28
The windrow where we had stuck went nearly to the bottom of the Passage. Earlier we had broken up the pack ice by backing, running one engine ahead and the other astern to create a circular current. That was what I had watched from the bridge when all the chunks began boiling up, but now we couldn’t ram without peeling the hull, and we had ridden too far up on the ice to back off. So we waited, but after another day when nothing changed, the wind didn’t shift, and we couldn’t turn around to raise the aft and try crushing the ice with the propellers, my father ordered the crew to spud. I put on my scratchy wool leggings and my hat and coat, and Alv came back for a moment to help me with my boots. I wanted to go up to the boat deck to watch because the gunnel on the weather deck was too high for me to see what was happening just below. All the while Bosun kept yelling, “What’s the matter with you whores? You never seen ice before?” So from the boat deck, where the lifeboats rested on their davits, I watched the men go over the side, down two long Jacob’s ladders that were kept rolled up in the lifeboats, one by one, deckhands first, even the ones who weren’t on duty, then some of the black gang too. They seemed almost merry as they descended with their ice saws and spud bars, long poles with a blade at the end. It was almost like watching a troop of soldiers preparing for battle, before they knew what a battle really entailed, because no one expected to die out there on the ice.
It was clear enough for me to see the little puffs of their breath as they called back and forth, even though I couldn’t hear what they said. When I was smaller I sometimes tried to blow my breath out in different shapes like bubbles or smoke rings, but it always came out just the same, a formless little cloud, though if I wasn’t wearing a scarf over my mouth sometimes the ice caught on my lips for a moment, and if I was fast enough I could lick up little prickles of my own breath before they melted, but sometimes it was so cold those little prickles stung my lips and made them bleed, not a lot, just specks like freckles on an overripe peach.
The men with the saws were cutting blocks out of the ice like the ice man did in our harbor, you could hear the rasping of the teeth, and the men with the spuds were hacking at the surface with their wide blades trying to create cracks. It looked like a regular party out there with so many men working, except the bosun, who stood at the rail yelling down, though I doubt they could hear him any better than I could hear them, and what I think is they enjoyed it, enjoyed the fact that they were doing something instead of just waiting, enjoyed being out there in the world instead of scrubbing and painting down below deck, enjoyed watching Bosun yell without having to hear him as much as they enjoyed ribbing each other while they worked—and they worked hard. You could see the slivers of ice flying into the air, and if it wasn’t quite as exciting as watching the big chunks explode up out of the ice field when we backed, somehow the party spirit floated all the way up to the boat deck, and I laughed when I saw Walter join the bosun at the rail and heard him say, “This the big blow you were talking about?”
“It’s coming,” Bosun said. “Didn’t say when.”
“That’s one way to cover a bet,” Walter said. “Blow’s always going to come sooner or later. Might even wait for spring.”
“There’ll be a blow all right.”
I believed him because now I knew a ghost, even though I didn’t know who it was or what it wanted, but it came every night, and so I knew it wanted something and that whatever it wanted it wanted from me.
I picked Alv out on the ice, because even from a distance and with all his heavy clothes you could see there was something still not quite formed about him. To my five, fourteen seemed old, but not on a ship full of men. He was slender, and even in his heavy clothes and despite his shadow of a limp, which was more apparent on the ice than on the ship, there was something fluid in the way the rest of his body moved, as if his bones had yet to fully settle. Some of the men were probably no more than twenty or so, but I could see what a difference there was between fourteen and twenty or twenty-five. Plus some of the men, like Bosun and Odd and the chief engineer, had to be forty or fifty or even nearing sixty like my father, but once a sailor hit thirty it was hard to tell because the lake weathered them so much. And that was the other thing. Alv hadn’t weathered, his skin was as smooth as mine, which was one of the reasons the men teased him so much. So far he’d stepped into a bucket of paint and flung the contents of the pilothouse spittoon into the wind and come back to the bridge with his face dripping wet tobacco. Not to mention they thought he’d been seasick when what he had was cat scratch fever. He wouldn’t have dared confess to them that what he really wanted was to play the piano.
It took a long time, but I could hear the ice cracking under the thud of the blades, and farther off I could see the men from the other boat down on the ice too, but finally the Bull of the Woods broke free, the men came back up the ladder and put their saws and spuds away, and then we ran alongside the other boat to make a pass, so close you could see the faces of the small crew on deck, and we waved back and forth like we were just passing by, but then we had to back again and try to make a channel for the other boat. It was a fishing tug named the Lela, but out there on the ice, no matter their size, the boats were all one fleet, like allies in a war. Sparks flew as the heavy tow cable spun out from the winch, and I stayed up on the boat deck to watch it all, how the tug was made fast once we’d broken up enough ice to pull it back off the windrow into the space we’d carved. Then my father found a small passage around, and it was like a procession, the two boats with our big ship in the lead, churning past the thick wall of ice, and it was a good thing that we were first because my father was such an experienced captain, and the Passage is so tricky, full of shoals and fickle currents, it wasn’t enough just to slide by the windrow, because we could still run aground, and now that it was clear again I could make out a distant frill of green flecks in a white ridge that rode the edge of the frozen lake. That was South Manitou Island, someone said, so I listened as hard as I could but all I heard was the crunch and scrape of the ice and the ship bumping through the floes, I couldn’t hear the cholera victims crying out for help, and I understood now why none of the passing ships came to their aid, because there was barely enough draft for ships as large as the Manitou even as far offshore as we were.
For a while we continued our procession, but then the Lela turned off to the west, and we continued north, because we would have to repeat the whole process to free the Ashley, and that’s what we did, though that wouldn’t happen till the next day, since it was going on dark. Alv’s cheeks and nose were red with cold when he came to get me for supper, and he seemed to have forgotten all about the piano and his infected hand and how much he hated the ship and its crew because he said with pride, “Well, I guess I’m a real deckhand now.”
29
It was my birthday. I wasn’t five or six or even seven anymore, I was eight, which seemed a very grown-up number, and my stepmother gave me a party. There were always parties, those informal afternoon gatherings of women eating sweets, drinking coffee, and playing cards, but this was special, a birthday party with a cake and eight candles, and though my father was on the lake all the children in my grade came with their mothers because the women wanted to enjoy the party too, but the presents were for me, a whole pile of them wrapped in fancy paper tied up with bows. I was wearing a new green taffeta dress with black velvet stripes on the skirt and sleeves that matched the bow at the little turned-out white piqué collar, and I felt so pretty. I’d never had a party before, at least not one I remembered. My mother was in the hospital when I turned five, and then when I was six my father and Lene must have been busy getting married, maybe my birthday got lost in the shuffle. And for my seventh birthday I got whooping cough. These days you’d have to hire a whole circus to make up for it, but back then there wasn’t nearly the fuss they make over children’s birthdays now. It was a big deal just to have a frilly little paper cup full of candies for each of your guests and a game of
pin the tail on the donkey, which was just an old sheet with a donkey drawn on it and tails cut out of black construction paper. By the time I was giving parties for my own children, the donkey game came in a kit, but at least you didn’t have to rent a skating rink or bring in Barnum and Bailey. And circus or no, we had a good time. We played drop the clothespins in the bottle and blind man’s bluff and stumbled all over both parlors. Billy fell against the piano stool and sent it scooting across the room, and all the grown-ups did was laugh. Then it was time for the birthday song and the candles on my cake.
“Make a wish,” someone instructed, so I did and blew the candles out, all eight of them at once, which meant my wish would come true.
“What did you wish for?” one of the girls in my class wanted to know, and then they all tried to tease me into telling, but Lene said I shouldn’t because if I told, my wish wouldn’t come true. And anyway I couldn’t tell my real everyday wish because that would hurt her feelings, after she went to so much trouble to give me such a nice party. Because one of my real everyday wishes was that my mother didn’t die, but that wouldn’t come true ever, no matter how many candles I blew out, and so on my birthday I wished for something that could happen, something that would.
So I thought it didn’t really matter if I told, but I went along with it, and in my best birthday girl voice I said, “I won’t tell you,” but right then one of the mothers, whose name was Mrs. Lunde, said, “My goodness, Lene, she’s getting to be such a big girl. Tell us, Fern, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“She wants to get married, of course,” another said, but still another, who wore too much scent and had the kind of marcelled hair that had gone out of fashion, said, “Maybe she wants to be a working girl. She could be a teacher or a nurse.”
“A secretary,” Mrs. Lunde suggested. “That’s a nice job for a woman.”
“Not for me,” I said airily. “I’m going to be a wheelsman on a ferry.”
That made them laugh, as if I’d said something cute. Then the third mother said, “No, seriously.”
“I bet she wants to marry a captain,” Mrs. Andersen guessed. “Just like Lene.”
“No,” I said. “I’m going to be a captain, but first I’ll be a deckhand, and then I’ll be a wheelsman, and when I write for my captain’s I’ll change the rules and let the captain steer.”
Again they tittered.
“The girl just idolizes her father,” one of Lene’s friends said.
The woman with the marcelled hair smoothed her skirt. “All little girls idolize their fathers.”
It was true, I did idolize my father, but that wasn’t what they meant and so I said, more forcefully, “No, I don’t.”
“I bet you get married.” The first mother scanned the room, and her eyes fell on Billy Johnson. “I bet your future husband is here right now.”
“Fern’s got a crush,” one of the girls in my class sang, and the others joined, singsonging “Fern li-ikes Billy.”
My face flamed. “I do not!”
“Oh, look, she’s blushing,” one of the women said, and my classmates took up the chant again.
“I am not!” I stomped my foot. “I’m never going to get married, and I don’t care what you say, I’m going to work on the ferries. I already know how.” I looked around, at their mocking faces, and my voice began to rise. “I can tie a clove hitch and dog down a door, I know how to clear the scuppers and ring the engine room on the chadburn, I know how to spud and how to back, and I know everything, because I know way more than any of you!”
“Fern!” my stepmother admonished, because that was no way for a little girl, even a girl as big as eight, to talk to an adult. My cheeks stung, their faces blurred, and I shouted, “I am too! I’m going to be a captain! You just wait and see!”
Again they laughed, but an uneasiness splintered through the laughter, and when my stepmother spoke again, her voice was no longer chiding, its volume had dropped, and hidden inside its reasonableness there was an attempt to be kind that upset me more than any scolding could. “Don’t you know that girls can’t grow up to work on the ferries?”
The woman with the marcelled hair smoothed her skirt again. “The railroad has an office in Beulah. You could work as a secretary there.”
“I hate Beulah.” My lip quivered as if I had been slapped, and my voice fell to a whimper that was the worst betrayal of all. “Yes they can, I will too, and none of you can stop me.” My eyes burned, I had begun to cry, because I knew then that what they said was true: I wouldn’t grow up to be a sailor, I wouldn’t be a wheelsman or a captain, because women weren’t allowed. How many had I seen on the Manitou? How many worked on the Ashley or the Beaver?
“I will too!” I repeated, shouting now, and my stepmother’s tone grew sharp. “That’s enough, Fern,” she said, but it wasn’t, nothing was enough until I ran off to my room to cry and ruined my own party.
30
Even though a lot of the men had eased up on him, it didn’t matter that Alv had become a real deckhand because the bosun was as ugly as ever. And because I had promised never to let anything hurt him, the next day at noon dinner, when the bosun started in, I rose on my stool and snapped, “Stop it.”
Alv tugged at my dress, trying to get me to sit down. The mess had gone completely silent. “He never did anything to you. So just stop.”
“Well, I’ll be darned,” Walter said under his breath. Everyone had their eyes on the bosun, whose face was an angry purple, but instead of saying anything to me or to Walter or even to Alv, he turned to the other hands and growled, “What are you looking at?” By this time, Alv had gotten me to sit down, but he wouldn’t raise his head. Everyone looked around like they didn’t quite know where to fix their eyes or what to say or whether to say anything at all, and the whole while the bosun continued to glare at them without ever looking at me or at Alv or even at Walter, who whispered, “Good for you, sweetheart,” but Alv didn’t say a word, and we all finished our dinner as quickly as we could.
Except me. I’d lost my appetite because I knew right away that I hadn’t made things better, I’d made them worse. I hadn’t even been brave, because there was nothing the bosun could do to me. One by one the men left the table, until Walter was the only one still there.
“It’s okay, honey.” He patted me on my shoulder. “You didn’t say anything everybody else hasn’t wanted to say.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, my eyes full of tears. “Why is the bosun always so mean to him?”
“Oh, honey. Because he can be. Don’t you know that’s the way things work?” Walter gave me another pat, but there was no comfort in it, because Alv had left the mess without even glancing at me.
And I did make things worse, because the bosun was meaner than ever, often aiming a nasty smile in my direction as he started in on Alv. When he wasn’t around some of the men who had begun to accept Alv, maybe even like him, began to tease him about hiding behind my skirts. And Alv still wouldn’t look at me.
But I was wrong about not having anything to lose. Because I don’t know who told, especially since my father was so opposed to hearing tales, but at suppertime he came to get me, and I had to eat in the officers’ mess with him. Across the way I could hear the crew laughing and talking, and it was even worse than the night I’d spent in the closet at Billy Johnson’s. I squirmed on my chair and pushed the food around on my plate.
“Are you sick, lille?” my father asked, but I only stared at my uneaten dinner.
“I want to eat with the crew,” I said.
My father pushed his napkin aside. “The bosun is paid to do his job, Fern.”
“He’s a bully.”
“A bosun doesn’t keep his men in line by making nice.”
“But he picks on Alv!”
My father sighed. “The boy is new. He has a lot to learn. You’re a good girl to want to look out for your friends, but your friend will learn to look out for himself.”
I re
turned my eyes to my plate as if the food I couldn’t eat might disappear if I looked at it hard enough.
“Is it really so bad eating here in the officers’ mess with me?”
I couldn’t say yes—that would be impudent—but I refused to say no. “It’s just so jolly in there. The men tell all these jokes and stories.” I paused. “Do you know any jokes?”
My father’s eyes crinkled as if he meant to smile, but instead he cleared his throat, his brow furrowed, and his voice grew stern. “I don’t know what kind of jokes and stories they’re telling, but not all sailors’ jokes are meant for a lady’s ears.”
“But I don’t want to be a lady. Please, Daddy. I won’t say anything again. They’re funny jokes. There’s one about a pirate, and a whole bunch about these people named Lena, Ole, and Sven.”
“Good Lord!” My father shook his head. “Those jokes are as old as the hills. I daresay they were telling them when my father was captain.”
Across the Great Lake Page 15
