Across the Great Lake Read online

  When I came back my father was waiting for me inside his open door. “Fern?”

  “I had to go to the bathroom, Daddy.”

  He stepped aside to let me in. I had already looked inside the locker that stowed his heavy coat and galoshes. I had opened the drawers beneath his berth and all the drawers of his desk, where I’d found a key that unlocked his wooden trunk, which held only a few books and extra woolen blankets that I had been careful not to unfold. At home I liked to play in the tower room that was fitted out to be his office though he rarely used it, but on the boat I was afraid to disturb his things because he might think that I was snooping, which I was—I wanted to see what kind of things a captain would have with him. I wasn’t afraid of him, no more than any child is afraid of her father. I just wanted to please him, though I didn’t really know how, except to be good, and that always seemed so very hard.

  “Are you warm enough? Are you hungry?” He was not accustomed to tending to my needs, and the questions seemed unfamiliar in his voice. I loved him, and surely he loved me, but I think we didn’t know what to expect of each other. He was a tall man with a lanky build and a lean face that was deeply lined from his years on the lake. In his presence, the ceiling of his cabin seemed to lower, but I thought no one in the world was as handsome. He looked so important in his navy blue uniform with its stripes of gold braid on the sleeves and double row of brass buttons, every one of them embossed with the name of the railroad. There was a circle of gold braid around his hat too, just above the shiny brim that had come down over my nose the one time he let me try it on, and the scratchy gray stubble on his cheeks gave him a salty look that seemed just right for a captain. I don’t know how he maintained it, because he never shaved it off or let it grow into a beard. He was a gentle man, but he was not demonstrative, and that reticence coupled with the authority of his office often made him seem stern. There was an air of formality about him, a regal loneliness that seemed suited to a man who spent his days in the lofty tower of a pilothouse, staring out at the unbroken line of a watery horizon he preferred to any sight on land.

  “I want to see the rest of the boat,” I said.

  “In a while,” my father promised. “The Kewaunee couldn’t get out last night. Channel’s froze up, and there’s a west wind pushing all that ice into the harbor, so right now I’m needed on the bridge. Once we get out on the lake we’re headed up past Point Betsie to the Passage. The Ashley’s stuck off Pyramid Point.”

  I’d been to Point Betsie. The big lighthouse was there. “Is the Ashley going to sink?” I thought it would be something to see a boat sink, especially if there was a man up to his knees in water on the flying bridge waving good-bye. Sometimes men escaped only to freeze to death in their lifeboats. That would be something to see too, a boat full of men turned into icy statues.

  “In this ice?” The lines around his eyes crinkled. He always seemed to smile more with his eyes than with his mouth. They were pale but very blue, and the color seemed to soften. “Not hardly, but if the wind stays to the west she could go aground. Wouldn’t be the first tub ice pushed ashore. And she’s not a good boat.”

  “What did she do?” It was an interesting notion, that boats might misbehave. Like children. At the time what I knew of the naughtiness of children was so trifling it scarcely bears mention, though I would learn what harm a child can do soon enough. “Keel blocks wouldn’t come loose when the Grand Trunk launched her. Then when the Ann Arbor bought her, they changed her name. That’s the railroad for you. Any sailor could have told them it’s bad luck.”

  “Is the Manitou a good boat?”

  “She is.” Even the big ships named for men were always she, I didn’t know why.

  “Is she lucky?”

  “She is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A captain always knows.” His eyes sparkled the way people’s do when they are getting ready to tell a good joke, though I don’t remember my father as one to tell jokes. “Boats talk if you know how to listen.”

  “What do they say?”

  He gazed toward the window and beyond, as if he might see what the Manitou said printed out the foredeck. “They talk about past journeys. About gales and storms, fog and stinging ice devils.”

  I listened, but all I could hear was the thunder of ice along the hull. I thought I would like to know about the stinging ice devils.

  “Will the Manitou tell you how to get the Ashley unstuck?”

  “She might.” It was the longest conversation I’d ever had with my father. True, he felt more at home aboard ship than he ever did on land, but it is also true that we were seldom alone together.

  “Can I help?”

  “That’d be a mought big a job for such a liten jente. Best for you to stay put right now. If ramming doesn’t work we’re going to have to try backing.” Even though my father didn’t speak the language, he liked to use Norwegian terms of endearment for me. I didn’t know exactly what the words meant, but all the same I thought of them as our secret code.

  “But I want something to do.” My voice sagged with disappointment. “Are you going to make Odd go home?”

  The arch of his eyebrows lifted the brim of his hat.

  “There was a row in the pilothouse. Alv told me. The first mate fired Odd, but he came back.”

  “Well,” my father said, and the way he said it made a whole sentence.

  “Then the second mate said he could stay, and they started yelling. Odd’s a drunk,” I added.

  My father’s face seemed to narrow. He had no ear for gossip, and I would learn that one thing he would not hear were tales about his crew. But then the pinch of lines around his eyes smiled again. “It’s all right, lille. Odd’s a good helmsman. He’ll sober up fast enough in this cold. Don’t you worry.”

  “You won’t make him go back?” I didn’t mind if he sent Odd home. I was afraid that he might change his mind and take me home too.

  “We’re not going back. Backing’s what a ship does when ramming doesn’t work, and when we put that port engine in reverse, this boat is going to shake worse than a wet dog. That’s why you’re best off right here.”

  “It’s boring here,” I complained, just as his eyes fell on the drawing I had made in his log.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s for you.”

  “You mustn’t draw in the captain’s log, Fern.” He was frowning, though he didn’t seem angry. “I suppose we should have thought to bring some paper and crayons. I daresay there’s not much to entertain a girl on a boat, but the boys will have an extra deck of cards and there may be a game or a puzzle in the observation room.”

  “It’s you, me, and Mama.”

  He turned away. “Yes, I see that.”

  “We’re at the beach. It’s summer. See the sun?” Because the house I had drawn was not our house but the big brown log house on Sac Street at the end of Forest Avenue, where it opened to the lake. I loved our house on the hill, where I could walk all the way to the water tower through the woods, but I thought it would be nice to live in a log house at the edge of the lake too. If you lived in a log house you could pretend to be a pioneer girl or even an Indian maiden who’d been captured, but that would be okay because you would like the house so much you wouldn’t care.

  “It’s a very nice picture,” he said, though he did not look at it again. His back was still toward me. “I’m sorry that your mother is sick.”

  “What’s a drunk?” I asked.

  “She’ll perk up.” He turned back to me. “A drunk is someone who suffers overfondness. It can be something of a sailor’s disease, I’m afraid.”

  “Is Odd sick like Mama?”

  “No, not like Mama.”

  “What’s the matter with her?”

  He didn’t answer, but I knew. Female troubles. It was term I’d heard whispered, though I had no idea what it meant. Something that happened to women that never happened to men, which hardly seemed fair.

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bsp; He nodded toward the bed where I’d laid my hat and coat. “Berth’s a mought narrow for two. If you wouldn’t be afraid by yourself, we could put you in one of the passenger cabins. You’d have your own room, just like home.”

  “Are we going to spend the night at sea?” I asked, then added, just to be sure, “You won’t make Odd go back?” I must have known we would spend the night. He had packed a little bag for me. There was a toothbrush and my nightgown, an extra sweater, and some clean underwear.

  “Lake’s froze near solid, and after we free the Ashley I’ve got thirty-two cars due in Menominee.” He patted my shoulder. “Winter runs are never easy, and this is the coldest winter in some time. I’m afraid you’re in for a long haul.”

  “But I want to see the boat.”

  “In due time. Once we get out of the harbor I’ll have one of the boys show you around. Mind, it’ll be cold down on the car deck. You’ll want to wear your outer things.” He looked down. I had put my shoes back on after taking off my leggings, but my boots were lying on the floor with their zippers open. “And your galoshes. The crew’s shoveled a path on the weather deck, but it’s slippery, and the engine room floor’s slick as a whistle. You’ll have to be careful.”

  “Can Alv show me around? He’s going to take me to eat dinner with the crew.”

  “Oh,” my father said, as if he were startled to think about something as mundane as meals. “I was figuring to have you eat with the officers.”

  “But I want to eat with the crew.”

  “I don’t think so, lille. The men can get a bit rowdy.”

  That sealed it. I’d missed the drunk and the row in the pilothouse. I didn’t intend to miss the rowdy men.

  “Please.” I waited, but my father seemed to feel the matter was settled. “Alv said I could.”

  “Oh, did he now?”

  I don’t remember if I’d ever talked back to my father before, but I pushed my lower lip out. “I want to eat with Alv.”

  “Last I heard, Alv was not your captain.”

  “Well, the captain wasn’t here!”

  To my surprise, my father laughed. It wasn’t a sound I often heard, and it seemed unnaturally hearty. “Man’s not even out of the harbor, and already he’s got a mutineer.”

  In truth, my father would have felt more capable of putting down a mutiny of men than dealing with a daughter. He was gone so often my mother would have been the one to handle my discipline. And I was a girl quick to sense an advantage. “Please, sir,” I said, pulling my lip back in to make nice. “May I eat with Alv?”

  My father hesitated. “Well, I’ll have a word. If the men behave themselves, I suppose there’s no harm. And I was thinking the boy could watch out for you. You don’t want to go getting into trouble on a ship.”

  Oh, but I did. “Thank you, sir.” I said.

  “Be nice to the boy, lille. He’s a little bit different.”

  “He’s different from everyone!” I cried.

  “Are you hungry? Do you want him to see if the cook has a little something you can eat?”

  “Does she have cookies?”

  “He.” My father paused with his hand on the knob at the door. “I’m afraid you’re the only lady on board.”

  “Does he have cookies?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Second cook does the baking, and he makes some tasty things.”

  If the second cook did the baking, there would have to be a first. There was a bosun and the mates and a chief engineer, which meant there must be others. Alv was only learning to be a deckhand, so there had to some who already knew how. And Odd, who was only the second wheelsman, was at the helm. “Who’s running the engine while you’re down here?”

  His hand relaxed on the knob. “Oh, I don’t run the engines, lille. The engineer does that.”

  On a train the engineer ran the engine, but he didn’t have a captain or a wheelsman. I wrinkled up my face in thought. “But if Odd steers and the engineer runs the engine, what do you do?”

  “Ah.” The question seemed to amuse him. “I keep watch on the bridge so I can tell the helmsman and the engineer what to do.”

  “You must have to yell awful loud for the engineer to hear you.” The engine room was below the car deck. There had to be at least four companionways between it and the pilothouse.

  He chuckled, not out loud, just a soft rattle inside his throat. “We use the chadburn. Just remember you’re the only lady,” he added as he opened the door. “That means you’ll have to act like one.”

  When he left I picked up my bear. “Manitou, do you know what a chadburn is? Because I don’t, but Alv is going to come back, and we’re going to have cookies and get to see the chadburn and the train and the drunk man all for ourselves.” I sat at my father’s desk and propped Manitou against the walnut paneling. “Also we are going to have a bed in our own cabinet in the passengers’ quarters.” But in the meantime there was nothing to do, so I sang to myself. Then I sang “The Cat Came Back” for Odd and every verse of “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic” for Manitou, but my father must have forgotten about the cookies, and still it wasn’t time for dinner.

  7

  I never learned whether the child my mother lost was a boy or a girl, only that it died before it was born and that my mother knew it was dead even before she went to the doctor. I was born at home, but this time my mother had to have an operation, and she went to the new hospital on the hill.

  My father was on the lake, and so I was sent to a neighbor’s house, where I was put to bed in a baby’s crib, even though I was too big. It was parked in a long closet, pressed up against a row of woolens that smelled of camphor. There was a party in the parlor. I could hear the laughter floating up the stairs to the dark closet, where it washed beneath the door on a narrow stripe of yellow light. It was past my bedtime, but the hosts’ son, Billy, had been allowed to stay up. He was in the parlor with the grown-ups. I could hear his voice. He sang a song, and everyone clapped, and then they laughed some more. It wasn’t fair, he was no older than I was—sometimes we played together in the woods between our houses, only days before we had gone sledding down my long driveway—but his mother let him stay up and put me to bed in a baby’s crib in a dark closet. My whole body burned with the injustice, even though I knew it must be my mother’s fault, she must have told them that I was to go to bed at eight. But surely she didn’t know there would be a party, surely she wouldn’t have wanted me to feel so excluded. At eight o’clock in the summertime, when the sky was still light, I often balked at bedtime. In the wintertime I was more compliant, but I hadn’t known there would be a party either, everyone in the whole world except me, it seemed, singing and dancing, eating krumkake, and having fun. And in the morning, as Billy and I sat poking over our porridge at the kitchen table, no one said anything about it, his mother didn’t suddenly slap her forehead and say, “Oh my goodness, we forgot all about you last night, I’m so sorry!” No one offered me a special treat to make it up, and I blistered with rage all over again, but all Mrs. Johnson said was, “Eat your breakfast.”

  When she wasn’t looking, I kicked Billy under the table.

  “Ow,” he yelled, but his mother didn’t turn from the stove. “Fern kicked me!”

  “Eat your breakfast,” she told him, and I smirked with satisfaction, though it hardly made up for missing the party.

  Now of course I wonder why I didn’t simply climb out of the crib. I was big enough. I suppose I just didn’t think of it, which is odd, because I was a girl who did think of things. Or maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I became one only after that night.

  My mother came home from the hospital and went to bed, my father came to get me, and no one said a word, no one asked if I had a good time while I was gone or explained why there wasn’t any baby, because at some point I must have been told that I was going to have a new brother or sister, surely I would have been curious the way children are, they would have wanted to prepare me. I don’t remember. What I remember is w
anting to tell my mother what they’d done. I wanted her to kiss me and tell me how sorry she was and how special I was. I wanted her to promise that she loved me and we would have our own party. I wanted my mother. But she went to bed and never got up again, and now my memory of that night in the closet has eclipsed any memory I might have kept of her, of those months of her pregnancy, when she must have gone around the house humming in anticipation of the birth. I try to remember her smile or the perfume of her hair, the shape of the baby growing beneath her dress and the way her lap must have felt as her stomach swelled and took more and more of it away from me, until finally it disappeared and I could no longer sit there at all, and maybe then I lay my head against her knees and she sang to me. I listen so hard for the lullaby of her voice, and what I hear instead is the ringing of the guests’ laughter inside the crib pressed against those heavy clothes with their suffocating smell of camphor, my body so taut with anger I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even cry, though I think I screamed, screamed, and screamed, but they were laughing too loud, they were having too much fun, no one heard me. I went home, and no one explained what had happened or why I didn’t have the promised brother or sister or why it was my father who fixed my porridge and heated the fiskesuppe the neighbors brought while my mother lay upstairs with her face turned to the wall, and my father wondered what to do about his wife and child and next voyage. Because the Manitou had first, second, and third mates, there were three wheelsmen and three engineers, but only one captain, and a captain’s first duty is to his ship. It’s his crew that is a captain’s real family.