Noah had stood impulsively and found himself hovering above his father for the second time in as many hours. Instead of lingering this time, he walked around the table and looked for something to distract them from the awkward moment. A couple of seconds seemed like a couple of minutes before he finally grabbed the afghan and spread it over his father’s legs.
“Thanks,” Olaf said, then gestured toward the stove. “Is there room in there for another log?”
Noah opened the stove door, knew another log wouldn’t make any difference. He took one from the wood box and tossed it in. When it hit the smoldering pile already in the stove, the logs collapsed and spread across the bottom of the stove in a bright, pumpkin-orange flash. The new log caught fire immediately.
“Close the damper a bit, too, would you?” Olaf asked.
Noah did. As he stood there within a few feet of the open door, watching the bark on the split oak disappear into ash, he figured the temperature in the cabin must have been at least eighty-five degrees, maybe ninety.
He closed the stove door and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. “If there was an explosion, isn’t it possible that that was the cause of a rupture in the hull?” Noah asked.
“Sure, sure,” Olaf said. “In fact, I’d be surprised if serious damage hadn’t been done by an explosion, the fire alone, even. But the fatal blow was the rocks.”
“How do you know?”
“It wasn’t more than a couple minutes after I got back on deck that we ran aground,” Olaf said. “Imagine that big boat butting against a line of rocks, each as big as a house. The jolt knocked me right off my feet. We were lucky we’d had time to get ourselves reattached to our lifelines. If we hadn’t, we would’ve been in the water — and probably dead.
“You see, when the boat’s adrift in the open water, the waves are up against a moving target. When the boat’s beached on the rocks, in the shoal water, they’re free to pound whatever’s there. I remember trying to get my feet back under me and the water crashing up over the deck. I didn’t have a whole lot of hope right then, that’s for damn sure.”
“It must have been terrifying,” Noah said, imagining himself in the same situation. “What do you think about at a moment like that?”
Olaf looked at him from the corner of his eye. “Have you ever been in a rumble?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Like a fistfight?”
“Yeah. You and another guy mixing it up.”
“No.”
“I’ve been in one fight,” Olaf said. “In Westby, Wisconsin, of all places. I was sixteen years old. I remember because it was the year I won the ski jumping tournament down there — you won there once, too, didn’t you?” he asked but didn’t wait for an answer. “We were in one of the bars in town after the tournament, and some local guy got it into his head that I was trying to move on his girl — which I probably was.” Olaf smiled. “He cussed me out, and before I knew it, he’d cracked my head with a beer bottle. It wasn’t a clean hit, but it was enough to knock me down. Then he sets to work kicking, punching, crashing bar chairs over my shoulders every time I tried to get on my feet. I didn’t know what in the hell had hit me, but I knew I had to get up. I thought that son of a bitch might’ve been crazy enough to kill me.
“The point is, I’d been getting the shit knocked out of me: the walk across the deck, the time on the open boat deck, running aground and taking that pounding, that all adds up. It would’ve been easy to just cling to that icy deck and hope.”
“Why didn’t you give up?”
“I guess there was some instinct to survive,” Olaf said. “And I knew I probably wouldn’t if I just sat there holding on for dear life.”
“Did you think you were going to die?”
Olaf thought about it for a second. “I don’t suppose I thought I was going to die, no. It was more a matter of thinking I wouldn’t survive. There’s a difference, or it seemed so at the time.
“We were only hung up on the rocks for a couple of minutes, but that was time enough for me to put some perspective on our situation. We had no engine, no engine crew, no steerage, no communication between ends of the ship, no communication at all, with anyone. We were thirty miles from safe harbor, stuck on a rock in the middle of Lake Superior, it was below zero, a near whiteout, with fifteen-foot waves. And we were already soaked to the bone.
“Now, I don’t care if you have two minutes or two days to make decisions when you’re in a mess like that, the fact is, there just aren’t a whole lot of options. You asked me if I thought I was going to die. If I’d had the time, I might’ve. But I didn’t. I had to decide whether to launch the lifeboats or get back with the rest of the crew on the bow.”
“Why would you have done that?”
“They were my crewmates,” Olaf said without hesitation. “I was an officer aboard a ship in peril.”
The notion of the crew’s importance touched an unidentifiable nerve in Noah. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Crossing back to the bow would have meant leaving the lifeboats. If you leave the lifeboats, you’ve got positively no chance.”
“That’s true if you know the boat is sinking. We didn’t.”
Noah shook his head. “You didn’t know you were sinking? You’re on the rocks, the lifeboats are ten feet from where you’re standing, half the crew is already dead — probably dead, anyway — and you hesitate to get off the ship?”
“They were my goddamn crewmates, I wanted to save them more than I wanted to save myself. How could I have helped anyone by getting into a lifeboat and rowing into the goddamn night?”
“How did you intend to save them by leaving behind the only means of escape?”
Olaf was clearly riled. “Oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe I thought there would be safety in numbers, maybe I thought one of those lifeboats out on the open water would have been suicide — I mean, hell, it nearly was. Or maybe I just didn’t know what to do. There’s no manual for surviving the end of the world.” He balled both hands into lopsided fists and pounded them against his legs.
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he concluded. “No sooner had the four of us met back on the deck than we came off the rocks. As soon as we did, I knew exactly what we had to do.”
Noah got up again, went to the kitchen, and wiped his face with a dish towel. Outside, it was dark, and Noah caught a glimpse of his reflection in the window. His hair was messy and on end, and he looked drunk. He hadn’t shaved since he’d left Boston, and his stubble darkened his chin. His eyes were slack but bright. There was fog on the outside of the window, and he figured it would have been frost if not for the heat inside.
“Understand something,” Olaf said, “until we got off the rocks, I still had the notion that everything was going to come together. I still thought — and it’s easy to see how ludicrous this sounds in hindsight — that somehow we could come out of it, you know? That we could avoid the end. Stupid, but it’s true.
“And another thing, contrary to conventional wisdom, when you’re on the edge of life — like that — and falling off, you don’t stop and reminisce. At least I didn’t. What you do is look for something to hold on to.”
Noah hoisted himself up onto the kitchen counter and crossed his legs. “I guess,” he said but didn’t understand. The notion that the old man’s crew of nobodies should take precedence over his mother and sister and himself still didn’t make sense.
“And maybe there was a chance up until we came free, you know? Maybe everything going through my head wasn’t just fear or indecision.”