“I know,” I said. “In case the ship begins to roll.”
There was more, but Alv said for me to hurry up, and even though the cabins were all the same, I had to inspect every one, along with the smoking room, where he said no women were allowed, and neither was the crew. Even when it was below zero they had to go out to the weather deck because it was dangerous to smoke below. The only thing the crew ever got to do in the passenger quarters was clean, though every two weeks they lined up in the passageway to collect their pay. Then Alv showed me the ladies’ head, which had wooden stall doors for the big square camp toilets like the one in the officer’s quarters, though I hoped this one wouldn’t be quite so stinky, and a shower that I would have all to myself when even my father had to share. At home we took baths in our big clawfoot tub. I had never taken a shower, but thought it would probably be like standing in the rain.
“What would you do if the ship began to roll?” I asked him but didn’t wait for an answer. “I like to roll down the hill where I live. Do you have a hill to roll down?”
“There’s too many trees on the one at the end of my street.” A memory that wasn’t quite a smile flickered at his mouth. “What we liked to do, us boys, we used to take a big piece of cardboard and slide down the dunes.”
That sounded like fun. The dunes were way steeper than my hill.
“It’s a short ride down and a long climb up” was what he said, though the way he said it made me know he thought the climb worth it.
“Maybe you could find a piece of cardboard and take me when we get back.” I had forgotten he would be working on the ship while I had time to play. Already I imagined us doing everything together. “Dick Butler says the ship is leaking. He said we’ll be in trouble if we hit a storm.”
“I guess you’re always in trouble when you hit a storm.”
I couldn’t decide if I hoped we did or not. It would be an adventure. “Maybe he’s wrong.”
“I hope so. But he’s no dummy. He knows his way around an engine room.”
“He’s mean to you.”
“Everybody’s mean to me.”
“How come?”
“Because. Anyway, it’s not going to storm. Before you know it we’ll be across the lake and back.”
That left me even more undecided. I wanted to be on my journey, but I didn’t want it to be over before I knew it.
“What’s that?” I pointed to a narrow door that had a hole where a knob or a handle should be. It looked as if my hand would just fit, but Alv said not to try it in case my hand got stuck.
“A closet,” he guessed, because the ship had to have someplace to keep all the linens. There was another door he hadn’t opened at the back of the lounge, but I couldn’t choose it either, though he unlocked it to let me see, because that was the special room for the managers from the railroad whenever they crossed the lake, and it was bigger than the purser’s and fancier than any of them. It had a big double bed in case a manager wanted to bring his wife, and there was a blanket with stripes that matched the rug on the floor and a built-in leather sofa, when my father didn’t have a rug or a sofa. The managers’ compartment was where the ghost lived, that’s what the men said. Bosun claimed that people saw the ghost’s face in the wood paneling at the back, but I didn’t see it, so I called, but it didn’t answer, and Alv said again to hurry up and choose my cabin because he had to lock the managers’ room back up before the bosun came looking to see what was taking so long.
“And don’t you be calling the ghost out anymore,” he told me. “Because ghosts can walk through walls, and I don’t want to see one.”
“I do.” I wanted to know what a ghost looked like and if you could see through them like people said.
I chose the first cabin behind the smoking room even though they were all alike, small as the mates’, with the same dark-wood paneling, but dressed up for company with bright green wool blankets instead of gray. And the top berth folded up like a Pullman car on a train, so a passenger could use the bottom berth as a sofa, though there wasn’t any need, because the wide, wood-paneled lounge that ran down the middle of the passenger quarters had all the seating anyone could want, little divans with side tables and leather armchairs that all had brass eyes on the back, where long hooks attached to the baseboard could secure them when seas got rough. Two square wooden columns ran straight up the middle, a fat one that enclosed the escape hatch that Alv was going to show me when we went below and a thinner one for the forward spar, and though there weren’t any windows and the ceilings were very low like they were everywhere on the ship except in the galley and passenger dining room, there were lights overhead, and at the front of the lounge, just below my father’s cabin, an observation room was fitted out like a sunroom with lots of windows and hemp chairs.
When Alv returned the keys to the purser’s office, I spotted a rack on the wall that held a row of little brass tubes that I hadn’t noticed before because I’d been so interested in the safe. “What’s that?”
But Alv said he was done answering my questions, the bosun wanted him below.
“Ask your father,” he said and had me put my coat in the wooden locker in my cabin while he went up to my father’s cabin to fetch Manitou and the little bag my father had packed. I thought Manitou would like the observation room because all the shutters were down inside their pockets and we could see out on three sides, plus there was a big brass compass that would tell us where we were going. I wondered if he would like the top berth, which is where I wanted to sleep because you got to climb a ladder that was hooked to the side. That was the rack I’d decided on, which is what sailors called their beds. When they went to sleep they said they were going to rack out. Even though it was his first trip, Alv knew a lot about ships from listening to his father talk; he just didn’t have any practice. Also there was a hitch in his gait, which I hadn’t noticed at first because everyone walks a little funny on a ship, but now when I asked he told me he’d had polio, but even so he was lucky because a lot of people with polio had to live inside an iron lung, and he just barely limped.
I didn’t know anyone with polio, so I thought maybe it was something you got from living in Elberta, but that wasn’t nice, and anyway I was more interested in the ship. I hadn’t thought when I decided on the upper berth, because what if Manitou fell out? He would get hurt, and it would be my fault, so I decided to climb up there by myself to look around but sleep with him on the bottom. I expected he would be impressed with all the new words I was learning. The handles on the doors were called dogs, and when you secured a door you were supposed to dog it down. I had wrapped a cookie in a napkin for him, though Alv told me that Billy Cooke—that was the second cook’s name, which was a big joke among the crew—got up in the middle of the night to make sure there were baked goods on hand all day, and whenever I wanted I could get a glass of milk or a cookie or even a sandwich because there was always meat and cheese in the big refrigerator. But what I wanted to know was how the refrigerator worked. At home there were electric wires, that’s how we had lights and why we didn’t have to buy ice from the icehouse.
“There’s generators.” His almond-shaped eyes lit. “Wait till you get a look at the engine room. You’ve never seen so much equipment.”
“Yes, please.” I tugged his hand. “Let’s go see it now.”
“When my shift’s over,” he said. “If Captain says it’s okay.”
“And the train,” I reminded him. “Don’t forget the train.”
“I won’t,” he promised, and then I was by myself in the big lounge, where I sat first in one chair and then another and pretended I was a grown-up lady on a grand tour, even though I didn’t really want to be a lady, until he came back with Manitou and my bag and I remembered that he was supposed to tell me about the pirate, but because I wanted to see everything and asked so many questions, he’d been gone too long already, though I knew if he had his choice he’d rather stay and tell me about the pirate. I would.
11
Children are animals. They want what they want. And all the unwanting in the world can never undo the damage.
12
The hatch to the car deck was behind the aft deckhouse, and because Alv had said that I could get a snack whenever I wanted, I went back through the galley, where Jake was washing dishes with his back to me in the prep room. From the crew’s quarters it was just steps across the deck to the doghouse, the big metal hood over the steep companionway we’d come up that morning when we boarded. I held the rail, which dipped at the top. The railcars blocked most of the light that came through the portholes strung like pearls high along the hull and over the top of the massive seagate that was supposed to keep waves from washing over the car deck, though sometimes seagates bent or even tore off, and the first Ann Arbor ferries didn’t have seagates at all. From the top I could see that the boxcars had a little peak to let ice and snow slide off. Then I was at the bottom, and the peaks disappeared, the cars looked flat on top. Down here the rasping thunder of the ice was much louder, along with the thumping of the boilers. The chains that held the cars creaked and seemed to echo inside the big metal cavern despite all the racket. I could have shouted, and no one would hear. A thrill of goosebumps rose along my arms. In the whole world there was no one who knew where I was. I could do anything I wanted.
The metal car deck pulsed through my feet, not the movement of the ice or the water (the higher you go the more you feel a ship’s sway), but the steady vibration of the engine. It was like something alive, and I liked the idea that the ship might be a living creature.
A row of white stanchions ran down the middle of the deck, but the train wasn’t like I thought it would be, because they had to park the cars on four rows of tracks that gleamed faintly in the shadowy light, so it was more like four short trains, which I would have known if I had thought about it or remembered from the loading, would have known even a ship as big as the Manitou wasn’t long enough for a whole train to stretch out like I was at a crossing watching it go by. Also the weight of the cars had to balance or else the ship would capsize and sink, which had happened to the Ann Arbor 4. Everything happened to the Ann Arbor 4. It seemed to be even unluckier than the Ashley. There were eight cars on each track, fastened in place with chains, big heavy sidejacks, blocks, clamps, and turnbuckles, because cars that broke loose in a storm could do worse than bend up the companionway rail, they could tear a hole in the hull, the engine room and flicker would flood, and the ship would go down, though sometimes if a ship was sinking the crew would raise the seagate and push cars over the stern into the lake to try to make the ship lighter. That’s what they did on the Pere Marquette 18, but Peter Kilty went down anyway. And before the Ann Arbor 4 sank at our south pier there was such a terrible storm that a brand new load of Buicks tore off the seagate and rolled into the lake. That happened before I was born, but to the crew it must have seemed like yesterday because the retired chief engineer still buttonholed anyone he could to show off his watch.
A tiny orange light flickered at the end of one track, and I pressed myself against the car so no one could see me, then when nothing happened, I peeked my head out. It was one of the men from below, from the black gang, because he was in his shirtsleeves and even in the dim light I could see rivulets of sweat and grime on his face. After a minute I recognized Dick Butler, the oiler who said the hull was leaking. He was smoking a cigarette, and when he was done, he dropped it to the deck, squashed it with his boot, then picked it up and dropped it into his shirt pocket. Then he disappeared through the hatch to the companionway that went below. The crew wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere but the weather deck, but it was snowing, and I guessed it was warmer on the car deck even though I was cold. I hadn’t put my coat on because I wanted to pretend I was just looking for a snack, and I shivered in my sweater, but I wasn’t done exploring.
There was no reason to look for an engine, because the engine was too heavy for the apron. They only used it to push the cars on board, and in Menominee there would be another engine waiting to pull them off. What I wanted to see was the caboose. Sometimes when you watched a freight train go by, the man in the caboose would come out on the little platform in back and wave, and I thought I would like to stand on that platform and wave too. I could wave good-bye to all of the people in Frankfort who were going about their business just like always on a cold winter day, trying to dig their cars out or shoveling their steps or walking to the butcher or grocer or maybe just visiting. Billy Johnson might be making a snowman in the yard that was just the other side of the big wooded lot between our houses. Or maybe he was coming through the woods with his sled so he could could ride down our long, steep driveway, and he might wonder where I was and why I didn’t come out to play, and he wouldn’t know that I was on a boat, that I was on a boat and a train both at the same time, and that I was going to sail all the way across the lake just as soon as we got out of the frozen harbor, and even Manitou, whom I had left in the observation room, got to go, and Billy didn’t. The tracks were so close together I had to be careful not to bang myself up on the jacks as I walked the length of the deck between each row. I had to climb over because you couldn’t go under, and there wasn’t enough room to go around, but I walked up and down the tracks between the cars, wondering what was inside them, and never once thought about my mother.
13
In school, the first thing we learned about the Great Lakes was that HOMES was the way to remember all their names, and we should have no trouble remembering HOMES because the Great Lakes region was our HOME. But the problem with remembering them that way was that it put them all out of order. They were not in an order in which one might sail from one to the others, not in alphabetical order or any other order that would have made sense to me. And anyway our home was Michigan. You might as well say you were from the world as from a region so big it included eight states and two countries.
It came as a disappointment to learn that Michigan was only the third largest of the five lakes, though I was glad to know it was the sixth largest freshwater lake on earth. Sailors called the Great Lakes our inland seas, the sweetwater seas, and I wanted to be a sailor, I wanted to talk like one, but my teacher talked like a book, which meant that she was forever correcting me. I don’t mean she punished me for cursing—there was less of that among my father’s crew than you might imagine, and not just because they watched their tongues around me but because blasphemy is
bad luck on a boat, along with cats, women, and preachers. No, it was my names for things that she objected to. An ice devil was not an ice devil but a waterspout, and they were fairly rare on the Great Lakes, I couldn’t possibly have seen one. Nor had I seen the wooden ghost steamer Chicora blowing distress signals and should not tell my classmates that I had because there was no such thing as ghosts, and South Manitou Island was not haunted by cholera victims who had been dropped off by immigrant ships enroute to Chicago and buried alive, though every sailor on the lake has heard their cries, and it was the coast guard that showed us a picture of the Chicora and asked if that was the ship we had seen, because other ships had reported seeing it too. There was also no such thing as a snow wasset, but I knew there was, because Bosun had encountered it on Lake Superior. It was as big as the Chicora, a cross between a whale and a giant snake, with scales on a belly that was bulging with blubber and you didn’t want to think about what else, because it could swallow a man as big as my father in one gulp and would follow a ship for days in a blow, just waiting for a chance to eat the crew, and even though it lived in the frigid waters above the UP, I kept an eye out, because if a ship could sail from Lake Superior to Lake Michigan, a giant snow wasset could get there too. For all she knew it could be the monster people kept seeing in Grand Traverse Bay, and that was in the newspaper so it had to be true. My problem, she told me, was that I had an overactive imagination. On my report card she wrote that I told lies.
Across the Great Lake Page 6
