Peter Geye - Safe from the Sea

“ The Darkest Place in the Night .”

“You know, it’s been a long time now. A long, long time. But I still remember the darkness. Maybe it’s just easy to imagine the dark, especially up here. I don’t know.”

“You must remember other things, too. I suppose it’s hard to forget.”

“Not so hard when you’re as old as me.” He smiled. “But I remember things, sure. We were at the mercy of many things back there. We had the inferno blazing beneath us, the snow squall suffocating us, seas still washing the deck. And wind. Holy shit, that wind. The thought of launching one of those lifeboats, because of all that, seemed like the greater of two evils. I mean, those things were made for Sunday picnics on a lake like this here”—he gestured toward Lake Forsone—“not all-nighters on a stormy Superior. They had no real keel to speak of, no cover, they were just big rowboats with a few supplies stowed under the thwarts. I’ll tell you what, it was awful damn hard to imagine rowing that thing across the lake.

“Where did you put that chart?”

Noah stood. “Here.” He fetched it from the shelf and unrolled it on the coffee table again.

“We were here, remember? I more or less knew our position, knew what neighborhood we were in, leastways. What I figured we’d do was simply make our way west, thought we’d end up in Thunder Bay or some spot south of there. In all the commotion I didn’t spend much time factoring in the hell working against us. No thought of wind, no thought of drifting, of the seiches. This was an oversight, I guess, but even after I decided to launch the boat I didn’t think about the ordeal we’d have ahead of us until we were actually lowering.

“There was some light back there. Floods on either side of the stack, the creepy glow from the fire beneath us, my headlamp and the flashlight Luke carried, but it was still hell to see anything. The lifeboat was set to two davits, the davits to two cables, the cables to winches that you lowered manually. There was a canvas tarp covering the boat lashed with Manila rope who knows how old? On a sunny day in July, lowering that boat might have taken three minutes. Clip the rope, pull the tarp off, unlock the winches, swing it out over the deck, and crank it down. The ladder that went over the side was just sort of piled atop the deck. Made of chain and steel rungs. Toss that over the deck, too. You could have had the crew in boats in five minutes. That night the whole goddamn operation was covered in ice six inches thick. Might as well’ve been set in concrete.”

“What did you do?”

“Red cut the rope off the tarp. Got two hammers from the toolbox in the lifeboat. He and Luke went at hacking the ice. I crossed the deck to the stack. You might not believe this, but I ripped a rung from the ladder that climbed the stack. I worked on the davits with the rung. Bjorn was in charge of the ladder. I don’t know what he used, but by the time we got the boat over the deck, ready to lower it, Bjorn tossed the ladder over. too.”

“It’s amazing what people are capable of in times of desperation,” Noah said.

“Listen, the four of us might have been able to portage that whole goddamn ship up the Soo, we were so desperate. Far cry from now,” he said, rubbing his biceps.

“I suspect you’re stronger than you think,” Noah said, remembering the barrel in the shed, how the old man must have lifted it onto the workbench.

“Anyway, we were ready to lower it. I ordered Luke and Bjorn into the boat. By then the ship had come about in the storm so the port side of her was taking all the seas. That created a lee for us on starboard. This was both good and bad. Good because it gave us a calmer spot to load the lifeboat, bad because that foundering son of a bitch was going to be right on top of us when we got in the water.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous to lower the lifeboats with guys in it?”

“No more dangerous than anything else that was happening. Normally there wouldn’t be anyone in the boat while it was lowered, no. But I figured there was an awful lot that could go wrong once the boat was in the water, and a couple guys down there to handle things wouldn’t be a bad thing. It was a gamble, sure, but we were so short on odds that it didn’t matter anyway.”

“What did you and Red do once the boat was in the water?”

“We scuttled our asses over the side of that boat, that’s what we did. Now, if you want to talk about spooky, let’s talk about getting down that ladder. You take the wind, the water, the ice, the fire. You take the darkness. You put it all together and try to imagine hanging over the side of that ship, climbing down to that boat bobbing all over the water.” Here Olaf stopped, a look of intense concentration on his face. Noah read it as the look of a man trying desperately to remember something he’d worked his whole life at forgetting.

“Did you see Red?”

“Did I see Red, what, go into the water?” He looked away with a surprising suddenness.

“Yeah, did you see anything?”

It was well documented in the annals of the wreck that after Olaf and Red had gone over the side of the ship, first Red, then Olaf, and after they’d passed the fantail deck and the flames without, Red had dropped from the ladder, not to be seen again until his body washed ashore on the rocks at Hat Point. The only scenario ever suggested was that he’d simply lost his footing in the chaos, managed to get hold of a rope once he was in the lake, and then managed to attach himself to the rope and so been towed behind it through the night.

“I did not see him fall.” Olaf faltered. “I did not hear a splash. Or a scream. There was nothing, I didn’t even know he was gone.” He let out a soft moan.

“I sent Red over first, thinking the sooner he was in the lifeboat the safer he’d be. I thought it must be written into my rank. Hell if I knew.”

Again he paused. Longer this time. He looked like a man in a confessional mood.

“I remember getting down that ladder. Rung by rung. Remember passing the decking, feeling the warmth of the fire. I remember the smell. I thought of all those guys in there. Cooked. I felt greedy for being on that ladder, greedy for being so close to the lifeboat. I didn’t even have much faith in surviving the night, but I was glad of the chance. I still wonder why that chance fell on me. It seemed to me all these years that something more than luck had its hand in it. But for all the many thousand times I’ve replayed it, that’s all I come up with. Dumb luck. I was lucky Jan sent me across the deck. I was lucky to get across the deck, lucky not to have been washed off the deck once we were aft, lucky I didn’t fall from the ladder like Red. Chrissakes, that’s all it was. Luck. Rotten luck.”

“What’s wrong with a little luck in a situation like that?” Noah asked, interpreting his father’s words as an act of contrition.

“Oh, hell, there’s nothing wrong with it. I was damn glad for it. But when it comes time to add it all up, saying you were lucky isn’t a very good explanation.”

“Maybe there’s no need for an explanation. Maybe there isn’t one.”

“Maybe not.”

“Did you see him again, I mean before morning?”

“Did I see him again? Jesus Christ, did I ever,” Olaf said, turning his eyes to the ceiling.

“When I got into the boat Luke and Bjorn were already bailing. The lifeboat was twenty feet long, and they were together in the bow. Red was just gone. I turned my headlamp out onto the lake. I was shouting his name. We were already in a mess. The water, it was churning.” He spit his words, made great gestures with his arms, whorling gestures that sufficed as testament to the nature of that lake. “That dark. Couldn’t see a damn thing, not at first. But then he was there. In the water. Behind the lifeboat. I saw him, Noah.”