The Lifeboat Read Online Free PDF Page A

places with Maria, so that if she were to lose her balance and fall, she would fall on top of Mary Ann or me and not out of the boat and into the brine.
    I was now one of the ones sitting along the rail being splashed by the oars as the oarsmen tried to hold our position against the current. After thinking about it for a long time, I put my hand down to touch the water. It was very cold and seemed to pull seductively at my fingers, though this effect was not really due to anything about the water and was more a product of the motion of our little boat through it and maybe partly the work of my imagination as well.

Day Three
     
    BY THE THIRD day, some of the shock had worn off. The pupils of Maria’s eyes shrank back to normal size, and once she made a clown face at little Charles when he poked his head out from beneath his mother’s skirt. We had traveled far enough that we no longer encountered pieces of the wreckage, or perhaps we had kept our place and it was the debris that had moved. In any case, there was nothing left of the Empress Alexandra. She might never have been, but how then to account for our plight? I thought of her as I have often thought of God—responsible for everything, but out of sight and maybe annihilated, splintered on the rocks of his own creation.
    The deacon said the experience renewed his faith in God—or if it hadn’t yet, it was bound to; Mrs. Grant said it renewed her conviction that there was no God; and little Mary Ann said, “Hush, hush, it doesn’t matter,” and led everyone in a hymn about those in peril on the sea. We felt uplifted, both tragic and chosen. It touched my heart to see that even Mrs. Grant joined in the singing, so great was our sense of unity and joy at being alive.
    If Mary Ann was childlike in her faith in the Bible’s literal truth, I was a practical Anglican. I deemed anything that encouraged people to be moral a good thing, but I never parsed the tenets I believed in from those I didn’t. I thought reverentially of the Bible as the sturdy book with closed covers that sat in my mother’s reading room, where we gathered for our bedtime story. I had a Bible of my own from which I was assigned passages to memorize by the Sunday school mistress, but my book was small and unimpressive, and after my confirmation at the age of eleven, I put it in a drawer and never looked at it again.
    Mr. Hardie remained confident, even grimly cheerful. “We’re lucky about the weather,” he said. “The wind is from the southwest and very light. The higher the clouds, the drier the air. The weather will hold.” I’d never wondered about it before and I never wondered about it again, but out there that day I wanted to know why the clouds were white, when they were supposedly made up of water, which is colorless. I asked Mr. Hardie, thinking that he, of all people, would know the answer, but all he said was “The sea is blue or black or all manner of color, and the spray of the breaking waves is white, and they’re made up of water, too.” Mr. Sinclair, whom I had observed rolling about the deck in his wheelchair but had never spoken to, said he wasn’t a scientist, but he had read that the color had to do with the refractive properties of light and the fact that the cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere turned the suspended water droplets into crystals of ice.
    Mr. Hardie was on firmer ground with a different sort of fact. He told us that the Empress Alexandra had been equipped with twenty lifeboats, that at least ten or eleven of them had been successfully launched, which meant that at least half of the nearly eight hundred people on board had been saved. We could see two of them in the distance, but what had become of the others, we did not know. At first, Mr. Hardie ordered the oarsmen not to go up alongside the other craft, but Colonel Marsh spoke up in favor of approaching close enough to talk to their occupants and to find out if they might contain our loved