“I remember eating dinner that night. We had pork chops and applesauce — that’s it. Nothing that had to be cooked on the stovetop because we were rolling too goddamn much. The guy that did the baking was named Ed Butterfield — we called him Butter — used to put together this delicious rye bread. When the weather got rough, we’d soak thick slices of it in water and stick them under our plates to keep them from sliding around. It was an old trick. The next morning, when things calmed down a bit, I remember watching the porters hacking it off with hammers and spatulas.”
“Did you ever wait on the weather?”
“Sure we did, just not as often as other boats. Once or twice every couple of years we’d sit one out, but it took some kind of hell for that.”
“Should you have sat it out the night she wrecked?”
Olaf guffawed. “The winds were supposed to shift more to the east. If they had, we knew we wouldn’t want to face the middle of the lake. But we also knew we wouldn’t have to, see? We knew that if push came to shove we could take shelter in the lee of Isle Royale.” He was snaking his arm — as if it were the ship — into the imaginary estuary between the Canadian shore and the long finger of Isle Royale. “It was an uncommon course but one we’d taken before. And even if the wind shifted sooner rather than later, we knew we could muscle our way to safety.
“By the time we passed Rock of Ages light we’d been at it with that goddamn lake for almost seventeen hours. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and snowing so hard we couldn’t see the railing around the pilothouse deck.
“And Jan hated to be blind,” Olaf continued. “I mean, we knew exactly where we were and where we were heading, but when you can’t see your hand in front of your face and you’re putting up with the hell we were, you have a tendency to get a little hot. At least Jan did.
“He had a guy at every position every minute of that cruise — a man at the wheel, a man at the radar, a man at the compass, a man on the charts — it was like watching an orchestra. Jan would say, ‘My heading?’ and the watchman at the gyrocompass would say, ‘Four five, sir,’ and Jan would say, ‘Speed?’ and a voice would say, ‘Eight knots steady, sir,’ and Jan would boom again, ‘Is it clear?’ and the wheelsman at the radar would say, ‘Clear, sir,’ and Jan, ‘Position?’ and the wheelsman at the chart, ‘Captain, we are at such and such latitude and longitude, sir,’ and Jan, ‘How much water have I got between me and that goddamn island?’ and the wheelsman at the radar would say, ‘Sir, Isle Royale six point zero seven nautical miles bearing one hundred and forty-one degrees,’ and the wheelsman at the chart would settle it all, ‘Six point zero nautical miles to shoal water, sir.’ ” Olaf related the whole pilothouse episode as if he were a conductor himself, raising and wagging his fingers.
Noah, his heart actually beating a little faster, was sitting on the edge of the sofa. “And the water is coming over your deck and it’s snowing like the end of the world. .”
“And in the middle of it all, roaming from the charts to the compass to the wheel, Jan would take each piece of information and plug it into his internal calculator and come up with some goddamn equation the sum of which dictated every move he made. And despite his aggravation at being blind, despite that goddamn lake and the wind like a hurricane, he still managed it all without a hitch. I don’t think he ever even spilled any of his coffee.”
Noah stood up and stretched his arms above his head. He felt boyish, nearly giddy in the thrall of the story. “What about the rest of the crew?”
This question seemed to sober Olaf. “The crew? They were just a bunch of anybodies. With the exception of guys like Jan and Luke, they were just men and boys.”
For the first time since Noah had arrived at his father’s house, he called up the picture in the museum, the one of the whole crew dockside with the Rag in the background. Although he could not summon a single face clearly, he could recall the apathy he’d felt looking at them. He remembered chalking it up to some kind of ambivalence toward his father, but in retrospect it was an ambivalence borne by the unconscious knowledge that what his father had just said was — and always had been — the truth. Twice already he’d alluded to the commonness of the crew, and twice now Noah had paused at the realization of this deflating fact: They weren’t gods and giants sunk on that ship, they were men and boys.
“That takes some of the starch out of the story, don’t you think?” Noah asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t it more fantastic to think of the guys who died as a little bit heroic, as swashbuckling sailors? As something more than a bunch of yokels from Great Lakes port towns?”
“I don’t think so,” Olaf said, pausing to consider it seriously. “It’s real life. In real life there’re boys from port towns.
“There’s one picture of them that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind,” Olaf continued. “After we’d cleared the southwestern tip of the island, must’ve been around suppertime, I went down into the crew’s quarters for a fresh thermos of coffee and something to eat. You remember that the top two decks on the bow of the Rag didn’t have any interior passageways, don’t you?”
Noah nodded.
“Well, that walk usually took, what, twenty seconds? Two flights of stairs, maybe thirty steps altogether? There were eighteen hours of snow and ice coating those stairs and that railing. You put that together with the wind and rolling of the boat and that walk was the hairiest time of my life. Until then anyway.
“The temperature couldn’t have been above zero, and I was out there without my mittens, without a hat, gripping that goddamn railing for dear life. In twenty seconds my fingers were burning cold. I was slipping all over the place helter-skelter. And I couldn’t see three feet in front of me. I remember sitting down for a second, wrapping my arms around the railing with my hands tucked up inside my coat, and hugging that goddamn thing like I was a child.
“The sound of that storm,” Olaf continued, shaking his head as he closed his eyes for a long moment, “it should have been my first warning. I could hear the lake washing over the deck. I could hear the wind roaring. And I sure as hell could feel that wind coming from every direction.” He looked hard at Noah, his eyes colorless in the cabin light. “For maybe three seconds while I was sitting there, everything went quiet, though, and I could hear her bending.”
“Bending?” Noah said, sitting up and combing his sweat-damp hair back with both his hands.
“I sat on that icy step for a couple of minutes. I don’t know what in the hell I was waiting for, but I couldn’t move. The ruckus was out of this world, howling and drumming all over the place. But then it just stopped, went quiet, and I heard it: a slow, high-pitched cry. I knew it was the Rag under the weight of all that ice and water. It sounded human.”
Noah dropped back onto the couch. “Those boats don’t bend.”
“Sure they do,” Olaf countered. “Like skyscrapers give a little in the wind.”
“What did you do?”
“I finally got down into the crew’s quarters. And that’s when I saw them — this is what I was getting at — all bleary-eyed and miserable, sitting around the common table playing euchre. Most of those boys were still drunk when they came back on board in Two Harbors, and when you put the weather and seas like we had on top of what they must have been feeling to begin with, well, they might as well have been dead already.