My stepmother was out, perhaps at the grocer’s since it would have been unusual for her to be visiting one of her friends on an occasion when my father was home. They were newlyweds, married no more than a few months, but there he was seated alone on the sofa, which must have been an antique even then, maroon with wood trim, all tufts and buttons, and not at all comfortable, but then my father was not comfortable anywhere except in his pilothouse high above the lake. He had turned off the radio and was tamping the bowl of his pipe, and I suppose it was that sound that caused me to look up from my tablet.
“Daddy,” I said. “Why did my mother die?”
He continued to tamp the pipe. “Lene is your mother now.”
“But why did my mother die?” For some reason the matter must have seemed particularly urgent to me that morning because I don’t remember asking before, though why that should be so I can’t say. Perhaps it was simply an opportunity that had not presented itself.
“Lene is your mother now,” he repeated. Abruptly he set the unlit pipe on top of the newspaper beside the flowered glass lamp, rose, and left the room, but then he must have thought better, must have weighed out an answer, because he came back, though not until I had copied two more lines. Spot said, “Mew, mew. I see a big red ball.” My children would correct me here, silly me, remembering a dog who mewed, or perhaps even worse, they would say nothing and just exchange glances, poor old mom, what to do now with her memory going, though the truth is I remember things they never knew. For them Spot was a dog and Puff the cat, but in those Elson-Gray primers of the thirties Spot was a kitten, and I recall the image of that gray cat on the arm of the overstuffed blue chair so clearly I can still see my crooked letters on the lines of my tablet and through the lens of all these years realize I have failed to capitalize the naughty feline’s name.
“It was complications,” he said, standing stiffly in the wide doorway between the two parlors.
“What kind of complications?” I asked.
He seemed at such a loss that I thought the conversation was over and bent to copy the next lines. I want it. I want the big red ball.
“The kind of complications you’ll understand later.” His hand did a little half circle in the air.
“When?”
“When you’re a woman,” he said.
“When will that be?” I asked, and perhaps I sighed, or maybe there was a high note of panic in my voice. Did I sigh because I thought it would be such a long time, or was I terrified that the time was already too short?
He smiled at me then. “Not for a while yet, lille.”
There was a short silence.
“I don’t want to be a woman,” I said.
I don’t recall that he looked alarmed. I think he assumed that I simply wanted to remain a child, and that would have been partially right, though already I envisioned myself as a grown-up, not one stirring pots in a kitchen and gossiping in parlors, but a sailor steering a great ship across the big lake.
“Lene will tell you all about it when it’s time,” he said, as if that concluded our commerce. He crouched beside me. “What do we have here?”
So I showed him my tablet and the book so that he could see for himself the red ball of yarn in the basket and the cat, and then I turned the page so he could see how it all came out, the pounce, the overturned basket and table, the kitten tangled up in yarn, because I must have wanted him to know I was just copying from my book, it wasn’t my story, it wasn’t my fault, and I didn’t want it, I didn’t want that big red ball of yarn at all.
25
I was six years old that year, a schoolgirl, a big girl, my father said. Why didn’t the naughty kitten make me think of Whispers and Alv? Or did they? Did I think of them and then go on with my childhood anyway? How could I? I loved where I lived, it’s true, but maybe nothing I remember is quite right.
26
Alv had cat scratch fever. At first it was just a bruise and a bump that began to fester up where Whispers bit him. Then he said he was tired, he had a headache, one minute he was hot, the next he had chills, but he wore his gloves as much as he could and in the mess he kept his right hand in his lap, even though he wasn’t used to eating with his left, but he wasn’t hungry anyway, and maybe no one would have noticed if he hadn’t spilled his coffee. “Don’t anybody sit next to new boy when this ark starts to rock,” Axel said. Then the bosun was all over Alv because he didn’t work fast enough and hadn’t learned some of his knots, but that was because his hand was swollen. When Alv left the mess, he vomited over the rail, and Bosun was right behind him, jabbing his fist into Alv’s ribs. “Ship ain’t even moving. What kind of sailor you going to make, boy?”
It was my fault, because I’d made him catch Whispers, but all Alv would say was that he’d scratched his hand on a rusty nail and it must have got infected.
“Where’d you find a rusty nail?” Bosun drew his lip back as he turned his mean face from Alv to the rest. “Unless some of you deck apes ain’t doing your job.” So Alv said it happened before, before he ever got on the Manitou.
“Step on a rusty nail you get lockjaw.” Axel offered a pantomime of the victim’s death throes that went on until Dick Butler noted, “Looks more like a case of cat scratch fever to me,” but still Alv didn’t tell, even though he could have said he had a cat at home, and that was true, he could say that Ashes scratched him, but he’d already said it was a nail, so he stuck to his story. “It was a nail come loose out back in the crap-house,” he said. But later when we went below to give Whispers a little fish mushed up in milk he let me see.
“I’m sorry.” My throat closed, and a hot mist of tears stung my eyes. “Are you mad? Because I’m the one made you get bit, but if I tell Bosun he’ll yell at me instead of you.”
“Fat chance.” I tried to swallow. “Anyway you can’t tell. He hates cats. You know what he’d do.”
My mouth trembled. The noise of the engines and the ice swallowed up my answer, and now I can’t remember what I said or if I said anything at all.
Alv’s face softened. “You would really do that? Take the blame for me?”
I nodded.
“Aw, Fern. I’m not going to let Bosun throw your pet overboard.”
I didn’t want that to happen. Even if Whispers landed on his feet, which he might, he would never find his way back to land over all the ice, and what if he fell through one of the cracks? Cats couldn’t swim, they didn’t like water. I knew, because once Billy Johnson threw his cat in the bathtub, and it jumped out so fast it was like the bathtub blew apart, and then it shot all over the house, hissing and spitting, and Mrs. Johnson took a belt to Billy’s behind, saying once again he would be the death of her. But even more than I didn’t want Whispers to drown, I didn’t want Alv to get lockjaw and die.
“It’s just a scratch,” he promised, pressing on the festered-up bump and grimacing, mashing down on the pain, making it sharper as a way of perceiving it as pleasure. I knew because sometimes I did the same thing. “I’ll put some more iodine on it and take an aspirin. It’ll be fine in a day or two.
By then Whispers had smelled the fish and crept out from his hiding place, and all the while my kitty ate I talked to him, telling how we were stuck behind a big windrow right now but were going to break loose and then we were going to free the Ashley and cross the lake and back and after that he could come home and live with me and Manitou and there would be another cat for him to play with next door, but I would never let Billy throw him in the bathtub even if he tried, which he might, because Billy was that way. “If you’re nice you can sleep in my bed with me and Manitou,” I promised, “but you can’t bite me or my bear and if you ever bite Alv again I’ll tell the bosun where to find you, and let me tell you Billy Johnson is nothing compared to him.”
As soon as I stopped, Alv burst out, “I hate this boat, I hate everyone on it but you. You’re my best friend here.”
A rill of joy opened inside my heart. “You’re my best frien
d in the whole world!”
“They all think I’m queer.”
“Well, that’s okay,” I said, because I thought queer just meant a little bit odd, and if that was the case then I was queer too. And so maybe because we had settled that I crouched beside the saucer and said to Whispers, “Alv’s my first best friend, and Manitou’s my second, but you can be my third, only you can’t come sleep with me in my cabinet because the bosun might find out, and anyway there’s a ghost comes at night.”
So I guessed I’d told after all, because Alv was standing right there, and he said, “What did you say?” And because he didn’t blame me about Whispers and had let me come down to feed him after he said he wouldn’t and was going to keep our secret, I said, “The ghost comes into my cabinet at night.”
Even in the shadows of the car deck I saw his eyes widen.
“Were you scared?” he asked and didn’t even scold me for calling it out, and because of that and because he was my best friend and friends always tell each other the truth, I said, “I was very scared.”
“I would be,” he admitted.
“Would you cry?”
“I might.”
“I did.”
He reached down to take my hand with his good one. “Poor little Fern, all by yourself with a ghost.”
“Manitou was there. But I think he was scared too.”
“What did it do?”
“Nothing,” I said, but it wasn’t the same way he’d said “nothing” to Bosun. It was a surprised kind of nothing instead of the sullen nothing that means something but I’m not going to tell you.
“Did you see it?”
I shook my head. “It grabbed my foot.”
He shuddered.
“Maybe Holgar could take a picture. Then we’d know what it looks like. Except if he did it wouldn’t be our secret anymore.”
Another shiver rippled down his back. “I don’t want to know what it looks like.”
Whispers mewed and rubbed against my ankle, but scampered off when I picked up the empty saucer, because we couldn’t leave it for the watch to find. When I straightened, Alv clasped my shoulder. “It’s okay to be scared. If it comes again, I mean. I would have cried too. But if it tries to hurt you, yell.”
“Nobody would hear me,” I said matter-of-factly.
“I’ll hear you,” he promised. “Because I am not going to let anyone or anything hurt you. Not ever.” He stooped to look me in the eyes. And even though he’d thrown up, his breath was as fresh and light as feathers. “Promise.”
I nodded. “Well, I am never going to let anyone hurt you either,” I said, even though I had yet to make the bosun like him.
The ghost did come back. It came every night, and I can’t say I liked it, but I got used to it. Once I even said, “What do you want?” But it never answered, and after Alv told me he would hear me if I yelled—even though I knew he couldn’t possibly, not all the way at the aft end of the deckhouse where he bunked with Twitches—I wasn’t quite so scared anymore. And because he was my best friend, someone who kept his promises, I thought I’d never have to be afraid of anything again.
27
My stepmother liked to visit her sister, Inger, in Beulah, at the eastern end of Crystal Lake. Before Lene married my father she and Inger had lived in a dark, little, two-story house on Clark Street in the shadow of the Granary, not far from the railroad track and the highway overpass, across the street from an empty field with a drainage ditch. The house was so dreary it looked like it belonged in Elberta, but that’s where they grew up, and where Inger, who never married, kept house for their father until he died. I don’t remember whether Inger had a job. She couldn’t have been a schoolteacher because she didn’t like children, or perhaps she was just unaccustomed to them and didn’t know what to say or how to act. Mostly Inger ignored me, and while she and Lene revisited old times I was left to my own devices, which would have been fine with me, but the field was hemmed in by the highway and the ditch, the ground was always muddy, and in the summer it was so buggy I would come home covered with red welts. I didn’t know any children to play with, and who wanted to swim in Crystal Lake? You had to walk halfway across before the water got deep, and there weren’t any big waves to dive into for the thrill of the cold water rushing over your head. The beach was so narrow it was just a strip of sand, and on the other side of the bathhouse there wasn’t any beach at all because the railroad tracks ran right along the lake’s edge. There was nothing to explore, no woods, no bluffs to hike around and see what surprises they might hide. Next to the beach there was a little park with a drinking fountain the children loved, you would have thought it was the circus come to town they made such a fuss, trip after trip to spray one another and drink from the spout. I didn’t get it. I considered those Beulah children bumpkins. But I was a snob. I thought I came from the only place on earth worth living.
The park also had a stage where people like the mayor made speeches on holidays and sometimes there were wrestling matches, which I thought would be more interesting than the speeches, but we never went to see the wrestling because Inger said it was vulgar, though when an orchestra played, we would take a blanket and sit on the grass, and that was okay. I wanted to visit the Cherry Hut that was just a little way up the highway because the face of Cherry Jerry was carved into the top of every pie, but Lene and Inger made their own pies and jams and saw no reason. The beach had swings and a slide near the edge of the water, but so did the big beach in Frankfort. One thing Beulah had that Frankfort didn’t was the bathhouse, where you could change your clothes to go swimming, but I hated those little cubicles and the nasty public toilets with their wads of wet tissue on the floor. As far as I was concerned back then the only good thing that was ever in Beulah was the free show.
That was the big outdoor screen the town stretched between two poles right on the beach once a week all summer to show movies. There were speakers too, so even though we were outside we could hear the music and everything the actors said, along with the gunfire and galloping hooves, because most of the movies shown were westerns with stars like Slim Whitaker, Gabby Hayes, and Tex Allen. Everyone in town and for miles around would turn out with their blankets because the movies were free. The way the town paid for them was to let all the local businesses put ads up on the screen, which is how I knew about the jack-o’-lantern face of Cherry Jerry. First they would show a newsreel or a short and then the feature, and it was even better than the Garden Theater because out there in the fresh air you could almost feel the dust the big horses churned up from the mesas. Under all those stars and the indigo sky going black, you felt like you were right in the saddle with those cowboys out west, in the middle of all the galloping and shooting and zinging arrows, it all felt so real.
Years later, at a drive-in movie with my husband, our children asleep in their pajamas in the back seat, looking at the big screen through our windshield, I remembered the free show and was so aware that John Wayne’s Wild West was just a Hollywood set that everything seemed tarnished. But that was my adult life. I lived it at half-mast.
Once we even saw the northern lights. You’re not supposed to be able to see them in summer, but I swear we did. They were just like rainbow-colored curtains coming down, and after the movie was over we stayed to watch those big, iridescent swatches of light dance in the sky. It was something, better than any movie, even better than the Fourth of July.
Another time I remember they broadcast the fight between the American Joe Louis and the German Max Schmeling over the speakers before the show began, not the fight that Louis lost, but the one where he knocked Schmeling out in the first round and got to be heavyweight champion of the world, and even though we never went to the wrestling matches my stepmother and her sister were cheering along with everyone else because the American beat the German. The war hadn’t started yet—it was 1938—but even the people of Beulah seemed to know one was coming, or maybe they were still mad at the Germans from World War
I, I didn’t know, I don’t even know if everyone realized right away that Joe Louis was a black man—colored was what people said then, though it wasn’t a term I’d much heard because there weren’t any black people in Benzie County—but afterward people still seemed glad though not as glad as they would have been if the American was white, because the newscaster called it a brutal fight. He said that Joe Louis was straight out of the jungle, as primitive as any savage, and people didn’t like that. They would rather he won just because he was American. But in those movies we watched out there at the free show the Indians were the savages, and they always lost. Because my father listened to the news whenever he was home I wondered what he would think, but he was on the lake, and to tell the truth I don’t know that he ever went to a movie to see the cowboys beat the Indians. There are a lot of ordinary things I can’t picture my father doing. But after the big fight whatever feature was playing that night came on—I think it was Sagebrush Trail—and I lay back on the blanket and looked up at a sky so full of stars it looked like they might spill over and fall to the ground while the music played and the credits rolled, and I thought about my father’s ship, which wasn’t the Bull of the Woods anymore because I had been on the Manitou’s last journey. Now he was captain of the Ashley, out there somewhere on the lake beneath the same sky. He would be up in the pilothouse, and the watch would be on deck, and maybe some of the crew were out there smoking, and they would all be looking at the same stars while below, in the firehold and the engine room, the black gang would be feeding the big Scotch boilers and wiping down the crankshaft and hosing off the pipes or else the ones off duty would be playing cards with the deckhands around the long table in the flicker, because sooner or later everyone on the ship except the officers ended up playing cards or chewing the fat in the flicker, which was once just an empty hold sealed off behind a bulkhead that the black gang found and made into their own, jury-rigging a series of extension cords that swayed with the ship’s movement and made the lights flicker on and off, which is how it came to be named. So I wondered if Amund and Nils and Malley and all the rest of the black gang wished they could be out there on the edge of Crystal Lake listening to the fight where the black man who was American knocked the German off his blocks, so hard he saw stars, or if they would care, and would they care that the cowboys whupped the Indians one more time, or would they just tip their heads back and drink in the unblinking stars of that vast ink-black sky?
Across the Great Lake Page 14
