Safe from the Sea (19 page)

“These are your mother’s figurines,” he said, unwrapping a miniature ceramic ballerina. “For the goddamn life of me, I never understood why she liked these things.” He unwrapped another figure, a two-inch-tall man in a tuxedo and top hat. He held it up as if to prove his point. “You get the picture,” he said, wrapping them back in newspaper. “There’s other stuff, too. Just be careful going through it. Who knows what’s hidden in this house?”

Noah said, “Dad, who keeps their life savings in Mason jars? Why isn’t the money in the bank? Why isn’t it invested?”

“Never my thing,” Olaf said, as if the matter had but one simple answer. “You got your paycheck, you cashed it, put a little in savings, a little in checking, otherwise you managed with what you had.”

“We’re talking about two hundred thousand dollars.”

Solveig asked, “What are we supposed to do with all of it?”

“Whatever you want. Solveig, sweetheart, it’s yours now.”

Olaf’s voice, Noah thought, was deteriorating with each word he spoke. No amount of coughing or throat-clearing helped. This lent his words an almost religious timbre that was as hypnotic as it was sad.

“We are not dropping you in the middle of this lake,” Solveig said suddenly, in a voice now controlled. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Absolutely ridiculous.”

“Please listen to me,” Olaf said.

Solveig started again but stopped. Noah could not speak.

“Are you done? If you’re done I’d like to say what I have to say,” Olaf said. He looked at each of them in turn. “When you get to be as old as me, and when you look back on your life, it’s impossible
not to regret every other step you took. I do anyway. But you also get to see the wonderful things. The most wonderful of the wonderful things for me were days spent here, with the two of you, when you were little kids, before so much went to shit. The happiest days of my life were our Christmas mornings here. I remember the looks on your faces as you pulled toys and candy from your stockings. And your Christmas oranges. I remember feeling like,
My God, these are my children!
Sometimes the only good things I can remember are those mornings and the huge feeling that came with them.” He paused, set his chin on his chest in that gesture now familiar to Noah. “If that sounds sad or like I’m feeling sorry for myself, it’s not meant to.

“Anyway, I’m not a religious man. I reckon the nearest we come to an afterlife is how we’re remembered by our children. I figure the more often you think of me when I’m gone, the happier my ghost will be. If I’m here, where I belong, as opposed to some cemetery in Duluth or Fargo where you’d come once every ten years, you’ll remember me a little more often.

“So,” he said, putting his hands together as if to pray, “I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, but a dead man’s a dead man no matter where he rests. I want you to bury me here. The lake is more than a hundred and fifty feet deep over by the falls. Do it there. Nobody will ever know.”

Noah looked at his father. He looked at Solveig. “Since when are you so eloquent?” he asked his father.

“I’ve been practicing that speech for a long time.”

L
ATER THAT MORNING
Solveig put her suitcase in the backseat of her truck. She turned to Noah. “Could you do it?”

Noah closed the truck door. He looked first at the house, then at the shed. “I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine, that’s for sure.”

“Who would come up with a plan like that?” She was thinking out loud more than asking a question. Or so Noah thought.

“How would I explain it to the authorities? It would look suspicious,” he said.

“To say the least. But you’d have to tell someone. The sheriff?”

“Tell them what?”

Solveig shook her head as if to erase the thought from her head. “What are we talking about, anyway? This is nuts.”

Again Noah looked at the shed. “It is and it isn’t.”

She gave him a look half imploring.

“He’s never asked anyone for anything. Not ever. Does he deserve it? Do we owe it to him?” he asked.

She leaned against her truck. “When he first mentioned it I thought he was completely bonkers,” she said. “Hearing him talk about it, I’m not so sure.”

“That makes two of us,” Noah said.

They looked at each other.

“What would Mom do?” Solveig said.

“Whatever Dad wanted. Without a second thought.”

“You’re right about that.”

There they stood. Noah hoped his sister would make a declaration on the matter, but she did not. His gaze kept falling on the shed, drawn by the hideous and marvelous trove of its contents. Each moment deepened his mystification.

“I’ll hurry back,” she said.

Noah looked at her, understood her complete lack of confidence in the utterance. “You have to tell me what to do if you don’t make it back in time.”

She closed her eyes tightly. “I couldn’t do it, Noah.” She opened her eyes. “I picture myself alone up here, with Dad, that terrible contraption he’s making . . .”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s the best I can do.”

H
ER BID TO
take Olaf with her had been rebuffed as swiftly as it had been offered. Noah and Olaf stood shoulder to shoulder in the yard and watched as her SUV bounced up the road. When it disappeared beyond the last curve Noah turned to his father. “If you’re up to it, why don’t you show me how that contraption works?”

Without a word Olaf led him to the shed. There he explained how the tubing was attached to the barrel. He demonstrated how the barrel should rest on his chest while the tubing extended down the length of his legs. He showed him how the chain should cross his back, under his arms—which were to be bound behind his back—and through the tubing. Noah stood with his hand on his chin trying to comprehend the instructions.

“Do you think it will work?” Olaf asked.

“What happens after you’ve been down there for a while? What about decomposition, things like that?”

“The water is cold enough at that depth I won’t decompose. Cold and dark both.”

“How will I know where to do it?”

“Anywhere under the falls is fine. It’s plenty deep over there.”

“I just toss you into the boat and row over there? Pitch you over the side? Between you and the barrel, that’s a lot of weight.”

Olaf pulled something like a section of dock from between the table and the wall. “This will fit across the boat, gunwale to gunwale.
Lay me across it. When you get to the other side of the lake slide it right over. Keep your weight opposite the side you drop me. The boat should be okay.”

Noah stood dumb for a moment, trying to imagine actually doing it. “What about everything that goes along with it? I mean, what about a death certificate? What about notifying Social Security and Superior Steel? How can I drop you over there and still take care of that?”

The elegance of his father’s earlier plea was getting lost in the crude details. Olaf didn’t know about death certificates and pensions, nor did he seem to care. “You’re smart, you’ll figure it out,” he said. “I still have to get the chain threaded in there. I’ll do that tomorrow. Right now I need to rest.”

Noah led him out of the shed and helped him across the yard. Inside, sitting opposite each other in the sofa and chair, Noah said, “What if I can’t do it?”

Quietly, Olaf said, “You will.”

III.
The Darkest Place in the Night

NINE

Five years after the wreck of the
Ragnarøk
, a poet from the Ontario town of Point au Baril on Georgian Bay and a woodcut artist from Duluth collaborated on a short book to commemorate the anniversary of the disaster. It was Noah’s favorite of the many books written about the wreck.

Five hundred copies were printed and bound in the woodcutter’s garage. It was a poem—billed as an “epic”—called
The Darkest Place in the Night
, and except for friends of either artist or aficionados of the Superior shippery, not many people knew about it. That changed five years later, when the
Herald
ran a feature on the ten-year anniversary of the wreck. Rather than leading with the customary, now famous photograph of the washed-up survivors—the same photograph that hung in the maritime museum in Duluth—it printed one of the woodcuts from the book and the last two lines of the poem. The woodcut showed three abstract figures clutching the icy gunwales of a lifeboat in portentous, black, fine-lined seas. A striking image. The lifeboat rode the crest of a wave, and each of the three faces diminished into abstraction so that only the first was clearly a face at all, one meant to exude the nightmare. The clear-faced figure raised a giant
Thorlike hammer above his shoulders, poised to strike the ice from the boat. For Noah, the image captured his own sentiment about what had happened, or how he imagined it had happened.

The poem itself became something like a belated anthem for the wreck, its final lines the standard epigraph for anything written about it. Strange, Noah thought, watching his father sleep with difficulty on the sofa in the wake of Solveig’s leaving, how one verse of an obscure poem could become so automatically associated with the fact of the disaster, but it had. Enough so, in fact, that even for Noah the famous quotation and the wreck had become irrevocably linked. In the five minutes he’d been looking at the book he’d managed to memorize again the last couplet. He sang it to himself:
The slaves of the lake beseeching the light,/Adrift in the darkest place in the night
.

After they’d finished in the shed, Olaf had lain down to sleep on the sofa without a word of any sort. Noah, at a loss again, tidied the house, refilled the wood box, and took the thawing cash from the Mason jars. His plan was to deposit it first thing in the morning. He should have been awed both by the sum of his inheritance and the manner in which Olaf had presented it, but the fact of the matter was that nothing surprised him anymore. The week had cured him of his wonder. Now he sat with the book open on his lap, staring at the page.

“That guy came to visit me once,” Olaf said, startling Noah, who had almost dozed off himself, the heat in the house stunning again.

“The poet or the artist?”

“The poet. Said he wanted to make sure he got it right.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I didn’t understand his poem, that I was more of a plainspoken sort.”

Noah tried to imagine the conversation, tried to imagine the poet’s horror in confronting his father. “You didn’t toss him out, I hope.”

“Why should I? He was a nice guy.”

“I prefer the woodcuts to the poem,” Noah said. “I like this one.” He showed him the opened page.

Olaf looked at it over the rim of his glasses and nodded his head as if to agree. “Whatever I thought about the poem, I liked the title. It’s a good title.”

“The other night you were telling me about the wreck. You never told me what happened once you were in the lifeboat.”

“I ran out of gas, didn’t I?”

“I think we both did.”

Olaf struggled with the afghan. Noah helped it across his shoulders.

“Why did you think it was a good title?”

“What?”

“
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.”