“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.”
This fact, to Noah’s knowledge, had never been revealed. Not to the investigators at the NTSB, not to the brass at Superior Steel, not to anyone. “You saw him?”
“I did.”
“Was he dead?”
Olaf closed his eyes slowly. “No,” he said. “I had the headlamp pointing into the lake. Just there, between the lifeboat and the ship, bobbing in the water like a goddamn buoy, old Red. I hollered to him. I saw his hand go up for help. I saw his eyes blinking, for Chrissakes.” He stopped, opened his eyes.
“Did Luke and Bjorn see him?”
“I don’t think so. We’d all looked, but by the time I saw him they were both consumed with what they were doing, they were already working overtime just to keep that boat from capsizing. Goddamn, it was like being lowered into a lion’s cage getting into that boat.” He closed his eyes again. “And there’s Red out on the water.” Olaf lifted his head slowly, opened his eyes, and turned them to the ceiling. He shook his head. “I got the heaving line and made a couple tosses, but it was no good. He had no chance. That’s what I figured anyway. We were taking such heavy seas. That goddamn gale was eating us alive. I needed to help Luke and Bjorn. I took the tiller, hoping to keep us in line with the wind.” He brought his eyes back to Noah. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to save him.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?”
“That I saw Red alive? It’s my fault he died. I should have saved him. I should have jumped in after him. Maybe he had broken bones, he was probably hypothermic already. We all were. What do I do? I toss him a line. All he saw was the light from the headlamp and a goddamn heaving line coming toward him. I should have done more. I could have done more.”
“Red couldn’t have survived.”
Olaf shot him a cold stare. “We did.”
“You hadn’t fallen from the ladder. You hadn’t fallen into the lake.”
“That’s horseshit. His soul is on me.”
“Jumping in for him, that would have been suicide. There was nothing you could have done.”
Olaf got up. He walked to the door and looked outside. My god, Noah thought. What do you do with a lifetime of that on your mind?
When Olaf came back Noah steered him to the chair.
“And I bet you were sure you couldn’t think less of me,” Olaf said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Letting Red go like that.”