In August 1931, Absalom Vardsted was thirty-seven years old, a Norwegian-born salvage diver with more than a decade of hard-hat work behind him. He had cut apart torpedoed ships in murky water, walked the mud floors of rivers in blackouts, and spent eleven hours on an unseen bottom freeing a tug’s screw. He was not a man who scared easily. After that August, he did not step into water above his ankles for the rest of his life.
He washed standing at a sink with a cloth and a bowl until he died in 1968. His widow said only: “He came home wrong that August, and whatever came home with him, it never quite left. ”
Vardsted was working a salvage contract for the Petronel Wrecking and Marine Recovery Company, a small outfit run by a former merchant captain named Renard Cornish, who had lost most of his fortune in the crash of 1929 and had taken to accepting jobs other firms refused. The job that July was the recovery of a strongbox from the SS Amberly, a 280-foot coastal freighter that had gone down off Petronel Ledges, Maine, in November 1929, three weeks after the market crashed.
She lay in thirty-two fathoms, 190 feet down. Twelve of her crew of nineteen made it into the boats; seven did not. An insurance concern in Hartford had offered a fee to any outfit willing to recover the strongbox from the purser’s office, said to contain roughly $60,000 in bearer bonds. Cornish hired Vardsted, a tender named Bertram Kolstead, and a young compressor man named Emrick Palgrave, his nephew by marriage.
On the morning of August 7, 1931, they steamed out of Rockland into an overcast dawn. Vardsted said later that the sea smelled of iron. He went over the side at 1:12 in the afternoon. The descent to 190 feet in the Mark V standard dress took about six minutes.
The water changed color four times on the way down, until near the bottom it was black, a black that ate the beam of his lamp before it could travel more than a few feet. He landed on the Amberly’s boat deck and was surprised by the state of the wreck. After twenty months in the current, the paint on the funnel was faded but intact, the lifeboat davits stood upright, and the deck planking was still tight in its seams. The silt on the deck looked laid rather than settled, in neat drifts along the bulkheads, as if someone had swept the deck clean and left the sweepings in careful lines.
He found the companionway to the lower passage. The door was already open, held open by a wedge. It was a man’s shoe, black leather and polished, set upright against the doorframe with its toe pointing inward. Beside it, a second shoe, placed identically.
Both were clean of silt, as though somebody had set them out that morning. He keyed the mic and told the surface there was evidence of prior entry. Kolstead told him Cornish wanted him to come up. Vardsted asked for ten minutes, was granted five, and went in.
The passageway was lined with paneled walls that had once been cream and were now dull green. There were no footprints in the silt. He passed closed doors and came to the purser’s office. It stood open.
Inside, a desk, a chair tucked in, a small lamp with its glass chimney intact, and an open ledger on the desk. The safe against the far bulkhead was open. The strongbox was not in it. He found it in the passageway behind him, sitting upright about eight feet outside the door, its lid closed.
On top of it lay a folded piece of butter-colored oilcloth tied with black ribbon. He untied the ribbon. Inside was a photograph on a stiff studio card: a man standing in a Mark V diving suit on the deck of a small salvage vessel, helmet tucked under his arm. Tall, gaunt, with hair the color of wet rope and a small piece missing from the top of his left ear.
The man in the photograph was Absalom Vardsted, older by perhaps ten years. In the corner, in pencil, was a date: August 7, 1941. Ten years to the day in his future. He said later that he understood two things at once: the picture had been left for him, and the person who left it was in the ship and knew what his face looked like.
He put the photograph back, tied the running line to the strongbox, and signaled the surface. The box was hauled up. At the far end of the passage, where his beam faded, he thought he saw the outline of a man in a diving suit, standing motionless, facing him. He never turned his lamp directly on it.
He followed the strongbox up, past the shoes, onto the boat deck, and rode the shot line to the surface. He broke water at four o’clock. The bearer bonds were inside the strongbox, in a sealed leather pouch, and dry. Cornish was smiling.
Vardsted was not. That evening, at anchor over the wreck, Cornish opened a bottle of rye and told him the job was not finished. He had quietly taken a second commission from a Portuguese family in Boston. The patriarch had been the Amberly’s second officer, one of the seven who had died.
The family said the man had carried in his cabin a small metal case containing three items: a silver crucifix that had belonged to his mother, a leather-bound book of prayers, and a lock of hair wrapped in wax paper. The family had offered Cornish $250 to recover it. The old man, Cornish said, had come to his office with shaking hands and explained why. Since his father went down with those items in his cabin, the peace had not been kept in the family house.
His wife would not sleep in the upstairs bedroom. The dog growled at the door of his father’s old room. His mother, a rational woman of sixty-eight, said she heard his father calling to her from under the parlor floor every night. And then Cornish told him something that stopped him.
The son said his father had told of a dream on that last voyage, three nights before she went down. He had dreamed of a diver walking on the deck of the ship, who came to the door of his cabin and knocked. When he opened the door, the diver stood there with his helmet under his arm and said one thing: “I’m coming for the case. ”
Vardsted did not tell Cornish about the shoes, the open safe, or the photograph.
He said, “I’ll go down tomorrow. ”
That night he did not sleep. He lay in his bunk and came to understand that whatever was in the ship had not left with him. He described it as a long, cold thread running down through the deck and into the water, and along that thread, in the small hours, he could feel a small, deliberate tug, as if something on the other end wanted to be sure he was still there.
At first light he suited up and descended again. The shoes were still there, un-silted and unmoved. He stepped past them, went down the passage past the purser’s office, and on to the far end, where a door stood closed: the second officer’s cabin. He put his hand on the handle and opened it.
The cabin was small, perhaps eight by six feet. On the bunk lay a man in a Mark V diving suit, boots on, helmet on, hose running from the back of the helmet along the bulkhead and out through a crack in the porthole. The breastplate rose and fell slowly, as if breathing. The helmet turned its face plate to face him.
Vardsted could not see whether a face was behind the glass. He recalled, later, that he was not afraid in the way he had felt fear before. It was less like fear than recognition. “It knew me, the way a dog knows the shape of its owner coming down a road.
The diver sat up smoothly, swung his lead-booted feet to the deck, stood, and made a small inviting gesture in the direction of the passageway. The helmet stayed aimed at his face, still dark. Vardsted stepped back. He spoke clearly into the wire: pull him up now.
Kolstead gave the emergency signal without asking a question. Vardsted understood that the diver in front of the cabin, in some way described years later without wanting to describe, was him. The diver was Absalom Vardsted at age forty-seven on August 7, 1941, come down to invite him in. He stepped back, and the diver stopped where it was.
It tilted its helmet slightly to one side, and Vardsted turned, and walked as fast as a man in lead boots could, back down the passage, over the shoes, to the shot line. The surface crew hauled him up far too fast, with no proper decompression stops. When they got him out of the suit, he could not stand. His joints were locking, and he was bleeding faintly from his nose and one ear.
They drove him through the night to a naval yard in Portland with a hyperbaric chamber. He went in on the morning of August 9 and came out alive on the 11th. He was thirty-seven when he went down; his wife met a man who, she said, had aged fifteen years in a week. His hair was gray at the temples, his hands shook slightly and never stopped, and he would not look at the sea, would not board a boat, would not bathe.
He took work in a hardware store in an inland town, where he was a quiet, courteous man oddly reluctant to sell anything related to boats. He spoke of the Amberly three times in the thirty-seven years of his marriage. In 1933, a photograph fell from a book. It was the photograph.
He said, when asked when it was taken, “It hasn’t been,” and burned it in the stove. In August 1941, he stopped eating for four days, asked his wife to cover every mirror in the house on the 7th, and sat with her silently all day and night. The next morning he looked at himself in the mirror and said quietly, “It wasn’t me then. Good.
” In 1968, near the end, dying of cancer, he told the priest who recorded his account: “There is a man in a copper helmet standing in a cabin in the black at the bottom of the North Atlantic. He has been standing there for 37 years. Every 7 years I feel him tilt his head. I stepped back, but I don’t know if I stepped back far enough.
”
He died on November 12, 1968. At his funeral, a salt-smelling mist rolled up over the town from the coast, seventy miles away, and hung over the churchyard for the entire service. The old-timers called it sea fog inland and shook their heads. His widow walked home alone along a country road.
Near a shallow pond, she heard the sound of a slow, deep, mechanical breath, like a man breathing through a copper helmet. She did not go closer. She said out loud, “He kept his side. Now you keep yours,” and walked on without looking back.
She never spoke of the pond again. The wreck of the Amberly has sat for nearly a century in the cold, black current in thirty-two fathoms off the coast of Maine. No salvage outfit has gone down to her a second time.
In a small cabin along the port side, according to the account of the man who once looked in through the doorway, there stands a diver in a copper helmet, helmet tilted slightly to one side, waiting for someone to say yes.