by Bodie Thoene
“Couldn’t be a German again, could it?” Tomas worried.
“Never you mind that,” Wilson corrected. “We’re too close in to the Western Approaches now. Airplanes’d spot ’em and plaster ’em good. No, this can’t be no Heinie this time.”
The shape of our deliverer grew larger and noticeably nearer as it emerged from the wall of mist. “I think they’ve seen us,” Barrett said with excitement. “I’m sure of it.”
“Are we rescued, Aunt Elisa?” Robert said.
“What are you waiting for, Browne?” Podlaski demanded. “Shoot the flare! Shoot it now!”
The oncoming ship began a slow turn to its left, presenting its flank to us.
“Slowing to rig out boats to come for us,” John said to Angelique. “It won’t be long now.”
The freighter rolled there on the swell, regarding us from a distance. Then there was an eruption of white water at its stern as the propellers revolved forcefully. The stack belched gray smoke, the ship lunged into motion…and turned away from us.
“No!” James shouted. “Come back! Don’t leave!”
“Don’t worry,” Wilson comforted. “Just their normal zig-zag course, like. You’ll see. That’s the zig. Next time, when they zag, they’ll be headed right for us.”
But he was wrong.
When the ship made its next maneuver, it turned still farther away and began to diminish in size.
“Don’t wait, man,” Podlaski scolded. “Fire the flare!”
There was a loud pop that made Yael and Simcha cover their ears, and a rocket streaked upward. It burst high overhead and hung there, a bright orange ball of fire drifting slowly back downward.
“Pop the smoke too,” Browne ordered Wilson.
Wilson pulled the ring and tossed the device overboard. The canister floated on the gentle swell, puffing out a cloud of vapor that drifted away from us toward the departing ship. “They can see it. They must be able to see it,” I said.
Then the freighter was gone, and they weren’t returning.
“It’s your fault,” Podlaski said, accusing Browne. “You waited too long.” He buried his face in his hands.
There was the low hum of angry muttering among the lascars.
“What do you say, Wilson?” Browne asked. “I think they saw us. I think they deliberately turned away. But why?”
“It’s like this, see, sir. Me brother’s in the merchant marine. He says them Nazis, well, sometimes they put out a lifeboat as a decoy. Then the U-boat hangs around, waitin’ to pounce on whoever motors up all unsuspecting.”
Browne scrubbed the stubble of his beard with ragged fingernails. “That must be it. What else could it mean?”
“But that’s still all right, in’it?” Wilson consoled. “They’ll still call in this position, so’s somebody will check us out. An airplane, most like. Why, we could have a plane here quick as bob’s your uncle, eh?”
Then the breeze shifted, bringing the fog bank over us, swallowing us up as thoroughly as if we were buried alive. We never did hear a plane pass by overhead, but it would not have mattered. They could never have seen us anyway.
That night Matt Wilson came forward again, picking his way over grousing sailors and groaning boys. He arrived just as Robert sobbed with hunger and aches in his legs.
“What’s this?” Wilson demanded. “Sniffling? Don’t you know real heroes never snivel?” Then gathering all the children with his words, he elaborated. “Don’t you know you’re all the heroes of a real-life adventure? So what if that ship turned away today? Don’t you realize what it means? We’re in the shipping lanes now. Tomorrow we’ll be found or we’ll run across another ship or we’ll reach Ireland and save ourselves. But turn it any way you like, there’s no cause for sniveling, is there? Buck up, mates. We’re writing a grand tale here. Don’t muck it up here at the end.”
The sky darkened and the breeze increased. It blew out of the east, so once again was no assistance in our voyage. We could not sail against the wind. The waves mounted one upon another, as if an unseen hand heaped them together and dashed them against us.
The sea had been so calm, the motion so steady, that we had forgotten what it was to be seasick. The hideous, corkscrew motion of the boat removed the delusion that we could not get sick. It was worse with nothing in our stomachs. Poor Robert retched until he almost choked and gasped for air. I patted his back and tried to console him, but he turned yellow and then green. His head lolled on his shoulders as if it might fall off at the next thundering roller.
Mariah crossed herself and called to me: “Pray! Pray to the Lord who calmed the sea!”
My prayer was only a single word: “Jesus! Jesus!”
We were soaked through, and the boat required constant bailing.
“Row!” Browne commanded. “Keep her head into the waves or we’ll capsize. And the rest of you: bail! Use your hands, your shoes!”
With almost no reserve of energy, pulling an oar to keep Number 7 from turning broadside to the waves or lifting a pail to dump over the gunnels seemed nearly impossible. Despite the urging of Officer Browne and the encouragement of Matt Wilson, I had no strength to do either.
Then it began to blow still harder—a gale-force wind.
I think I almost gave up at that moment. A complete sense of the utter futility of fighting wind and wave and hunger and thirst and exhaustion overwhelmed me as never before. If I could just go to sleep—permanently, I thought—then all those pains and aches and fears would be eliminated.
Wilson’s voice roused me from my despair. “What’s the matter with all of you? Don’t you realize it’s about to rain? Fresh water, free for the taking, lads. Loosen the sail, John. That’s it. You and James hold up the sides. Form it into a channel. Peter, Tomas, get all the empty milk tins, peach cans…whatever you can find. Hold them beneath the spout. Don’t waste a drop.”
Our faces turned upward in expectation. We were starving baby birds in this nest of a lifeboat, waiting for the moisture that would sustain our lives. Mariah raised her eyes heavenward. I saw her lips form the words, “Thank you.”
The rain came, slashing violently into mouths and filling the gully in the sail.
I swallowed convulsively, gulping the bounty from the storm, helping Robert do the same, and Connor. Robert lapped from my cupped palm, greedily.
Around Raquel her girls wiped their cheeks, caught drops in their mouths, and laughed.
Just as abruptly as it began, the squall passed.
“There now,” Wilson said. “How many tins did we fill?”
“A dozen,” John reported. “An extra ration all around.”
“That’s the way, boy! That’s the proper spirit. Hand me one. I was too busy bailing to drink, but I’ll take my share now.”
Weary half smiles watched the progress of a can of miraculously delivered water as it passed from Peter’s hand to his brother’s to Wilson’s. Expectant eyes were fastened to the sailor’s face as he tipped it up.
What happened next caused a convulsive shudder to pass through all of us that had nothing to do with the movement of the sea.
He spat it out and scrubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “Brine,” he said flatly. “Salt trapped in the sail from the spray. Don’t drink it,” he warned Mariah, who had a pineapple tin halfway to her lips.
The disappointment was crushing.
For once it took Wilson a long time to find the silver lining. At last he said slowly, “Next time it’ll be better. Washed the salt loose so with the next squall we can drink all we can catch. Wait and see.”
But there was no further rain that evening. Squalls of rain pattered to left and right and behind us, but no more fell on Number 7. We had no strength available to paddle into one of the cloudbursts.
The wind died and the sea calmed. There was even a small breeze out of the west behind the storm. And everything aboard Number 7 went back to what it had been before…dismal and nearly hopeless.
Robert’s
eyes were only half open and the portion that showed was glazed. He stared into the distance at something only he could see. He could not chew even the softest food and had stopped eating altogether. I forced him to swallow a tablespoon of canned milk and drink his water ration, but that was all I could get down him.
As the afternoon wore on, he began to rave. “Mama, I promise I’ll be good. Don’t punish me anymore, Mama. Whatever I did, I won’t do it again, I promise. Please, Mama, please. Can’t I have something to drink? Please?”
It broke my heart to hear him. I hugged him and rocked him. Connor, so weak himself he could no longer stand, tried to help. He sang to Robert until he was hoarse and he couldn’t be heard above the flapping of the sail.
The sun cast lengthening shadows from the rigging. Black tangles formed by the cables’ shades lay across Robert as if tying him down.
He plucked feebly at the dark lines. “Why am I tied up? Why are you making me stay here? What are these bars for? What did I do?”
Matt Wilson came in response to the whimpering. Though he still looked muscled and hardy, the grizzled sailor staggered as he stepped across the thwarts. He put out a hand and caught the mast to keep from falling. It worried me to see him affected in any way. He was the rock of encouragement for all of us. How could we go on if he failed?
“What’s this, then? Why are you moanin’ and carryin’ on?” Somehow Wilson’s voice broke through the boy’s stupor.
“My throat hurts and my feet hurt and I want to go home.”
“And so we will! But real heroes don’t whine, do they?”
“I don’t want to be a hero,” Robert protested. “Please, I want some water.”
“Couple hours yet,” Wilson returned, squinting at the sun’s height.
Robert blubbered silently into my chest. He had no moisture left to make tears, and his mouth left streaks of salt on my blouse.
“Please,” Connor pleaded, “can’t he have his water early, just this once? I’m…I’m afraid.”
I shook myself and raised my head. “Connor is right. Robert needs water, and he needs it now. If we wait, he may be…it may do him no good.”
Wilson fixed his gaze on mine and studied me, then nodded curtly. He went back to the stern and had a whispered conference with Browne.
I saw Podlaski interrupt. I saw Barrett threaten the diplomat with a clenched fist.
Browne shook his head. Wilson persisted.
Eventually Browne relented. “Listen, everyone,” the officer said. Exhaustion was evident in the way he spoke. Every few words he needed to marshal his strength before uttering the next phrase. “I am ordering…one extra measure…of water…for the boy. Not trying to…hide it. No one else…so don’t ask.”
The angry buzz of protests started at once among the native sailors.
“What about Farouk?”
“Farouk? What about me?”
“English officer for English boy…not for lascar.”
“Wasted. Boy will die soon any—”
“Belay that talk,” Wilson warned. “Clap a stopper over it before I do it for you, see?”
Wilson returned to where we sat with the water—four ounces of precious, life-giving fluid.
Robert sucked it down, then held the measuring tube upright over his mouth to catch one more clinging drip. “Thank…you,” he said. “I’ll do my best not to whine.”
“I know you will, son,” Wilson agreed. “Maybe Missus Murphy there will rub your feet and legs for you. Would you like that?”
“Oh, yes, please.”
I put out my hand and touched Wilson’s arm. “Thank you. I mean it…thank you.”
“Never mind,” he replied. “What it’s all about, in’it?”
22
LIFEBOAT NUMBER 7
NORTH ATLANTIC
AUTUMN 1940
We rocked along on the bosom of the ocean. It was hours since the last water ration and hours still to the next. Two of the lascars were near death. Robert, despite the extra share, lay limp beside me.
A morbid image came into my head, and I could not dispel it. What if we all died? Would Number 7 sail along, a floating hearse, until it eventually bumped into land or a ship? When our desiccated bodies were discovered, would anyone say, “We should have looked harder. We should not have given up so soon.”
Or would our fate be ascribed to the tragedies of war: Dear Sir, we regret to inform you…?
I had left the Newcastle with nothing but what I was wearing. My mind reviewed how many times in my life I had been reduced to starting over. Leaving Germany, leaving Austria, bombed out of London, and now sunk. Oh, Murphy, I thought. I was such a bad investment for you, wasn’t I?
Was there some reason I was reviewing this Shakespearian tragedy of endless woe? What had I been trying to determine?
Finally it came back to me. Was there anything aboard on which I could write a few words so Murphy and my children would know I had been thinking of them? I wondered if Officer Browne would let me scribble a note inside the Book of Common Prayer. Poetic touch, that, I thought. Like something you would read in a novel. It would never happen in real life.
I resolved to ask him…later. The very idea of transforming thoughts into words on paper was just too much effort for now. No one seemed to have any energy left at all. The lascars lay on their oars. The rigging clanged idly against the mast. No one wanted to sing or tell stories or compare likes and dislikes. Each of us retreated further into private shells of misery.
The exceptions were Simcha and Yael. The two young gypsy girls talked softly together in the bow of the boat. They lay in the creases between the canvas awning and the gunnels, one on one side of the prow and one on the other.
“Should we say anything?” I overheard Yael ask her sister.
“I don’t think so. Remember how unhappy it made everyone when you saw that ship and then it didn’t stop for us? Remember? Let’s watch awhile longer and then maybe…maybe we’ll tell Raquel.”
“All right,” Yael returned glumly. “I don’t want to get in trouble. But won’t getting to Ireland be a good thing? They have water there, don’t they?”
Dreaming or hallucinating, I wondered. The longer we were adrift, the thinner the line between imagination and madness.
Leaning my head back I stared up into fleecy clouds in an azure sky. When the weather was foul, we feared Number 7 would swamp or overturn or be blown so far from land we’d never get home again.
On days like today, when scarcely a breath of wind rippled the dark green sea it was fair weather that was our foe. We had no strength to row. If God did not send a breeze or a boat, we would languish here forever…and never get home again.
It seemed a dilemma without a solution, or perhaps my brain was too fuzzy to put coherent thoughts together.
A dark shadow swooped over my vision, then another. Was I going blind or was I hallucinating? Which was preferable? Crazy people don’t know they’re crazy, do they?
Another blurry something swept overhead. This time it added a pair of screeches.
Seagulls. So as yet I was neither blind nor delusional. That was comforting.
“Gulls,” Barrett remarked. “Seagulls. Isn’t it true…don’t people say…I’ve heard…”
What was the poor man trying to convey? I wished he’d hurry and finish the sentence.
Matt Wilson took over for him. “Gulls never go far out from land. If they found us, then we must be closer to land than we think.”
“That’s what Yael and I wanted to tell you,” Simcha said, rising up from her perch. “Is that maybe Ireland over there?”
All who could be roused peered up at the birds still soaring above our mast and then into the distance.
“Fog bank,” Podlaski said, folding his arms across his chest and sitting back down with a thump.
Barrett ignored him. “What do you say, Browne? Wilson? Could it be land?”
“Watch,” Browne replied.
Ahead of us,
almost at the limit of our vision, lay a gray wall. A shaft of sun jetted down from behind a cloud, highlighting steel-colored cliffs and the darker outline of a canyon.
“Connemara?” Mariah wondered. “Donegal? Sure, I can’t tell. Me eyes are so fuzzy, so they are.”
“Maybe,” James offered. “Maybe it’s…Scotland? Maybe we sailed past the northern end of Ireland. That would explain why it’s taken so long.”
Wilson stared ahead. “What do you think, Connor, lad? And you, John? You’ve got good glims. What do you see?”
“I think,” Connor said, “I think I see smoke. Could it be from houses or a factory…or maybe ships in the bay?”
Excitement increasing, John said, “That looks like the entrance to a bay, right enough! And beyond it. See that lighter line just where the land and sea meet? Couldn’t that be a beach?”
“I think I see houses?” James added. “Two-story houses painted white.”
“If it’s a bay then…there’ll be ships…coming and going,” Browne said. “Look sharp. When we see one we’ll…pop another flare…to get his attention.”
The current carried us past the mouth of the bay. The headlands rose steep on either side. Any moment now the view into the depth of the harbor would open. Then certainly we’d see ships and houses and rescue.
It was taking a long time to sail across the entrance. I saw what Connor noticed: spirals of vapor rising above the hills.
Then another helpful beam of sunlight darted ahead of us. It glinted against the canyon walls with painful brilliance and shone into the recesses of the harbor to reveal…nothing.
The fog bank rose from the horizon as if it had merely been resting there. In the space of a minute harbor, town, homes, factories, ships, food, a cool, refreshing drink, rescue…all disappeared. The curtain rolled back to reveal a perfectly flat, unblemished ocean…and nothing else.
I was awakened by someone plucking at my elbow. In my stupor I thought I was back at the Savoy. “Murphy,” I murmured drowsily.