When the officials from the railroad office in Beulah came to call on the evening of the thirteenth, the news came as a confirmation of what we already knew but would not say. To do so would have seemed like a jinx, because as long as it was not official we could hope that we were wrong, that communications had simply been severed and tomorrow my father’s ship would come home, perhaps with an engine gone and a broken spar, everyone on board somewhat shaken but all accounted for, all alive. The power had gone out in Frankfort, and there was no school on the twelfth as we began to dig out from the blizzard. Throughout the day of the twelfth my stepmother was unusually quiet, though she went about her daily business as best she could. Without lights, without her radio programs, we went to bed early. Sometime Wednesday afternoon the power was restored. By then I was back at school. Even without electricity our classrooms got plenty of light through the windows and the building was heated by a coal-fired boiler. The bathrooms in the basement were always dark and creepy, but that day if you had to go a teacher took you down with a flashlight. Yet even when the electricity came back on the sounds in the halls seemed muted, the teachers’ voices subdued. It wasn’t possible to live in Frankfort without knowing someone on the ferries. Neither the coast guard nor the railroad had heard from the Ashley, which had been assigned to my father after the Manitou was lost. Many of the crew from the Manitou still sailed with my father. Morten Johannessen had been given his own ship at last, but the other mates and the wheelsmen had gone over to the Ashley with my father. Axel was a watch now, and Nils a water tender. Amund had moved up from water tender to third engineer. Even the bosun, Rudy, had gone with my father.
But the storm was over, the winds had calmed, and we went about our lessons as if nothing could be wrong. At the same time everything felt off, and as we recited, our voices seemed to take on a strange echo, as if the barometer were dropping and we were waiting on a storm instead of watching through the window as the janitor picked up debris from a storm that was done. But perhaps I was the only one staring out and listening to strange echoes, perhaps my classmates were simply thinking about what they would do in the free hours before supper after school let out. They had never been through a storm out on the lake. And yet I thought less about the way the Manitou had pitched and yawed and nearly sunk than I did about my father standing in his cabin and telling me the Ashley was unlucky. Boats talk, he’d said; a captain always knew. Even so he had taken command without complaint—I think he was thankful that the railroad didn’t hold him responsible for the loss of the Manitou—and when I asked what the Ashley had said to him after his first voyage—this was in the year after my mother died and before he married Lene—he had patted my head and said, “Now, lille, don’t believe every silly superstition you hear.”
“But you said,” I protested. “The railroad shouldn’t have changed her name. You said it was bad luck.”
“Aye,” he said, “but I’ll tell you a secret. I still call her by her right name, and she likes that, so she behaves herself for me.”
For the life of me, I cannot remember what that real name was, though perhaps he never told me, perhaps I never knew. My head tipped warily to one side. “So she’s not unlucky anymore?”
“Not a bit of it. After all, I’m her captain, she listens to me.”
Because I was young enough to want to believe him I accepted what my father said and didn’t think of it again until those long days of the twelfth and then the thirteenth, when I sat at my desk unable to focus on my arithmetic, hoping that my father had already docked in Elberta, only no one thought to send word because I was at school and it was important that I learn long division. But then it was lunchtime, and I walked the three blocks home, where Lene served me a cold roast beef sandwich with an apple, and because she said nothing I knew it wasn’t so, knew she’d heard nothing, and didn’t dare ask if there was news.
That night the railroad men came from Beulah in their gray fedoras and heavy topcoats, climbing the four sets of steps to the front porch and knocking politely on the front door.
Lene rose from the loveseat in the front parlor. “I believe you have homework,” she said to me.
“No, I don’t,” I said, but she repeated, “You have homework,” which meant I was to go to my room, and she waited while I climbed the stairs before she opened the door. I tried to listen from the upstairs hall, but she ushered them into the back parlor, where they would have sat on the uncomfortable maroon sofa to deliver those details that they knew. The Ashley had left Menominee bound for Frankfort Monday morning. She had passed St. Martin Island and was in open water a bit southwest of where we had fought the blizzard and storm not four years before when she sent a distress signal, then disappeared. The bodies of Billy Cooke and Holgar had washed up a few miles apart west of Seul Choix Point, and a life preserver stenciled with the name of the Ashley had been found floating in the bay. The ship was presumed to have sunk with all hands.
I had crept back downstairs, standing behind the half-closed pocket doors between the front and back parlors, and I heard nearly every word. There was nothing about the message tubes, and I wondered if the bosun had gone to the purser’s office to pocket one before the storm hit, if a message might still wash up to tell us what went wrong besides the weather. Billy Cooke, whose name had been such a source of merriment among my father’s crew, had baked the apple pie I had gobbled in the mess, where many of the men who’d now gone down had sat waiting along with me for the storm that nearly sank the Manitou. My father’s actions, his and the crew’s, had saved us, and I wondered why they hadn’t saved him now. Did they have to turn? Did the engine seize? Did the coal get so wet the firemen were unable to maintain pressure?
My stepmother simply nodded, though when she rose, gravity seemed to push her back down, as if her legs had turned to cement. I slipped into a corner, and I don’t know whether she was aware of me or not before she closed the front door and turned around, whether she knew that I had heard it all and seen her nod when the railroad men told her they were sorry. We hadn’t spoken of the storm since I had come home from school in that screaming wind two days before, and she had gone about her business, cooking supper and cleaning up with her usual vigor, though except for the sound of her scrubbing and wiping, the house was silent. In the corner of the front parlor the piano had stood untouched, the lid lowered over the keys, and the stool seemed so strangely still, as if we were accustomed to it spinning of its own accord. And in the back parlor even after the power came on when it was time for her shows the radio sat mute. I was acutely aware of every sound I made, my breath shooshing in and out, my footsteps on the stairs, even though I tiptoed.
She didn’t speak at first after showing the railroad men out, making sure the porch light was on and watching as they descended the porch steps and then those four more flights to the street, their hats bobbing in the golden hoop the streetlight cast onto the snow, the beams of their own flashlights dancing on the scraped white bits from the shovel. Only after they’d reached the sidewalk at the bottom without either of them slipping or falling did she turn around.
“Well, Fern,” she said, “we shall have to make the best of it.”
40
Just as the men had predicted, Bosun picked Alv to go first when it was time to jump the clump at Manistique. My father went into the aft pilothouse and used the chadburn to instruct Odd as we backed up to the slip just inside the river while the deckhands strung a cable outside the stanchions on the weather deck and attached a manila line that ran down to the car deck at the stern. Already the seagate had been raised, and as the stern swung in alongside the pilings, Alv’s face went pale, though I didn’t know if he worried that his bad leg might give way when he landed or that the line would snap. Even though the Annies didn’t use bosun’s chairs when they tied up to unload, the crew had told him again and again that the new boy always went first on the chair because that was how the bosun found out whether the rope was rotten. Freighters carried safet
y blocks, but not the ferries. “Come through the worst storm ever been only to die at the dock ’cause the railroad’s too cheap to buy a goddamn block of wood,” they warned Alv, like it was a fate meant just for him, but you could see that Axel was nervous too, the lines in his face drawn tight, even though the men all agreed it was actually lucky the ship had taken on so much water because if a ship rode too high she would catch the wind like a sail, and then the crew would have all it could do to get her tied up. “Open your eyes, you stupid jackass,” Bosun yelled as Alv grabbed the line, took a deep breath, and jumped, Axel and Holgar right behind him. Then the three of them were teetering on top of the pilings, pulling the line and then the cable while Twitches took up the slack with the winch because he was the strongest hand, and if the cable sank it would be too heavy for the men to haul. As soon as they had secured it to a bollard, their shoulders dropped with relief, but the bosun kept yelling, “Faster! Get the lead out. What are you waiting for?”
Then they had to unfasten all the chains and turnbuckles and jacks to unload the railcars that clanked and rumbled across the metal apron. After that the deckhands had to untie the ship so we could tie up alongside the other dock where the ship would be repaired. This time they used the chair, and once again Alv had to go first, but the rope held, and he dropped to the dock, and after we made fast, a square I hadn’t noticed in the hull opened like a secret door, and the rest of us walked through it down a gangway from the car deck to the dock. It was the first time I’d set foot on land in over eight days, and I looked around for caribou—somehow I had imagined them lining up to meet us—but all I could see was the river and the railyard and the squatty red lighthouse at the end of the east pier. It didn’t look all that different from the Lower Peninsula.
Now that the cars were in the yard the stanchions could be straightened. The starboard engine had to be repaired, the bulkhead between the flicker and the engine room replaced, and the sinks that had pulled loose fastened back to the wall. The hull would be patched until the Manitou got back to Elberta, because a proper job of hull work required a ship to go to dry dock, and there was no time for that now. But before they could do any of it the stern had to be raised and a cofferdam built around it so the crew at the shipyard could pump the water out. A normal round trip was supposed to take fourteen hours, but we were already more than a week out and now we would have to spend more time in Manistique. So during the day we had time to go up the street, but at night we came back to the ship because the railroad didn’t want to pay for a hotel, even though the repair work went round the clock with so much clanging and banging we all had to sleep with our pillows over our heads.
But the first thing we did was go to the doctor so the injured crew members could be treated. He put a splint on Holgar’s wrist and a cast on Malley’s broken leg and with a nod toward a door that must have opened to the surgery, said we were lucky no one got frostbite. The best part was I got to wear a sling because my humerous was fractured. That was my armbone. I had broken my other arm when I fell on the ice the year before, so now I guessed they matched, but the doctor said that children’s bones knit so fast I’d be healed before I could say Jack Robinson. So I said, “Jack Robinson” before I thought, because I didn’t want my arm to heal, I wanted to wear my sling forever. I was impressed to have broken something with such a big name, which I repeated for everyone in case they hadn’t heard, but then Axel said it was just my funny bone, because it was my “humorous, get it?” and Holgar suggested in that case Axel might as well stop telling me jokes and everyone else too since he’d told them all six times already. Alv had found Manitou like he promised, and when I told the doctor my bear was hurt, the doctor wrapped a big white bandage around Manitou’s arm, which he liked so much we had to show it off to everyone on the crew plus all the people we met on the street.
Afterward we went to a bar that wasn’t far from the railyard, even my father, who drank a beer with his men and thanked them for the courage they had shown in keeping the Manitou afloat through what he still called a bit of weather, and everyone was in a jolly mood because we’d come through the storm and now we had some days off and the boat would be fixed even if the railroad wasn’t happy about the expense or lost time, but “what do they expect?” Pete said. “Act like God, but if they got that kind of power, how come they didn’t hold back the storm?” The men hoisted a glass to my father for his steadiness under fire, and John Larsen said we owed our lives to him because he’d ordered the engines twisted for the turn, had rung for full speed ahead on the starboard engine and full speed astern on the port, and if he hadn’t we probably wouldn’t have come about, so I was proud of my father and lifted my glass too because the bartender had brought me a fizzy new drink called a Shirley Temple for the little girl who sang and danced in the movies, so I sat on my stool and sang along with the men even though I didn’t know the words, but when they came to the chorus I belted out, “Way hey up she rises, way hey up she rises, earl-lie in the morning!” But then my father took me back to the boat, “before things get rowdy,” he said, and Alv came along with us while the bosun stayed at the bar with the men, all drinking together like they’d always been the best of friends. My father told me again what a brave little girl I had been, and then he went to his cabin to write a report for the railroad, and Alv and I snuck back down the gangway to explore the railyard, hunting for Whispers’s car. I had worried what would happen to him after the storm, but Alv trapped him in a box before we unloaded and put him inside one of the cars that had lost its seal, then closed the door tight so that he couldn’t get away. The cars looked so much alike I was afraid we wouldn’t find it, but a few still had unbroken seals, and my kitten was meowing so loud we could hear him several cars away, though he quieted right down when Alv slipped him some food. But Alv wouldn’t let me take him out because if he got away in the yard we’d never find him. I stood outside the car and explained about the storm so he would understand why Alv had to put him in a box and why he had to wait a little longer, because once the stanchions were braced with steel rods the deck crew would have to paint them to keep them from rusting, there would be all kinds of things for the deckhands to do to get the ship ready.
Alv kept busy doing laundry and putting things back in place, though not so busy some of the crew didn’t haul him up the street to get a tattoo. Later he rolled up his sleeve and showed it to me. It was a blue anchor, like nearly all the sailors had, but he said not to touch it because it was sore and the skin around it was red, though I could tell by the way he kept looking at it over his shoulder that he thought the pain was worth it even if it hadn’t been his idea.
“I want one,” I said, but he shook his head.
“I don’t care if it hurts. I wouldn’t cry. And you know where to go. You could take me.”
“Captain would skin me alive. Girls don’t get tattoos.”
Even though I knew it was true, my father wouldn’t like it, and I didn’t want to think what my mother would say, I blew a big disappointed breath out through my lips and vowed, “Well, next time I’m going with you, and then we’ll see.”
Mr. Strom, the mate who was filling in for the sick purser because he was good with numbers, ordered new supplies, so I got to watch the steward’s crew, the cooks and the porter, haul all the new groceries across the deck in the wagon that had broken loose in the storm, we got new mugs to replace the ones that broke, and then, when everything was fixed, the leak patched as best it could be from inside, the deck crew got busy painting, and after the coal we had left was dried out with fans, we had to take on more because we’d burned up so much fighting the ice and then the storm, so we had to back up to the apron again, and before the railcars were loaded, several coal cars came on to dump their loads with a roar of choking black dust. Then the railcars were loaded, the boilers began to thump, the seagate came down, and this time there was nothing between us and Menominee except Death’s Door, and after all we’d been through, Death’s Door would
be nothing, Axel said, which wasn’t what he’d said before, but after the storm everything changed, we were all just so glad to be alive and on our way it was like we were already there, and everyone, even the bosun, seemed to be humming a happy tune inside, a whole chorus that everyone could feel even if it made no sound.
41
So we made the best of it, Lene and I, or so I thought, though things were not the same without my father. He’d been away so much, you wouldn’t think his absence could make such a difference, but it did. It wasn’t as if we’d spent our hours in anticipation of his arrival, because it was nothing we could count on, a certain time, a certain day. And yet there was something so draining in knowing that he would never come home.
I had never gotten used to thinking of him on the Ashley, not even when Lene and I were taking picnics up to the Elberta bluff to watch it depart. I’d loved the Manitou so much, whenever I pictured my father on the lake, it was always on the Bull of the Woods. I would close my eyes and see the Annies’ trademark cutaway prow, see all the brightly polished brass in the pilothouse and the cords for the whistles and the sign for left and right that once made me wonder about getting turned all around, and Odd or Pete on the thick mat of latticed wood behind the wheel, my father in his uniform, bending over the chart desk or sitting on the chair with his newspaper. But the Ashley had been built for the Grand Trunk, it didn’t have the cutaway prow, and I didn’t know what its pilothouse looked like inside. What I pictured was Alv, face turning pale as he clutched the manila line to jump the clump in Manistique. I saw the men I knew, the men I’d played cards and once gone to a bar with, gathered at the long red table in the flicker, where I could trace in my mind every nick in the paint, every groove and fingernail-sized dip in the wood, the same way I knew the red-checked oilcloth in the crew’s mess and the scratchy feel of my wool blanket, and the way the cables smoked and sparked on their winches when they were let out, knew the smells, bread baking in the galley, Sam’s soup on the stove, the oil in the engine room, wax on the wood paneling in the deckhouse, and the acrid sting of the soogee. I wondered if the Ashley had a linen closet with a hole where the knob should be and if the blankets in the passenger cabins were green, was there a special compartment for the managers, did it have a ghost, and if I was aboard and closed my eyes would everything be in the same place? I didn’t know, because my father had no call to take me across the lake again, and so I never went aboard the Ashley, which made it hard to imagine at the bottom of the lake, to walk its passageways and skim down the steps of its companionways in my mind, to read the brass plates above the cabin doors and know who they belonged to, though no one knew where each man was on the ship when he drowned, or maybe they didn’t drown, because when icy water hit the boilers they would explode, though no one knew for sure whether the boilers on the Ashley exploded or not and I didn’t want to think about that. I preferred to think that the ship was intact on the lake’s deep floor.
Across the Great Lake Page 20