River Odyssey (8 page)

OLD FARMERS AND
fishermen have something in common: enormous hands. Like my grandfather, Marie’s grandpapa had hands that could crush a coconut. It was as if the strength of their backs and legs went into their hands when they got older. When he shook hands with me it felt like my hand had been caught in a wooden trap. I couldn’t move it until he let it go; and he didn’t let it go until he had shaken it up and down about ten times. I didn’t believe in all my lifetime I would ever have strength like that.

Marie was right; he loved to talk about the war. And he spoke English too. But he didn’t hear very well, so we had to shout. Marie and I sat on the floor with a plate of crepes and cups of hot chocolate, like two kids listening to a bed-time story. The crepes were just skinny pancakes filled with fresh strawberries, cream and maple syrup, and they were absolutely delicious. Hollie sat on Marie’s lap, sniffed at her crepes and waited for her to pat him, which she did a lot.

Her grandpapa was gentle, but his eyes were wild. Marie said that one of them was made of glass. I didn’t want to stare, but one of the eyes kept staring at me. The other one was smaller and wandered around a lot. I couldn’t tell which one was the real one.

He hadn’t served in the war, he said, because of an accident when he was a boy. That’s when he lost his eye. He never told us what the accident was. He said that he and his friends played on the river a lot and that the river was a dangerous place to play. I believed him. As a young man, he floated logs downriver to the sawmill and sometimes rowed his girlfriend out at night to see the lights of the peninsula from the water. It was on one of those nights, in the summer of 1942, that he saw a German U-boat surface in the river.

“She broke the surface like a demon from the deep,” he said, with his big eye fixed on me and the smaller one wandering around the room. You could tell that he enjoyed telling the story. “She climbed out of that dark water and pulled herself up on top of the surface and snorted like a beast. She snorted just like a bull! And there she was, not more than a hundred and fifty feet away from us.”

“How big was she?”

“Hey?”

“How big was the submarine?”

“Long! Long as a giant eel! Two hundred and fifty feet long! They caught her off the coast of Nova Scotia the next year and sank her. But she sent a dozen ships to the grave first, including the ferry between Port aux Basques and North Sydney. Killed a hundred and thirty-six people that night, before they rammed her.”

“They rammed her?”

“Hey?”

“They
rammed
her?”

“Oh, yah! Ran over her like a snake on the road, sent her to the bottom. HMS
Viscount
.”

Wow. I tried to picture a ship ramming a submarine. It was like sea monsters fighting. “And the night you saw the submarine?”

“Hey?”

“Tell us about the night you saw the submarine, Grandpapa.”

“Oh, yah! She sank the
Carolus
that very night. A big Finnish freighter. Canadian government seized her for the war then the Germans sank her a few days later. Right off Metis Beach.”

He jumped to his feet, went to the bookshelf and pulled down a heavy book. As he dropped it onto the table, the book opened by itself to a page where it was creased. He stuck it with his finger. Then, he pointed out the window towards the river. “She’s out there!”

I leaned closer and saw an old black and white photo of a merchant steamer with a single smokestack in her centre. She was over three hundred feet long! Now, she lay on the river bottom. I wondered if we would see her on our way.

“Were you afraid?”

“Hey?”

“Were you
afraid,
Grandpapa?”

He laughed. “Oh, yah! I was afraid. But they were nice enough.”

“What? They saw you?”

“Hey?”

“Did they
see you,
Grandpapa?”

“Yah! They saw me and they waved to me. They were just regular sailors like anybody else. Caught up in the war. They sank the
Carolus,
and then it was their turn. War doesn’t play favourites.”

War doesn’t play favourites. His words stayed in my mind after we left. They reminded me of Ziegfried’s saying: the sea doesn’t care if you are sincere. Beware all who sail. True enough. Some of us cannot resist it still.

Marie stayed the night. Hollie and I returned to the sub. He hated to leave. I knew he would. His only consolation was that it meant another walk. Marie’s grandpapa was horrified that we would leave so late at night, but she told him I wanted to sleep on my boat. She never told him it was a submarine.

We planned to meet in the afternoon the next day. She would sail with us as far as Quebec City. We didn’t usually take passengers but she was used to the sub now and we were going there anyway. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

When Hollie and I returned to the sub, I was shocked at what we found. We had moored at high tide. Now, the tide was out. The sub was sitting on the river bottom! It was exposed! Thank heavens it was dark. I would have to wait an hour or so for the tide to reverse enough before we were even able to move! I knew the tide came up the river but never dreamed it would change the river’s height
that
much. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

I paddled the dinghy over and we climbed in. I hated the feeling of the sub not moving, and was only happy when the river returned enough to lift us free. I motored to a deeper spot, tied up again to rocks but left enough slack in the ropes to allow for the tide. Then I submerged to periscope depth and went to bed. Seaweed was still out but he would have no trouble spotting us. Chances were he’d be sitting on the periscope when I woke.

It was late afternoon when I peeked through the periscope and saw Marie sitting patiently on a rock. The tide had come and gone once more and we were able to motor closer to shore again. I surfaced awash, showing the portal merely a foot above the surface, and kept the hull hidden. I inflated the dinghy, rowed over and picked her up. She was carrying her pack and holding a bag with a dozen crepes and a Thermos of hot chocolate. Her face was beaming. If she were sad about Jacques, she was dealing with it well.

“How exciting is this?” she said. “We’re sailing to Quebec City in a submarine! Will you let me look out of the periscope, Alfred?”

“Sure.”

“Oh! Wonderful!”

Marie’s grandpapa had said that the
Carolus
was lying just outside in the river but the map suggested she had actually sunk a hundred miles upstream. No one had found her yet. We went up against the retreating tide, which I measured at almost four knots with the current, although the current seemed to change easily depending upon depth and other things such as the wind. It was tricky. Marie stood at the periscope and kept an eye on other vessels while I watched the screens, studied the map and tried to determine our true speed.

“I see a ship! Oh! I see another one! This is so exciting! They are passing so close to us and they don’t even know we are here!”

We were sailing under battery power, submerged, at thirteen knots. Our true speed against the land was probably only about nine knots. As soon as the tide reversed, the current reversed and the river actually flowed backwards! Then, our true speed was closer to sixteen knots, but I was mostly just guessing because it was too hard to determine speed accurately when it was constantly changing. It took us all evening and most of the night to reach Metis Beach. At least we were able to ride on the surface after dark and sail by engine. We arrived in the middle of the night, dropped anchor in thirty feet of water in high tide and went to sleep for just a couple of hours. We set the alarm for a few minutes before sunrise. I didn’t want anyone spotting us when the sun came up. We wanted to look for the wreck in daylight as we passed. I dropped onto my bunk and fell asleep instantly. Hollie curled up with Marie on her sleeping bag and I heard her whisper sweetly to him as I drifted off.

WE NEVER HAD
a chance of finding the
Carolus.
I should have realized that. The river was too murky and way too deep. A few miles offshore the bottom fell to a thousand feet! It was fifty miles between banks still. That was some river! Maybe, if we made hundreds of passes back and forth, crisscrossing like a spider’s web, we might have picked her up on sonar. Maybe. But we could never go down there, not even close, and could never even peek at her. I had other things I was supposed to be doing anyway, like getting to Montreal and back.

So, we moved on. An hour and a half later, we found another wreck. It was lying in our path in only a hundred and thirty feet of water and it was gigantic!

The
Empress of Ireland
was the biggest naval disaster in Canadian history, not counting the Halifax Explosion, and I had never even heard of it. Marie told me all about it but I could hardly believe it. In 1914, the giant luxury ocean-liner, five hundred and seventy feet long, was sailing down the river from Quebec City when she collided with another ship, tore up her bow and sank like a stone. Within minutes, over a thousand people drowned. This was kind of hard for me to grasp. The
Empress of Ireland
was as long as eleven of Cartier’s ships in a row! That was unbelievable! Now, she was lying in only a hundred and thirty feet of water. If she stood on end, four hundred and forty feet of her would stick out of the water. Talk about a sea monster! And yet, as we slowed to a drift above the wreck, just offshore from Rimouski, the river was peaceful and friendly. You would never know such a monstrous vessel lay beneath the river’s gentle flow, or that such a terrible tragedy had taken place here, one of the greatest tragedies Canada has ever known.

But there was more.

Marie said that the
Empress
was carrying a sarcophagus with a princess from ancient Egypt. A mummy. And the mummy was supposedly cursed and believed to have caused the disaster.

“Whoa! That’s crazy,” I said. “Do you believe that?”

“Not really. But a lot of people did. And some say that the wreck is cursed still.”

“Why?”

“Because a lot of divers have died here, looking for treasure and stuff. And bodies and parts of bodies have washed out of the wreck ever since it went down.”

“Creepy. Do you believe in ghosts?”

“No. Do you?”

“I’m not sure.”

Marie ran her fingers through Hollie’s fur. “I believe in the Loch Ness monster.”

“What? You don’t believe in ghosts but you believe in the Loch Ness
monster?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because ghosts are not from this world, but large creatures have always existed, especially in the deep. In prehistoric times they were
really
big. And, we have other prehistoric creatures around today, like the coelacanth.”

She put her face to Hollie’s face. “You’re precious.”

“The what?”

“The coelacanth. A fish from the dinosaur age. We used to only find fossils of them. Then, fishermen started catching them in their nets.”

“Cool.”

“So … that’s why I believe there is a huge creature deep in Loch Ness.”

We were gliding through the water on battery power at periscope depth. Visibility was about ten feet through the observation window, but a murky visibility, nothing like at sea. A hundred feet down, visibility would be even worse. No doubt that contributed to the danger of diving at such a wreck. A bigger danger, I imagined, was the size of her. Divers would swim inside, become lost and their air would run out. That’s what happened to underwater cave divers sometimes. Diving was a dangerous hobby.

It didn’t take long to find the
Empress
with sonar. She was enormous! We were like a little bug in the water above her. Marie sat close to the window, leaning on her elbows and staring down. Hollie stared too but was just pretending. He never took an interest in the observation window because he couldn’t smell anything through it. It was just part of the decoration of his living space.

We descended slowly but I warned Marie that the wreck might appear very suddenly and scare her.