By Ed Staskus

   Oliver could never afterwards remember exactly how it happened. One minute he was standing at the railing of the MV Confederation in the moonlight listening to an old man with a scraggy face telling him a story about rum runners and the next minute he was on the wrong side of the railing. He fell into the Northumberland Strait, a tidal body of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Prince Edward Island from the mainland. 

   “Swim to that ghost ship,” the old man shouted down to him. “There, where you see the flames. I’ll find the skipper of this here boat, we’ll come back for you.”

   “No, wait, throw me a life preserver first!” Oliver shouted, but by then the man was gone. The boat continued on its way, leaving him behind. He kicked his shoes off and stripped off his clothes, except for his underwear.

   That’s better, he thought, dog paddling.

   The MV Confederation was a roll-on roll-off ferry. It could hold six hundred passengers and more than two hundred cars. It sailed from Caribou, Nova Scotia to Wood Islands on Prince Edward Island eight times a day in the summer. The crossing took about an hour-and-a-half. 

   Oliver, his sister Emma, and their father and mother were on the last departure of the day from Nova Scotia. It was their second trip to the island, although they had taken the 8-mile long Confederation Bridge from New Brunswick their first time the previous year. They had spent a week at the Coastline Cottages in North Rustico. They soaked up Atlantic Canada and were back for more.

   The ghost ship was a half mile away. Oliver had been taking swimming lessons at the Lake County YMCA in Painesville the past two years. The first stroke he had learned was the front crawl and it was still the stroke he was best at. Even though he had only swum in untroubled open water on Lake Erie at the Mentor Headlands State Park, he thought he could make it, ocean or no ocean. The water wasn’t especially cold or wavy, although it was salty, which he wasn’t used to. He spit out what was in his mouth. 

   Lake Erie was full of perch and walleye. His father sometimes took the family to Pickle Bills in Grand River for a perch platter. His mother didn’t like walleye. She said the fish was too fishy for her, so they always had perch. One of their neighbors in Perry, where they lived in Ohio, was Polish. He always said, “Fish, to taste right, must swim three times, in water, in butter, and in wine.”

   What was in the water of the Northumberland Strait? He thought there were probably cod, bass, and mackerel. He hoped the West Point Sea Serpent wasn’t around, or the barrel thick sea worms he had heard about. He didn’t especially like worms, to begin with, and was sure he wouldn’t like a big sea worm bearing down on him, at all

   He started towards the ghost ship, slow and steady, not trying to rush the crawl. He got there in twenty minutes. When he got close to it he noticed the flames engulfing the ship didn’t feel hot, or even warm. There wasn’t any smoke, either. It was flying a tattered distress flag. The flag was upside down.  He flipped over on his back and looked up the side of the starboard side of the  boat. It was a three-masted sailing schooner. A face appeared at the gunwale. It was the old man with the scraggy face.

   “What you be doing in the water there, boy?”

   “I fell off that ferry,” Oliver said, pointing to it in the distance. It didn’t seem to be turning around.

   “I don’t see no ferry.”

   “All right, but can you help me get out of this water?”

   “Look to yourself, boy, the devil is loose.” His voice had the sound of an unfriendly cackle in the dark. Oliver wasn’t sure he liked that.

   “What does that mean?” he asked, but the old man had fallen silent. Just then he heard ripples. He looked over his shoulder. It was a barrel thick sea worm bearing down on him. He made for the Jacob’s ladder on the side of the ship and clambered aboard the schooner.

   The old man with the scraggy face was perched on a barrel. It was a provision tub filled with salt pork. His eyes were shiny and sharp as the tip of an icepick. There was a clay pipe in his hand. It was a nose-warmer kind of clay pipe. It was filled with plug tobacco that had been soaked in molasses. There was a wooden piggin of grog in his other hand. 

   “Never trust a fighting man who doesn’t smoke or drink,” he said.

   The helmsman on the aft deck was staring straight ahead, his line of sight far past the booms and sails. Three dogs were chasing one another from one end of the ship to the other. A knot of sailors were at the main deck hatch covers, playing cards on the flat wooden surfaces that doubled as tables. They were playing whist, some copper and silver coins scattered about, along with slips of paper, which were IOU’s for future rations.

   All the while the sailing schooner was burning, although it didn’t seem to have any effect on anybody or anything.

   “What is this ship?” Oliver asked.

   “Some along the New Brunswick  coast, they say we be the John Craig Light, a ship that wrecked off Shippigan Island. Other herring chokers on that coast say we be the Colbum, lost in a storm in 1838. Over in Pictou, down there in the Scotia lands, I have heard them say we are a contraband runner once bound for Scotland, but never heard of again. It’s all false reckonings. What we are is the Isabella. We left Charlottetown for South America in 1868, loaded with lumber. We was last seen outside the harbor by the lighthouse keeper at Amnet Island. We was never seen again, but the lumber we was carrying still burns, boy.”

   “Oh, I see, well, that’s very interesting, but I’ve got to get to Wood Islands, my parents will be worried sick if they can’t find me. Do you have an inflatable life raft with an onboard motor I could borrow?”

   “Inflatable?”

   “You know, a rubber boat you blow up with CO2 when there’s an emergency.”

   “Are you are spinning me a yarn, boy?”

   “No, I don’t have time for that, I’ve got to get going.”

   “There is no going anywhere once you be on the Isabella. We need help in the galley and you will do.”

   “What kind of help?”

   “Lighting fires, peeling vegetables and potatoes, scraping mess kits, and then there’s carrying food and drink from the galley to the crew topside, and after that there’s swabbing the decks and hauling rope up the ratlines. We will make a reefer of you soon enough.”

   “I can’t do that, whatever all that is. I’m in fifth grade. School starts right after we get home.”

   “Your lessons start right here, right now.”

   The schooner lurched forward suddenly, picking up speed, even though it was going against the wind. Oliver looked around. He had to get off the ship. He saw a rope dangling from the stern. At the other end of the rope was a yawl being towed. He ran to the stern, found a rigging knife, cut the rope, and  jumped off the ship into the yawl. There was a monkey jacket tucked under the sternsheets. He put it on and started rowing.

   It was a clear night and he didn’t have any trouble finding Wood Islands. He landed at the lighthouse, walked up a provincial park trail lit by moonlight to the terminal, and spotted the family Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot.

   “Where have you been?” his mother asked. “Why are you wet? What happened to your shoes? And where did you get that ratty coat?”

   Oliver hit the sack as soon as they got to the Coastline Cottages and slept like a log. It was later in the week that he, Emma, and their parents were at the Stanley Bridge Hall for a ceilidh, Scottish and Irish folk songs on fiddle, guitar, accordion, whistle, and occasional bodhran. Lennie Gallant, a singer songwriter from nearby Rustico, was on stage, telling stories and singing songs. When he broke out into “Tales of the Phantom Ship” Oliver pricked up his ears.

   “There’s a burst of flame and a flash of light, and there on the tide is a frightening sight, as a tall ship all aflame lights up the sky, tales of the phantom ship, from truck to keel in flames, she sails the wide Northumberland Strait, no one knows her name.”

   “Isabella,” Oliver called out, jumping to his feet. “It’s the Isabella.”

   “Yes?” a voice beside him said.

   He looked down at the voice. A dark-haired girl around his own age was looking up at him from her seat. She flashed a smile at him.

   “I am Isabella,” she said.