The Lifeboat: A Novel (12 page)

COUNTING THE TWO
sisters, but not Mrs. Forester, who languished on the blankets for another two days, we had lost eight of our original thirty-nine. “We didn’t have to kill Mr. Turner or the deacon and Mr. Sinclair, then, did we?” screamed Mary Ann. “We could have waited a day longer!”

“Shut yer mouth, fool!” Mr. Hardie shouted back. “We almost sank last night as it was, or didn’t ye notice? Can’t ye see that we’re still taking on water where we were hit? That means we’re still overcrowded and now instead of too little food, we have no food at all.” I noticed then that Hardie seemed smaller. He was extremely gaunt and appeared to have caved in on himself. For the first time, he seemed tired and was sometimes idle. He held his left hand in against his side as if he had sustained an injury during the fury of the day before. I didn’t like to see him like this, but it seemed to make Hannah very bold as she moved about the boat setting things in order. Hardie watched her the way an injured dog watches a wild and hungry cat.

I knew we were dying. The only surprising thing was that we were not yet dead. Throughout the day I felt profoundly connected to the countless men and women through the ages who have at some time or other come to this realization about themselves: that life is a relentless sliding down, that eventually everyone finds himself in water up to his neck, and that the ability to have such realizations is what distinguishes men from beasts.

Put differently, it was on day eleven that I began to feel intensely alive. I was finally able to forget my empty stomach and wet feet. I stopped believing that a ship would save us or that Henry would be waiting for me when we got to shore. I looked at my own two hands, raw and scraped as they were, and thought in a new way about how God helped those who helped themselves. Was God a necessary part of that equation? I wondered. Couldn’t people be strong or good without always crediting their strength and goodness to God? During the night it had rained hard enough that we were able to replenish the water in the barrels and, thanks to Hardie’s foresight, we were all able to get enough to drink.

The day dawned clear, and while there was a good breeze, the waves were modest in size and tended to roll rather than break. Because of our reduced number, we could more easily adjust the weight in the boat to counterbalance the heeling, so Hardie, who had plugged the hole as best he could, fixed the boat cover onto the oars once more, and again we started to make progress through the water. Mr. Nilsson worked the rudder, and the rest of us took turns spreading the blankets out across our laps so that they could dry in the sun, which finally warmed us even as it dried our skin to the point of bleeding. My blisters had started to scab over, and I marveled at the capacity of the body to heal itself, to carry on with its life force even in the face of certain death. For once we had had enough to drink, but we had no food, and it wasn’t far from our thoughts that we were slowly starving to death. I asked Mr. Preston how long a person could live without nourishment, and he told me it was somewhere between four and six weeks. “That’s assuming you have enough water,” he said.

“We’re set for a while longer, then,” I said, and he replied that he expected we were, but he looked so dejected that I added, “I think we’re going to pull through,” though it stood to reason that we probably weren’t.

It was then that Mr. Preston told me something he had once heard from a medical doctor he knew. “Starvation doesn’t depend only on the body,” he said. “It also depends on the mind. People who resist are more likely to survive than those who have lost the force of their will.”

“Then we must resist,” I told him, but I felt my heart fluttering as I said it.

“I think about Doris,” he told me. “Doris is my source of strength.” I assumed that Doris was his wife even if he didn’t explicitly say so. “I don’t care so much for myself, but I must survive for her!”

“But wouldn’t you want to live anyway?” I asked, astonished by his vehemence. “Don’t you want to live for yourself?”

His lips were painfully cracked and swollen to twice their normal size, and I saw that his palms were a bloody pulp from struggling with the oars during the storm. He kept them curled into fists, and I only saw them when the boat lurched and he reached out to steady himself. His shoulders heaved once, but his thin voice was steady as he told me about going every day to an unheated warehouse where he sat in a dim pool of light and entered long columns of numbers into a ledger; and if he could do that day after day and year after year so that he and Doris could put food on the table and have a decent place to live, he could do anything. I thought about my own sister Miranda and how I had not imagined her as strong at all. She seemed to me like a combination of Mr. Preston and Mary Ann, and I wondered how she would have fared if she had been in the lifeboat instead of me.

After we had sold our big house, Miranda persuaded me to go with her to see it. We stood in a side street and surveyed the back garden with its box bushes and pickets before Miranda became bolder and we strolled past the front of the house, trying to look nonchalant. Suddenly Miranda stopped in the street directly opposite the front door and cried, “How could they take our house!” I replied that they hadn’t taken it, that we had given it up. Miranda’s emotion struck a chord deep inside me, but this manifested itself as irritation with my sister, not as anger at people who were more successful at life than my family had been.

While we were standing there like beggars in the street, a young woman opened the door and came out, followed by a man who might have been her father. We had moved down the street and were slightly obscured by the shrubbery so I don’t think she saw us, but her presence seemed to knock some sense into Miranda. I was able to convince her to come away, but not before she had given the new owners of the house an evil look. But I felt differently. A large part of me admired them, and the sight of the young woman dressed in a long white gown adorned with blue ribbons gave me a strange kind of hope.

Something about my talk with Mr. Preston steadied me. I don’t know whether it was the idea that I contained my motivation to live within or whether he had aroused in me a sense of competition, a resolve not to be bested by circumstance. I looked around me at the others in the boat, then snatched the nearest bailer out of the hands of whoever was holding it and started bailing as if my life depended on it, which maybe it did.

We had decided to sail for Europe, even though it was farther away than America. Occasionally Mr. Hardie would shout, “Bearing away” or “Hard alee,” which meant he was changing the course of the boat in relation to the wind. Then we would be required to shift our seats to compensate for the weight of the wind against the sail. During one such maneuver, I found myself sitting just in front of Mary Ann, who had positioned herself between Hannah and Mrs. Grant. Her eyes flickered back and forth between the two older women, and I heard her say, “He didn’t exempt himself. He drew a straw, too.”

Hannah replied cynically, “Do you think he didn’t know which straw was which? He was controlling the entire thing. What would we have done yesterday without Mr. Nilsson, Mr. Hoffman, and Colonel Marsh? Even Mr. Preston is stronger than most of the women. We lost only the weakest of the men. Do you think that is just a coincidence?” In a flash I realized that I had had exactly the same thought the day before but had entirely forgotten it. “If he arranged it,” I ventured to say, “it was to save the rest of us.”

“So,” said Hannah coldly, “you subscribe to murder so long as it saves your skin?”

I did not know how to answer. I did not know why Hannah suddenly seemed to dislike me, but Mrs. Grant looked me up and down in that appraising way she had and said, “Don’t worry about Grace, Hannah. Grace will be of use to us yet.”

Mary Ann later went to sit beside Greta, the young German woman who so revered Mrs. Grant, and I saw them with their heads together, talking in an earnest way. Thus the seeds of mistrust were spread and nourished. Later that day, Mrs. Grant questioned Hardie about his sense of direction. “We’re sailing around in circles,” she said. “First we go one way and then another.” This caused Hardie to scoff and ask, “What do you know about it?” Again I realized that he must have injured himself in the storm, for he had removed the life vest the deacon had given him and bound his left arm against his chest. But I was glad to see him holding his knife at the ready and scanning the surface of the water for fish. This was the old Hardie. Perhaps he was not so handicapped after all.

Hannah said, “I thought we had decided to steer due east in order to take advantage of the wind and the current, but now, for some reason, we are headed south.” Indeed, the sun had started to sink from its zenith, which made the cardinal directions increasingly evident. Mary Ann burst into wails. All of us were upset by this conversation, whether it meant anything or not. Hardie said, “And I’d like to see ye sail directly into the wind. If ye knew anything, ye’d know it can’t be done.”

“But I thought the wind was blowing from America,” said Hannah.

After that, Hardie stubbornly refused to speak, addressing himself to the many little tasks that constantly occupied him; but it was not lost on me that he corrected our course so that we were again headed in what seemed to be an easterly direction. Mrs. Grant called us “dear” in her somber way and assured us that all was not lost, that as long as we kept heading east, sooner or later we were bound to reach England or France. The division between Mrs. Grant and Hardie had been working under the surface for some time, but I now saw how she had played several situations to her advantage since that first day, when she had come out in favor of picking up the child. She had been the first to suggest trying to sail, which had seemed like a good idea to us, even if the boat had been too crowded for it to work. Then, she had loudly criticized the entire notion of drawing lots without objecting to it in a way that would have caused it not to happen. That the men had died had benefited us all, but Mrs. Grant had emerged from the incident as the one holding the higher moral ground.

As Hardie searched for fish, his shoulders hunched in on themselves, giving him more and more of an animal look. His eyes sank into their sockets, and every now and then he glared at us with thinly veiled suspicion. I knew instinctively that he was no longer sure of his command. He was also physically weaker—as we all were—and made his pronouncements, which in the beginning had given us such courage, far less forcefully than before. The women as often turned to Mrs. Grant for predictions as they did to Mr. Hardie, and once, when he had drifted into a deep sleep to make up for his lack of rest the previous night, Mrs. Grant brazenly made her way to the storage casks that held our water supply and looked inside. “There’s not as much as I expected,” she answered to our inquiries; then she whispered something to Hannah, whose eyes had narrowed to catlike slits. “He thinks we’re incapable of understanding a thing,” said Hannah, and when Hardie awoke, she asked him outright how much water was now contained in the barrels. “Enough for at least four days,” said Hardie, which we now presumed to be a lie, for Mrs. Grant had just inspected the barrels for herself.

“Don’t lie to us,” shouted Greta. “We’re not children!”

Hardie was surprised, but he stuck to his story.

“Open the barrels and show us, then,” said Hannah.

“This isn’t a democracy,” he replied, and he once again set about measuring the angle of the sun. The wind had turned into a steady breeze, and we were skimming along at a fine clip, but the water incident and the mistake in direction of the morning had seriously damaged his authority. And with three fewer men among our number, he had lost important natural allies. Perhaps if he had explained everything to us in a clear manner, he might have helped his position, but he had gruffly gone on about apparent wind versus true wind and missing compasses and chronometers and people who had too much money but too little sense in a way that evidenced disordered thinking. We thought that sailing was something one either did or did not know how to do. We didn’t want to hear about atmospheric disturbances or prevailing currents or wind shifts or acts of God.

That evening, Mrs. Grant and Hannah, with Mary Ann creeping along behind them, made their way to the back of the boat and again requested that the water barrels be opened so that we could judge for ourselves the gravity of our situation. Again, Mr. Hardie refused. I could only see glimpses of Hardie’s face because the three women were blocking my view. My hearing and my vision, too, had a way of clicking on and off, whether because of malnutrition or exposure to the elements, making it very hard to understand exactly what was going on, though some of the pieces have fallen into place as I look back on the events of those days. On the one hand, I wanted to believe Hardie’s assertion that there was plenty of water for the foreseeable future, a time period that had shrunk to span no more than a day or two, for I was sure that in a day or two we would all be dead. On the other, I had an intellectual interest in the truth. I was aware, however, of being as angry at Mrs. Grant and Hannah for filling the boat with a new sort of tension as I was at Hardie for any lies he might have told us or mistakes he might have made. Above all, I did not want to see the fear that flickered briefly in Mr. Hardie’s eyes. I did not want to see any seam of weakness exposed, for I had put my hopes of survival in him. I sensed the same reluctance on the part of several others for any sort of showdown. Mrs. Grant might well have been right in her claims, but we clung to our illusions, or at least to what shreds of them remained.

ON OUR TWELFTH
day in the boat, a flock of birds fell inexplicably from the heavens.

“It means we’re going to live!” exulted Mrs. Hewitt.

“It means we’re going to die,” screamed Mary Ann, who was never far now from a state of panic.

“Of course we’re going to die,” said Hardie cheerfully in response to questions from every quarter of the boat. “It’s just a question of when.”

“It’s a gift from God,” said Isabelle, who was unfailingly serious and godly, causing Maria to make the sign of the cross. Immediately, Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Nilsson grabbed up their oars and used them to move the birds close enough so that the rest of us could gather them into the boat.

The prosecutor told Mr. Reichmann he planned to use this in the trial as evidence that we did not have to kill each other, for who knew when God would rain birds down on us again? “How could we expect that,” I asked in amazement, “when none of us had ever heard of such a thing before?”

We argued all day about what kind of birds they were. Hannah, who had taken over the deacon’s duties of blessing the food and making pronouncements about God and providence, insisted they were doves, if only symbolically, in the way that all birds and messengers are either doves or hawks; and since we were all eager to think we were approaching land, we tacitly agreed to call them doves, even as we laughed and ripped their tawny feathers off and gnawed the raw flesh from their fragile bones.

It was Hardie who spoiled the mood by saying, “It’s not because we’re near land that these birds fell into our laps, it’s because we’re not near land that they dropped dead. Sheer exhaustion, that’s what did them in.”

We heard him. We even understood him, but we already knew that we were in the middle of the ocean, far from land and all that was familiar. We didn’t want to be reminded of it in the face of this great blessing. When we had eaten our fill, Mrs. Grant suggested that we dry some of the flesh so that we would have something to eat for the next day. “It’s not likely that such a miracle will befall us twice,” she said, so we busied ourselves with the task, and soon we were covered in down and offal, like laborers in some gruesome butchery. Mrs. McCain, who had established herself as rigid and devoid of humor from the start, surprised everyone by saying, “If only my sister could see me now.” We laughed to hear such a serious person say something that could only be construed as a joke.

The bird flesh tasted oily and slightly of fish. I had the fleeting image of myself as a predator, until I looked around me and realized that we were all predators and that we always had been. But what was foremost in my mind was what Mr. Preston had told me about how long the human body could last without nourishment. We were being given the opportunity to stave off starvation for another day or two, which seemed to me like the greatest blessing we could hope for; and as I think back on that day, I realize that we had stopped hoping to be rescued and had started thinking that our only salvation lay in rescuing ourselves. I was not alone in feeling a strange sympathy for all that lay around me: the sky, the sea, and the boat full of people, all of whom now had blood dripping down their chins and lips creased with painful fissures that cracked and bled when they chanced to smile.