The Landing

by John Ibbitson

  “Cut-rate weekends, family packages, that’s the thing,” Hotchkiss had explained. “Cut every expense, cut staff back to the bone, simple food, canoe rentals. Make Muskoka affordable to people who can’t afford Muskoka.”

  The place was run down, and it would take work. Henry had walked through the property — the main building with its dining room and lounge on the main floor and rooms on the second floor with the bathroom down the hall; the outlying cabins clustered around and behind it — pointing out leaking roofs and rotting planks.

  “It’ll take six men three months to get it in shape,” Henry predicted.

  “How about four men and two months,” Hotchkiss countered. “We only need to fix the worst of it, the parts you can see.”

  It was the parts you couldn’t see that did in a house, Henry had often said. But he just scowled and agreed to take the job and to find two other men. This would mean work for both of them through April and May.

  “I know you’ll do fine,” Hotchkiss smiled, as they shook hands. “I hear you and Ben did a bang-up job on Pine Island.”

  It was late when they were done, so they had spent the night at Port Carling — Hotchkiss paid for a room but not a meal, so dinner was the baloney sandwiches Ben’s mom had made them and a cup of tea — and waited for the Waome to pick them up in the morning. By ten o’clock they were on their way back home.

  Ben stood on the starboard railing, gazing down at the choppy water, the collar of his canvas coat pulled up, his wool hat jammed over his ears, and tried to ignore the rain. It was warmer in the cabin, but Henry was in the cabin, and he had had enough of Henry, who’d kept him awake the night before with his snoring. He’d be spending two months with Henry on that island, working on that lodge. They’d sleep there at night and cook their own food and maybe get off the island on weekends — or maybe not, if they fell behind on the work. In the weeks since Ruth Chapman had left the island he had felt as though the air had gotten heavier and harder to breath. He knew his mom sensed it.

  “What’s the matter?” she had asked him one day the week before as he turned the wheel that turned the blades that chopped the turnips his mother was feeding into the machine. The cows loved turnips, and the fattening pig would love turnips for a little while longer.

  “Nothing,” he’d replied, because what could he tell her? That he felt trapped, and she was part of the reason?

  “Son.” She straightened up and looked at him. “What’s bothering you?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Ben —”

  “I said it’s nothing!” And he had stalked away and gone to his room and stayed there till dinner, which they ate in even greater silence than usual.

  Something might happen, his mother had hoped. You never knew. But now he did know. Nothing happened.

  The sheet music that Ruth Chapman had given him, it was all beautiful, but a lot of it he just couldn’t play. There were too many notes, and he couldn’t handle the fingering; he twisted his fingers in knots, it seemed, trying to figure out how it should be done. Patience, his mother had urged, as he stormed into the kitchen from the toolshed one morning, frustrated by music that seemed just out of reach. Patience and practice. But that wasn’t it. There were things you had to know how to do, skills, techniques. Someone had to show you. There was no one here. He had taken the music into town once and shown it to Ambrose, who just shook his head. “Way beyond me. This isn’t fiddle music. This is violin music. And we’re just a couple of fiddlers, Ben. Though who knows, if we’d had a chance …” He didn’t finish the sentence, because he didn’t have to.

  There was one piece Ben had dedicated himself to. He practiced it day after day. It was called a chaconne, by Bach, for solo violin, and playing it chilled Ben, made him shiver. Most of it was slow, which at least made it playable, though in other places there were leaps and double-stops and scales that he knew were beyond him. But he had practiced it every day for a month, and he was starting to get some of it. The piece opened with a cry of despair — wailing notes of pain and loss that made Ben gasp the first time he played through them. Then came a melodic line, simple at first, but grave, severe. The melody built on itself, doubled back, sped up, turned into cascades of notes that Ben’s fingers and brain were too thick to play, but he tried anyway, pushing himself through it. There was math in it, Ben could see, in the way the composer took different lines of melody and wove them together, intertwined them, then drew them apart. But the music always doubled back, returning to its roots: pain, loss, and then whatever comes after loss. What was it? Ben couldn’t define it. An ache, but a memory, too, a remembrance, an acceptance. It was so beautiful, beautiful beyond crying. When they got home today, he’d practice some more after chores.

  Henry was standing beside him. Ben hadn’t heard him approach. He leaned over the railing, as Ben was leaning, and looked down at the water, as though he was trying to see what it was Ben was staring at. But Ben wasn’t staring at anything.

  “Hotchkiss doesn’t pay one cent more than he has to.” Henry’s mouth twisted into a smirk. They weren’t getting half what Ruth Chapman had paid, but it was the only work around, so they took it.

  “Guess that’s why he’s rich and we’re not,” Ben joked, if it really was a joke.

  “Guess so.” They were silent for a bit, but Henry spoke up again, as though he actually wanted to talk, which was strange, because Henry never wanted to talk, unless it was to complain.

  “But it’ll be a change, anyway, working up there.”

  Ben couldn’t be sure, but it almost seemed to him that Henry had been easier on him since the night on the dock. He wasn’t riding Ben as hard about chores, and took more time to explain how things were done.“Yeah, I guess so,” Ben agreed, though it wasn’t a change he was looking forward to. “Anyway, it’s not like we have a choice.”

  “Nope.” Henry looked back down at the water. “We don’t have a choice. We never do.”

  We never do. Ben let the breath out of his lungs, slowly. Henry knew it, too.

  There was something strange about the water. It was even grayer, darker than before. Ben looked up.

  “Henry.” Henry caught the undercurrent of worried surprise in Ben’s voice and straightened up.

  “Jesus,” he breathed. “Would you look at that.”

  They were in one of the widest parts of the lake, with two miles of open water to the west, leading into Bala Bay. A cloud was racing across that water beneath the overcast sky — dark, ugly rain sheeting down from it, the lake roiling underneath. Squalls were common on the lake — sudden gusts of wind and wave that came on you in a minute and lasted a few minutes and then moved on. You could usually see them coming, like you could see this one. The thing to do was to turn your bow into the wind and ride it out. But Ben had never seen a cloud like that, that big, that black, that fast. And the Waome wasn’t turning.

  Alvin Saulter, who was manning the engine and boiler room, came out on deck for some air. The crew outnumbered the passengers this late in the season. Besides Saulter there was a cook, a man to stoke the boiler, the purser, the mate and Bill Henshaw, the captain. Everyone knew Henshaw: he’d been sailing the ships of the Muskoka Navigation Company his whole adult life, and he had a reputation as a careful captain who could tell a good story. Apart from Ben and Henry, the only passenger was a Presbyterian minister on his way to Bracebridge — a polite, gentle man, who had retreated to the relative warmth of the dining room one deck below as soon as the boat cleared the river. The second smallest steamer in the fleet was the only one still plying the lakes, and now that the cottagers were all gone it mostly just carried supplies and mail. This would be the last week before the entire fleet went into winter quarters.

  “That’s a dirty looking piece of weather out there,” Saulter muttered.

  For a second nobody said anything as the squall approached. Then Ben realized
. The storm was coming at them from the starboard stern. Captain Henshaw wouldn’t be able to see it.

  Henry realized it at the same instant.

  “He’s got to turn the boat.” Henry was right beside the wheelhouse. He limped two steps and yanked open the wheelhouse door.

  “Bill!” he yelled. “Turn ’er to —”

  And then it struck.

  Ben was hit by a moving wall of wind and water that sucked the breath out of his lungs and lifted him off his feet and flung him through the door of the cabin. He wasn’t afraid — he was too astonished to be afraid. He had never felt anything like this — anything even remotely like this — in his life. A second later, the force of the blast drove him against the far wall of the cabin, and a terrible pain stabbed through his left shoulder and down his chest. The pain made him yell out. And now he was very afraid.

  A second shock: water — numbing, cold, October water, flooding over him. This made no sense. He was in the cabin, two decks above the lake. Why was there water?

  Nothing made sense. The wall of the cabin was beneath him, and water surged through the windows, and the floor he had been blown and skidded across was now a wall. Then he realized. The force of the blast had heeled the Waome over onto her port side, pushing the cabin walls and windows under water. Water was rushing through windows and doors, filling the cabin. The ship was in trouble.

  The deck was almost perpendicular now. He was trapped. The only way out of there was the door that he had been blown through, the door on the other side of the cabin. Only now it was overhead, like a trapdoor, and there was no way to reach it.

  Yes, there was. He was only a few steps from the wall separating the cabin from the wheelhouse. There was a small table bolted to it, and a fire ax. He could use them to climb.

  The ship groaned, and there was a sudden crash overhead. Was it the funnel breaking loose? Were they in that much trouble? Then a new layer of fear gripped him. Water would be rushing into the boiler room. When it hit the red-hot metal of the boiler, the boiler could explode, blowing up the ship and everyone still on it.

  Panic gripped him. He was going to drown. He was going to die. He had to get out.

  Blindly, he thrashed toward the wall. The table was under water, but he could stand on its edge. He heaved himself up, then reached up and grabbed the fire ax with his left hand, wincing at the pain in his shoulder, and reached for the door with his right hand. It was too far. It was too far. It was too far and the boat was sinking and he was going to die. He wasn’t thinking now. He bent his knees, then launched off the table, lunging for the edge of the doorway. Three fingers of his right hand grabbed it, clung to it, and with the strength that only comes with white terror, he pulled himself up, out of the water that was trying to suck him back down, until he could grab the edge with his other hand, and though pain coursed down his left arm he chin-upped his way out of there. He was still alive.

  But he was outside on a ship heeled to port, alone. The wind raged at him, and white-capped waves smashed against the ship, which was almost completely on its side. She could roll over any second, trapping everyone beneath her hull. Except there wasn’t anyone else. He couldn’t see a soul. The railing he had been leaning over less than — my God, it hadn’t been a minute ago — was now above him. He reached up, grabbed it for support and stood. How was he going to get out of here? He’d have to climb up on the railing and then slide down the side of the boat into the water. Then what? But there was no then. There was only this minute. Trying to live for one more minute.

  And then, through the fog of the panic, he remembered. Henry.

  He had been at the wheelhouse, yelling at Captain Henshaw. Except the wheelhouse was now almost completely under water. Where was Henry?

  Keeping one firm hand on the railing, then another, Ben groped toward the wheelhouse. He was there in a matter of seconds, but there wasn’t much to see except water beneath him and darkness, and — a hand! groping for the opening. Ben grabbed Henry’s bony hand. It was white cold, clammy, and the grasp was weak.

  “Henry!” Ben shouted over the wind. “Come on!”

  But there was no response. Just the weak clasp. Something was awfully wrong.

  Ben lowered himself into the water, gasping at the cold. It was dark. Everything was under water, the wheel, the engine signal, everything. Ben blinked the water out of his eyes, trying to orient himself.

  “Ben?”

  In the corner, in the thin pocket of air between water and wall, he could make out Henry’s head, gasping, gulping, his left hand clinging to a window sill.

  “Henry, we’ve got to get out of here!” Ben yelled. The wheelhouse could be under water any second.

  “Can’t swim.” Ben knew that. Henry hadn’t swum a stroke since the accident, decades before.

  “I’ll help you.” Ben tried to get his left arm around Henry, tried to ignore the pain gripping his left side. He had no idea how he was going to lift him out of the wheelhouse, but he had to try.

  But Henry pushed him away, or tried to. He was awfully weak.

  “No. Go on.”

  “No!” Ben reached his arm around again, tried to pull Henry away. But he was clinging to that windowsill with every ounce of strength he had, which wasn’t much.

  And then everything began to shift again. Metal groaned, wood ripped and splintered and snapped, and for a terrifying moment Ben was sure the Waome was capsizing. But instead she was righting herself, floor becoming floor again; walls, walls.

  Except they were still up to their chests in water, and as Ben watched, wide-eyed, the bow of the ship began to lift out of the water. The Waome was going down by the stern, and she was going down now.

  Ben suddenly realized that Henry was clutching him, shivering. Ben turned to speak, but his words choked on the shock. Henry’s head was matted in blood. He could see the gash, ugly, oozing blood, which started on his forehead and ran down almost to his right ear. He was shivering violently, his eyes unfocused, unthinking.

  “Come on.” Holding his uncle, Ben waded out of the wheelhouse, onto the sloping deck. The ship was sliding under and would take them with her if they couldn’t swim free of the undertow. Ben propped Henry up against the railing, climbed onto it, and lifted Henry over. Pain shot through his elbow, and he cried out. But Henry was over the side and in the water, and so was Ben, surrounded by pieces of wood and rope and other debris from the ship. The Waome was slipping away beneath them, and Ben could feel the suction tugging at his legs. Flailing, he reached for a couple of pieces of wood and propped them under himself and Henry. It was enough. In a moment, the suction had stopped. The Waome was gone.

  And now things were much, much worse. Four-foot waves with frothing caps washed over their heads, one after the other, driven on by the howl of a wind that seemed to push them as fast as a current. Ben’s sodden clothes weighed him down, and his shoes were like anchors. He and Henry were holding onto two boards nailed together, a yard or so long, part of the deck, probably, but they weren’t enough to keep both of them afloat, and Henry’s head started to disappear beneath the water. Frantic, Ben let go, then used the toe of one shoe to kick off the other, and his own toes to pull off the other shoe, so at least his feet were free. Shrugging off his canvas coat, he pulled Henry as far onto the board as he dared before it started to sink again, then backed off. He could keep Henry’s head above water, and one arm, but that was about all.

  And Henry wasn’t helping. His eyes were half-closed, his mouth half-open, and he barely sputtered when water washed over him. He let out a low moan.

  “Henry!” Ben yelled. “Come on! We have to swim!” He wasn’t sure if Henry even heard.

  Where was land? Ben looked around, desperate, and panic started to seize him again. They were in open water, but there was an island maybe five hundred yards to the north. On a calm, warm day, an easy swim. Weighed down by clothes, w
eighed down by Henry, with four-foot waves, in October water, his left side throbbing, could he do it?

  “Ben!”

  The voice came over the water, to his right. It was Reg Leeder, one of the crew. He was bleeding, too, and clinging to a chair. Ben wasn’t alone. His heart lifted.

  “Make for the island!” Leeder shouted.

  “No!” It was another voice. George Harvey, the purser, about ten feet away. “The wind’s too strong. We have to swim with the wind.” He pointed in the other direction. “That one!”

  Oh my God.

  He knew the island, Keewaydin. He’d delivered some wood there a year ago, for the cottage on it. It was half a mile away. And already the water had numbed his fingers. There was no way.

  “Come on,” Harvey yelled. “Swim for it!”

  Ben threw his left arm around Henry. “Let’s go, Henry. Just hang onto the board. Let’s go home.”

  He could see others in the water now. Alvin Saulter had made it out, and Bob Bonnis, a big man who had been tending the boiler, and there was Captain Henshaw.

  “Come on, everyone!” Harvey yelled. “We swim or we die!” Ben kicked his feet and carved into the oncoming wave with his right arm. Kick. Stroke. Kick. Stroke. Live. Live.

  “Where’s the captain?” someone yelled. It had only been a couple of minutes, but already Ben’s mind had started to shut down. He jerked his head up and looked around. He’d seen Captain Henshaw in the water just a few moments before. Where was he now?

  “He’s gone,” Harvey yelled out. “He’s gone.”

  He was in his sixties. Too old, the heart too weak, the water too cold. Ben looked at Henry. His head was rolling side to side. “Henry!” Ben yelled, trying to wake him. “Henry, come on, wake up!” Nothing.

  He had to get Henry to shore. He had to get help. Ben fixed his eyes on the island, then lowered his head, and kicked and stroked. He had to get there. He had to.