Of course the children of Frankfort tormented their classmates from Elberta. More than anything else it was those gas tanks that marked them. Whenever one walked by, the children of Frankfort would hold their noses and hiss, “You stink.”
I would like to say it was because of Alv that I never took part in that schoolyard teasing. More likely I was not invited to. I was an odd child—not unpopular, though I was certainly unpopular among my teachers, who felt I had too many ideas, “more ideas than you can shake a stick at,” one of them wrote by way of requesting a meeting with my stepmother. To her credit, Lene did not tell my father—although this was perhaps less a kindness to me than a wish not to disturb him—and only said, more than once, “Fern, you have to do better, do you promise?” and I would promise, knowing that I not only would not do better but wouldn’t even try, and so instead of creating a bond between us our secret only opened more distance. My schoolmates liked me well enough—children are drawn to rebels and troublemakers, though I would not say that I was actually either, at least not by intention, and it’s useless to speculate on what kind of girl I might have been if my mother hadn’t died and I hadn’t gone across the lake that winter with my father. I was too young to remember or even know what kind of girl I’d been before, and anyway what is the point of that sort of navel-gazing? I have no patience for people who prattle on about themselves, listing for anyone who will listen their virtues and special quirks, a call best left to others, if you ask me. I had playmates, but I didn’t make close friends, I was not a joiner, there was a wildness inside me that was not driven by peers who might long to see how far I would go, to hear what story I would tell next, or what disturbance I might cause. It was more private than that. Always, as far back as I can remember, I held myself apart. I preferred the outdoors, which was hardly unusual up north, but my habits tended to the solitary and make-believe even when I was snowshoeing through the woods.
It’s possible that Alv actually fit in at school better than I did, though I doubt it. The children would have taunted him, wrinkled their noses, and called him “crip” or “gimp.” Or maybe they too called him a fairy. Was he gay? I don’t know. Maybe at fourteen he didn’t either. I’m not even sure why some of the men aboard the Manitou assumed he was, unless it was his uncanny beauty. I blame the rumor on Dick Butler, Dick and the bosun, though the bosun called all the deckhands faggots and pussies and whores. It was years before I understood what any of this meant, even longer before I sensed that Dick’s animosity to Alv might have been a response to his own attraction. How else to explain his obsession? It’s not the sexuality of others people fear nearly as much as their own. Perhaps my father sensed as much, and that’s why he started Alv on deck instead of with the black gang below.
In any case Alv’s classmates would have been all too aware of the slight limp I didn’t notice at first because, as I say, on a ship everyone walks a little funny. Sailors barely touch the steps when they come down a companionway—they grab the rails and skim their feet along the edges, and once he mastered it Alv must have loved that trick because it gave him an agility he’d never had. On land he would have shuffled up that tree-flanked walk to the tower that always made me feel like I was entering a castle but would have left him wanting nothing more than to hobble back out, because he too would have been something of a loner. He was artistic in a world dominated by the physical pursuit of the outdoors, and I suppose I appreciate that all the more because I wasn’t. I picture him in a dark parlor in one of those dingy Elberta houses, which one I never knew. There is a piano, not so fine as ours, perhaps it’s a bit scratched, perhaps its yellowed keys are chipped, though I’m certain it’s in tune. He would have seen to that, or perhaps his mother did, perhaps she played, perhaps he learned from her, and maybe in the evenings while his father tended the crankpins in the engine room at the very bottom of the Kewaunee Alv played for her, she who came from that line of reindeer herders, though she had no memory of the herd’s gamey scent or the midnight sun and midsummer snow, or of the native tongue that was forbidden to the children who were sent to boarding school under the Norwegianization policy, just like the Native American children who were taken away from their parents and stripped of their language and traditions here. All that would have been prehistory to her, and yet she would have understood how her son felt, what it was like to be different, to be lonely. That’s what I imagine anyway, Alv’s mother in the parlor, tipping her head as she listens to him play and thinks that maybe he will grow up to be a pianist, as she once dreamed that she would do, a girl who had come so far from the land her ancestors once wandered that she could aspire to a music other than the pounding of hooves and barking of dogs, but then she married an oiler for the ferries who couldn’t see the point, not for her, and especially not for his son, not when there was a living to be had from the boats, and even by his own account the boy wasn’t much of a student, so why wait? What kind of money did she think he had, talking about the music camp at Interlochen, just a few miles away? As far as they were concerned, it might as well have been on the other side of the world. It was enough that he had bought the secondhand piano she insisted on. Too much in fact. Because the boy was different, not just crippled, and to his father that meant not right. And it is one thing to be different if your father is a captain and you live in a big house on the north side of Leelanau Avenue and quite another if you live behind Furnace Avenue in a dreary little house with a toilet seat perched over a bucket, even if those houses are no more than a mile apart.
Or maybe it wasn’t that way at all. For all I know he might have loved where he lived. The steep face of the bluffs, the cries of the gulls, the songs of the orioles and grosbeaks courting in the woods, the smell of lilacs through an open window and blush of cherry blossoms in the orchards come spring, summer’s flash of goldfinches or an egret sailing the bright-blue sky, the wind licking through the trees and cattails soughing in the marsh beyond the gaudy splashes of spotted knapweed, goldenrod, and Queen Anne’s lace along the tracks, the veils of morning mist that married lake to heaven, the many colors of sand and sky and that transcendent stretch of sweetwater sea that lay between us and the edge of our world, most of all the rhythm of the waves coming home day after day, night after night, all that would have been there for him just as it was for me. For all I know he too might have remembered his childhood as happy.
19
The ghost came that night, after supper, after Alv coaxed Whispers out of hiding with a saucer of milk, after my tour of the engine room and the firehold, where I stood in a corner to watch the fireman feeding the big furnaces that glowed such a bright red-orange inside the doors it was like the sun exploded—you couldn’t see anything except the silhouettes of the fireman with his long-handled shovel and the coal passer removing the clinkers. And even though I did what they said and didn’t move, the heat scorched my skin, and then when we came out into the big two-story engine room, because that’s how tall the engines were, we were covered with coal dust. Alv’s face was as black as a minstrel’s in a show, and mine must have been too because he said I would have to take a shower before bed and leave my clothes out on a chair in the lounge so that he could take them below and wash them in the wringer washing machine that was just like the one on our back porch, except ours was a General Electric, but on a ship it had to be a Maytag because that was the only kind that could run on direct current, that’s what Amund, the Yooper who was playing cards at a long, red table in the flicker, said. Manitou was above, and I was glad I hadn’t brought him down with me, because his fur would be all burnt and he would have to take a shower too, and it’s not easy to dry a stuffed bear.
Dick Butler, who was playing cards with Amund and Nils, glanced up at Alv. “Looks like a new boy ought. Ain’t right startin’ the little faggot above.”
Nils looked up. “Takes one to know one.”
Dick scowled. “Said it yourself, if you recall. Boy should have started at the bottom.”
“So I did,” Nils acknowledged. “But I’m not the one all worked up about it.”
“You want to be captain, start out as a deck ape,” Amund said. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see the bottom of his tattoo. My father had one of those blue anchors on his arm too, though I rarely saw it, only when he was coming out of our bathroom at home in his undershirt. “Me, I like it down here. Do my job and don’t owe Bosun shit.”
Like Dick Butler, Nils was an oiler, one step above fireman, but I was confused because I didn’t know what a Yooper did on a ship, and Amund had to explain that he was a water tender, that was his job, but he was also a Yooper because he was from the UP. Supposedly the term is new, but sailors used it even before the Mackinac Bridge was built and the Yoopers started calling everyone who lived below the bridge, on the Lower Peninsula, trolls. Sitting at a table in the flicker playing cards the men called each other a lot of names, though no one seemed to mind. Nils picked me up and set me on his lap even though I was all sooty, but no one in the black gang cared about that, not as long as you washed your hands at one of the sinks along the bulwark between the flicker and the hold before you picked up your cards, because even after they washed up there was coal dust ground into the creases around their eyes and in the back of their necks and their wrists and knuckles. Nils showed me his cards and even let me hold them, making sure I pointed them straight up so no one else could see, and that’s how I learned to play poker. One of his fingernails was black and sort of bubbled up, but it wasn’t from the coal dust, it was from catching his hand in a hatch. Malley, the other water tender, was at the end of the table playing a sad song on his harmonica instead of cards. That was because his girlfriend wouldn’t marry him, Amund said, she didn’t want to marry a man who was at sea all the time. Nils, Malley, and Amund, all of the men in fact except Bosun and Twitches, would explain a lot of things and tell all kinds of stories as we crossed the lake. They seemed so eager to explain how things worked it was like a contest, who got to tell me most, probably because there wasn’t anyone else to tell what they knew because the other men knew the same things and when they came home the people who hadn’t been to sea didn’t care. Or maybe it was just because I listened so hard. I wanted to learn everything so that I could grow up to work on a ship too.
Amund and Dick Butler each threw another penny in the middle of the table, but Nils took his cards back and laid them facedown. “I’m out.”
“I want to keep playing,” I protested, so Dick explained that when you folded it meant you knew you couldn’t win and if you couldn’t win and you were smart you got out of the game. He said it so nice I wondered if he knew I’d seem him smoking on the car deck. Not that I’d tell. Because that was the second rule on a ship. Though they might quarrel among themselves, sailors didn’t rat each other out.
But one thing no one explained was the shower. It was like I thought it would be, but in the shower you had to turn the faucets just right or else the water was ice cold, and then it was so hot I jumped back and fell, with scalding water pouring down all over my backside. I wanted someone to come, but my father didn’t know I needed help because at home the person who always helped me was my mother. So I had to get up by myself and reach around to the faucets, but finally I found the place that was like a warm summer rain, and after that I cheered up and sang a song because I had heard about singing in the shower. Later I would wonder if the ghost knew about the faucets, because if it did it could have helped me, though I guessed ghosts didn’t care to go around assisting people. What they wanted was some kind of help themselves, but ghosts can’t say what they want, and that’s why people are so afraid of them, though all that was something I thought about later, after I was used to it. That first night I wasn’t used to it at all.
When it came, it was after the rudder pin broke and the engineer began his walk across the ice, after the bowling alley closed and I could no longer hear the crack of the ball and explosions of the pins, and I began to hear the ship speak in a way you don’t hear it in the daytime, maybe because the way you listen in the dark is different. There was still the grinding of ice against the hull, though not as loud because we weren’t trying to push through it anymore. Instead the ship itself was groaning and creaking, moaning and carrying on like it was a ghost, or like you think a ghost might do, but it wasn’t the ghost, it was just the night air making the steel hull contract. A ship is built to flex or else the hull will break apart, so I knew what I heard was the ship and not a ghost, but even so I clutched Manitou tight against my neck and kept my eyes open. The snow had stopped hours before, and the air outside was colder now not just because it was night but because the sky had cleared, and before I went to bed I knelt in one of the hemp chairs in the observation room and saw all the stars like a sky full up with diamonds, the way you only ever see them from the beach on a winter night because up on Leelanau Avenue there were too many trees, and so I tipped my head up and looked until I was dizzy, and then I went back to my cabin and closed the door and got in bed and the ship started making all that night noise.
But even though my eyes were open I never saw the ghost, because no matter what some people say about glimpsing apparitions, figures you can see through or shadows without anyone to cast them, the main thing about ghosts is not what you see. Holgar, who was one of the deckhands, the one who didn’t like Finns and was always taking pictures with his Brownie camera, was forever asking to see the special compartment because he’d heard you could see the ghost’s face in the wood paneling, and he said that sometimes ghosts will show in pictures even when you can’t see them in real life, but the crew wasn’t allowed to hang around the passenger quarters, except Alv, who came and got my clothes and washed them and hung them to dry on the line strung across the flicker, so I don’t know whether this ghost would have showed in a picture or not. Also when the ghost came it was dark. Outside, all around the deckhouse and the aft pilothouse there are lights. On a platform on the forward spar below the crow’s nest, red and green port and starboard lights keep ships from running into each other in the fog or at night, and from the passenger lounge you can see the light that’s kept on all night in the galley, but inside my cabin with the door and shutters closed up tight it was what they call pitch black.
And what happened when it came, it wasn’t the way you would think, because it didn’t make any noise at all, and the way I knew it was there was how quiet the ship got. All of a sudden you couldn’t hear the ice or the flexing steel plates on the hull, all the moaning and groaning and shrieking just stopped. Some ghosts are supposed to weep, and the ghosts of the cholera victims buried alive on South Manitou Island cry out for help, their voices echoing over the water, trying to hail the passing ships. People hear footsteps on the stairs, the thump of an empty chair set to rocking, or the slamming of a door, though the only reason a ghost could have to slam a door would be to get your attention, because they don’t need doors or windows to go from room to room, not that they travel much—they don’t wander the earth like some people say, only a very little part of it where something terrible happened. I didn’t know what happened to the ghost on the Manitou or even who it was, nobody seemed to, only that in the daytime it lived in the special room the managers used when they crossed the lake. I’m not sure the men even knew that it came out at night and moved around the passenger quarters because it never went anywhere else on the ship, not down to the flicker, where the black gang bunked, or up to the pilothouse, not even to the galley or messes nearby, because if it had, the men would have talked about it, but they never did, not even the bosun, and he was not one to keep a ghost to himself.
So that was how I knew it was there, because everything got so quiet, and at the same time I felt it, because you don’t have to see or hear a ghost to know one’s there. You feel it the same way you feel a storm is coming, there’s a change in pressure, a heaviness in the air, you can’t breathe, and what you hear isn’t the ghost but your own blood pounding inside your ears an
d what you feel is that same blood beating in your throat, but a ghost doesn’t warn you like a storm will, it just comes all of a sudden and then it’s there. And what this ghost did, it reached down and took hold of my big toe. I can’t say whether it lifted the scratchy wool blanket, reached through it, or what, because I couldn’t feel anything but the pressure of its hand on my foot, not the nib of a fingernail or warmth of a palm, because the ghost didn’t have surface, only weight, a heaviness that was not like anything else, and all night long it gripped my toe and never said what it wanted or why it was there, and I wanted to be the girl I bragged I was, but I wasn’t, because that first night when the ghost came into my compartment and clasped my foot in its hand I was so scared I couldn’t even scream, and in the morning when I woke and the ghost was gone, my eyes were all crusty in the corners, and both Manitou and my pillowcase were wet, and I realized that I had cried all night long without ever making so much sound as a sniffle.
20
I am wrong. Alv wouldn’t have gone to my school, he had his own, for there on the wall of the Benzie Area Historical Museum in Benzonia is a picture of the Elberta schoolhouse, a white frame building near the bottom of Betsie Lake at the corner of George Street and Frankfort Avenue. It even had a tower entrance, though not so tall or grand as ours. In the picture, the harbor seems to open out behind it, and in the distance you can see the rise of the Frankfort hill, though my house is much too far away to pick out. You can’t even locate the water tower that crowned our hill because the three-story school in the foreground eclipses all the Frankfort landmarks. Once, before I was born, the water tower burst and sent a flood coursing down the hill—it was something people still talked about when I was a girl, and I was disappointed to have missed it, because I liked the idea of sailing down Fourth Street with Manitou, like a couple on Noah’s ark. That was the old wooden water tower, which has long since been replaced. At one time Elberta too had a wooden water tower atop its bluff. The railroad built it to fill the boilers on the ships, so it must have been there when I was a girl, though I have no more recollection of it than I do of Alv’s school. There is no tower on the Elberta bluff now, just as there is no longer a railroad or a school, only the rotting dock where the ferries once tied up. If it weren’t for the picture in the museum I wouldn’t know the school ever existed.
Across the Great Lake Page 11