Safe from the Sea (9 page)

The first couple of necklaces he pulled out of the case had agates the size of Ping-Pong balls attached to thick gold chains. Noah asked if he had anything with a smaller agate, something on a silver chain perhaps. As he said it the absurdity of buying her an
agate
hit him. Just as he thought it, though, the man behind the counter pulled out a pearl-sized, emerald-green agate attached to a very thin, very pretty silver chain. “This one’s actually a real Superior agate,” he said, putting on a pair of glasses and reading from the little tag. “An Agate Beach agate. Not all of them are.” He winked.

“How much is it?”

He checked the tag again. “Says here thirty-five dollars.”

Noah would have paid ten times the amount. “I’ll take it,” he said. “And while you’re at it, how about a pound of that salmon over there?”

II.
The
Rag Is
Burning

FIVE

It wasn’t until Noah got back to the house that he remembered the chain, and he might not have remembered it then if not for the padlock on the shed. The shake shingles and cedar siding that had been so inconspicuous at first—sitting under the overgrown trees, among the overgrown grass and bunchberry bushes—had taken on a new significance with the knowledge that the shack was doubling as his mother’s tomb.

The smoke coughing from the tin chimney on the house smelled wintry. It was a good smell, clean and faint. As it rose and dispersed into the flurries, Noah forgot about his mother’s ashes and felt an urge to hunker down and spend his afternoon with a big book—a book of myths or the biography of a king. The thought of bundling up and heading back to the gulch to finish with the oak seemed not only arduous but a waste of time. There was no way his father would live to burn a tenth of the wood that was already split and stacked around the house.

Inside, Noah kicked off his boots, set them on a braided rug beside the door, and hung his coat on a peg. He put the smoked fish in the refrigerator.

“He’s back,” Olaf said, setting a magazine on his lap.

“Hey. How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine.”

The fire was searing, he could tell, not only from the heat pouring out of the stove but from the faint whine and pinging of its cast-iron flanks. Noah took off his turtleneck and tossed it into the spare bedroom.

“Have any trouble with the truck?”

“No. But I forgot the chain. Sorry.”

“I’m going to need that chain. And soon.”

Noah sensed more than heard agitation in his father’s voice. “I can go back and get it.”

“Next time you’re in town. You’ve been there more in the last handful of days than I have in the last handful of months.”

Noah sat across from his father. “I talked to Solveig today. She’s going to come as soon as she can.”

“I asked you not to call her.”

“I can’t leave her in the dark even if you can. She’s worried about you and she loves you and she wants to help.”

“I guess that’s her prerogative. Though I don’t see why it’s necessary. She’s got a busy life.”

“We’ve all got busy lives.”

“I guess between your wife and your sister coming, we’ll just be a regular meeting place.”

“I guess we will.”

Olaf set the magazine he’d been reading on the coffee table and settled back into the sofa.

“What’s that?” Noah said.

“Magazine article Luke gave me. You remember Luke?”

“Your partner in survival. Who could forget Luke?”

“He’s a good man.” Olaf held the magazine up. “Anyway, it’s about shipwreck property. Can’t make the first bit of sense of it.”

“You thinking about diving for the booty left on the
Rag
?”

Olaf declared, “Rest assured of this, nobody’s ever salvaging the
Rag
. She’s too deep.”

“You know, I always wanted to hear the story from you. About the
Rag
, I mean.”

Olaf looked down into his coffee. “I wouldn’t know how to tell it.”

“Start in Two Harbors.”

“It’s a long story, Noah.”

“And we’re sitting in the middle of the woods. It’s snowing. We’ve got nowhere to go.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“It was snowing then, too,” Noah coaxed.

Olaf took a deep breath and looked squarely at Noah. “We took twelve tons of taconite,” he began. “It was the first mate’s job to oversee loading, but you knew that.”

Noah nodded.

“Well, it snowed like a son of a bitch, and before we could start with the hatch covers we had to shovel her clear. We got started, but before even one of them was clear, Jan called us off.”

“It was the fuel line, right?” Noah asked, knowing perfectly well that it was.

“On the trip up, we noticed a leak. It wasn’t too bad at a glance, and we managed to get from Toledo to Two Harbors without any trouble, but after we unloaded the coal and were refueling, the bilge started to fill with diesel. That’s when Jan got jittery.

“I wasn’t ever a spook, but something in the back of my mind got a little itchy when they told us to replace the fuel line. I remember
thinking it was strange that the higher-ups okayed a repair like that so late in the season. I mean, their priority was always bottom-line tonnage.” He paused, scratching the back of his head. “I chalked it up to the engine being new and the brass just not knowing how reckless they could be. But I was still uneasy about it.

“Twenty-two hours we sat there while a contractor put the new line in. We gave the crew fourteen hours’ leave and watched them all hump into Two Harbors.”

“I bet they did their best to hump once they got there, too.” Olaf smiled. “They usually did.”

“In Two Harbors, though?”

“You’d be surprised.” Olaf smiled again, shook his head, and then turned more serious. “Some of those boys lived up there. Bjorn did. He had a baby girl and a sweet little wife. I’ll tell you what, he was off that goddamn boat in five minutes.

“The boys who didn’t live there got pissed in the bars up on Willow Street. I’d venture to guess that more than one or two of those fellas had a pretty good time that night.” Olaf smiled again, as if to admit that despite his age, the memories of those little Great Lake ports, the run-down pubs that filled them, and the sailor-loving girls who knew the ship schedules like their multiplication tables hadn’t escaped him even now.

“The next morning, when they came back aboard, it was like watching a zombie parade. I remember the days before I met your mother, before I became an officer, too, and the shit we used to get ourselves into.” He smiled again. “Those boys knew how to dig it up. They were all red-eyed and pale, sweating in spite of the weather. Goddamn.

“The boys who lived up there, though, they all looked happy as clams. Walking lightly, you know,” he said and winked. “But not Bjorn.
I didn’t know him well, but he looked like two different people at once. You could see he was happy—must have been thinking of his little girl and wife—but he also looked resentful as hell, probably about shipping out again. He was one of those guys who got tricked into his life on the boats. He was just dumb enough not to be able to do something else and just smart enough to hate what he did. There were a lot of guys like that on the Lakes.”

Noah scanned his memory for the men he knew from his father’s trade. Having had it put so simply, he could recognize the split in many of them. Some of the men, like Luke, stood out. They were single-minded types, gruff and bigger than life. But the majority of the men he remembered—men from his childhood cruises on the boats with his father and from his time slumming down in Canal Park with his high school buddies—were just ordinary guys.

“I’ll bet you put them right to work,” Noah said.

“Of course. We had to get the deck cleared and only had a short window of time to do it.”

“Because of the weather?”

“One front had already passed—the one that left a foot and a half of snow on our deck—and another one was coming, a nor’easter. We knew the seas would be rough and that it’d be cold as hell, so we wanted to get loaded and in front of the weather. It was no fun to be out there latching the hatches when it got below zero.”

“Didn’t the forecast warrant sitting tight for a few hours?” Noah asked.

“We could see it coming, we could feel it, too, but we never would’ve backed down on the basis of the weather reports we were getting.”

“Were they wrong?”

“Not wrong,” Olaf said. “When the wind turned around and the
flurries started out of the northeast, we all got that sinking feeling. When the lake started crashing over the breakwater and the harbor water got choppy, we knew it was going to be a mean day, but it would’ve taken more than we saw to keep us in port.

“Anyway, we knew we could hug the lee of the Minnesota shore if we had to. There were also three ships ahead of us, a French freighter full of lumber . . .”

“The
Lachete
,” Noah said.

Olaf looked at Noah sideways. “Yeah, the
Lachete
. There was also one of our boats out there, the
Heldig
, and one of the boats from the Cleveland Cliffs fleet.” He tapped his bushy lip, thinking.

“The
Prudence
,” Noah said.

“Was it you there or me?” Olaf asked.

Noah grinned.

“All three of those ships were updating us on the weather.”

“And each of them talked about seeking shelter from the time they left port. What did they tell you that made you think getting started was a good idea?”

“It didn’t matter what
they
told us. We were going to go or not go on the basis of Jan’s gut, not on what some goddamn Frenchman had to say about the wind.”

“What about the
Heldig
? Didn’t you have any confidence in her?”

“You see, it was never a question of the confidence we had in the reports the other boats were sending. They were instruments, that’s it. It was always just a simple question: Did we feel like the
Rag
could handle what the lake was giving? If the answer was no for the
Heldig
or the
Prudence
or any of the other boats out on the Lakes, it didn’t necessarily mean it was no for us.” There was no vanity, no posturing, in what his father said. Noah knew this as simply as he knew the story itself.

Olaf gazed over his shoulder at the stove.

“Don’t tell me you’re cold.”

“No, no,” Olaf said, looking up at him. “I was just thinking about how it felt to be on that ship,” he said. “Standing on the bridge, even in the worst weather, it was easy to stick your chest out—to puff it up—because we knew that no matter what was in front of us, the
Rag
was behind us.

“She was six hundred and ten feet long. Sixty-two feet abeam. The hull alone—hull number 768—weighed five thousand tons. Loaded as she was, there were more than eighteen thousand tons—
eighteen thousand tons—
of steel lugging it up that lake under two thousand horsepower,” Olaf said, raising an eyebrow. “The bridge was forty feet above the surface of the lake, and still we had to keep the wipers going in order to see out the damn window. Despite all this we were making better than seven knots. Under normal conditions and with a normal load we would’ve made twelve knots, thirteen on a good day. But seven was a hell of a pull, all things considered.”

“Seven knots makes for a long day up Superior,” Noah said.

“Better than sixteen hours to Rock of Ages light.”

“As opposed to?”

“Ah, nine or ten,” Olaf said with a wave of the hand. “The point is she wasn’t normal.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean she shouldn’t have been making that time. The other ships were thirty or forty miles ahead of us and they weren’t making a third of the time we were.” Again he shook his head. “But that’s just how the
Rag
was—above the weather, above the seas, those things just didn’t bother her, they didn’t stop her.”

“Why?”

Without a touch of embarrassment Olaf said, “She was a goddess, I guess.

“I remember storms she weathered that would’ve sunk other ships in a second. On Erie we sailed through the worst lightning storm I ever saw. Took two bolts right on deck. Lost one coaming thirty miles from safe harbor. The pumps were working that night.

“Another time we hit a real beast coming out of Whitefish Bay, heading up to Marquette. When we got to the Soo they were all set to close her down until it blew over, but when they saw we were next in line to pass, they let us up. Eight or ten boats had to wait out a twelve-hour blow in the St. Mary’s River while we chugged out onto the lake. Now
that
was a storm we might’ve sat out.

“I remember eating dinner that night. We had pork chops and applesauce—that’s it. Nothing that had to be cooked on the stovetop because we were rolling too goddamn much. The guy that did the baking was named Ed Butterfield—we called him Butter—used to put together this delicious rye bread. When the weather got rough, we’d soak thick slices of it in water and stick them under our plates to keep them from sliding around. It was an old trick. The next morning, when things calmed down a bit, I remember watching the porters hacking it off with hammers and spatulas.”

“Did you ever wait on the weather?”

“Sure we did, just not as often as other boats. Once or twice every couple of years we’d sit one out, but it took some kind of hell for that.”

“Should you have sat it out the night she wrecked?”

Olaf guffawed. “The winds were supposed to shift more to the east. If they had, we knew we wouldn’t want to face the middle of the lake. But we also knew we wouldn’t have to, see? We knew that if push came to shove we could take shelter in the lee of Isle Royale.” He was snaking his arm—as if it were the ship—into the imaginary estuary between the Canadian shore and the long finger of Isle Royale.
“It was an uncommon course but one we’d taken before. And even if the wind shifted sooner rather than later, we knew we could muscle our way to safety.

“By the time we passed Rock of Ages light we’d been at it with that goddamn lake for almost seventeen hours. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and snowing so hard we couldn’t see the railing around the pilothouse deck.