jaw quivering in a now familiar way. The look of concentration on his face had given way to drowsiness.
“How did you pick the guys to cross the deck with you?”
“I picked Red because he was the single strongest guy I ever knew,” Olaf said. “Short bastard, built like a brick shithouse, with a red beard that hung to his chest and eyebrows the same color, bushy as a hedge. He had a cannonball of a gut, rock solid and sticking out there like a pregnant woman’s. Huge shoulders”—he hunched his shoulders up for effect—“but the smallest goddamn feet you ever saw. Like a bird.
“And a goofball, too. Always laughing and joking and playing pranks, good guy to have on your boat any time of year but especially in the fall, when everyone’s good and goddamn tired of each other. He wore the damnedest red boots.
“During a lifesaving drill earlier that year, he hauled one of the lifeboats twenty yards up a Lake Ontario beach. Might not sound like much, but I could have picked any team of three other guys on that boat and together we wouldn’t have been able to do the same thing. Amazing. I’m sure I had that in mind when I told him to bundle up.”
“Why Luke?”
“Luke was the guy I trusted most on that boat. He was the only guy—aside from Jan—who I believed would do anything to save another guy’s life. You said something about heroes, well, Luke was as close as we got.
“He was in his cabin, and I poked my head in and said, ‘Luke, we’re going aft. We’ve got trouble,’ and he was up and in his gear in thirty seconds. Keep in mind he was asleep in his drawers at the time. Always willing to help, always had the best interest of the crew in mind.” Olaf yawned, twitched his nose, and tried to cross his legs but couldn’t.
“And why Bjorn?”
“Bjorn was sitting closest to the door.”
Again the photograph in the maritime museum of the three men huddled on the beach came to mind. The distance between Bjorn’s place at the card table and that otherworldly beach suddenly seemed like an impossible span. Noah wondered how much the picking of that particular group of men mattered. He wondered if Red had been a weakling, or if Luke had been less willing, or if Bjorn had been asleep in his bunk, whether things would have turned out differently.
Olaf interrupted Noah’s thought. “We were out on the deck within minutes. I instructed the boys to keep together and latched myself onto the lifeline. I went first, then Red, then Bjorn, and Luke was last. The lifeline was a taut, half-inch steel cable that ran from the bow decking to the stern decking right down the middle of the boat. We had lines attached to our waists that we clipped onto it.
“We each had a flashlight or headlamp. Red had a walkie-talkie. There were half-a-dozen lamps running down the edge of either side of the deck. On a clear night they lit the Rag up like a boulevard, but they barely cracked the darkness that night. And the spotlight Jan had shining down on us from the roof of the pilothouse was just a little glimmer in the dark. Might as well have been a star on a cloudy night for all the good it was doing.
“The darkness wasn’t the terrible part, though. It was everything else. Even though we’d gotten the ship turned around, we were still taking some pretty heavy seas, and our big problem was the ice. The deck was covered with it, the lifeline was heavy with it, and in no time at all we were covered in it ourselves. And the wind—Jesus Christ, the wind—so strong at times it’d just whip up behind us and send one of us sprawling face-first onto the deck.
“And the snow,” he said finally and whistled.
“And cold?”
“So goddamn cold I felt like I was on fire,” Olaf said.
One of the few points of difference in the chronicles of that night was the moment at which the fire became the central fact of the catastrophe. Although Bjorn had told a reporter during an interview a few weeks after the wreck that they could smell the fire while they were crossing the deck—a detail that should have put the speculation to rest—some refused to believe this could have been true. They argued that it would have been impossible to smell the fire, seeing how the smoke would have been contained in the engine room, how by then the wind would have been coming from behind them. These same people argued that any fire would certainly have resulted in an immediate explosion that the men on the deck would have heard and felt despite the rough crossing. Noah doubted these speculations. Although it seemed fair enough to assume that they might have felt or heard the explosion, it didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that they might not have, either. As for smelling the fire, Noah had little doubt that the stench could have escaped from any of a hundred crannies in the decking.
“How soon did you know she was burning?” Noah said.
“Hard to say. We were probably better than halfway across the deck when it dawned on me that something smelled wrong. It was like burning hair is what it was, but there was so much other goddamn commotion that it must have been another minute or two before it hit me. We’d crossed under the hatch crane and were probably only thirty or forty feet from reaching the decking when the stink took over.
“All at once I knew what was happening, and no sooner had I put it all together than Red grabs me by the shoulder. I thought he was falling and using me for balance, so I didn’t turn around right away. But when he shook me again I turned, and he was shining his flashlight on the walkie-talkie.
“‘Boss,’ he said, hollering at the top of his goddamn lungs, ‘the captain’s calling.’
“There was so much static and interference from the noise in the background that I could barely hear what Jan was saying, but the long and short of it was that we were pretty well sunk.” He looked off into the corner for a few seconds.
“He told me we had no steerage, that the engine room was incommunicado again. That’s what I gathered from the static anyway. But then his voice came clear: ‘The Rag is burning,’ he said. It seemed absolutely impossible.” He looked down and quit talking.
“Jan must have already made the mayday, huh?”
Olaf lifted his eyes slowly. In the dim light Noah might have mistaken their glassiness for tears.
“Hand me the book,” Olaf said. “And grab my glasses off the counter.”
Noah did.
“I don’t know exactly what time it was when Jan radioed us on the deck, but it had to have been some time around quarter of eleven. Everything was happening so fast.” He had the open book under his nose in the lamplight and was scanning the page with his long, thick finger. “He made the mayday at ten thirty-three. And I’m sure he made the mayday before he signaled us.”
“You said something about all the answers being in the mayday transcript,” Noah said.
“I said as much as we’ll ever know is in here.” Olaf looked back down at the page for a second. “In the mayday,” he said, closing the book but keeping it marked with his finger, “he gives them our position—which had hardly changed from the time of the pan-pan—and tells them there’s a fire in the engine room, that he’s lost contact with the stern, that he’s got four men en route to investigate, and that he’s lost his rudder.
“We know the fuel line was leaking. We know that everyone on the stern was busy trying to contain the leak. We know that sometime between, say, ten twenty and ten thirty, the whole thing went up, and that within minutes the steerage was shot and Jan made the mayday. It’s safe to assume that there was some sort of explosion because a fire alone wouldn’t have put the rudder out of commission so fast. It’s also safe to assume there was an explosion because we never saw any of those boys alive.
“When we finally reached the stern, I sent Luke and Red down below to see what was going on while Bjorn and I went up to the boat deck to see about steering that son of a bitch.”
“Wha
t do you mean steering it?”
“At the very stern of the ship, behind the stack, up on the boat deck, there were two emergency wheels. Jan told us he’d lost the rudder, so up we went. I’ll tell you what, there couldn’t have been a more wide-open spot for heaven to piss on us than the ass end of that ship.”
Noah was trying to piece it all together. “But you didn’t have a compass, you didn’t have a radar or the charts.”
“We knew which way the wind was blowing, though. I figured if we kept it behind us, we’d be okay.”
Olaf pinched the bridge of his nose as he took off his glasses. “We were fighting it, you know? We had no idea what in the hell was going on but that we had to keep the boat pointed in the right direction.” He was shaking his head and suddenly sounded as if he were pleading to a jury. “After a while—right before we ran aground—Red and Luke came up to the boat deck. Bear in mind, we’re still right in the middle of hell. It was cold and windy and we were soaked and coated with ice and standing up on that deck with targets on our chests, just waiting to get dead. We’ve got no idea what the hell is happening below us until Luke comes back up. In the middle of all that screaming wind he tells me we’re done, that the engine room and her crew are gone, that right below us all four decks are up in flames: The fantail deck, the windlass room, the cabins—everything—poof”—he exploded his hands—“roaring away. He tells me they didn’t see anyone, that we’ve got no chance. Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath.
“And I’m thinking to myself, those goddamn boats sitting tight in Thunder Bay better damn well be on their way, and the Coast Guard better have a cutter and a few helicopters coming to search or we’re as good as dead.
“My mind was all tangled up. I was sitting on a time bomb with all the water in the world exploding around me. It’s so goddamn dark and cold and my guys are telling me that right beneath our feet half the crew is cooked.” He closed his eyes, looking, Noah thought, like he was trying to erase the picture from his mind. “I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I grabbed Red by the arm and we went back down.
