Put Good Foot
(Based on actual events)

The mist lifts for a moment and the sky looms gray over London’s Oxford Street. A thick smell of coal dust hangs and a hansome cab clatters by spraying mud. Mrs. Maria Panula draws her five sons closer, pressing back against the stone storefront. People crowd round and her eyes dart about. She sniffs, wrinkles crease her cheeks and she shivers.

She straightens and comforts her children in a foreign tongue. With the cab safely past, she draws a well-thumbed letter from her purse. She steps back to gaze up at the store’s sign and slowly mouths the letters. She compares them to the note in her hand. She marshals her sons and they resume their slow walk.
Maria’s youngest son, Eino is in her arms; the oldest, Ernesti, holds Urhu’s hand, while Juho and Sanni clutch at their mother’s faded coat. The boys, their fair hair blowing in the wind, range from thirteen months to ten years old. Maria’s pale hair is tied severely back in a ponytail. Her lined, blue eyes age her beyond her twenty-nine years.

They reach number 221, Barbers Shoes, and enter.

The proprietor eyes their patched clothing and his upper lip curls into a smile. “May I be of service, Ma’am?”
“Please. My English no good – from Finland. I learn speak, we go America. I buy shoes…” She points at her sons.

He shrugs. “Shoes for the children. That will be expensive, Ma’am. Do you have any… it will be perhaps twelve pounds, Ma’am.”

She takes bills from her purse and thrusts them at him. “I use this, yes?”

He counts the money and the smile broadens to reach his eyes. “Yes, Ma’am. This will be enough to purchase a nice pair of shoes for you, too.”

She shakes her head, “No. Children, just. We go Chicago. My husband there, twenty months. Finland too hard. Children get new shoes. They put - they put good foot in new land.”

The proprietor nods – he understands the power of new shoes. He measures their feet on a wooden rule and returns with shoes. The four older children try them on. He hands Maria a pair of leather baby’s shoes. Brown, about five inches long, two inches wide, with three straps secured by tiny buttons.

“These are the newest type of shoes, Ma’am. See how beautifully regular the stitches are. Stitched by a machine. A machine which takes less time than a human does, so the shoes are less costly.”

Mrs. Panula runs her fingers over the precisely spaced stitches, feels the soft leather, fits the shoes to Eino’s feet and stands him upright. Tall for his age, he seems older for a moment, but his mother’s hands tickle him while buttoning the straps and he chortles. He thrusts his arms out sideways, staggers forward and trips on his new shoes. Ernesti, the sales clerk and Maria catch him and tenderly set him vertical again. Laughing at the lurching dance of the big people, Eino throws himself horizontal to be caught again and again. Within minutes they are all giggling.

The proprietor wraps parcels and hands Maria her change. They leave the store with the boy’s proudly wearing their purchases; Ernesti and Urhu carrying the parcels of newly boxed old shoes.

They walk to their lodgings behind Covent Garden. Rotting cabbages and trodden potatoes make Maria breathe shallowly, and her arm aches from holding Eino. She sets her chin at the flight of wrought-iron stairs and uses her free hand to haul her and Eino up each pain-filled step. Panting at the top, she turns the brass handle gratefully and they enter the lightless room. She smiles: a private refuge for the night; she laughs as she sets Eino down. The family enjoys their bread and cheese and retires for the night, cuddled together for warmth.

The next morning they board a train to Southampton at Waterloo station. They reach the dockyards at 11:30 and are directed to pier forty-four, the White Star Line’s berth. The liner’s black hull and white superstructure dwarf the quay, wisps of steam rise from three of her four funnels. The Panulas start as a shrill toot rips from the whistle.

The sulphurous smell of burning coal and its smoke float overhead and people bustle about or stand and gaze at the bunting flapping in the breeze. Forward, near the bow, the ship’s derrick hoists nets of provisions, water and coal from the dock. It is April 10th, 1912, and the Panula Family, with almost two-and-a-half thousand other passengers, struggles up the steep gangplanks to board the liner.

For the next four and a half days, the ship steams across the Atlantic at twenty-one knots, taking her more than two thousand miles closer to New York. The steerage accommodations are more luxurious than Maria expected, and her sons enjoy their own bunks for the first time. Maria eats meals she didn’t cook and smiles as she thinks of others washing her plates and cutlery. Many nationalities surround her, all heading to America to reinvent themselves: the mood aboard is festive. An impromptu band of musicians plays and people dance in a small space cleared between the tables. Maria’s sons gaze in amazement as she dances with each of them in turn.

A half-hour before midnight on the 14th of April, the ship collides with an iceberg. Thirty-five minutes later, she is bow down and listing to starboard. In a little over two hours, she will break in half and sink.

Mrs. Panula and many of her fellow passengers stand in two feet of water, the level rising rapidly inside the third-class companionway. Some seem rooted to the deck, only their eyes staring vacantly about; others run with apparent purpose, yet move in aimless circles.

The freezing water reaches Maria’s knees, but she’s unaware for she has lost Ernesti and Urhu in the running mass of screaming people. She holds baby Eino firmly in the clasp of her left arm and encircles her right arm around Juho and Sanni. Her sons cry hysterically and she sobs, her vision blurred with tears.

A steward hands her a single lifejacket: “I’m so sorry, Madam. But this is the last one.”

“What is?” Maria asks, holding the bulky white object, her panic momentarily stilled by his authority.
“You put it on, like that gentleman,” he says, pointing. “You won’t have to swim, do you see?”

As she comprehends his words she begs for more lifejackets, only to be told again that there are none left. The steward leaves her crying.

She chooses Eino, as he is the most helpless. Shortly after she manages to fasten the device on him, she finds herself swept out of the third-class section by the mob and ejected onto the upper deck. She has now lost all of her children except Eino. Her face calms, her eyes glassy in shock. The ship’s stern rises higher and higher. Gravity tears her from the rail and she falls towards the bow and the sea.

Six days later, on April 21st, seven hundred nautical miles from Halifax, Nova Scotia, the sun rises across an Atlantic shrouded in fog. The Mackay-Bennett is heaved to, rocking in the swell. She is a cable-layer, hired by the White Star Line from the Commercial Cable Company in Halifax. Her crew lines the rail, seeing in the dismal light an ocean strewn with drawers, tables, chairs and corpses.

The Mackay-Bennett’s crew has volunteered to retrieve the Titanic’s dead. Loaded with tons of ice and one hundred coffins, their ranks swollen by forty undertakers, they have steamed towards this point for five days. Their eyes shift uneasily, afraid to rest too long on objects floating in the water. The raucous screams of the gulls makes them flinch.

Captain F.H. Lardner fills his pipe. He glances at the Reverend Canon Hind of All Saints Cathedral next to him, and walks forward to the rail atop the bridge-deck. A gaunt man, his beard reflects the gray of the water and fog. He pushes his pipe slowly into his greatcoat pocket and presses his thighs against the rail. Testing its strength, shoring himself up.

He clasps his hands as if in prayer and says, “Men. We are here today for a duty none of us wants, but a task that must be done. Every body out there was a human being a week ago, and many on land want to know what happened to their loved ones.” He glances at the sea uneasily. “Be careful out there. There’s a big swell and the bodies will be waterlogged.” He shakes his head and whispers, “Lord knows enough death floats nearby.” He turns slowly back to his men, clears his throat and says more distinctly, “Godspeed, my lads… Cutter away with the first party.”

He lights his pipe, shielding the match with his woolen cap, drawing solace from the routine.
Four men clamber into the wooden cutter and the boat lowers to the sea. Within seconds its occupants are drenched but they row to the first body, grasp it by its lifejacket and haul it into the boat, grunting with the effort.

The eyes are raw sockets, the nose and one ear are holes bored into the skull and strips of skin hang from the cheeks. The young man in the stern vomits over the side. He gathers himself, plunges his head into the icy water and picks up his oar.

They continue loading bodies and return to the ship. Ten corpses are brought aboard. The smallest one looks asleep. With no identification he is entered in the official record as: NO. 4. - MALE. - ESTIMATED AGE, 2. - HAIR, FAIR. CLOTHING - Grey coat with fur on collar and cuffs; brown serge frock; Brown Petticoat; flannel garment; pink woolen singlet; brown shoes and stockings.

Captain Lardner chokes back a sob. He turns to the Reverend, and says, “This is all wrong. Such tiny souls deserve to outlive the likes of us.” With a harrowed face he asks, “Why, James? Why this babe?”

“We are not privy to the Grand Plan, Frederick. We will never know why he was chosen.” The Reverend weeps openly, his words shoring his faith, his tears revealing that the Plan’s followers require great conviction.
They recover the bodies of forty-six men, two children and three women on the first day. Captain Lardner decides to bury at sea those who are beyond recognition. At 8 p.m., the ship’s bell summons all hands to the forecastle. The thirty bodies lie inside canvas coffins weighted with iron rods.

A crescent moon glimmers against a black sky. The men huddle close as the Reverend’s service echoes round the ship. The rigging drips on their uplifted faces, and the dark sea and ghostly glow of the moonbeams on the canvas sheaths lend their hymn a deeper meaning.

As each body is raised to the rail the Reverend intones, “Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother departed, we, therefore, commit his body to the deep to be turned to corruption…” A slithering scrape, silence and a final splash. The next coffin is carried to the rail.

On April 30th, the Mackay-Bennett docks at the Navy Yard in Halifax Harbor. Relatives and friends of the victims, reporters, telegraph operators and police line the streets. They stand with bared heads on the wharves and the tops of houses. The flags on ships and buildings droop at half-mast. A procession of hearses conveys the dead to the Mayflower Curling Rink, converted to a temporary morgue. Sergeant Northover of the Halifax police force stands guard. He directs the hearses to the rear of the building and supervises the unloading of the bodies onto the ice.

The sergeant is six foot three, wide in the shoulder, with black hair and blue eyes. A jovial man, fond of entering a barroom brawl with his night stick hidden inside his uniform’s sleeve, and, as he puts it, lowering the boom on a too-boisterous sailor’s head. But tonight his supervisor’s words reverberate in his mind: “Clarence. The deceased are the subject of intense interest all over the world. A decision has been made to avoid any collection of souvenirs. None. We will hand all personal effects to anyone who claims a deceased, and burn all the rest. And I do mean the rest, you understand, even the clothes. No grave robber is going to make a profit off one of these poor souls.”

With a sinking heart Clarence watches the corpses spread slowly across the rink. He mounts a guard that maintains its vigil for three weeks. Death certificates are issued (Cause — Accidental drowning. S. S. Titanic at sea), and all identified bodies are claimed for burial by their families.

Reporters use the Unknown Child as the image for their headlines and he comes to represent the tragedy. Offers to sponsor his funeral pour in from around the world, addressed to the White Star line offices in New York. The honor is awarded to the crew of the Mackay-Bennett. They buy him a granite tombstone and a bronze medallion inscribed, Our Babe.

Saturday, May 4th, people pack St. George’s Anglican Church for his funeral service. Six of the Mackay-Bennett’s crew carries the flower-covered, white coffin to the hearse for burial at Fairview Cemetery. His tombstone is inscribed: Erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the disaster to the Titanic, April 15, 1912.

On May 14th, Clarence is given two hundred boxes of personal effects and ordered to feed them to an incinerator. He does, until he comes across body number four’s tiny shoes. He picks them up and tries to throw them into the fire, but he remembers the infant boy lying alone on the ice-rink. Such small shoes and their owner never to progress to the next size…. These shoes would have fitted his baby son, Charles, who died four years earlier.

His fingers push and pull the leather, and he weeps as his son’s face replaces the child’s on the rink. He puts the shoes aside and burns everything else. He spends weeks inquiring at hospitals and then, unable to find the parents, he wraps the shoes in a local newspaper’s story on the disaster, puts the package in a box, and stores it in his desk drawer.

In Chicago, Mr. Panula waited a long time for news of his family. His whole world went down with the ship: Maria and Eino’s brothers were never found and Mr. Panula never knew that his son was the Unknown Child.
Several years later Clarence Northover retired and moved to Toronto. The shoes passed to one of his sons, to various members of his family, and finally to his grandson, who in 1999, donated them to the Halifax Maritime Museum. Using passenger lists from the ship’s maiden voyage, and blood samples from still-living relatives, the museum authenticated the shoes by performing a DNA analysis of the body of the Unknown Child. In 2002, 90 years after he drowned, his identity was revealed as Eino Panula.

The museum displays the shoes in a glass case next to a pair of gloves that belonged to the railway tycoon, Charles Hayes. On some days, a reflection seems to dance across the glass and one can almost see Eino filling his shoes again: standing upright and taking a few more steps, this time safely across the ocean. And with a wealthy gentleman on hand in case he trips, he’s fulfilling his mother’s hope that he put good foot in his new land.