Plotching a hand here and there across the tabletop, he named off the bodies of water—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario—while I paid strict attention as if about to be called on in class.
He steered the sugar bowl toward me. “Where you sit is Duluth. Full of iron mines. How it works, Badger Voyager comes, loads ore, takes it maybe here, maybe there”—he maneuvered the sugar bowl in winding routes to various ports of call, where he told me the ore was turned into steel, Chicago, Cleveland, all the way to Buffalo.
Very instructive, yes, if you could make yourself interested in that kind of thing. “But what about—”
“‘Dutch,’ yah. Coming to that.”
He peered at the sugar bowl through his strong glasses as if encouraging me to have a close look, too. “He is on the ore boat, see. Me, I mean. Twenty years.” Pride shone out of him as he sat back, shoulders near square enough to burst out of his shirt. “A stoker I was.”
I puzzled over that. Like stoking a stove? A cook’s helper, like I sometimes was in kitchen chores for Gram? He pawed away that supposition, explaining a stoker’s job in the boiler room of a ship. “Mountains of coal have I shoveled.”
“But you don’t do that anymore,” I said, thinking of Aunt Kate’s mocking response when I’d asked about his job.
“Hah, no. I am onshore, so ‘Dutch’ is no more. No shipmates to call me that. I change to ‘Herman,’ who I was before.”
This was a whole lot more complicated than my Red Chief nickname coming and going at will, I could see. Still, something had been left out of the story, and my guarded silence must have told him I knew it had. Herman, who looked to me as if he could still stoke coal all day long if he wanted to, read my face with that unsettling cockeyed gaze. “The Kate did not blabber it to you? Something wrong. Her tongue must be tied up.”
He sat back again and folded his arms as if putting away the hands that fit a coal shovel. “A settlement I have.”
Thinking the word through, I took it apart enough to ask hesitantly, “Wh-what got settled? Like a fight?”
“I show you.”
He navigated the sugar bowl back to the Lake Superior territory of the table, then began wobbling it so drastically I thought it would spill.
“Straits of Mackinaw,” he pronounced the word that is spelled Mackinac. For some moments, he didn’t say anything more, a tic working at the corner of his eye as if he had something in it, all the while staring at the imaginary piece of water. At last he said in a strained voice: “Bad place any old time. Bad and then some, when Witch of November comes.”
Another one of those? One more Great Spirit of Gitche Gumee or whatever, I didn’t need. My skin was starting to crawl again.
All seriousness, he cupped his hands around the sugar bowl as if protecting it. “Witch of November is big storm. Guess what time of year.”
He drew a breath as if girding himself for that mean-sounding storm. “When Witch of November comes, you are on the boat, no place to go”—opening his hands to expose the fragile sugar bowl—“and waves big like hills hitting the deck, send you over the side if you don’t hang on hard as you can. Drown you like a kitten katten in a bag, it will.”
That description did make quite a bit of an impression, I had to admit. But we still weren’t anywhere near how the name Dutch went down with the ship and Herman was sitting here big as life. Maybe I was being a sucker, but I said, “Go on.”
“Night of thirtieth of November, Badger Voyager gets to Straits of Mackinac,” his voice growing husky as he maneuvered the sugar bowl. “We feel lucky, no Witch that year, nineteen and forty-seven. Then it starts storming, middle of night—Witch of November saving up all month, hah? Worst I was in, ever. Lost an old friend, the bosun.” Teeth clenched, he girded himself again for telling this. “We sailed together maybe hundred times on the Lakes. This time, bad luck is with him. One minute he is giving orders like ever, and the next, the Witch takes him in biggest wave yet and he is gone.” Sugar shook from the bowl, he quivered it so hard. “After that, the Badger Voyager sinked, like I say. Big waves broke her in half.” He lifted his hands and mimicked snapping a branch.
You can bet I was on the edge of my chair for the next part. “Raining and wind blowing like anything when order comes, ‘Abandon ship.’” He continued slowly, as if retelling it to himself to make sure he got it right. “I go to climb in the lifeboat, and a pulley swings loose from the davit and hits me, like so.”
All too graphically, he clapped a hand over his left eye and I couldn’t help recoiling in horror.
“Hits ‘Dutch,’ yah?” he made sure I was following all the way. Now he removed his glasses, set them aside, and took the spoon out of the sugar bowl. Reaching up to his left eye with his free hand, he held his eyelids apart. My own eyes bugged as he lightly tapped his eyeball with the spoon handle, plink plinkety-plink-plink plink-plink distinct as anything.