“Blow was going to happen no matter what,” Walter insisted, but there wasn’t a man on the ship who believed him now, except possibly my father, but my father always ate in the officers’ mess with the mates, and he was not one to court superstition, though he’d told me himself that ships speak. Most of the time you couldn’t tell what he thought, unless he’d heard something he didn’t like, talk about going down or about the crew and their various resentments, and then he would say, “There’ll be no more of that, boys.” And I was always astonished how a quiet word from him stuck, because they never ever talked back, not even the bosun, though I never really saw my father and the bosun together until we were on the ice in Green Bay. What it was, I thought, was that captains never liked their bosuns, and probably the bosuns never liked their captains either, but they each had their jobs to do, and the captain was happy to let the bosun boss his deck crew around because the deck crews and nearly everyone else hated the bosun, but he got the job done, and the men spent their anger on him, keeping a kind of awed and distant respect for the captain.
So long before we got to Death’s Door the men joshed and told stories, but underneath their banter, just like underneath the ice, which looked solid but was always moving with the currents, there was a narrow ribbon of fear. Still we made our slow way through the ice without getting stuck, even though we had to back now and then and once, as we got closer to land, raise the aft to use the propellers to churn up the ice, and no one even speculated on what would happen if we caught another storm or a gale or if one happened inside Death’s Door, where the ship would surely be smashed against the rocks, though when the conversation fell off and the mess or flicker grew quiet, I could feel the men thinking, because fear gives a quality to the air, a faint electrical prickle. So maybe that was it, maybe that was what the ghost had to tell me. Another storm was on the way.
But then the men began to say they thought Manitou was good luck—not the bosun of course—but the rest of them joked about it, saying, “Wasn’t the captain, was the captain’s daughter’s little bear brought us through the storm.”
“Let me hold him a minute,” Nils said to me, and then they all wanted to take turns, and it was a sight, these weathered sailors sitting at the long, red table in the flicker holding a teddy bear with a big, white bandage on its arm in their laps. “You been hoggin’ him. Give him over,” Axel said, because he was down to his last pennies. “I need some cards, damn it.” And the men seemed to think it was the funniest thing ever when he took the next hand with a full house, aces over eights, and after that whoever was holding Manitou took to bluffing—maybe, because mostly the others would fold and we never got to see the winning hand. Once Dick even staked me and let me tuck Manitou behind my sling to play my own hand, and I didn’t have anything—by then they had taught me to read the cards—but one by one they all folded, and then I had ten whole cents to myself, and even though I knew they had just let me win, I whooped and hollered and did a little victory dance, but when it was time for bed I made them give my bear back, because even though I hoped the ghost would return now that all the racket was over, I didn’t want to face it alone.
“You’re awfully popular,” I told him as I took a cookie from the galley and drank a glass of milk for my bedtime snack. “Just don’t let it give you a swelled head. Because it wasn’t you that brought us through the storm. It was my father twisting the engines, and don’t you forget it. All you did was get lost.”
That night we saw the beacon that marked Plum Island, but as we worked our way toward Cedar River there was more resistance from the ice. It didn’t move so much with the currents now, it went deeper, and my father gave the order to sit out the night because a smear of clouds had closed around the moon, and visibility was so poor he wanted to wait until morning to tackle the big job ahead.
We were in Wisconsin now, because we had to sail through Wisconsin to get back to Michigan and Menominee, on the far side of Green Bay. It was even a different time here, someone had said, Central, a whole hour earlier, which meant we had sailed forward in space only to slip backward in time, and I couldn’t stop remarking about it because the idea seemed impossible, the world so much bigger than I’d known, so big there would be places where yesterday was today and today was tomorrow. I had never been farther than Traverse City and Glen Haven, but here I was in a whole new state on the other side of the lake, where a forest fire had sent the mother bear and her two cubs over to us, and what if that had never happened? There would be no Sleeping Bear, no Dunesmobiles, no Manitou Islands, no Manitou Passage, and even though I still didn’t understand why the mother bear wouldn’t have turned around to save her two cubs, it seemed to me that the world I knew, the world I loved so much, hadn’t come out of Adam and Eve the way the Sunday school teacher said, but out of that fire, and though I didn’t know the story about the phoenix, it seemed that was the way it should be, it seemed right.
43
I found my grandparents’ graves in the Norwegian Cemetery out on M-115, across from the township hall and turnoff to the airport. Now it is called Crystal Lake Township East, but back when my father’s parents were interred it was still the Norwegian Cemetery, then, when they began to let Swedes and Finns in, it became the Scandinavian Cemetery, then the Lutheran Cemetery, and finally the township took it over, though they might as well have kept the original name since Norwegians bought up nearly all the plots first thing. My grandparents are buried side by side near the back. Henrik Halvorsen, born in Norway, died November 17, 1913. I hadn’t known my father was named after his, and for the first time I wondered what my father’s boyhood been like. Had he loved Frankfort the way I did, or did he just love the lake? Katrin Halvorsen, wife of Henrik Halvorsen, born in Norway, died April 8, 1918. So my grandmother had outlived her husband by four and a half years. Seeing that, I wondered where they’d lived, if they had passed the tower house on Leelanau Avenue down to my father, or had he bought it himself, and if so which house had been theirs, another of the grand homes on Leelanau, one on Forest or even Michigan Avenue, where there would be a view of the beach? I knew all the old houses, I would recognize it. And wouldn’t that be strange, to stand outside of one of those dwellings I’d passed every day as a girl and realize that my father had grown up there?
Of course I could find out. The Benzie Shores Library would have histories of Frankfort. There would be a record of deeds at the county courthouse in Beulah, and I made a mental note to check them, but I wasn’t looking for my ancestors. I had stumbled across my grandparents only because I was searching for my mother.
I found her in Crystal Lake Township North, not far from where Michigan Avenue intersects with M-22, the road that takes you north, past the western end of Crystal Lake, to the turnoff for Point Betsie, and beyond, through the national park, which wasn’t a national park when I lived there as a child. If you keep going on M-22 you will reach Leland, where in-season excursion boats run to the North and South Manitou Islands. In fact M-22 will take you all the way around the Leelanau Peninsula, to the very tip and back down to Traverse City, where people once claimed to have seen a sea monster in Grand Traverse Bay. But that is the long way around.
When I didn’t find her stone in Crystal Lake East I thought she might not have one, might simply have vanished, her existence unmarked, but afterward I was glad, because the Norwegian Cemetery is so flat and barren. Why my mother was buried in North I don’t know. I never visited her grave as a child, if there was a funeral I must have been thought too young, and in September of 1941, when I was ten years old and my stepmother sold the house on Leelanau Avenue to move back to Beulah, I boarded an Ann Arbor train for Toledo with a suitcase full of clothes and in Toledo I changed trains to travel on to Lititz. I graduated from Linden Hall and went on to Wheaton, then to Boston and Raleigh. That first year in Pennsylvania I missed the lake so much I hated the state, the school, and especially my schoolmates. The girls made fun of my midwestern accent, though why that sh
ould be so—after all, they came from all over, though most hailed from the East—I don’t know. Probably my accent was just an excuse. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t try. I was too much inside myself. Still as the years went on, because I had been an only child and had no family left, I came to enjoy living in a dormitory with a roommate and so many other girls, not all of whom I liked, of course, but then not all of them liked me. Lene and I exchanged occasional letters, but I did not travel back to Michigan when she died, which was shortly after I graduated college, while I was living in Boston. I have no idea where she and her sister, Inger, are buried.
Crystal Lake North is what you want the cemetery where your mother is interred to look like. It has hills and tall trees and big family plots marked off by borders of stone or crumbling cement terraced into the slopes. Though it is scarcely older than Crystal Lake East, it looks much older, and you don’t want a cemetery to look new. My mother lies somewhat off to herself at the top of a hill, at the edge of the woods at the north end, and I can’t think how her stone got there if my father didn’t pay for it, though whether he visited it I cannot say, any more than I can say whether he imagined that he would someday lie next to her at the edge of those woods so like the woods behind our house where I played as a girl and that’s why he chose that plot instead of one near his parents in Crystal Lake East or even another one in North, on the side of the same hill or at the foot, where the Civil War veterans sleep with their wives. Or perhaps even as she was laid to rest he thought the only proper way to be buried was at sea. Or after he and Lene married maybe he imagined that he would be buried beside my stepmother instead. I have said before that Lene was not an unkind woman, and in that summer before I left Frankfort and my childhood behind, I’m sure she would have taken me to see my mother if I’d asked. Why didn’t I? I wonder. I suppose I was too angry to ask anything of her at all.
And I am glad that my father lies at the bottom of the lake, for I wouldn’t want to think of my mother here alone with my father next to Lene. When Ed died he was cremated, and per his wish I scattered his ashes along the beach at Wrightsville, where we owned a cottage for so many years, though Wrightsville was always far too built-up to suit me. I believe it was illegal—that’s one of my complaints about Wrightsville with all its rules and regulations about no dogs on the beach come summer and when and where you can walk them in winter—but when the sand starts to blow around who’s to mind a few ashes in the mix? We had sold the cottage several years before—too much upkeep, and after Ed retired he wanted to travel—so I had to drive to the southern end of the island and feed a parking meter, to time his dispersal before the meter ran out, and what kind of place is that? Better to go down with your ship at sea.
I know that my mother chose to die. Once, when we were children, Billy Johnson told me she killed herself, though if that was true surely I would have heard more about it, bits and pieces of rumor, whispered fragments following me down the school halls or the street. It is kinder to think she had a postpartum infection, what they used to call puerperal fever, though I suspect her depression was so deep she simply chose not to live, that she just lay in the sleigh bed in my parents’ room with her face to the wall until she expired. We were gone so long even if she meant to see me again she would have lost the strength to wait. I can’t imagine that neighbors wouldn’t have checked on her, but perhaps she sent them away. And perhaps no one knew how seriously ill she was. My father told me himself that she’d perk up, and he must have believed it. He had to. It would change everything if he didn’t.
At any rate, there’s no one left to ask, if anyone ever knew. Even Billy Johnson is dead, along with his parents, buried in another part of Crystal Lake North, and now his son is our mayor.
Her stone is simple, no mottoes, no hearts, no flowers, thank heaven none of those skulls you see on the stones in Boston’s old graveyards. It’s enough to be dead, you don’t need the sour face of your bare bones etched above you. Just her name, Silje Halvorsen, and the years that she lived, 1911–1936, no months or days because she was an orphan and perhaps the exact date of her birth was unknown. She died while we were at sea, and I don’t know who found her or when. I’m not even sure how long my father knew before he told me. Communications between land and ship were so unreliable back then. We had a ship-to-shore, but it was so full of static it was almost of no use.
But there it was, is, the grave I traveled over a thousand miles and more than seventy years to find. I crouched to brush a few leaves off the stone, which felt cool to my hand, a little mossy, a bit porous, with a faint moldering scent of earth and last year’s leaves, the smell of deep shade, but there wasn’t much tidying to do. And nothing to say except, “Mother, I’ve come home.”
I wanted to say mama, but the word wouldn’t come. I don’t remember her, and she remembers nothing. Because when my father offered me as a reason for her to get back up, I was not enough to keep her alive.
44
If the ghosts from the hundreds of ships lost to Death’s Door called anyone’s name that night, I didn’t hear. Even the ghost from the manager’s compartment failed to visit, though I had been so sure it would come back at least one last time, and I wondered what happened. Was it so frightened by the storm that it stole down the gangway and went up the street like the sailor who’d been so terrified of drowning? Maybe it was slipping through the woods with the caribou I never got to see. But what if it was lost? And what if it was still angry? It would never tell me what I was now certain I needed to know.
When the sky began to pale, the engines pounded into action. The wind had picked up, out of the west, and though the ice was denser you could feel movement beneath, and up ahead the current had forced a geyser of spray through a hole in the surface. It was my first ice devil, and I ran up to the bridge to get a better look. Below, in front of the ship, the prow made a spiderweb of cracks, and as we thrust forward the ice in the passage began to buckle and roar, we were able to force our way through by backing, there was land close all around us, then finally we were through Death’s Door, past Washington Island, inside Green Bay, making the turn toward Chambers Island and Menominee. My father called the engine room so the firemen could get up full steam, and then just before the turn he rang the chadburn for full power, because it’s nearly as hard to turn a ship in the ice as it is in high seas, though we didn’t have to come about like we had in the storm. Pete spun the wheel several spokes to the left, we swung to the southwest, and then we were back to fighting the ice, backing off and ramming, running up on it and backing off again, slowly breaking our way through Green Bay. It was overcast, but visibility was fair, and I could see the ice-covered escarpment that was Wisconsin off to port, those unforgiving rock cliffs where the Winnebago had ambushed the Potawatomi or maybe it was the other way around, because it was so long ago no one seemed to know, though that didn’t keep Red and Roald from arguing about it. By then we were coming up on supper. I was still fascinated by the time difference, and it delighted me to think that it could be five o’clock and four o’clock at the same time because if the line ran right down the middle of the ship, it would be suppertime only on one side of the table. So I took a portside stool and exclaimed to the crew across the table, “I’m eating before you are,” but then Roald spoiled it and said that Menominee was on Central Time, just like Wisconsin. “Time don’t change on a ship,” Bosun added, which made sense because my father would wear his pocket watch out if he had to reset it every time the Manitou crossed the lake. But it was like the bosun to want to spoil things even more.
“Just don’t get ahead of yourself,” was what Holgar said to me.
After supper there was another windrow and another ship stuck up ahead. By then we were nearing Chambers Island and the Strawberry Passage, though we would turn before we reached the Strawberry Islands and skirt Chambers Island to the west because only a small boat could navigate the shoals to the east. There was no moon and a fog had set in, we could no longer see the Do
or Peninsula, and though Axel claimed that on a clear day you could see Wisconsin and Michigan both, neither could have been much more than a line along the horizon with the water tower at Menominee sticking up, until Wisconsin receded as the water tower grew and you got closer to the river and the Menominee lighthouse appeared. My father called for rest again, so that we would be fresh and have enough light to free the other ship before making the last sixteen miles to Menominee.
“We’re almost there,” I whispered to Manitou as we settled down for the night. I was sleepy. I’d been up early, in the pilothouse when my father made the turn into the bay, in the mess, on the car deck talking to Whispers, and down in the flicker, where the men were dealing yet another hand and Malley was still playing a sad song on his harmonica at the end of the table when I went up to bed.
“Tell your nursemaid he gets to jump the clump first again,” Dick Butler called after me.
He was still sore about Alv being above deck, and even when the others brushed him off he wouldn’t let it go. “You tell the little faggot this time when we take him up the street we’re going to see he gets turned into a man. Takes a man to do a man’s job, don’t he know?”
“Ah, can it, would you,” Amund said and drew three cards. “You want to be on deck so bad, go sign on some other ship and just don’t tell ’em you know your way around the engine room and a firehold.”
“Sweet dreams,” Dick called after me as I climbed the companionway back to the spar deck and my cabin. He was in one of his nasty moods again, and Nils replied, “Might be you don’t come back with us from Menominee. Be a whole lot more peaceful.”
And the funny thing is I did have sweet dreams, which is to say I slept soundly and didn’t have any dreams at all. I’d cheered up considerably through the light of day. “Ghost ship don’t bring the storm, just warns you it’s coming,” Bosun had said, but he was just a superstitious old man, because we’d come through Death’s Door just fine and were practically to port, and who cared what a ghost that was such a scaredy-cat it ran up the street because of a bit of weather had to say?
Across the Great Lake Page 22
