by Terry Griggs
Hearing it, Black Pete of the Northern Belle paused but did not turn to watch the Echo leave the bay. He shook his head sadly, as he considered the equivocal nature of such instruments, why they call to us so irresistibly and yet are so deceitful.
CHAPTER FIVE
mal de mer
A man attuned to what the weather was bringing him might feel it in the texture of the wind—a freshening, a stiffening; no longer a cool soft silk pouring over his skin, but a material more ruched and abrasive, like that handful of lace he sank his face into one time. Grif stood on the deck of the Echo, letting it rush over him, the wind like an endlessly unfurling bolt of funereal crepe, rasping cloth that told him a thing or two. Not that he needed to be told, since the ship’s name said it all (twice). The Echo—it practically invited misfortune on board. It seemed more the title of some dreary elegaic poem, thick with tragedy, one he would turn away from instinctively, because who needs to be entertained with a mind-crushing wallop of sorrow? The problem was that Grif was in this tragedy, riding on its very deck, his hands clutching the railing so hard he might have been wearing white gloves, formally attired for the occasion with fear’s accessories.
He was only a boy when the Asia went down in this lake, on this very run, up past the Bruce Peninsula and into the Devil’s Gap. One hundred and twenty people had drowned, corpses spread from Flowerpot Island to Manitoulin. Like many women at the time, his mother wouldn’t serve fish for months afterwards, fearing that by some ungodly jigging of the food chain they would indirectly consume some of the victims. There had been two young survivors, Duncan Tinkus and Christy Morrison, saved most likely by their impervious adolescence: death may not have occurred to them. Their ordeal made them celebrities. Reams of poetry about them had appeared in the papers, and a song had become inescapably popular. Grif did not expect that he would survive as a lyric let alone as a minor character if the Echo’s foundering got written up as a story. He wouldn’t cause the faintest smirk of grief before the page was turned and he was forgotten. Literature could scarcely claim him if life had already dropped him through the cracks—he wasn’t on the passenger list. He wasn’t even on the devil’s list of the carnally experienced.
He whipped off his hat and fired it into the lake, that unsettling brew of black, churning water. It rode for a while, jaunty on the crest of calamity, then was carried away out of sight. Horse Turd, he thought. That had been the name of a tug he had seen at Owen Sound, and it struck him as a far more honest name, uncontaminated by the pretensions of mythology. He wished to God he were riding on that piece of excrement rather than this one.
Amelia Kennedy was completely surprised to encounter him again. Given the ungentlemanly haste of his departure—he hadn’t even said goodbye—she had assumed that he liked vermin even less than she did, and that once out of the cabin door he had put a good distance between himself and this ship, disembarking easily enough at the dock. Yet here he was, still on board. She had come out of her room to take in some scenery and air—mostly air. That rat had upset her and she had begun to feel queasy. She discovered Grif leaning against a railing on the quarterdeck, gazing moodily into the water as if mesmerized by his own broken reflection. It was her fault, of course. In assisting her, he had missed his own boat, or his day’s work, or whatever had brought him down to the dock in the first place; she hadn’t enquired. He must be furious, taken so far out of his way, and penniless perhaps, his absence a cause of panic and worry at home.
She moved toward him, staggering to keep her balance. How rough the lake was getting. The waves were lashing the sides of the boat like black tongues.
He was studying the water so intently, she’d didn’t think he was at all aware of her approach. But he turned to her, and said a bit savagely, “I need to … fornicate. You. You’ll do.”
Well, there was a prettier way of putting this, less direct and certainly less crude. The whole social machinery of courtship and marriage hummed along so that these words did not have to be uttered at all. Grif didn’t have time for that, though, and he was married already, and he was going to die, and he had never done it, and he was a man after all, and he was astonished at what he had just said.
He fully expected her to be so outraged she’d give him a ringing clout on the side of the head, knock him flat; and that too was a form of intercourse not unwelcome.
Amelia gasped, and her fantastic hat trembled slightly, absorbing the aftershock of the request. There was a charged pause as she stared at him, hard, and then she threw back her head and laughed—too loudly, her lips too relaxed. He caught a glimpse of decay in her back molars, and with her bellow of laughter came a sweetish, offensive mortal smell. Her breath betrayed her, and he hoped to hell she would not say yes. Unfortunately, assent at this moment seemed all too likely; he caught a flickering lascivious gleam in her eye like a cat’s. It might be wiser, he thought, to travel virginal into the dark, letting innocence light the way.
He had succeeded in diverting her, in any event. After her laughter subsided, she still wore a pert, knowing smile on her face. The vulgarity had pleased her, warmed her, but she sidestepped it nonetheless in asking, “What is that you have in your hand, Mr. Smolders?”
He glanced down. “A book.”
“A present? It is very oddly wrapped, wouldn’t you say?” She was having some difficulty in suppressing her merriment. Apparently he stroked a woman’s funny bone, if nothing else.
“Yes,” he said, “it is.”
Grif had enfolded his journal in a square of canvas and then secured it with a length of cord, materials provided by the boat itself. Earlier, after watching the shore recede and Fenwick dwindle to a fly-sized speck, he decided that he had better take a tour of the Echo. One thing he definitely wanted to do was count the number of lifeboats. Three. Given the number of people on board, the sums were not promising; things did not add up. Using a knife he’d picked up in the dining room, he cut the canvas and cord from the tarpaulin covering one of the lifeboats. No one stopped him from hacking away at the ship’s property, not a steward or a deckhand, for the boat was eerily short of crew. No one seemed to be in charge, and yet there was no shortage of passengers: on his way through the dining room he had stepped over men, women and children stretched out on the floor, and then discovered even more down in steerage, readying crates to bed down in.
Amelia persisted. “What kind of book? A novel of some sort, something full of adventure and romance?” she teased. “Is it Mr. Zangwill’s latest? ‘Her white teeth flashed ’twixt laughing lips. His voice was hoarse, faltering … She came nearer and her eyes wrapped him in flame.’ No, wait—you’re not a preacher, are you? It’s not a bible, surely?”
Grif didn’t have the energy to lie, or the interest in doing so, but before he could respond they were distracted by something that hit the railing, a substance soft and wet. And red, red as blood, some of which spattered onto Amelia’s dress.
“Oh!” She leapt back. “What is it?”
“Beets,” said Grif. He surveyed a group of passengers further up, several bent in misery over the rail. They were speaking their dinners into the wind.
Amelia clapped her hand to her lips, and the colour drained from her face, as did her amusement.
He slipped the packet, the journal, back into his pocket and grabbed her arm. “Listen, Miss Kennedy,” he said. “The lifeboat on this side, can you remember that? This side. You must get to this one, and not the other two. I’ve checked, they’re not built properly. Without watertight compartments built into them, they won’t right themselves in a high sea.”
“High sea? What in heaven’s name are you talking about?” She was annoyed now, and cross, wrenching her arm away. The gauze on her hat, undone by the wind, had begun to rise out of her head like smoke. “You have been reading too many adventure stories. The lake is a bit rough, I agree, but really … ohhh.” She stumbled to the railing and gripped it like a wrestler. She was going to be sick, but not in front of hi
m.
Grif stared at his shoes, trying hard not to hear her, thankful that he had forgone breakfast himself. After buying the boater, he had spent his last few cents on a shoeshine; at least he would be a dapper corpse. He honestly couldn’t see what use there was in having this advance knowledge when it wasn’t going to save his life or anyone else’s. Soon enough an awareness of their common fate was going to spread from mind to mind like fire and there would be a democracy of terror on board. Even now he could hear the horses and cattle in the hold, stamping and bellowing, could almost see their eyes rolling, their nostrils flaring, awled with the scent of death. They knew, and as she turned back toward him, wiping her mouth on her sleeve, so did she. Her eyes had gone cold as stones in her head. The wind whipped off her ridiculous hat and smacked it against the deck, bones snapping. Unpinned, her hair was flying wild. To him, her head looked so pitiable and vulnerable he wanted to cup it in his hands and crush it.
“Come,” he said, reaching out. “Let’s wait in your room. We’ll pray if you like.”
She accompanied him back, both weaving along the deck like drunks, but she did not want to engage in anything as submissive as prayer. He might have expected her to be docile and malleable, yearning for sanctuary in his arms, but fear had an unusual effect upon her, and she became suddenly furious. She smacked him on the side of the face, then glared at him, as if in a delayed response to his earlier request for intimacy. She made a fist, which she was clearly about to drive into his chest when he grabbed her by the wrist and they began to struggle. What she needed to do most of all, it seemed, was fight—with him, as if he were responsible, as if he contained not only the secret but the means of her death, and she was determined to wrest it out of him and obliterate it, like a mother tenaciously and brutally digging into a child’s heart for a suspected lie.
While the wind rose higher, and the waves, and the ship began to pitch and roll, and voices outside the cabin rose in alarm—men shouting, women screaming—they tumbled on the floor, locked in an embrace that looked like love but wasn’t. She attacked him, viciously. Grif did all he could to protect himself from her kicks and thrusting knees and clawing hands. She was a brute. She swore shockingly. All he thought he knew about women, which admittedly wasn’t much, she ripped to shreds. He had been ready to offer her comfort, kindness, even the illusion of hope; the ship might make it through the storm, who was he to say? But all she wanted was this dressing down of the starkest truth that by some bad fortune he had come to represent.
The Echo had become like a huge cradle rocked by a lunatic’s hand. Furniture skidded past them, and luggage, and hats leapt out of boxes like wild surprises. Locked together, steamrolling from one side of the cabin to the other, they crushed silk roses, flattened crowns, got entangled in ribbons and were stabbed with the quills of ostrich feathers. Anyone would have taken them for soused revellers, rather than desperate strangers pointlessly exhausting themselves.
Abruptly, she stopped struggling. Not that she was done with him, but he could sense her listening, attending to something outside, a noise more providential, she must have hoped, than shrieking humans or the howling wind.
“What is that sound?”
He didn’t want to set her off again, but answered, “Below deck, they’re dumping cargo overboard. The animals too, they’re being driven into the lake. God, listen to them.”
“Will it save us?” she shouted at him, her face only inches from his own, her mouth wrenched and ugly.
“No, Miss Kennedy. It’s not likely.”
“Call me Amy,” she said.
That is when he thought he might strike her. He certainly wanted to, wanted to ball up his fist and smash it into her face, and watch with satisfaction how it shattered—now that their relationship was a little less formal.
“I have blood on my hands,” she said.
Grif glanced down at himself in case it was true she might have injured him. But the only blood on her hands was invisible, its weight borne with a slight trembling, as she sat up and brushed a strand of hair from her face. “I’ve murdered a man.”
He didn’t doubt it. By this admission it was clear that she was on the run too, and for a crime far worse than his own; at least Avice was still breathing (down his neck, like an arctic wind). Yet this was hardly the time or place for the felonious details, and besides, he was thoroughly sick of her. Did she think he was really a preacher? If so, he had no absolving words. Salvation, if there was even a glimmer of it available to either of them, lay not in this room, in this death-trap confessional, but outside, where all hell had broken loose.
“Look, Amy,” he said, slapping down the curse of her name. “Somewhere here, under the bed, there should be life preservers. Have you checked? If there is only one, you take it. Remember that lifeboat I told you about. Get to it. Don’t let anyone stop you.”
Not, he thought, that anyone would dare.
When Grif and Amy stepped out of the stateroom, uncertain and afraid, awkward as children strapped in their bulky life preservers, they stepped into sheer chaos. The world had been upended. The day was as dark as night, the waves had mounted into enormous towers of water, the wind sawed through their heads, the boat itself had become one huge cacophonous instrument of the devil. As for the human element, it was dissolving. People raced pointlessly every which way, frantic, pushing, crying out. Many were on their knees shouting prayers, imploring God for deliverance, for mercy. Some were howling, clutching at themselves, at their mates or children, tearing at their clothes, their hair. Some had already thrown themselves into the lake, and others had been swept in by the waves that were crashing over the railings.
If only Grif could have stopped up his ears. The scene had already been scored into his eyes so deep he would never forget it. But the sound, he thought, was going to kill him. The collective voice of despair was overwhelming, the black and leaden weight of it enough to engulf and sink him before even one drop of water entered his lungs.
He knew he had to act, even if there was absolutely nothing he could do and nowhere in this churning world around him that was safe. He flattened himself against the wall of the deck and inched along, recoiling from the crates that hurtled past, and the bodies. In the confusion he had lost track of Amy, she had vanished from his side. He thought she must have ducked back into the cabin rather than confront this—as many other passengers had probably done. There was no hope. They were all staring into the featureless and terrifying face of eternity.
The Echo, quaking and shuddering against him, felt so tenuous it seemed as if the winds might pluck it out of the water altogether and launch it like a paper ship into the sky. Or smash it to pieces. The boat had been labouring for some time in a deep trough between tremendous waves, which had now begun to sweep overtop of it. Grif’s mind went numb, stupefied with fear, anaesthetized for what was to come—a mercy so small you could hardly credit it as such.
Only his devious heart was haring along, beating so fast in his chest that, against all odds, it seemed determined to outrun death itself.
CHAPTER SIX
modern hero
It was the work of a moment, but a moment split open, cracked like an atom, its forces unleashed. The Echo was hit with a sixty-foot wall of water and rolled over on its side, slowly, like an animal defeated, lying down. A deep rending noise resounded within: the boat had begun to break up. And then it suffered another wave, this one composed of pure sound as the passengers joined in a cry of horror. When the ship began to sink beneath them, they swarmed upward in a solid body, a group as cohesive as the pounding water itself, screaming like gulls. Then, as the last of the Echo disappeared beneath the waves, this community of the terrified flew apart, and the real life-and-death contest began.
Someone, possibly some member of the phantom crew, had released the lifeboats, and they were floating free. The thing was to get to them, and the protocol was savage. In the water, people were thrashing and flailing, grasping onto whatever the
y could, taking a flying foot in the mouth or a fatal helping of the lake. Three people attached themselves to Grif and clung to him like limpets. For the first time in his life he had become a valuable man, a potential saviour, but only because he was one of the few in the water wearing a life preserver—wreckage with a human aspect. What none of these hangers-on seemed to realize was that they were all going to drown if they didn’t let go, or he didn’t get rid of the thing. Desperately—and desperately trying to forget that he couldn’t swim—he grabbed at a hunk of board torn loose from the ship and, hanging on to it, managed to struggle out of the life preserver and thrust himself away from the clutching hands of his admirers. Let them fight over it.
Head empty as a buoy, he struck out toward one of the lifeboats. Later, when it no longer mattered, he would tell himself the bad news: that survival was not possible, and that he was unworthy of it anyway—the prize of life fine as a mote and too elusive to seize. Such thoughts, he knew, weighed very little but could take you straight to the bottom. Doubt, not good; compassion and chivalry, both deadly. Having gotten rid of his shoes (his new shoes) before the ship foundered, he kicked his feet freely and vigorously, holding on to his board as if born to it, while trying to keep the lifeboat in view. He passed a woman and saw her go under, dragged down by the weight of her sodden skirts. He wasn’t sure, but it was possible that he had struck her with the board. He could have grabbed her swirling hair and pulled her back up, but he didn’t. He wondered if he would stop to rescue a child, but then refused to consider it. Thinking was an indulgence—and indulgences killed you.
Undeterred by obstacles moral or physical, he managed to reach the lifeboat, and called out to those on board for help, adding that he was a man of the cloth. (He was wearing clothes, wasn’t he?) This was a ploy that could easily have backfired, as it might have been a boatload of atheists, or should have been by now; but a hand was extended to him, and then another, and he was pulled on board, gasping his blessings. These benisons didn’t cost him anything but breath, and the shaken passengers were grateful to receive them. The boat was already overloaded, and others clamouring in the water, begging to get on, were not going to be so lucky. Those scrabbling at the sides, pitiful and imploring, would be by necessity ignored, their clawing hands smacked away with an oar. Grif caught sight of one of the other lifeboats and saw that it had flipped over and was floating upside down, a struggling mass of limbs and bobbing heads boiling around it. The other boat was gone, probably swamped and drifting to the bottom of the lake. Again, the sounds that filled the air were wrenching, unbearable. The roar of the storm, the agony of the dying. Grif feared that something essential in him was about to be ripped out through his head. He clamped his hands over his ears and tried to bury his head between his knees, but someone yanked roughly at his arm and shouted in his face, “Hold on to the lifeline, man, for Christ’s sake, we’re going over.”