We were stuck, but the ice in the passage was different from the slush ice in the harbor, and when my father had the engineer fill the aft ballasts and empty the forward ones, which I knew he was doing because I saw the prow rise, we backed up, then sped toward the ice until we ran the prow right up on it, and I felt as if I was standing on top of a mountain, but then we crashed down through that mountain of ice with a huge roar that sent big chunks of ice flying up around the hull like an explosion, and I grabbed onto the rail because it felt like we were falling through the bottom of the world. I was standing on the bridge with a sweater buttoned over my dress because my coat was in my locker, but for the moment I didn’t feel cold, it was too exciting, all those big chunks of ice boiling up into the sunlight, bobbing and heaving like toy blocks, except the blocks were as big as refrigerators, almost as wide as I was tall, and Holgar, who was supposed to be on duty, ran up the steps with his camera to snap a picture, so I knew I was seeing something you didn’t get to see every day. Then he ran back down and around the deckhouse, and I realized that my fingers were so stiff I couldn’t straighten them enough to let go of the rail. They hurt, but they weren’t red, they were white, so white they looked blue, and when I yanked them away I jammed them up beneath my wool sweater. I was shivering, but still I couldn’t stop watching until finally a taller windrow rose before us, a dam of ice that stretched as far as I could see, all the way across the Passage it seemed. As we backed up to ram it I imagined the bells ringing in the engine room and the man dozing on the stool beneath the chadburn. He had missed the Chicora because he was down where he missed the whole show and it was hot down there, warm enough to fall asleep, and I imagined him sitting up with a start and yelling for the engineer to reverse the engines, and that happened three times, and then we stopped.
I opened the heavy door to the pilothouse. “Why are we stopping?” I asked because I wanted to keep hitting the wall of ice and watch the pieces fly up.
“Can’t risk peeling the hull,” my father said. My eyes widened as I imagined the hull splitting open like the skin of a banana. No pump would be able to keep up with that. “Did you see the ghost ship?”
I nodded. “Bosun says it’s the Chicora.”
“First time I’ve seen it,” my father said, “but I daresay it is.”
“They say there’s always a blow after you see it.” Ebbe, the wheelsman on duty, glanced at my father.
“Have you seen it before?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”
“Bosun says there’ll be a blow,” I said.
“Maybe,” my father said. “But I wouldn’t put too much stock in his stories.”
“What’ll we do if there is?” It felt good to be inside the warm space, even with a million fiery needles pushing up beneath my numb skin, but I was thinking again about what Dick had said, that we’d better not run into a storm because we’d need all the coal we had and even with fans it would be too wet to burn.
“Well for now there isn’t,” my father said. “And for now what we do is wait.”
“But we have to free the Ashley.”
My father chuckled inside his throat. “Looks like the Ashley waits too. Right now we could use another boat to free us.”
While we waited, a smaller boat tried to come through the Passage, and then it was the two of us stuck out there in the world of ice together, both with all our deck lights on because the light had suddenly turned dingy again, it was almost like night coming on, and even though the other boat was much smaller with all our lights it looked like we had a built a little city out there on the ice, just like the hotel Axel talked about on Green Bay.
The ice looked solid, but underneath the surface it was pushed by the northwesterly winds that had built up the windrows even inside the Passage. There were waves beneath the ice, and all that movement brought so much pressure against the sides of the ship the Manitou was moaning and shrieking almost like it had in the night. You could hear it even up in the pilothouse, which meant that down below in the flicker and the cabins where the engine crew slept it would be so loud the men wouldn’t be able to hear each other talk. Even with the engines standing by it was the noisiest place on the ship because there were the big boilers, the generators, the crankshaft and screw, steam hissing through all those pipes, and the gush of water from the hoses used to flush them. I didn’t know if it was the heat or the noise or just so much to see, but my first time my eyes seemed to come loose, as if they were rolling around in their sockets, I couldn’t focus, and my head got so light I was afraid I would faint and then I wouldn’t get to see everything, but I didn’t faint, I didn’t even throw up, and after a few minutes everything came back into focus. And right now besides all the other noise down there maybe someone was doing laundry, with the soap swishing and metal buttons clinking against the sides of the tub, and someone might be shouting, “Watch out,” if someone else got too close to the big electrical panel, and every now and then the big wooden cane they used to rescue anyone who touched it by accident would fall over and clatter to the floor. It was the busiest place on the ship, and it would be the best except that you couldn’t see out, because there weren’t any ports down there below the water line, no ports in the engine room or the quarters off the flicker where the black gang bunked. I thought about the spring on the UP that people talked about. It had an Indian name I liked to say out loud, Kitch-iti-kipi, and it was supposed to be forty feet deep with an emerald bottom and water so clear you could read the date off a penny if you dropped one in, and there was a raft with a window in the floor that visitors could pole out to the middle and look down. I thought maybe people cheated and memorized the dates before they tossed their pennies in, but that wasn’t so according to the second mate’s brother, who owned the tailor shop on Main Street. It was a state park like Benzie State Park on the Platte River, and he had been there and ridden on the glass-bottom raft where people took turns looking through to see all the coins and the fish, and I thought there should be a window like that on the Manitou, because then I could lie on the floor of the engine room and watch all the fish swimming around below the ice, the big sturgeon and muskies and the pike and all the little perches that got fried up in the restaurants every Friday, but that was silly, because no window would be strong enough to withstand all the action that was beneath the surface of such a great lake.
It was almost too much to think about, the ghost that came to my cabin at night, the ghost ship, and all the fish and the movement of the wind and the waves beneath the surface, and somewhere down there would be the crew of the Chicora, the skeleton crew, Dick Butler called them, and the crews of all the other ships that went down, Captain Peter Kilty himself, maybe all walking around, and I wondered if the Chicora and the Griffon and all the other ghost ships mostly stayed on the bottom and just sometimes came up and if that was so was it because they wanted to warn the ships that hadn’t gone down yet a blow was in store or did they just come up when they felt like it, and it was such a lot to think about—what if there really could be a ship with a window on the bottom like the Kitch-iti-kipi raft, what would you see when you lay on the bottom of the ship and looked down?
23
I didn’t go to the Benzie Area Historical Museum to find the picture of Alv’s school, of course. I made the short trip up M-115 to see the car ferry exhibit. When the museum moved into the Benzonia Congregational Church that is its home, I’m not sure. I don’t know if it even existed when I was a girl, though Benzie County had plenty of history even back then, from the prehistory of the corals and brachiopods on up through the Indians to the white man’s exploration, Father Marquette, the fur trade, the lumber mills, commercial fisheries, a peach industry that failed after an especially hard winter, the heyday of the railroad and grand opening of the Royal Frontenac Hotel, the summer Frankfort’s streets were paved, the year electric streetlights went up, and so on. But children never think about history. Oh, they’re aware of some of
its significant moments, like the night the Royal Frontenac caught fire. That was emblazoned into the collective memory at least in part because it was such a shame on the town, upright citizens having joined the looting once they realized that the building would burn to the ground and nothing would be saved. People remember shipwrecks and fires. But children cannot see the past as a timeline, a road from the brachiopods and the glaciers that runs past the Potawatomi and Ojibwe, fur traders and timber barons, and if they did they would think the line ended with them, they wouldn’t see how they too were only a small station, no more than a spark from the wheel of an express rocketing past, destination unknown. If children think of the past at all it is as a still life, a curiosity, a tableau. It is too much to ask a child to comprehend that the world went about its business moment by disappearing moment for billions of years without her. It’s the sad shock of adulthood to realize what a short blip of time we inhabit.
One person’s lifetime, give or take a few years: that’s how long the railroad car ferries lasted. An historical marker near the site of the old railyard in Elberta offers up the dates, 1892–1982, though if you were to ask someone when they stopped running, a waitress at Dinghy’s, say, a drugstore clerk, or the cashier at the BP, he or she would most likely frown, give a little shrug, and respond, “I don’t know, five or six years ago maybe?” Even for adults the line of the past contracts, years run together, sequences blur. No doubt there are many citizens, not just transplants but young people born right here in Benzie County who no longer remember or perhaps never knew that for ninety years, not a single day or night passed without the blast of the steam whistle or wail of the foghorn. I was long gone when the Viking docked in the harbor for the last time, but I imagine that to the people who were here, the people who would crowd the breakwaters a year later to watch the once proud ship be towed away, the town must have seemed as eerily silent as a forest suddenly abandoned by birds. But then another day would have passed without horn or whistle, and another and another, until everyone forgot what Frankfort used to sound like.
I have said that little has changed to the eye, but that’s not entirely true. Though what is here hasn’t changed that much, so much is gone. If it weren’t for the bike path it would be hard to picture where the railroad tracks once were.
I can’t say exactly why I went to see the exhibit on the car ferries when I haven’t gone to visit the S.S. City of Milwaukee, the only railroad car ferry left, which is permanently docked in Manistee and open to the public for guided tours in season. I haven’t been because I don’t think I could stand to climb the companionways or file through the passageways and silent engine room, where I once got so hot and dizzy, to visit the crew’s mess with its table sitting empty or the flicker without the black gang and deckhands playing cards, to see the vacant passenger cabins so like the one where I once spent a night weeping because a ghost got hold of my foot.
A museum is different. You enter a museum expecting the dimensions of the past to be flattened. It wasn’t a space where I would look for Holgar or Nils or even the bosun, though I wouldn’t have minded one of those interactive exhibits, a button you could press just to hear the whistle again, that sound that was not a moan, not a shriek, not a wail or a cry, rather a deep-throated call that contained all of those things, but I suppose such technology is beyond the budget of a county museum, one that recalls the history of a sparsely populated county at that. Still, I was surprised by the museum’s scope, by the size of the upstairs corner devoted to the ferries and how much it holds, so many photographs and paintings, along with lanterns, life preservers, seaman’s papers, nameplates, union cards, binnacle and compass. All of the Annies are pictured, the Manitou looking just as I remember in the black-and-white photograph on the wall.
The glass cases held even more, including the yellowed newspaper clipping from the year the ill-fated Ann Arbor 4 sank at the south pier. There is a copy of the mural in the new Frankfort post office that depicts the derailed cars plunging overboard, the desperate men, the icicles hanging from the deck. I say new because it was new the year I left. The post office I remember is the one where I used to stare at the wanted posters for the Barker Gang and Al Brady. And of course there’s that other yellowed clipping, the one that tells what happened to the Manitou, but I didn’t need to read that. Because the paper would tell only half the story. I alone ever knew the whole.
The objects are all so familiar and yet out of place, behind glass or hung from the vaulted ceiling and walls there on the second floor of the old church that opens out to a dormer with an arched stained-glass window, just one of the four corners of a vast second-floor room in a museum devoted to everything bygone, railroads, vintage kitchens, doctor’s offices, summer camps, schools. In the middle of the car ferry display a dressmaker’s dummy sports a double-breasted, navy-blue, wool, twill captain’s jacket with its gold star and four gold stripes on the sleeves, each button embossed with the name Ann Arbor. It is topped by a red silk scarf such as my father never wore and a captain’s hat like the one he once let me try on. The scarf covers the upholstered stump of the neck that holds the hat, but that crimson-covered space is so short the hat looks as if it belongs to a headless horseman, and I wanted to snatch it off, never mind that it belongs to a museum and is not to be touched. I wanted to lift it, to make room for that long, grizzled face with its pale but intensely blue eyes set in a crinkle of lines above the gray stubble along his cheeks and chin, a face I have waited for, waited and waited, because the ghosts I want will not come, they will not tell me what they want. I should say I’m not a woman much given to tears. Perhaps I suffered too many losses early on, I didn’t dwell, I made the best of it, as my stepmother said. I was a child after all. The world might have ended, and still I skated on the harbor and ran through the woods, sledded, had snowball fights, played tag, sassed my teachers, told stories, exchanged penny Valentines, and passed notes in school. But the sight of that legless uniform with its empty arms and headless hat assailed me like a blow. My knees buckled, and there, on the second floor of the Benzie Area Historical Museum under the watchful eye of the stained-glass Jesus with his staff and flock of lambs—a Jesus whose eyes don’t actually look watchful at all, whose face is nearly as blank as the tumble of white clouds behind his head—there, in the room with what is left of everything I once desired, I let loose a sob so loud the docent came flying up the stairs.
“What’s the matter?” she cried. “Are you ill? Is there someone we should call, something I can do?”
I struggled to my feet and said, stupidly, “Your captain needs a face.”
I would like to say I left it at that and walked away, dignity intact, but no, I am an old woman, she had to help me to a seat on the long pew that faced that indifferent Congregational shepherd, obviously uncertain whether she should stay with me or go summon the director.
“Can I get you a glass of water?”
“Your Jesus,” I answered, “he needs a face too.”
24
Once when my father was home we found ourselves alone together in the back parlor. This would have been in 1937, late spring I think, because there was a slight prickle to the air, a damp chill, but no fire in the hearth. My stepmother had already come to live with us. I would have been nearing the end of my first year of school, and I was sprawled on the rug practicing my printing. My father had been reading the paper and listening to the radio. He often did both at the same time, as if the two things somehow enhanced each other. On the radio he liked to tune to Father Coughlin. As I understood it at the time, Father Coughlin was on the side of the downtrodden, an early supporter of President Roosevelt and the New Deal. Whether he had yet soured on the president as he became more vehemently anticommunist and anti-Semitic, more outspoken in his approval of the fascist governments in Europe and his opposition to American involvement in the coming war, I don’t remember, likely because I was too young to understand what he was saying in the first place, any more than I und
erstood the labor unrest that had boiled over in Detroit and Chicago. I just knew his voice, along with the president’s, because my father listened to FDR’s fireside chats when he was home, and so I believe he must have approved of the president, though what he felt about the labor unions and growing tension overseas I can’t say, only that he followed the news. He was a thoughtful man, he listened and seemed to weigh things but seldom voiced his opinion, unlike my stepmother, who listened less and spoke more. She preferred Your Hit Parade and Moon River, which came on after I went to bed, and variety shows like The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, a name I can’t recall now without picturing the show rising from the speaker like dough.
My favorites were Little Orphan Annie, Buck Rogers, and The Green Hornet. We had an old-fashioned radio, old-fashioned even at the time, I think, since it was a big wooden console that sat on the floor with a top that was arched like a church window and wooden fretwork over the nubby beige fabric that covered the speaker, an instrument as grand in its way as the upright piano in the front parlor. And that’s what I see first when I remember this scene, the handsome radio, the cold fireplace, the newspaper folded on an end table with a fretwork rim, and my wide-ruled tablet on the Persian rug. The rug had a slightly musty smell, though perhaps it was just the smell of that chilly in-between air. I knew every figure and whorl because sometimes I lay on the floor to do up its fringe in little braids, though some of the fringe was worn away and too short. That day I was copying a story from my primer, and I can still see my uneven block letters on the page: “A ball was in the basket. It was a big red ball. It was a pretty ball.” I suppose we hadn’t learned the beauty of compound and complex sentences yet. No models of style, those early readers. No one I knew, not even children, talked like that.
Across the Great Lake Page 13