“You ever been in an earthquake?” Roald asked Holgar.
“No, but I been on a ship went broadside. Rolled so far over her spars went under. Swept the watch right off the deck.”
“Quit your yap,” Axel said. “You’re gettin’ on my nerves.”
“Just trying to impart some useful information to the rookies.”
“Impart? You been reading a dictionary instead of that raggedy Sears catalog?” Roald asked. The catalog belonged to Dick, but all the men passed it around for something to do. I liked to look at the pictures of the toys.
“Yeah, well shut it,” Axel said, and this time Holgar didn’t say anything back.
I don’t know where the bosun was, below deck maybe, checking for the third or fourth time that his crew had secured every mop, brush, and bucket once he called a halt to the soogeeing and painting he’d ordered right after breakfast.
Some of the hands at the table were on duty, but they hadn’t cleaned or painted very long. “Painting with a gale coming on,” Slim had snorted as he passed through on his watch. “That’s a good way to take a bucket in the face.” But all Bosun said was, “You don’t say when she hits, I do, and she’s going to take her time, just long enough to make all you ladies wet your pants.” Alv told me about it when he came up, because almost as soon as Slim had passed through the engine room, Bosun had put them to work stowing away all the supplies they’d just gotten out. So we went to join the other men in the mess and play cards.
Before that, when Alv was still below, I had gone into the observation room with Manitou to watch for the storm, but when nothing happened except the popping in my ears, when the sky stayed so stubbornly blue, the whitecaps no bigger than ruffles, I got bored and went back through the passenger lounge to make extra sure nothing was loose in my cabin. That’s when I noticed that no one had secured the brass eyes on the back of the leather chairs. I set Manitou in one and pulled it to the wall so the hook could reach, and then the bosun came in.
“What do you think you’re doing, girlie?” It was the first time he’d spoken to me since I’d called him out.
I straightened and tried to sound like one of the men. “I’m dogging down the ship, sir.”
He looked at the hook reaching up to the chair, and to my astonishment he laughed. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, then seemed to catch himself. His eyes moved to Manitou, sitting in the chair, and the grump came back to his face. “Better get a move on then. Storm don’t wait for no teddy bears lounging around.”
“Yes, sir.” I moved to the next chair, then crossed in front of him to fasten the ones on the other side. I’d never been alone with the bosun before. Sometimes when he was around I tried to make myself invisible, but now there was no crew to blend into, and all of a sudden I didn’t want him to ignore me. So I said, “Sir. Do you think the storm is my fault?”
“Storm’s a storm,” he said.
“But you said women are bad luck.”
“Storm’s bad luck, but it’s the kind of luck you can count on, just like death and taxes.”
I didn’t like that he said death. “There’s a ghost in the managers’ cabinet,” I said. “It comes out at night. Do you know who it is? It won’t tell me what it wants.”
His eyes squinched, and the lines between the little rolls of fat on his forehead deepened, though the dome of his head stayed smooth as ever. “You seen the ghost?”
“No. I just feel it.”
“I heard of it,” he said slowly, “but don’t anyone on the ship know who it is.”
“You like ghosts,” I said.
“I know some. Ain’t the same thing as liking.”
“What about the ghost on St. Martin Island who wants to find his children? Do you know him?”
“Well, see, miss,” he said, “a ghost don’t ever get what it wants.”
I liked that he called me miss. But I wanted to be sure that he knew the storm wasn’t my doing, not mine and not Whispers’s, whom he didn’t even know about, because Dick Butler had kept the secret too, and there weren’t any preachers aboard unless the ghost was a preacher, but if the ghost was a preacher it ought to be able to pray for what it wanted.
“Well, sir, I believe it was the Chicora,” I said.
His gold tooth winked. “That’s right. But ghost ship don’t bring the storm, just warns you it’s coming.”
I thought for a minute. “Do you think this ghost is trying to warn me?”
“Can’t say,” he said just as I spotted Alv in the passageway from the mess, and Bosun spun around like he felt who it was even before he saw him. “What are you gawking at, boy?”
Which seemed an unfair question since Alv hadn’t even entered the lounge yet. He wasn’t looking at anything.
“Captain sent me to check on Fern. He says for her stay in her cabin.”
“Might check the chairs while you’re at it, you little pussy.” Bosun gestured toward the wall. “Girl already done all your work for you.” He moved toward the wood-paneled wall next to the purser’s office, which was rounded at the end so there wouldn’t be any sharp corners if a storm flung someone down the passageway. I supposed that was why there was no knob on the narrow door I’d noticed just inside the passenger quarters when Alv first brought me in to choose my cabin. The bosun crouched in front of it to reach through the hole, but his hand was too big, and after a minute he stood and turned around. “Girl. Come over here. See if you can fit your hand through.”
I reached in.
“Now twist it up and feel against the wall to the left. There’s some keys. I want the one in the middle.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, feeling along the grain of the wood and nap of folded towels until I touched metal.
Bosun said nothing as he took it, just unlocked the door to the purser’s office without looking at either of us, and neither of us told that my father had let Alv have a key, though I guessed he gave it back, because he only needed it to let me into my cabin that first time. And what the bosun did before he came out, I saw it even though he did it like he didn’t want anyone to know, was pocket one of the little brass message tubes sealed with cork. He handed me the key. “Put it back.” Then he looked at Alv and said again, “What are you gawking at?”
“Nothing.”
“Ain’t nothing to see,” Bosun said. “So you just go on and tell the captain his little girl is just fine.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Me and the captain’s daughter here just been having us a conversation,” Bosun said, and I thought that meant we weren’t done yet, but then he started down the passageway behind Alv, so I called after him, “Sir!”
He turned. “What?” There was a snarl on his face now.
“I don’t believe the ship will go down.” I’m not sure whether I meant to reassure a superstitious old man or convince myself. I liked the idea of a storm, but the tension that strained the men’s faces and hands all morning had begun to frighten me, and I was glad to know where the key was so that I could take one of the tubes for myself, and if I had to I would get Alv to help me write my last will and testament—those were words the men sometimes bandied about. But the idea didn’t seem so appealing anymore.
“No,” he said. “She’ll take a beating, but she won’t sink.”
Do you promise? I wanted to ask. But this was the bosun, and I was going to be a sailor, so what I said was, “No, sir.”
35
The lull lasted a minute or two. Then the mess went dark, the sky outside turned black, and even before the ship rolled, the wind shook the deckhouse so hard the plates in the galley rattled behind their cages. Waves were slamming the ship, and when I tried to look out the window I fell. A couple of the men staggered, and the others clutched the table. You couldn’t stay on your stool without hanging on to the table, and we could hear the chairs in the passenger dining room that weren’t bolted to the floor hurtling against the walls. I wanted to go up to the pilothouse, but my father would be busy, and I was sup
posed to be in my cabin, so I decided to go back to the observation room to get a better view. The alarm bleated as the men fought their way to whatever stations they were supposed to take in a storm, most of them below in case the ship took on water or the railcars came loose. My sea legs wouldn’t balance, so I crawled through the passageway. Manitou slid across the floor of the lounge, and I tried to grab him, but he slipped out of reach. That scared me worse than anything the men had said, and I started yelling, “Manitou! Manitou!” but he couldn’t hear me, I couldn’t hear myself over the lashing waves and all the things flying loose. The ship was yawing, my father and whatever wheelsman was on duty would be fighting to keep us from going broadside, and the lights overhead were flickering, the floor was skidding around, it was like the earthquake Holgar talked about, but I couldn’t find anything to tie myself with, everything was moving so fast. Back then, before radar, lake captains often preferred to beat into the wind for fear of running out of lake, going aground and breaking up in the surf, but the wind had shifted so quickly waves were coming up beneath the stern, lifting us so high it was like the bottom of the earth falling out when we dropped, but the wind was still rising, and then we weren’t plunging so much as pitching. The chairs in the lounge were sliding back and forth on their hooks, but the hemp chairs in the observation room didn’t have hooks, and by the time I reached it one of them had already been thrown into the lounge, just missing me as it crashed into the wooden column that enclosed the spar, the others were upside down and sideways, scooting around, there were checkers and puzzle pieces everywhere, and the sky had been blocked out by snow, I couldn’t see the lake, even though I could hear big cakes of ice being hurled against the hull. I didn’t want to be alone, so I crawled back into the lounge, where Manitou skidded just beyond my reach again, but then we collided, and I grabbed him up by the ear and tried to hold him against me with one hand and keep crawling, but the stern rose so high I was thrown all the way back to the observation room when the wave crested, and then nearly to the galley as we rose again. I was still clutching my bear, but there was no one in the galley or the messes, everyone was on the bridge or below, working to keep the ship out of the trough or the fires stoked and the cars from coming loose, or else they were in their cabins, hunkered in their bunks, holding on. I didn’t know where Alv was. Ahead of me Axel staggered and fell, then crawled along the crew’s passageway, he was trying to get to the head, and it was Hail Mary even though most of the men were Lutherans, he was yelling and puking both, and I was at the door that opened to the weather deck and the hatch to the car deck, I was yelling too, and even though we couldn’t hear each other I knew he was telling me not to open it, and I was asking him to help me get it open, and then somehow it flew open, and both of us pitched through, onto the icy deck, where I was hit with a spray of sleet in the second before I struck the back of the doghouse and fell all the way down the companionway to the car deck, where some of the cars had come loose from their jacks and were rolling back and forth on the tracks, and there wasn’t enough room, the cars that broke loose were threatening to knock the others off their jacks too. Holgar was moaning, and there were some other men sick, but they were trying to get the cars secured before they derailed, and then above the screeching wind and roar of the lake we heard something blow. It was the bulkhead between the engine room and the flicker. My body ached so much I couldn’t even tell which part was hurt, I’d lost Manitou again, but I kept crawling along the icy car deck to the engine room hatch, which came open like something sucked it right off its hinge, I heard it hit one of stanchions, or maybe it was one of the cars. I didn’t think about Whispers because you couldn’t think, but I hung on to the companionway rail and half slid down the stairs. There was water on the floor of the flicker, but it hadn’t come up over the lips of the cabin doorways, though the row of sinks against the wall was pulling loose and in the engine room the water was rising. The black gang was fetching dry coal by hand off the top of the pile in the hold, and the pumps and fans were running, but they were ankle-deep in the frigid water. Down here you couldn’t hear the wind as much, only the noise of the engines and hiss of the pipes, but each time the ship lurched, it seemed as if the firemen would be flung into the furnaces, though somehow the other men held on to them, and they kept slinging coal into the fires. Dick Butler grabbed me and pulled me back to the companionway. “Up,” he ordered, “up,” and I crawled up the steps to the car deck, where some of the stanchions were starting to buckle, but still I couldn’t find Alv. It was so cold the spray turned to ice, the scuppers had clogged, and water was sloshing over the rails and between the cars. “Up,” Dick kept saying, he was still behind, pushing me, because with the cars busting loose the car deck was dangerous, and waves were exploding over the seagate, making the job of trying to anchor them even harder. I wondered if the men would try to raise the gate and push some of the cars off, like they did on the Milwaukee, but Dick kept prodding me from behind even though I knew he was needed below, and the deckhouse would be dangerous too, the deck would be riding up and down now that the stanchions were giving. The companionway was cockeyed, but I managed to climb it and pull myself back through the hatch to the deck, where the freezing waves were breaking over the aft pilothouse, and the wagon they used to load groceries had come loose and went skidding past, but Dick got me into the deckhouse and we staggered and crawled through the aft passageway back through the galley, where the rack that held cups had come loose from the wall, and broken dishes littered the floor, and when we got to the lounge and my cabin somehow he found a life jacket that would fit a child and buckled it on me, even though he had to know that anyone who went into the water would lose consciousness within seconds, or maybe he thought I would somehow climb onto a floe and hang on even though the floes were all being smashed into one another and flung against the steel hull.
“You stay here and keep safe,” he said.
“But the coal is wet. What if the furnaces go out?”
“We don’t want that to happen. So right now your job is to stay up here and pray for us.”
“All of us?”
“All of us,” he confirmed.
“Alv too?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Yes,” he said. “Alv too.”
Then he zigzagged and gripped his way down the passageway, back to where he was needed to stoke the fires along with the firemen so we would have enough power to ride the storm out.
I crawled back to the observation room, but there was no horizon, no lake or sky, and I couldn’t see the snow, because we were all turned around, we were in the trough and rolling over, and I slid down the floor to the wall, and what I was looking at, I realized, was the lake, it was above us, but finally we righted. I wanted Alv. I wanted my mother and my father, and I worked to get the door cracked and slipped through to the deck and up the icy ladder to the officers’ quarters, where I crept up the inner staircase to the pilothouse. We were out of the trough and pitching again, and when I peered in, the helmsman, Pete this time, was clutching the wheel to keep balance, and my father was hanging onto a chadburn, I could see galoshes and the navy wool of his trousers ballooning above them. A watch was beside him, one of his galoshes was flapping, and Loke was saying, “Pumps can’t keep up. We’re taking too much water over the stern, hull’s leaking, engine room’s flooding, bulkhead’s gone.”
My father shouted. “Goddamn wind rattailed. We’ll have to turn.”
My father called down to the car deck to warn the men and ask someone to go above to the crew’s quarters and let the rest know, took a second to swear, then rang for the engines and seemed to count the waves to make sure we didn’t go broadside on the seventh, and when he was ready he yelled at Pete, “Hard left and pray she makes it.”
The ship went over to starboard and shook so hard I fell down the stairs. We were broadside then, so far over, the wall was underneath me and the waves were breaking overhead, then slowly we righted again and began to beat into the wind
. Waves were slamming over the bow, pounding the deckhouse, and over the ripping of the storm I heard a shatter of glass. The whistle cord had broken off, and each time it swung the whistle wailed.
When I got to the crew’s mess Odd and Holgar were clinging to stools. “We’re all in,” Odd said, but it was hard to hear over the bellowing wind. Holgar’s wrist was broken, you could see, the way his hand was splayed out on the billowing oilcloth. Everything else in the mess had fallen in spite of the wet dishtowels Sam had put out to try to hold things down, but then Mr. Andersen, the mate, staggered in and said, “Boys, we’ve always brought you home before, and we need you now if we’re to bring you home again.” So they both got up, Holgar with his broken wrist and Odd, and followed Mr. Andersen down the aft passageway to give it their last.
No one slept. No one ate. The coffee urn had toppled. For as long as I could, I kept crawling around the ship, but it didn’t stop, and finally I did what my father said and got into my bunk and pulled my blanket up and held on to the side, but it wasn’t possible to sleep, and time didn’t pass, there is no such thing as time in a storm, there is only the next wave. I can’t say how long it went on, only that when the wind began to subside, though the ship was still tossing, just not quite as violently, I went to sleep at last. When I woke it was daylight, and the storm was over, the ship damaged but aright. There was a strange silence, as if everyone on the ship was dead or else holding his breath to see if it was just a pause or really done. When it was clear that it was through I stepped out into the passenger lounge, but there was no one there, just the chairs and puzzle pieces from the observation room flung all around. Alv came to find me. He had been on the car deck, working to keep the rest of the cars from breaking loose. His face was streaked with black, the sleeve of his Carhartt jacket torn off—which was something because those jackets are strong—his gloves lost, his hand swollen up again. He began to right the observation room chairs and put things in order.
Across the Great Lake Page 18
