That’s what I did at night those first weeks, tried to walk myself through the watery passageways and along the car deck and the weather deck and on up to the boat deck, where I pictured the lifeboats still on their davits. I would imagine it all, just as if the ship were on the surface, but then the chair in the pilothouse would begin to float around, the cup rack in the galley would fall, the sinks would pull away from the bulwark between the flicker and the hold, and I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep, or else I would fall asleep and another image would appear in a dream and wake me up. It was almost like the first time the ghost came to me on the Manitou, because in the morning my pillowcase and Manitou’s fur would be damp and that’s how I knew that I’d cried. I was too old to be sleeping with a teddy bear, but after my father went down I rescued him from the top of my chest of drawers and brought him to bed, because he had been aboard the Bull of the Woods, he had crossed the lake, gotten stuck in the ice and lost in the storm, he’d escaped the fire, and if I no longer pretended that he could talk, I could still talk to him. One of his eyes had come off, but each night I whispered into the ear that no longer had any silk plush on its edge at all, though I can’t remember what I said. It was a hard time.
It was an equally hard time for Lene. She too had trouble sleeping or else fell asleep and woke up with a bad dream. Sometimes at night I could hear her moving around the house stealthily—perhaps she was afraid to wake me—with none of her daytime vigor, though that too seemed to wane. She cooked our meals and kept the house clean, though somehow there seemed little point to either. She still visited with her friends, but their conversations lacked the old lilt, there wasn’t nearly as much laughter, and she never ever sat down to the piano. She listened to her radio shows but without the visible pleasure they had given her before, and I couldn’t stand to listen to the radio at all, because I would strain to hear the sound of my father rustling his newspaper or tamping his pipe through the drone of the newscasters, though probably I was luckier than Lene, for I was a girl still, I had school and homework and a few classmates I could call friends. We had our sports, after school we went sledding and skating, at birthday parties I dropped clothespins in the bottle and pinned the tail on the donkey, just as I must have when I came back from the other side of the lake, so numb with guilt and grief and no mother, I barely remember that first year back. I was nine and then ten, Lene made an effort and gave me a party even though my birthday was little more than two months after my father was lost and we never spoke of the one I had ruined two years before. Still there was something missing. I don’t mean my father, not exactly, for he had rarely been available for parties. Rather, his absence left something missing in us.
The third mate from the Manitou, who had become my father’s second mate on the Ashley, had a daughter two years ahead of me in school. Her name was Doris Strom, and though we hadn’t been friends before that winter, two years being a great gap in age when children are so young, after our fathers were lost she sought me out. She lived on Forest Avenue, and together we often walked the two blocks down Leelanau to Fifth Street, where she turned off to go home. It was an odd friendship, because we almost never mentioned our fathers even though it was our fathers who brought us together—rather we chattered about school, and because she was older she would tell me who the cute boys in her grade were, and sometimes she would ask about the cute boys in mine, which was something I hadn’t paid much attention to. “Oh, you will,” she would say airily, and we would go on to talk about the teachers, which ones were mean and which were nice. And sometimes when the weather turned warm that spring she would coax me into going to Collins Drugstore for a soda. There was a war on in Europe now, but America was not yet involved, and we paid little attention to the world beyond the fourth and sixth grades and the pursuits of our leisure.
Yet every now and then she would say, out of the blue, “Do you think our fathers went to heaven?” And I would be startled by the question because even though Lene and I still attended the Scandinavian Lutheran Church, even though I stared at those stained-glass windows behind the altar every Sunday, sat through the sermon, and went to Sunday school, I never thought about my father in heaven, I only thought of him at the bottom of the lake with all the fishes I once imagined I would see if I could look through a glass window on the ship’s floor. I couldn’t picture him in the clouds among a bunch of angels playing harps. Instead I wondered where he had been when the Ashley sank—down with his men, trying to lighten the ship by pushing the cars off their rails into the lake, or up on the bridge like Peter Kilty, knee-deep in water, waving good-bye. What happened after you sank I didn’t know, and yes I wondered, did you stay where you were, or did you bob around the ship, because if you were in your cabin or in the mess, you would probably still be on the ship, though if you were outside on the bridge or on deck the current would surely pull you off. After they found the first two bodies, Billy Cooke and Holgar, they only ever found one more, Axel, along with just enough wreckage to be sure the ship had gone down. It was months before I stopped hoping that someone, maybe the bosun, had written a message and sent one of the brass tubes overboard. I wanted those few last words—We’re all in, good-bye—no matter who wrote them.
Another time Doris said, “My mother cries all the time.”
Lene did not cry, not in front of me, though she may have cried in the privacy of their room with its big old-fashioned wooden sleigh bed where only she slept now, still on her same side. What she did with my father’s things, I don’t know. She left his tower office intact, but one day his extra uniform and other clothes were no longer in their closet, and I grieved over their loss as if they were my father. The only criticism I’d ever heard the crew voice about him was that he wore his uniform too often, but they didn’t understand how much a part of him it was.
Nor did Lene try to comfort me, though to her credit I may not have appeared to need comfort, any more than she did. We went about our business, just somehow a little more mechanically, and that was how we mourned. We went to the Garden Theater, though more often I went with friends now. We went to visit her sister in Beulah, though I was old enough to stay by myself and usually chose to remain home. Billy Johnson asked me to be his girlfriend, and I said no because I didn’t want a boyfriend, I wasn’t interested in boys, but then I wondered why he asked, was it because he felt sorry for me? His father was a banker who went to work every morning and came home every night, his mother cooked their dinner and sometimes sent pastries or other little treats over for Lene and me, so he hadn’t been the death of her after all, and whether he would be when he got a little older, when the mischief of boys grew more serious than throwing a cat in the bathtub or digging up a flowerbed for worms, when they did more than dare one another to cannonball off the diving board or climb to the iron railing in front of the lighthouse’s second-story door, I was not to find out.
Because near the end of the school year, before it was warm enough for the free show or swimming in the lake, I came home one afternoon to find Lene waiting for me in the front parlor, where the lid over the keys of the August Förster piano remained down, the sheet music on its rack untouched.
“This house is too big,” she said.
But it wasn’t, oh it wasn’t! Not for me.
“It’s too much to keep up. There’s other families would enjoy it.” She was seated on the loveseat, and her back was very straight, her hands folded in her lap. I was still holding my schoolbooks, for I’d meant to head upstairs, but now I put them on the newel post and sat on a straight-backed chair next to the piano. The pleats between her brows had deepened since my father died, and little pouches of weariness sagged beneath her eyes.
“I’ve decided to sell it and move back in with Inger,” she said.
A chill ran down my arms, and I hugged them closer to me. The house in Beulah was too small, it was so dark, Lene and I would have to share a room, and there was hardly any yard, just the buggy field across the street with its dra
inage ditch and the highway overpass that cut us off from the woods.
“I hate Beulah.”
“Now, Fern.”
“I don’t want to move,” I said.
“But Fern . . .”
“How can you make me move away from the lake?” My voice began to swell. “That’s where my father is! I want to watch the ferries, I want to walk on our beach and canoe down through the marsh to the river, I want . . .”
She cut me off. “I wasn’t thinking that you would move with me.”
I stared at her. There were strands of gray in the dark-blonde hair that waved along her broad face, and her gray-blue eyes were set at the same time they were expressionless. She had a habit of penciling her brows, and they made her face look hard.
“Inger’s house is too small, and she’s not used to children.”
You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, I sniffed to myself, so distressed I didn’t even think what that could mean—did she intend to have me move in with the Johnsons or with Doris Strom?
“And you’re getting to be such a grown-up girl, I thought maybe we should send you to school.”
“I go to school,” I said.
“I mean to a school for girls where they live, a boarding school.” She leaned forward. “You wouldn’t get an education here like you will there. It’s an opportunity not many girls get. You should be grateful.”
“Where is it?” I asked suspiciously.
“Pennsylvania. A town called Lititz.”
“What a stupid name.” My hands clenched in my lap. “I don’t want to live in Pennsylvania.” I’d learned the states in school, their capitals and major products. Pennsylvania’s was Harrisburg, and its product was coal. I imagined living in a dark hole beneath the earth, my face blackened with dust and streaked with sweat, just like I was one of the black gang, but without a ship, without a lake. Pennsylvania was a desert full of black holes.
“Linden Hall is one of the oldest and best schools in the country.”
It didn’t occur to me to ask how she knew about it or to realize that she must have been planning her move for some time, sending off for brochures and information. No doubt she wanted to move because of the memories the house held, but she didn’t say so, and I gave her no credit for her grief.
“No!” My stomach burned, and acid churned inside my throat. “I can’t leave Frankfort. I love it.”
“But you see you can’t stay.” She sat back and crossed her legs. “When I sell the house . . .”
“You can’t sell it. It’s not yours.”
“But it is,” she said.
“This is my father’s house, it’s my house. This is my HOME!” I was shouting now. “I was here first.”
“Your father is dead, Fern. And I miss him as much as you do. Maybe more. When you’re older you’ll understand what there is between a man and a woman.”
“My mother is here!” I cried, though the truth is I didn’t know where my mother was. No one had ever taken me to see her grave.
She uncrossed her legs. “Well, I’ve made up my mind.” Her voice was even. Mine was the one that that quickened and rose.
I did cry then, but it did no good, nothing moved her because she had decided, decided what was best, I just hadn’t understood that, lame as it was, the best of it wasn’t what we were already making.
“We can write letters,” she offered. “I will miss you, Fern.”
But I was too angry to pretend that I would miss her. Because I was an orphan, never mind she was my stepmother—“your mother now,” my father had said, but neither of us had ever been fooled by that, no matter how polite we were—and there was nothing left to miss except the biggest loss of all, and that was the lake.
42
The buoyant mood with which we left Manistique didn’t last because there was still so much ice clotting the way, and as the day crept along and the men began talking about Death’s Door again, their voices lost animation and grew thin. Much as they joked, they hated going through Porte des Morts, which was much narrower and rockier than the Manitou Passage, even though both were feared as graveyards for ships.
“Two months and we could take the canal,” Axel complained in the mess.
“Ice can’t be any worse in the canal,” Holgar added. This was the Sturgeon Bay Canal, which had been built in 1890 because so many ships had been lost to Death’s Door, but Holgar was wrong—the ferries never used the canal before late April because the ice was impassable, and in winter captains nearly always chose Death’s Door, the passage between Gills Rock and Plum Island. The only other possibility was to go around Washington Island to the north, passing between it and Rock Island, which, according to Odd, “ain’t the end of the earth, but you sure as hell can see it from there,” or between Rock and St. Martin Island, and that was the problem, too many islands, too many shoals, not enough draft, not to mention the ice, which thickened as we neared Pilot Island and the Door County peninsula.
“Gives me da willies every time.” Hans, who was normally not so superstitious as some of the others, and no one was as superstititious as the bosun, pronounced the word villies, and I practiced it that way myself. “Gives me da villies,” I would say to Manitou or when I was talking to the boxcar where Alv had kept Whispers hidden, though I would always add, “You vill be fine, you vill see, ve vill come tru it because our captain is da best. He brought you tru da storm, remember?”
“Who are you talking to?” Dick Butler asked once, coming from behind a railcar to startle me when I thought I had the car deck to myself. His clothes gave off a stale stench of smoke. Everyone on the boat had his own special odor, from Odd’s whiskey to the bosun’s sour breath, Alv’s sweet boy smell, and my father’s aroma of authority.
“Nobody.”
“Talk to yourself, do you?” he asked, but it was just swagger, because he’d seen me take note of the butt he dropped into his pocket.
“Don’t you?” I responded, because I did talk to myself, not just to Whispers and Manitou.
“Can’t say I do,” he said and went back down to the flicker, where I knew the men would be grumbling about Death’s Door just like they had been doing up in the mess. I wondered if Dick knew that Alv had hidden Whispers, or if his mood had soured because he assumed the cat had been lost when we got to Manistique.
That night at supper Bosun said, “There’s ghosts from lost ships call you by name,” and then he told us how he’d once worked on a ship out of Alpena that had gone through a terrible storm on Huron that had washed the purser, first cook, and watch overboard. It had taken out the port engine and snapped the forward spar, but the ship had been repaired and put back into service, and on moonless nights he claimed the missing crew members came back aboard, reported to their stations, and slowly went about their duties, the watch prowling the decks, the cook sifting flour in the galley, the purser counting money in his office, and then they would simply vanish or sometimes you could even see them climbing noiselessly over the side to return to their watery graves. “But it warn’t no apparitions,” he insisted, and I believed him because I knew how quiet my ghost could be. “That dead cook, he’d come aboard, and in the morning the new cook would go into the galley and find the dough already mixed and risen.”
Loke hooted. “What I say is come back as a ghost might as well make yourself useful.”
Bosun also claimed to have seen one of the Flying Dutchmen, those old sailing ships that wrecked in Death’s Door. “Come up on the crest of the wave and there it was, three masts and sails set, moon so full you couldn’t mistake it, just east of Gills Rock this was, but we lost sight when the wave topped, and at the crest of the next it was gone.”
Loke might have argued and some of the other men too, but not after we’d all seen the Chicora and then, just like Bosun said, there was a blow, and even if it took a few days every man aboard agreed it was the worst February storm anyone had seen.
I thought about my ghost, who hadn’t come the w
hole time we were docked in Manistique, maybe because the repairs went on all night with so much racket and all that coming and going. So much time had passed the bruise on my ankle had faded to a sickly yellow, but I hoped the ghost would return tonight. An uneasy metallic taste seeped from the slippery flesh inside my cheeks because the ghost had gotten angry when I asked it to make the bosun stop picking on Alv, and what if that was why it disappeared? I dreaded it, but even so I wanted it back. I had to know what it meant to warn me about.
Across the Great Lake Page 21
