Emerging from the fog bank, the Beatrix appeared before them, a sleeping leviathan suddenly filling their vision in the twilight of a late-summer morning. She was one of the new models of commercial bottom trawler, easily eight times larger than Niall’s father’s boat, An Saighdiúir. The pink-orange halo of the impending sunrise at their backs reflected in the windows on the bridge, and this was as close to a sign of life as he could see.
“Christ, look at the angle the fucker is at.”
The Beatrix, despite its size, appeared to be caught on a cold-water reef. The bow and most of the deck were partially submerged beneath the cold grey Atlantic, while the stern was almost fully out of the water, hunched over like a dead cavalryman still seated on his horse. The reef was now the only thing keeping the rest of the ship from sinking, and Niall doubted that it would hold out for much longer. He checked his watch. It had been eighty-four minutes since the distress call.
He turned and spoke, as his father had, in their native Gaeilge, “How close can we get?”
“Tide isn’t strong, we’ll try and pull up alongside.”
“What then? That thing is too high to get aboard with anything we have, even tilted like it is.”
His father poked him roughly on the arm. “You’re strong enough, boy. Now, get the ropes ready.”
“The Lifeboat crowd could land at any time.”
His father let go of the wheel and grabbed him tightly by the shoulders. “Boy, who does the thinking on this boat?”
Niall looked down, avoiding his father’s eye. “Captain.”
“And are you the captain?”
“No, you are.”
“Dead right, and you’ll be captain of fuck-all if we don’t do this. No one’s out here but us. Quit whingeing, and get those ropes ready. Captain’s orders.”
Danny Mac Aoidh relinquished his grip and Niall quickly stepped out into the fresh sea air. The Beatrix was much closer now. It took up so much of his vision that he felt that it was about to swallow them. Niall guessed that it would be about twenty-five to thirty feet of a climb to get aboard.
A loud moan from the sea called out in warning.
Niall whipped his head around, and then ran to the starboard side. He thought maybe an orca had taken to following them, but they were too far out to sea to find one by itself. Through the back window of the cabin, he could see his father trying to kill their momentum and put them in reverse.
“What was that?” Niall shouted into the cabin.
“The bastardin’ reef is about to break,” he spat.
As Danny hurriedly tried to turn the boat, the moan grew persistently louder. Niall stood digging his fingernails into the wood of the gunwale.
“Come on, down, you bastard,” he whispered. “Put an end to this.”
When the first man dropped over the side of the Beatrix, Niall recoiled as if he had been punched. Looking up, he saw a second man was standing on the harshly-slanted deck, waving his right arm wildly and gripping the railing with his left, trying to gain Saighdiúir’s attention. Anticipating the impending doom of his vessel, he too then climbed over the side and jumped into the water below. The moaning was now so loud that when Niall shouted for his father, he couldn’t hear himself speak and hurriedly ran into the cabin.
“Man overboard! Two in the water!”
Danny gave his son an unsettling smile. “Here we go then. Grab that life ring and stand ready.”
As Niall returned to the deck, a deafening crash erupted and the airborne stern of the Beatrix thundered downwards and stopped jarringly, unable to lift the weight of its submerged bow from the water. The shock wave from the trawler’s rapid change of position rippled through the Atlantic and Niall dived onto the deck as a large wave walloped into An Saighdiúir’s rusting starboard side.
Restarting the engine, Danny sailed in a wide arc in front of the Beatrix in an attempt to pick the two men up without coming too close to the now-sinking trawler. Niall stood with the life ring in hand, but the morning sun had just broken over the horizon behind them and he squinted as the bright reflection of the water stung at his eyes.
The two men came into view a few seconds later, a small, dark spot among the blinding lights. One man was lying on his back and didn’t appear to be moving. The other was holding onto his companion’s side with his legs in the water and was kicking hard to move the two of them away from the trawler, assisted by gentle waves making room for the Beatrix, which eventually guided them right up to An Saighdiúir’s hull.
After a few minutes of struggling, Niall, with his father holding his legs, had managed to lift both men out of the water. He had lifted the conscious man out first. He was barrel-chested but reasonably light and had collapsed immediately onto the deck, shivering violently. The second man had been trickier. He was not only unconscious, but taller and heavier than the first man. It had taken no less than three attempts to get him out. As Danny retrieved blankets from the cabin, Niall stood hunched over with his hands on his knees and breathing heavily with the exertion of lifting both men. In his exhausted daze, he watched the run-off of the unconscious man’s clothes forming a puddle on the deck, tinged with drops of red. He knelt down hard on the deck and lifted the man’s hat to find a deep gash above his left ear. Over the starboard side, the last remnants of the Beatrix slid into the dark abyss below the shimmering Atlantic.
*
After nearly forty-five minutes of shivering under blankets while An Saighdiúir sailed for the coast, the conscious man finally spoke, asking for another coat in Dutch-accented English. Coat in hand, he attempted to coax his muscles into action, but eventually defeatedly asked Niall to assist. Hearing voices from the deck, Danny stepped out to join the conversation.
“What’s your name?” Niall asked.
He searched his memory for a minute and then, reassured of his faculties, said, “Axel…Axel.”
“What in God’s name happened to that ship?”
This time there was no hesitation. “Collision.”
Danny looked confused. “Collision with what?”
“Some nothing little island in the middle of nowhere. Rockland, or Rockmount, or something like that.”
“Rockall? How did yous crash into that? It’s not exactly small.” Niall bit his cheek at his father’s unnecessarily harsh tone.
“Storm,” Axel coughed. “Captain didn’t know the waters. We kept telling him to head south away from the storm instead of east to bring in the catch. Didn’t listen. Got too close in poor visibility and it tore a hole through the hull and short-circuited all the fancy new electronics. We were dead in the water and drifting for two hours before we hit that reef.”
“Where’s the rest of your crew?” Danny asked.
He laughed weakly. “Fuck knows. Majority of them abandoned ship in lifeboats the night before we hit the storm when it was clear we weren’t going to change course. They’re probably all dead.” With difficulty, he attempted to shuffle himself into a better seating position and seemed to regard his surroundings for the first time.
“Are you… fishermen?”
“Only sometimes these days but aye, we are,” Danny replied cautiously.
Niall tensed, sensing his father’s anger.
The Dutchman looked confused. “If you’re fishermen, then why did you answer the distress call?”
“We have the Lifeboaters’ distress channel on our radio and since we were already on the water, out of good Christian charity, we decided that we would try to help.”
“But how did you-”
Danny interrupted quickly, “I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but I have to get back to steering us towards land. An Saighdiúir only goes so far on her own, and I need to radio ahead for the ambulance.”
He turned and started back towards the cabin, tugging his son abruptly by his sleeve to follow him. He had switched back to speaking in Gaeilge.
“I’m giving you a job now and I’m relying on you. I need you to get the rest of the story from him. If this is going to play out, I need the full picture. Do ya follow that?”
Niall grimaced. “We should just ignore him until we get to shore.”
Danny grabbed him by the jaw and held him close to his face, taking a moment to check that the Dutchman wasn’t watching them. “Your captain just gave you an order. Now, go and fucking follow it.” He released him before adding, “I’m depending on you.”
Niall stroked his face, holding back the tears he could feel coming. Danny stepped back into the cabin and closed the door. As the engines began to pick up again, Niall sat down across from Axel. The Dutchman extended his arm awkwardly to point over at the other rescued man.
“Is he gone?”
Niall shook his head. “No, he’s still alive, but just barely.”
Axel laughed. “I suppose if he survived a war then a bump on the head wouldn’t be the best way to die. Still, by the time you get us to shore he’ll be dead anyway.”
“Where’s he from?” Niall asked.
Axel shrugged. “Iran, Iraq. One of those fucking places that’s always on fire. His name’s Jawad. Didn’t talk much but he was a good sailor.”
“Were the two of you the only ones left?”
He nodded. “As far as I know, anyone who hadn’t already abandoned ship died trying to get to the stern as her front sank. Me and him made it to the bridge, that’s when we got the radio working again.”
“How?”
Axel pointed at Jawad again. “It was him, not me. He probably worked with radios in his home country. Of course nobody thought to ask him when it would have made a difference.”
“When did he hit his head?”
“On the way out, just before I had to throw him into the water.” He regarded Niall curiously. “Is this the point where you admit to me that you were fishing illegally and beg me not to say anything?”
Niall’s eyes widened.
“You don’t have to think of a lie. There’s no way that the two of you could have made it to us in the time you did on this wreck if you were inside the six-mile limit.”
Niall bristled at the jab about An Saighdiúir. “Bit of gratitude wouldn’t go amiss,” he replied irritably.
Axel smiled. “I apologise, my friend. We Dutch can be a bit frank in getting to the point.”
Niall remained silent.
“Just tell me, why would you risk getting caught to save sailors you don’t know?”
Niall said nothing.
“I won’t say a thing, you have my word. From one fisherman to another, tell me.”
“I don’t even know,” he replied quietly. He saw sympathy in the Dutchman’s eyes.
“Your father doesn’t trust you with these things?”
Niall shook his head.
“Well then, I’ll ask him, and we’ll both have some light shed on the situation for us. What do you think?”
Niall stared at him for a moment. It was clear the Dutchman would tell him no more. He nodded and knocked on the cabin door.
“He wants to speak to you about your plan,” Niall said glumly as his father answered the door.
Danny looked over at Axel, and then regarded his son coldly. He handed him the wrench that he was holding. “Make yourself useful for a change and tighten the bolts at the base of that wheel.”
As Danny stepped out onto the deck, Niall remained rooted to the spot, clutching the wrench tightly as if the failure would seep out of him into the cold metal.
Danny stood over Axel.
“You have a lot of questions,” Danny began. “Then listen. You and your fancy company’s big ship came into waters my people have fished for hundreds of years, and it left you for dead. I came out here and plucked you from the jaws of death, Dutch. We’ll see who thinks that it’s me and my boat that needs to stick to a six-mile limit when they see the state of your ship and how a peasant like me saved her only surviving crew. So, warm up, a chara, you’ll be famous soon.”
Axel stared at the wiry Irishman incredulously. “You … you think you’ll make some grand statement by doing this? You will destroy yourself. The fishing company will crucify you. They’ll say what you did was ‘vigilantism’ and ‘the exact reason why small fishermen can’t be trusted’. You’ll be the scapegoat, a distraction from the accident. What you’re doing will not bring you the results you want.”
Danny stood up again considering this. “You would say that though, wouldn’t you?”
This annoyed the Dutchman. “You think I’m protecting them? Companies like them destroyed my father’s livelihood. I have no choice but to work for them, what else is there? And you accuse me of favouring them?”
“Kick a dog enough, and he’ll come to heel, even when he doesn’t have to.”
“Arrogant bastard,” Axel snarled, “they will put you and your son in jail. They will ruin your family’s lives rather than have you make them look stupid!”
Niall’s brain hadn’t made the decision to strike his father across the jaw with the wrench, but before he could process it, his father lay on the deck bleeding heavily from the mouth. He then strode wordlessly over to the unconscious Jawad, now significantly paler from loss of blood. Niall wondered what part of him had plotted out his actions as he hoisted the copper-skinned man by the shoulders and laid him on the gunwale. From his peripheral vision, he was vaguely aware of Axel weakly kicking his foot off the deck and shouting at him, but the impulse that had taken over drowned everything out, and he pushed Jawad over the side.
He then turned to Axel, red in the face and screaming inaudible curses at him. Niall didn’t struggle as much to lift him as he had done with the other man. Occasional weak slaps hit Niall about the face, but the power hadn’t returned to the Dutchman’s muscles, and as Niall pushed him into the water, he saw him struggle to swim only for a few seconds before sinking silently like the Beatrix.
From the deck where Jawad had lain, Niall retrieved the remainder of the bandages and dropped them in front of his father, semi-conscious and with a layer of blood surrounding his mouth. He knelt down beside him, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice.
“I’m taking us home. Clean yourself up, and sort out them ropes.”
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- All Souls Lost by Keelan Gallagher - November 9, 2023