IN THE SHADOW OF THE TITANIC by Patrick Hicks
My grandfather met some of the men who built the Titanic. According to him, they were burly, hard, and their hands were sledgehammers. This happened in the early twentieth century, and like so many other boys of my grandfather’s generation, he grew up in the missing shadow of this ship, he saw the dock where it had been skeletoned into shape. Long after the Titanic sailed up Belfast Lough and charted a course for England, the sound of rivets being pounded into steel plates could still be heard echoing across the city. The shipyards were a constant hive of noise in the 1910s. A rhythmic cascade of hammering and tonging lasted until the sun went down. And then? Silence.
The Titanic was the Apollo moon project of its day. Nothing quite so huge or technologically advanced had ever been pushed into the ocean before. The propellers alone were as tall as a house and they were designed to churn up the sea at an unprecedented speed. Passengers would not only reach New York at a fast clip, they would do so in luxury beyond imagining. There were high expectations for the Titanic and everyone in Belfast knew that it was being created in their city.
The men who built the Titanic were Protestants and my grandfather told me stories about how they threw hot rivets at Catholics who waited outside the shipyard in the hope of getting a job. These men with sooty fists didn’t trust outsiders and they spoke in the coded language of their trade. They also helped themselves to the raw material scattered around the hull of their ship. Even today, you can walk into certain pubs of Belfast and find brass fittings, mirrors, small chandeliers, and teak floorboards that were supposed to be on that mighty ship. Instead of being placed in the first class lounge, these bits of extravagance were hustled out of the shipyard under moonlight. If you want to see what the inside of the Titanic looked like, all you have to do is visit Belfast and order a pint.
These men knew they were creating something that would last, something they could take pride in. They emptied all of their strength into the hull, the wheelhouse, the dining rooms, the massive boilers, and when this ship finally set sail they gathered around the docks and waved. A grand and amazing adventure was about to begin for the Titanic. Good things waited on the horizon.
When she sank off the coast of Canada, these men were inconsolable. They collapsed to the ground and wept. Many of them walked around the shipyard in stunned silence. It was, they said, just like losing a child.
My grandfather told me this a few weeks before he died. He sat with his hands folded in his lap and when it came to the part about these men losing something they loved, something they had raised up and placed all their hope into, he looked at me with a weak smile – it was the smile of someone who understood how they felt.
* * *
In 1858, Edward Harland and Gustav Woolf walked along the muck of Queens Island and looked out at the sun-greased water of Belfast Lough. They considered the smoky factories behind them and decided to build what would become the largest shipyard in the world. By 1900, no one could touch Belfast for how well they built ships. The city grew rich. When the White Star Line announced plans for new luxury ships that promised to furrow across the Atlantic in less than fifteen days, the city rejoiced. Over 10,000 people would be employed for years to come and surely new contracts would pour in. Sleeves were rolled up, hammers were lifted, and looms in the busy linen mills continued to clack. Belfast prepared to rule the twentieth century, and the shipyards at Harland & Woolf would be the engine. This was the buoyant and optimistic world that my grandfather was born into. Everything floated.
For the longest time, the most famous ship in the world was simply known by its production number: 401. Nothing quite like it had been undertaken before. New technology was needed and innovative ways of doing things had to be devised. Thomas Andrews, the chief architect, said that the ship would be as “nearly perfect as human brains can make her.”
Nothing would be spared. The blueprints illuminated a grand future.
* * *
Shortly after my grandparents married, they bought a house not too far away from Harland & Woolf. The war was on. They listened to the BBC and knew that terrible things were happening to London. The Blitz was the stuff of nightmares. Nazi bombs razored through the dark and sent huge jets of fire towering into the air. Everyone in Northern Ireland thought they were too far north for the German bombers, so Belfast didn’t take the blackout very seriously. Lights were left on, curtains weren’t tugged snugly into place, and from high above the city shimmered like a jewel.
My grandfather knew about those lights because he was in charge of Belfast’s main power station. On April 15, 1941, when he heard the moan of Nazi bombers on the horizon, he was sure he would die. The Germans were targeting the shipyards, yes, of course, but surely they’d also hit the power station? After all, if the electricity was knocked out, war production in Belfast would come to a grinding halt. Ships couldn’t be built. He stayed in the power station and watched the generator dials. Air raid sirens went off, and in the heavy ink of night, the desynchronized engines of Nazi bombers came closer and closer. Whurr-a . . . whurr-a . . .whurr-a. German engineers had designed the double-noted roar to cause maximum fear. And it worked.
To my grandfather’s astonishment, not a single bomb fell on the power station. A blast radius never touched his body and, as a result, I was eventually allowed to come into existence and write sentences like this one. And this one. And this one, too. In fact, these words only flit beneath your eyes right now because of what happened – or rather, what didn’t happen – in the past. At this very moment, the history of Belfast is in some way touching us both.
But let’s get back to the Blitz.
To say that my grandfather was surprised to be alive is to play around with understatement, and as he looked around the next morning, the whole city seemed to be on fire. Clouds of tarry black smoke floated overhead. Although the power station wasn’t damaged, plenty of other buildings were. Broken glass and chunks of brick were everywhere. The fire brigade couldn’t keep up with all the emergencies because the Nazis had intentionally bombed the water reservoirs, and this in turn made the pressure in their hoses little more than a dribble. Harland & Woolf had been hit especially hard and much of the machinery that built the Titanic was either destroyed or on fire. An ugly orange glow hung over the city and the sun was just a pale wafer in the sky. This was the world my mother was born into. It was a world of gravity.
* * *
After the war, when Europe began to stitch itself back together, my grandparents had a son. They named him Charles, as was family custom. Charles Robert Dempster Chapman. My nana began to suffer from depression – she received several bouts of electroshock therapy for it – and since nothing seemed to be working it was decided that a change in scenery might do her good. Such was the thinking of the day. So the family packed their steamer trunks and boarded a ship for Canada. They set sail for a new life.
While my mother never really warmed to Montreal, Charles loved it, especially the mania for a sport called hockey. As he pushed into his teenage years, he collected autographs and memorized statistics. He lived for hockey and was unusually gifted at mathematics. Hockey and math, those were the things that made him glow. When he went to college, it surprised no one that he wanted to bring these two passions together and – who knew? – maybe he’d become a statistician for a professional hockey team. My grandparents supported him, they poured everything they had into him, they built Charles up, they nurtured him, and they outfitted him with love.
In the early hours of October 6, 1973, the police showed up at their house on Avenue Saint-Louis. It was 2 a.m. They needed to talk with my grandfather. Something unexpected and terrible had happened.
* * *
The Titanic became famous not for what she had done, but what had been done to her. It wasn’t always like this, of course. In Belfast, ship number 400 and 401 were built alongside each other like two children. A husk of metal scaffolding surrounded them and they grew together, the Olympic and the Titanic. They soared up from the waterfront and became the pride of the city. Rivet furnaces made the air blurry with heat and winches lifted massive sheets of steel into place.
The R.M.S. Titanic was launched on May 31, 1911. At the time it was the largest and heaviest object ever to be pushed into the ocean. Over 100,000 people turned out to see the event and a brass band played as the hull rolled, stern first, into the water. Some 22 tons of tallow and soap were greased onto the slipway to reduce friction. It’s possible that my great-grandfather, Joseph Chapman, who was born in 1865, was there. Maybe he waved a handkerchief like everyone else. The gantries surrounding the hull were decked out with triangular flags that spelled out the words GOOD LUCK. Ships blasted their horns in celebration. When the Titanic came to a stop, tugboats appeared and she was nudged into a dry dock to be fitted out. Over the next ten months not only were the boilers added, but so too were the smokestacks and flooring. When these were in place, the remaining finery could be brought up the gangplanks. This included furniture, linen, chandeliers, exercise equipment, brass fittings, silverware, marble bannisters, stained glass, and much else.
Before any of this could happen, though, the ship needed several coats of paint. It was pushed into one of the largest buildings in the world, a massive structure simply known as the “Paint Shed.” This enormous metal hall somehow managed to survive the Blitz and today, it’s a movie studio. Game of Thrones is filmed inside it. In fact, last year, when I hired a car in Belfast from the same company that supplies the film crew and actors with transportation, I was told this is where some of the White Walker scenes are shot. It’s a place of snow and cold. The great white frozen north.
* * *
When my grandparents stepped onto the dock of Montreal, they stood around with their two children and their steamer trunks. The hull of the R.M.S. Ivernia loomed behind them. No doubt they looked around and wondered what this new country would bring to them. My nana probably lit a cigarette and flicked ash into the wind.
Shortly before my grandfather died, I asked him about this moment and he said it was the most terrifying day of his life. It was far worse than the Blitz. He wasn’t sure about anything, the people around him spoke a language his tongue had yet to master, and there he was with his young family and all of their worldly possessions. He had never been to North America before, he knew little about Quebec, and he didn’t even know where they would live yet.
Two decades later, he must have been happy that his son was far away from the Troubles that were quite literally exploding back home in Northern Ireland. It was the 1970s. Evening news showed bombs going off in Belfast and Derry. Catholics and Protestants killed each other in the streets. There were riots, car bombs, and tear gas. The British Army had been brought in and helicopters patrolled the skies. Maybe he had done the right thing by moving his family to Canada? At least his son was safe. As for his daughter, she was happily married to an American. Instead of a life in Northern Ireland, she now lived in Minnesota – it wasn’t too far away – just a plane ride. I imagine him enjoying a cup of tea and quietly congratulating himself that both of his children were safe and healthy.
Charles was attending Bishop’s University and he needed a car to get back and forth between campus and his part-time job, so my grandfather gave him a 1965 Buick Skylark. It was pale blue. License plate number: 484 710.
* * *
The Titanic set sail from Belfast on April 2, 1912. That morning had consisted of lengthy sea trials and the grand ship was put through her paces. She sailed out to the Irish Sea for speed tests, turned around, and paperwork was signed at Harland & Woolf that declared her seaworthy. She set sail again, this time on her first official voyage, and she charted a course to pick up passengers in England. The Titanic churned away from the factories of Belfast at eight in the evening. Gas lamps flared awake, horns sounded, and a crowd gathered to watch her move up Belfast Lough.
Who could have guessed that something unseen and immovable waited up ahead in the dark?
* * *
Charles slammed into the back of a semi-trailer truck in the early hours of Saturday, October 6, 1973. It was a low flatbed – the kind that carries bulldozers – and it was waiting at a red light. Exhaust hung in the cold night air. The accident happened shortly after the light turned green. My uncle veered at the last second to avoid hitting the truck, but it was too late. The front end of his car was crushed and his good friend in the passenger seat was ejected into the night. Almost immediately after this impact, another car rear-ended my uncle. Charles was thrown violently forward and violently backwards within a matter of seconds. He was wearing his seatbelt. Alcohol was not involved.
My family still talks about the accident taking place on a Friday night but the clock had just clicked over to Saturday, a brand new day. The collision took place at the Pine Beach intersection which had recently been dubbed “the death trap” by the citizens of Montreal because it had claimed three lives in less than six months. A week earlier, Robert Avon died inside his burning car. A few days after that, Shirley Rider, a high school student, was running across the road to catch a train when she was hit by a car. Earlier in the summer, Olaf Teske, just fifteen, was rushing home to tell his parents about a scholarship that he’d won when he, too, was hit by a car.
The so-called “death trap” was a block away from my grandparents’ house. There were calls for traffic to be slowed down, for a crosswalk to be put in, for an underground pedestrian tunnel to be built – for something to be done. My grandparents felt this way too. It seemed like only a matter of time before someone else was killed.
This is why Charles’s accident became front page news. The whole city woke up on Saturday morning to find out that two more lives had been claimed. People drank coffee and read about it in The Montreal Star. I’ve read this article and there’s one line that absolutely haunts me: “One of the victims had to be pried from the wreckage.”
On the front page there is a picture of his car. Seven police officers are standing around it as radiator fluid pools beneath the mangled front end. The passenger side is totally caved in. The right front wheel has been punched deep into the engine. Astonishingly, one of the four headlights isn’t damaged at all – it looks like it’s in perfect condition. Above the photo is an italicized headline, Pine Beach “death trap” claims two more lives.
Before I wrote this essay, I assumed that anyone could find this photo on the internet. I’ve since discovered that this isn’t true and, I have to admit, I’m happy about that now. I’m relieved that you can’t Google the picture for yourself. It seems too personal, too private, too intimate. However, this wasn’t the case in 1973. Back then, everyone studied the photo of the wreckage. And so, for a brief period of time, Charles became famous not for how he had lived, but for how he had died.
Even after all of these decades, we still have questions about what happened that night. This is what we do know: he was traveling at 55 miles per hour when he saw a truck owned by the Fillion Transport Company. Maybe the brake lights weren’t working on the semi-trailer? Maybe my uncle dozed off? He veered at the last second to miss the rusting flatbed but it was too late. The unbreakable laws of momentum and force had taken over.
Debris from the crash was launched into the other lane of traffic. Glass. Steel. Chrome.
When it was all over, the truck driver climbed down from his idling rig. Maybe he hooked up the brake lights. Maybe he didn’t need to do this because they were already hooked up. Maybe he ran over to my uncle. Maybe he spoke words of kindness to him.
Someone, we have no idea who, called the police.
* * *
It’s a popular but incorrect belief that the Titanic was the first ship to use SOS. Jack Phillips was the radio operator and he used the standard message of CQD, which had been a distress call for decades. CQ was shorthand for “all stations” (as in, seeking other ships) and D meant distress. Anyone hearing the Morse code of CQD would ask for coordinates and immediately turn their rudder to help.
On that particular night, after the collision, Jack Phillips alternated between CQD and the newer but less well known SOS. It had recently been adopted because it was easier for amateur radio operators to use. Phillips stayed at his station until the last of the lifeboats were unmoored from the great ship. He tapped the black button of his telegraph over and over again. He pulsed out alternating messages of distress until the electricity gave out. CQD. SOS.
– • – • – – • – – • •
• • • – – – • • •
News of the sinking would soon devastate family members in Ireland and North America.
* * *
The doorbell rang sometime after two in the morning.
My mother, now living in Minnesota, happened to be visiting her parents in Montreal at the time, and her best friend, Jill, had just flown over from Northern Ireland for the occasion. The two of them, plus my nana, were sitting around the kitchen table. It was late. They were drinking brandy. They were talking about the old country and how Jill’s brother had been killed in a fire a few years earlier. Apparently she found out about it when three police officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary pulled up to the house.
“They always come in threes,” Jill said. “To deliver news like that, they always come in threes.”
It was around this time they heard sirens in the night. It came from the direction of Pine Beach. They stopped talking about Northern Ireland and glanced at each other. A moment passed before they shrugged their shoulders and went back to chatting. It’s such a normal reaction – sirens, a pause, a shrug – but in this particular case they were hearing emergency vehicles rushing for Charles.
They went to bed ten or fifteen minutes later. Charles would turn up in his own good time. He had a habit of driving friends around and committing random acts of kindness. Maybe someone needed a ride home? Yes, he’d show up soon. Best to leave the yard light on.
My mother crawled into bed and had just fallen into the dreamy syrup of sleep when the doorbell chimed. She jumped up in the hopes that no one else might be woken in the house. She padded barefoot to the front door in a blue nightie and was certain it was Charles. As she reached for the handle she thought, “That bloody idiot has forgotten his keys.”
As soon as she opens the door, she is surprised to find three police officers standing there. They’re wearing peaked caps and one of them is very young, he looks pale, nervous. They always come in threes, she thinks. The cold blows through her nightie.
My grandfather and nana appear in the kitchen. I imagine adrenaline filling up their veins as they step closer.
One of the officers, the one on the right, clears his throat and takes a deep breath. “I am sorry to tell you . . . there has been a bad accident. Can you come to Lachine Hospital? We’ll drive you.”
He speaks English with a French accent.
“What’s happened?” my grandfather asks.
“He’s at Lachine.”
“What’s happened?” my grandfather asks again, this time more forcefully.
By now my mother is shaking and she looks at the youngest officer. He looks even more pale.
“Est-il mort?” my mother asks him.
This young French-Canadian officer simply nods. He looks at his boots.
By now my grandfather’s hands are grasping the air as if he’s trying to hold onto something. The truth is too awful to accept and he keeps squeezing the air in front of him as if trying to hold onto something that is already gone. My nana goes nearly hysterical at the news. There’s no denial on her part – she goes straight into acceptance. Maybe she does this because of the conversation they had earlier, maybe she accepts it because there are three police officers, maybe she believes it because she heard the sirens. She half-screams the name of her son and stumbles into the living room where she grabs a framed photo off a table. She clutches it to her chest and orbits around the house saying his name over and over again. “My Charles . . . my Charles . . . my Charles.”
Meanwhile, my grandfather continues to wring the air. He tries to ask questions.
The older officer says that someone needs to come and identify the body. My grandfather really doesn’t want to do this (“His face is fine,” the officer adds gently) and Jill volunteers to go with my grandfather to Lachine. She will identity the body in case it’s too much for him.
The house becomes a hive of activity after this. Whiskey is poured but it does nothing to dilute the mood. Nana has slipped into a catatonic state of grief and my mother begins to make phone calls to Northern Ireland, where it is already morning. She dials numbers that will set bells ringing. News will travel fast.
As strange as it is to say, I was in the house during all of this. All of it. Believe it or not, I was asleep in Charles’s bed. As darkness dragged the adults of my life down, down, down into crushing depths of pain they had never known before, I slept on. I was three at the time and I have no memory of that night. Nothing. It’s a blank slate. Maybe I woke up when I heard the unfamiliar voices of the police officers, or maybe I heard my nana buckling under the grief that had filled her up or, just as likely, I slept on, my body at rest.
Before the accident I asked for my uncle all the time. After that night though, I didn’t say his name for years. It’s as if I knew that something terrible had happened to him, it’s as if I knew that strong and beautiful things can vanish into the night, never to be seen again.
* * *
His friends called him “Stats” or sometimes “Chuck.” My nana hated that last one. If someone called the house asking for Chuck she’d say, “There’s no one here by that name” and hang up. His friends learned pretty fast that if you got Mrs. Chapman on the line you’d better ask for “Charles” or you’d get an ear-full of dial tone.
He was known as “Stats” because he dreamed of becoming a statistician for the Montreal Canadiens. In fact, a few weeks before the crash, he talked to someone at the head office who seemed interested enough that he told Charles to come back after he graduated. Maybe something could be arranged? Charles certainly had an impressive vault of statistics in his head, which makes this phrase from his autopsy report all the more difficult to read: “Fractures crâniennes, hémorragie méningée.” Skull fractures, brain hemorrhage. All those stats, all those carefully gathered bits of information, all that memorization, it was all drowned, all lost.
A few days after the accident, The Montreal Star asked my mom about what Charles was like and she is quoted as saying, “He could tell you just about anything pertaining to sports, even things which happened many years ago. He was very keen on sports facts and records.” Although I haven’t asked my mom this, I’m sure it was hard for her to use the past tense when she was speaking to that reporter. Was. “He was very keen.”
Even all these decades later I notice that my mom says, “When Charles was killed” and not “When Charles died.” It tells me something about how she still feels about losing her only sibling. There is violence and swiftness to killing. Everyone dies, but not everyone is killed. It is a robbing of life. A sense of injustice and shock radiates out from the word killed. “Charles was killed.”
* * *
A few days after the crash my nana made a passing comment to my mom. In a hushed voice she said, “All those vitamins I gave him . . .”
She must have felt betrayed by the universe. She did everything right for her boy and she showered him with daily acts of love, including giving him vitamins. All the effort she put into building him up, and feeding him, and making him brush his teeth, and buying him clothes, and taking him to the doctor, and helping him with homework, and hugging him, and cooking dinner, and paying for college, and giving him a car. He was just at the beginning of life when –
* * *
The car. The Skylark was totaled. Beyond repair. My grandfather was asked by the police if they could tour it around Canada to promote road safety. He agreed to this.
His body. Charles had asked my mother to take up his dress pants on the morning he died and she joked that he could bloody well do it himself. When he was placed into a coffin a few days later, he wore those same dress pants, and my mom made sure they fit him perfectly. She got out a needle and thread, she went to work. He was cremated on October 10 and his remains were placed into a small coffin-shaped urn. His ashes were sailed across the Atlantic, he was brought home to Northern Ireland, and his worldly remains sank into the soil on January 3, 1974.
The truck. Months after the accident, an insurance company sent my grandfather a bill. They said he owed $50 to fix the rear end of the semi-trailer. It was damaged.
* * *
Seven years after the accident, my nana died of pulmonary fibrosis. That’s what the autopsy said, and while I don’t dispute the physical cause of death, I believe the loss of her son is what really stole the vitality of her life force. She just wasn’t the same after the accident. To see a photo of my nana in 1970 and then to see a photo of her in 1980 is to look at two different human beings. One is vibrant and hale and laughing; the other is white-haired, wrinkled, and stooped into herself.
She died in Northern Ireland. It happened when she was visiting family. As I understand it, she had just returned from the grave of her son when she suddenly had difficulty breathing. An ambulance was called and she was rushed to City Hospital. This happened during the Troubles, and the doctors of Belfast were world famous for re-attaching limbs that had been blown off. They knew the limits of the human body. They knew the limits of their trade.
The paramedic that whisked my nana to the emergency room did a wonderful job, he calmed her down and he told her, “Missus dear, I’ve got your purse so don’t worry about that. You’ll be fine.”
She wasn’t fine, of course, and I miss her still.
* * *
I saw my grandfather cry for the first and only time shortly before he passed away. He was in his 95th year of life, and winter was just giving way to a soupy spring. After the deaths of his son and wife, he moved to Minnesota to be closer to my mother. From 1981 until 2007 a small river town in the United States was his home. He never remarried.
On the morning I saw him cry, he was sitting in his favorite chair and behind him were paintings of the Irish landscape. He had congestive heart failure, which meant that the muscle in his chest was getting weaker and weaker. Soon, breathing would become difficult. His hands were balled up in his lap. We talked about Northern Ireland, the Titanic, and the long arc of his well-lived life.
He looked up and said something to me that I’d never heard before.
“After Charles, you helped me in ways I can’t even put into words. To lose a child is . . . ” He shook his head and that’s when the tears came. “When you were a teenager, you helped me, Patrick. Being with you was sometimes like being with Charles. Sometimes I felt like I still had a son. I can’t thank you enough for that. You made me feel like I still had a son.”
He died a few weeks later.
As per his wishes, he is buried next to Charles in Northern Ireland. They rest in a family grave that has existed since 1620. My grandfather was the last of his name. No other Chapman will ever be laid to rest there.
* * *
Now that peace has found Belfast, the city has made good on its history of building the Titanic. Tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world come to Titanic Quarter every year to see a new museum near the docks. It’s a magnificent building constructed out of silver anodized aluminum shards. The four corners are designed to look like the prow of the massive ship and it rises up from the skyline. It shimmers in the sun. Given the wry sense of dark humor that exists in Belfast, the locals call it “The Iceberg.” I’ve been in the museum a few times and there’s a special room that overlooks the slipway where the Titanic was launched. Visitors can stand in front of the window and think. I’ve seen several people stare at the emptiness.
The capital of Northern Ireland also has a professional hockey team now – the Belfast Giants. Catholics and Protestants come together to cheer for a sport that is neither Irish nor British. The old bigotries that fueled the Troubles aren’t on display and everyone is more interested in slap shots and hip checks. No doubt the Giants have a head statistician. Maybe this person drives to work each day and is dumbfounded by their own good luck.
Charles continues to remain this massive unspoken presence in my family. What might he have transformed into if he hadn’t slammed into the back of a truck so many years ago? There is the immediate collision, which is most definitely over, and then there is the ongoing emotional physics of the crash that continue to ripple out. I sometimes think about the kids he might have had, the cousins I never got a chance to meet, I think about how different my own life might have been if I had an uncle in Montreal. Right now, he and I should be Facebook friends. We should be exchanging dumb photos and keeping up with the daily wonders and frustrations of life. If he were here now, he’d be on the verge of retirement and maybe, just maybe, he’d be a grandfather. As I get older, I realize that when he hit the back of that truck it knocked so many lives onto different courses. What happened that night wasn’t supposed to happen, and all I know is that his once living body now rests deep in the soil.
Also at this very moment the Titanic is beneath two miles of watery darkness. It rests at the bottom of a crushing ocean where it’s rusting into oblivion. Even as you read this, it is dissolving into the ocean floor, time is nibbling away at it, and soon there will be nothing left, nothing left of it at all.
Patrick Hicks is author of seven poetry collections, a collection of short stories, and the novel The Commandant of Lubizec (Steerforth, 2014). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Georgia Review, Salon, and The Utne Reader.