It was the work of a moment, but a moment split open, cracked like an atom, its forces unleashed. The Echo was hit with a sixty-foot wall of water and rolled over on its side, slowly, like an animal defeated, lying down. A deep rending noise resounded within: the boat had begun to break up. And then it suffered another wave, this one composed of pure sound as the passengers joined in a cry of horror. When the ship began to sink beneath them, they swarmed upward in a solid body, a group as cohesive as the pounding water itself, screaming like gulls. Then, as the last of the Echo disappeared beneath the waves, this community of the terrified flew apart, and the real life-and-death contest began.
Someone, possibly some member of the phantom crew, had released the lifeboats, and they were floating free. The thing was to get to them, and the protocol was savage. In the water, people were thrashing and flailing, grasping onto whatever they could, taking a flying foot in the mouth or a fatal helping of the lake. Three people attached themselves to Grif and clung to him like limpets. For the first time in his life he had become a valuable man, a potential saviour, but only because he was one of the few in the water wearing a life preserver—wreckage with a human aspect. What none of these hangers-on seemed to realize was that they were all going to drown if they didn’t let go, or he didn’t get rid of the thing. Desperately—and desperately trying to forget that he couldn’t swim—he grabbed at a hunk of board torn loose from the ship and, hanging on to it, managed to struggle out of the life preserver and thrust himself away from the clutching hands of his admirers. Let them fight over it.
Head empty as a buoy, he struck out toward one of the lifeboats. Later, when it no longer mattered, he would tell himself the bad news: that survival was not possible, and that he was unworthy of it anyway—the prize of life fine as a mote and too elusive to seize. Such thoughts, he knew, weighed very little but could take you straight to the bottom. Doubt, not good; compassion and chivalry, both deadly. Having gotten rid of his shoes (his new shoes) before the ship foundered, he kicked his feet freely and vigorously, holding on to his board as if born to it, while trying to keep the lifeboat in view. He passed a woman and saw her go under, dragged down by the weight of her sodden skirts. He wasn’t sure, but it was possible that he had struck her with the board. He could have grabbed her swirling hair and pulled her back up, but he didn’t. He wondered if he would stop to rescue a child, but then refused to consider it. Thinking was an indulgence—and indulgences killed you.
Undeterred by obstacles moral or physical, he managed to reach the lifeboat, and called out to those on board for help, adding that he was a man of the cloth. (He was wearing clothes, wasn’t he?) This was a ploy that could easily have backfired, as it might have been a boatload of atheists, or should have been by now; but a hand was extended to him, and then another, and he was pulled on board, gasping his blessings. These benisons didn’t cost him anything but breath, and the shaken passengers were grateful to receive them. The boat was already overloaded, and others clamouring in the water, begging to get on, were not going to be so lucky. Those scrabbling at the sides, pitiful and imploring, would be by necessity ignored, their clawing hands smacked away with an oar. Grif caught sight of one of the other lifeboats and saw that it had flipped over and was floating upside down, a struggling mass of limbs and bobbing heads boiling around it. The other boat was gone, probably swamped and drifting to the bottom of the lake. Again, the sounds that filled the air were wrenching, unbearable. The roar of the storm, the agony of the dying. Grif feared that something essential in him was about to be ripped out through his head. He clamped his hands over his ears and tried to bury his head between his knees, but someone yanked roughly at his arm and shouted in his face, “Hold on to the lifeline, man, for Christ’s sake, we’re going over.”
He grabbed blindly at what was offered, fingers closing tightly over the coarse bristle of a rope, and almost immediately the boat was broadsided. He felt himself being thrown into the wind like a scrap. A sharp object struck him on the head, and then a wave smashed him back into the side of the boat. The water pounded him, dragged him away, sucked him under—but he didn’t let go. In this wild, shifting element the simple material reliability of the rope seemed miraculous. Blessed be the rope-makers. He gritted his teeth and kept his lips clamped shut. He knew better than to pray; open your mouth to plead for divine intervention and half of the lake would waltz in. He suspected that God had an unsophisticated sense of humour, roaring at these vaudevillian entertainments, the pratfalls and comic disasters to which humans were given. At least fortune, or dumb luck, had delivered Grif to the one lifeboat worth its name. All he had to do was stick with it, clinging to the rope with one hand and his life with the other.
The lifeboat did right itself as he had thought it would, unlike the other two. The passengers who had survived the dunking began to pull themselves back in, those younger and with fewer injuries lending a helping hand to the others. Grif saw that there weren’t as many on board as before, but he also saw, incredibly, that one of them was Amelia Kennedy. Amy. She sat soaked and shivering in the stern, her hair plastered to her head, her face blank with shock. She was the only woman among them. A sprig of affection stirred in him. Or relief. Or perhaps it was only gratitude to see a familiar face.
“You made it,” he shouted at her.
“Yes.” Her voice was flat, toneless. “You’re hurt.”
Grif touched his temple, dipping his fingertips into a wetness that was not water. Feeling the tug of custom, he almost crossed himself with it, with his own blood, as if his head were a holy font. Instead, he stared at his fingers, stained black in the storm light, wondering if the disease of mortality was going to spread and engulf him.
A man seated beside him said, “Take care when she goes over, she’ll knock you senseless.”
He was referring to the lifeboat, but Grif thought for a moment he meant Amy, her capacity for violence possibly visible on her pallid face. I’ve murdered a man, she had confessed, and it occurred to him only now that she might have meant him. Maybe it had been a prediction, an admission of culpability.
Another fellow, about fifty years of age, white mutton chops thick as brushes sprouting on the sides of his head, was cursing richly, and kept it up, repeating the same profane sequence over and over, each word a hard bead of blasphemy in a rosary of oaths.
“Stow it,” someone finally ordered. “Save your strength, granddad, yer gonna need it.”
“Mary,” someone else was moaning. “Mary, Mary.”
The man beside Grif nudged him sharply in the ribs and pointed at something that was riding the waves, a boxy vessel—not one of the other lifeboats, which had both disappeared, but the ship’s wheelhouse, which must have broken off from the Echo when the boat went down. A man stood balanced on its roof, laughing raucously, his arms outstretched, hands poised and waving gracefully as if conducting a symphony. He was conducting a symphony, commanding the raging elements, orchestrating the whole storm.
“The captain,” Grif’s companion snarled. “Drunken jackass. If that thing gets blown this way, I swear I’ll kill the bastard. I’ll rip off his arms and shove them down his bloody throat.”
Grif felt he would gladly assist in applying this bit of marine justice, but he didn’t get the chance. Nor did the Echo’s captain get the chance to sink them once again, which would have been the more likely outcome had the two vessels met. The man was suddenly spirited away, driven completely out of sight as another wave separated them and swept them in opposite directions.
Also gone from view, mercifully, were those passengers still struggling in the lake, still clinging to the wreckage and crying out for help. Their last words, stark and unanswered, whipped bare by the wind, were finally blown entirely away.
If those remaining in the lifeboat were spared this final scene and silencing, they weren’t spared much else. At first a surge of guilty relief passed through them. What could they possibly do to help the others now? It was beyond them, beyond human strength and ability. The Lord Himself had chosen them, for what reason they couldn’t guess, to be the survivors. Or possibly not. Perhaps they had been chosen for something more prolonged and cruel, a thought that must have occurred to more than one spiritual vagrant on board the lifeboat when it was struck hard and capsized again. And again, repeatedly. They were in the water and out, hands raw and bleeding from being sawed by the rope or from scrabbling up the sides of the boat. Their bodies were bruised and cut, and bones broken. Exhaustion, exposure, concussion, despair were the black cards slapped down in this game, in which there seemed to be only one wild card, one joker: Grif.
He caught on quickly to what was necessary, dodging whatever harm was being dealt to mind or body. When the boat flipped, he learned how to go with it, and then how to get himself back on board with the minimum of fuss—sometimes with a ruthless efficiency that meant others weren’t so lucky. So be it. Once back in the lifeboat he sat quietly, canny and contained, watching as the handful of passengers who remained prayed or wept or talked compulsively, draining themselves of life, making caskets of their own bodies. In the extremity they had voyaged into, in this borderland near death, he had sniffed out a survivor’s secret. Oddly, no one else had discovered it, although he couldn’t see why, as it was obvious to him. He felt he must be shining with the certainty of it, even though no one took particular notice. Except Amy, who occasionally turned on him a wondering and pitying eye.
It was fairly straightforward, and involved a hardening, a turning away, a willed invulnerability. He would summon up his worst attributes and make use of them. He saw it so clearly. A window was open, like that window at the Belvedere Hotel on the night of his wedding, and he was going to escape through it even if no one else did. He did not intend to let anyone else’s chances of survival diminish his own. If there was a hole in his heart through which emotion flowed, he would stop it up. He himself would become an unsinkable vessel, tightly caulked and containing a mechanism that no one would dare tamper with.
In other words, he was destined to become the hero of this disaster, but only to himself, his individuality so firmly outlined it was impermeable.
From his point of view Amy had launched herself on a fool’s course, for apparently she had decided to head in the opposite direction and become a saint, a Florence Nightingale of the lake. When the storm finally blew itself out, and the lifeboat no longer bucked and turned turtle, she regained some spunk, which she poured into a new role, sisterly and ministering. Five men, not counting Grif, remained, and to these she applied her attentions. She spoke softly to them, and listened sympathetically to their mother and wife stories, their anguish and regrets. She sang hymns to them, her voice pure as a child’s, and they joined in. What she helped them face was the long drift into the night, the knowledge that they might never see land again, or if they did wash up on some uninhabited island, they might never be found. No supplies, no oars (long since lost), no hope—this is what she had to work with, these non-existent materials, and yet she cobbled together something to give them.
Grif knew what that something was, too: enough ease and comfort to die with. Her kindly ministrations weakened them, her warming blankets of sentiment made them unwary, and he watched as they fell one by one into the deepest of sleeps. Never mind about him—the trouble she had caused, the harm done—she was murdering them all. Hers were the last words they heard in this world, her hypnotic whispering in the dark, her voice like a drug, a lethal lullaby.
Before he died, the man seated next to Grif, the one who had earlier offered him the lifeline, broke a lengthy silence, saying to him, “My name is William. William Ferris.”
Grif wasn’t having anything to do with this. He knew what the man wanted: his own name echoed. Ah, William, yes. Bill, is it? Bill Ferris? His little self gently placed and cradled in his ear, or clutched to his breast like a doll, the pathetic comfort of one’s own self acknowledged before giving it up for good.
He said nothing in reply and the man’s quiet expectancy soon died on his face.
Grif did not want to know these men, even minimally; and what would it signify if he did, since they were all sailing straight into anonymity? They—not he. That man with the mutton chops, he was long gone, his oaths, no matter how strong, having failed to save him. The handsome fellow with the British accent, lost overboard. The government man with the horseshoe cravat pin lay stone cold on the floor of the boat, an anvil-shaped gash on his forehead. And now his neighbour …
“Please,” Amy spoke from the stern, “that man beside you, say something to him.”
He didn’t, though.
Much later she said, “Will you hold me?”
Grif did not think this was a good idea. The boat could easily tip if he were to stumble down to that end. So unsteady did he feel, he might even pitch into the lake himself.
Even later, when everyone else had fallen completely silent, and the waves had stretched out satiny and black—the night so beautifully clear and peaceful that it was almost impossible to believe it had been the scene of such fury and destruction—she spoke again. She said, very quietly, “Forgive me.”
He thought about answering. He seriously considered it—but never did. He was distracted from offering her anything, even the smallest and emptiest of consolations, when his eye was caught by a glimmer in the water, by a light. He turned and saw a lighthouse signalling in the distance, its bright stroke scything through the dark.
“Amy!” he said, jumping up, rocking the boat and hastily sitting back down. He touched his fingers to his eyes as if seeking some assurance that he could trust them. He looked again and said, “You see it too, don’t you?”
He turned back to her, feeling that his own face must be lit like a lamp, but this time he had to leave her name hanging, because she was gone. Dead. She had slipped away into the night, was drifting out over the water, stealthy as an owl, no creak of wings to betray her. She left when he wasn’t looking, or speaking. Call me Amy, like a bird’s cry.
“Amy,” he said again, softly, but only to himself.