“Winter’s in that wind,” Olaf said, turning the collar of his shirt up.
His voice startled Noah from his reverie. He hadn’t noticed the outright chill in the air but felt it the moment his father mentioned it.
“You fell asleep.”
“It’s awfully damn late for me.”
Noah turned his attention back to the lake and the rippling water. Steadier now, the waves lapped gently against the dock posts and onto the beach. “Two weeks ago that sky would’ve been a circus with northern lights,” Olaf said, pointing upward. “It’s a goddamn sight.
“My first year on the Loki I used to sit watch from midnight until four. Ninety percent of the time this meant just staying awake. Sometimes I’d be up in the pilothouse, sometimes down on deck, depending on the weather and where we were. It was a boring job, boring as hell to tell the truth, but my captain that first year was a German guy named Wolfgang, a hell of a guy, smart as anyone I ever knew. He introduced me to the stars, so to speak.” Olaf nodded up at the sky. “He taught me some things about navigating. Just basic stuff, but I was hooked. He said that a true seaman could sail around the world without anything more than a watch and a sextant and the sky to guide him. I didn’t even know what a sextant was, just figured you knew where to go if you were in charge of one of those boats. I never reckoned there was any science to it. Wolf taught me how to take sun sights, how to chart our course, how to estimate our position using dead reckoning when the sky was cloudy and the shore out of sight.” He paused, cleared his throat. “Now it’s just a bunch of satellites telling you where you are and where to go. Back then it was still something beautiful to steer a ship.”
Olaf stopped talking, looked up at the sky, and pointed to different clusters of stars, marking the air with fingertips. Noah, in all his life, had never heard his father say so much at one time. He’d never heard him say half as much.
“What are you pointing at?”
Olaf looked down. “Nothing,” he said. “There was a lot of down-time on the ship, especially as a kid when I didn’t have any responsibilities outside my watch. On clear nights I used to stand on the stern deck looking out at the wake. There’re a lot of things to see in the night sky, especially on Superior. And there were a lot of reasons to be lonely, especially if you were the new kid onboard. But when you’re aching to get away, which I was, even the worst loneliness doesn’t sound too bad.
“Anyway, I got interested in what the captain was teaching me. I used to watch him take his sights, consult our charts, mark our position, do the math. After a couple seasons I had a real sense for this stuff. I could keep time in my head. I knew where we were all the time. I got good at it.
“You see there?” he asked Noah, pointing nearly straight up at a cluster of bright stars. “That’s Andromeda, you can tell by the spiraling cloudiness of it. It’ll be lower in the sky in the next month. That’s Cassiopeia to the left there. That’s Auriga there, and that’s Capella, that bright star right on the edge of that cluster. You can’t see Orion or Betelgeuse now because they’re too low on the horizon. Jesus, those stars are a long ways away. I can hardly even think about it now. But I’ll tell you what”—he coughed to clear his throat and nodded affirmatively—“I used to sail by their light — I used to sail by Andromeda’s light — and I got around just fine.”
A long silence ensued, Olaf still calculating some impossible star equation with the tip of his finger, still conducting, Noah thought it looked like, some star symphony.
“The galley would start serving breakfast at six o’clock on every ship I ever sailed. Those first couple seasons I’d sit on deck until right before chowtime, take my morning sight, then head to the galley and eat breakfast like it was meant to be eaten.” He smacked his lips. “Buttermilk pancakes drowning in syrup, eggs, hash browns, bacon and sausage, coffee, juice, fruit. Sometimes we’d even have chops or steaks. We all ate like that, all the time. It was one of the perks for living on those boats. I still remember what it felt like to be that full. I’d go back to my cabin, slide off my boots, and lie down on my bunk.” He sighed. “Didn’t have a goddamn thing to worry about in that sleep. Nothing.”
“But later,” Noah said.
“I’ve never been a good sleeper, but those mornings were pretty damn fine. After your mother and I got hitched and you came along, the sleep got a little bit tougher. I was ten years into my career when I met your mother, though. There was nothing else I could do.”
Olaf stood and stretched. “It all blends together for me now, everything before the Rag. Each of the ships and each of the years have turned out to be the same thing unless I’ve got pictures to remind me. But I’ll tell you what, my life was split the night she sank.”
FOUR
Olaf had adjourned to bed with only a nod. So many old feelings had been uncorked down on the beach, not least of which were the ones Noah had been expecting most, the anger and reproach years in the making, stirred up by the mere mention of his mother and her wanting to play piano at his wedding.
Noah had sent his father a wedding invitation as if he were a distant relative. The reply had come by way of his sister, who had told Noah their father intended to make the drive east by himself. Noah did not believe he would, but on the night before his wedding, Olaf showed up.
They held the rehearsal dinner at Natalie’s parents’ Swampscott home, a beautiful place with huge oak trees in the front yard, a deck overlooking Foster Pond in the back, and a red-brick chimney set against the clapboard siding. When Olaf stepped from his old Suburban and looked up at the three-story house, Noah felt heartsick. In order to quell the sadness he doubted his father deserved, he summoned his anger instead, put it on as if it were a coat of arms. From the window of the foyer he could see that the old man looked presentable if rustic. His beard and hair were longer than they’d been, but they were also more kempt. The corduroy pants and rumpled chamois shirt were at least clean. Instead of boots he wore a pair of chocolate-brown, size fourteen loafers. It wouldn’t have surprised Noah to find the box they’d come in on the floor of the truck.
They met at the front door, shaking hands as they had before breakfast at the Freighter. Noah said, “Nice shoes.”
The look of smug satisfaction on the old man’s face said all Noah needed to know.
Grudgingly, Noah said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
Having been cautioned about the impending and inevitable debacle, Natalie graciously ignored Noah’s warnings. She treated Olaf like her own father from the start. When she introduced him to her parents, Olaf offered them a gift.
Natalie’s mother sold real estate and presented the agent’s facade that everything was always fantastic. In fact, she was a whip-smart pessimist with a master’s degree in art history. Mr. Maier had served as an Essex County public defender for thirty years before retiring that summer. As they leaned against the granite countertops of their newly remodeled kitchen, sporting their Ralph Lauren garb, each with a long-stemmed glass of chardonnay, Noah knew the cut of their jib would not sit well with his father. In fact, he knew his father hated people like them, people who had no discernible faults, no tragedy in their lives.
“What is it?” Mrs. Maier said, withdrawing a brown bottle from the paper sack.
“This is aquavit, Linie aquavit, to be precise. Comes from Norway. I have a friend, captain’s a salty running Minnesota wheat to South Africa, he brings me a case each year.”