Lifeboat
The escape, told elliptically. The others die in the boat.
8 maker's notes · underlined phrases open the annotation
The sky went wrong behind us like a lantern kicked to straw, and I looked — God have His mercy — where the others wouldn't look: every man laid out like worship with his face turned to the dawn, and the wireless man still sending... every word the water took.
Someone has to know — pull, boys, pull. If the sea won't have it told, then row, boys, row.
Four of us came off her, but the boat sat low with more, for I stowed away the thing I'd seen, and it weighs the same as lead. I have carried coal and cordage, I have pulled an honest oar — I have never built a vessel for the carrying of dead.
Someone has to know — pull, boys, pull. If the sea won't have it told, then row, boys, row. (Pull boys pull!) Hold fast, and set to keel The shore becomes the test to know If any of this is real.
And the boys went quiet on me in the old familiar way — first Willem's hands forgot the oar, then Willem went to sleep. I closed his eyes at morning and I took his pull all day, and I told him what I'd tell you, love. Some things are his to keep.
I am rowing against water, I am rowing against night, I am rowing on the same slow dark that took her whole and hale, and I do not row for landfall, love, I do not row for light — I row because a story drowns the moment that I fail.
Someone has to know — pull, boys, pull. If the sea won't have it told, then row, boys... row. (Row boys row!) Alone, my back against the dead But still set against horizon A strip of land, hope's thin thread.
One telling gives the ship a single survivor — a man who reached a lifeboat, washed ashore, and told his story to a missionary before dying. Everything the world claims to know comes through that one dying account. The album makes that its literal spine.