Excerpted from Sailor Girl. Copyright © 2008 by Sheree-Lee Olson. Published by The Porcupine's Quill, Erin, Ont.
The MV Black River in no way resembled Kate's idea of a ship. A ship has a sophisticated geometry, an elegance of form. It is white and jaunty. It sparkles in the sunshine.
The Black River swallowed the light.
She stood looking up at a great black wall of scabbed and pocked and riveted steel, four storeys high and as long as a city block. She had to turn her head to take it all in. It was a monstrous tub. A zeppelin, fallen from the sky.
A narrow ladder leaned like a sketch against its hull. She felt it bounce and shake as she climbed, her soles ringing against the metal.
Up top she found a large bearded man coiling ropes. He pointed toward a low white structure weighed down by an enormous black smokestack. She could hear the lunchtime clash of china.
She located the galley by its smell, cooked meat and greasy soup. Inside she was given an apron and a pair of thick blue rubber gloves, steered to two deep sinks by the door, which were piled high with pots and roasting pans. She still wore the clothes she had put on that morning, skinny Daniel Hechter jeans and a lace-up white tank top and cowboy boots. The jeans chafed in the heat. Sweat dripped from her braids into the greasy water.
She would have gone to her room to change but she didn't know where it was. And she was afraid to ask the two fierce women in whi te who harried each other across the steel-clad galley. She did not bother to try to grasp their argument. Her consciousness was absorbed by the pain that was moving around her body like the hands of a clock. She pretzeled herself over the sinks, trying to relieve the ache that rose up her legs from the steel floor, like water filling postholes.
Soon the pain had reached her shoulders, shooting bright flares through her trapezoid muscles.
Kate felt betrayed by her body. She had got soft. She
had always been a strong girl, a roamer, a climber of trees. And she was only 19; those women, the cooks, they must be at least 40.
They casually hefted huge cauldrons off the stove and banged them onto the drainboard at her elbow. They emerged from the pantry with frozen legs of animals and threw them down onto steel counters. They never stopped shouting.
The din was tremendous, like a furious orchestra tuning up: the gonging of pots and pans, the clash of glass and cutlery, the clatter of plates arriving from dining rooms. She scraped away gobbets of pink meat, pale mounds of potato, cigarette butts in mahogany gravy. She had never seen such an abuse of food.
And through it all, a sound that filled the air, a great roar from below her feet, as the boat shuddered out of its berth in the city's west harbour. Kate did not hear it until her body felt it, and then she could hear nothing else.
At 1 o'clock in the afternoon she glanced through the steam-coated porthole and saw the shore pulling away, the trucks and cranes of the port of Toronto shrinking into toys. It was only then that she realized she had not called Jenna. The ship was carrying her out into the middle of Lake Ontario, and no one in the city knew where she was. But the pain cascading down her spine made the thoug ht inconsequential.
