by Peter Geye
This question seemed to sober Olaf. “The crew? They were just a bunch of anybodies. With the exception of guys like Jan and Luke, they were just men and boys.”
For the first time since Noah had arrived at his father’s house, he called up the picture in the museum, the one of the whole crew dockside with the Rag in the background. Although he could not summon a single face clearly, he could recall the apathy he’d felt looking at them. He remembered chalking it up to some kind of ambivalence toward his father, but in retrospect it was an ambivalence borne by the unconscious knowledge that what his father had just said was—and always had been—the truth. Twice already he’d alluded to the commonness of the crew, and twice now Noah had paused at the realization of this deflating fact: They weren’t gods and giants sunk on that ship, they were men and boys.
“That takes some of the starch out of the story, don’t you think?” Noah asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it more fantastic to think of the guys who died as a little bit heroic, as swashbuckling sailors? As something more than a bunch of yokels from Great Lakes port towns?”
“I don’t think so,” Olaf said, pausing to consider it seriously. “It’s real life. In real life there’re boys from port towns.
“There’s one picture of them that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind,” Olaf continued. “After we’d cleared the southwestern tip of the island, must’ve been around suppertime, I went down into the crew’s quarters for a fresh thermos of coffee and something to eat. You remember that the top two decks on the bow of the Rag didn’t have any interior passageways, don’t you?”
Noah nodded.
“Well, that walk usually took, what, twenty seconds? Two flights of stairs, maybe thirty steps altogether? There were eighteen hours of snow and ice coating those stairs and that railing. You put that together with the wind and rolling of the boat and that walk was the hairiest time of my life. Until then anyway.
“The temperature couldn’t have been above zero, and I was out there without my mittens, without a hat, gripping that goddamn railing for dear life. In twenty seconds my fingers were burning cold. I was slipping all over the place helter-skelter. And I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. I remember sitting down for a second, wrapping my arms around the railing with my hands tucked up inside my coat, and hugging that goddamn thing like I was a child.
“The sound of that storm,” Olaf continued, shaking his head as he closed his eyes for a long moment, “it should have been my first warning. I could hear the lake washing over the deck. I could hear the wind roaring. And I sure as hell could feel that wind coming from every direction.” He looked hard at Noah, his eyes colorless in the cabin light. “For maybe three seconds while I was sitting there, everything went quiet, though, and I could hear her bending.”
“Bending?” Noah said, sitting up and combing his sweat-damp hair back with both his hands.
“I sat on that icy step for a couple of minutes. I don’t know what in the hell I was waiting for, but I couldn’t move. The ruckus was out of this world, howling and drumming all over the place. But then it just stopped, went quiet, and I heard it: a slow, high-pitched cry. I knew it was the Rag under the weight of all that ice and water. It sounded human.”
Noah dropped back onto the couch. “Those boats don’t bend.”
“Sure they do,” Olaf countered. “Like skyscrapers give a little in the wind.”
“What did you do?”
“I finally got down into the crew’s quarters. And that’s when I saw them—this is what I was getting at—all bleary-eyed and miserable, sitting around the common table playing euchre. Most of those boys were still drunk when they came back on board in Two Harbors, and when you put the weather and seas like we had on top of what they must have been feeling to begin with, well, they might as well have been dead already.
“Tell you what, I never saw a card game on that ship without a pile of money in the middle of it. Hell, those boys found ways to gamble over Crazy 8s, but not that night. They were just trying to keep their cards on the table.
“There were thirty men on that boat, the lesser part of half of them on the bow—wheelsmen, watchmen, deckhands, the mates—and the rest on the stern—the engineers and oilers and firemen and wipers. The galley crew. The boys on the back had their berths in eight small cabins above the engine room in some goddamn cold and clammy quarters. Steel bunks with lumpy mattresses attached to the low overheads. Even the shortest guy back there couldn’t stand upright without knocking his head on something.
“And noisy as hell, too. They had to sleep through the constant whining of that engine and the churning of the prop. None of them could hear a goddamn thing. They had shit and grime under their fingernails all the time, and their trousers were always dirty at the knees. But for as filthy as they always seemed to be, that engine room was the cleanest place aboard that boat.
“The chief back there was Danny Oppvaskkum—a great guy—who knew the physics and chemistry and engineering of that ship like he’d invented and built it himself. Couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing, but he could’ve taken that thing apart and put it back together with a screwdriver.”
“How old was he?” Noah asked.
“Danny must’ve been about forty-five.”
“Was it”—Noah paused, hoping a second’s delay might make the question seem more delicate—“you know, was it his fault?”
“Oh, Christ no. No, no. Danny was innocent in that mess. He probably gave each of those boys an extra hour of life with his thinking.”
“There’s a picture of all of you in the maritime museum down in Duluth. Did you know that? You look like a football team in it.”
“They might as well have been a football team, being as they were young and lean to a man.”
“Did they have any idea, do you think?”
“Any idea of what?”
“Any idea they were about to die?”
Olaf closed his eyes, appeared to be thinking about it. “The storm was bad, no doubt about it, but we were killing it. It was snowing like hell, and it was cold as hell, and there’s no doubt some of those boys wished they were dead, but none of us thought we were going to die. Not in our wildest, worst dreams.” He’d rolled up the magazine and tapped his knee with it. After a second he concluded, “At least none of them were thinking about it then.”
Outside, it was still snowing and the leafless trees were all tangled in a stiffening breeze. Inside, the air suffocated and the stove continued to ping.
Olaf, whose hands were crossed over his lap, was thumb-wrestling himself. He looked up. The few seconds of silence had clogged up his voice, and he had to clear his throat before he asked Noah how long it takes to brew a pot of coffee and make a couple turkey sandwiches.
“I don’t know,” Noah said.
“Think about it.”
“Five minutes?”
“It took me twenty minutes from the time I stepped into the little galley in the crew’s quarters to the time I had a fresh thermos of coffee and sandwiches for the boys on the bridge. The way that goddamn thing was yawing, I dropped a full jar of mayonnaise, beat the hell out of my knee on the corner of the icebox, nearly burned my left hand off making coffee. I was a goddamn fool for trying.”
“Was the walk back up to the bridge as scary as the walk down?” Noah asked.
“It was no stroll on deck,” Olaf said as he set his head back against the chair.
Noah tried to place the story his father was telling in the context of what he already knew himself, or had at least read. None of the books that dealt with the wreck differed much in terms of what happened. His father returned to the bridge to find a panicked captain. The three methods of communicating with the engine room from the bridge had all failed. Noah could picture the brass Chadburn standing like a giant keyhole with the black-handled lever that, when set to a certain position in the pilothouse, would signal the engine room to adjust so
me aspect of her speed or bearing. He knew that if the Chadburn failed there was an onboard telephone line that connected the two ends of the ship. If both of those failed, there was a system of bell messages that the bridge could send to the engine room. Two whistles check? he wondered. Four whistles all right?
In each of the histories written about the Rag, the authors told similar stories of the simultaneous failure of all three modes of communication. None of them knew, though, precisely why the engine room had taken so long to comply with the captain’s orders. The reason they didn’t know was that the only man who had witnessed or been privy to the finer points of the communications snafu and lived to tell about it had never bothered to do so.
“Why didn’t you ever set the record straight on why they weren’t answering Jan’s command? It makes the whole thing seem sort of fishy, doesn’t it?” Noah asked.
“Nothing fishy happened on that boat,” Olaf said. “Not unless you consider twenty-seven men burning and drowning fishy.
“The reason I never gave those goddamn reporters the details is because what happened out there was nobody’s business but ours. Selling newspapers on account of our bad luck seemed like horseshit to me. If people wanted to know what it was like to get out of something like that with your life, they should have signed up to ship out at Superior Steel and taken the chance on finding out for themselves. It was between us and the lake. The big-bellied newspapermen weren’t interested in what happened, they were interested in making a circus out of us, in selling their goddamn advertisers an extra ad in a special section.”
“Don’t you think there were plenty of people who just cared enough to know?”
Olaf dismissed him with a wave of the hand.
“The Coast Guard and National Transportation Safety Board reports both said the same thing—that when you got back to the bridge Jan was upset because he couldn’t contact the engine room and he wanted to check down because you were about to round Isle Royale.”
“How in the world do you know what the Coast Guard and NTSB reports say?”
“It wasn’t just the newspapermen who wanted to know,” Noah said.
Olaf cast a glance at Noah, one he interpreted as apologetic, even sheepish. “Jan’s agitation was as simple as that, yes,” he said, steeling his voice as best he could. “When I got back up to the bridge, he was trying to get them to check down. We were about to pass the northern end of Isle Royale, and he wanted to be prepared to assess the seas.”
“Were you in danger?” Noah asked.
“None that we knew of. Jan was taking things slow because of the whiteout, but we weren’t in danger. At least not because of the weather, we weren’t going to run aground or founder under those seas.”
“But not being able to get in touch with the engine room . . .”
“That was cause for concern,” Olaf said.
One of the things that had never added up for Noah was why—after only two minutes of trying to reach the engine room—Captain Vat had become so anxious. He remembered being on midsummer cruises with his father when the Rag was still running on coal. He recalled his impression of the engine room after watching it in action for an hour or two. If not chaotic, it had certainly seemed perpetually hectic. All the levers and gauges, the noise and motion, so many pipes steaming or dripping with condensation or whistling out of the blue, and so many guys, even on calm days, tending to the countless details, led him to believe it was a miracle they had time to listen to orders of any sort. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what the commotion must have been like back there on the night she went down.
“So what did Jan do?”
“He nearly panicked, that’s what he did. When I got back up to the bridge he was sounding the bells for the third time. Three whistles,” Olaf said, “it meant they were to check down. When they didn’t respond after the third try, he thought about sending a couple deckhands back to see what the hell was going on. In fact, he went so far as to summon them to the pilothouse.
“I’ll tell you what,” Olaf continued, “the look on the faces of those kids said as much as anything about the shape we were in. We’d been at it for years, right? Jan and myself and Joe? But these kids were just starting out, just finishing their first season. It was the first big blow any of them had seen. When Jan told them to put on their life vests and they took turns looking out the window into that wildness, Jesus, you’d’ve thought he was sending them right to hell.”
“But he didn’t send them, did he?”
“Goddamn,” Olaf said. “I sure as hell didn’t want him to. I thought it was a suicide mission.”
“But you had to cross it.”
“I did, later. But it was different when he asked me to go because I expected to. I was used to those responsibilities. These boys just wanted to go to bed. As it turned out, not sending them cost them any chance they might have had.” Here his voice trailed off again. Noah could practically see the parade of crewmates passing through his father’s memory.
“Anyway, Danny finally called, and Jan lit into him like I’d never seen. ‘Goddamnit, Oppvaskkum, I almost sent two boys across that deck. Do you have any idea how dangerous that would have been? Do you realize ignoring calls from the captain—even in emergency situations, especially in emergency situations—is unacceptable if not outright insubordinate? We’re fighting a monster up here and you don’t have the time to heed my calls?’ ” Olaf was doing his best impression of a man with a much deeper voice than his own.
“But he was trying to contain the leak. It wasn’t his fault,” Noah said.
“You’re right, it wasn’t his fault that the line was leaking, but I can’t imagine what kind of trouble they were in—or how fast that trouble must have found them—to justify not responding to the bridge. We’re talking about one of the cardinal rules here.”
“So even if a guy’s up to his ankles in diesel in a place as combustible as that, it’s more important that he pick up the phone right away than figure out how to stop the leak?”
“The point is that by not picking up the phone, he jeopardized the whole order of things. Because he didn’t pick up the phone, two guys were about to be sent out into that storm. Because he didn’t answer the phone, the guy in charge of the ship was paralyzed, see?”
The line of reasoning was so familiar to Noah that he almost laughed. How many times had his father used the same hierarchical theory to make Noah paint the garage or shovel the sidewalk at their old house on High Street? “Aren’t there exceptions to the cardinal rules?” Noah asked.
“I’ve never seen one,” Olaf said. “And I’ve seen a lot.”
That was familiar, too, his father slapping down the trump card of experience.
“What did Danny finally say that made Jan send you across the deck?”
“Danny knew right away how serious the problem was. As far as I could tell—and I never knew for certain—the main fuel line had ruptured near the tank, which was in the forward half of the engine room where the coal bunker had been the season before. The leak was serious enough that the entire engine-room crew, including the porters and steward, were busy trying to clean it. It had to have happened so goddamn fast—gotten out of hand so goddamn fast—that there was no chance to even sound an alarm.
“When Danny finally got around to calling the wheelhouse, there was no question about what kind of shape we were in. I only heard one side of the conversation, but there wasn’t much doubt about our dire straits. Jan decided in an instant that we’d have to seek shelter, and his last words to Danny sent a hot chill up my back: ‘Double-lash anything that could cause a spark, and keep a couple of those boys at the ready with fire extinguishers, we’re going to come about.’
“Now, how’d you like to hear something like that from the boss’s mouth?”
“It’d scare the shit out of me.”
“Well, it scared the shit out of me, too. Jan and Joe and me got together in the chart room. Old Jan, he briefed us. We got our positi
on figured out, and we decided to bring her around and head straight west for Thunder Bay, where the Lachete, Prudence, and Heldig were already at anchor.
“We had a little shelter from the worst of it, being as close as we were to the north shore, but it wasn’t like we could just tip our caps and wave good-bye to those seas. We were going to pay for it. The good news was that once we got around, the wind would have been behind us and getting to Thunder Bay would have come pretty easy. Anyway, it was the only option we had.
“Goddamn,” Olaf almost whispered, “I remember like it was yesterday. He had the engine going slow astern while he waited for just the right lull—it seemed like days—and as soon as he felt it, he ordered engines full ahead and the rudder full left. Everyone in the wheelhouse swayed and lurched and grabbed for a railing or something to hold on to as she slid down one side of a trough and up another. She listed bad for a second or two while a big swell washed over the length of the deck.
“We took a couple more waves before we got on course, but we did manage to get turned around. We were looking at two and a half hours,” Olaf mused. “Two and a half, maybe three. That’s nothing. It’s the amount of time it takes to play a baseball game or drive from Duluth to Misquah. It’s nothing.”
“But it was too long,” Noah said.
“A half hour would have been too long,” Olaf concluded, making to stand up. He planted his slippers two feet apart, rested his elbows on his knees, lifted his head from beneath his drooping shoulders, and straightened at the knees, still bent at the waist. As he labored, a spasm of pain must have shot through his stomach because he fell back into the chair clenching his guts.
Noah jumped from the sofa and found himself standing over the old man with his hands out. His father’s face was frozen and gnarled in pain. “What can I do?” Noah asked. “Can I help?”
Olaf took a deep, tremulous breath and rolled his head back. “It’s cold in here,” he said. “I was going to put another log on the fire.”
Without a word Noah opened the stove and put a heavy piece of wood in among the embers.