Safe from the Sea (13 page)

“We came about at ten fifteen, the fire starts at about ten thirty, you factor an hour of powerless drifting in, and we’d have hit the
rocks about eleven thirty. From Canoe Rocks we drift a little farther southwest for a half hour or so and sink exactly here,” he said, thumping a black X scrawled on the chart with his thumb.

Noah sat up, retraced the path his father suggested, and leaned in to have a closer look at the sounding marked on the chart. “It says here the water’s only five hundred and eighty-two feet deep. I thought the
Rag
was deeper than that.”

Olaf pointed at the fine print along the upper edge of the map. “This chart was published in 1964. After the
Rag
sank, during the investigation they spent a lot of time using sonar equipment and whatnot trying to determine the exact whereabouts of the wreckage. They discovered the original soundings were off a couple hundred feet.”

“No small error,” Noah said.

“Discrepancies on these lake charts only mattered if they were in shallow water, in the harbors and along the coasts. The difference between five hundred and eighty feet and eight hundred feet doesn’t mean much to a boat drafting twenty-five.”

They both sat back and sighed and turned to face each other. After an awkward second Olaf looked away and patted Noah’s knee before trying to stand up. The edge of the couch was lower than the chair, though, and he couldn’t get his legs to lift him. Rather than trying to get up again, he let himself slide back into the cushions.

Noah had stood impulsively and found himself hovering above his father for the second time in as many hours. Instead of lingering this time, he walked around the table and looked for something to distract them from the awkward moment. A couple of seconds seemed like a couple of minutes before he finally grabbed the afghan and spread it over his father’s legs.

“Thanks,” Olaf said, then gestured toward the stove. “Is there room in there for another log?”

Noah opened the stove door, knew another log wouldn’t make any difference. He took one from the wood box and tossed it in. When it hit the smoldering pile already in the stove, the logs collapsed and spread across the bottom of the stove in a bright, pumpkin-orange flash. The new log caught fire immediately.

“Close the damper a bit, too, would you?” Olaf asked.

Noah did. As he stood there within a few feet of the open door, watching the bark on the split oak disappear into ash, he figured the temperature in the cabin must have been at least eighty-five degrees, maybe ninety.

He closed the stove door and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. “If there was an explosion, isn’t it possible that
that
was the cause of a rupture in the hull?” Noah asked.

“Sure, sure,” Olaf said. “In fact, I’d be surprised if serious damage hadn’t been done by an explosion, the fire alone, even. But the fatal blow was the rocks.”

“How do you know?”

“It wasn’t more than a couple minutes after I got back on deck that we ran aground,” Olaf said. “Imagine that big boat butting against a line of rocks, each as big as a house. The jolt knocked me right off my feet. We were lucky we’d had time to get ourselves reattached to our lifelines. If we hadn’t, we would’ve been in the water—and probably dead.

“You see, when the boat’s adrift in the open water, the waves are up against a moving target. When the boat’s beached on the rocks, in the shoal water, they’re free to pound whatever’s there. I remember trying to get my feet back under me and the water crashing up over the deck. I didn’t have a whole lot of hope right then, that’s for damn sure.”

“It must have been terrifying,” Noah said, imagining himself in the same situation. “What do you think about at a moment like that?”

Olaf looked at him from the corner of his eye. “Have you ever been in a rumble?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Like a fistfight?”

“Yeah. You and another guy mixing it up.”

“No.”

“I’ve been in one fight,” Olaf said. “In Westby, Wisconsin, of all places. I was sixteen years old. I remember because it was the year I won the ski jumping tournament down there—you won there once, too, didn’t you?” he asked but didn’t wait for an answer. “We were in one of the bars in town after the tournament, and some local guy got it into his head that I was trying to move on his girl—which I probably was.” Olaf smiled. “He cussed me out, and before I knew it, he’d cracked my head with a beer bottle. It wasn’t a clean hit, but it was enough to knock me down. Then he sets to work kicking, punching, crashing bar chairs over my shoulders every time I tried to get on my feet. I didn’t know what in the hell had hit me, but I knew I had to get up. I thought that son of a bitch might’ve been crazy enough to kill me.

“The point is, I’d been getting the shit knocked out of me: the walk across the deck, the time on the open boat deck, running aground and taking that pounding, that all adds up. It would’ve been easy to just cling to that icy deck and hope.”

“Why didn’t you give up?”

“I guess there was some instinct to survive,” Olaf said. “And I knew I probably wouldn’t if I just sat there holding on for dear life.”

“Did you think you were going to die?”

Olaf thought about it for a second. “I don’t suppose I thought I was going to die, no. It was more a matter of thinking I wouldn’t survive. There’s a difference, or it seemed so at the time.

“We were only hung up on the rocks for a couple of minutes, but that was time enough for me to put some perspective on our situation. We had no engine, no engine
crew
, no steerage, no communication between ends of the ship, no communication at all, with anyone. We were thirty miles from safe harbor, stuck on a rock in the middle of Lake Superior, it was below zero, a near whiteout, with fifteen-foot waves. And we were already soaked to the bone.

“Now, I don’t care if you have two minutes or two days to make decisions when you’re in a mess like that, the fact is, there just aren’t a whole lot of options. You asked me if I thought I was going to die. If I’d had the time, I might’ve. But I didn’t. I had to decide whether to launch the lifeboats or get back with the rest of the crew on the bow.”

“Why would you have done that?”

“They were my crewmates,” Olaf said without hesitation. “I was an officer aboard a ship in peril.”

The notion of the crew’s importance touched an unidentifiable nerve in Noah. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Crossing back to the bow would have meant leaving the lifeboats. If you leave the lifeboats, you’ve got positively no chance.”

“That’s true
if
you know the boat is sinking. We didn’t.”

Noah shook his head. “You didn’t know you were sinking? You’re on the rocks, the lifeboats are ten feet from where you’re standing, half the crew is already dead—probably dead, anyway—and you hesitate to get off the ship?”

“They were my goddamn crewmates, I wanted to save them more than I wanted to save myself. How could I have helped anyone by getting into a lifeboat and rowing into the goddamn night?”

“How did you intend to save them by leaving behind the only means of escape?”

Olaf was clearly riled. “Oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe I thought there would be safety in numbers, maybe I thought one of those lifeboats out on the open water would have been suicide—I mean, hell, it nearly was. Or maybe I just didn’t know what to do. There’s no manual for surviving the end of the world.” He balled both hands into lopsided fists and pounded them against his legs.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he concluded. “No sooner had the four of us met back on the deck than we came off the rocks. As soon as we did, I knew exactly what we had to do.”

Noah got up again, went to the kitchen, and wiped his face with a dish towel. Outside, it was dark, and Noah caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. His hair was messy and on end, and he looked drunk. He hadn’t shaved since he’d left Boston, and his stubble darkened his chin. His eyes were slack but bright. There was fog on the outside of the window, and he figured it would have been frost if not for the heat inside.

“Understand something,” Olaf said, “until we got off the rocks, I still had the notion that everything was going to come together. I still thought—and it’s easy to see how ludicrous this sounds in hindsight—that somehow we could come out of it, you know? That we could avoid the end. Stupid, but it’s true.

“And another thing, contrary to conventional wisdom, when you’re on the edge of life—like that—and falling off, you don’t stop and reminisce. At least I didn’t. What you do is look for something to hold on to.”

Noah hoisted himself up onto the kitchen counter and crossed his legs. “I guess,” he said but didn’t understand. The notion that the old man’s crew of nobodies should take precedence over his mother and sister and himself still didn’t make sense.

“And maybe there was a chance up until we came free, you know? Maybe everything going through my head wasn’t just fear or indecision.”

Noah thought,
He’s pleading. Maybe not to me, but he is.

“It’s all the same, though, like I said, because when we did come off the rocks, all I wanted to do was get off that goddamn boat. It was the only thing left to do.”

Noah looked up at him. “So that’s when you knew she was going down.”

“There wasn’t much doubt about it. I mean, despite the fact that we couldn’t see a thing, you could tell she was wallowing.” He paused. “Whenever I imagine what she must have looked like from God’s view, all I can see is the dying light.”

“How fast did it happen?”

“Can’t say for sure, but between the four of us we couldn’t have gotten the lifeboat launched in any less than fifteen or twenty minutes, and considering how far from the rocks she ended up, it was probably a little longer than that.”

“Not enough time for any of the other ships to get there?”

“No way.”

“Or the Coast Guard?”

“What were they going to do even if they’d been able to get there? Searching for us on a night like that would’ve been like looking for a cotton ball in a cloud. They never would have found us.”

“And the rest of the crew?” Noah asked, almost in a whisper.

“Don’t know what happened,” Olaf said and put his head down.

They sat in silence for a while before Noah slid off the counter and went back to the armchair. “You look tired,” he said.

“I’m always tired.”

“I’m tired, too,” he said, looking at his watch to find that it was only six o’clock. “Why don’t you get some sleep?”

“I think I will,” Olaf said. “Give me a hand, would you?”

Noah skirted around the coffee table and took his father by the elbow. His arm was thin and soft. Noah helped him around the table.

“Gotta hit the head,” Olaf said.

“Me, too.”

“You know, I never thought much about it, but the worst part of the whole goddamn night came after we got the lifeboat in the water.”

They walked to the door and stood in the dusky light coming off the kitchen, pushing their feet into a pile of unlaced boots by the door.

“
That’s
the real story,” Olaf said.

“Why don’t you save that part for another time, huh?”

“It was a hell of a thing, you know? A hell of a thing.”

“I’ve no doubt about that,” Noah said as he pushed the door open. The air was biting, and no sooner did Noah step outside than his body drew taut and a shiver rippled up his back and through his shoulders.

They walked to the edge of the glow from the house and stood next to each other beside a tree, their shoulders almost touching.

“Already stars in the west,” Olaf said, pointing through the trees. “It’s going to clear up.”

“Hopefully warm up, too.”

“What, it doesn’t get cold in Boston?”

“Of course it does, it’s just that we usually hold off on the snow until winter.”

“Ah, hell, that wasn’t snow.”

“It looked like snow to me. It got me thinking about your dog.” Noah could picture Vikar somewhere in the middle of the woods, wet and bloody-muzzled, devouring a freshly slain rabbit.

“Don’t worry about him. He’s been roaming these woods for a long time now,” Olaf said as he climbed the three rickety wooden steps back into the house. Noah held him steady by the elbow.

When he opened the door, Noah could feel the warm air surge out of the house. The blustery evening had cleared Noah’s head—had invigorated him—and when he stepped back into the house, he thought it smelled like boiling rutabaga. It was a smell that reminded him of his mother and the dreaded Friday-night fish boils of his childhood. He was instantly sapped again.

He kicked off the boots and sat back down on the couch while Olaf filled a glass jar with water from the pitcher. He drank it, then filled it again, took two chalky tablets from a canister on the counter, and dropped them into the jar. Finally he dug into his mouth and pulled his teeth out and dropped them in the jar.

“What?” Noah said. “Since when do you have dentures?”

“Six years ago. I hate the goddamn things,” Olaf said, picking up the jar and holding it to the light. His lips seemed baggier without his teeth, and it made him look even older.

Noah ran his tongue across the front of his own teeth. “I didn’t know you had them.”

“I guess you wouldn’t.”

“I guess not.”

Noah rolled the chart back up and returned it to the shelf. Standing at the window, he thought,
That’s it then. That’s the dead come back to life
. “I’ll have some dreams tonight,” he said.

Olaf set his teeth on the counter. “You’re lucky enough to still dream, huh?”

SIX

What a sight the old man made. On one end of the couch his bushy-rimmed head rested on a pillow. A collage of quilts covered him, leaving only his clownish feet—snug in thick wool socks—dangling over the other end of the sofa. His arms were folded over his chest, the sleeves of his union suit coming apart at the cuffs. He might have looked like this in a coffin, Noah thought as he walked past, slid on a pair of boots, and stepped outside.

A ribbon of beguiling fog curled up the trail from the lake, and he followed it down. Pockets of complete darkness still haunted the woods on either side of the path, heavy, wet, and eerie in a polka-dotted dawn. He could see the lightness above the lake and the still-black water exhaling mist. He thought again of Natalie’s arriving today.