Across the Great Lake Read online

  “What’s a row?” I asked.

  “A dustup, you know, an argument.” He looked around the cabin. There was a small radiator near the sink in the part where the berth was, and little puddles had formed on the floor where the snow had dripped from my father’s big galoshes when he carried me in. “Captain must be below, checking the jacks. Chief engineer thinks everything below deck belongs to him, but it’s the captain deals with the rumpus if the cars bust loose.” His eyes returned to me. “How did you get here?”

  “My mother is sick.” I thought of my parents’ voices from behind the closed door and turned the terms over in my head. My parents had a dustup, a row, because my mother was sick, and now I was on a big ship headed out to sea. “What did they argue about?”

  Alv’s eyes quickened. “It’s the second wheelsman. The first mate fired him last night, but Odd came back while we were loading, he’s at the wheel now, and Mr. Johannessen’s mad as a hornet.”

  Dimly I recalled hearing my father use the same word at the dinner table. He must have been telling my mother that he’d fired someone, and I’d thought he meant burned.

  “He’s a drunk, Odd is, so Johannessen gave him the boot, but now he’s back and won’t go.” A note of merriment seeped into Alv’s voice. “‘Dammit, I fired you,’ Johannessen said, and Odd says, ‘I like it here. I’ll tell you when I’m ready to quit.’”

  “My father will make him go.”

  “Can’t. Boat’s underway.”

  “What will they do?” I asked. Someone must have read me a story about pirates, because I imagined my father and all the sailors lining up on deck to watch the drunk man named Odd walk the plank. In the corner, above the sink, there was a wooden rack with an orange life jacket suspended from the ceiling, and I wondered if they would let him wear it. It didn’t occur to me that he could simply walk back to Elberta over the ice, as the chief engineer would do that night, when we broke a rudder pin. We would spend our first night on the ice just outside our own harbor while he waited for the blacksmith to forge a new one and the ghost stole out from the compartment where it lived during the day.

  “Second mate’s already said let him steer, might as well get some use out of him if he has to be fed.” The dimples in Alv’s cheeks deepened when he smiled. “He says that’s the way Captain would see it, but Johannessen doesn’t think so. I don’t think the mates get along too good.”

  “Did they holler?”

  “You bet.”

  “I want to see.”

  “Oh no. I might get in trouble with the captain.”

  “My father is the captain,” I said again. “And Manitou’s bored. We want to go upstairs.”

  “Above,” he corrected. “Bosun goes beserk anyone says upstairs or downstairs. Who’s Manitou?” he added as his eyes fell on the bear, whose brown silk plush was wearing away along one ear. “Hello, Manitou.” To me he added, “I know that story.”

  “Everyone knows that story.” But I was pleased that he knew it, that he understood I had not named my bear for my father’s ship. I retreated to my father’s berth and sat to give my boot another tug, then frowned. “I can’t get these off.”

  “Might want to leave them on if Captain lets you go on deck.”

  I didn’t want to explain about the scratchy leggings. I didn’t want him to know that I hadn’t dressed myself. I knew how, but I had still been in my nightgown when my father came in to get me. Alv was my first crush, and I wanted him to think I was more grown up than I was. “I can put them back on when I go outside.”

  He took off his gloves and knelt on the floor. When he pulled at the first boot, my shoe flew off along with it. He was as tall as some men, but up close I could see he still had the smooth skin of a boy, and his eyelashes were as long and black as a woman’s. “There,” he said when he had removed the other one. He glanced at Manitou again. “Is Manitou a boy or girl bear?”

  “A boy,” I said instantly, though until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that Manitou should be one or the other. No one had ever said which the cubs were, and I had never asked. Probably they were a boy and a girl, because that’s the way a story would work, but Manitou couldn’t be both because everyone, even bears, had to be one and whichever one you were meant you couldn’t be the other.

  “How old are you, Fern?”

  “Five.” I held up my fingers. “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Is your mother sick too?”

  “I’m learning how to be a deckhand.” His weight seemed to shift, and his voice seesawed, as if it didn’t know yet whether it belonged to a man or a boy. “Well, for now I guess I’m more like an errand boy, but if we get stuck or there’s a blow, I’ll be a deckhand for sure.”

  “I think I’d like to be a deckhand,” I said.

  “You more than me. It’s my father’s idea.”

  “Is he one of the mates? How come they don’t get along?”

  Alv shook his head. “He’s an oiler on the Kewaunee. He says it’s a good living on the boats and with times the way they are I might as well get started. I was in school, but the teacher got sick of me—‘Half the time you’re not here,’ she says, ‘and when you are you aren’t here anyway.’ So my father figured I ought to go to work.”

  “I’m going to school next year.” I fingered my father’s blanket and hopped back to my feet, though I still had one shoe off and the other on. “I already know my numbers and my letters. Do you live in Frankfort?” I knew before he answered that he didn’t. Only the officers lived in Frankfort. He would live on the other side of the harbor, in Elberta, and if my mother had been there I would have known better than to ask, but I was by myself with this beautiful, almost grown boy who was going to be a deckhand and who was talking to me just like I was almost grown and maybe going to be a deckhand too. I said whatever came into my head. “I live in Frankfort. I live in a big house on the hill on Leelanau Avenue. It has a tower room, I have a swing, we have a car, and the whole end of Fourth Street is our driveway.”

  “Of course you do.” He smiled at me, and his dimples pooled. With his perfect nose, the plump mouth, golden skin, and eyes as big and dark as the whole north woods, he didn’t resemble anyone I knew. Though his cap covered his hair, I knew if he took it off, his hair would be as thick and black as his eyelashes. “What it is, a first mate never likes the second mate calling the shots.”

  “I think this is going to be a very long trip,” I said. Already I liked the idea that I was going to sea. I must have known that my destination was Menominee, which was still in Michigan, but on the UP at the very edge of the Wisconsin border. I imagined Wisconsin to be halfway around the world. “And Manitou and I can’t see out the window.”

  “I can fix that.” Alv slid a shutter into a pocket below a window. I hadn’t known the pocket was there, and I thought it was so clever I asked him to do all the others and then raise them back up just so I could watch him do it again. Then he boosted me to the glass. The sky had paled, and I recognized the white beam inside a fountain of frozen spray way ahead to starboard. It was the north pier light. The south light was red, because a captain was supposed to look for red on the right whenever he came into a harbor in the fog or at night. That was how he knew where to steer. I looked the other way across the ice, and there it was, up ahead to port, the red glow, blinking inside a cage of frozen spray at the end of the icy precipice that was the south pier. In summer, when I played on the beach and hunted for Petoskey stones below the bluff, we sometimes walked out past the diving board on the north pier, past the turn where it narrowed, all the way to the light. So many hours at sea, and I was not yet as far as I had already been. When he set me down I tugged his sleeve and handed him Manitou. Alv pressed the bear’s face to the window. “What do you think, Manitou?”

  I shook my head. “He’s a very nice bear. You can talk to him, but if you want him to talk back you have to make it all up.” I liked the idea of such a long trip, but not
if I had to spend it all inside my father’s cabin. “I want to see the rest of the boat. Why doesn’t my father come get me?”

  “Because he has a ship to command. But I’ll tell you what. If Captain’s busy, I’ll come back and get you for dinner.”

  “When?”

  “Noon. Bosun says I eat first shift with him.”

  “Promise?” I asked, even though noon was forever. It was barely time for breakfast, though my father had given me some sweet soup with bread and butter before we left. “Best to fill your belly, Fern,” he had said, but noon was half a day, and a day was forever done twice.

  When Alv was gone, I sat next to my bear against the pillow on my father’s berth and dipped my face to his. “Manitou, this is going to be a long trip, and I do not want you asking if we are there yet. You are going to have to act very grown up.”

  5

  We were Norwegian, my parents and I, as were most of the people we knew. For a long time when I was young I thought everyone must be Norwegian, or else Swedish. My father’s name was Henrik Halvorsen, my mother’s Silje, names that make them sound more Norwegian than they were since both of them were born in Michigan, at least I think my mother was. I never learned much about her, only that she was an orphan. She was a great deal younger than my father. It was his parents who came from the old country. His father left Norway to become a sailor at the age of fourteen, the same age as Alv. Eventually he arrived in Frankfort, where he too became a captain, but people didn’t live so long back then, and both of my grandparents died before I was born. They’re buried in what used to be called the Norwegian Cemetery out beside the highway to Benzonia. Until I was in my teens the Lutheran church in Frankfort still conducted services in Norwegian, but we attended the ones in English, and I don’t think my father knew more than a few words in his parents’ native tongue. What it meant to be Norwegian to me was Santa Lucia Day with its white lights and fragrant saffron buns, the Christmas pinnekjøtt, big marzipan kransekake, and buttery julekake that even children consumed with strong black coffee, the lefse I liked sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, my stepmother’s potato dumplings, and Sunday’s svinestek, roast pork with pickled cabbage and mashed potatoes. On the occasional evenings when he was home, my father liked to play the old Norsk sea tunes he learned from his father on his accordion and drink a beer brewed the malty Norwegian way, but really we were American, or so I thought until I went away to school and learned that I was not Norwegian or American, either one, but Midwestern.

  Alv was Norwegian too, but he was not the same as us. We were a pale people, with blue eyes, blond hair, and thin Nordic noses. His thick dark hair, dark eyes, and full face, maybe even his dimples, came from his Sami mother. I didn’t know about the Sami then, those Arctic reindeer herders who migrated from Siberia to the northern coast of Scandinavia thousands of years ago. The notion of herding reindeer would have been as foreign, as exotic, to me as the practice of driving an entire train onto a boat surely would have seemed to the Sami. There were caribou on the Upper Peninsula, but I had never been to the UP. Our house backed on woods and I often saw deer, rabbits, sometimes a fox. In the evenings tourists liked to park their cars at the dump to watch bears come out to forage, but my father had no time for such foolishness, and my acquaintance with reindeer came strictly from “The Night before Christmas.”

  Yet it was not just Alv’s Sami mother who made him different. He had left school to work on the boats because that was what his father wanted, but what he wanted, what he really wanted, was to play the piano. When he told me the first afternoon of our journey, his eyes sparkled in the light of the passenger lounge, as he seemed to see himself playing on a stage or perhaps in a saloon, whatever venue he dreamed, maybe just a room with nothing but himself and a big Steinway, though I don’t suppose he would have known what a Steinway was, and the piano where I imagined him was the August Förster upright in our parlor. I was a lonely child, and already I wanted him to come live with us and be my big brother.

  “My mother plays the piano,” I said, and isn’t it strange that I should so clearly remember telling him that when I can’t remember my mother playing the piano at all? When I picture that instrument now, it’s my stepmother on the stool, picking out “Cheek to Cheek” or “My Blue Heaven” with her right hand and harmonizing with her left. I must have sat down to it a few times myself, though I cannot recall the feel of the keys beneath my fingers; that endless row of ivory teeth looked all too much the same, I had no ear for it, I lacked the patience that would have allowed me to decode the notes spattered across the sheet music on its rack. Even as a small girl I loved the outdoors, the woods, the lake, Betsie Bay, the river that spooled down through the marsh, and the smaller lakes all around us. I wasn’t artistic, and my connection to that piano with its candle sconces and burled wood insets was the dustrag.

  But isn’t it also strange that I should remember nearly every moment of that journey when I have forgotten so much else? Some people say that the distant past comes back to them as if it were yesterday, but those days I spent on the Manitou do not come back to me like yesterday, they come back like today, this very minute, the way a book springs back to life and happens all over again, with all its colors and smells, the raw sorrow for each setback and joy in its triumphs, every time you take it off the shelf. That first night we spent on the ice outside the harbor waiting for a new rudder pin, it was so quiet I could hear the crack of the pins in the bowling alley on Main Street. Now, of course, I wonder whether my mother heard them too as she lay in my parents’ upstairs bedroom. Did she open her eyes and trace the faint glow of the streetlight on the white curtain, in her grief unable to sleep? Did she think about me, did she wonder where I was, if I was safe, or did she think only that the sound of those pins, that cadence of happy explosions echoing through the frozen silence, was the last cruelty she would have to bear?

  I have read somewhere that the memories that seem most familiar to us, the ones we most often visit, are in fact our least accurate, for each time we review them we change them, revisions so subtle we’re unaware of making them, until the more we seem to remember, the less we actually do. But what happens to the memories you suppress, the ones you can’t bear to visit waking, and so they come to you in dreams? For me it’s a moose, a moose with devil’s horns, starving, staining the ice red as it dies, looking up at me with its sad, reproachful eyes. I didn’t kill it, but awake or asleep, in calling up the past, memory always lies.

  Yet I have to wonder how a lie could be so fully textured. Surely the true memory is the one that is vivid.

  Far more vivid than that of the luncheon I attended at the assisted living out near the airport yesterday, where we all wore party hats like fools to honor a birthday girl much too doddering and weak to blow out the eighty-six candles that should have been on her cake. So many years had passed since we’d last seen each other—though she was two years older, in grade school we’d briefly been friends—she probably wouldn’t have recognized me even if her memory was intact, though the truth is I hardly recognize myself, the crepey skin along my arms, web of lines around my mouth, wattled neck, and drooping eyelids. Already I can’t pick my voice out of that “Happy Birthday” chorus, don’t know any of those cracked, tuneless yaps as mine, only the lilt of a little girl, tucking her hand inside the new apprentice deckhand’s as he leads her from her father’s cabin, down the ladder to the weather deck and the mess inside the deckhouse and her first dinner aboard ship, and she asks, please, when they are done eating, can she be taken below to see the train?

  6

  If my father had been captain of a freighter, he would have enjoyed larger quarters, with his own bathroom and an extra bedroom for family visits. But the railroad had designed its ferries for short hauls, never mind that they sometimes stuck in the ice for days or that the sailors spent weeks on board, back and forth across the lake, in order to earn their few days off. My father’s cabin was so narrow it was nearly bisected by the woo
den locker in the middle, and he had to share a bathroom—which is not called a bathroom on a ship, but the head, and you’d best not let the bosun hear you call it anything else, though later, when I went to school and raised my hand to ask my teacher if I could please go to the head, she stiffened her shoulders as if she’d been struck and said that it was unacceptable for a girl to be so vulgar. But comfort didn’t much matter to my father. He was not a complainer—nor, I should add, did he care to hear the complaints of others. As for myself I was glad he didn’t have a private bath, because in order to find the head he shared with all the other officers I had to go exploring. And if I couldn’t go up to the pilothouse, where a drunk was at the wheel and maybe the two mates were still yelling, I had to do something.

  The passageway through the officers’ quarters was so tight I braced my hands against both walls until I found my sea legs, even though the ship was just plowing through the slush ice and wasn’t rocking like it would in a chop. When I peered up the companionway to the pilothouse, all I could see was a pool of light. The little brass plates above the doors to all the cabins were too high for me to read, not that I knew many words, but what they would say was who slept there, and anyone could figure that out by how many lines there were, because the first mate had his own, but the second and third mates had to share, even though you could tell how small the cabins would be, less than half the size of my father’s, so I hoped the second and third mates got along better than the second and the first. I wanted to see a cabin, so I listened outside the doors for a whisper of breath inside. Sure enough, the one I chose was empty, so compact it looked like a child’s playhouse, with a sink in the corner like my father’s and a little fold-down stool on the wall. At the very back of the officers’ quarters, behind the head, there was a compartment for the boatswain, the unlicensed mate in charge of the deck crew and maintenance. All I knew about the bosun was what Alv had told me, that he got mad if you acted like a landlubber and called things by the wrong names, but I knew it had to be his because the word started with B. Later, by way of telling me what a bosun did, one of the watches said it was his job to be a son-of-a-bitch, pardon his French, and that will tell you why the bosun got his own cabin in the officers’ quarters away from the crew when even the chief engineer had to bunk off the engineers’ hall, along with the cooks and porters and other engineers, in back of the galley, just in front of the cabins for the deck crew.