The Good Left Undone(91)
McVicars climbed down the emergency ladders all the way to the hull to coordinate the lifeboats for the Italians. The prisoners had gathered on the deck, with more men trapped in the companionway and the passageway below. Some were fully dressed; others were in their undershirts and shorts. Most were barefoot. McVicars directed them to the lifeboats. The sentries arrived and began to hand out life jackets. McVicars scanned the deck for his friends, but there was no sign of them.
Through the barbed wire mesh, the Italians could see the Nazi prisoners launching lifeboats off the side of the upper tier. The lifeboats lowered past them to the surface of the water, guided by the German puppeteers overhead. Whoever controlled those ropes determined who would be saved. The Italians began to grab at the lifeboats as they went past, as though their rubber handles were brass rings that could change their luck. They cut themselves as they reached through the barbed wire thorns, lacerating their hands, arms, and faces as they fought to escape. Others took the stairs and followed the Germans to the top tier.
“Son of a bitch,” Savattini muttered as he slipped a life jacket over his dress shirt and pants and pulled the waist cord tightly. Mattiuzzi and Piccolo pulled on their life jackets. The sentries funneled the Italians through the holes they had hacked in the barbed wire to clear the way for prisoners to jump and save themselves, but clearly there was no guarantee of that. The irony that the soldiers ordered to transport the prisoners to their Canadian prison camp were now authorized to set them free was not lost on Savattini.
“Where’s Antica?” Mattiuzzi shouted over the mayhem.
“He wasn’t below,” Piccolo hollered.
“I’ll look for him.”
Piccolo turned around and grabbed the chest straps of his father’s life jacket. “You can’t, Papa. You can’t go back! You can only move up.”
“I will find him,” Savattini shouted. “Secure a lifeboat!”
The ship shook as the boiler and furnace imploded, knocking the men on the decks over. The storage hull caught fire. Smoke from the burning carcasses of beef stored in the refrigerated vaults made it nearly impossible to breathe. Mattiuzzi looked back as the smoke billowed up the stairs of the companionway and engulfed the lower deck. Filaments of orange, burning embers from the fire below, sizzled in the thick air. If Antica was below, he would not survive the fire.
Savattini hurled himself into the smoke and called for Antica. He circled around the deck, grabbing the barbed wire because he could not see. He pierced his hands and cursed. The sentry shouted, directing the men to go up the stairs. Savattini made the sign of the cross for his friend and looked for a way to save himself. He climbed the stairs to the second deck.
“Move!” the sentries shouted as they pushed the Italians wearing life jackets through the wire. The recitation of the rosary could be heard as the Italians jumped. They remembered the miracle at Fatima and called on the Blessed Mother to save them. When no miracle was revealed, the men called to their own mothers as they jumped. Many would break their necks and backs as they hit the water before sinking into their cold tombs.
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.