Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye Read Free Book Online

lakes—as well. Just as the Pittsburgh Steamships wore their tin or silver stacks, so the Superiors wore their black hulls and white decking.And emblazoned on the stern and port side of each ship’s nose the diamond and S.S.C. logo of the fleet looked like an opened serpent’s mouth. Though any ship from any fleet or port of call stirred something like awe in Noah—even now but especially as a boy—the ominous, serpentine Superiors ruled his imagination.
    And the Rag , of course, ruled most, both in Noah’s boyish imagination and in the collective imagination of the people of Duluth. Although flagship honors fell on the newer, bigger SS Odin Asgaard , the Rag remained—until her foundering—the secret darling of the Superior Steel Company brass. Her officers’ crew all hailed from Duluth, a fact that alone would have made her revered, but she had a mystique, too, one whispered about in the sailors’ bars and church basements. Though exaggerated, an ounce of truth pervaded the legend. She was tenacious in wicked seas, as she proved over and over again in the November gales. She’d withstood ice, the shoals, the concrete piers jutting out into the lakes from Duluth to Ashtabula, and even, allegedly, a tornado in the middle of Lake Huron. She possessed the belly of a whale, too, exceeding her load limit from one trip to the next. Though the Asgaard was one hundred feet longer and made to carry three thousand tons more ore than the Rag , though the Asgaard and her type eventually replaced the ships in the Rag ’s class, during the last few years of her life the Rag performed—categorically—on an almost equal annual footing with the flagship. She was the mother of the Superiors, even if not her majesty.
    Noah knew all this because when the subjects of ski jumping, what was for dinner, or the goddamn unions weren’t being discussed at home, the Ragnarøk was. He knew her statistics like some kids knew the batting averages of their favorite ballplayers. He could still remember them.
    Olaf’s voice seemed to whistle at him. “That’s the Rag .”
    Noah looked up from the picture and saw his father’s nub pinky—the one that had been amputated at the second knuckle because of frostbite—pointing at the picture. “I know.”
    “And those are the Bulldogs there, the Bulldogs and a couple hands working on the hull.” “Bulldogs” was the moniker given to the all-Duluth officer crew of the Rag in honor of their tenacity but also because it was the namesake of the local state college. “That kid in the chair is Bjorn Vifte. You knew Bjorn. Seventeen years old there. That’s me, of course, that’s Jan, that’s Joe, that’s Luke—you knew him, too—and that’s Danny Oppvaskkum, the engineer. This picture was taken a few days after Christmas the year before she went down.”
    “Who’s this?” Noah asked, pointing to the kid on the ladder.
    “Ed Krebs, one of the deckhands.”
    “And who’s Joe?”
    “Joe was second mate. Joe Schlichtenberg. He hung around when you were a kid. Joe probably froze to death. Or drowned. Danny O. was in charge of the engine room. He probably burned to death.”
    Noah had always longed to hear—from his father—the story of what had happened the night the Rag went down, and even a hint of it got his pulse thrumming. “The ship here, she’s at Fraser shipyards?”
    “Four or five ships from our fleet wintered up there every year. In ’66 and ’67 the Rag got her new engine, a diesel. They did it at Fraser.”
    “You guys all look the same.”
    “We were.”
    They sat in the dining room of the Manitou Lodge for a couple hours, talking about each photograph as if it were a wonder. Thepictures dated as far back as the spring of 1938, Olaf’s first year on the lakes, when he had shipped as a deckhand on the two-hundred-fifty-three-foot Harold Loki , a ship named for the original chief executive of Superior Steel. Olaf was a baby-faced kid in one of the pictures, his