Across the Great Lake

by Lee Zacharias

  Also by Lee Zacharias

  Short Stories

  Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night

  Novels

  Lessons

  At Random

  Essays

  The Only Sounds We Make

  Across the Great Lake

  Lee Zacharias

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

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  Copyright © 2018 by Lee Zacharias

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to rights@uwpress.wisc.edu.

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zacharias, Lee, author.

  Title: Across the great lake / Lee Zacharias.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018011386 | ISBN 9780299320904 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Michigan, Lake—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels. | Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3576.A18 A64 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011386

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-32098-0 (electronic)

  For

  Michael

  and for our sons,

  Max and Al

  In memory of my father,

  Joseph Ryan Ives

  who served as a merchant marine from 1937 to 1945 but never spoke of his time on the oceans or the Great Lakes to me

  For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess an ocean-like expansiveness . . . They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles . . . they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories . . . they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  To Lake Michigan—the only one of the Great Lakes without an international boundary—sailing masters pay the utmost respect, not only because of this Lake’s long history of sudden disaster, but because of the prevailing winds that can sweep its length to roll up backbreaking seas, the scarcity of natural harbors or even man-made places of refuge, and the crowning fact that it is the trickiest of the Lakes to keep a course on, due to currents caused by a flow around the Straits of Mackinac when the wind shifts.

  William Ratigan, Great Lakes Shipwrecks and Survivals

  1

  We went to the ice. That was the year my mother died, but I do not remember her. What I remember is the ice, everywhere I looked, a world made of ice, and then the fire. But first there were the voices.

  “Get up,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “I can’t.”

  Was I listening outside the closed door? Surely my mother taught me better, had told me that eavesdropping was not something a polite little girl would do. Such a strange word, eavesdropping. Did I know it then? Was I already a bad girl? Perhaps she despaired of me, I don’t know. We got stuck in the ice, there was a storm, and while we were gone my mother died. My father was not a man of words, and now that so many years have passed, there is no one left to ask whether I was ever a good girl, a girl who might have deserved love, or not.

  “There’s other women lost a child.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I know enough.”

  A clot of silence seemed to thicken, though perhaps they only lowered their voices, perhaps I simply couldn’t hear them.

  “For the last time, get up,” he said. “You’ve another child needs tending.”

  Did she answer? My father was a captain. When he spoke people listened. They did what he said. Perhaps she repeated “I can’t,” the only memory I really have of her, those two words in her voice. Or perhaps, when my father offered me as a reason for her to get back up and live, she said nothing at all. I had just turned five years old. In the hallway there was a yellow light in a sconce. It was a grand house, set against the hill on Leelanau Avenue, but the light had scorched a spot on the wallpaper, and there was a water stain near a seam, a small, brownish lake in the green-and-gray print. I used to spend hours perusing those blotches, as if imperfection was what my eyes sought from the start, though I don’t remember whether I noticed them that night.

  “All right then,” my father said. “I’m taking the girl.”

  Surely neighbor women would have cared for me, as they did later, after my mother died. I suppose it’s possible he never meant to take me, only to frighten her back into life. A railroad car ferry, those women would tell me later, their voices hushed because he was a captain and in our town a captain was beyond reproach, is no place for a girl, and in the dead of winter too. But my mother must have sunk back into her pillow and said nothing, because I went to my room, and not long after, he came in and dressed me in heavy woolens, pulled a cap down over my ears, and wrapped a scratchy scarf around my face. It was dark when we left the big house on our side of the harbor, the pretty side. He had an automobile, and we drove the snow-crusted road through the welcome gate with its model ferry on the crossbar around to the other side, where the boats docked and the men who worked on them lived behind their sagging porches in shabby little houses sided with tarpaper brick.

  I had never seen the loading before. There was a great clanking as the railcars, those big freight cars, loomed up out of the darkness and rolled onto the vast lower deck of the ship, the flagship of the Annies, as the townspeople called the Ann Arbor Railroad ferries, though my father always called his ship a boat, as if it were no bigger than a dory. Later, in the summertime, I would sometimes sit on the Elberta bluff with my stepmother, watching his ship pass between the stub piers into the big basin enclosed by the breakwaters and beyond, because a captain is never home and for the people who belonged to the captains and crews, such rituals are what passed for family life. Even from that distance anyone could see that it was not a boat such as you might take out to fish, but a huge and powerful ship with a tall, handsome pilothouse and big smoking stacks, no place for a girl, though I loved it, I cannot tell you how much I loved it. I came to know it inside out. I knew more than my father knew. Because it was not his job to watch me. He had a ship to command. No one on such a ship was in the habit of minding little girls, and no one on a ship in trouble could have spared the time. Today you would say I slipped below the radar, but there was no radar then, only a magnetic compass, lead and log lines. They forgot me, all of them except Alv, and I loved being a forgotten girl, a secret girl, a girl whose life began to speak to me down on the car deck and below, in the bowel of the ship where I was not supposed to be, a girl who believed her real life was beginning.

  As the cars loaded I listened to the buzz of the men’s voices and burrs of their laughter, barely audible beneath the loud wheels, metal on metal, the boom of the sidejacks and stanchions and ringing of
the chains, then the groaning of the ropes and hiss of steam as the big seagate came down and closed over the stern. When the whistle shrilled, I was taken to my father’s cabin and set on the bunk above its built-in wooden drawers, across from the desk with his instruments, his charts, and his log, where even before the ship heaved away from the dock I drew a house with a stick mother and father and child beneath a spoked sun, which was another thing a good girl ought not have done. It was the captain’s log, a book for grown-ups, not children’s doodles, but it must have looked so dull, all those words on the page with no pictures. So I made that little gift for my father. Then the horn sounded, the engines sent a shudder up through the floor into my feet, and we went to the ice.

  2

  My father’s ship, which came to be known as the Bull of the Woods, was named the Manitou, for the two islands in the fishing grounds to the north, where captains often sought shelter from high seas. It was a lake, but they called the waves seas, for it was a lake as big as a sea and in a gale or a storm such a lake is more treacherous than the ocean, its waves just as steep but sharper and closer together. And of all the Great Lakes, my father’s, the one the Ojibwe named Michigami, great water, is the trickiest to navigate. If you could walk its deep floor, you would have to skirt a litter of beams, timbers, and bones from all the ships it has claimed. Every child in Frankfort knew about the seventeen men who perished when the Westmoreland failed to outrun a blizzard in a northwest gale and sank in Platte Bay. We knew about the nine hundred lives lost on the Eastland at the far south end of the lake and the fifty-two sailors who perished on the Milwaukee. Our heads were full of proper nouns. The Alpena, Andaste, Lady Elgin, Mahor, Rising Sun, Rosabelle, and Rouse Simmons. That was the Christmas tree ship that was never found though its cargo of balsam and spruce came up in the fishermen’s nets the next spring. We knew how Captain Peter Kilty went down on the Pere Marquette 18, knee-deep in water on the flying bridge as he waved good-bye, taking twenty-seven of his crew with him, knew all the wrecks and close calls, the hotels in town that had burned, the Royal Frontenac, the Yeazel, their names seared into our memory even before we were born. The chief engineer who had survived when the crippled Ann Arbor 4 sank beside the south pier was our neighbor. He liked to show us the pocket watch that had hung frozen in ice on the engine room bulkhead until the ship could be raised the next spring, liked to put it to our ears so we could hear how it still kept perfect time.

  Even the islands that gave my father’s ship its name drew their own from disaster. It was our bedtime story, the Ojibwe legend about the mother bear and two cubs who swam all the way across Lake Michigan in order to escape a forest fire raging in Wisconsin. When they arrived, the mother climbed the steep bluff that became Sleeping Bear Dune, but the cubs were too tired, and when they drowned they became the North and South Manitou Islands, the very islands our fathers sought in storms as safe harbor. Every night we mourned those cubs as we rode the sheltering arms of our parents up to our rooms. Why would their mother have left them to die? Why didn’t she turn around, why didn’t she save them? Those baby bears spoke to us in a way all the other tragedies the lake held did not, even those of us whose fathers were captains and mates and chief engineers, our fathers who might perish on the most routine journey, more than fifty ships lost in the Manitou Passage alone. For our sake our mothers muted their worry. I think people were more stoic then than they are now, but what they kept from us we knew because we passed news of disasters the same way children pass the truth about Santa Claus and still later their first inklings and misinformation about sex.

  It was 1936. We were children of the Depression, though I can’t say any of us knew what that meant. The ferries ran as it seemed they always had, always would. I lived in a tall house on Leelanau Avenue with my mother and father, and there was work to go around, even for the shanty boys who lived in Elberta. It is true: the ferries saved us, up there in our remote little corner of Michigan, just as the new cement breakwaters that angled two thousand feet out into the lake protected our harbor. And if the railroad had once been more prosperous, how was a child to know? Santa Claus didn’t do as much for children as he seems to these days. We didn’t love him, we didn’t love those sunken ships or the men who died, but we did love those two little cubs.

  And we knew ice. There in Michigan’s north woods we grew up like the Eskimo boys and girls who learn a hundred words for snow. If we didn’t know that salt makes sea ice porous, we did know that lake ice is dense. The harbor, where we skated each winter, often froze all the way to the bottom; some winters the whole lake froze shore to shore, an ice field more than one hundred miles across. My father’s ship came to be known as the Bull of the Woods not because it was the newest or fastest in the fleet, but because it proved to be the best icebreaker and was often called to help other ships, even when it got stuck itself, as many as three of them trapped together behind a range of tall windrows. Even when he was home my father might be called away any minute. Fully loaded, the Manitou had a draft of eighteen feet, but a few feet above the waterline there was a sharp slant to the aft, the Annies’ trademark cutaway prow, which allowed it to ride up on the ice in order to crush it with the ship’s weight, though the path it broke was so narrow sailors called it a horse’s tail.

  But the ice we went to was not the ice I had known, not the slick on the sidewalks and steep front steps to my house, where I fell and broke my arm the year before, or the glaze on the road that sometimes kept my father from coming home even when the Manitou was docked across the harbor in Elberta. It was not the hard-packed hill where we rode our sleds, the ragged escarpments that rose along the breakwaters, or even the spray that froze midair around the lights at the ends, those giant white sculptures that took the faces of fairytale monsters and goblins. What I knew was the scrim of frost on our windowpanes, the ice in my father’s eyebrows, the crystals that were my breath caught in the pores of the scarf stiffening around my face, and the enormous fangs that hung from our eaves and the ships’ bridges, icicles so long you could see them all the way across the harbor, along with the heavy crust like salt all over the sides that made the ships look like giant deer licks, for in the winter deer often walked out on the ice, and sometimes, when it was not so thick, they fell into the cracks between the floes and drowned, though no one thought to name an island after them.

  Crossing the lake that February of 1936, I would learn more of winter’s names: sheet ice, which is a field when it is attached to something and a floe when it is not, and blue ice, which is a kind of sheet ice that is nearly transparent but very hard even for the Bull of the Woods to break up. White ice is older, more forgiving because it holds more air. White ice can be rammed, but to ram the anchor ice that builds around slips would damage the docks, and the pack ice that piles against the piers goes even deeper. In spring I liked to stomp and splatter the slush of melting snow in the gutters with my rubber galoshes, but all winter long in the basin between the breakwaters slush ice piled atop the sheet ice, sticking to the sides of the ships and creating more drag than the shallow harbor could handle. Ships rode up on it and stuck as if they had fetched up on a sandbar. That February it was ten degrees below zero as we crossed a continent of icy plains and windrows, those mountains that the wind heaves up when it shoves ice sheets together, forcing chunks up and down through the cracks into thick walls ten and fifteen feet high and as deep as twenty-five, so many miles long that later, in school, when we learned about the Great Wall of China it was those endless white mountains on the lake that I pictured.

  3

  There was a ghost on my father’s ship, but I can’t tell that story yet. Because ghosts take their time. They keep their secrets. A ghost never comes at you straightaway.

  4

  Manitou, wake up,” I whispered to the teddy bear I’d settled against the pillow on my father’s neatly made berth. “We’re at sea.” Below us a dull roar echoed along the sides of the ship, and it seemed as if we had already been gon
e a very long time. I didn’t know that we were not yet out of the harbor, still fighting through the slush ice, riding up and backing off, cutting a horse’s tail to the lake. My father was not accustomed to dressing me, and he had put my leggings on backward. The wool itched, and the seam pulled against my crotch, but to put them right I would have to take off my boots and Buster Browns. The boots had newfangled zippers, and I had learned to tie and untie my shoelaces, but the rubber fit so snugly over the leather that I was still seated on the berth, struggling with the first one, when there was a knock at the cabin door and then it banged open.

  “Sir!” a boy shouted and stopped short as I stood. “Oh.” I couldn’t see him around the corner of my father’s wooden locker, so I stepped forward. He was not so tall as my father, but his face was fuller, his cheeks red beneath his watch cap. Despite the sturdiness of his face, there was something otherwordly about it, an incandescence that made it seem as if his skin might be lined with gold, a rosy flame flickering just behind his dark eyes. I was so young I don’t suppose I had ever thought about beauty before, but I was stricken by it now. “I was looking for the captain.”

  “My father is the captain,” I said.

  He blinked. The shutters at the windows were closed, and the light in the long walnut-paneled cabin was dim. “There’s a row in the pilothouse,” he said.

  “My name is Fern.” After a minute I added, “My father’s not here.”

  “Alv,” he offered and stepped inside to hold his hand out. It made me feel quite grown up to shake it, though my bare hand felt small inside his canvas glove. A smell of cold air came off his skin. The coat and mittens I had taken off were lying beside my hat and scarf on my father’s berth. The mittens were threaded through the sleeves on a string my mother must have braided. Probably she had knit the patterned mittens too, though I was too young to know to keep them when I outgrew them in a year or so.