by Terry Griggs
He grabbed blindly at what was offered, fingers closing tightly over the coarse bristle of a rope, and almost immediately the boat was broadsided. He felt himself being thrown into the wind like a scrap. A sharp object struck him on the head, and then a wave smashed him back into the side of the boat. The water pounded him, dragged him away, sucked him under—but he didn’t let go. In this wild, shifting element the simple material reliability of the rope seemed miraculous. Blessed be the rope-makers. He gritted his teeth and kept his lips clamped shut. He knew better than to pray; open your mouth to plead for divine intervention and half of the lake would waltz in. He suspected that God had an unsophisticated sense of humour, roaring at these vaudevillian entertainments, the pratfalls and comic disasters to which humans were given. At least fortune, or dumb luck, had delivered Grif to the one lifeboat worth its name. All he had to do was stick with it, clinging to the rope with one hand and his life with the other.
The lifeboat did right itself as he had thought it would, unlike the other two. The passengers who had survived the dunking began to pull themselves back in, those younger and with fewer injuries lending a helping hand to the others. Grif saw that there weren’t as many on board as before, but he also saw, incredibly, that one of them was Amelia Kennedy. Amy. She sat soaked and shivering in the stern, her hair plastered to her head, her face blank with shock. She was the only woman among them. A sprig of affection stirred in him. Or relief. Or perhaps it was only gratitude to see a familiar face.
“You made it,” he shouted at her.
“Yes.” Her voice was flat, toneless. “You’re hurt.”
Grif touched his temple, dipping his fingertips into a wetness that was not water. Feeling the tug of custom, he almost crossed himself with it, with his own blood, as if his head were a holy font. Instead, he stared at his fingers, stained black in the storm light, wondering if the disease of mortality was going to spread and engulf him.
A man seated beside him said, “Take care when she goes over, she’ll knock you senseless.”
He was referring to the lifeboat, but Grif thought for a moment he meant Amy, her capacity for violence possibly visible on her pallid face. I’ve murdered a man, she had confessed, and it occurred to him only now that she might have meant him. Maybe it had been a prediction, an admission of culpability.
Another fellow, about fifty years of age, white mutton chops thick as brushes sprouting on the sides of his head, was cursing richly, and kept it up, repeating the same profane sequence over and over, each word a hard bead of blasphemy in a rosary of oaths.
“Stow it,” someone finally ordered. “Save your strength, granddad, yer gonna need it.”
“Mary,” someone else was moaning. “Mary, Mary.”
The man beside Grif nudged him sharply in the ribs and pointed at something that was riding the waves, a boxy vessel—not one of the other lifeboats, which had both disappeared, but the ship’s wheelhouse, which must have broken off from the Echo when the boat went down. A man stood balanced on its roof, laughing raucously, his arms outstretched, hands poised and waving gracefully as if conducting a symphony. He was conducting a symphony, commanding the raging elements, orchestrating the whole storm.
“The captain,” Grif’s companion snarled. “Drunken jackass. If that thing gets blown this way, I swear I’ll kill the bastard. I’ll rip off his arms and shove them down his bloody throat.”
Grif felt he would gladly assist in applying this bit of marine justice, but he didn’t get the chance. Nor did the Echo’s captain get the chance to sink them once again, which would have been the more likely outcome had the two vessels met. The man was suddenly spirited away, driven completely out of sight as another wave separated them and swept them in opposite directions.
Also gone from view, mercifully, were those passengers still struggling in the lake, still clinging to the wreckage and crying out for help. Their last words, stark and unanswered, whipped bare by the wind, were finally blown entirely away.
If those remaining in the lifeboat were spared this final scene and silencing, they weren’t spared much else. At first a surge of guilty relief passed through them. What could they possibly do to help the others now? It was beyond them, beyond human strength and ability. The Lord Himself had chosen them, for what reason they couldn’t guess, to be the survivors. Or possibly not. Perhaps they had been chosen for something more prolonged and cruel, a thought that must have occurred to more than one spiritual vagrant on board the lifeboat when it was struck hard and capsized again. And again, repeatedly. They were in the water and out, hands raw and bleeding from being sawed by the rope or from scrabbling up the sides of the boat. Their bodies were bruised and cut, and bones broken. Exhaustion, exposure, concussion, despair were the black cards slapped down in this game, in which there seemed to be only one wild card, one joker: Grif.
He caught on quickly to what was necessary, dodging whatever harm was being dealt to mind or body. When the boat flipped, he learned how to go with it, and then how to get himself back on board with the minimum of fuss—sometimes with a ruthless efficiency that meant others weren’t so lucky. So be it. Once back in the lifeboat he sat quietly, canny and contained, watching as the handful of passengers who remained prayed or wept or talked compulsively, draining themselves of life, making caskets of their own bodies. In the extremity they had voyaged into, in this borderland near death, he had sniffed out a survivor’s secret. Oddly, no one else had discovered it, although he couldn’t see why, as it was obvious to him. He felt he must be shining with the certainty of it, even though no one took particular notice. Except Amy, who occasionally turned on him a wondering and pitying eye.
It was fairly straightforward, and involved a hardening, a turning away, a willed invulnerability. He would summon up his worst attributes and make use of them. He saw it so clearly. A window was open, like that window at the Belvedere Hotel on the night of his wedding, and he was going to escape through it even if no one else did. He did not intend to let anyone else’s chances of survival diminish his own. If there was a hole in his heart through which emotion flowed, he would stop it up. He himself would become an unsinkable vessel, tightly caulked and containing a mechanism that no one would dare tamper with.
In other words, he was destined to become the hero of this disaster, but only to himself, his individuality so firmly outlined it was impermeable.
From his point of view Amy had launched herself on a fool’s course, for apparently she had decided to head in the opposite direction and become a saint, a Florence Nightingale of the lake. When the storm finally blew itself out, and the lifeboat no longer bucked and turned turtle, she regained some spunk, which she poured into a new role, sisterly and ministering. Five men, not counting Grif, remained, and to these she applied her attentions. She spoke softly to them, and listened sympathetically to their mother and wife stories, their anguish and regrets. She sang hymns to them, her voice pure as a child’s, and they joined in. What she helped them face was the long drift into the night, the knowledge that they might never see land again, or if they did wash up on some uninhabited island, they might never be found. No supplies, no oars (long since lost), no hope—this is what she had to work with, these non-existent materials, and yet she cobbled together something to give them.
Grif knew what that something was, too: enough ease and comfort to die with. Her kindly ministrations weakened them, her warming blankets of sentiment made them unwary, and he watched as they fell one by one into the deepest of sleeps. Never mind about him—the trouble she had caused, the harm done—she was murdering them all. Hers were the last words they heard in this world, her hypnotic whispering in the dark, her voice like a drug, a lethal lullaby.
Before he died, the man seated next to Grif, the one who had earlier offered him the lifeline, broke a lengthy silence, saying to him, “My name is William. William Ferris.”
Grif wasn’t having anything to do with this. He knew what the man wanted: his own name echoed. Ah, W
illiam, yes. Bill, is it? Bill Ferris? His little self gently placed and cradled in his ear, or clutched to his breast like a doll, the pathetic comfort of one’s own self acknowledged before giving it up for good.
He said nothing in reply and the man’s quiet expectancy soon died on his face.
Grif did not want to know these men, even minimally; and what would it signify if he did, since they were all sailing straight into anonymity? They—not he. That man with the mutton chops, he was long gone, his oaths, no matter how strong, having failed to save him. The handsome fellow with the British accent, lost overboard. The government man with the horseshoe cravat pin lay stone cold on the floor of the boat, an anvil-shaped gash on his forehead. And now his neighbour …
“Please,” Amy spoke from the stern, “that man beside you, say something to him.”
He didn’t, though.
Much later she said, “Will you hold me?”
Grif did not think this was a good idea. The boat could easily tip if he were to stumble down to that end. So unsteady did he feel, he might even pitch into the lake himself.
Even later, when everyone else had fallen completely silent, and the waves had stretched out satiny and black—the night so beautifully clear and peaceful that it was almost impossible to believe it had been the scene of such fury and destruction—she spoke again. She said, very quietly, “Forgive me.”
He thought about answering. He seriously considered it—but never did. He was distracted from offering her anything, even the smallest and emptiest of consolations, when his eye was caught by a glimmer in the water, by a light. He turned and saw a lighthouse signalling in the distance, its bright stroke scything through the dark.
“Amy!” he said, jumping up, rocking the boat and hastily sitting back down. He touched his fingers to his eyes as if seeking some assurance that he could trust them. He looked again and said, “You see it too, don’t you?”
He turned back to her, feeling that his own face must be lit like a lamp, but this time he had to leave her name hanging, because she was gone. Dead. She had slipped away into the night, was drifting out over the water, stealthy as an owl, no creak of wings to betray her. She left when he wasn’t looking, or speaking. Call me Amy, like a bird’s cry.
“Amy,” he said again, softly, but only to himself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
flotsam
What woke Grif was a faint tap tapping against the soles of his feet. His bare feet. Lord, but it was hard to keep shod a wayfaring man. It seems his shoes got into the habit of movement and couldn’t stop. He had forgotten that he himself had taken them off and thought they must have deserted him, danced away across the water. Not only that, but they took his socks along for company.
Tap tap tap. If he were really awake, if he were alive even, he would get up and see what that was knocking against the bottom of his feet so insistently. But his head was too full of the night and its horrors. He couldn’t lift it. It was heavy as a rock, packed tight, recollection and hallucination jammed together, one embedded inseparably in the other. The storm had gotten into his head, the wind and the lake, and thinking tore through it like screaming. He had assumed death would be quieter, less troublesome, more final. He should not be able to feel that thing at his feet, whatever it was, tapping with a gentle persistence, calling him back. During the ordeal, he had been so determined to live. Why that might have been, he couldn’t remember.
What he did remember, he wished he couldn’t. How the lifeboat and its cargo of corpses had drifted away from the lighthouse and salvation. They had drifted into an endless stretch of night and time, during which the dead refused their peace. They twitched and rustled and groaned. He would have thrown them overboard but was too terrified to touch them. They stared accusingly at him, especially Amy, her cold eyes following his every move. They wanted something from him, wanted to pluck some bright fibre out of his being, mix their ashes with his living flesh, like Father Fallon’s thumbprint on his forehead, his father’s hand wiping it out, and out, and out.
Grif opened his eyes and saw the whole magnificent vault of the sky ranged above him, a clear and beneficent blue, cloudless, devil-routed, a sky out of which you’d think only good news could come.
He lay numb as a plank on a bed of rocks, feet in the water, shod now in the whole lake. By rights he too was a corpse, but sensation was insistent, slowly returning, called up by that messenger at his feet, some piece of loyal flotsam trailing in his wake. He began to feel the sharp, uneven lay of rocks at his back, and the heat they radiated into his legs and hands. He could smell it too, baked rock, and a faint perfume of evergreen, and another fragrance—chamomile. Somewhere not far above him he heard a scritching noise, a bird picking through dried reeds. He heard the water lapping, felt the silky warmth of it caressing his feet. Far above, a single gull wheeled in that perfectly blue sky. He raised his hand in front of his face, and his own shadow marked it. Sea wrack plays sundial. He saw that his nails were beautifully clean—held at a certain angle, sunlight glanced off them—but he knew his hands were dirty.
Alive then, though not much better than sentient rubble. (No miracle of sumption overtaking him, no flickering presence of the Divine.) He was nothing and had landed nowhere. As an unregistered passenger, he was more missing than the missing. He was the ultimate stowaway, in his marriage (just try to find him), in his life—but no longer in his shoes.
Tap tap. The pesky, nagging thing might be his hardened conscience, which had slipped out through the bottom of his feet and wanted re-entry.
Why wasn’t he dead? Obviously, he had no talent for it. Only a creator as perverse as the Almighty would have dreamt that one up and offered it as a gift, something a man would be grateful to receive in a situation like this. But Grif didn’t want any gifts from God. He’d take his punishment, if this was it. He had tried his best to drown, finally hurling himself out of that wretched lifeboat, no land in sight, his lazy crew exacting their grim mutiny, staring him overboard. But life clung to him like the dressing on a wound, a curse he couldn’t shake. He had thrashed and clawed his way through the lake, ungainly as a monster. His had been no victor’s swim, and no contest, but somehow he had won himself a stretch of shoreline.
By Christ, piss off. He gave the thing at his feet a kick, and it sailed a few feet away but soon was back, barking up against his soles. It wouldn’t let him be. Or rather, it wouldn’t let him not be. He raised himself stiffly, head woozy, stomach uncertain, to have a look. When he saw what it was, he jerked his head aside and retched into the rocks.
It was a baby, stiff as statuary, swaddled in its own blue skin. Its face was twisted in anger, set in the shape of its final complaint. Not only were its eyes squeezed shut and its tiny hands fisted tight, but its whole body was clenched, as if determined to hang on to something from this world, if only the injustice suffered. When Grif was able to look at it again, he tried to see it merely as an object floating among other objects, a purely inanimate thing knocking against that barrel close by or the overturned kettle—shipwreck souvenirs. He needed to rob the child of its humanity, but it continued to bump up against him as if he were its miscreant and unresponsive parent. The dead do make their wishes known, and he was appalled to think that he was being asked to gather it up and hold it close, to be its cradle of pain, groaning like old wood as he rocked it. Just because his heart had turned to stone didn’t mean it couldn’t break.
“Is it yours?”
The voice drifted down quietly, but the surprise of it was great enough to startle a shout out of him, or the beginnings of one that turned into a choking cough.
“Forgive me.” The voice was all around him. “I thought you were dead.”
A figure crouched down before him. Grif saw a man dressed for the occasion of death, in a black suit, high-buttoned waistcoat, white pocket square, tie, hat. This attire was surely more formal than one would expect for the middle of nowhere, some deserted island, some distant shore. His luck that he s
hould wash up in a place where the only citizen was an undertaker, or the Lord’s own bounty hunter.
Grif found he couldn’t speak. A snare had tightened around his throat, and so he shook his head instead, more to deny the man’s presence than anything.
“Not yours, then.” The man regarded the child, sorrow fitting his face well enough. “Poor little wretch. I have a couple laid out up above and will put him with them. They’ll make a family of sorts.” He moved to the water’s edge, scooped the baby out and carried it away, dripping, its northern baptism complete.
He returned shortly, this time with a silver flask in hand. “Whisky,” he said, “compliments of the late Theodore Rudd of Chatham, Ontario. My guests don’t always arrive so well provisioned. Nor are they so easily identified.” He held up a calling card in his other hand. “I’m afraid we can no longer drink to Mr. Rudd’s health, although we can make an attempt at yours.” He offered the flask to Grif.