It was not yet light when I woke. I had left the little stool by the sink folded down in case the ghost came back, all tired out and wanting to sit, but I knew it hadn’t. I would have felt it if it had. I was kneeling on the stool to brush my teeth when I realized I smelled smoke, but it wasn’t the kind of smoke like Sam cooking bacon or the stale stink from Dick Butler’s clothes. It was a thick, smudgy smell that seemed to hold something sharp inside, and I was trying to pin it down when the general alarm began to ring, and I rushed outside still in my nightgown, where the men were gathering on the weather deck.
“Fire on the car deck,” someone yelled, and just then flames splashed a bright reflection into the doghouse over the hatch, which was open because men were scurrying up the companionway from the flicker and the engine room, the golden light from the heat fluttering across their faces. The distress horn was blowing along with the general alarm. Below the fire was cracking and popping, and the deck seared my bare feet, but there was no pulse from the engines because my father had already signaled for them to be turned off and the ship to be evacuated. Despite the pumps the fire had leapt out of control so quickly the last of the black gang had to come up through the escape hatch. The air was damp and cold, but you couldn’t feel the damp or the cold because the deck was so hot it warped the air, sending wavy shimmers up through the chill. Smoke smeared the sky, and even though we were in sight of land we were much too far from shore for a breeches buoy even if we’d been close enough to a station for the Coasties to get the cart with the Lyle gun down to the beach. Instead some of the deck crew were hooking the rope ladders, the Jacob’s ladders from the lifeboats, over the gunnels, and the mates were on deck, lining us up. “Quick,” Casper Strom, the third mate, said to me, “Get your coat and boots. We’re going to the ice.” By now smoke was tumbling out the ports below and from the funnels up above the boat deck, squeezing through the scuppers, choking the air in thick, oily black clouds, and below the flames weren’t popping and cracking so much as they were licking and roaring. My eyes burned, I had begun to cough, and as I rushed to my cabin my soles felt as if they were melting off my feet. By the time I was back, struggling into the sleeves of my coat, my galoshes unzipped, my father was on deck. He took my hand and snatched Alv from the line for one of the ladders. Manitou was tucked safe inside my good arm, still wearing his bandage, because he didn’t take it off at night like I did my sling, and in my haste I had left my sling and my shoes behind. “Take her off first,” my father said. “You go ahead so you can catch her if she slips. Do you understand? That’s an order. My daughter gets off the ship first.” He bent to kiss me and zipped my boots. “Don’t be afraid, lille,” he whispered. “Alv will see that you’re safe.” Then he was gone, and I cried, “Daddy!” When I turned around Alv had already hoisted himself to the rail and was motioning Holgar to boost me.
“Whispers!” I screamed. “Alv, what about Whispers?”
He dropped back to the deck. “I’ll get him,” he promised. “Holgar, take her off like the captain said. I’ll be right back.” Alv ran toward the doghouse on the afterdeck, so Holgar went down first, and it was Bosun himself who lifted me to the rail to follow Holgar down the ladder that swung against the ship with our weight. Men were scrambling down the other ladder, and when I looked up I saw the soles of a heavy pair of boots a rung above. Then we were on the ice, which was so cold through my rubber boots without my shoes my feet forgot all about the sizzling deck. Flames billowed up through the hatch toward the deckhouse, and the sound was like a thousand trains rocketing through a crossing all at once. It was all the paint and whatever was inside the rail cars, the tons of coal and coal dust, the ship went up so fast they couldn’t even man the pumps. My father must have signaled the ship ahead to port because it was already putting down its Jacob’s ladders for us. On the ice the men were running, slipping, trying to get away in case the Manitou exploded. Bosun picked me up, running with me pressed against his barrel chest, my legs bouncing against his thighs, and over his shoulder I watched the flames writhing through the ports. They were shooting from the deckhouse now, and even on the ice my face flushed with the heat. When the bosun must have felt we were a safe distance, he stopped and turned around to see. “It warn’t your fault, none of it, just remember that, miss,” he said, and I don’t know why unless it was because he had said women were bad luck on a ship or he thought my father wouldn’t make it off, but then my father was there, the bosun was handing me over, I was in my father’s arms, still clutching Manitou. My father’s jacket smelled like fire, there was soot in his eyebrows and streaked along one cheek, his whiskers smelled singed.
“Fern,” he said. “About your mother . . .”
But I wasn’t listening. The ladders had burned through and were puddled on the ice beneath the hull midships, and we were all there, watching the fire consume the Bull of the Woods. Holgar took a picture, you could hear the popping of the paint cans through the roar, and we were walking now, the long, slow walk to the other ship that was stuck off Chambers Island, where we would wait for the Beaver to come free us and take us home. “Your mother . . .” my father said again, but I didn’t hear him, I was screaming, a jagged shriek ripping up from my lungs through my throat. Because Alv wasn’t on the ice, he wasn’t walking to the other ship or running, either one. The deckhouse had collapsed, the ladders burned through and fallen, there was nothing left to be saved, and Alv wasn’t there.
45
I never told. Not about Alv. Not about Dick Butler, who survived along with the rest of the crew. He even survived the Armistice Day storm because he left the boats after we got back to Frankfort. Or else he did what Amund said and signed on some other ship for some other line and never mentioned that he knew his way around an engine room and a firehold.
My father never forgave himself, of course. He’d been so certain that Alv got off first. And even so I never told.
46
I never told on Dick Butler because that was the code. And how could I tell on him after, when I hadn’t told before? Because if I’d told before maybe none of it would have happened.
But if I had told on myself? It wouldn’t have made any difference for my father. He was a captain, last man off the ship, no matter what. He blamed himself. And I know what he, you, or anyone would have said: “But you were only five years old.”
And it is true. I was only five years old. But there can be no forgiveness without blame. Someone has to acknowledge the harm that you have done. Because guilt casts a long shadow, it does not accept excuses, and guilt that goes unspoken is a wound that needs air. So I have to wonder—if I had told would it have made a difference for me? Did I choose not to tell because I was afraid or because I was afraid to be let off the hook? I sent Alv back. It was the last secret we shared. Maybe I wanted to hoard it.
I don’t know, I can’t say, because the ghosts I want, the ghosts that I have waited for, waited and waited, will not come. They will not tell me what they want. They will not tell me what I needed.
But lately I have had this dream. We are crossing the lake on a great ship, Alv and I. Both of us are grown. Sometimes I am the captain, and he is my crew; other times he is the captain, and I am his crew. Together we stand in the pilothouse, looking out the windows high above the deep blue of the lake, which rocks the ship like a cradle in its delicate white lace of waves, just the two of us, gazing out at the vast, unbroken world of water. It is a perfect summer day, sky the color of cornflowers, a bright band of clouds laid just above the horizon. Below, in the passenger lounge, there is a piano, an August Förster upright with candle sconces and insets of burled wood, on its legs shiny brass eyes so that it can be dogged down if the ship begins to roll. But of course it never does, and when the sky grows dark, it is only evening shadowing in. Because on this ship there are no storms, no fires, no stowaway cats, no spoiled and willful little girls. And so together we stand to watch the sun slide beneath the waves as the low scud of clouds turns lavend
er and pink and gold, lingering until the last ember of daylight turns to ash. Then we go below. He seats himself at the keyboard, and I choose a leather chair, propping my elbow on its arm, cheek resting against my palm as I cock my head to listen. And in the chords he plays I hear the thrum of the engines and kiss of waves against the hull, the cries of the gulls circling overhead and trill of a redwing blackbird in the marsh, there is a soft clatter of reeds as I dip my paddle into the river, wind ruffles through the woods, stirring the feathers of the grosbeaks and cardinals and greening new leaves. Across the harbor the foghorn sounds its deep call, and through it I hear a bright splash of waves against the base of the lighthouse, the patter of raindrops on the sand, and the wet, heavy silence of falling snow. What he plays is the song of my childhood, but then, as he lifts his hands from the keys and looks up, there is one last echoing note. It is the sound of those two cubs, the North and South Manitou Islands, waking from their long winter’s sleep with a yawn as they stretch themselves and make ready to climb the steep dune to their mother.
But of course it’s not a dream at all, only a notion I took that year so long ago when we went to the ice. Before I knew that I was the ghost, come to warn myself, and the ice tore a hole through the hull of my heart.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published under the title “When I Was Five” in The Best of the Fuquay-Varina Reading Series 2014, and an adapted version of chapter 13 appeared under the title “HOMES” in storySouth 38. My thanks to the editors.
Across the Great Lake is a work of fiction, and throughout the research and the writing my goal remained plausibility rather than historical accuracy. There was an Ann Arbor ferry, the Ann Arbor 5, that was nicknamed the Bull of the Woods for its superior ice-breaking ability, but the ship I have given that nickname is fictional, and everyone aboard is a product of my imagination. The Ann Arbor 4 did sink beside Frankfort’s south pier in 1923, and its chief engineer’s watch survived the winter frozen on the bulwark, but whether he put it up to the ears of the children of Frankfort I can’t say. Although I have read an account of the old Frankfort water tower’s bursting and flooding the town, official records suggest that it merely sprang a leak. There are reports of a mate firing a wheelsman who went home, got drunk, came back, and refused to leave, just as Don Barnard recalls an uncle with a big nose who insisted that keeping it out of other people’s business gave it a chance to grow. I am indebted to the several writers who shared memories and information that I transformed into fiction.
The following books were extremely helpful to my knowledge of Frankfort, the ferries, Lake Michigan, the Armistice Day storm of 1940, and Great Lakes lore: Dennis A. Albert, Borne of the Wind: Michigan Sand Dunes; Charles M. Anderson, Memo’s of Betsie Bay: A History of Frankfort; Don Barnard, Growing Up Stories: Growing Up in Benzie and Manistee Counties, Mich. in the 1930’s; Florence Bixby and Pete Sandman, Port City Perspectives: Frankfort, Michigan at 150 (1850–2000); Victoria Brehm, Sweetwater, Storms, and Spirits: Stories of the Great Lakes; Grant Brown Jr., Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan: The History of the Ann Arbor Car Ferries; M. Christine Byron and Thomas R. Wilson, Vintage Views along the West Michigan Pike: From Sand Trails to US-31; Charles F. Chapman, Seamanship; Art Chavez and Bob Strauss, SS City of Milwaukee; Jerry Dennis, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas; Fred W. Dutton, Life on the Great Lakes: A Wheelsman’s Story; Arthur C. Frederickson and Lucy F. Frederickson, Early History of the Ann Arbor Carferries, Frederickson’s History of the Ann Arbor Auto and Train Ferries, and Pictorial History of the C & O Train and Auto Ferries and Pere Marquette Line Steamers; Skip Gillham, Ships in Trouble: The Great Lakes, 1880–1950; Bernie Griner, My 90 Years in the Northwoods: From Pomona to the Betsie River; Jonathan P. Hawley, From Artisans to Artists: Betsie Bay’s Historic “Island” Story and Point Betsie: Lightkeeping and Lifesaving on Northeastern Lake Michigan; Nelson Haydamacker with Alan D. Millar, Deckhand: Life on Freighters of the Great Lakes; Richard N. Hill, Lake Effect: A Deckhand’s Journey on the Great Lakes Freighters; George W. Hilton, The Great Lakes Car Ferries; Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Manual of Seamanship: 1932, vol. 2; Jim McGavran, In the Shadow of the Bear: A Michigan Memoir; Loreen Niewenhuis, A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach: One Woman’s Trek of the Perimeter of Lake Michigan; Eugene Edward O’Donnell, The Merchant Marine Manual; N. A. Parker, History of Crystal Lake Township; Tom Powers, In the Grip of the Whirlwind: The Armistice Day Storm of 1940; William Ratigan, Great Lakes Shipwrecks and Survivals; Benjamin J. Shelak, Shipwrecks of Lake Michigan; Kathleen Stocking, Letters from the Leelanau: Essays of People and Place; Frederick Stonehouse, Haunted Lake Michigan and Haunted Lakes: Great Lakes Ghost Stories, Superstitions, and Sea Serpents; Louis Yock, Lost Benzie County; and Karl Zimmermann, Lake Michigan’s Railroad Car Ferries. Websites too numerous to mention provided much additional information about ships, the Great Lakes, and local history.
For their assistance with my research, I am grateful to Linda Spencer, executive director of the S.S. City of Milwaukee National Historic Landmark and Museum, and to Bob Newcomb, who led me through the ship more times than I can count; to the Frankfort Chamber of Commerce; to Amy Ferris of Crystal Lake Township; to the staff of the Benzie Area Historical Museum; to the principal of the Frankfort Elementary School; to the pastor and secretary of Frankfort’s Trinity Lutheran Church; to Tom Mendenhall of the Manitou Island Transit Company; and to Henrik Bjarheim, David Betts, Stephen White, Phil Richardson, and Gary Greer for their input on the Norwegian and the nautical. Many thanks to Janice Fuller for reading the last chapters and offering suggestions.
I owe a great debt to Grant Brown Jr., whose history of the Ann Arbor railroad car ferries, Ninety Years Crossing Lake Michigan, which I read while researching an essay about Frankfort, so fascinated me I couldn’t let the material go, and who answered many questions from a stranger, often taking time to research the answers and interview old-timers who had worked on the ferries. I wouldn’t have written this book without having read his, and I couldn’t have written it as plausibly without the generosity of his input, though any mistakes are mine.
Always I offer thanks to I. D. Blumenthal, the Blumenthal Foundation, and Wildacres Retreat, where this novel was begun and a first draft completed, and to my many friends there, who were its first audience. I am grateful to the North Carolina Arts Council for a writer’s fellowship grant that funded an invaluable last fact-checking trip to Michigan and Wisconsin. Many thanks to Amber Rose, Sheila Leary, Adam Mehring, Michelle Wing, Ann Weinstock, and especially Raphael Kadushin of the University of Wisconsin Press. I can’t imagine a better experience in publishing. Thanks also to Caitlin Hamilton Summie for assistance with publicity.
To my family: my husband, Michael Gaspeny, and our sons, Al and Max, I want to say how fortunate I feel to have your love and support. And to my husband, who has cheered for the Tigers all his life, special thanks for the information about Father Coughlin and Hank Greenberg, for your suggestion that a cat or a dog might stow away on the ship, and for the enormous care you put into reading and offering suggestions on how to improve the manuscript. You are all over this book. You.
Lee Zacharias is the author of four previous books, including The Only Sounds We Make and Lessons, a Book of the Month Club selection. Her work has appeared in the Best American Essays series. Born in Chicago and raised in Hammond, Indiana, she is professor emerita of English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
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