The Lifeboat: A Novel (7 page)

IN THOSE FIRST
days we looked at Hardie as a kind of oracle. His sort of encouragement was neither glib nor plentiful, so when his first predictions failed to come true (we were not immediately rescued and the fine weather continued to hold), we were not overly alarmed. What happened, though, was that certain people began to pump him for more particulars: “Is the wind from the west or the southwest? Is that a good sign or not?” or “What is it they say about a red sky at dawn?” or “What is the significance of a pinkish-yellow halo around the moon?”

“It means a change in the weather,” replied Hardie, and indeed, on the sixth day, the blue sky gave way to a layer of ragged clouds, which only now and then parted to show an angry sun. The wind had subsided overnight, but now it stirred the surface of the sea, which changed color dramatically depending on whether or not the sun broke through. It was no longer green and glassy or cobalt and opaque, but a dark and fathomless color that was neither gray nor blue. Little waves crested and broke over the rail of the boat, prompting Mr. Hardie to give up the tin cups he kept under his seat and to set two more of us to bailing, despite Mr. Nilsson’s warning that this would contaminate our drinking water with salt. He made us memorize a detailed roster of duties: in addition to the five bailers and the four people sitting along the rail who were to keep watch for signs of approaching ships, two others were appointed to keep tabs on the lifeboat that still bobbed in the distance, and four people at a time manned the oars and were charged with keeping the prow of the boat headed into the waves to prevent them from breaking over the side. Six women were assigned to scan the water for signs of fish, but its corrugated surface foiled our efforts. At one point a thin woman named Joan startled everyone by calling out, “I see one!” but it was only Mr. Hardie’s fish, which he had secured to the side of the boat to preserve its meat in the cool ocean water. Every hour, the Colonel called out “Time!” and we switched jobs or rested in our seats or went forward in pairs or threes to sleep on the piles of damp blankets that could not be kept dry despite the canvas boat cover we tucked in over them. Mr. Hardie made a great production of mealtime, even though our water ration had been severely reduced and we received only a piece of fish or a bite-sized square of hardtack. Twice a day the deacon was called upon to say grace, and that evening, Hardie held up the second fish for a blessing from the sky.

Hannah was ill-tempered that day. She kicked Mary Ann’s foot when it encroached on what she perceived as her territory, causing Mary Ann to weep quietly into her sleeve; and as we were eating breakfast, she said, “If we’re going to get rescued soon, what are you starving us for?” Perhaps it was inevitable that Hardie would be blamed for our hunger and maybe for our plight, but I had the sense Hannah didn’t really blame him herself. Instead, she was, in a roundabout way, encouraging this sentiment in others, for she seemed to suppress a grim smile and nod in Mrs. Grant’s direction when others started to grumble and echo her complaint. I, too, had been eyeing the fish and the barrels of water and wondering what Hardie was saving them for.

Despite his edict that no one change seats without permission, Hannah said, in a loud and provocative voice, “Come now, Mary Ann, stop sniveling. I’m going to change places with you,” and she squeezed herself in beside Mrs. Grant, abruptly displacing Mary Ann, who shot Hardie a fleeting look of injury; but Hannah stared right back at him in what seemed to me an open challenge, and he remained silent. I think Hardie might have lost some of his authority that day. He should have commanded Hannah to regain her original position, but he didn’t, and then it was too late.

Unaided, Mary Ann was not able to withstand Hannah’s determination and eventually moved to a vacant spot on the rail, so that she was sitting on the other side of Mr. Preston from me. Then Hannah bent her head close to Mrs. Grant’s, and by dinnertime, most of the others were grumbling too, but about what, it wasn’t entirely clear.

The wind had increased steadily over the course of the day, and just when Hannah and two of the other women left their seats to approach Hardie with a demand that the dinner rations be increased, a large wave crashed over the side of the boat, drenching everyone on the port side and knocking one of the standing women overboard. Hannah only saved herself by clutching on to Mrs. Hewitt, a large, silent woman, who screamed and was knocked into the bottom of the boat. I heard someone shout out the name of Rebecca Frost, who had been an employee on the
Empress Alexandra
and who had sat, until now, quietly in her seat at the back of the boat. While I had never spoken to Rebecca, I had seen her glancing admiringly at Hannah and Hannah smiling at her in return; but now Rebecca was flailing about in the water behind the boat before disappearing inside a cresting wave. A second wave broke over her head, but again she rose from the blue-black water, and I remember her pitiful eyes staring, I thought, directly into mine. “Do something!” I yelled. In her sworn statement, Hannah insisted she and Mrs. McCain were the ones who exhorted Hardie to action and that I was only idly looking on, which goes to show that Hannah was not aware of as much as she claims.

Mr. Hardie was standing in the aft of the boat. Behind him the clouds were made livid by the half-obscured sun. Dark water had engulfed Rebecca up to her nostrils. Strands of hair streamed over her face like black eels, and her white, beseeching hands clutched the air. “Sit down!” barked Hardie, and Hannah, after her near miss, sat down and was quiet for once, while I shouted out, “Isn’t anyone going to help her?” Two of the men got up then and made as if to throw the life ring to Rebecca. The boat was rocking to and fro with the redistribution of weight, and each time it rocked, more water slopped in over the side.

“Bailers!” shouted Hardie. “Who are my bailers? Stop gawking and get to work!” As he said it, he grabbed the life ring away from whoever was holding it. Mrs. Grant shouted, “She’s over there,” and pointed to where Rebecca was frantically waving her hands at the sky and gurgling with watery attempts at speech. Her dress billowed around her, her cap was tied tightly over her ears, and while her life vest was serving to keep her head above water, it was not keeping the waves from rolling over her or the current from increasing the distance between her and us. Her expression was more surprised than horrified, and I thought I heard her call, “Over here, Mr. Hardie, over here,” almost politely. She was sure of being rescued, just as we were all, still, sure. The sea was rougher than it had been, and the level of water in the bottom of the boat was rising. Hardie spent precious minutes redirecting the bailers to their task, for everyone was either watching Rebecca or trying to keep from slipping off their seats in the pitching boat, during which time it began to occur to me that Rebecca’s rescue was by no means a certain thing.

Only after what seemed like ages did Hardie order the oarsmen to steer the boat toward her, and when at last he fished her out of the water, I did not have the feeling that it was a heroic act. Hardie exuded more strongly than ever that air of omnipotence and the ability to bend nature and events to his will, but it now seemed slightly tinged with malice. In the succeeding days, I tried to think that his hesitation in rescuing Rebecca stemmed from an honest indecision about the manner in which a rescue could safely be accomplished given the choppy surface of the sea, the overcrowded situation in the boat, and the precarious balance of those who had jumped to their feet rather than remaining seated as they had been told. At the same time, it occurred to me—and it must have occurred to Mr. Hardie as well—to wonder if Rebecca was the victim of some sort of natural selection and to think that if she had fallen overboard, maybe it was for the best. This thought was followed by the idea that Hardie’s dedication was to those of us in the boat, not those outside of it, however they came to be there. Then, underneath everything else came the notion, sneaking into the strongbox of my thinking like water through an uncaulked chink, that Hardie was attempting to teach us a lesson of sorts. Oh, I knew my fate was in his hands already. It was not a lesson I needed to learn.

I don’t think I was the only one who felt this way, given the silence that stretched between us, taut and thin as a rope, and the number of times I caught one or another of the passengers staring fixedly at Hardie after he had finally hauled Rebecca in and the Italian women had stripped off her clothing and sandwiched her in among the blankets. It was fear in their eyes as much as awe and respect, though those words wouldn’t describe the way Hannah looked at him, or Mrs. Grant. Of course, it could have been the wind, which seemed to press down on us rather than blow, or our hunger, or the fact that many of us were now wet through; and of course we had all watched Rebecca almost die. We sat shivering in our places like bedraggled dogs as Mrs. Grant made her way forward one careful step at a time to comfort Rebecca while the boat rocked and Mr. Hardie shouted at the bailers and the Italian women emitted a chorus of operatic wailings and turned their tragic faces to the sky. All the while, Mrs. Cook, who when she wasn’t telling stories was strangely submissive, ineffectually dabbed at Rebecca’s hair with a sodden rag and Hardie held the tin of wafers up to the dark afternoon sky and the deacon forced false enthusiasm into his voice at the repeated mention of Jesus Christ and we finally ate our scrap of crust in spiritless dejection.

I don’t know what Rebecca was thinking, if she was thinking at all. For a long time she cowered in the dormitory and didn’t speak. At one point she said, “If only little Hans were here.” She shook visibly beneath the damp blanket. Hardie said gruffly, “Well, we don’t have room for ’im.” Hardie was not the only one who seemed angry. Mr. Hoffman and his friend Nilsson were talking in low voices and now and then they looked from Rebecca to the rail of the boat, which was riding very low in the water, though probably no lower than it had been before, and I could see they were thinking that Hardie had made the wrong decision about fishing Rebecca out of the sea.

Overnight the wind lessened, but a thick fog had set in. When it lifted a day and a half later, the other lifeboat was nowhere in sight. I can’t tell you how I missed it. Knowing other people were out there somewhere was not the same as seeing them floating more or less within reach and occasionally within hailing distance, even if we never got close enough to recognize their faces or to make out what was said.

DURING THOSE TWO
days of fog, we all heard the sounds of a foghorn. There was no mistaking it. Mrs. Grant asked if the other lifeboat might have carried such an instrument with it, and Hardie said, “It’s possible, but it sounds to me like the horn of a ship.”

Everyone was excited, but frustrated by the lack of visibility. We shouted out with all our might. We banged on the sides of the boat with the oars and the bailers, with anything that would make noise, but by noon, the sounds of the foghorn had ceased; and when the fog finally lifted and we saw that the second lifeboat was gone, it was as if some protective fog had lifted from our souls as well, leaving us clear-eyed and able to see the profound starkness of our situation. We had all heard the foghorn—there wasn’t a question about that as there had been about Mr. Preston’s lights. After much discussion, during which Hardie was silently measuring the angle of the sun, Mr. Preston decided that the occupants of the other lifeboat had been found and that our chances of a similar rescue were gone. This prompted Mr. Nilsson to say, “If we could see the other lifeboat, then surely they could see us. They’d never let a rescue ship leave the area without mounting a search.”

“You don’t know Blake,” muttered Hardie. “There’s no telling what Blake would have done.”

“Blake,” said Mr. Preston. “He was the one who came up from the radio room. He was the one who helped to launch our boat.”

“He was the second officer on the
Empress Alexandra,
” added Greta.

“Aye,” said Mr. Hardie. “Meanest mongrel that ever passed for a man.”

Mr. Preston turned to me and said, “You knew Mr. Blake, didn’t you?” I replied that I didn’t think I did. “Then your husband knew him, for I’m sure I saw you standing together on the deck.”

I gave him a questioning look, and he stole a glance at Mary Ann before he said, “I must be mistaken,” but he seemed to be holding something back, and I wondered what he was thinking of or if Mary Ann had merely been telling him one of those stories that circulated on the boat and that seemed to change with each telling.

“How do you know it was Blake’s boat that stayed with us and not the other one we saw?” the Colonel wanted to know. “Since the first days, we haven’t gotten close enough to see them clearly.”

“It was Blake, all right,” said Hardie. “The other boat was full and the one we have been seeing wasn’t. Besides, you notice how they never approached us.”

“But it was you who told us not to go near them!” exclaimed Hannah.

“Blake is a rabid dog. Didn’t you hear that bearded fellow tell us how Blake pushed two people out of his boat? With the captain out of the way, he’d as soon kill me as look at me. It was better to stay away.”

“Or safer,” said Hannah.

“Safer is better. You haven’t spent your lives at sea as I have. The men who go to sea are often the ones with something to escape!”

“Are you including yourself?” Hannah asked, but I was willing to believe Hardie had stayed away from Blake’s boat in order to protect us. It was Hannah who whispered it around that Hardie had done it to protect himself.

“We don’t really know why Blake pushed people out of his boat—maybe they caused some sort of trouble. What if there had been extra places in it after all?” demanded Mrs. Grant, finally voicing something that had occurred to me days before and had probably occurred to the others as well. “Even if the boat was damaged, it seems to me we might have helped fix it and then moved some of our people over. We should have at least tried. We might not be in such danger if we had.” As with many of the things Mrs. Grant said, the suggestion of repairing the other boat was vague and without any specifics about how it might have been accomplished without materials or tools, but the idea that Hardie was acting out of pure self-interest had begun to creep into our consciousnesses. He had been so precise with other details; why had he neglected to tell us about his history with Blake back at the beginning? Perhaps he was making it up to cover for his mistakes. Perhaps Mr. Hardie was the one with a past he wanted to hide.

The Colonel tried to steer the conversation back onto a more useful track: “I’d lay a wager that the other lifeboat was hit in the fog by a passing ship and sank without being seen,” he said. “If its occupants had been rescued, one of them would have mentioned us, regardless of Blake’s thoughts on the matter.”

“Wouldn’t the ship have felt the collision? Surely they would have known they’d run into something and tried to find out what it was,” said Mrs. McCain, while Mrs. Cook, who had been so vocal in the beginning, looked on like someone in a trance.

Hardie refused to comment on our interpretation of things. All he would say was “Maybe” or “Maybe not” when asked his opinion directly. Eventually Mrs. Grant said, “All this talk of being rescued, as if everything depends on someone else. I say we plot a course and set about trying to rescue ourselves,” which gave me a momentary burst of hilarious hope. It was so simple and obvious that I wondered why no one had mentioned it before. The inescapable fact was that we hadn’t been rescued, so there seemed to be no reason now to stay in the vicinity of the wreck.

“Of course!” I exclaimed out loud, and others took up the cry: “God helps those who help themselves!” It was a principle I lived by, and while it sometimes might make a person who espoused it seem selfish and theologically uninformed, people who refused to live by it looked, to me, weak and parasitic. When the sun had first broken through the fog, I had been reluctant to face it, having grown accustomed to taking refuge in the night, in limited vision; and those crystal days where we could see forever, at least until the world curved and dropped off into nothingness, haunted me, because there was nothing to see. But now that we had a plan, I was glad to be able to see as far as the horizon because it gave us a destination—west!

God helps those who help themselves, I said over and over to myself, exactly the way I had said it to Felicity Close the time she came to see me. She had followed Henry one day, which is how she knew where I lived. She was well dressed, but she lacked airs, and I thought we might have been friends if we hadn’t been rivals. I told her that we were both practical people and that practicality must prevail, but mostly I just listened. One of the things she told me was that Henry was steeped in traditions I couldn’t hope to understand and that once he had come to his senses, she feared, he would mourn their loss. She also said, “This is very out of character for him. Henry is not rash or passionate in the least,” and I wondered if we were talking about the same man. She had her say and left, and while I felt sorry for her, I could see that I had freed Henry, both from tradition and from emotional restraint, which was something the upright Felicity would never have been able to do. It was this realization that took away any feelings of guilt I might have had.

Mrs. Grant kept a constant vigil. She was dressed entirely in black. Her hair was pulled severely back, and even a week of wind and waves was not enough to loosen it from its fastenings. Her gaze did not waver in the face of nothingness. Her face burned. Then the skin peeled off and she turned a dark brown color; and still she gazed out to sea. I had the idea that if a ship appeared on the horizon after all this time, it would be because she had drawn it to her by her sheer determination and the force of her will. I could see the effect she was having on some of the others, who would make excuses to move near her or touch her shoulder as she went about her duties. I saw this and I think I understood it, but still I looked to Hardie as the foundation of my strength.

Hardie’s continued belief was that it was wise to stay in the vicinity of the place where the ship had gone down and from which the distress signals had been sent and also where we had heard the foghorn, but Mrs. Grant had made a forceful argument, and when, toward noon, the wind again sprang up, Hardie set to work fashioning the canvas boat cover into a sail by lashing it to two of the oars with strips cut from one of the blankets with his knife. He then cut away part of the safety rope that was attached to the perimeter of the boat and used it as a means of pulling the sail in and letting it out again, depending on the strength and direction of the wind. After inserting the oar-mast into the mast hole, he set a course that made sense, I assume, to him. To the rest of us, the horizon in front could not be distinguished from the horizon behind or to the sides. Still, I took courage from the fact that Mr. Hardie seemed to have a plan. His hands were rarely still, and if Mrs. Grant was the picture of quiet strength, Hardie was the picture of violent industry.

The oarsmen shipped their oars, and soon we were moving through the water quickly enough that we half expected the shores of America to rise before us at any minute. Using the long, sticklike tiller that was attached to the rudder and controlled its movement, Hardie pointed the boat as close to the wind as he could, which made the air rush at us across the port bow and caused the choppy water to feel a lot rougher than it had before. Because the sail had a tendency to push the boat over in the water, we had to counterbalance the tipping effect with our weight. This required constant alertness on our part, and it became a kind of grim game to keep the railing out of the water and the boat from capsizing altogether.

Rebecca, who had taken a chill and fever ever since her drenching in the ocean, now stared about with glassy eyes. At one point she fixed her gaze on Mr. Hardie and shouted out, “Father, Father! The little dog has run into the road!” Mrs. Grant did her best to calm her, and Hannah said, “There’s no dog, Rebecca. You’re thinking of something from long ago”; but this made Rebecca angry and upset. Tears oozed from her eyes. She said, “You never liked him anyway, did you? It was only because of Mother that you bought him for little Hans.”

Even though these comments seemed to be directed at him, Hardie did not reply, concentrating instead on the many tasks he had set himself and which none of the rest of us understood. Finally, Mrs. Grant snatched a rag from the satchel she kept at her feet, wrapped it into a bundle, and placed it into Rebecca’s hands, saying, “He’s safe now, dear. Your little dog is safe.” Rebecca rocked back and forth in the bottom of the boat, oblivious to the water there, stroking her make-believe dog throughout the afternoon.

The wind continued to pick up, and before long the boat was shooting through the water with great speed. The bailers were steadily bent to their task, but the level of water in the bottom was rising rapidly, and I had the idea that the boat had sprung a leak. When it came my turn to bail, I searched the boards near my feet for anything that looked like a hole. At one point I found myself contemplating the water that swirled around my ankles. It was as if I had suddenly come awake from a deep sleep. I don’t know how long I had been staring into nothingness, but when I “woke up,” I was aware of an encompassing bodily weakness, of the tendency of my eyes to lose focus, of my ears to hear only disjointed snatches of the murmured conversations going on around me. For instance, I heard Hannah very clearly when she said, “There was something between Hardie and that ship’s officer, Blake. We might have been saved by now,” but I only made out the last part of Mrs. Grant’s reply: “…nothing about sailing…bide our time.”

When Hardie dropped the sail, saying, “The wind’s too strong” and “She’s far too heavy with water to sail,” and took up a bailer himself, even Mrs. Grant didn’t protest, for the boat immediately flattened out and the constant stream of water over the railing lessened to an intermittent spray. It was just in time, too, for the water had now reached a height well up on my shins. I redoubled my own efforts with the bailer, but the weakness that clouded my mind suffused my limbs as well. That was when Hardie said it, softly, I think, though I also have the sense that everyone heard him, in which case he must have been shouting to be audible over the wind and the flapping of the makeshift sail, which billowed up in the bow of the boat, where it had been spread to dry: “Unless we lighten the load, we’ll sink like a bloody stone.”

There was no reason to doubt him. I looked at the pile of sodden blankets, the casks of water and the hardtack tins that Hardie kept all but hidden under his thwart, the small accumulation of personal possessions stowed beneath the seats or floating about in the brine: Mrs. Grant’s sodden satchel, upon which her small feet rested, the Colonel’s strongbox, little Charlie’s stuffed bear, and thought, “We can do without those,” not yet making the connection that we needed the food and water and blankets in order to survive and that the other things weighed twenty pounds at most, hardly the difference between salvation and death.

The others must have caught Hardie’s drift before I did, for the wave of consternation was as sobering as the cold water that now and then washed in on us. There was a low murmuring. My leg was touching that of the deacon, who had turned in his seat in order to face what he had started to call his flock: it was as if an electric shock passed from his body to mine, and that is when I comprehended that Mr. Hardie was finally asking for volunteers.

“Volunteer yourself!” said Hannah angrily, as though the rising water were Hardie’s to deal with and had nothing to do with her or anyone else.

“The boat’s too heavy to sail. We can’t bail fast enough. As yet, the wind is no more than a breeze. Even if we give up on the idea of sailing, if we’re hit with a gale it’ll be too late.”

All of us looked out at the sea. I had been bailing and peering peevishly at the bottom of the boat for over an hour, so I had a distorted perception of what kind of water we were talking about. I had seen a pool approximately one foot deep, greenish in color, but mostly clear and filled with wet leather shoes of various sorts. Now I realized my mistake. The water he was talking about was bluish-black and rolled past us like an unending herd of whales. The lifeboat alternately rose high on their broad backs and slid down into the deep depressions between them.