Against the Wind (20 page)

“We must keep looking,” she demanded. “There must be others. We can’t be the only ones left alive.”

“We won’t give up yet,” Harold Browne agreed.

“Won’t the other ships in the convoy be coming soon to pick us up and to help search?” Raquel asked.

There was no immediate reply and the omission was ominous. “No,” the officer said at last. “Convoy procedure requires that if one ship is attacked, all the others scatter. Lingering to search for survivors would be to invite more U-boat attacks. No, none of the other ships will be coming back for us.”

“So we’re all alone?” Cedric Barrett, the playwright, queried.

“Not for long,” Browne corrected, adding a brighter note to his earlier words. “I was near the radio room when the torpedo struck. I heard Sparks get off a message to Western Approaches Command. He gave our position exact to the last minute. Why, right now destroyers are steaming toward us. You can be certain they’re coming at flank speed.”

“How fast is that?” Robert inquired, lifting his green-hooded head.

“Thirty knots,” the Apostle named James said with authority. “Thirty-five, the newer class.”

“Right you are, mate,” Matt Wilson confirmed. “And how long will it take ’em to get here if they start from three hundred miles away? A bit of figurin’, eh?”

“Ten hours or less,” John, James’s older brother, calculated.

“By breakfast time tomorrow,” Connor said cheerfully.

“So we’ll keep searching,” Browne said again. “Those of you who can, get some sleep.”

There was much less debris around us now. On the featureless ocean, hemmed in by cloud and fog, I could not even point to where
Newcastle
had sunk, though I had witnessed it.

“How do we know where to search?” I quietly asked Wilson.

“That’s all right, miss,” he said, running his hand through his mop of shaggy blond hair. “Mister Browne there knows what he’s about. Wind was out of the west when we was struck. It hasn’t changed direction, so we just keep rowin’ with the breeze to our faces. That’ll help us stay near anyone who might have gone in the water, don’tcha see? It’ll also keep us close to where the destroyers will come lookin’ for us.”

Wilson located a pack of blankets from a watertight container and passed them out. They were some shelter from the wind, but were soon soaked with spindrift.

The sailors plied the oars with long, even, unhurried strokes. They pulled for several minutes; then Browne ordered them to stop while he called out in the darkness, “Is anyone there?” and listened for any reply.

After each pause, they resumed rowing.

I dozed a little amid that fruitless survey. I awoke when the weather turned still dirtier. Rain squalls added to our misery but flattened the waves some.

Mariah’s gaze roamed over the blankness as if by intensity alone she could locate her beloved little nephew.

It felt tragically bleak.

Just as the rain storm moved off to the east she said, “There! I see something there!”

The direction toward which Mariah waved was at right angles to our course. I could not make out anything on the bearing she indicated. Her hopeful imagination was getting the better of her, I thought.

Third Officer Browne, who had been huddled in the stern trying to keep warm, stood upright and stared where Mariah pointed. “I don’t…,” he began, then, “Wait! There is something there. Hullo! Is anyone there? Can you hear me? Hullo!”

Every ear in Number 7 strained for the response.

“Hullo? Is anyone…?”

“Yes!” came the emphatic reply. “Help! Help!”

“Pull, boys,” the officer commanded. “Stretch out and pull!”

I shook off my drowsiness. Looking around me, I saw the lethargy that had engulfed everyone aboard Number 7 roll back. If we could save just one more life, it would be a triumph.

“Over…here,” a male voice sputtered and coughed. “Hurry!”

As we drew near, a vague, bread-loaf shape on the waves resolved itself into an overturned lifeboat. Lying across its keel was a figure I recognized as Podlaski, the Polish diplomat…and he had one arm wrapped tightly around Mariah’s nephew, Michael.

Patsy and her children were alive, but barely so. Raquel chafed Michael’s feet and hands while I rubbed Moira’s. Mariah concentrated on her sister. Mariah crooned to Patsy in Gaelic—lullabies of Connemara, tunes of comfort and hope.

Then the rains arrived in earnest. A solid-seeming deluge blotted the scene. The cold drenching from the skies piled misery upon misery. The lascars lay on their oars. The officer made no move to order them into renewed action.

“We must keep searching,” Mariah insisted. “What if I had given up before we found Patsy?”

Browne shrugged. “If there are any survivors alive out there still, they will have to wait ’til daylight. I can’t keep on any kind of bearing. Anyway, tomorrow we may need our strength for a real purpose.”

His phrasing emphasized the finality of the loss of so many people we had known.

The officer’s words were the curtain speech. The rainfall was the final curtain, ending Act One, during which we had rescued others.

The second act of the play brought the growing realization of our own great peril.

The first night after
Newcastle
’s sinking was, as Saint John of the Cross says, “the dark night of the soul” for many on board Lifeboat Number 7. Our prayers seemed to bounce off the drape of gloom and despair. They rose no higher than the height of the waves.

Harold Browne attempted to instill hope by making us believe some things were still in our power. “Women and children into the bow,” he said. “You men rig the tarpaulin.” His instructions caused a triangular canvas shelter to be raised as some protection against the spray and the cold. With four women and eleven children on board, it was not possible for the bit of canvas to shield all of us. “You’ll have to take turns,” the officer said. “And I insist that you do so. The risk from exposure is great. Even a few minutes’ warmth may save your life.”

Browne and Wilson gathered in the stern, together with Cedric Barrett and Podlaski. The nine lascar sailors occupied the seats between them and us.

The jostling required to maneuver in the confined space caused some irritation. The effort to get us organized allowed some sense of control.

It did not last.

Around midnight, one of the lascar sailors died. He had come aboard with a head injury and never fully regained consciousness. When his mate shook his elbow and slapped his cheek, there was no response.

What followed would have been unthinkable in the ease and civilized comfort of SS
Newcastle
.

What a difference two hours makes to basic human decency.

After determining the man was in fact truly dead, Browne ordered, “We are cramped for space. I’m sorry, but there it is. Put him over the rail.”

“With no ceremony? No words spoken over him?” Raquel murmured.

“He is…was…a Mohammedan,” Wilson noted. “Doubt if Anglican prayers’d suit ’im. If any of his friends wish to speak, they may.”

No one did.

Since the dead body lay between his mate and the Apostle named John, the thirteen-year-old boy was called on to lift the corpse under the arms and help slip it over the side.

At this Raquel protested: “Why make the boy do it? Can’t someone else?”

To which John replied, “It’s all right, ma’am. I don’t mind.”

John was strong and sturdily built. The body was hoisted over the gunnels and deposited in the sea without a splash.

The silent farewell was not the end of the horror. The body floated alongside the boat, drifting with us in silent reproach.

Eventually a current eddied between us and the dead man, and he fell away astern. This experience was only one among the nightmares of that night. Worse was yet to come.

Would dawn never arrive? The sense of being abandoned, swallowed by inescapable gloom, permeated the boat. I prayed the coming of the sun would raise our spirits.

“Three in the morning,” I heard James murmur to his brother. “Sunrise isn’t until six thirty at this latitude.”

More than three hours to wait. I continued massaging Moira’s little hands and arms, trying to get some warmth and circulation back into the five-year-old’s listless body. Beside me Raquel did the same with three-year-old Michael.

Patsy and Mariah were at the center of the canvas shelter. Behind the sisters, forming a living cocoon, were Angelique, Simcha, and Yael. Raquel and I were next, but facing Patsy so she could see her children.

The boys made an outer ring around us, but they were outside the lip of the tarpaulin. Despite what the officer had said, we did not change places. John insisted, and the other boys agreed, that we females remain beneath or at least closest to the makeshift awning.

It worried me that Patsy and her children were so lethargic. All three had been immersed in the sea and had come aboard Number 7 soaked through. We dried them as best we could but had no way of restoring heat to their bodies.

“Look here, Aunt Elisa,” Tomas said, touching my elbow to get my attention. He extended a glass jug. “The officer gave it to me. A bottle of tea. One of the men brought it but thought he’d lost it overboard. Just now found it. For the little guys and Mizz Patsy.”

“Thank you, Tomas. But shouldn’t everyone have a share?”

John said firmly, “Wouldn’t even be a mouthful each.”

Connor: “That’s the right of it, Elisa.”

The fragrant brew was barely warmer than our surroundings, but it was thickly sweetened.

I pressed the rim of the flask to Moira’s mouth. She swallowed and licked her lips. It seemed to ease her. Some of the rock-hard tension left her body. I handed the container to Raquel, who tipped it into Michael’s mouth. Mariah did the same for Patsy. We passed the bottle back and forth until, all too soon, the contents were gone.

I scrubbed little Moira’s hands, then rubbed the calves of her legs. Pressing her close to me, I tucked her cheek against mine and tried by force of will to send life back into her barely responsive form. I knew no Gaelic, but what I had I offered to her:

“Golden slumber kiss your eyes,
Smiles await you when you rise.
Sleep, pretty baby, do not cry,
And I will sing you a lullaby.”

“I know that song,” Tomas said, rousing himself. Though his voice quaked with cold, he sang the lyrics to the chorus:

“Care you know not, therefore sleep.
While I, over you, watch do keep.
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry,
And I will sing you a lullaby.”
¹³

The waves smacked against the boat in a twelve-count beat, such as I had learned from Raquel.
THUMP, slap, slap; THUMP, slap, slap; THUMP, slap, THUMP, slap, THUMP, slap.

The rhythm sounded familiar. What was it called? I could not make my foggy brain unravel the mystery.

Raquel wore her coat like a cloak buttoned up to the neck. She had Michael wrapped inside the garment with her. The coat’s empty sleeves flapped in the wind like a scarecrow. Only Michael’s forehead and nose protruded at the collar.

Raquel bent toward me. I thought she was adjusting her position, trying to ease her aching limbs. She hissed to get my attention.

I leaned close.

Her words felt warm on my ear but struck an icy dagger into my heart. “The boy is dead,” she said. “I’m sure of it. He has not moved in an hour, and he’s getting colder and colder.”

Patsy’s eyelids drooped, and her mouth was slack.

Then I turned toward Mariah. Her gaze bored into mine like blazing coals. Somehow she knew!

“Yes, dear, the children are well. They’re coming along fine,” Mariah remarked to Patsy, more loudly than necessary. “Getting their strength back. You must do the same. Come on! Wiggle your fingers and toes for me. Just try, darlin’. Don’t give up.”

Her words were directed at her sister, but their meaning was for Raquel. The shock of Michael’s death would sap the last life force from Patsy. Mariah’s pointed speech conveyed we had to act as if Michael was still living, for Patsy’s sake.