A kitten was even better.
“It wasn’t inside the car. It was up underneath the axle.”
“I want to keep it! Catch it for me, please. Please?” I was so excited I was hopping in place. “Catch the kitty, Alv, pretty please, oh pretty please with sugar on it!”
“A black cat.” His voice flattened. “You better hope it stays up under the cars so Bosun doesn’t find it.”
“But I want it. It’s dark under there, the poor kitty doesn’t have anything to eat, the harbor’s all froze, it’s going to take forever to get to Menominee, and by then my kitty’s going to die.”
“It’ll catch mice.”
I made a face. I didn’t want my kitten eating mice. “What if it doesn’t find any?”
“A cat can always find a mouse,” he said, but there was a thread of uncertainty in his voice. “It looks to be pretty young though. Maybe we could find a box or something. I could hide it in the closet off the flicker where they keep the mops and paint and cleaning supplies. Bosun never goes in there, but . . .” He seemed to be thinking. “Watch out!” he yelled as the kitten reappeared, and he dove for it, but the cat leapt past him, then turned and stood looking at us with yellow eyes that glowed in the dark.
“See, it’s hungry,” I said. “And Sam said I could have a glass of milk whenever I wanted. Please.”
“Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.” Alv crouched, and the kitten slowly approached, but instead of going to Alv it came to me, arching its back and rubbing all around my ankles.
I stroked its back. The fur was very soft, and I could see now that it wasn’t all black, there was a little triangle of white on its chest and some white hairs at the very tips of its paws, and it was much smaller than Billy Johnson’s cat, which was orange. “See, it’s lonely. We can take it above, and Sam will give us some milk and maybe even some fiskesuppe.”
Gingerly Alv reached out.
“My father would let me keep it.” I didn’t know about that. We didn’t have a cat at home, a cat or a dog or even a canary. “It can sleep in my rack with me and Manitou.”
“Not on your life. Bosun finds out, he’ll pitch it overboard. This has to be our secret. You and me.”
“But I haven’t ever had a pet, and Sam has all that food.” My mouth began to tremble. “You said you’d hide it in the closet.”
“I changed my mind. The deckhands go in there, and what if one of them told?” All the while he seemed to think, the cat kept arching around my ankles and I petted its back. “I like cats,” he conceded. “We have a cat named Ashes at home. My mother found her on our doorstep.”
I kept quiet, because I could tell that he was going to give in, and when you know that’s going to happen the best way to argue is not to say anything at all.
“What’s my father going to say if I don’t get to be a deckhand?”
We were standing very close because it was the only way to hear each other. I could feel the warmth of his body inside the coverall someone had loaned him. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll leave it to hide down here, but you can ask Sam for a glass of milk, and later I’ll come down and feed it and hope Bosun doesn’t throw me overboard. He hates me.”
“Why?”
“Bosun never likes the new boy.” He looked away. “Anyway my father says I’m not right.”
“But I like you. I love you,” I cried. Because that’s the way children are, they choose to love, and the choice takes no longer than an instant. It’s their power, because love is the only thing they possess, the one thing they have to bestow. “Don’t you love me?”
“You’re going to get me in trouble.”
I was so crushed, I bit my lip and looked down at the deck, afraid I would cry.
“Okay,” he said. “I like you. But you’re still going to get me in trouble.”
I tucked my hand in his. “Well, I’m going to make the bosun like me, and when I do I’ll tell him he has to like you too.” I hurried on in case he might change his mind. “What about the watch?”
“It’ll hide,” Alv said. “Kittens are always getting up under stuff or inside.”
“You said you’d find a box and put it in the closet with the mops.”
He shook his head. “I told you. It wasn’t a good idea.”
“But how are we going to feed it?”
“Me,” Alv said. “You’re not supposed to be down here.”
“Okay. How will you feed it then?”
“If I bring food it’ll come out, and then it’ll know to expect me.”
I didn’t tell him that I planned to sneak down too, because if it was going to be my cat, it needed to know me too. “We have to name it. Is it a boy or girl cat?”
“I couldn’t see.”
I wondered if the ghost no one ever saw was a boy ghost or a girl ghost. Billy Johnson had shown me how to tell, but if nobody ever saw it, how would anyone know?
I tried to think of a name that would work for either. Manitou was a good one, and I hadn’t even thought about that when I named him. Sleeping Bear was a girl, Ashley was a boy, because James Ashley was the man who started the ferries and now the railroad had given his name to an unlucky ship, which didn’t seem right because if you were the man who thought it all up it seemed like they ought to name the best ship for you, but Manitou was the best ship, and I was proud that it belonged to my father. Elberta sounded like a girl, Frankfort a boy, and anyway I wouldn’t want Alv to think I picked my town over his. “I know. Let’s call it Whispers. Because it’s our secret, you and me.” I bent down again to pet the cat, which rolled onto its back, but the instant Alv reached out it sprang up, twisting in the air as it struck.
“Upstairs,” he said, clutching his hand to the front of his coverall as he led me to the foot of the companionway. Already Whispers had disappeared beneath one of the cars. “We need to put some iodine on your knee.”
“Will it hurt? Above,” I added, because he forgot and said upstairs.
“Probably.”
He stepped aside for me to go first. It wasn’t until we reached the light at the top that I saw blood where he was holding his hand against the coverall. He washed it in the sink in my cabin and wrapped it with a towel, then knelt to wash my knee.
“Whispers bit you!” I said.
The overhead lamp seemed to burnish the top of his face. “Captain’s not going to be happy when he sees your clothes.”
“It’s okay to tear your dress on a ship.” I thought about my mother then, because our mothers always told us to keep our Sunday clothes nice, but there was a tree to climb right outside the church, and no matter how many times the Sunday school teacher warned us not to, the boys always ripped the knees of their pants and the girls tore out their hems, and when their mothers saw them they would say, “What did I tell you?” But maybe my father wouldn’t notice.
“Do not leave this compartment,” he said as he went off to find the first aid kit.
“I did what you said. I stayed right here,” I said as soon as he came back. The towel he’d wrapped around his hand was sopped red. “You promised to tell me about the pirate.” I winced as he applied the iodine, and he recapped the bottle. “Aren’t you going use some?”
“That’s okay.”
I took the bottle, but when I poured it over his hand he yelped. “A pirate meets a sailor in a bar,” I prompted, adding, “You yelled and I didn’t. I must be braver than you.”
“You used too much.” He took another towel, staining it with iodine, and that never came out in the wash.
“What’s a bar?”
“It’s where men go to drink.”
“Is that where Odd goes?”
“Of course it’s where Odd goes.”
“Have you ever been to one?”
“Not yet.”
“Are the pirate and the sailor drunk?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. They’re at a bar. What they do, they tell each other stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
> “About their adventures at sea.”
“Do you think we’ll see pirates?”
“I doubt it.”
“Does this pirate have a parrot?”
“He has a peg leg, an eyepatch, and a hook.”
“He should have a parrot,” I said.
“Okay. He has a parrot.”
“What’s the parrot’s name?”
“I don’t know!”
“Is your hand still bleeding?”
He peeked beneath the towel. “I think it’s stopped.”
“Tell me the story.”
“It’s a joke, not a story. The sailor asks the pirate how he got his wooden leg, and the pirate says, ‘We was caught in this monster storm around Cape Horn, and I got swept overboard, and just as they’re pulling me out, a big shark swims up and bites off me leg.’” Alv made his voice all funny like the pirate, then leaned toward me to chomp his teeth.
I felt my eyes widen. “Do you think we’ll see sharks?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because sharks live in the ocean.”
“Sturgeon,” I said. “I bet we see big sturgeon.”
“Through this ice? About the pirate and the sailor”—Alv pitched his voice again—“‘Blimey,’ the sailor says. ‘And what about the hook?’ So the pirate says, ‘See, we was boardin’ a trader ship, pistols blastin’, swords a-swingin’, and in the ruckus me hand got chopped off.’”
I hugged my hand to my chest. “Does your hand hurt? Do you think you’ll get gangrene? You might have to get a hook.”
“I hope not.”
“Then you could be a pirate.”
“I don’t want to be a pirate.”
“Where is Cape Horn?”
“I don’t know where it is,” he admitted.
“But why do they call it Cape Horn?”
“I don’t know. ‘Zounds,’ the sailor says, and then . . .”
“What’s the difference between a joke and a story?”
“Stories aren’t always funny.”
“Are jokes always funny?”
He thought a minute. “Depends on who’s listening.”
“Is this one funny?”
His mouth twitched. “If you’d let me finish, you could decide for yourself. Sailor asks, ‘How came ye by the eye patch?’”
“Do you think the bosun might throw me overboard?”
“No.”
“You said he’d throw Whispers.”
“Cat’s not the same as the captain’s daughter.”
“You said he’d throw you overboard.”
“I told you, he doesn’t like me.”
But I was going to make the bosun like him. “Tell me about the eyepatch.”
So he did the voices again. “‘Seagull dropping fell in me eye,’ the pirate says, and the sailor says, ‘You gotta be joking. You mean to tell me you lost an eye just because . . .’”
“A seagull pooped in it!” I shouted, but the joke wasn’t over.
“‘Well,’ the pirate says, ‘it was me first day with the hook.’”
I clapped my hands and laughed. “That’s a funny joke. Tell it again.”
“Bosun needs me below. When I finish painting, I’ve got to practice knots. Anyway, you interrupt too much.”
I followed him into the passengers’ lounge. “Well, I don’t care if he doesn’t like you, because I’m going to grow up and be a sailor, and you and I can work on the same boat, and we’ll have a different bosun, or maybe you can be the bosun. What would you rather be, a bosun or the captain? I think I’d like to be the person who gets to steer.”
We were standing near the wooden column that enclosed the forward spar, and that’s when he said, “See, what I like—what I want—I like to play the piano.” And I knew then he didn’t want to be a bosun or a captain and that he didn’t care about hearing the ship talk and didn’t hear its music, because the music he liked was different, but his father wanted him to be a deckhand, and maybe that was why he said Alv wasn’t right, because he wanted Alv to be different than he was, like the bosun wanted everyone to be different than they were, and I was glad my father was the captain and not the bosun or my father would want me to be different than I was too, but I didn’t think Alv could help the way he was any more than I could help the way I was, whatever that was, somebody who was too much trouble and interrupted too much.
“My mother plays the piano,” I said.
15
You may want to know what I looked like back then, but I can’t tell you. There are no pictures except the ones Holgar took, and who knows what became of those? I had a narrow face, blonde hair, and blue eyes, and was small for my age, my ribs a thin cage of bones. Kids are supposed to be cute. And maybe I was, but my hair was snarled, my clothes were torn, my knees were scraped, my fingernails were dirty. I wasn’t pretty.
16
Despite everything that happened, I remember my childhood as happy.
I loved where I lived.
The lake stretched so far it often appeared to be a world without limits, the horizon seamless, no edge between sea and sky at all, though other times the line was as sharp as the blade of a knife, still others a single stitch of silver thread. Some days the water turned so blue it looked almost navy, or else it was a pale aquamarine, delicate as crystal. On those days you could stand on the breakwater looking down at veins of sunlight dancing on the mossy boulders piled around its base, then when you raised your head, there across the great shimmering bowl of clear, green water was our bluff with its crown of trees and steep, sand-streaked face. At the north end, where our beach met the bluff, the shore narrowed and turned stony, and I used to walk along collecting pebbles as the waves washed up over the sand only to slide back into the lake, a rush of cold water over my bare feet. The shallow surf swirled around the larger rocks, and I pretended they were islands inhabited by creatures so tiny no one could see them but me. Most years there was a strip of beach below the bluff, though the year before I left, the water was so high the lake lapped right up against it, toppling trees and shearing off little cliffs. That frightened me, because what if the whole bluff tumbled in and disappeared? I didn’t know that was just the way lake levels cycled. Nor could I imagine how many of those cycles I would miss because I never intended to leave. I was sent away.
Sometimes a cloud would pass over the sun where I was standing on shore while the same sun still shown farther out, and then there would be a spangled patch on the rolling quilt of water like a sparkling far-off land. Late in the day, if you turned your eyes west the water looked cold as crumpled steel beneath a sun so blinding it flattened all the boats to silhouettes, though all you had to do was turn your head back for the world to warm, the same sun melting like butter across the sand. Often on summer evenings after supper we strolled down to the breakwater or beach to watch the sunset. On clear nights the sun turned into a huge red ball that dropped behind the lake in a way that made you understand why people used to think the earth was flat, the way its waist lost shape and seemed to puddle on top of the great shelf of water, but then it would pull itself back together and sink behind the edge as if the snow wasset had swallowed it. Always I begged to go, and when my father wasn’t home my stepmother frequently relented, because on partly cloudy evenings no one could predict. Sometimes the whole sky would catch fire, or else the sun might lurk behind the clouds, edging them with gold while they turned to smoldering pink and purple ashes inside, and we would wait until the last ember died, lingering as those purple-gray clouds took the shape of dinosaurs and long-nosed fish, not turning toward home until the sky deepened to cobalt and the lights at the ends of the piers came on. “It’s a sight,” my stepmother would admit as we walked home in step, acknowledging the world we shared in a way we never did at other times.
But even better I liked early morning, when the lake was such a lovely pastel blue, the sand pink and amber, and I wasn’t coming up on bedtime but had a whole new day str
etched out before me. If the wind was still, the outer harbor, that pool between the breakwaters, was smooth as glass, while outside the embrace of those arms the lake kept lap-lapping to shore, and overhead the gulls wheeled and cried. Other mornings a gauzy silver mist rose from the inner harbor, and the small fishing boats coming through the channel between the stub piers seemed to appear out of nowhere like ghosts. On blustery days the waves thrashed, exploding over the breakwaters in enormous white plumes that trailed off into veils as they slid down the other side. You didn’t dare walk out then, lest you be swept off and drowned. Sometimes storms turned the morning sky black, lightning forked, and the roar was so ferocious you couldn’t tell the thunder from the tumult of lake and wind, but every now and then the sun would come out before the sky caught up, and that was magic, a rainbow arcing over the shining white spear of the lighthouse against a wall of black sky. And once I saw a seiche, one of those giant waves that slosh all the way from one shore to the other and back. It emptied our harbor like a bathtub and then surged back up past the beach.
It was never the same. Not the sight, not the sound. What I mean to say is that when you grow up on the shore of a great lake you learn its moods, and observing those you begin to learn the inconstancy of the world.
In the old days, before the lights were electrified, the keepers had to go out no matter how perilous the weather, and so some of the lighthouses, like the one at Manistee, had catwalks built on stilts above the piers. There must have been one intended for Frankfort too, because the north pier light has a second-story door with nowhere to go, like the doorway to the hayloft above our carriage house, except the hayloft didn’t have a door, just an opening that I liked to jump out of, so it was a good thing the lighthouse was locked up tight because otherwise boys would have been hurling themselves from that second floor and shattering their skulls on the rocks.
We called Lake Michigan the big lake because there were so many others. To the south there were the Upper and Lower Herrings, Portage, and Bear, to the north Long Lake, Rush, Loon, and the two Plattes. Benzie State Park was on the Platte River, and there was a little store where you could rent rowboats to go down the Platte, across Loon Lake, all the way to Platte Bay. The Empire Bluff was right across from where you came out, and it was so lofty, so rich in color, it would take your breath away just to know there could be that much beauty in the world. And if the day was clear you could even see the bald, white flank of Sleeping Bear in the distance. Once we took inner tubes down the Platte, which you weren’t supposed to do unless you were a good swimmer, because Loon Lake is so deep and the bottom so mucky if you fell out you would sink into it and never come up, but I was a good swimmer, all of the children were because we had been jumping off the diving board on the breakwater since we were tots, though I don’t think Mrs. Johnson could swim at all, and she had the funniest old-fashioned bathing suit, but nobody tipped over, nobody drowned, and we all had the best time.
Across the Great Lake Page 8
