By three o’clock on Monday afternoon the lake had gone white.
Not the white of snow. The white of water torn to pieces: every wave out to the edge of sight breaking along its whole length, and the wind ripping the tops off them in long smoking streaks. The weather radio above Claire’s bench had been saying the same thing since noon in its flat synthetic voice. Storm warning. Northeast winds forty-five knots, gusts to sixty. Waves eighteen to twenty-two feet. Heavy freezing spray. The man on the Duluth station said the ore boats were anchored in the lee of the Apostles, and then, because it was the ninth, reminded everybody what day tomorrow was.
They brought the last of the boats inside, Claire on the yard tractor and Thorsen walking beside each hull calling the gap. They were talking again, carefully, the way you walk on new ice. She did not mention the church and he did not mention the stitches. Once, holding a trailer tongue, she looked up at him with snow in her eyelashes and said, “You look better,” and he said, “Than what?” and she said, “Than a man lying in the snow in his underwear,” and went back to the jack. That was the nearest either of them came.
At six she pulled the last door down, and the wind boomed on the steel walls like somebody hitting a drum in another room.
“Stay for supper,” she said, not looking at him. “The road’s going to be bad.”
At four minutes to nine, while they were washing up, the marine radio on the wall spoke.
It was a man’s voice, hoarse, with a Canadian flatness in it and something underneath that Thorsen had heard a few times on police radios and never forgotten. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is sailing vessel Marguerite.
Claire turned off the tap.
Two men aboard. A thirty-eight-foot sloop, on a late delivery from Thunder Bay to Duluth. They had lost the mast an hour ago off the mouth of a river, and the rig had gone over the side and wrapped the propeller and stopped the engine, and they were drifting south-west before the wind. I can see breakers inshore of us. We’re going onto the rocks.
The Coast Guard came back at once, Sector in the Soo, three hundred miles away: a young steady woman’s voice. Then a pause, long enough to hear. Be advised, rescue helicopter is unable to launch due to icing. Station Duluth is under way to your position. Estimated time of arrival two hours. Remain with your vessel.
Claire was already at the chart by the door. Her finger went down the shore from the mouth of the Kettle, past the Point, to the knuckle of rock that closed the east side of Stone Bay, and the row of dots off the end of it that the chart called a reef and everybody on the shore called the Brothers.
“There. That’s where they’ll go on. Nothing to stop them between the Kettle and the Brothers.” She looked at the clock. “They haven’t got two hours. They’ve got thirty minutes.”
She took two orange float coats off the hooks and threw one to him. “Zip it to your chin. Boots. Gloves. Gus, stay.” She lifted the handset. “Coast Guard Sector, workboat Nokomis, Stone Bay. I’m two miles from that position. I’m going out.”
The young woman in the Soo said something about risk. Claire said, “Understood,” and hung up, and looked at Thorsen.
“I need somebody on the bow who does what I tell them, when I tell them. Not after he’s thought about it.”
“I grew up in San Pedro. My father had a boat.”
“Your father’s boat wasn’t in this.” She zipped her coat. “Do what I tell you, and I’ll bring you back. Don’t, and I won’t be able to.”
The Nokomis lay at the end of her dock in the inner bay. Twenty-six feet of welded aluminium, grey and square and ugly as a shoe, with a flat bow that was really a ramp, an open well behind it, a little cuddy with the wheel, and two big outboards on the transom. Claire had built her. She did not say so.
She threw on the searchlight on the cuddy roof and clipped a short line from the front of his float coat to a rail inside the ramp.
“You stay clipped. You stay low. When I say hold on, you hold on with both hands and you don’t let go for anything. Not for me, not for them.”
“I hold on.”
He cast off, and the Nokomis turned and went out across the bay into the dark.
They came round the end of the point and the lake hit them.
It came out of the dark as a wall. The searchlight found it fifty feet ahead, a slope of black water going up and up, its top torn off and smoking, and the Nokomis put her flat nose into it and climbed until Thorsen, on his knees behind the ramp, was lying back against the deck looking at the sky. Then the top of it came over the ramp solid, green-black in the light, and hit him in the chest and filled the well to his waist, and they were falling down the back of it into a trough so deep the next one was over their heads before they were out.
The water was so cold it did not feel like water. It felt like a blow.
He held on. Claire drove the boat into each sea with the throttles, easing at the crest, gunning in the trough, and after the fourth or fifth he understood that she was not letting the lake do anything to the boat that she had not agreed to. The spray froze where it landed. Within ten minutes the rail under his gloves was furred with ice, and every time he moved his head ice cracked off his hood.
“There,” Claire shouted. “One o’clock.”
The Marguerite was on the Brothers.
The searchlight held her: a white hull lying over on her side across the black rock sixty feet away, deck towards them, the broken mast over the near side in a tangle of wire and sail. Every few seconds a sea came out of the dark beyond her and burst over her in a white explosion as high as a house, and poured off the reef into the deep water where the Nokomis was. Then the rock stood black and streaming until the next.
There was a figure in the cockpit, small, in a yellow jacket, crouched with its arms round the steering pedestal. And a second one in the water on the near side, in the tangle of the fallen rig, clinging to a wire, going under with every sea and coming up.
Claire watched the seas. Thorsen counted his own heartbeats and lost count.
“Three big, then smaller,” she shouted. “I’m going in on the back of the third one. You’ll have thirty seconds before the next set. Get the one on deck.”
“And the other?”
“One at a time.”
The third big one burst over the Marguerite and poured off the reef, and Claire put the throttles forward and drove in behind it through the foam, and the ramp in front of him whined and went down. Not all the way: halfway, a steel slope towards the rock with white water sluicing up it. The bow hit the reef with a grinding bang he felt in his teeth, and the engines roared and held her there, pinned, nose to the rock in the lee of the wreck.
He went down the ramp on his hands and knees. It was like crawling down a frozen roof with a river running over it. At the end of it the Marguerite‘s deck was four feet away, tilted like a wall, and the boy in the yellow jacket was looking down at him from the cockpit: very young, white-faced, his mouth open. There was a tether running from his chest to a steel line on the deck.
“Let go and come down to me.”
The boy shook his head. Not refusing. Showing him. His hands were in the tether clip at his chest, pulling at it, and nothing was happening. They were too cold to open it. They were not hands any more.
Thorsen’s own tether ran back up the ramp behind him, four feet too short. There was a sailor’s knife in a sheath on the front of the boy’s jacket.
He unclipped himself and stood on the end of the ramp and grabbed the Marguerite‘s rail and hauled himself up the tilted deck, and got an arm round the boy, and pulled the knife and sawed through the tether. It parted. They went down the deck together in a slide and hit the ramp, and Thorsen got a hand in the boy’s collar and shoved him up it, and the boy went on his hands and knees and fell over the top into the well.
“Thorsen,” Claire was shouting, “clip on, set’s coming —”
The man in the water was gone from the wire. The first sea of the set had come over while Thorsen was on the deck, and he had not seen it, only felt it go past, and it had stripped the man off the rig and carried him across the reef in the foam. He was ten feet from the end of the ramp, on his knees in the shallows on the reef top, trying to stand, and the backwash was dragging him towards the edge.
Thorsen went off the ramp.
The water on the reef came to his waist. It was not cold. It was an electric shock that did not stop, a clamp round his whole body below the ribs, and the breath went out of him in a great involuntary whoop and would not come back. The rock was slick with weed and he could not feel his feet on it. He got two fists in the back of the man’s float coat and turned and dragged him, half walking, half falling, to the ramp, and put his shoulder under him and heaved, and somebody above was pulling: the boy, lying on the top of the ramp pulling at the man’s collar with his dead hands. The man went up and over.
Then the second sea of the set came over the Marguerite and took Thorsen off the reef.
There was a noise like a train, and the light went white, and then there was no rock and no air and no up.
The cold took him by the chest. The deep water off the edge of the Brothers closed over his head and it was like being struck all over at once, and his mouth opened by itself and he breathed in, he could not stop it, and it was water. Black. Roaring. He was turning over. His arms were moving and he could not feel them move.
The float coat brought him up into snow and a searchlight blazing into his eyes, choking, and he tried to breathe and his chest would not do it; it went in and out in tiny useless sobs, like a dog panting. The Nokomis was there. Fifteen feet. Twenty. Going away from him, or he from it. He could hear the next sea coming.
Something hit him on the head.
It hit him again, on the shoulder, and hooked, and held, and he felt the collar of the float coat bite into the back of his neck. He was going towards the boat, dragged through the water by the neck like a sack, and over the roar he could hear Claire, not shouting, making a long grinding sound through her teeth like somebody lifting a weight too heavy for them.
She had left the wheel. She had left the engines in gear to hold the bow on the rock and come forward onto the ice of the ramp on her knees with the long boat hook, and hooked him by the collar, and she was hauling him in along the pole with her whole body thrown back against it. His hand hit the edge of the ramp and would not close. She dropped the hook and got both fists in the front of his coat and leaned back, and the boy came down beside her and got a hand in it too, and they got his chest onto the steel, and his waist, and then the third sea of the set broke over all three of them and washed them up the ramp together into the well in a tangle, like fish tipped out of a net.
Claire was up first. She went aft at a scrambling run, and the engines roared in reverse, and the Nokomis came off the reef with a long scream of aluminium on rock and the ramp came up and they were going backwards into the dark, away from the white explosions on the Brothers and the Marguerite lying on her side in the light, empty.
Thorsen lay on his back in a foot of freezing water between the boy and the skipper, and looked up at the snow going over, and breathed.
He remembered the run home in pieces. Claire’s voice on the radio, steady as a bus driver’s. Sector, Nokomis. Three persons recovered. Returning Stone Bay. The young woman in the Soo saying something back that was not in any procedure.
He could not walk up the dock. Claire put his arm over her shoulders, the way Arne had a week ago, and the boy took the skipper, and they went across the yard through the snow with Gus running round them, barking.
Claire fed the boiler stove till the iron ticked. She cut the skipper’s clothes off with shears on the concrete and wrapped him in two sleeping bags and laid him flat, and did not rub his arms or legs, and told Thorsen not to either. His name was Rafe, a grey-bearded delivery skipper out of Thunder Bay, and he had stopped shivering, which Claire did not like. He lay with his eyes open and looked at the roof.
The boy was his nephew, Eli, nineteen. He kept saying sorry, sorry, and Claire held a mug of tea with four sugars in it to his mouth and said, “Drink it. Don’t be sorry. Drink it,” until he did.
Then she came to Thorsen, sitting against the workbench with his teeth going so hard he could not speak. She got him out of everything and wrapped him in a blanket that smelled of dog, and held the mug to his mouth.
“I told you to stay clipped,” she said.
He could not answer. She did not seem to need him to.
Bellanger came at midnight with the Nordby crew, two hours on roads the ploughs had given up on. He looked at the three men round the stove and then at Thorsen. “You again.”
He knelt by Rafe and his face went still. “Eighty-nine, and he’s quit shivering,” he said to his partner, and they had Rafe on a stretcher in a cocoon of foil within five minutes, lifting him level, as if he were glass. Claire had lit the sauna on the shore an hour before and asked if it would help. “Not him,” Bellanger said. “You’d stop his heart.” She nodded. “I thought so. I lit it anyway.”
They took the boy too. Eli turned in the doorway with a blanket round him and his hand on his uncle’s stretcher.
“I couldn’t make my hands work,” he said to Thorsen. “On the clip.”
“I know. I borrowed your knife. Sorry.”
Bellanger came back for Thorsen last, and Thorsen shook his head before he could ask. Bellanger held out a refusal form and a pen, and did not seem surprised.
“Second time in eight days,” he said. “I’m starting a file.”
At two in the morning they were alone in the shop.
Gus was asleep against Thorsen’s legs. Claire sat on the floor a yard away with her back to the bench, in a sweater and the wet jeans she had not stopped long enough to change, her hair coming out of its braid, a cold mug in her lap. She was shaking. He had not noticed until now.
She saw him looking. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.” Her teeth chattered on it and she clenched them, and it came out through them, and sounded ridiculous, and she heard it.
And she began to laugh.
Neither of them knew at what. It came up out of her like the shaking, and then it had him too, sitting on the floor of a welding shop at two in the morning wrapped in a dog blanket, laughing until his ribs hurt. Gus lifted his head and looked at them both and put it back down.
When it ran out they sat in the quiet.
“The sauna’s lit,” Claire said at last. “Nobody’s in it. It seems a shame.”
It was a low log hut at the edge of the bay, and inside it was eighty degrees and smelled of cedar and birch smoke. They sat on the top bench in the dark with the stove ticking and the heat coming into them like a slow tide, and last of all into the middle of him, where the lake had been. The shaking came back once, hard, so that his whole body jerked, and then eased, and did not come back.
“The lake doesn’t give them back,” Claire said in the dark. “That’s what they always say.”
“Yes.”
“It does if somebody goes in after them.” She was quiet. “I do.”
He turned his head. He could see her only by the red line of light round the stove door: the side of her face, the wet hair, her eyes.
He did not know which of them moved. It did not matter. It was not much of a kiss: slow and careful, and then less careful, and then her forehead against his and her hand on his chest over his heart, as if checking that it was still going.
It was.
Out on the porch, where he had lain down against the door, Gus thumped his tail twice on the boards and went back to sleep.
The wind went down on Tuesday afternoon in long steps, as if going down a staircase, and by four the sky to the west had come apart into bars of copper and grey.
Claire drove them down to Split Rock in her truck.
There were two hundred people on the headland in the last of the light, round the foot of the yellow brick tower on its red cliff, with the lake still booming on the rocks below. Nobody talked much.
At half past four a man from the historical society stood at a microphone beside a ship’s bell on a frame and began to read names. After each one somebody struck the bell, once, and the note went out over the lake and faded before the next. Ernest M. McSorley, Captain. The bell. John H. McCarthy, First Mate. The bell. Twenty-nine men who had gone down in a November gale fifty-one years ago tonight, so fast that nobody had time to call Mayday, and had never been brought up. Thorsen stood in the snow and listened to their names.
After the twenty-ninth the bell was struck once more.
“For all the others,” the man said. “For everyone this lake has kept.”
Then the lamp came on. The great lens at the top of the tower turned, and the beam came round out over the dark water and swept on, and came round again: a bar of light going out across Superior to nobody.
He thought about Joseph Lacourse, who had gone out in a cedar skiff in November 1923 with a man who had promised him a share of the catch. He thought about Leonard Lacourse, who had shaved and put on a clean shirt and gone up the shore on glass. Nobody had read their names out. Nobody rang a bell. A priest had written one of them in a book in Latin, and somebody had written a lie underneath, and that was all.
Claire stood beside him with her hands in her pockets, watching the beam go round.
“My dad brought me,” she said. “The first year they did this. I was nine.” The light swept over them, and on. “He put me up on his shoulders so I could see the lamp.”
She took one hand out of her pocket and put it in his, without looking at him, and they stood there in the cold until the last of the copper had gone out of the sky, and the beam went round, and round, over the water.