The Lifeboat: A Novel (11 page)

A minute or so passed. The black line of rough water was now only about twenty-five or thirty boat lengths away. In the distance forks of lightning ripped through the livid sky.

“I’m not forcing anybody,” Hardie said. Then he himself drew one of the splinters. He looked at it without much interest, but I could tell by the faces of the people sitting near him it was a long one. Mr. Nilsson drew next, and from the glazed vacancy of his eyes, I had the sense that he wasn’t entirely aware of what he was doing.

Colonel Marsh was stoic and remote as he took his turn, but Michael Turner made a joke of it, saying, “If I win this lottery, it will be the first thing I’ve ever won in my life.” He was one of the ones who had never had a life vest, which made him appear even thinner and less substantial than he was. No sooner had he taken his turn than he stood up, laughed crazily, and leapt out of the boat. There were four straws left, and one of them was short. I watched Mr. Preston draw and heave a sigh of relief, but the deacon looked panic-stricken as he crawled aft to take his turn. Only he, Sinclair, and Hoffman were left of the men. Hoffman merely shrugged and drew, all the while regarding Hardie with narrowed eyes; again I had the sense that some secret was crossing the air between them. “God help us,” said the deacon. He knelt in the bottom of the boat facing Hardie, his back toward the rest of us, his clenched hands upraised to the violent sky. “O Lord,” he wailed, “I’m willing to sacrifice myself for these dear children of yours, but why is it so hard to do?” He looked wretchedly out at the waves, a quivering incarnation of fear and maybe the dawning realization that “dear children” was not an apt description of his companions in the boat. I blocked my ears to the sound of him and clung harder than ever to Mary Ann. The bare bones of our natures were showing. None of us were worth a spit. We were stripped of all decency. I couldn’t see that there was anything good or noble left once food and shelter were taken away.

The deacon looked with infinite sorrow in Mr. Sinclair’s direction, then took both of the remaining splinters. “I wonder if this counts as suicide,” I heard him say. “I wonder if paradise is forever lost.” He reached around to pat Mr. Sinclair on the back and laid the two splinters out in his open hand, where they were immediately caught by the wind and blown into the sea. The deacon rose slowly to his feet, saying, “The Lord bless you and preserve you.” Then he removed his life vest, which he tossed to Mr. Hardie, and dove into the water and immediately vanished. Mr. Sinclair shouted after him, “Come back! That was to have been mine!” but no one paid him any attention; and when Mr. Sinclair pulled himself up with his extraordinary arms and hauled himself to the boat’s rail, no attempt was made to stop him. The saddest thing about the sacrifice was that it was being made for people such as we. I thought these things imperfectly. Anyway, I was immediately distracted, for it was then that the squall line hit.

NOW I KNEW
why Mr. Hardie had said that the wind up until that point had been nothing but a breeze, but I think even he was unprepared for its force. The little boat was thrown like a nutshell by waves the size of ocean liners. I thought of the deacon and Mr. Sinclair, and how Hardie could have avoided becoming a murderer—yes, that is the word I used—for it seemed to me that the exact number of people in the boat mattered little if at all. We would all die in seconds anyway, and what I regretted most was that I was not to die with my view of human nature intact. I had been allowed to believe in man’s innate goodness for the twenty-two years of my life, and I had hoped to carry the belief with me to my grave. I wanted to think that all people could have what they wanted, that there was no inherent conflict between competing interests, and that, if tragedies had to happen, they were not something mere human beings could control.

I thought these things, but not, that afternoon, in any coherent way. The boat pitched and rolled as it alternately climbed the foamy heights of the waves and then descended into hellish troughs so that we were surrounded on four sides by walls of black water. It was terrifying to see. Mr. Hardie and Mr. Nilsson took up one oar each while the Colonel and Mr. Hoffman struggled with a third. Together they made a valiant effort to keep our nose to the wind, for we could only hope to ride it out, and we grasped at one another the way I grasped at the shreds of my beliefs. Mrs. Grant and Mr. Preston did what they could with the last of the oars, but they were no match for the fury of the storm. Still, I was grateful for their efforts and admired the way they wrestled with the long blades. Despite their lack of effectiveness, neither one of them gave up. With one hand I gripped the seat so as not to be thrown from it like the rider of a wild horse, and with the other I held on to Mary Ann, who was sitting next to me and clutching at me with both hands as though I were the buoyant plank that would save her.

Adding to our distress were the torrential rain that battered us from above and the jagged lightning that split the sky. We could hardly see the length of the boat, so if I were to say that the waves rose to twenty feet or thirty, it would be mere speculation on my part. Hardie later told us that they had reached at least forty feet, but how he knew this I cannot say. Sometimes the boat would crest a wave and hang for an instant before pitching downward from that height like a sled down an icy slope. Our stomachs lurched and heaved when this happened, but sometimes we weren’t so lucky, and the wave would slam into our shoulders and fill the boat with even more water, which was now almost to our knees, but still the little cutter did not sink.

In the minutes before the squall hit, Mr. Hardie ordered a change of oarsmen and passed the empty hardtack tins to Hannah and Isabelle, who immediately started bailing furiously with them. Then he ripped the tops off two of the casks he had been guarding as jealously as if they still held water, and Colonel Marsh and Mr. Hoffman struggled to hold on to the slippery wood as they filled them and emptied them into the ocean. All the while, Hardie made a valiant effort to keep the prow of the boat pointed into the waves while the other oarsmen did their best to help him. The boat was pitching with such fury that only one in five attempts to empty the barrels over the side was successful, but they kept at it, insanely, heroically, and I wondered what we would have done without those five strong men. What if Colonel Marsh had drawn the short straw, or Mr. Nilsson or Hardie himself? Michael Turner had been the oldest of the men by far, and the deacon had been thin and weak; and while Mr. Sinclair had had impressive muscles in his arms, he could not move about the boat or use his legs at all. With a shudder of horror, I realized that it could not be luck that had arranged it so, even if I had not noticed the sleight of hand by which this result had been accomplished. Hardie had left nothing to chance, but had chosen who would live and who would die. I could not rid my mind of the idea that there was evil in that little boat, that it was the devil himself who was keeping me alive.

Not too much time passed before Mr. Hoffman lost hold of his barrel, and it immediately disappeared in the maelstrom. Hardie said not a word, but thrust his oar at Hoffman and tore the covering off the third and last of the containers. This time he kept it for himself, thrusting it into the water and hauling it over the side, but only after I had seen that it contained no rainwater at all, only a small box that Hardie hastily stuffed inside his jacket. This made no impression on me at the time. I thought only that Hardie had done well to make the supply of water last as long as it did.

Only one other event stands out against the background of horror of that terrible storm. The dark day turned into an even darker night. The rain was relentless. It was as if the sea and sky had merged. Still, the boat rose up and either plummeted down or crashed into the crests of the waves as they broke. Despite the sickening feeling of falling into a bottomless void, I thanked God and Mr. Hardie every time we were spared a deluge of water upon our heads.

I was giving thanks for another safe slide down when there was a resounding thud against the hull of the boat and a burst of unintelligible shouting from those sitting on the starboard rail. Hardie stopped bailing for a moment to inquire what the fuss was about. “We’ve hit something!” came the answer, or “Something has hit us!”—not that the exact words matter in the least. Whether it was the lost barrel or debris from the
Empress Alexandra
or something placed there by God for our destruction, we couldn’t know.

Eventually the wind lessened somewhat and the monstrous waves became merely huge, though the rain continued until well after dark. Mr. Hardie propped the two remaining barrels between the side of the boat and the sodden pile of blankets and instructed those sitting nearest to divert the rainwater that collected in the canvas boat cover into the barrels. I wouldn’t have thought of it, or if I had, I would not have acted on the thought. I understood what an optimist Hardie must be, or maybe these were just the reflexive actions of a creature determined to survive.

MRS. FORESTER, WHO
had been so silent and watchful, went mad overnight. She started raving about her husband, who had been drinking the day of the shipwreck and was probably lost. “If you dare to lay a hand on me this time,” she said, “I’ll kill you in the night with your own knife.” It was only when she started addressing Colonel Marsh, who was sitting directly in front of her, as Collin and making slashing motions at him with her fist that anyone tried to restrain her. The woman named Joan, who had been her attendant for twenty years, clung to her and beseeched her to restrain herself. “That’s not Collin, missus,” she said reasonably. “Collin isn’t here.”

“Poor thing,” said Hannah in a burst of compassion, but any attempts to touch Mrs. Forester or soothe her were strongly rebuffed. Finally she fell unconscious, and Joan, with the help of Mr. Preston and Mrs. Grant, succeeded in dragging her forward and making her as comfortable as possible on the wet blankets, which had the effect of preventing anyone else from going forward to rest or sleep. Mr. Hoffman was all for tossing her over the side, but Hannah and Mrs. Grant protected her, saying that it was men who had made her that way and they could damn well live with the results.

I slept fitfully. When I wasn’t thinking about the events of that devastating day, I was dreaming about them. I would lurch awake when I imagined I was falling overboard, and sometimes I really was falling, but only onto Mary Ann or Mr. Preston, who was sitting beside me, toward the rail.

The thing that preoccupied me that night was the notion that a person’s choices are only rarely between right and wrong or between good and evil. I saw very clearly that people were mostly faced with much murkier options and that there were no clear signposts marking the better path to take. Had Mr. Hardie been right to arrange the lottery? I could only determine that right and wrong didn’t come into it. As I considered this, an incident from the first day kept scratching at my consciousness until I opened the door to it, and that was when we had left the child to die.

I don’t know how difficult it would have been to reach him. One minute I was convinced that a rescue might have been accomplished without too much trouble and the next I remembered an ocean full of dangerous obstacles between our boat and the boy. I still wonder if my imagination has magnified or reduced the dangers changing our course to save him would have entailed, but now I think that if I and the others in the lifeboat are to be tried for anything, it should be for that.

Perhaps it was the misery of sitting in soaking clothes or perhaps it was those strange feelings of remorse over the child that kept me awake, but as I brooded over him, I became aware that Mrs. Grant, who was sitting on the other side of Mary Ann from me, was looking out over the railing to where a few stars were now shining in the sky. Because Mary Ann was lying across my lap and so was not a solid presence between us, Mrs. Grant came to realize that I was awake and for the first and last time, she reached over and took my hand. I told her I was thinking about the child and she said, “There’s no use. What’s done is done.” Then I poured out the story of the Marconi and my suspicion that Mr. Hardie might have dissembled when he told us about the distress signals. She thanked me for telling her, then said somewhat cryptically, “If we had known this…,” but she didn’t follow with whatever corollary she was contemplating. If we had known it, what? Would we have acted differently during those first days? Aside from throwing people out of the boat sooner and putting up the sail or rowing for Europe while we had the strength, I am not sure what we could have done.

Soon after dawn, it was discovered that the two sisters who had sat quietly in the back of the boat had disappeared without a trace. No one had seen them go overboard, and even though Mary Ann had never spoken to them, she was quite affected by their loss. Perhaps because they were near to our age, she took it as a sign of what could happen to us. She turned to me with a wild look in her eyes and asked, “Do you think we’ll die?” At that point I fully expected that we would and I thought of telling her so. I was as devastated by the events of the previous day as Mary Ann had been, and I resented her expectation that I had either answers or strength. I wanted to shout, “Of course we’re going to die! The sisters are the lucky ones—for them it is over!” but I didn’t. I put my hand on her shoulder the way I wished for someone to lay hands on me and uttered some kind of invocation. I think I said, “Lord protect us,” but I might also have said, “Mr. Hardie is doing whatever he can. I wouldn’t give up on him yet.”

When we took further stock of our situation, we saw that whatever had hit us had punched a fist-sized hole in the side of the boat just under the starboard rail. A steady stream of water was pouring through it, which Mr. Hardie had spent the night trying to stanch; so in this regard, we were no better off than we had been before.