Safe from the Sea (2 page)

Their talk over the next hour could hardly have passed for conversation. Between bites of runny eggs and greasy hash browns, Olaf asked Noah about his job and his girlfriend. Noah asked after the old man’s health and the state of the cabin up on Lake Forsone, where Olaf had recently moved after selling their house on High Street. Olaf drank two more Bloody Marys with Grain Belt snits. Occasionally his voice surged and the other men in the bar set their drinks down to look at him. Everyone knew who he was, of course, and there seemed to be dueling sympathies in their attention. On the one hand, they must have admired his tragedy, and on the other, pitied his churlishness.

In a lull during their breakfast Noah said, “I’m getting married.”

“That’s what your sister tells me.” Olaf shifted his gaze from the bar back to the ceiling and blew a stream of smoke. “Getting hitched,” he continued under his breath.

Noah slid his plate forward and swiveled to face his father. “In October. I hope you’ll be there.”

Instead of answering, Olaf summoned Mel. “The boy’s settling down, partner,” he announced. “Tying the knot.”

“The slipknot?”

“That’s the one,” Olaf said.

“God help him,” Mel replied.

“I’d offer to buy you a drink,” Olaf said, turning his attention back to Noah, “but you’ve already got your juice.” Instead he motioned for another Bloody Mary. Mel set about making it. “A slipknot, it’s like a noose,” Olaf explained. “It’s a joke, boy.”

“A good one, too.”

Noah remembered looking his father in the eye and seeing nothing but a boozy vacancy. The old man’s drunkenness had always struck Noah as cumulative. Olaf had not spent nights in the hoosegow, he’d not crashed the family car into light poles or missed mortgage payments because his paycheck had been squandered here at the Freighter. Despite this, the years had surely added up to something, to some soggy history that diminished the old man. Noah had an impulse to scold him but did not. Instead he rose to leave. “I’ve got a flight,” he explained. “I hope you’ll make the wedding.” He put his hand on his father’s shoulder in a gesture that should have been reversed. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Olaf looked again over the top of his glasses. “I’ll see you in October.”

“Y
OU READY FOR
another beer?” The bartender’s voice came as if from that morning years ago. He cleared the empty basket, took measure of Noah’s shot glass on the bar.

“No, thanks.”

“I swear, if you weren’t the spitting image of that old cuss, I’d suspect you of lying.” He pointed at the whiskey.

“Sorry,” Noah said. “I appreciate the thought. I’ve just never been able to stomach the stuff.”

“No harm,” he said, then placed the tab on the bar.

“Are there any boats tonight?” Noah asked.

Mel looked at the clock on the wall. “
Erindring
’s outbound in an hour. Load of coal for the good people of Stockholm.”

Noah laid payment on the tab. “Does he ever come down here anymore? You ever see him?”

“Your old man? Nah. I haven’t seen him in what, five years? Maybe longer.”

“I’ll tell him you said hello. Thanks for everything.”

“Anytime, now. Good-night.”

A
T THE BREAKWATER
he listened to the canal water lapping against the wall. Herring gulls squawked and rolled and dove on invisible currents above the aerial bridge. Every couple of minutes one would pull up on the breakwater and hop toward Noah with a cocked head. They appeared famished and well fed at the same time. Their iridescent eyes glistened in the lamplight. He had always loved watching the gulls and thought there was something majestic about them up here, something very different from the scavenger gulls back in Boston. Here the gulls fished first and begged only after the smelt had gone out.

He looked over the breakwater wall, caught his shadowy reflection in the waves, and wondered how many times during the last twenty-four hours he’d tried to remember his father’s aged face. Even as Noah had replayed the memories of that morning years ago in the Freighter, he had not quite been able to summon it.

The last of the gulls flew into the harbor, and he turned to head back. A light rain now mixed with the fog, and the temperature seemed to be falling. Not fifty paces to his left the foyer of the maritime museum was still lit. He approached the entrance and saw that it was open for another half hour. Inside, the split-level entryway was covered with posters and artifacts representing the Great Lakes shipping industry. He took the ramp up, which led into a large room with windows overlooking the canal. But for the person sitting behind the information desk, Noah was alone in the museum.

A crumpled lifeboat hung suspended from the ceiling on the edge of the main room. Next to it one of the anterooms advertised itself as the
RAGNARØK EXHIBIT
. Noah ventured in. A montage of photographs hung on the wall, and his father’s image glared back from two. The first took Noah’s breath away. It was an eighteen-by-twelve-inch black-and-white of the crew of the
Rag
. They huddled dockside in front of the black-hulled freighter during a late-winter snow squall. Taken in March 1967, the day of her first cruise that shipping season, it reminded Noah of countless other departures. Most of the thirty faces in the photograph were blurred in the snow or hidden by the wool collars of the crew’s standard-issue peacoats, but the image of his father’s gaze—unblemished by the snow and unhidden by his collar—was clear. The placard beside the photo said:
THE CREW OF THE ILL-FATED SUPERIOR STEEL SHIP SS RAGNARØK, MARCH 1967. THE SHIP IS AT BERTH AT THE SUPERIOR STEEL DOCKS IN DULUTH HARBOR. THE RAG WOULD FOUNDER IN A GALE OFF ISLE ROYALE EIGHT MONTHS LATER. TWENTY-SEVEN OF HER THIRTY HANDS WERE LOST.
It also listed, in parentheses, each of the men, from left to right, front to back.

Noah recognized the second photograph, taken of the three survivors. Luke Lifthrasir lay on a four-handled gurney being carried up the glazed boulder beach, his gauze-wrapped arm raised triumphantly in a frostbitten fist. Two men in Coast Guard uniforms tended to Bjorn Vifte, who sat huddled under a wool blanket. Noah’s father sat in the edge of the picture, alone, his shoulders slumped over his knees, the small of his back resting against an ancient cedar tree that grew from a cleft in the bedrock. Blood frozen in parallel lines stained his cheek. In the background, a photographer aimed his camera at the same wrecked lifeboat that hung on display from the ceiling in the next room. The second placard read:
THE THREE SURVIVORS OF THE WRECK OF THE SS RAGNARØK, ASHORE AT LAST, HAT POINT, WAUSWAUGONING BAY, LAKE SUPERIOR. NOVEMBER 6TH, 1967
.

Noah toured the rest of the museum like a somnambulist. A collection of ship models and more photographs chronicling the nautical history of Lake Superior filled one room. Recovered relics from Great Lake shipwrecks—forks, lanterns, life vests, a teakettle, a sextant, a compass, an oil can, a coal shovel, a brass bell—lined the glass cases that circled another exhibit. A row of small rooms replicated the cabins of different ships, a sort of timeline of living conditions aboard Great Lakes freighters. A steam-turbine tugboat engine, circa 1925, twenty feet tall, rose between the split-level entry. And the museum’s centerpiece, a model pilothouse complete with an antique wooden wheel, a chart room, and a brass Chadburn set to full steam, sat in the middle of the main hall.

From behind the wheel Noah looked out onto the lake. Although it was dark, he could see through the bare branches of a maple tree. Beyond the canal breakwaters and the channel lights the lake disappeared into an even deeper darkness. To his left, he knew, the hills stretched above town, shrouded in a chrysalis of late-autumn mizzle. And behind him the aerial bridge loomed like a skeleton.

Back outside, he resumed his spot at the breakwater. He heard the
Erindring
before he saw it. The ship blasted its horn, giving notice to the bridge-keeper. One long blow, like a cello’s moan, followed by two short blows was responded to in kind. The warning arms dropped on either side of the bridge, and it rose. A couple minutes later and the freighter was in full view, pushing through the pewter lake fog and faint harbor lights. It moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, and Noah marveled—as he had maybe a thousand times before—at the original notion of a million pounds of floating steel.

A faint hum accompanied the steaming ship under the bridge as it eased its way through the channel, past Noah, who had walked out to the end of the breakwater. The muted drone and eerie slapping of water against the hull accentuated a silence that seemed to grow as the ship inched its way nearer the end of the pier. When the first quarter of the bow passed, it was quiet enough that he could hear two men standing on the pilothouse deck, speaking a language he didn’t recognize. One of the men tossed his cigarette into the lake and nodded at Noah. In another few seconds the stern was even with the end of the breakwater and the hum replaced by water gurgling up from the prop. For five minutes Noah watched the ship until it disappeared into the eventide.

N
OAH STOOD AT
the breakwater thinking of Natalie long after the
Erindring
had passed into the darkness. After he had hung up with his father the day before, he sat on the edge of the bed in dumb disbelief. He heard his wife come into the bedroom, and when he looked up she was leaning against the door frame in the oversized Dartmouth sweatshirt she wore around the house.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“My father.”

She stepped fully into the bedroom and stood before Noah. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s sick.” Noah looked back down. “I told him I’d come home.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“No.” He stood and put the phone back in the bedside cradle. “It’s probably not a very good idea. But why would he call? I have to go, don’t I?”

“Noah, you haven’t seen him since our wedding.” There was a tone of incrimination in her voice.

“He’s old, Nat, and this sounded serious.”

“If you think you should go, then I guess you will.” With those cryptic words she walked down to the basement for her treadmill workout. Noah was too stunned—both by Natalie’s reaction and his conversation with his father—to follow her.

Later, as Noah packed, Natalie lay in bed with her laptop open and files spread around her. She hadn’t said much all night, and the weight of her silence was troubling. “Want to tell me what’s on your mind?” he said.

She clapped her laptop shut and gathered her files. The look she gave him could have cut glass. “You don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?”

“There are other things now, Noah.”

He looked at her, confused.

“Never mind,” she said, leaning over to turn out her lamp. “If your father’s ill, you should go. I hope it’s not serious.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“It’s nothing. Forget it.”

“Hey,” he persisted, going around to her side of the bed, “why aren’t you talking to me?”

“I said it’s nothing,” she said and pulled the covers over her head.

Noah knew her dismissals to be final, so he let her go to sleep. It was only later, while he lay in bed himself, unable to sleep, that he understood her chagrin: It was time to try to get pregnant again.

Natalie was a woman wholly given to her convictions. Because just about everything in her life had gone according to plan—by virtue of some good luck but more hard work—their inability to have a child had become, for her, less a thing to puzzle over than
proof that she had exhausted all her good fortune. Her fatalism drove Noah crazy, and he had recently become apathetic about their travails. Though he resented their childlessness, he simply did not see it as a reason to cease with the rest of his life. Oftentimes, it seemed, she did.

He tossed and turned, weighing his father’s phone call and all that it portended against his wife’s sorrow. He thought of waking her, of telling her that he understood why she was so sad but that he had to brave this homecoming. He thought of taking her in his arms, hoping his embrace would prove his devotion.

But he didn’t wake or embrace her. He lay awake nearly all night, falling asleep only after the first hints of light had filtered into the bedroom. When he woke a couple of hours later she had already left for work.

N
OW HE WALKED
back to his car and drove up Superior Street to the Olde Hotel, where he checked into a lakeview room. Natalie had never visited Duluth, and he was glad of her absence now. It seemed not only right to be alone but a relief.

He dropped his bag on the settee and walked over to the window and spread the curtains. He knew he should call her. She would expect a call.

He called Ed instead. Three years ago Noah had quit teaching history at a Brookline prep school and bought an antiquarian map business he’d seen advertised in the back of
Harper’s
. His single employee was a retired marine colonel. Ed was dependable to a fault and was looking after the store while Noah was away. Over the phone he reassured Noah that he needn’t worry, said he’d call if he had questions, and told Noah firmly to go take care of his ailing father.

Outside, the rain had stiffened and was washing away the fog. Noah kept his eyes on the lake while he dialed home.

“Hey,” he said, “it’s me.”

“It’s you,” she said, the sound of her voice taut with disappointment.

“I’m in Duluth. I got here about three hours ago, too late to drive up to Misquah. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“You didn’t.”

“I got a hotel room. I’ll drive up there in the morning.”

He noticed a light gathering form out on the lake.

“Okay,” she said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine. Listen, Nat, I’m sorry about how I left.”

“It’s not how you left, Noah. It’s
that
you left.” She took a deep breath. “But I think you know that.”

It was his turn to take a deep breath. What could he say to appease her? “I said I was sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize.” He heard the refrigerator crunching out ice, her glass of water before bed.