We were rising again. We didn’t have the buoyancy of a ship in water, but rocked as if balanced on the air itself. Sheridan’s comment at breakfast came back to me: the Fitzgerald being held in the air and snapped in two. I didn’t understand what was happening, why were we rising, why there was no water pushing up, but I felt vilely sick.
Bledsoe was standing near me, his face gray. I clung to the self-unloader for support and pulled myself up for the second time. The crew were crawling away from the open sides of the ship toward the pilothouse, but we could not help one another. The ship was too unstable.
As we rose, sheets of water rushed up like giant geysers between the sides of the ship and the lock. They towered skyward in a thick curtain cutting us off from the land, and then from the sky. A hundred feet above us the water rushed before falling in a pounding torrent onto the deck, knocking me over again, knocking everyone over. I could hear some of the men near me screaming.
I peered stupidly at the curtain of water, trying to see through it to the men at the sides with their cables. They couldn’t be holding them, couldn’t be restraining the ship as she rose lurchingly upward, lashing forward and backward in her concrete confines.
Holding the self-unloader, I struggled to my knees. A wall of water was pounding the forward gate, ripping panels from it. Great logs spewed into the air and disappeared through the sheets of water which still rose on either side of the ship.
I wanted to shut my eyes, shut out the disaster, but I couldn’t stop staring, horror-stricken. It was like watching through a marijuana high. Pieces of the lock broke off in slow motion. I could see each one, each separate fragment, each drop of water spraying loose, knowing all the time that the scene was moving very quickly.
Just when it seemed that nothing could keep us from diving forward and smashing against the rocks in the rapids below us, a great cry sounded above the roaring, the cry of a million women weeping in anguish, an unearthly screaming. The deck cracked in front of me.
People were trying to shout at each other to hold on, but no one could be heard over those screams as the beams wrenched and tore and the ship broke in two. The geysers of water rising above us shut off abruptly. We fell again into the lock, falling forward and down at a great jolting speed, ramming the forward gates and the bottom with a bone-jarring impact. A hatch cover popped free and knocked over one of the crewmen. Wet barley poured out, covering everyone in the middle of the ship with pale gold mud. The deck slanted sharply down toward the crack and I grabbed the self-unloader to keep from being hurled into the center. The broken giant lay still.
18
The Long Journey Home
The air was blessedly quiet following the roar of the explosion and the screams of the ship; all other sounds carried through it. People yelling, both on the Lucella and on land. In the distance we could hear sirens beginning to wail. Every few seconds another piece of the deck broke and clattered down the inclined plane toward the gash in the middle.
My legs were shaking. I let go of the self-unloader’s side and massaged the aching muscles in my left shoulder. Bledsoe still stood next to me, his eyes glassy, his face gray. I wanted to say something to him, but no words came. An explosion. Someone blew up a sixty-thousand-ton ship. Sixty thousand tons. Sixty thousand tons. The words beat meaninglessly in my brain.
The deck swam up and down in front of me; I thought it was starting to rise again. My trembling legs buckled and I collapsed. I fainted for a few seconds only, but lay on the deck until the swimming in my head passed, then forced myself to my feet. Bledsoe was still standing near me.
to the port side of the ship. I could hear him retching behind me.
“Martin. Our ship. Our ship. What happened?” That was Bemis.
“Someone planted explosives on your hull, Captain.” The words came from far away. Bemis was looking at me strangely: I realized it was I who was talking.
He shook his head, a jack-in-the-box on a spring; he couldn’t stop shaking it. “No. Not my ship. It must have been in the lock.”
“Couldn’t have been.” I started to argue with him but my brain felt flaccid. I wanted to sleep. Disjointed images floated in the gray mist of my mind. The geysers of water towering over the ship. The water changing color as the Lucella cut through it. The troughs of water dug by the screws as we left Thunder Bay. A dark figure in a wet suit climbing out of the water.
The figure in the wet suit. That meant something. I forced myself to focus on it. That was the person who planted the charges. It was done yesterday. In Thunder Bay.
I opened my mouth to blurt it out, then swallowed the words. No one was in any state to deal with such news.
Keith Winstein made his way over to us. His face was streaked with tears and mud. “Karpansky and Bittenberg. They’re both—both dead, sir. They were down on the bank with the cables. They must’ve—must’ve been—smashed into the side.” He gulped and shuddered.