But it did, whether I remember it or not. What does it mean, I wonder, that I’ve invented that cold morning trek around the harbor through drifts of snow and Alv’s numbing dread of the walk up to Frankfort’s school? He never hung his jacket on the iron hooks of any of those coatrooms I later used, where I can still summon the dull light that filtered through the transoms from the classrooms, the way it gleamed on the waxed floor of the long hall, can still smell the mixture of melting snow, rubber boots, and wet wool. He never stood on the fringes of our playground, longing to be chosen for dodgeball or included in a game of tag. He had his own playground, his own playmates, on the other side of the harbor, a schoolhouse whose light and smells he would have known as well as I knew mine. It’s an understandable error, I suppose. The children of Elberta do attend the Frankfort schools these days, the two districts having long since been consolidated. But the truth is I was long gone by 1956, the date the museum lists for the consolidation, and I have no reason to know where the local children go to school now. My children grew up elsewhere, as have theirs, and those days when they were bringing home report cards and permission slips, when I was checking homework, baking cupcakes, and chaperoning field trips seem a lifetime ago, somehow more distant than my own report cards, first readers, and minutes counted till recess.
Memory is a notoriously faulty tool, of course, and at such a span of years it is easy to put the bank where the butcher was and the drugstore on the wrong corner, to lay out a map of the past with the streets transposed and sweet breezes wafting through windows that were walls, to remember a second-grade teacher with a blue dress and red curls when the redhead was Sunday school and your second-grade teacher wore rolled stockings and old-fashioned tortoise-shell combs in gray hair pinched into a bun, easier still to forget a school I may never have been aware of in the first place. It is not what I’ve forgotten that disturbs me, rather what I remember, those children from Elberta huddled at the edges of our playground, noses running, eyes cast down, as we chose sides for the games they were never asked to join, the ugly chords of insults we never delivered. Why would I remember something so false? More important, why would I remember that cruelty so vividly and yet claim I stood apart? What does it mean to remember crimes that never happened only to insist that you are not to blame?
The more I relive that trip across the lake with my father that mercilessly cold winter, the less I seem to know who I am, the little girl I was then or the old woman I’ve become. They’re mixed up together, I see, after so many years of wanting to believe that any connection between them would be the slightest of threads, as if we were distant relatives who had heard of each other but never met. And now their thoughts seem so jumbled I can’t even tell you which is speaking when. Fortunately my children are far away, one in California, the other in France. Otherwise they might assume I’ve gone senile, though no one uses that word anymore. Back when I was a girl, people tiptoed around the elderly’s habits of mind, spoke of them, of their non sequiturs and lapses, as entering their second childhoods, but no one is allowed a repeat of childhood anymore, old age is no longer a phase of life but a disease caused by too much plaque in the brain, Alzheimer’s or some other fancy kind of dementia, syndromes with names like Korsakoff or Lewy body, and at the first sign, off you go to the nursing home.
No thank you. I didn’t even move to the new senior center on the hill when I came back to Frankfort, though my children think coming back at all is evidence of dementia enough. “Mother,” my daughter, Ellen, said over the phone, and I started at the word, it seemed so strange you’d think I’d never been one, though I blame that on her intonation, that exaggerated patience grafted onto exasperation that turns daughter into mother and you the child. “Have you lost your mind? What about winter? What happens when you fall on the ice and break your hip? Who’s going to take care of you?” “I want to go home,” I said, and Ellen sniffed. “Home? You haven’t lived there in more than seventy years. What makes you think you’d even recognize the place?”
What she doesn’t know is how little has changed, at least to the eye. And it’s not as if I proposed to buy one of the big, beautiful old houses like the one I lived in as a girl. I’m not that foolish. My children grew up in an old house in Raleigh. I’ve had enough of the maintenance that kind of charm requires. What I wanted was simply to wander the same streets, to walk out along the breakwater come sunset, to stroll the beach up past the bluff and feel the cold rush of water over my feet again, and though the senior center offers spectacular views from its lofty perch on the bluff, they’re like looking at a postcard, a picture on the wall, a landscape you see but cannot enter, can’t smell or touch. I wanted to be a part of the town again, not to have to search out a parking space as if I were a tourist. So here I am in a condo on that spit of land old-timers called “the island,” not far from the cross that marks where Father Marquette ended his earthly journey. Perhaps it’s only hard for Ellen to accept that I would call a place she’s never seen home, but I think my husband would like it if he were still alive, though he would be surprised, for we never traveled to Michigan, there was no reason to, I never expressed a desire to come back, even though the mere sight of a Michigan license plate in a parking lot could cause such a pang I would stumble, and each time the Tigers won the World Series I became the sports fan I never was, remembering the voices of Walter, Red, and Roald so clearly they might have been cheering along with me in my den. But only since Ed—his name was Edmund, Edmund Fitzgerald if you can believe it, how that’s for irony?—only since he passed and that part of my life ended did I begin to think so much about it. Things that happen in your childhood come back to haunt you more and more as you get older, and once you are alone you no longer need pretend that the life at hand is where you live. So, yes, he would be surprised, yet I think he would like the view of the lighthouse and outer harbor, in the evening he would enjoy walking along the breakwater or the beach or even sitting on our porch to watch the sun set over the great lake beyond, so much bluer and more beautiful than the Atlantic Ocean at Wrightsville, where we took the children every summer. Ed always wanted to take a cruise, but I demurred, and he was such a kind man, so considerate, much more thoughtful than I deserved, he would murmur, “Of course. Your father . . .” and I never told him that wasn’t it at all. I haven’t set foot on a boat larger than a canoe since my father called for us to abandon the Manitou. I simply could not bear to board a ship as a passenger.
In the picture at the Benzie Area Historical Museum it is winter, perhaps the very same winter I crossed the lake, for the cars lined up beside the school look to be of that era, though I am certainly no expert on cars. Children cluster on the hard-packed street, some with sleds in hand, and perhaps just beyond the frame there are others dangling skates. School has apparently just let out—they are leaving, not coming, the joy on their faces belongs to afternoon, to the unencumbered fun of the remaining daylight hours. Across the harbor Frankfort’s children would have been leaving school in just the same way, gathering merrily at the corner of Leelanau and Seventh with sleds and skates, eyes just as bright, cheeks just as flushed, but they are not pictured.
And though it is surely true that if the children of Elberta had been there on the north side of the harbor outside the brick schoolhouse at Leelanau and Seventh, the children of Frankfort would have been holding their noses, blowing raspberries, and hurling names, the fact is they are not. Those other children are secure in Elberta, about to belly down on their sleds, lace skates, and sling snowballs, faces chapped with cold, their breath little clouds in the air, as unaware of the children on the other side of the harbor as those children are of them. They’re much too far away to hear anything the arrogant sons and daughters of Frankfort have to say. They don’t care whether my voice is among them, they blame me for nothing. They don’t know I exist.
21
The ghost disappeared the same way it appeared—first it was there, then the air got thinner and lighter
, I could no longer feel the pressure of its hand against my foot, and so I knew it had gone. That must have been when I fell asleep, though I didn’t sleep very long because as soon as Sam started breakfast the smell of coffee and bacon seeped into the passenger quarters and I woke up. Alv had returned my clothes, folded and dry, to the chair outside my cabin, so I got up and brushed my teeth and tucked my nightgown underneath my pillow just like I always did at home and tried to make up my rack. In the crew’s mess Alv was drinking orange juice and eating flapjacks, and I wondered when he had brought my clothes, if it was before or after the ghost left, because I hadn’t heard him. Bosun was sitting right across from him with a cup of coffee, baring his gold tooth and grousing about all the things Alv needed to do that should have been done yesterday or even before that, to hear him talk you’d think they should have been done a hundred years before Alv was ever born. He was so mean I began to worry that if he found Whispers he really would throw my cat overboard, and he would do something terrible to Alv, I knew. I had failed to make him like me, so I would never make him like Alv the way I’d promised.
At the end of the table Twitches was muttering to himself, and Roald and Red were arguing about baseball again. Axel wasn’t there, but the rest of the men were all talking about the new rudder pin and how long it would take to install, how soon we might get underway, and when we might hope to reach the Ashley, which had been on her way back to Frankfort from the Straits, where she had been leased by the Mackinac Transportation Company while the Chief Wawatam was in dry dock for repair. That was why we had to go through the Passage instead of heading out into the lake for Menominee, which was something the men had plenty to say about, and I could see how things were on a ship. It was like a parade, which was the best thing ever, but if you’ve been to one you know how they go, a little bit of parading and a whole lot of standing around. Everyone except Bosun seemed a bit sleepy, and I was about to announce that the ghost from the managers’ cabin had visited me last night—maybe I meant to liven things up or perhaps I thought that saying it out loud would put a little daylight on the long, terrifying shadow of the night—but just then Alv’s sleeve brushed my arm, and I remembered that he had told me not to go calling the ghost out and maybe he would think I’d called it and that’s why it came, he would think it was my fault and be mad. His canvas coverall had white paint streaked down one arm, which made him seem more like a regular deckhand instead of a boy, and that was good, because maybe the bosun would lay off, he wouldn’t be the new kid anymore, and everyone would stop picking on him. Except it made me feel a bit bereft too, like maybe he’d get to be so friendly with the crew he’d forget me.
On the other hand I thought if Bosun knew I had spent my whole night with a ghost and never once screamed or called out for help maybe that would make him start to like me. At the least he would be interested since he liked to talk about haunts, being more superstitious than Ahab, that’s what Loke had said. But the new rudder pin wasn’t in place yet, and we were still within walking distance to Frankfort, and if my father knew the ghost had come to me he might make me go back, maybe he would make Alv take me back, and then neither one of us would get to go across the lake and see Menominee and Death’s Door and maybe even the old lightkeeper still looking for his children on St. Martin Island, which wouldn’t scare me a bit because a phantom green lamp bobbing along in the distance was nothing compared to having an actual ghost reach out and touch you.
So I kept very quiet, which gave me time to think. And that brought me to the ghost itself. Because I hadn’t considered the ghost, and what if it got angry with me for telling? I didn’t know what a ghost might do if it got angry, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to find out, so that settled it, and I decided that what I would do instead was listen, because if I listened hard enough the men might let on who the ghost was and where it came from and what it wanted. And maybe Holgar would get a picture with his Brownie camera, and that would answer all my questions, so I drank my milk and ate my flapjacks and bacon and eggs and the apple Jake brought me, but all the men talked about was the rudder pin and the Ashley and how soon we might get to Pyramid Point until Bosun aimed a stare at Alv and said, “What happened to your hand, boy?”
Alv dropped it from the table to his lap so fast I couldn’t see, but it was his right hand, the one Whispers had bitten. “Nothing,” he said.
“Better be.”
I wondered if his hand had festered up like the time I fell and cut my knee and the cut got infected. Or maybe the iodine hadn’t washed off in the shower, and what Bosun saw was a big orange stain. And maybe Alv’s hand was why he hadn’t learned to go down a companionway like a real sailor yet, which was another thing the men rode him about. I had no trouble with it once I saw how it was done, because that’s the way kids would always go down steps if grown-ups let them. And Alv would remember that, because even with the new paint on his coverall and a paycheck to come he would remember how it was to be a boy. So now I had two secrets, Whispers and the ghost, but no one asked about either one, because little girls weren’t supposed to have secrets. They were supposed to wear hair bows and pretty dresses and sweet smiles and never talk back.
Instead the men were still grumbling about the Ashley and having to go through the Passage, and before I knew it the first bell rang and breakfast was over.
22
It was in the Manitou Passage that we sighted the Chicora. The watch saw it first, in the early afternoon, when the light that had been so clear all night and early morning suddenly turned gauzy. It was off to port, and we were just done with noon dinner, some of the men lingering over their coffee, when the watch burst into the mess, yelling, “Holy smokes, you gotta see this!” And we all rushed out to the deck without bothering to put on our coats, and there it was like an apparition coming out of a mist that wasn’t mist but that strange, webby light, like the air was made out of curtains, a big wooden vessel with a single stack and two broken masts that somehow gave her the appearance of an old sailing ship even though she was clearly a steamer, but the way the spars were broken over they looked like what was left of a skeleton rigging, not a sail hoisted, the ship just drifting in a way that seemed impossible in the ice. No one ever saw ships like that, which is why the watch called us and we raced out just in time to see her before she disappeared inside the filmy air.
“It’s the Chicora,” Bosun said.
“Can’t be,” Walter said. “She’s too far off course.”
“It’s the Chicora, I tell you. Ship comes up from the bottom can go anywhere she likes.”
“What’s she doing in the Passage then?” Odd asked. “I could go anywhere I wanted, I’d head for the South Seas.”
“Go on home,” Red suggested. “There’s people waitin’.”
“Not anymore. Even the people waitin’s all dead.”
Everyone was talking at once, words streaming from their mouths in white plumes.
Roald snorted. “South Seas! You want those balmy breezes, whyn’t you sign on a saltie?”
“Next time maybe I will.”
“Says who? You’re like a bad penny. Captain himself can’t get rid of you.”
“Wish I’d had my camera,” Holgar said.
Walter shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“Course you don’t,” Bosun said. “Going to be a hell of a blow.”
“It’s too cold for a blow,” Walter said.
“Ain’t never too cold for a blow. It’s an omen, I tell you.”
Alv was still standing at the rail, staring off to where the ship disappeared. Though it was below zero, none of us seemed in any hurry to go back inside. “How do you know it’s the Chicora?”
Bosun glared. “What do you think, it’s the Griffon? Can’t tell a barque from a steamer. Little fairy thinks he sees La Salle himself walking around on deck.”
“I didn’t see anybody.” Something in Alv’s face steeled when he turned.
“First trip out, already s
olved all the mysteries of the deep.”
“It was just a question,” Alv said, and I was proud of him for talking back, but the bosun must have sensed it because he turned his glare on me.
“Course he didn’t,” Roald said. “Crew’s been dead for forty years.”
Dick Butler chortled. “Guess that’s what you call a real skeleton crew.”
“It’s what you call a bunch of pussies standing around gawking when they’re supposed to be working.” Bosun included everyone in his glare now. “Any of you ladies hear eight bells?”
“No, sir,” Axel and Alv said in unison.
“Ghost stories,” Walter said like he meant to dismiss them, even though he looked shaken because he’d seen the ship too, broken masts and listing until it disappeared, as if behind a windrow, but there wasn’t any windrow, and despite what Bosun said, despite the cold, we were all lingering on deck to see if it would reappear, but it didn’t, and finally the men began to disperse back to their posts. Then there was a windrow, out of nowhere it seemed, just like the ghost in my cabin and the Chicora, but the windrow wasn’t any ghost, we were face to face with it, solid ice, and I knew that up in the pilothouse my father would be instructing the wheelsman to change course and go around, there was room even in the narrow Passage, there had to be because we couldn’t see South Manitou or North Manitou, not the new crib light that marked the North Manitou shoal or the mainland either, just the wall of ice and filmy air, and because I was the captain’s daughter I climbed the steps to the bridge to get a better view, and from where I was the veil seemed to lift, I was standing in full sun, and beyond the mountain of the windrow it was just plains and plains of ice as far as I could see, plains strewn with so many white boulders I had never seen anything like it, and I sucked in my breath and said, this time to myself, “This is the world!”
Across the Great Lake Page 12
