Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

“How much is it?”

He checked the tag again. “Says here thirty-five dollars.”

Noah would have paid ten times the amount. “I’ll take it,” he said. “And while you’re at it, how about a pound of that salmon over there?”

It wasn’t until Noah got back to the house that he remembered the chain, and he might not have remembered it then if not for the padlock on the shed. The shake shingles and cedar siding that had been so inconspicuous at first — sitting under the overgrown trees, among the overgrown grass and bunchberry bushes — had taken on a new significance with the knowledge that the shack was doubling as his mother’s tomb.

The smoke coughing from the tin chimney on the house smelled wintry. It was a good smell, clean and faint. As it rose and dispersed into the flurries, Noah forgot about his mother’s ashes and felt an urge to hunker down and spend his afternoon with a big book — a book of myths or the biography of a king. The thought of bundling up and heading back to the gulch to finish with the oak seemed not only arduous but a waste of time. There was no way his father would live to burn a tenth of the wood that was already split and stacked around the house.

Inside, Noah kicked off his boots, set them on a braided rug beside the door, and hung his coat on a peg. He put the smoked fish in the refrigerator.

“He’s back,” Olaf said, setting a magazine on his lap.

“Hey. How are you doing?”

“Fine, fine.”

The fire was searing, he could tell, not only from the heat pouring out of the stove but from the faint whine and pinging of its cast-iron flanks. Noah took off his turtleneck and tossed it into the spare bedroom.

“Have any trouble with the truck?”

“No. But I forgot the chain. Sorry.”

“I’m going to need that chain. And soon.”

Noah sensed more than heard agitation in his father’s voice. “I can go back and get it.”

“Next time you’re in town. You’ve been there more in the last handful of days than I have in the last handful of months.”

Noah sat across from his father. “I talked to Solveig today. She’s going to come as soon as she can.”

“I asked you not to call her.”

“I can’t leave her in the dark even if you can. She’s worried about you and she loves you and she wants to help.”

“I guess that’s her prerogative. Though I don’t see why it’s necessary. She’s got a busy life.”

“We’ve all got busy lives.”

“I guess between your wife and your sister coming, we’ll just be a regular meeting place.”

“I guess we will.”

Olaf set the magazine he’d been reading on the coffee table and settled back into the sofa.

“What’s that?” Noah said.

“Magazine article Luke gave me. You remember Luke?”

“Your partner in survival. Who could forget Luke?”

“He’s a good man.” Olaf held the magazine up. “Anyway, it’s about shipwreck property. Can’t make the first bit of sense of it.”

“You thinking about diving for the booty left on the Rag ?”

Olaf declared, “Rest assured of this, nobody’s ever salvaging the Rag . She’s too deep.”

“You know, I always wanted to hear the story from you. About the Rag , I mean.”

Olaf looked down into his coffee. “I wouldn’t know how to tell it.”

“Start in Two Harbors.”

“It’s a long story, Noah.”

“And we’re sitting in the middle of the woods. It’s snowing. We’ve got nowhere to go.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“It was snowing then, too,” Noah coaxed.

Olaf took a deep breath and looked squarely at Noah. “We took twelve tons of taconite,” he began. “It was the first mate’s job to oversee loading, but you knew that.”

Noah nodded.

“Well, it snowed like a son of a bitch, and before we could start with the hatch covers we had to shovel her clear. We got started, but before even one of them was clear, Jan called us off.”

“It was the fuel line, right?” Noah asked, knowing perfectly well that it was.

“On the trip up, we noticed a leak. It wasn’t too bad at a glance, and we managed to get from Toledo to Two Harbors without any trouble, but after we unloaded the coal and were refueling, the bilge started to fill with diesel. That’s when Jan got jittery.

“I wasn’t ever a spook, but something in the back of my mind got a little itchy when they told us to replace the fuel line. I remember thinking it was strange that the higher-ups okayed a repair like that so late in the season. I mean, their priority was always bottom-line tonnage.” He paused, scratching the back of his head. “I chalked it up to the engine being new and the brass just not knowing how reckless they could be. But I was still uneasy about it.

“Twenty-two hours we sat there while a contractor put the new line in. We gave the crew fourteen hours’ leave and watched them all hump into Two Harbors.”

“I bet they did their best to hump once they got there, too.” Olaf smiled. “They usually did.”

“In Two Harbors, though?”

“You’d be surprised.” Olaf smiled again, shook his head, and then turned more serious. “Some of those boys lived up there. Bjorn did. He had a baby girl and a sweet little wife. I’ll tell you what, he was off that goddamn boat in five minutes.

“The boys who didn’t live there got pissed in the bars up on Willow Street. I’d venture to guess that more than one or two of those fellas had a pretty good time that night.” Olaf smiled again, as if to admit that despite his age, the memories of those little Great Lake ports, the run-down pubs that filled them, and the sailor-loving girls who knew the ship schedules like their multiplication tables hadn’t escaped him even now.

“The next morning, when they came back aboard, it was like watching a zombie parade. I remember the days before I met your mother, before I became an officer, too, and the shit we used to get ourselves into.” He smiled again. “Those boys knew how to dig it up. They were all red-eyed and pale, sweating in spite of the weather. Goddamn.

“The boys who lived up there, though, they all looked happy as clams. Walking lightly, you know,” he said and winked. “But not Bjorn. I didn’t know him well, but he looked like two different people at once. You could see he was happy — must have been thinking of his little girl and wife — but he also looked resentful as hell, probably about shipping out again. He was one of those guys who got tricked into his life on the boats. He was just dumb enough not to be able to do something else and just smart enough to hate what he did. There were a lot of guys like that on the Lakes.”

Noah scanned his memory for the men he knew from his father’s trade. Having had it put so simply, he could recognize the split in many of them. Some of the men, like Luke, stood out. They were single-minded types, gruff and bigger than life. But the majority of the men he remembered — men from his childhood cruises on the boats with his father and from his time slumming down in Canal Park with his high school buddies — were just ordinary guys.

“I’ll bet you put them right to work,” Noah said.

“Of course. We had to get the deck cleared and only had a short window of time to do it.”

“Because of the weather?”

“One front had already passed — the one that left a foot and a half of snow on our deck — and another one was coming, a nor’easter. We knew the seas would be rough and that it’d be cold as hell, so we wanted to get loaded and in front of the weather. It was no fun to be out there latching the hatches when it got below zero.”