“When we finally reached the stern, I sent Luke and Red down below to see what was going on while Bjorn and I went up to the boat deck to see about steering that son of a bitch.”
“What do you mean steering it?”
“At the very stern of the ship, behind the stack, up on the boat deck, there were two emergency wheels. Jan told us he’d lost the rudder, so up we went. I’ll tell you what, there couldn’t have been a more wide-open spot for heaven to piss on us than the ass end of that ship.”
Noah was trying to piece it all together. “But you didn’t have a compass, you didn’t have a radar or the charts.”
“We knew which way the wind was blowing, though. I figured if we kept it behind us, we’d be okay.”
Olaf pinched the bridge of his nose as he took off his glasses. “We were fighting it, you know? We had no idea what in the hell was going on but that we had to keep the boat pointed in the right direction.” He was shaking his head and suddenly sounded as if he were pleading to a jury. “After a while — right before we ran aground — Red and Luke came up to the boat deck. Bear in mind, we’re still right in the middle of hell. It was cold and windy and we were soaked and coated with ice and standing up on that deck with targets on our chests, just waiting to get dead. We’ve got no idea what the hell is happening below us until Luke comes back up. In the middle of all that screaming wind he tells me we’re done, that the engine room and her crew are gone, that right below us all four decks are up in flames: The fantail deck, the windlass room, the cabins — everything — poof”—he exploded his hands—“roaring away. He tells me they didn’t see anyone, that we’ve got no chance. Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath.
“And I’m thinking to myself, those goddamn boats sitting tight in Thunder Bay better damn well be on their way, and the Coast Guard better have a cutter and a few helicopters coming to search or we’re as good as dead.
“My mind was all tangled up. I was sitting on a time bomb with all the water in the world exploding around me. It’s so goddamn dark and cold and my guys are telling me that right beneath our feet half the crew is cooked.” He closed his eyes, looking, Noah thought, like he was trying to erase the picture from his mind. “I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I grabbed Red by the arm and we went back down.
“I told him to stay right with me, that we were going to slog it back into the engine room and see if there was anything we could do.”
“But they’d just been down there. They said it was impossible.”
“I had to see it for myself, I guess. As much as I trusted Luke, I knew it would haunt me forever if I got off that boat without checking on those guys.
“Jesus, it was something. We entered by way of the galley, grabbed fire extinguishers, and worked our way to the dining room and then toward the gangway that led into the crew’s quarters. I sounded the alarm, tried to make it into the cabins. But we had to stop. We couldn’t have gotten ten steps into those rooms without going up in flames ourselves.
“The strange part was that nothing in particular seemed to be on fire. It was like the air was on fire, all of the air. We were getting tossed around, of course, and each time I got thrown against the wall I could feel how goddamn hot it was. If I hadn’t been soaked through and halfway frozen, I probably would have come out of there with burns everywhere. Instead it was almost a relief if you can believe that.”
“How long were you down there?”
“Impossible to say, five, maybe ten minutes I’d guess. Once our extinguishers went empty we had no choice but to get back up on deck with Luke and Bjorn.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Why would you want to?” Olaf asked. “Why in the world would anyone want to imagine that hell?”
Noah took the question as a cue and sat there silently trying to remember what he knew about the ships that had laid up in Thunder Bay — whether it was just two or all three of them that had responded — and whether it was a search plane or helicopters that the Gunflint coast guard had dispatched when the wind weakened.
After a few minutes Olaf broke the silence again. “It had to be Canoe Rocks,” he said.
“What did?”
“Where we ran aground. The death blow.”
Olaf labored to his feet again, this time staying bowed at the waist as he took a few steps across the living room toward a wall shelf that sat behind the dining table. It was cluttered with cast-iron cookware and decorative Norwegian dishes, unused cookbooks, and antique cans of mosquito repellent. From the top of the shelf he grabbed what looked to Noah like a poster that was rolled up and tied with blue-and-white string.
“This is an old chart of Superior,” Olaf said, as he tried to catch some of the faint light in order to read a curled-up edge of it. “Right up your alley, come to think of it.”
“Let’s have a look at that.” Noah pushed the mugs and magazines and books on the coffee table to one end.
Olaf fiddled with the knot for a couple of seconds before he gave up and handed it to Noah, who fidgeted with it himself for a moment before biting through the string and unrolling the map on the coffee table. Olaf had grabbed a couple of heavy books from the bookcase and set one at each end of the table to keep the chart from coiling back up.
It was an old Loran-C chart published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that Noah recognized at a glance. It covered the north Superior shoreline from Grand Portage Bay, Minnesota, to Shesheeb Point, Ontario, and included the entire Isle Royale archipelago. People were always coming into his shop in Boston hoping that the folded and faded maps they had found in their attics were priceless relics. More often than not, they were just like this one, worth nothing more than what it would cost to mail them.
Olaf had turned a couple of lamps on and sat down knobby-kneed next to Noah on the sofa. “You see here?” he asked, dragging his nub pinky up the length of Isle Royale to its northeastern tip. “These are the Canoe Rocks. And this,” he said, dragging his thumb another couple of inches straight north, “is where we came about, where Jan made the mayday. The wind was coming from there,” he said, stretching his arm toward the dark corner of the great room and then signaling the direction with his thumb by pulling it back toward them, “so you see, the rocks were the first things in our path.
“We came about at ten fifteen, the fire starts at about ten thirty, you factor an hour of powerless drifting in, and we’d have hit the rocks about eleven thirty. From Canoe Rocks we drift a little farther southwest for a half hour or so and sink exactly here,” he said, thumping a black X scrawled on the chart with his thumb.
Noah sat up, retraced the path his father suggested, and leaned in to have a closer look at the sounding marked on the chart. “It says here the water’s only five hundred and eighty-two feet deep. I thought the Rag was deeper than that.”
Olaf pointed at the fine print along the upper edge of the map. “This chart was published in 1964. After the Rag sank, during the investigation they spent a lot of time using sonar equipment and whatnot trying to determine the exact whereabouts of the wreckage. They discovered the original soundings were off a couple hundred feet.”
“No small error,” Noah said.
“Discrepancies on these lake charts only mattered if they were in shallow water, in the harbors and along the coasts. The difference between five hundred and eighty feet and eight hundred feet doesn’t mean much to a boat drafting twenty-five.”
They both sat back and sighed and turned to face each other. After an awkward second Olaf looked away and patted Noah’s knee before trying to stand up. The edge of the couch was lower than the chair, though, and he couldn’t get his legs to lift him. Rather than trying to get up again, he let himself slide back into the cushions.