S.O.S. Titanic (17 page)

He thought of the
Titanic
lying at the bottom of the ocean. Bubbles would be coming out of her, drifting lazily up, the way they came from his toy boat the time he sank it in the fishpond. He imagined the colonel still upright on the deck. But that couldn't be ... Mr. and Mrs. Goldstein and Arthur asleep on their deck chairs, the fish swimming furiously around them. Mrs. Cherry Hat, nice Malcolm, Scollins. Did he make it through the wave?

"Is Scollins on here with us?" he asked Pegeen. "Or Watley?" But Pegeen couldn't seem to hear him, even though he asked twice and she had her ear next to his mouth. He felt her shivering against him. He heard the rasp of her breathing. She kept stroking his hair, drying off the water that splashed on him, wiping away her own tears.

Watley had known he wouldn't be saved, Barry thought. Was he still holding the green-and-gold box, or was it drifting on the ocean, the caul inside still; and when the wood soaked through, would the caul spread itself like an invisible net on the water?

Pegeen talked to him a lot and sometimes he understood her, but sometimes her words drifted away before his mind could take hold of them. Mosdy she talked about her family, the time Jonnie stole the hat from McKee's window, that time when they caught him. Their mother had had a baby, newborn, then. Something about the baptism and her ma with no hat. Something about McKee, the draper. Barry saw McKee's in his mind, saw the main street in Mullinmore. A fair day and the cattle all brought in for market. She was saying something about the magistrate. "The magistrate told Jonnie, 'One more time and it's jail for you, my boy, or out of the country entirely.' And then that old fellow that drives the carriage for your grandfather, Jonnie just looking at the carriage, he loved the shine and the grandness of it. Your grandfather's man, lifting his whip, and Jonnie putting the big scratch on the side of the shining carriage. It was wrong." Pegeen sobbing big gulps of sobs and Barry trying to touch her, but she seemed so far away. "Sorry," he said. But she was too far away. He saw the silver gleam of the brooch at her neck, the one that held her mother's hair.

"And now Jonnie's dead, drowned. Jonnie and Frank both, and all the others. My poor ma."

He thought he heard a splash at the back of the upturned boat. Somebody said, "It's the stoker. Poor lad, he jumped off the stern." Somebody else said, "It's well for him to go. His burns are that bad."

Pegeen was keening like a dog locked out in the cold.

Poor stoker,
Barry thought.
Poor Jonnie, poor Frank, poor all of them, the ones kept below who never had a chance.

"No chance in their living, no chance in their dying," he said to Pegeen. "It will be different in America." But she didn't seem to understand that either.
I can make it different,
he thought,
because I know the way it is and the way it can't be anymore.

Somebody gave him a sip of something from a flask. It was the bear man. There was essence of peppermint in the silver botde. Grandmother gave him essence of peppermint when he had a cold.

Somebody else was trying to get onto their boat. Was somebody else still alive?

"Help," a voice said.

"We've lost two. There's room for another one."

"Who...?" Barry asked Pegeen, but all she said was, "Rest, Barry. Rest, love." He knew she said "love," he'd heard it. He didn't think he was wrong about that.

The boat rocked dangerously as the person clambered on. Pegeen held Barry tight.

"It's Bride. Bride from the Marconi Room," someone said.

"I've been hanging underneath," Bride said. "All this time. There's air in there to breathe. I was clinging to the seats." He was shaking.

The bear gave him a drink of peppermint essence. A man gave him his own knitted cap and said, "You're half-frozen, son. I can do without this."

Barry wished he had the cap. He was so cold, so deathly cold. He remembered Bride from the Marconi Room. Someone said, "He was the one who sent those SOS messages."
Save Our Ship,
Barry thought. But no one had saved it.

"The
Carpathians
on her way." Bride's teeth ratded; his voice came in frozen spurts. "She got our message be fore we sank. She'll be here by daybreak. If we can stay afloat..."

"We'll have to work at it," a voice in front said. And someone asked, "Work how, Mr. Lightoller?"

"Officer Lightoller's at the bow. He's taken charge," Pegeen whispered. "The water's coming over the keel. There has to be a way to keep the boat balanced or we'll overturn."

"Everybody stand up," Lightoller said. "Careful, careful."

"My friend can't stand," Pegeen shouted.

"I know that. You stay with him. Anybody who can, get on your feet slowly. Don't sink us. We have to keep this boat level or she'll turn over. If it dips one way, we lean the other. It's live or die."

The upturned boat rocked, and then Barry heard Lightoller shouting, "Lean to the left ... Stand upright ... Lean to the right..." He said it over and over. Barry's eyes were so salt crusted he could only open them halfway. When he did he could make no sense of what he saw. It was as if the people were doing some crazy dance, standing in a double row on the keel of the boat, swaying this way and that all night long while the stars above them danced, too. There was no other sound in the world but Iightoller's voice and the sloshing of the sea, and it all around them, and over them, over their legs, over their feet.

The stars were disappearing and the sky was changing in color from gray to pink. Barry kept feeling for his legs. Would he ever be able to walk on them again?

Green stars now splashing the sky, one after the other. Exploding. How could stars be green? Pretty, though. He tried to point.

"She's coming, lads."

"It's the Carpathian There was an exhausted cheer.

"She's picked up the other boats. We'll be next."

Pegeen leaned across him. "Barry. Barry O'Neill, we're to be saved, you and I. Hold on now. Don't die on me, for you're all I'll have of Ireland in this new, strange land."

Barry licked his cracked lips, opened his brisdy eyes. A large steamer, smoke billowing from her funnels, was coming toward them.

"Glory! Glory be!" Pegeen whispered, and her tears dropped on his upturned face.

He saw her in the sky's morning glow, a light about her as if someone had drawn her outline with a bright, shining pencil.

"I'm to be living in the Bronx," she said. "All the night long you've been talking about Brooklyn and your mother and father waiting."

He didn't remember.

The whistle he'd bought and hung around her neck so long, long ago gleamed silver. He lifted a finger and touched it.

"I don't know where either place is," he whispered. "But blow this. Wherever I am, I'll come."

She smiled.

This time he knew she'd heard.

The Cunard liner
Carpathia
picked up all the survivors from the lifeboats. There were 705 saved. It was 8:30
A.M.
The
Carpathia
was close to where the
Titanic
had gone down. Captain Arthur Henry Rostron later reported that he saw "a lot of small broken-up stuff—nothing in the way of anything large." He saw "one body floating with a preserver on." That was all. Estimates of those lost when the RMS
Titanic
sank are uncertain and vary from 1,490 to 1,517.

The day after the sinking, the steamer
Prinz Adelbert
of the Hamburg American Line passed a large iceberg. On one side, red paint "which had the appearance of having been made by the scraping of a vessel on the iceberg" was plainly visible. They watched as, scarred but otherwise unharmed, the iceberg sailed on.