“It’s not your fault. You must know that.”
“You’re wrong. I took a few tugs on that rope once it was in the water. I might have thought about him for a minute. Then it was time to go. Who knows what Luke and Bjorn ever thought.”
“Why is Red more important than the other guys? Why are you lugging his ghost around?”
“None of the others had a chance. Red had a chance. I was his chance.”
They sat silently in the flotsam of his father’s avowal for a half hour. Perhaps longer. The evolution of Olaf’s face in those minutes was like that of a man relieved. Did Noah feel different now? Had history lied?
“Anyway,” Olaf said finally, breaking a silence that had become palpable.
“It doesn’t change anything,” Noah said. He had decided this was true.
“It’s not supposed to.”
They fell silent for another minute. “I always wondered about the others. Why didn’t they ever make a run for the lifeboats?”
Olaf looked out of words, like he couldn’t say another thing. But he did. “Do you know the story of the Mataafa?”
“It rings a bell.”
“I think it was 1905. Maybe the worst weather Superior’s ever seen. The Mataafa was from the Pittsburgh line. It’s morning, the boat steams out of Duluth. Right away they know they’ve made the wrong choice. So she comes about. Other ships had done the same thing, started only to reenter the harbor. The Mataafa, unlike the other boats, towed a barge behind her. She couldn’t get back into safe water, was hung up on the rocks just outside the harbor. There were nine men on the aft end of the ship, the rest of the crew was in the bow decking. They’re all taking a beating. Incredible waves. Wind. The day goes on and half the population of Duluth is on shore watching her wallow. They see a handful of men attempt to cross the deck. Three made it. One of the guys washed over but got back on board. He stayed astern. The water was so rough the Coast Guard couldn’t even get out of the harbor. This ship is sitting literally a couple hundred yards off the shore and nobody can help.
“All night it storms. The temperature drops. Snow piles up. Now hordes of people are lining the shore to see what happens to this ship and her crew. At dawn the seas have settled some, and a rescue boat is dispatched. They make one pass and get the men off the bow. Fifteen of them. When they go back for the guys on the stern, they’re all frozen. Literally encased in ice. Nine of them dead. Frozen to death, you see? They probably could have smelled the bonfires ashore, burning all night long. That’s Superior.
“You asked why nobody else made a run for the lifeboats, and the answer is simple — I don’t know. I don’t know why or even if they thought it would be best to stay put. Maybe Jan had a plan. Maybe he thought there would be a rescue attempt and the odds were better up there. Hell, maybe they did try to get back to the lifeboats and simply didn’t make it. It’s impossible to say.
“All I know for sure is we were off that boat. Bjorn and Luke. And Red, somewhere in the water. We were in a mess all over again. Hopeless, I thought. Some light still came from the Rag, but mostly it was just us and the darkness. I was on the tiller. and with the wind behind us it didn’t take long before we were a fair distance from the ship.” He stared down at the chart spread across the coffee table. “It seems impossible to me now to think that the whole night he was riding behind us like a goddamn anchor. How he got himself hooked onto that line I’ll never know. Why didn’t it snap? How in the hell did he come crashing up onto that rocky beach in the morning?”
“How did you guys manage?”
“Believe me, we managed nothing. Right away we were bailing water and still we were up to our ankles in it. Not just water, Superior water, water so cold it would’ve hurt to drink. Luke was rowing, trying to keep it between troughs so we’d take less. But it did little good. Too many waves from too many directions. Bjorn was working on the gunwale ice while he bailed.” Again he went silent. Noah didn’t dare to ask any more questions.
“I remember all of it. The cold. The wet. The dark. It should have been impossible for me to notice the glow behind us with all that commotion, but I did. It was like a ghost already. In the snow and sea spray, I could see a hazy light where the ship was. Maybe four hundred yards behind us. The flames, I guess, and whatever onboard lights were still working. That spot just flickered, coming in and out of view as we rode the waves. The farther we got the fainter it got, of course, until it was gone. We rode up a wave and I looked and there was nothing but the night.”
Noah had scooted to the edge of his chair in order to hear better. Olaf’s voice had weakened with each word, or seemed to. By the time he said “night” there was almost no sound at all, just a little parting of his lips and an indiscriminate wave of his hands. Despite the ebbing and softening of his voice — or maybe because of it — the image of the receding light from the sinking ship resounded in Noah, seemed especially important in light of all the darkness to come.
“The wind was coming from every direction. So was the water,” Olaf continued, his voice now barely more than a whisper. “We were soaked. Every thirty seconds another wave would wash over the gunwales and swamp us. Sometimes they were waves so big I thought we’d sink right under them. Sometimes they were easier. So we kept her afloat. It was like the water wanted us, but the darkness wanted us more. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s the truth. There were times I couldn’t even see the other guys in the boat. I’d yell as loud as I could and they wouldn’t hear me six feet away.”
The utter silence of the house, broken only by the pinging stove and Olaf’s labored breathing, compounded the image of the riotous night in the boat. The old man elbowed himself up on the couch. He rearranged the afghan over his shoulders. He cleared his throat.
“We kept the gunwales clear as we could. Kept from freezing by working so goddamn hard. Somehow we stayed in the boat. I mentioned luck before. No amount of luck earlier in the night measured up to staying alive all night in that mess. By the time morning broke I ought to have learned to believe in God.”
“It truly was a miracle,” Noah said, more to himself than to his father.
But Olaf heard him. “Here’s the thing.” He coughed to clear something in his throat not there. “It’s a whole lot more remarkable-sounding now than it seemed at the time. Maybe that’s obvious, maybe not, but the fact is, for those eight hours it was like we weren’t really there. It was downright impossible that we could be so cold, so wet. That it could be so dark. And even though we were working hard to stay alive, I suspect that each of us was waiting to die, too. I know I was.
“I’d spend some minutes woolgathering over you kids and your mother all tucked under your quilts at home without realizing that my hands were so cold I could hardly grip the tiller. I wanted to say good-night so badly, wanted to touch each of your foreheads the way I always did. When I’d snap out of it, it was like I’d been shot. All the pain would surge up, all the panic. But just as quick I’d be back in some other trance, thinking about getting ready for church when I was a tyke back in Norway, thinking about my mother pulling the curlers from her hair. And the whole time we were just frantically working, rowing and hammering and bailing. I suppose I kept at it with thoughts of all of you because I knew that any minute the boat would heave me out into the lake and that would be it. That would be the end.” He closed his eyes. Rested.
Noah looked at his father there on the sofa, bereft of the vitality he had once possessed so abundantly. For the old man’s son there was as much sadness in the moment as relief. He suspected his father felt little of either, was likely unmoved and unchanged. Perhaps emptiness filled the place where once a secret had resided.