The Lifeboat: A Novel (14 page)

“I’m impressed you remember it so clearly, Mary Ann. I, for one, was in a complete panic. I ended up in a lifeboat and I’m glad I did, but I can’t for the life of me remember how it came about.”

THAT NIGHT I
slept not at all, or if I did, it would be more aptly described as a drifting in and out of consciousness, where the border between one state and the other was a wide territory that was more filled with mental activity and physical movement than the periods when I was awake. I think we were all fearful of being thrown overboard while we slept, which had the effect of causing people to start suddenly and to shout out whenever they ventured to cross the frontier into sleep. Mr. Preston, who had regained his seat on the rail, was still close enough to hit me with his fist when he started awake, shouting, “I can explain everything!” and another time he muttered, “The box couldn’t have been mine! I’m only an accountant, after all—what would I be doing with jewels?”

I reached over to shake him fully awake, fearful that he might harm himself in his sleep. “Mr. Preston!” I cried. “Calm yourself!” But my own brain was experiencing the same sort of disordered thinking. At one moment I would be standing in front of our old house with Miranda, vowing to get it back for her, and at another, I would be holding on to Henry as he sank beneath the waves. At still another moment, after hours of trying to hold myself upright, I felt myself slipping, not off the thwart onto the damp boards that formed the bottom of the boat, but off the deck of the
Empress Alexandra
and into a sea that was teeming with bodies and debris. A child raised his face to me and stretched out his arms, but when I reached for him, his eyes turned red with little flames and he laughed a childish yet demonic laugh.

Our anxiety that night was certainly due to the fact that the tensions that had been lurking beneath the surface had now been made explicit. Mrs. Grant had said what many people in the boat were thinking—that Mr. Hardie was no longer fit to lead us, that he had made several decisions based on some unstated purpose of his own, and that innocent people had died when, if we had played our hand differently, they might have been saved. Whether Mrs. Grant was right in her suspicions that Mr. Hardie had acted out of selfish motives or not, once they had been articulated, they could not be unsaid. Whatever the truth, our situation was now more perilous than it had ever been, for we felt ourselves threatened not only by the forces of nature, but by the human beings with whom we shared the boat.

The night stretched on. Clouds obscured the moon, adding a thick cover of darkness that made it impossible to see who was stirring and who was crying out. I suspect Mrs. Grant had assigned some of the people sitting closest to Mr. Hardie to take turns watching him, and just before dawn, when one of the women near him gave out a bloodcurdling scream, I was sure she was being murdered. A moment later, I heard a rustling and felt the balance of the boat shift and then I heard Mrs. Grant’s soothing voice telling whoever it was that whatever had frightened her had been nothing but a dream. Eventually, the sun cast its gray morning light on us, illuminating our floating world by nearly imperceptible degrees; but any hopes we had harbored during the night that a new dawn would erase the drama of the previous day were about to be shattered.

EVERYONE WAS STRANGELY
calm when, once the day had fully dawned, Mrs. Grant called for a vote on whether Mr. Hardie should go over the side. I can only explain this equanimity by the trust that had been established between Mrs. Grant and the other passengers and that I have described before, or perhaps it was the fact that the day dawned windless, gray, and still. Only Anya Robeson displayed a kind of shocked attention, as if she were only now sensible of the events around her. “What about the other lifeboat?” she asked, making sure that her hands were covering her son’s ears. “If you don’t want him in this boat, couldn’t he go in that one?”

When I think back, I credit Anya with trying to come up with some kind of middle ground, but at the time, the suggestion seemed highly unrealistic, almost grounded in delusional thinking. For one thing, the other boat was nowhere to be seen, so there was no real possibility of enlisting its aid. And for another, I think we had become so used to thinking of ourselves as separated from any sort of human society that the idea of succor coming from outside our little boat had long since stopped occurring to us. Mrs. Grant answered Anya kindly—I remember the tone, but not the exact words. “A yes vote means he dies,” added Hannah, so there would be no mistake about the purpose of the vote. Mary Ann, however, turned her wild eyes on me and hissed, “What? What is she asking?”

I was more and more ruthless toward Mary Ann, who seemed to assume that people would take care of her despite her accusations and emotional instability. All along, her timid indecision had given me courage, but I did not credit her with giving me anything, only with taking. If the situation was bleak, I would not shield her from it. It was not in my nature to come up with metaphors she could understand or accept, as Hannah might have done. I found her questions silly and unnecessary, but because she was desperate to think that one of us had answers, she hung on every word I said. Often, after getting my attention, she would have nothing to say, or she would hope for an answer without having first to frame a question. I, too, was hungry for absolutes, and on some days it was only Mary Ann’s grasping desperation that lifted me above the compulsion to act in the same childish manner. If Mr. Hardie said, “The wind has shifted to the west,” she would say, “The west? Did he say west?”

“Yes,” I would answer, or “No,” as the case might require, and mostly I told her the truth.

“What does that mean?” she would ask, or “Which way is west?”

I would use what little I knew of our position to tell her the grim facts: “It means we are being blown back toward England,” I said in those early days when we were desperate to hold our position. “Look on the bright side,” I added. “If we’re blown back far enough, you can get a brand-new dress for your wedding.” Hannah, however, would say something like “Think of it as a seesaw, Mary Ann. It’s bound to shift right back again.”

Now we were being asked to make a difficult choice about Hardie’s culpability and about the resulting sentence, but I made it seem as if the problem were with Mary Ann’s lack of staunchness. “Oh, come now,” I said. “You can’t pretend we’re playing in the bathtub, Mary Ann. I’m sorry if you don’t like the choices, but the hard fact is that Mr. Hardie has become dangerous to the rest of us. He has lost his authority and his ability to make sound decisions. Either he goes overboard or we all drown, it’s as simple as that.”

Even as I uttered them, I wondered if my words were true. I honestly did not know then and I don’t have any better idea now. When I looked at Mr. Hardie that morning, I was hard-pressed to recognize the superhuman figure of those first days in the boat. If Mr. Hardie was still godlike, he had become god in his human form, and we all know what happens to gods like that. Perhaps he had changed, or perhaps we had, or perhaps it was only the situation that was now calling for something new. But whether Mr. Hardie had changed or not, Mrs. Grant had only become more of whatever she had been at the first: solid, enduring, endlessly capable. But even more than those two people, it was the prevailing mood in the boat that needed to be assessed; and while I was putting Mary Ann off with whatever words came into my head, a deeper part of my consciousness was scrutinizing the faces of the people around me and trying to decipher their thoughts.

Did I know in advance what the order of voting would be? As it happened, Mary Ann was called upon before I was. To a person sitting at a desk assessing the facts, this was perfectly predictable: in taking turns at Mr. Hardie’s roster of duties or in passing the cup of water around, we always started clockwise from where Mr. Hardie sat in the back of the boat, then proceeding up one thwart and down the next as we came to them, so it would be natural to assume that Mrs. Grant would follow a similar pattern, thus occasioning Mary Ann, who was now sitting on my right, to cast her vote before I was called upon to cast mine. Of course, Mr. Hardie had been in charge of the duty roster and Mrs. Grant was now running things, and there was no real reason to assume that she would adopt the same convention, but it had become a habit with us; and if I had thought it out beyond the first or second round of analysis—which I’m not sure I was capable of doing in my weakened state—I would have come to the conclusion that Mrs. Grant would want to keep things as normal as possible in order to convince us that this was just another of many routine duties, what anyone who found himself adrift in a lifeboat would be asked to do.

In any case, Mary Ann voted before I did. After what I had said to her—I also said something like “Don’t think so much of yourself. Think of your Robert. Think of
us,
or think of yourself if you must, floundering around in the black water, struggling to prolong your life for a useless minute or two, not because it will do any good, but because struggling against death is the very nature of the beast”—Mary Ann hid her face and murmured pathetically, “I am not a beast,” before raising her hand and nodding her head to signal assent.

Then came my turn. Mary Ann’s eyes remained hidden behind her clenched fists. Her hair fell forward in a knotty tangle. There were already enough votes to pass the resolution, so when Mrs. Grant and Hannah turned their eyes on me, I whispered, “I abstain. You don’t need my vote. Do whatever you like.” I’m not sure Hardie could hear my words from where he sat, but I shook my head, hoping he would think I had voted no. I still felt some obligation to the man in charge—to men in general—and, of course, to God, who I had always assumed was a man, albeit now I envisioned him in liquid form, capriciously rising up and threatening to drown us but keeping us alive to endure more of his capriciousness and threats.

Hannah hissed something under her breath. Her emaciated face narrowed to a grimace. Her wound was a long red gash across her cheek. I could not hear her words, but to this day I can see her lips, which were cracked and bleeding like another wound carved in above the jut of her chin. “Coward,” she seemed to be saying, but Mrs. Grant calmed her with a touch and turned her impenetrable gaze on me for an instant, and I felt consoled, somewhat, for I too was partially under her spell. It was a gift Mrs. Grant had, of making a person feel understood. She had an even stronger effect on the other women than she had on me. They exchanged serene looks with her, and some of them were emboldened enough to look fearlessly at Hardie himself.

If you counted the Italian women, who had raised their hands and wailed, though it was anyone’s guess whether or not they understood the issue before them, all of the women except Anya and me voted without hesitation to kill Mr. Hardie, and all of the men voted to save him. I still do not know how I would have voted if they had forced me to make a choice. I stole a glance at Mr. Hardie. He was giving me a fixed and evil stare, and at that moment I might have sent them all to the devil, every man and woman of them, every wretched human speck.

I repeat that we were weak. Even I find that hard to remember now, and I was there. The officials of the court seem absolutely incapable of comprehending our circumstances, and how could they? I only fault them because they failed to comprehend that they could not comprehend. My vision seemed to resonate, to echo. Primary images were confused with afterimages, with red and yellow splashes of light, with a watery smearing together of faces and features and the muted glimmer of the sun on the sea. “Resolution passed,” said Mrs. Grant. The Italian women looked eager and blank, as if now the way were cleared for our salvation. Mary Ann whimpered beside me, emitting thin, spasmodic sobs. I hated her then. “Stop it!” I shouted. “What good will it do? Isn’t it enough that we have to listen to the endless wailing of the wind?” But then the hopelessness of our position burst over me like one of the relentless green waves, and I put my arms around her and we clung to each other, her blond and tangled locks falling against my cheeks in exactly the same way that my dark and tangled locks fell against hers.

So Mr. Hardie was to die. The problem now became one of getting him out of the boat. He was crouched on the aft thwart like the mongrel he was, baring his yellow teeth and snapping at the air. “Ye ’aven’t got me yet, ye ’aven’t got me yet,” he barked, and if the vote had been held then, I would have raised my voice and shouted, “Let the mangy mongrel die!”

Mr. Hardie had removed the top of one of the water barrels and was holding it before him like a shield. Hannah had crawled forward and was clawing at it, trying to push it out of the way, but she lacked the strength to do so. As she approached, Mr. Hardie pushed the shield outward, ostensibly to hit her with it, but his injured arm was all but useless and he was so weak that he fell backward against the side of the boat.

“Grace! Mary Ann!” shouted Mrs. Grant. “Go to help Hannah!” To this day, I don’t know why I was chosen, but she looked at me in that familiar appraising way she had and called my name softly, as if she were certain of my loyalty. I was the only one who had failed to cast a vote, and it has occurred to me that it was her way of implicating me, of making me vote with my actions whether or not I would vote with my words. Her round face and amethyst eyes were aimed at us like beams of purple light as I followed Hannah through the swirling seawater in the bottom of the boat, which was still awash with pieces of bird bones saved for their marrow and stray wing feathers and the last bits of rotting meat. I closed my eyes and tried to bring order to my thoughts. I was cold to the core now that Mary Ann was not pressed in against me. Mr. Hardie was saying, “Ye won’t get me, ha! Not if I get ye first!”

Hannah said, “He’s insane! He’ll kill us all! We must save ourselves! Grab him!”

I opened my eyes, as much to restore my balance, which had faltered without the aid of sight, as to ward off any threat. I think if Mr. Hardie had looked straight at me or called out my name or made any show of recognition, I might have sat down next to Greta and moved no farther toward him. But it was Hannah who was watching me, and it was Mrs. Grant who called my name, followed by soft words of encouragement. As I made my way closer, crouching and clutching at the shoulders of the others in order to keep my balance in the rocking boat, my ears pulsed with the sounds of the Italian women, who were moaning and shrieking behind us. I steadied myself against the Colonel, who was shrinking into his seat as if to avoid detection. Something large and black was flapping in my peripheral vision. I thought it must be the angel of death, but it was not at all clear at that point whom the angel had in its sights. Only when Hardie lashed out at Hannah did the angel stumble forward and take the shape of one of the Italian women, who was brandishing the wing of a bird and stumbling forward to poke it into Hardie’s eyes. I think I called out Mr. Hardie’s name, giving him one last chance to assert himself. His eyes grazed over me, but they were unseeing marbles and he seemed to be beyond sensible speech.

Mrs. Grant was suddenly beside me, her solid presence giving me strength. The moment ballooned and time stopped, allowing me to take in the metallic surface of the water and the dull glint of the sun on it. It seemed to me that anyone forced onto that icy tundra would merely pick himself up and walk away, relieved to be free of the boat and the stinking humanity it contained. I do not know what the others were doing—it was as if I alone controlled the strings of destiny. I know now that it was the height of egotism to think that I held any power at all, but for that moment, I was sure I was standing up for the forces of good. Somewhere I even heard a voice that might have been Mrs. Grant’s croon, “Good girl,” but I can’t swear she said anything. I only know that for several seconds that seemed to have been excised from the day, I stood unaided in the boat and faced Mr. Hardie one to one and saw nothing of humanity left in him.

Then the gears caught and time again ticked forward. I can’t tell you what I was thinking or if I was thinking. I only know that whatever dangers we had faced had coalesced into something bigger and more menacing, and it seemed up to me to decide, not if Mr. Hardie would live or die, but if the rest of us would live. Hannah’s face was a terrible sight, bloodless except for the crimson gash where the knife had sliced into it, the colorless eyes, the black snakes of her hair. Hannah and Mrs. Grant had each grabbed hold of one of Hardie’s arms and Hannah shouted, “Grace, grab the bloody bastard’s neck.”

I did. I put my two hands around Hardie’s thin neck. It was as cold as a fish, hard and stringy, like naked bones. In the instant before I tightened my grip, I felt the cloud of his breath on my face. The smell seemed evidence of what he contained within him: only death and decay. I squeezed as hard as I could; I felt the windpipe convulse beneath my fingers and the Adam’s apple twitch like a grizzled heart.

“Squeeze harder, dear,” said Mrs. Grant in an oddly soothing voice. She had none of Hannah’s cold fury or the mad hysteria of the Italian woman who was again jabbing at Hardie’s face with the bird’s bony wing. There was a crazed look in Mr. Hardie’s eyes, and I was afraid to let go, for if I did, he would surely kill me.