Safe from the Sea (20 page)

“It’s amazing what people are capable of in times of desperation,” Noah said.

“Listen, the four of us might have been able to portage that whole goddamn ship up the Soo, we were so desperate. Far cry from now,” he said, rubbing his biceps.

“I suspect you’re stronger than you think,” Noah said, remembering the barrel in the shed, how the old man must have lifted it onto the workbench.

“Anyway, we were ready to lower it. I ordered Luke and Bjorn into the boat. By then the ship had come about in the storm so the port side of her was taking all the seas. That created a lee for us on starboard. This was both good and bad. Good because it gave us a calmer spot to load the lifeboat, bad because that foundering son of a bitch was going to be right on top of us when we got in the water.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous to lower the lifeboats with guys in it?”

“No more dangerous than anything else that was happening. Normally there wouldn’t be anyone in the boat while it was lowered, no. But I figured there was an awful lot that could go wrong once the boat was in the water, and a couple guys down there to handle things wouldn’t be a bad thing. It was a gamble, sure, but we were so short on odds that it didn’t matter anyway.”

“What did you and Red do once the boat was in the water?”

“We scuttled our asses over the side of that boat, that’s what we
did. Now, if you want to talk about spooky, let’s talk about getting down that ladder. You take the wind, the water, the ice, the fire. You take the darkness. You put it all together and try to imagine hanging over the side of that ship, climbing down to that boat bobbing all over the water.” Here Olaf stopped, a look of intense concentration on his face. Noah read it as the look of a man trying desperately to remember something he’d worked his whole life at forgetting.

“Did you see Red?”

“Did I see Red, what, go into the water?” He looked away with a surprising suddenness.

“Yeah, did you see anything?”

It was well documented in the annals of the wreck that after Olaf and Red had gone over the side of the ship, first Red, then Olaf, and after they’d passed the fantail deck and the flames without, Red had dropped from the ladder, not to be seen again until his body washed ashore on the rocks at Hat Point. The only scenario ever suggested was that he’d simply lost his footing in the chaos, managed to get hold of a rope once he was in the lake, and then managed to attach himself to the rope and so been towed behind it through the night.

“I did not see him fall.” Olaf faltered. “I did not hear a splash. Or a scream. There was nothing, I didn’t even know he was gone.” He let out a soft moan.

“I sent Red over first, thinking the sooner he was in the lifeboat the safer he’d be. I thought it must be written into my rank. Hell if I knew.”

Again he paused. Longer this time. He looked like a man in a confessional mood.

“I remember getting down that ladder. Rung by rung. Remember passing the decking, feeling the warmth of the fire. I remember the smell. I thought of all those guys in there. Cooked. I felt greedy
for being on that ladder, greedy for being so close to the lifeboat. I didn’t even have much faith in surviving the night, but I was glad of the chance. I still wonder why that chance fell on me. It seemed to me all these years that something more than luck had its hand in it. But for all the many thousand times I’ve replayed it, that’s all I come up with. Dumb luck. I was lucky Jan sent me across the deck. I was lucky to get across the deck, lucky not to have been washed off the deck once we were aft, lucky I didn’t fall from the ladder like Red. Chrissakes, that’s all it was. Luck. Rotten luck.”

“What’s wrong with a little luck in a situation like that?” Noah asked, interpreting his father’s words as an act of contrition.

“Oh, hell, there’s nothing wrong with it. I was damn glad for it. But when it comes time to add it all up, saying you were lucky isn’t a very good explanation.”

“Maybe there’s no need for an explanation. Maybe there
isn’t
one.”

“Maybe not.”

“Did you see him again, I mean before morning?”

“Did I see him again? Jesus Christ, did I ever,” Olaf said, turning his eyes to the ceiling.

“When I got into the boat Luke and Bjorn were already bailing. The lifeboat was twenty feet long, and they were together in the bow. Red was just gone. I turned my headlamp out onto the lake. I was shouting his name. We were already in a mess. The water, it was churning.” He spit his words, made great gestures with his arms, whorling gestures that sufficed as testament to the nature of that lake. “That dark. Couldn’t see a damn thing, not at first. But then he was there. In the water. Behind the lifeboat. I saw him, Noah.”

This fact, to Noah’s knowledge, had never been revealed. Not to the investigators at the NTSB, not to the brass at Superior Steel, not to anyone. “You saw him?”

“I did.”

“Was he dead?”

Olaf closed his eyes slowly. “No,” he said. “I had the headlamp pointing into the lake. Just there, between the lifeboat and the ship, bobbing in the water like a goddamn buoy, old Red. I hollered to him. I saw his hand go up for help. I saw his eyes blinking, for Chrissakes.” He stopped, opened his eyes.

“Did Luke and Bjorn see him?”

“I don’t think so. We’d all looked, but by the time I saw him they were both consumed with what they were doing, they were already working overtime just to keep that boat from capsizing. Goddamn, it was like being lowered into a lion’s cage getting into that boat.” He closed his eyes again. “And there’s Red out on the water.” Olaf lifted his head slowly, opened his eyes, and turned them to the ceiling. He shook his head. “I got the heaving line and made a couple tosses, but it was no good. He had no chance. That’s what I figured anyway. We were taking such heavy seas. That goddamn gale was eating us alive. I needed to help Luke and Bjorn. I took the tiller, hoping to keep us in line with the wind.” He brought his eyes back to Noah. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to save him.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”

“That I saw Red alive? It’s my fault he died. I should have saved him. I should have jumped in after him. Maybe he had broken bones, he was probably hypothermic already. We all were. What do I do? I toss him a line. All he saw was the light from the headlamp and a goddamn
heaving line
coming toward him. I should have done more. I could have done more.”

“Red couldn’t have survived.”

Olaf shot him a cold stare. “We did.”

“You hadn’t fallen from the ladder. You hadn’t fallen into the lake.”

“That’s horseshit. His soul is on me.”

“Jumping in for him, that would have been suicide. There was nothing you could have done.”

Olaf got up. He walked to the door and looked outside.
My god
, Noah thought.
What do you do with a lifetime of that on your mind?

When Olaf came back Noah steered him to the chair.

“And I bet you were sure you couldn’t think less of me,” Olaf said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Letting Red go like that.”

“It’s not your fault. You must know that.”

“You’re wrong. I took a few tugs on that rope once it was in the water. I might have thought about him for a minute. Then it was time to go. Who knows what Luke and Bjorn ever thought.”

“Why is Red more important than the other guys? Why are you lugging his ghost around?”

“None of the others had a chance. Red had a chance. I was his chance.”

They sat silently in the flotsam of his father’s avowal for a half hour. Perhaps longer. The evolution of Olaf’s face in those minutes was like that of a man relieved. Did Noah feel different now? Had history lied?

“Anyway,” Olaf said finally, breaking a silence that had become palpable.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Noah said. He had decided this was true.

“It’s not supposed to.”

They fell silent for another minute. “I always wondered about the others. Why didn’t they ever make a run for the lifeboats?”

Olaf looked out of words, like he couldn’t say another thing. But he did. “Do you know the story of the
Mataafa
?”

“It rings a bell.”

“I think it was 1905. Maybe the worst weather Superior’s ever seen. The
Mataafa
was from the Pittsburgh line. It’s morning, the boat steams out of Duluth. Right away they know they’ve made the wrong choice. So she comes about. Other ships had done the same thing, started only to reenter the harbor. The
Mataafa
, unlike the other boats, towed a barge behind her. She couldn’t get back into safe water, was hung up on the rocks just outside the harbor. There were nine men on the aft end of the ship, the rest of the crew was in the bow decking. They’re all taking a beating. Incredible waves. Wind. The day goes on and half the population of Duluth is on shore watching her wallow. They see a handful of men attempt to cross the deck. Three made it. One of the guys washed over but got back on board. He stayed astern. The water was so rough the Coast Guard couldn’t even get out of the harbor. This ship is sitting literally a couple hundred yards off the shore and nobody can help.

“All night it storms. The temperature drops. Snow piles up. Now hordes of people are lining the shore to see what happens to this ship and her crew. At dawn the seas have settled some, and a rescue boat is dispatched. They make one pass and get the men off the bow. Fifteen of them. When they go back for the guys on the stern, they’re all frozen. Literally encased in ice. Nine of them dead. Frozen to death, you see? They probably could have smelled the bonfires ashore, burning all night long. That’s Superior.

“You asked why nobody else made a run for the lifeboats, and the answer is simple—I don’t know. I don’t know why or even if they thought it would be best to stay put. Maybe Jan had a plan. Maybe he thought there would be a rescue attempt and the odds were better up there. Hell, maybe they
did
try to get back to the lifeboats and simply didn’t make it. It’s impossible to say.

“All I know for sure is we were off that boat. Bjorn and Luke. And Red, somewhere in the water. We were in a mess all over again. Hopeless, I thought. Some light still came from the
Rag
, but mostly it was just us and the darkness. I was on the tiller. and with the wind behind us it didn’t take long before we were a fair distance from the ship.” He stared down at the chart spread across the coffee table. “It seems impossible to me now to think that the whole night he was riding behind us like a goddamn anchor. How he got himself hooked onto that line I’ll never know. Why didn’t it snap? How in the hell did he come crashing up onto that rocky beach in the morning?”

“How did you guys manage?”

“Believe me, we managed nothing. Right away we were bailing water and still we were up to our ankles in it. Not just water, Superior water, water so cold it would’ve hurt to drink. Luke was rowing, trying to keep it between troughs so we’d take less. But it did little good. Too many waves from too many directions. Bjorn was working on the gunwale ice while he bailed.” Again he went silent. Noah didn’t dare to ask any more questions.

“I remember all of it. The cold. The wet. The dark. It should have been impossible for me to notice the glow behind us with all that commotion, but I did. It was like a ghost already. In the snow and sea spray, I could see a hazy light where the ship was. Maybe four hundred yards behind us. The flames, I guess, and whatever onboard lights were still working. That spot just flickered, coming in and out of view as we rode the waves. The farther we got the fainter it got, of course, until it was gone. We rode up a wave and I looked and there was nothing but the night.”

Noah had scooted to the edge of his chair in order to hear better. Olaf’s voice had weakened with each word, or seemed to. By the time he said “night” there was almost no sound at all, just a little parting
of his lips and an indiscriminate wave of his hands. Despite the ebbing and softening of his voice—or maybe because of it—the image of the receding light from the sinking ship resounded in Noah, seemed especially important in light of all the darkness to come.

“The wind was coming from every direction. So was the water,” Olaf continued, his voice now barely more than a whisper. “We were soaked. Every thirty seconds another wave would wash over the gunwales and swamp us. Sometimes they were waves so big I thought we’d sink right under them. Sometimes they were easier. So we kept her afloat. It was like the water wanted us, but the darkness wanted us more. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s the truth. There were times I couldn’t even see the other guys in the boat. I’d yell as loud as I could and they wouldn’t hear me six feet away.”

The utter silence of the house, broken only by the pinging stove and Olaf’s labored breathing, compounded the image of the riotous night in the boat. The old man elbowed himself up on the couch. He rearranged the afghan over his shoulders. He cleared his throat.

“We kept the gunwales clear as we could. Kept from freezing by working so goddamn hard. Somehow we stayed in the boat. I mentioned luck before. No amount of luck earlier in the night measured up to staying alive all night in that mess. By the time morning broke I ought to have learned to believe in God.”

“It truly was a miracle,” Noah said, more to himself than to his father.

But Olaf heard him. “Here’s the thing.” He coughed to clear something in his throat not there. “It’s a whole lot more remarkable-sounding now than it seemed at the time. Maybe that’s obvious, maybe not, but the fact is, for those eight hours it was like we weren’t really there. It was downright impossible that we could be so cold, so wet. That it could be so dark. And even though we were working
hard to stay alive, I suspect that each of us was waiting to die, too. I know I was.

“I’d spend some minutes woolgathering over you kids and your mother all tucked under your quilts at home without realizing that my hands were so cold I could hardly grip the tiller. I wanted to say good-night so badly, wanted to touch each of your foreheads the way I always did. When I’d snap out of it, it was like I’d been shot. All the pain would surge up, all the panic. But just as quick I’d be back in some other trance, thinking about getting ready for church when I was a tyke back in Norway, thinking about my mother pulling the curlers from her hair. And the whole time we were just frantically working, rowing and hammering and bailing. I suppose I kept at it with thoughts of all of you because I knew that any minute the boat would heave me out into the lake and that would be it. That would be the end.” He closed his eyes. Rested.