Tales of Uncle Ernest - Chapter 6

Chapter 6  Tales of Uncle Ernest

Uncle Ernest returned and sprawled out on the grass beside me. After setting his glass aside, steadying it carefully in the turf, he grabbed me, wrestled me around, and got me in a headlock before I could break away. I squirmed out of it easily of course as I always did, and with ruffled hair and sore ears I asked him to finish his story.

“How did you get out of that ocean, Unk?” I asked, frowning with concern.

“It wasn’t easy, Moose, because the weather turned really dirty. A vicious, driving storm drove us north, and after five or six days of being blown and battered by the wind and rain, we began seeing white chunks in the water.”

“It was ice, right Unk?” I yelled.

“Right you are,” he replied, tilting his glass towards his nose, “and as we advanced they got larger. A while later Chuck pointed to a gigantic iceberg off to our left. We were now in the Northern Atlantic and we both were shivering something awful. It was soon after this, after we paddled past the iceberg, that we saw a deadly sight.

“A mammoth ship, an ocean liner, was half submerged in the sea, its bow under water and its stern almost straight up into the sky. Chuck, whose eyes were better than mine, said that the liner looked almost new, and its name on the bow was scraped off except for the last four letters that were, he thought, ---anic. I can’t image what the name could have been. Do you think it may have been called The Panic?”

“Maybe,” I said, wracking my brain with the puzzle.

“This is the part of my story that I don’t like to tell, Moose, because people were screaming and crying something awful. It was about this time that we saw him bobbing in the water and clutching a five gallon can. When I paddled over next to him, Chuck reached down and pulled him aboard. The fellow was almost an iceberg himself, so Chuck and I used our own bodies to warm him up. Then I wrapped him up in the sail that had been Em’s trench coat.

“Suddenly the little fellow started yelling, ‘Nine, nine! Ach mine leeber got.’ And I saw why. A fat man with a big, red nose, brown tousled hair, and a Boston accent was flailing towards us doggie-paddle style and yelling some dreadful obscenities. ‘You dirty sons of britches,’ he screamed. ‘I’m an important man. Get me the hail out of this water you fools or I’ll have you shot.’ When he reached the canoe he almost capsized it, so I had to bust his hands with the paddle. The last we saw of him, his red, bloated face was bobbing in the water as the current carried him away.”  [To be continued Tuesday, 1/3/2012]