“When do you get to steer?” I asked my father.
“Captain’s not allowed to touch the wheel,” he said.
I thought a captain ought to be able to do whatever he wanted, but no, each man had his own job, and steering was the helmsman’s. And the job I’d set myself was to make the bosun like me so that I could make him like Alv. Pete’s profile was turned, and I stared at his nose, which seemed to grow more grotesque the longer I looked.
“What if the wheelsman died?”
“Ho!” Pete said in a voice so big and round he sounded like Santa Claus, and just then the deckwatch named Loke, who had been on the bridge, came inside with a stomp of his feet and cold breath of air. “Captain’s daughter’s trying to kill me off.”
“Now there’s an idea,” Loke said, and they both laughed. The watch studied me for a minute. “I think she likes your nose,” he said to Pete.
Pete winked at me, then reached up to rub the crook. “Tell you a secret. Keeping your nose out of other people’s business gives it a chance to grow.”
I reached up to my own. I didn’t want it to look like his, so I guessed I would have to go around sticking it in other people’s business, even though I knew neither my mother nor father would approve.
“What if the wheelsman’s drunk?”
“Hah!” the watch said.
My father patted my head. “Don’t you worry about Odd. He’s sober enough when he takes the helm.”
I wasn’t worried. Not about that anyway. I just didn’t think it was fair that the captain never got to steer. I blew a little puff of air out my mouth, like a sigh. “What if the ship was going down?”
“Ship’s going down it’s all hands on deck,” Loke said. “Job description don’t much matter then.”
Pete winked at me again. “Well, missy, captain’s not allowed to touch the wheel, but if the first wheelsman died, second wheelsman was drunk, third wheelsman nowhere to be found, and the ship was going down, maybe we’d make an exception for your father.”
My father looked out the window. “Steady as she goes,” he said as he picked up a newspaper from the chair beside the wheel chadburn and sat.
“Steady as she goes,” Pete repeated and turned the wheel a quarter spoke to port even though we were making such slow progress.
“Let her take it for a minute,” my father said, and Pete bent to whisper in my ear.
“Steady as she goes,” I repeated in my best sailor’s voice as Pete placed my hands on the satin-smooth wood, and even though he stood right behind me and never took his own hands off, for a minute anyway I got to steer, and my father didn’t.
When Pete took the wheel back, I looked at the chart desk. There was a book on top and behind that a radio, which was how the captain called the radio shack on the Elberta bluff, so the railroad could call the coast guard. The Ann Arbor was among the first to equip their ships with radios, though the connections were so bad mostly all you could hear were pops and crackles of static.
My father was reading, so I asked the watch, “Is that the ship’s log?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you write in it?”
“Captain and mates keep the log.” I climbed on the tall stool beside the desk to see. It looked a lot like the one in my father’s cabin, except bigger, and my father must have had the same thought, because he said to Loke, “Look in the drawer and see if you can find her some paper and a pencil before she starts drawing on the log.”
“Does the bosun write in it?”
Pete snorted.
“You’re in the head shed,” Loke said. “Up here’s where Captain and his mates plot the boat’s course and decide on everyone’s job.”
“I thought the bosun did that.”
The watch and Pete exchanged glances. “Now there’s a good position for a bully. Never met one didn’t train for it on the playground.”
“But does he get to write in the log?” I didn’t want Bosun to write something bad about Alv.
“Bosun comes up to get his orders.” Loke handed me a sheet of paper and a pencil. He had taken off his gloves, and there was a fleece of blond hair across his knuckles. “That’s it.”
“Can I draw up here?” I asked my father.
“If you’re quiet.” Briefly my father rose to look out the window again. “Steady as she goes.”
“Steady as she goes,” Pete responded. I set Manitou beside the radio. There was a blotter with four corners that held the marked-up chart in place. Except for the ice and the faint thrum of the engines it was quiet. My father’s paper rustled, and steam hissed in the curvy brass pipes below the windows. The watch and the wheelsman stared out at the ice as if they were hypnotized, which was something I had heard about. Sometimes at home I would close my eyes and walk around bumping into things and pretend I was hypnotized. But up here in the pilothouse I could see how the endless horizon, nodding warmth, and slow drain of hours might hypnotize you for real. And what would happen if you were hypnotized when the pumps stopped working and the hold filled up with water and the coal got so wet it wouldn’t burn and the engines quit and you couldn’t see land on any side?
I wanted to ask my father about the leak but was afraid to bring it up. He didn’t like it when people repeated everything they heard.
I drew a boat with two big stacks, though the vibration of the ship made my lines a little shaky. I thought maybe my picture could go into one of the waterproof brass tubes in the purser’s office that were for sending messages when a ship was going down and someone would find it, and even though they didn’t know me they would be sad because they would know that I was just a little girl and had drowned on a ship that sank and could never, ever come back again. Or maybe I should write a note from Manitou. I wondered what he would want to say if he knew he was going down, and I thought it would probably be about me because he loved me so much, and the person who found it would be even sadder because my bear drowned with me even though he tried—that’s what he would say in his message, he would say how very hard he tried to save me before he drowned too—and thinking about how sad it all was, I almost began to cry.
“Daddy?” I said, and my voice sounded very loud because no one had said anything for such a long time. “What do the messages in the little brass tubes say?”
My father looked up.
“The tubes in the purser’s office where they write notes to send overboard when the ship is sinking.”
He set his newspaper aside. “I thought you were drawing pictures.”
“I am.” I showed him my drawing of the boat, which he seemed to like, but said I couldn’t put it in a canister or send it overboard.
“But what do they say?” I persisted.
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “Sometimes they’re a message to a sailor’s wife or parents to say that he loves them. Usually they say what’s happening so the railroad can try to figure out what went wrong.”
“But the sailors are going to drown.”
“I suppose they are, but they’re sailors, they do their duty and don’t complain.”
“What kind of things?”
My father ran his hand along the stubble on his cheek. “Well, when the Milwaukee went down the purser wrote she was taking water fast and they had turned around to try to make a run back to shore.” He glanced out at the ice. “Pumps were working, but the seagate was bent in, flicker was flooded, seas were tremendous, things looked bad. It was eight thirty—that’s important, to say what time it is. The first body they found had a watch that stopped at nine forty-five, so the old girl must have put up quite a struggle.”
“What would you write?” I asked Pete.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Might curse the fates if it was me.”
“You’d do no such thing,” Loke said. “You’d tell your mother you loved her and go down like a man.”
“That’s enough, boys.” My father’s voice stiffened. “No use calling on disaster.”
“You want
to know about disaster, talk to Bosun.” Pete shifted his eyes. “That sailor’s more superstitious than Ahab.”
My father stood. “Who told you about the message tubes?”
“I saw them when Alv unlocked the purser’s office to get the key to my cabinet. There’s a ghost in the managers’ compartment.”
“Did you see it?” Loke asked.
“No,” I said sadly.
“Ghost never hurt anyone,” my father promised. “Don’t you worry about that. It’s a rare boat doesn’t have a haunt.”
“Keeps us boys on our toes, eh, Captain?” Pete said.
“That’s right,” my father said.
I looked down at their feet. My father wore shiny black shoes with his navy-blue dress uniform, but the wheelsman had scuffed, brown lace-up shoes, and the watch had on galoshes that were unbuckled down the front. I didn’t think you would want to be wearing galoshes if you escaped a sinking ship because water would get inside them and you wouldn’t be able to swim. I thought about the purser’s note from the Milwaukee. I liked the part about the seagate because I had been where it was. Whispers was down there, and what if since I’d left, our seagate had bent and the flicker I hadn’t seen yet was flooded because the pumps had quit and up in the head shed I didn’t know that my kitten and everyone else was swimming around the lower decks, trying to keep afloat. I would just have to write a note to my mother, I decided. I would tell her I loved her, and I would ask my father what time it was so I could put that in my note, and then go ahead and drown like a man.
Bells rang. I looked at the chadburn, and scrambled off the stool. “Daddy?”
“Eight bells. Shift’s over,” my father explained.
I had been certain it was the general alarm. “Does that mean Alv is done working for the bosun?”
“Doesn’t anybody ever get done working for the bosun,” Loke said, adding to no one in particular, “Don’t know why the boy didn’t start as a coal passer.” A coal passer, I would learn, was the lowest position on the ship, the poorest paid, but he didn’t work for the bosun, he worked for the chief engineer.
My father seemed to stand a little taller. “I’ll not put a lad of fourteen without papers in the firehold is why. Not that it’s any business of a watch.”
“Just reporting what the black gang has to say. And the men . . .” Loke gave a surreptitious look at me. “Some of the men think . . .”
“Did you see a captain in the black gang?”
“No, sir.” Loke took a breath as if he was about to say something more, but my father cut him off.
“Well then.” A lot of captains wore their uniforms only to pose for pictures, but I think my father liked the way it reminded his men who was in charge.
They seemed to have forgotten me, so I said, “Alv promised to show me the engine room when he gets off, and then I’ll get to see the man who sits on the stool.” I almost added that maybe Alv would take me to visit Whispers, but then I remembered my father wasn’t to know, which was too bad because I’d never had a pet before and I wanted to tell someone. For a minute I wished Billy Johnson was there so I could tell him, but then I thought maybe I could write a message and put it in one of the little brass tubes when Alv opened the purser’s office again. I could draw a cat and print my name, and as soon as the ice melted the message would wash up on the beach, and if Billy was playing there he would find it, and even if he didn’t, someone would be walking, there was always someone taking a walk on the beach even in winter if the ice wasn’t too slippery or the wind too raw, and they would find it, they would tell him how I was at sea and had a cat named Whispers, and I would be sure to have Alv say in my note that I was okay so Billy wouldn’t think I’d drowned. It would be like a postal card that people on vacation send home to say what a good time they are having so that everyone else who isn’t on vacation will be jealous.
“Depends on the bosun.” My father’s face softened. “You seem to have taken a shine to the lad. That’s good. He’ll be able to look out for you.”
“Oh yes, please,” I said, and my father picked up the telephone and asked the engine room to send Alv up to the pilothouse to get me. He gave a pointed look to Loke. “The men say a lot of things. Best to stick to your own business.”
18
The first legal plat from Benzie County was the “Plat of Frankfort City,” filed in 1867, though the area that was mapped was not the old part of Frankfort where I would live, but Elberta. Legend has it that the name came from a fur trapper named Frank Martin, who ran his operation from the beach to the north of what was then Lac Aux Becs Scies, trading with the Indians and the French in the mid-nineteenth century. In their bitterness about a business that excluded them, the trappers on the other side of Aux Becs Scies dubbed it “Frank’s Fort.” No one knows what happened to Frank Martin, but there’s no record of the early German settlers who supposedly named the town after their native Frankfurt either. A more recent version of the Frank Martin legend places him at the mouth of the Betsie River in a cabin so buffeted by the winds off the lake that he built a fortlike fence around it. This is the version the Frankfort Chamber of Commerce offers tourists, with no mention of the disgruntled trappers. Take your pick, though I can tell you anyone who’s ever lived in Benzie County would put money on number one.
As a settlement Frankfort preceded Elberta. Seventeen years before the plat was filed, a schooner caught in a storm on Lake Michigan rode a wave over the shallow bar to safe harbor in Lac Aux Becs Scies. When the weather cleared, the captain explored the region while his crew dug an opening in the bar. As a result of his report the ship’s owner purchased more than a thousand acres, which he sold to a company from Detroit that brought in a sawmill and dredged a channel to transform Betsie Lake into a harbor. By the time the Civil War brought construction to a halt, the town extended all the way to Fourth Street. The post office closed, and the channel disappeared, but the sandy lane that ran uphill to end at our carriage house was already in place.
After the war, the federal government dredged a new channel at the south end of the strip of land between the lakes, and the lumber barons arrived to build their houses in the town already established on the north side of the harbor and their mills on the south, where the Bestie River offered a way to float logs to Lake Michigan. The Frankfort Iron Works opened in what was then known as South Frankfort the same year the plat was filed. And by 1892, when the first ferry steamed out of South Frankfort, loaded with four coal cars and bound for Kewaunee, the town that would soon cut its ties and change its name to Elberta had become the industrial hub of Benzie County. The roundhouse and railyard, grain elevators, cannery, and warehouses have vanished, but the road behind the ruins of the Iron Works, where wildflowers bloom through the collapsing walls and cracked cement floors, is still called Furnace Avenue.
Somewhere behind Furnace Avenue is the house where Alv would have grown up. It would not have been that far from mine, less than a mile as a gull flies and no more than two if you drove around the harbor. He would have gone to my school, for in those days one school served both towns. It was three blocks from my house, and much of the winter I picked my way over paths shoveled through the snow and ice, my face wrapped in a scarf that grew so stiff with my breath it cracked when I took it off. All winter there were little puddles on the floors of the coatrooms outside our classrooms. The first thing we did when we sat down at our desks was to break the skin of ice that formed across our inkwells.
Stop me here, if you will. My children would—five miles to school, uphill both ways, one of those dreary stories parents tell the children they have worked hard to overprivilege, though the gratitude such stories are meant to inspire seldom comes, something I must have sensed, because I rarely spoke of my childhood to my children, rarely spoke of it even to my husband, who was an engineer, more interested in how things worked than the inner lives of people. How could my children have appreciated the challenges of a Michigan winter growing up as they did in No
rth Carolina? In their world the least hint of snow stripped the stores of bread and milk and canceled school.
But there it is, because Alv would have had to walk those two frozen miles around the harbor. Perhaps in early fall or late spring, when the harbor wasn’t iced over, some of the Elberta children crossed in boats, though most of the waterfront belonged to the railroad, crisscrossed by tracks and the trains waiting to be loaded. In winter they may have skated. Certainly there were no school buses, no public transportation, and few of their families would have owned cars. What did those children from Elberta do? I suppose I am hazy about this not just because so much time has passed but because the truth is we didn’t pay much attention to difficulties that were not ours.
Did we make fun of our schoolmates from Elberta? Probably, yes, I’m sure we did. Children are cruel. They take privilege for granted, and if we were heirs to the lumber barons whose mansions we lived in, the children of Elberta were the spawn of those disgruntled trappers, the shanty boys and mill hands whose drab little houses lined the streets behind the blighted waterfront, though no one would have used the word blighted then. The railroad, those warehouses, and factories were food on the table. But either way, eyesore or boon, it’s all gone now. When the ferries stopped running in 1982, Elberta’s economy collapsed. Even the gas tanks, those four asphalt storage tanks near the beach that gave the town its distinctive odor, have finally been removed. Thirty years later the village is sprucing up. There is a park along part of Betsie Bay, and the restored lifesaving station is now rented out for weddings, though the houses will never rival those on the other side of the harbor and the old railyard is just a weedy lot with locked chain link fence where the trains once lined up to be loaded.
Across the Great Lake Page 10