Axel laughed when he saw what I intended. “Bloodthirsty little thing, aren’t you? Better hope your friend doesn’t slip with the knife. He could be sprouting devil’s horns himself.”
“I wish Dick didn’t shoot it,” I said. “But now it’s dead, I want to see.” I wondered if we would keep the head with its misshapen rack. We could hang it on the wall of the passenger lounge. And maybe deer would come out too, and pretty soon the lounge would look just like the log cabin restaurant. And if there was a storm that would be something, all those heads tumbling down off the wall, eyes staring every which way, antlers tangled up like a fight. I was so excited by the moose that for a moment I forgot about the wet coal and not eating with the crew.
Roald pitched the rope ladder over the side, and the wooden rungs clattered against the hull. Then he, Alv, and Axel mounted the gunnel and went down. I watched as they tied the legs and turned the moose over on his back. Then Alv peeled the pelt from the jaw to the tail. I was surprised how white it was inside, not bloody at all. And when he cut out the windpipe that was white too, white on white, striped with bright rings. Years later, the first time I found a whelk egg case at the ocean, I remembered the windpipe inside the dead moose and couldn’t explain to anyone why the lump in my throat turned my voice to gravel. That was when the moose began to visit me in dreams. I stayed up on the boat deck to watch the whole thing, the dark gush when they bled it and emptied out the entrails. Alv used a hatchet and a saw to cut the animal into quarters, but it wasn’t nearly as gory as I expected, except for the blood that ran out on the ice, turning pink and watery at the edges, and the steaming purple mess of guts. I wondered if it smelled bad up close. I sniffed the crisp air for a hint and believed I could at least smell the hide. Axel and Roald stood aside. Their mouths were moving, they would be giving Alv a hard time, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he did the whole job himself until it was quartered, and then they helped him cut it into parts like the round and the loin, because even a quartered moose is too big for a man to bring up on a ladder. It took a long time, but I watched the whole thing, and when they were done they left the head with its devil’s horns and the gut pile and the feet and the fur and brought all the rest of it up, and Bosun made sure they kept the breakfast loins opposite the backstrap intact, because that was the best meat, and the best meat always went to the captain. And after they were done my father had the engineer start the engines and the wheelsman turn us around so that we could empty the aft ballast tanks and raise the stern to break up the ice with the propellers, and we got unstuck, and then pulled up close to the Ashley and broke her out, all the while Sam was fixing up our supper of roast moose with potatoes and carrots and onions, and I don’t know how the breakfast loins tasted, because in the commotion over the moose my father seemed to have forgotten I was supposed to eat with him, but the roast, even the roast off a starving moose, was better than any meat I’ve ever eaten, better than Sunday’s svinestek, and at the first bite I stopped thinking about the poor moose with his sad eyes and clunky nose, forgot all about the way he looked at me before he fell, like maybe he thought it was my fault. I didn’t think about any of that as soon as I tasted that first bite because back in the crews’ mess I guess I really was hungry enough to eat a moose.
32
Alv’s swollen hand might have made him a little slow to learn his knots, but one thing he knew was how to dress game. He’d grown up hunting with his father, though his father always yelled and told him he couldn’t do anything right. “But I guess I did,” he said to me. “I guess I did all right this time, and a moose is a whole lot bigger than a deer.”
I wished his father could have seen, though it wouldn’t have mattered because Alv couldn’t do anything to suit him, just like he couldn’t do anything to suit the bosun. But Axel had never been hunting and Roald said the biggest thing he’d ever dressed was a squirrel, and neither of them had any idea how to dress something as big as a moose. So the whole while we were eating and exclaiming, Alv’s face glimmered with pride. And when the men called him “Moose Boy” and laughed it was a different kind of laughter. Except the bosun, who didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile, didn’t say a word, though he ate just as much as everybody else. Even Dick Butler glanced up from his plate and said, “I’ll give the little fairy this much, he knows how to dress game.”
It was the oddest thing. Because Dick Butler shot the moose I got to eat with the crew again and things beween Alv and me went back to the way they had been. It was one of those bad things that make everything good.
And maybe because of that, maybe because everything seemed right again, that night I got my courage up while I lay waiting like I always did for the ship to stop its shrieking and moaning and go quiet, for the air to change, and the ghost to steal into my compartment. This time I sat up, though I was careful not to disturb my foot, but even so I felt the ghost’s hand slide from my toe to the arch. “Please?” I said. “I need your help. I need you to make the bosun stop being so mean to Alv.” Soft as it was, my voice seemed to empty out the air, but then it closed in, so dense I could scarcely breathe, and my voice dropped to a whisper. “I know you want something, if you could just tell me what, but you’re the only one I know to ask.” I was so terrified my whole body trembled. “Just this once? Please?” The hand tightened around my instep, inching past my heel until it gripped my ankle. And then it was morning, I woke to the smell of eggs and bacon, and Manitou was beside me on my pillow just like always, it was like nothing had happened, except my head ached, my ankle hurt, and when I got up to get dressed and put on my socks, there it was, all black and purple and blue.
33
The blow came after we had freed the Ashley and turned west, after we passed between North Manitou and South Fox islands and found open water. The sun had come out, and it was so clear that from the pilothouse you could see for miles, but there was no land in sight, only ice and the inky-blue water spilling little whitecaps between the floes, because out there the ice had a lot more cracks, it wasn’t quite so solid, and the day promised to be the fairest one yet until the barometer began to drop. We were at breakfast in the mess when I felt the change of pressure in my ears and the crew’s voices began to sound funny, and I realized it was because my own voice was ringing, like an echo in a phone with a party line, which is the only kind of line people had in those days.
“Told you there’d be a blow,” Bosun said, and his voice seemed to echo even more than theirs because the room had suddenly gone quiet as all the men felt it. They knew what was coming even if I didn’t, not yet.
“Oh, why don’t you go to hell with your omens and ghosts,” Dick Butler said. It was something none of the deck crew would dare say. Dick Butler only thought he could because he didn’t work for the bosun, he worked for John Larsen, and the chief engineer wasn’t there. But all of them worked for my father, and there was only one thing you were allowed to say to the captain, and that was “Yes, sir.” So I guessed that Dick knew Bosun wouldn’t go whining to my father that someone from the black gang talked back to him because another rule was no fighting. A ship is close quarters, even a ship as big as the Manitou, and I had learned that not all the men felt the bond of being on it together, they got on each other’s nerves but had to find a way to get along. Oddly, I don’t think anyone disliked Twitches, who was at the end of the table muttering to himself as usual, because he did his job and didn’t bother anyone once you got used to the constant buzz of his voice, he was like a bee in the background, and when I asked Alv what it was like to bunk with him, Alv only shrugged and said, “Well, he talks to himself, but he doesn’t expect anyone to answer, he’s not so bad, he minds his own business and doesn’t snore, but if he did I’d just put my pillow over my head.”
Even before he killed the moose Dick Butler had a nasty streak anyone could see, because the men were always pranking each other, short-sheeting their racks, putting salt in the sugar box, that sort of thing, but what Di
ck passed off as pranks, like tripping Alv and making him put his foot in a bucket of paint the first day to keep balance, wasn’t meant in fun, though the black gang stuck together, so none of his own ever called him out. And now that the men had enjoyed their fine moose dinner with more to come, they seemed to have forgotten how ornery he was to kill it, and my father wasn’t there, so he was back to his cocky self.
Except when I looked at him again I realized he wasn’t feeling cocky at all. There was a seam of worry behind his eyes, and I knew he was thinking about the leak and what would happen in the storm. He might like to be right, but he’d rather be wrong than go down in a storm.
Because I had free roam of the ship I had seen him pinching out his butts on the car deck more than once. Of course, I didn’t really have free roam, I just took it, and as long as I stayed out of Bosun’s way no one ratted me out, that was what they called it when they told on one another, which they never did, because if you ratted someone out it made you a rat, and the officers had no more use for rats than they did for the men that got ratted on. I still didn’t know who had ratted me out to my father because most of the crew had got to be fond of me. I don’t think Twitches noticed I was there, and maybe the bosun didn’t like me and neither he nor Dick had much use for Alv, but the rest of the black gang took to me like I was their special pet. Except for the bosun, men on a ship kind of like having a woman around even if she’s a little girl. So Dick Butler never practiced his mean streak on me, even though he had to know I’d seen him smoking on the car deck. Instead he went back and forth, because sometimes he was nice, like when he told me little secrets about playing poker or gave me the clothespin. And there was another thing, something I never told Alv—once when I went down to the car deck, I saw Dick put out his cigarette and drop it in his pocket, and then he pulled a little ball made out of crumpled paper out of another pocket. The ball was attached to a length of string, and he crouched down and bounced that paper ball around until Whispers came out to bat at it, and every time he did, Dick jerked the string, and this went on long enough that I realized he must have played with Whispers before, and I thought about what he’d said about cat scratch fever. He must have discovered the kitten on one of his smoking trips, maybe even before we did. For all I knew, he could be feeding Whispers too. And maybe he knew that I knew and that was why he was so nice to me sometimes.
Axel had been in the middle of another Ole and Lena joke, but when he felt the pressure drop and the bosun said, “Told you,” he just stopped. His harelip tensed, and then he said to Dick, “Why don’t you go to hell yourself,” and the bosun didn’t say a word. I supposed he felt it served Dick Butler right. But Axel wasn’t mad. He was scared. Everyone was.
My father appeared in the doorway, on his way from the officers’ mess. “Well, boys,” he said, “I believe we may have to tolerate a bit of weather.”
“Storm’s coming, all right,” Holgar said as soon as my father left, and then for a minute all the men were talking, how long it would take and how hard it would hit, and who would be the first to know, was it the captain up in the pilothouse, who didn’t bother to share the weather information he got with the crew, though in those days before radar that information was scanty at best, the deck watch, or who? My father’s brief announcement was all the crew could expect. They would be left to read the signs for themselves, though I wondered if they felt the signs the same way in the engine room and the firehold.
“They’ll know soon enough if a bulkhead goes and the water starts rising,” Roald said.
“Going to need every bit of that coal.” Holgar glanced at Dick, his face clouded with worry.
But mostly the men broke off talking. Other times they told stories about storms they’d been in, like the one where a wave pitched all the way up over the pilothouse, pulled the deckhouse loose, and left it floating around like Noah’s ark, or the time the carload of Buicks rolled off the stern of the Ann Arbor 4, taking the wooden seagate with it, the waves tore all the stanchions loose, and the upper deck dropped so low the steam pipe to the big whistle broke and if the chief engineer hadn’t crawled on top of the boilers and shut off the valve, the ship would have sunk right there in the lake instead of later at the dock, where the whole crew was saved. That was before their time, at least most of them, though they all talked about it as if they’d been there. But no one seemed inclined to recall past mishaps now as we lingered in the mess because there was nothing to do but wait to see how bad it would be. The watches would double-check everything, the steward’s crew would see that all the dishes were stowed away, and each of us would make sure we’d secured our cabins and anything else we were responsible for, but for the moment the crew seemed caught by a spell of paralysis so deep they didn’t even feel like talking. I might have piped up, because for all their stories and despite the leak, the idea of a storm still excited me, I might have asked if they thought the deckhouse would come loose or the cars bust off their jacks, if the engine room would flood and the engines fail, but I didn’t. I would like to say that I had enough sense not to, enough sense to know that every man was wondering if this would be the big one, if he’d ever see land and the people he’d left behind again, but I think I was just afraid that the bosun would yell at me. Especially after I’d asked the ghost to make him stop treating Alv so ugly. He wouldn’t like knowing I’d sicced a ghost on him. Even the thought of it made my ankle throb.
Once Holgar told a story about a ship he’d been on where a new deckhand was so afraid of drowning he’d worn a life jacket to bed and when he was off duty he just sat in the mess with that same life jacket on and wouldn’t speak to anyone, it was like he was already communicating with the dead, and when some of the men began to rib him, asking what he’d signed onto a ship for then, he couldn’t answer and turned so white he looked like he was already his own ghost, and the first port they reached he went up the street and was never seen again. So I wondered if all the men who seemed suddenly too lead-limbed to move were thinking about drowning and began to wonder what it would feel like, was it just like when you got a mouthful of Lake Michigan while you were swimming and started sputtering and choking? But that was summer. In winter the water was so cold you would freeze to death before you had time to drown. And that part didn’t sound nearly as enthralling as floating around in a deckhouse or watching the railcars bust loose.
Bosun cracked the silence. “You ladies going to sit here waiting for doomsday or do your jobs?” He glared at Alv. “There’s a bucket of soogee with your name on it, boy. You want to leave a clean house you get swept overboard.” Which was silly, since a bad storm would turn everything topsy turvy, and who cared whether the wreckage was clean or not.
I wanted someone to open the purser’s office so I could fetch the little brass message tubes in case anyone wanted to write a letter, but I could tell it wouldn’t be a good thing to ask.
So one by one the men rose and went off to their posts, the watches to make sure nothing was open and nothing was loose, the deckhands to their cleaning, the black gang back to stoking and wiping. They had to try to dry out the coal and make sure there was plenty at the ready, because a blow always put a strain on the boilers as the captain tried to keep the ship from falling into the trough of the waves, but even the black gang moved as if in slow motion, as if the dropping pressure made the air so thick it weighed them down, and I learned the first thing about the kind of storm that gives warning: that the worst thing of all seems to be the waiting, though when the storm hit I would learn the second thing, and that is that the first thing isn’t true.
34
We were rocking almost gently among the floes when the wind suddenly shifted to the southwest and began to pick up. “Here she comes,” Odd said, and though a tingle seemed to pass through the room, for a moment the men actually relaxed on their stools. Odd was in the mess playing poker at one end of the table with Axel, Holgar, and Roald, which is where the deck crew sometimes gathered between meals when t
hey were off duty, though more often they went down to see what was happening in the flicker. I was at the other end playing a card game we’d made up all by ourselves with Alv. It had been hours since we felt the barometer begin to drop. All morning we had waited, then eaten a noon dinner of moose hash, though the long morning sapped the men’s appetite in spite of the apple pie still warm from the oven. But I ate it all, every crumb. “What’s the difference? Going to puke it all up anyway when she blows,” Holgar said, watching me, then reaching for his pie.
“You are,” Odd said, because he almost never ate dessert. He preferred a nip to a sweet, that’s what the other men said. What Odd said was, “Liquid sugar goes down easy. Don’t even have to chew.” Other times he bragged, “A little whiskey’s what keeps a man sober. Get behind that wheel, close one eye, and you ain’t never going to see more than one horizon.”
“Go ahead, eat your pie,” they said to Alv now. “You’re the one going to puke for sure.” They were joking, but the morning had worn lines into the fine muscles on their faces as their fingers tensed on the cards and the barbs they hurled at one another grew sharper until the air itself seemed to bite at the same time there was a slackness to it, a flabby indecision the ship’s sudden yaw seemed to give shape, but then she straightened and the air slackened again.
“You know to tie yourself down if Captain has to turn?” Holgar asked Alv and me.
“What to?” I asked.
“Whatever you got. He’ll give a signal, and you find something, because she’s going to tilt so far you’ll think upside is down, when that prop comes out of the water this ship’s going shake so hard you’ll feel like you’ve been knocked to kingdom come, and sweetheart an earthquake’s got nothing on that.”
I swallowed as I pictured Alv and me lashed together to a chair like prisoners. My father hadn’t said anything about that when he stopped by the mess to say that we would have to tolerate some weather. Later he had called down to suggest that I ride it out in my cabin, but the storm was taking its time, and I didn’t want to miss it all by myself in the passenger quarters.
Across the Great Lake Page 17