by Peter Geye
“Maybe there’s no need for an explanation. Maybe there isn’t one.”
“Maybe not.”
“Did you see him again, I mean before morning?”
“Did I see him again? Jesus Christ, did I ever,” Olaf said, turning his eyes to the ceiling.
“When I got into the boat Luke and Bjorn were already bailing. The lifeboat was twenty feet long, and they were together in the bow. Red was just gone. I turned my headlamp out onto the lake. I was shouting his name. We were already in a mess. The water, it was churning.” He spit his words, made great gestures with his arms, whorling gestures that sufficed as testament to the nature of that lake. “That dark. Couldn’t see a damn thing, not at first. But then he was there. In the water. Behind the lifeboat. I saw him, Noah.”
This fact, to Noah’s knowledge, had never been revealed. Not to the investigators at the NTSB, not to the brass at Superior Steel, not to anyone. “You saw him?”
“I did.”
“Was he dead?”
Olaf closed his eyes slowly. “No,” he said. “I had the headlamp pointing into the lake. Just there, between the lifeboat and the ship, bobbing in the water like a goddamn buoy, old Red. I hollered to him. I saw his hand go up for help. I saw his eyes blinking, for Chrissakes.” He stopped, opened his eyes.
“Did Luke and Bjorn see him?”
“I don’t think so. We’d all looked, but by the time I saw him they were both consumed with what they were doing, they were already working overtime just to keep that boat from capsizing. Goddamn, it was like being lowered into a lion’s cage getting into that boat.” He closed his eyes again. “And there’s Red out on the water.” Olaf lifted his head slowly, opened his eyes, and turned them to the ceiling. He shook his head. “I got the heaving line and made a couple tosses, but it was no good. He had no chance. That’s what I figured anyway. We were taking such heavy seas. That goddamn gale was eating us alive. I needed to help Luke and Bjorn. I took the tiller, hoping to keep us in line with the wind.” He brought his eyes back to Noah. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to save him.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”
“That I saw Red alive? It’s my fault he died. I should have saved him. I should have jumped in after him. Maybe he had broken bones, he was probably hypothermic already. We all were. What do I do? I toss him a line. All he saw was the light from the headlamp and a goddamn heaving line coming toward him. I should have done more. I could have done more.”
“Red couldn’t have survived.”
Olaf shot him a cold stare. “We did.”
“You hadn’t fallen from the ladder. You hadn’t fallen into the lake.”
“That’s horseshit. His soul is on me.”
“Jumping in for him, that would have been suicide. There was nothing you could have done.”
Olaf got up. He walked to the door and looked outside. My god, Noah thought. What do you do with a lifetime of that on your mind?
When Olaf came back Noah steered him to the chair.
“And I bet you were sure you couldn’t think less of me,” Olaf said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Letting Red go like that.”
“It’s not your fault. You must know that.”
“You’re wrong. I took a few tugs on that rope once it was in the water. I might have thought about him for a minute. Then it was time to go. Who knows what Luke and Bjorn ever thought.”
“Why is Red more important than the other guys? Why are you lugging his ghost around?”
“None of the others had a chance. Red had a chance. I was his chance.”
They sat silently in the flotsam of his father’s avowal for a half hour. Perhaps longer. The evolution of Olaf’s face in those minutes was like that of a man relieved. Did Noah feel different now? Had history lied?
“Anyway,” Olaf said finally, breaking a silence that had become palpable.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Noah said. He had decided this was true.
“It’s not supposed to.”
They fell silent for another minute. “I always wondered about the others. Why didn’t they ever make a run for the lifeboats?”
Olaf looked out of words, like he couldn’t say another thing. But he did. “Do you know the story of the Mataafa?”
“It rings a bell.”
“I think it was 1905. Maybe the worst weather Superior’s ever seen. The Mataafa was from the Pittsburgh line. It’s morning, the boat steams out of Duluth. Right away they know they’ve made the wrong choice. So she comes about. Other ships had done the same thing, started only to reenter the harbor. The Mataafa, unlike the other boats, towed a barge behind her. She couldn’t get back into safe water, was hung up on the rocks just outside the harbor. There were nine men on the aft end of the ship, the rest of the crew was in the bow decking. They’re all taking a beating. Incredible waves. Wind. The day goes on and half the population of Duluth is on shore watching her wallow. They see a handful of men attempt to cross the deck. Three made it. One of the guys washed over but got back on board. He stayed astern. The water was so rough the Coast Guard couldn’t even get out of the harbor. This ship is sitting literally a couple hundred yards off the shore and nobody can help.
“All night it storms. The temperature drops. Snow piles up. Now hordes of people are lining the shore to see what happens to this ship and her crew. At dawn the seas have settled some, and a rescue boat is dispatched. They make one pass and get the men off the bow. Fifteen of them. When they go back for the guys on the stern, they’re all frozen. Literally encased in ice. Nine of them dead. Frozen to death, you see? They probably could have smelled the bonfires ashore, burning all night long. That’s Superior.
“You asked why nobody else made a run for the lifeboats, and the answer is simple—I don’t know. I don’t know why or even if they thought it would be best to stay put. Maybe Jan had a plan. Maybe he thought there would be a rescue attempt and the odds were better up there. Hell, maybe they did try to get back to the lifeboats and simply didn’t make it. It’s impossible to say.
“All I know for sure is we were off that boat. Bjorn and Luke. And Red, somewhere in the water. We were in a mess all over again. Hopeless, I thought. Some light still came from the Rag, but mostly it was just us and the darkness. I was on the tiller. and with the wind behind us it didn’t take long before we were a fair distance from the ship.” He stared down at the chart spread across the coffee table. “It seems impossible to me now to think that the whole night he was riding behind us like a goddamn anchor. How he got himself hooked onto that line I’ll never know. Why didn’t it snap? How in the hell did he come crashing up onto that rocky beach in the morning?”
“How did you guys manage?”
“Believe me, we managed nothing. Right away we were bailing water and still we were up to our ankles in it. Not just water, Superior water, water so cold it would’ve hurt to drink. Luke was rowing, trying to keep it between troughs so we’d take less. But it did little good. Too many waves from too many directions. Bjorn was working on the gunwale ice while he bailed.” Again he went silent. Noah didn’t dare to ask any more questions.
“I remember all of it. The cold. The wet. The dark. It should have been impossible for me to notice the glow behind us with all that commotion, but I did. It was like a ghost already. In the snow and sea spray, I could see a hazy light where the ship was. Maybe four hundred yards behind us. The flames, I guess, and whatever onboard lights were still working. That spot just flickered, coming in and out of view as we rode the waves. The farther we got the fainter it got, of course, until it was gone. We rode up a wave and I looked and there was nothing but the night.”
Noah had scooted to the edge of his chair in order to hear better. Olaf’s voice had weakened with each word, or seemed to. By the time he said “night” there was almost no sound at all, just a little parting of his lips and an indiscriminate wave of his hands. Despite the ebbing and
softening of his voice—or maybe because of it—the image of the receding light from the sinking ship resounded in Noah, seemed especially important in light of all the darkness to come.
“The wind was coming from every direction. So was the water,” Olaf continued, his voice now barely more than a whisper. “We were soaked. Every thirty seconds another wave would wash over the gunwales and swamp us. Sometimes they were waves so big I thought we’d sink right under them. Sometimes they were easier. So we kept her afloat. It was like the water wanted us, but the darkness wanted us more. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s the truth. There were times I couldn’t even see the other guys in the boat. I’d yell as loud as I could and they wouldn’t hear me six feet away.”
The utter silence of the house, broken only by the pinging stove and Olaf’s labored breathing, compounded the image of the riotous night in the boat. The old man elbowed himself up on the couch. He rearranged the afghan over his shoulders. He cleared his throat.
“We kept the gunwales clear as we could. Kept from freezing by working so goddamn hard. Somehow we stayed in the boat. I mentioned luck before. No amount of luck earlier in the night measured up to staying alive all night in that mess. By the time morning broke I ought to have learned to believe in God.”
“It truly was a miracle,” Noah said, more to himself than to his father.
But Olaf heard him. “Here’s the thing.” He coughed to clear something in his throat not there. “It’s a whole lot more remarkable-sounding now than it seemed at the time. Maybe that’s obvious, maybe not, but the fact is, for those eight hours it was like we weren’t really there. It was downright impossible that we could be so cold, so wet. That it could be so dark. And even though we were working hard to stay alive, I suspect that each of us was waiting to die, too. I know I was.
“I’d spend some minutes woolgathering over you kids and your mother all tucked under your quilts at home without realizing that my hands were so cold I could hardly grip the tiller. I wanted to say good-night so badly, wanted to touch each of your foreheads the way I always did. When I’d snap out of it, it was like I’d been shot. All the pain would surge up, all the panic. But just as quick I’d be back in some other trance, thinking about getting ready for church when I was a tyke back in Norway, thinking about my mother pulling the curlers from her hair. And the whole time we were just frantically working, rowing and hammering and bailing. I suppose I kept at it with thoughts of all of you because I knew that any minute the boat would heave me out into the lake and that would be it. That would be the end.” He closed his eyes. Rested.
Noah looked at his father there on the sofa, bereft of the vitality he had once possessed so abundantly. For the old man’s son there was as much sadness in the moment as relief. He suspected his father felt little of either, was likely unmoved and unchanged. Perhaps emptiness filled the place where once a secret had resided.
“I don’t know,” Olaf said. “It’s amazing, the memories you carry around with you. Never once had I thought of my mother getting ready for church until that night. But there she was. Those memories are in you all the time. On a night like that they’re just hurrying up for one last trip across your mind. I suppose a wise man might have learned something. But what did I do? I ended up wrapped around a tree growing out of the rocks on a frozen beach not sixty miles as the gull flies from where we sit now. You start wondering, why me?” He pointed feebly at his own chest.
Noah wanted to console him but didn’t know how.
“You end up as the line in a poem, as the face in a picture in a museum. Meanwhile, your crewmates are dead and you haven’t talked to your wife—honestly talked to her—in years. And your kids grow to fear you. And instead of making it right you let it ride. You drink in the raunchiest bars in eight states. Jesus, do you drink.” He cleared his voice now and said more loudly than he had said anything in an hour, “And you lose all shame.” In his faintest voice yet he concluded, “Chrissakes, that is some ancient grief.”
Noah stood. He walked over to the sofa and sat down next to his father as if his proximity might ease the pain of the memory, as if the gesture could speak. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder, moved the afghan to make the moment less awkward.
“So there’s your story, Noah. Sorry as it is, that’s it. We washed onto the beach at Hat Point and all I had in me was jetsam and you suffered for it. So did your mother and sister.”
Noah thought, I wonder if he’s dying right now. In this instant. I imagine this is what it might look like.
Instead Olaf said, “The morning broke and we could see the shoreline. We rowed like hell to get there. Did you know it was below zero that morning? We were sitting there like we’d just been for a swim, for Chrissakes. We thought about trying to build a fire but the only thing we might have burned on that barren shore was the lifeboat, and it was covered with ice. Bjorn, he was trying to light his coat on fire with his lighter.” He mimicked Bjorn trying to start his sleeve ablaze. “But his thumb was just a lump of ice. Could have used it for a hammer.
“It’s strange, but had we been out on the lake on a clear day, passing Hat Point, I could have given you our coordinates to within a minute each way. But pressed up against those rocks, that cliff looming behind us, snowy as the morning was, I wouldn’t have guessed it with ten tries. Delirious, that’s what we were, all of us. Hallucinating. We had one blanket among us, from one of the stows in the lifeboat. That was it. We were just waiting to die again.” He paused and scratched his bald head. “And of course Red washed up.”
“Red,” Noah said.
They sat in silence for a moment before Noah continued, “How long before they found you?”
“Seemed like days but it wasn’t long. We didn’t have time to freeze to death, so that tells you something. First a plane circled above us, then we saw a cutter offshore. I tried to get up and wave, but I couldn’t. I think we were all in shock. Everything was blurry. My eyes were coated with ice. None of us could talk. Soon enough an army of highway patrolmen and paramedics were there, coming up the shore like so many dreams.”
“And you were saved.”
Olaf looked at Noah, put his hand on his son’s shoulder now. “That’s one way of saying it. They got us out of our clothes, bundled us up in blankets and parkas and whatever else they had around. First they took us to a lodge, a place in Grand Portage. They worked on us there until the helicopters came to bring us down to Duluth. I asked for a cup of coffee, I remember, like we were getting up for breakfast.” He actually smiled, halfway and to himself, to be sure. “Just like that, the whole thing was over.”
Noah started to say he was sorry but Olaf interrupted him. “Actually, it wasn’t over.” He leaned over the coffee table, traced a line from the black X off Isle Royale to Hat Point. He traced it back. After a few minutes Olaf looked at Noah again. “For most of your life I’ve used that night as an excuse. Not because I wanted or needed one but because I had no control over what it did to me. I should have. Hard as it would’ve been, I should have beaten it.
“I never told anyone any of this before, son. Never told your mother, even though she deserved to know. Never told your sister. Never told any of the guys down at the Freighter, not even on my worst night. I never told it on the bridge of a single ship I later sailed. Hell, I never even told the NTSB or the bosses at Superior Steel the whole story. Everything I just told you, it’s been rotting in me all this time.”
“Why,” Noah said, his own voice now faint, “did you tell me?”
Olaf looked at him. He leaned forward and took off his glasses. “You asked me, Noah. That’s why. And you deserved to know. Aside from your mother, you deserved it more than anyone.”
TEN
Cold the next morning, as cold as it could be in early November. He drove a half hour up the rutted highway to Gunflint with the sunrise, the road unwinding to lake vistas magnificent in the metallic onset of the morning and winter. There seemed equal resolve among both the
day and the season.
On the south end of town a pickup truck waited outside the ranger station at the head of the Brule Trail, a solitary man leaning against the bumper smoking a cigarette. Otherwise the town hunkered ghostlike, a few streets along the lake that gave way behind them to an incalculable wilderness. No Wednesday-morning rush hour here. The semblance of a village nestled around the harbor. Cars were filling up at the Holiday gas station. Noah stopped at a traffic signal on Wisconsin Street. Next to him a white-haired woman in a Chevy sedan almost as old as his father’s truck smiled as if expecting the codger. When she saw Noah she waved anyway. He had decided he loved driving that old Suburban and thought he’d never be able to drive his half-electric car again.
The bank was on the north end of town, and except for two raccoons, its parking lot was empty. He looked at his watch. The bank opened at eight. All morning he’d been feeling mixed up about hastening off with the inheritance. Though it was exhilarating in its way to think about the sudden boon of all that money—how could it not be?—he also thought anyone glancing at the situation would think it peculiar. A father so sick left alone, if only for a morning. An estranged son reaping a financial reward so significant. The simple fact was, he had assured himself repeatedly during the drive, that he’d never once imagined the possibility of an inheritance from the moment his father had called him until the first wad of frozen cash had been pulled from the first jar. Noah knew he could not have rested—much less taken care of the jobs around the house—until the money was safely deposited. His nature would not allow it. The sign before the bank flashed the temperature. Thirteen degrees.
Inside, two tellers stood behind the counter. A receptionist sat at a desk on the right. He walked toward the tellers, passing a table piled with jumper cables. A sign hanging above it enticed people with a free gift for opening a home-equity line of credit. It struck Noah as he hefted the duffel off his shoulder and onto the counter that it must be tough for a bank like this to stick it out, how with people like his father living in the hills above town, business must be difficult. Signs hung everywhere on the walls advertising auto loans, low-interest credit cards, and free ATM withdrawals.