The fire in the boiler raged and was soon followed by the flood. Black oil leached from the boiler, feeding the flames, which set the remaining ballast tanks loose. Fire ignited on the surface of the seawater that surged in the passageways. The smoke blew off the decks and out over the ocean in charcoal clouds so thick they blocked the sun.
In the darkness that blanketed the Arandora, the prisoners and crew who remained on the ship froze in terror. The rumble of explosions deep in the hull were followed by the crash of steel beams ripping apart. As the smoke lifted on the outer decks, prisoners ran to the edge of the ship as the Arandora lumbered onto its side. For any man who hadn’t made it to the lifeboats or escaped into the sea, the glug of seawater as the Arandora slowly capsized was the sound of time running out.
* * *
Antica stood against the railing on the far end of the lower deck as the last of the men scrambled up the stairs through the hatch. He had already made his decision. He reacted to the chaos in a state of calm. A man who has reached three score and ten has lived a full life and fulfilled the biblical promise. Let the others save themselves.
“There are holes in this one,” an Italian prisoner shouted, unable to inflate a lifeboat. “è inutile! Accidenti ai Tedeschi!” A lifeboat full of Nazis paddled away from the ship. An Italian threw a chair at them through a hole in the barbed wire. “Die!” he shouted as he climbed the companionway to try to find another way to save himself. Antica, a few prisoners, and the sentries guiding them to jump were the only men left on the lower deck. Antica slipped away from them and found a spot where he could be alone.
Antica had dreamt that night of the accident in the marble quarry that had maimed him for life. When he was jolted awake by the explosion of the Nazi torpedo, it had sounded eerily like the quarry blast that disfigured his hand. At twenty years old, Antica took the job of setting off the dynamite because it paid the highest wage in the marble quarry. Young Antica was fearless. Hunger gives you courage, Antica believed. Earlier in the morning on the day of the accident, Antica had prepared the explosives. He measured and loaded the cylinder with powder, placed the capsule inside, and inserted the long wick, careful to pintuck the paper tube closed around the rim of the tube as though he were pinching the edge of a piecrust. It was all so routine. Antica was placed in a rig and lowered down the sleek rock wall of black marble to place the cylinder and light it.
Antica methodically stuffed the explosives in a shell hole dug out of the wall by a fellow quarrier, who had cut the nesting holes from the bottom to the top of the quarry wall.
The crew overhead watched in horror as the explosives blew before Antica had a chance to light it. The blast took two fingers off his right hand. He temporarily lost hearing in both ears. Antica never found out why the explosive went off before he lit it. He surmised it might have been a piece of ash from a cigarette from the workers on the ledge overhead, where the men were planing marble. Or, it was a dangerous methane level in the quarry that triggered spontaneous combustion. He would never know.
Antica’s mother had been waiting for him when he returned home. Attempting to lift his spirits, she said, “Be grateful to God. You still have three fingers. They will remind you of the Holy Trinity.” Antica would understand when he became a father that his mother’s reaction, which hurt him at the time, was for his own good. She did not want her son to wallow in self-pity for all he had lost. When his mother died, he found out she had wept about the accident every night for the rest of her life.
Antica had believed that no woman would ever love him, damaged as he was. Later he found great love in the arms of Angela Palermo, who couldn’t have cared less about the injury and agreed to marry him. They had six children—five daughters and one son—who gratefully had gone to America to work with his cousin and avoided the roundup. The thought of his children made him smile. He was slipping his right hand into his pocket when the strangest sensation occurred. He felt the phantom fingers and their touch return. His hand felt whole as it had when he was young, before the accident.
Antica understood explosives. A torpedo was a steel version of the dynamite tube he created to blast the rock in the quarry. He could only guess the power of the military bomb, but he was certain the torpedo that hit the ship would sink it.
Antica calculated that the Arandora had a few minutes left before it sank into the ocean. He was not the only man on board with that notion, as the prisoners jockeyed to jump now that the lifeboats were filled. A few prisoners who had not made it to the upper decks were scrambling around him, desperately looking for a way off the ship. At his age, Antica could not help them. The burden of the decision to jump was not to be made by an old man, but by the men who had something to live for.