Peter Geye: Safe from the Sea

As Noah approached, he took inventory of the old man: A baggy chambray work shirt frayed at the collar and cuffs and a pair of dungarees cinched with a canvas belt brought attention to how thin he had become; his hair and beard were both completely white now and even more unkempt than Noah remembered; his black boots were untied. As Olaf extended his hand, Noah saw evidence of the arthritis his sister had warned him of, but when he took the old man’s hand, the strength of the grip surprised him.

“Hi, Dad.”

Olaf pulled the barstool out further. When Noah sat, his father stepped back, sizing up Noah in his own manner. “Penny loafers, huh?”

Noah shrugged and held his hands up in a gesture of deference.

“What’ll you drink?” Olaf said.

“Orange juice. It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

“Orange juice for the boy, Mel!”

Whereas the other patrons had newspapers or each other for company, Olaf had been sitting alone, with only his drink before him. When he rejoined Noah at the bar, he resumed the posture of a loner, looking straight ahead at the bar back and rolling another cigarette.

Their talk over the next hour could hardly have passed for conversation. Between bites of runny eggs and greasy hash browns, Olaf asked Noah about his job and his girlfriend. Noah asked after the old man’s health and the state of the cabin up on Lake Forsone, where Olaf had recently moved after selling their house on High Street. Olaf drank two more Bloody Marys with Grain Belt snits. Occasionally his voice surged and the other men in the bar set their drinks down to look at him. Everyone knew who he was, of course, and there seemed to be dueling sympathies in their attention. On the one hand, they must have admired his tragedy, and on the other, pitied his churlishness.

In a lull during their breakfast Noah said, “I’m getting married.”

“That’s what your sister tells me.” Olaf shifted his gaze from the bar back to the ceiling and blew a stream of smoke. “Getting hitched,” he continued under his breath.

Noah slid his plate forward and swiveled to face his father. “In October. I hope you’ll be there.”

Instead of answering, Olaf summoned Mel. “The boy’s settling down, partner,” he announced. “Tying the knot.”

“The slipknot?”

“That’s the one,” Olaf said.

“God help him,” Mel replied.

“I’d offer to buy you a drink,” Olaf said, turning his attention back to Noah, “but you’ve already got your juice.” Instead he motioned for another Bloody Mary. Mel set about making it. “A slipknot, it’s like a noose,” Olaf explained. “It’s a joke, boy.”

“A good one, too.”

Noah remembered looking his father in the eye and seeing nothing but a boozy vacancy. The old man’s drunkenness had always struck Noah as cumulative. Olaf had not spent nights in the hoosegow, he’d not crashed the family car into light poles or missed mortgage payments because his paycheck had been squandered here at the Freighter. Despite this, the years had surely added up to something, to some soggy history that diminished the old man. Noah had an impulse to scold him but did not. Instead he rose to leave. “I’ve got a flight,” he explained. “I hope you’ll make the wedding.” He put his hand on his father’s shoulder in a gesture that should have been reversed. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Olaf looked again over the top of his glasses. “I’ll see you in October.”

“YOU READY FOR another beer?” The bartender’s voice came as if from that morning years ago. He cleared the empty basket, took measure of Noah’s shot glass on the bar.

“No, thanks.”

“I swear, if you weren’t the spitting image of that old cuss, I’d suspect you of lying.” He pointed at the whiskey.

“Sorry,” Noah said. “I appreciate the thought. I’ve just never been able to stomach the stuff.”

“No harm,” he said, then placed the tab on the bar.

“Are there any boats tonight?” Noah asked.

Mel looked at the clock on the wall. “ Erindring ’s outbound in an hour. Load of coal for the good people of Stockholm.”

Noah laid payment on the tab. “Does he ever come down here anymore? You ever see him?”

“Your old man? Nah. I haven’t seen him in what, five years? Maybe longer.”

“I’ll tell him you said hello. Thanks for everything.”

“Anytime, now. Good-night.”

AT THE BREAKWATER he listened to the canal water lapping against the wall. Herring gulls squawked and rolled and dove on invisible currents above the aerial bridge. Every couple of minutes one would pull up on the breakwater and hop toward Noah with a cocked head. They appeared famished and well fed at the same time. Their iridescent eyes glistened in the lamplight. He had always loved watching the gulls and thought there was something majestic about them up here, something very different from the scavenger gulls back in Boston. Here the gulls fished first and begged only after the smelt had gone out.

He looked over the breakwater wall, caught his shadowy reflection in the waves, and wondered how many times during the last twenty-four hours he’d tried to remember his father’s aged face. Even as Noah had replayed the memories of that morning years ago in the Freighter, he had not quite been able to summon it.

The last of the gulls flew into the harbor, and he turned to head back. A light rain now mixed with the fog, and the temperature seemed to be falling. Not fifty paces to his left the foyer of the maritime museum was still lit. He approached the entrance and saw that it was open for another half hour. Inside, the split-level entryway was covered with posters and artifacts representing the Great Lakes shipping industry. He took the ramp up, which led into a large room with windows overlooking the canal. But for the person sitting behind the information desk, Noah was alone in the museum.

A crumpled lifeboat hung suspended from the ceiling on the edge of the main room. Next to it one of the anterooms advertised itself as the RAGNARØK EXHIBIT. Noah ventured in. A montage of photographs hung on the wall, and his father’s image glared back from two. The first took Noah’s breath away. It was an eighteen-by-twelve-inch black-and-white of the crew of the Rag . They huddled dockside in front of the black-hulled freighter during a late-winter snow squall. Taken in March 1967, the day of her first cruise that shipping season, it reminded Noah of countless other departures. Most of the thirty faces in the photograph were blurred in the snow or hidden by the wool collars of the crew’s standard-issue peacoats, but the image of his father’s gaze — unblemished by the snow and unhidden by his collar — was clear. The placard beside the photo said: THE CREW OF THE ILL-FATED SUPERIOR STEEL SHIP SS RAGNARØK, MARCH 1967. THE SHIP IS AT BERTH AT THE SUPERIOR STEEL DOCKS IN DULUTH HARBOR. THE RAG WOULD FOUNDER IN A GALE OFF ISLE ROYALE EIGHT MONTHS LATER. TWENTY-SEVEN OF HER THIRTY HANDS WERE LOST. It also listed, in parentheses, each of the men, from left to right, front to back.

Noah recognized the second photograph, taken of the three survivors. Luke Lifthrasir lay on a four-handled gurney being carried up the glazed boulder beach, his gauze-wrapped arm raised triumphantly in a frostbitten fist. Two men in Coast Guard uniforms tended to Bjorn Vifte, who sat huddled under a wool blanket. Noah’s father sat in the edge of the picture, alone, his shoulders slumped over his knees, the small of his back resting against an ancient cedar tree that grew from a cleft in the bedrock. Blood frozen in parallel lines stained his cheek. In the background, a photographer aimed his camera at the same wrecked lifeboat that hung on display from the ceiling in the next room. The second placard read: THE THREE SURVIVORS OF THE WRECK OF THE SS RAGNARØK, ASHORE AT LAST, HAT POINT, WAUSWAUGONING BAY, LAKE SUPERIOR. NOVEMBER 6TH, 1967.