Across the Great Lake

by Lee Zacharias

  The light that came through the windows behind the men across the table had softened to a pale pearl. It had begun to snow, which seemed strange because in town when it snowed it always got so quiet, but here in the crew’s mess everything was so jolly, and even when the conversation lulled, you could still hear Twitches muttering to himself and the ice pounding against the hull. It was the best party I’d ever been to, and Billy Johnson didn’t get to come.

  “Now Hansen’s never been on the ice before, he don’t know the way, so once Glass is dressed he sets out for Menominee to get help. Course Hansen’s own clothes is none too dry, by now it’s full dark, there’s all this fog, doggone harness busted, and he figures both of ’em are goners since Glass is sure to freeze to death before he ever gets to Menominee, still five miles off if he can even see to walk a straight line. Hansen himself is walkin’ in circles just to keep movin’ he’s so cold, even that dumb horse is shiverin’, walkin’ circles right behind him like he’s hitched to a grindstone. But, whaddaya know, Glass makes it and gets two stage men from Menominee who know the route to go back out. There was icicles half a foot long hanging from Hansen’s moustache when they found him, but they took him back to the Menominee Hotel and gave him some brandy and that perked him right up, though he said he’d never cross the bay again unless someone come along to invent a flyin’ machine.”

  Odd turned to Alv. “Imagine icicles half a foot long hanging from your moustache.”

  “You think that boy can grow a moustache?” Holgar asked, and most of the men laughed.

  “But what happened to the horse?” I wanted to know, which made them laugh even harder.

  “Don’t you worry about that horse, honey,” Walter said. “That horse survived just fine.”

  “Never went anywhere near water again though,” Axel said. “Not even to take a drink.”

  I pondered that as Jake brought a platter of cookies to the table and eyed my plate. “I believe this little girl likes Sam’s cooking.”

  “Thank you for my dinner. It was delicious,” I said, remembering my manners.

  “Glad someone does,” Odd said. “He serving that bilgewater for supper again?”

  The men began to guffaw. “Oh, thank you for our vittles, they was ever so good” several of them chanted in falsetto.

  “That’s fiskesuppe to you,” Sam said as he appeared in the door to the galley. “Made with the finest lake perch.”

  “Finest lake perch is fried,” Bosun said. “You going ice-fishing this afternoon or serving last week’s stew?”

  “Matey, you’re skating on thin ice.” Sam had big, square, yellow teeth and freckles, even on his hands. He was dressed all in white with a white apron over his white shirt and pants and a funny little white hat that looked like it was made out of paper on top of his crinkly ginger-colored hair. “It’s a risky business, insulting the cook.” I didn’t understand because everyone had seconds and seemed to like the food as much as I did, and Alv had to explain to me later that they were just having fun.

  “You ought to wish it was thin ice,” Red grumbled. “Ice this thick we’ll be lucky to get back before opening day.”

  “If,” Dick repeated. “I’m telling you, she’s leaking.”

  “Don’t be such a sad apple,” Sam said. “What do you think, Walter? You’re the engineer.” Which was a sore point, because it was Walter who’d been promoted instead of Dick.

  “Pumps are working.” Walter turned to Red. “You think the Hebrew Hammer’s wrist is healed back up?”

  “Counting on it. I want to see the Tigers take two in a row.”

  “What do you care?” Roald said. “You ain’t going to see or hear it. You’re going to be down in the firehold, and the whole season’s going to pass you by.”

  “Doesn’t matter whether I see it. World champs are world champs whether I’m there or not.”

  Axel cleared his throat. “I got another joke. Sailor meets a pirate in a bar.”

  Bosun stood. “Chow’s over. Time for you whores to get back to work.” Everyone else worked two four-hour shifts a day, but the deckhands worked eight, though whenever a ship docked all the deckhands went to work no matter whose shift it was.

  “I want to hear about the pirate,” I said.

  Walter pushed his cup aside. “Aw, let her hear about the pirate.”

  “You too, new boy,” Bosun said.

  “Captain says I’m supposed to move his daughter to one of the passenger cabins,” Alv said.

  “Oh, I see. We ain’t got one woman aboard, we got two. Captain’s daughter and her nursemaid.”

  “It’s snowing. Go ahead and take her through the galley,” Jake offered.

  “Inside, outside, don’t make no difference on a ship,” Slim said.

  “Does to me,” Holgar said with that little whistle in his nose again.

  Bosun glared at Alv. “Five minutes, and I want you down in the engine room with a paintbrush in your hand. I don’t like your sweater.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But I want to hear about the pirate,” I said. “And about the ghost that no one sees.”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” Axel answered. “Don’t nobody know ’cause nobody ever sees.”

  “But if I could get a picture . . .” Holgar said.

  “You and your camera. You think a ghost is goin’ to sit down and pose all pretty?” Axel turned his profile to Holgar and primped a hand along his cheek. “Say cheese.”

  “That’s okay,” Alv promised me. “I know that joke. I’ll tell you later.”

  9

  My stepmother was a gay woman. I hesitate to use that word because it has such a different meaning now, yet none of the other words I might choose—cheerful, lively, happy, though she was all of those things—convey quite so precisely her zest. I don’t know what my mother was like, but I imagine they were quite different. My stepmother liked to sing, she was a noisy woman, always banging on the piano. When she raised a window or put one down it thumped, in her kitchen pots and pans rang out, her scrub brush rasped, her footsteps echoed. When my father was gone, she kept company with her women friends, and they seemed to have a jolly time of it, chattering their afternoons away, playing spardam and gin. At the end of July, when the cherries ripened, they got together to can, and the house filled with the sound of glass jars rattling in big enamel pots. It was my job to pick the stems, then they had to dig the pits, and when they boiled the fruit down, the fragrant steam seemed to carry their gossip back and forth like the cartoon clouds in The Captain and the Kids and Little Orphan Annie. Driving was not something many women did in Frankfort in the 1930s, but she did, and on the occasions when she drove us up to the Elberta bluff to watch my father’s ship depart, she packed a picnic. “Now, Fern,” she would say, “we are going to have a good time,” though to me it always sounded less like a wish or a prediction than a decree, something that was going to happen whether I liked it or not, and I did not. I wanted to be aboard the ship, listening to the men’s jokes in the mess, up in the pilothouse at the helm, down on the car deck fastening the clamps and turnbuckles, in the engine room wiping down the crankshaft, playing cards in the flicker, or even in the uneasy dark of my cabin waiting on a ghost. The only place I didn’t want to be was where I was, up on the bluff watching.

  She was different from my father, but it was that difference that made her so well suited to him. She was the ideal captain’s wife—she never seemed to mind that he was gone, though she was equally merry when he was there. I should have taken to her, but I didn’t. She was nice to me, but there was something relentless about her cheer. She was a woman who made the best of things, not out of effort but because she was incapable of doing otherwise. There was something simple about her, and she was admirable in that particular way that simple people sometimes are. Do not misunderstand me: I don’t mean that she was simpleminded. Nor did I dislike her. I accepted her, I just did not take to her. This was not out of loyalty to my mother. Already
I could scarcely remember my mother. Yet there was some part of me that I withheld. She did not try to kiss or hug me, and I did not kiss or hug her. I called her Mother because I was supposed to. Her name was Lene.

  She was older than my mother but still a good bit younger than my father, a widow I believe, though I never heard mention of her first husband, and she brought no children to the marriage with my father, nor did they have children together. It may have been that she was what they used to call barren, though if she wanted children of her own, if it pained her not to have them, she did not let on. She would have been over forty when they married, and I suppose it’s possible that it was simply getting past her time. In any case, I suspect she did not show disappointments because she felt none. She was a woman of enormous energy but no passion. It was all the same to her, children or not, my father home or not, winter or summer, fair weather or foul.

  They married a year after my mother died. I don’t know if he loved her. As I say, my father was not a demonstrative man. And perhaps love didn’t matter. It was not unheard of for a widower to remarry in order to give his children a mother. My father was gone so much, and in the time between my mother’s death and their marriage I was often cared for by this or that neighbor, the women of the West Side, those blocks of Forest and Leelanau Avenues closest to the lake. There was a woman who came in once a week to clean and do some cooking, and he might have hired her or someone else to stay with me, but I suspect they wouldn’t hear of it. Norwegians, and they were primarily Norwegian, are a hospitable people who help each other out. Another mouth to feed or child to tend would not have troubled them. Or perhaps they were wary that a live-in woman might set her sights on my father. Either way their generosity, which I did not perceive to be generosity because children take for granted whatever they are given, was not extended out of fondness for my mother. They said little about her to me, so little I think they must have made a point of it. I’m not saying they disliked her—because she was my father’s wife, they would have accepted her—but I never had the feeling that they embraced her, not in the way they did Lene. It was one of those West Side women who introduced Lene to my father. She came from Beulah, otherwise he would have known her already, and once she married him they took her in completely. It’s quite possible that they chose her for him as a way of choosing her for themselves. My father wasn’t the only captain or mate from the West Side, and they set great store on the friendships that sustained them while their husbands were away.

  She was a large woman, not fat but dense, thick through the middle, big boned, and tall, taller than my mother. It was as if her personality required a larger presence, took up more space. I sometimes wonder if the reason I don’t remember my mother is that she took up no space at all. I have always imagined her to be a quiet woman, somewhat solitary, much like my father, but without his sustaining passion for the lake.

  Certainly she was smaller. That much I know from the few photographs I possess. I never saw a picture of her as a girl—she was an orphan, and it’s possible no one ever thought to take one. How she came to be orphaned I don’t know. I liked to imagine her parents both died on one of those many ships that sailed through a crack in the lake, as sailors say of those ships that disappear without a trace, that sail from fair weather into the sharp teeth of a storm and simply vanish, or maybe they went down with Captain Kilty, perhaps her father was a mate on the Pere Marquette 18 and her mother the cabin maid, though I knew it wasn’t so, for if it was we would have known it.

  The earliest of those pictures is my parents’ wedding portrait, in which she wears a simple drop-waist dress of white or cream with a V-neck, long sleeves, and a soft hem that falls below her knees, what appear to be pale, silk stockings, and white or cream-colored Mary Jane heels with pointed toes. The long flap on her matching cloche hat conceals her forehead and all but a few wisps of blonde hair. In one hand she holds a small bouquet; the other is linked inside my father’s arm. He wears his uniform, and they both look very formal. Neither smile, though I think that is less a comment on their union than a convention of the wedding portraits of the time. The photograph is so stylized it seems to say more about the era than either of my parents. With that hat I can’t even tell whether she was pretty or if I might resemble her, only that like all of us she was fair.

  There is another picture of her holding me as a baby, but the print is so small inside its wide, white crenellated border, the camera so far away, you cannot read her expression. It would have been taken in late afternoon, for the shadow of the photographer stretches toward her across the grass. Her dress appears to have some sort of subtle pattern, tiny flowers perhaps, or maybe it’s geometric, and the light-colored Mary Jane heels look to be the same ones she wore to marry. I want to believe that she is smiling, though a magnifying glass yields only blur. The wind is blowing her hair, which is neither long nor short, across her mouth, and in her arms I am no more than a lump in a blanket.

  In the last picture I am three or four. She is seated on the top step of the front porch of the house on Leelanau Avenue, and I am standing on the second, our heads nearly level. We are facing each other, her arms are clasped around my knees, one of mine reaches around her shoulder, and the other rests against her collarbone. I am wearing a pale, short-sleeved shift that might be organdy with a starched white cotton collar, and my outstretched arms have lifted the hem to expose the edge of my underpants. Her dress drapes around her calves. It too is a light color, though hers has a waist, and both of us wear Mary Janes, hers the same white or ivory heels, mine black with rounded toes and a sheen that must be patent leather, the sort of shoes a little girl would get for Easter, though it is clearly summer, for on Easter in Frankfort we were often still picking our way up the walk to church in boots. Her hair is swept back from her forehead, mine is cut short, bobbed in the back, with bangs like a little Dutch girl’s, and though my face is in shadow, I am surely smiling. She is. Her lips are parted, she is not looking at the camera, but at me, and her face is so radiant she may be laughing. It’s not much to tell me who we were, but it does promise that in that moment we were happy. She wasn’t always the woman who came home from the hospital and turned her face to the wall.

  I think my father must have loved her. Why else would he have married after all those years spent single? He was near fifty when they wed, and she was not yet twenty. Moreover, he sailed a perilous inland sea. He could not have expected to be widowed. On that day he or whoever took that picture of us on our porch could not have imagined she would leave us so soon. But what’s to be made of that, what’s to be said? That we never know what will happen? True enough if trite.

  But it is also true that sometimes you know exactly what will happen, or to be more precise, you know what cannot. That was my problem. And I held it against my stepmother, whose only crime was to accept things as they are.

  10

  We couldn’t just pass through the galley to the passenger quarters because Sam had to show me how everything worked, the cupboard that opened from the top so nothing could fall out in rough weather, the plates that were stacked in wooden cages to keep them from flying off the shelves, the rail across the front of the stove. Even the shelves for the cups slanted backward. But all he said about the tall metal urns with spigots for hot water and coffee was that I was never to touch them lest I get burned. Down the passageway a walk-in refrigerator let off a chill breath of air, and on our way I peeked inside the officers’ mess, where the first and third mates were still at the table drinking coffee, not even talking. It was fancier than the crew’s, with a white linen cloth and chairs instead of stools, and the passenger dining room was fancier still, with curtains on the bottom windows and that soft, even, white light coming through the windows of its clerestory just like it did in the galley and the extra room for preparation and washing dishes.

  The Manitou was ticketed as a freight boat, which meant it couldn’t carry more than twelve passengers, though even in summer it rarely
carried that many, just the occasional railroad official or family of tourists taking a shortcut across the lake. I couldn’t see why the whole, wide forward part of the deckhouse should belong to them while the crew was packed into the narrow aft space.

  My father had told Alv that I was to choose whichever cabin I wanted and entrusted him with the key to the purser’s office, where the keys for the whole ship hung from a rack above the desk. The purser was the officer in charge of money and supplies, but he was sick, and my father had put his third mate, Casper Strom, in charge of supplies, though he still had to bunk in the cabin he shared with the second mate instead of the bigger cabin behind the purser’s office. I wanted to choose it, but Alv said I couldn’t, just one of the regular passenger cabins, though he let me look around the office while he fetched the keys. There was a wavy glass window that opened in the door so the purser could take the passengers’ money, and I raised it up and down until Alv told me to quit because he had to get below and I still hadn’t picked my cabin, but first I had to look at the safe beside the purser’s desk. That was where the purser kept all the ship’s money and if they wanted, the passengers could give him their valuables for safekeeping. I liked the word valuables, so I tried it out a few times to see how it felt in my mouth, and then I said, “What kind of valuables?”

  “If they had lots of money or jewelry or something,” Alv said, but the way he said it made me know he couldn’t imagine having lots of money or jewelry. I wanted him to open the safe so we could see the jewels, but it didn’t have the kind of lock he could open with a key, you had to know the combination, and anyway there wouldn’t be any jewelry inside now, though I still wished he had the combination because I wanted to see what the inside of a safe looked like, if it was lined in velvet or fur, but even when it was empty it had to be locked because . . .