Inukshuk (23 page)

“I'm looking for John Franklin,” the man said, and nodded. Cleared his throat. He had on a plaid red-and-white jacket, cowboy boots, no gloves. Something wrong with his hands, too, Thomas noticed. The fingers were bent-seeming and stuck together wrong with what looked like extra knuckles everywhere, and ruined nails.

“He's not here,” Thomas said.

“But this
is
his house. Do you expect him anytime soon?”

Thomas shrugged. The more he looked at the man's face, the more it seemed unweird, but then it also became harder to look away. Why was his mustache so much more yellow than the rest of his hair? “I don't. I don't know. Can I give him some kind of message?”

“Sure, you can tell him I was looking for him.”

Thomas nodded. “OK. And you are . . .”

“He'll know.”

Again, Thomas nodded. “He'll know.” As if it made sense. “OK.”

The man leaned and made a dry spitting sound, but Thomas didn't see anything come from his mouth. Then he stepped back, tipped an imaginary hat, and went quickly across the yard, boot heels crunching in the ice, up the street, and out of sight.

Thomas was alone again in the semidark, watching his breath cloud and still feeling the house key in his pocket. Moments later, he heard a car door slam and an engine revving. He waited to see if the man would drive by, giving him one more chance to maybe identify him or at least see what kind of car he drove. But no. He felt his blood fizz and settle. What the hell? Maybe he'd dreamed it all. As suddenly as the man had become the singlemost real and weirdly out-of-place thing in the world, he was gone again. Sometimes when Thomas was younger, he used to suppose, given how quiet and private his father was and the number of hours he spent out of the house, that he must be having affairs or involved in some kind of illicit activity, espionage, or drug dealing. Something underground. What else could have kept him away? Poetry? Maybe all that time he'd been right and here at last was his evidence—a message for his father from the underground.

He went the rest of the way up the walk, remembering as he
turned the key in the lock and let himself in that he'd never gotten the mail. Completely forgot. There would be a letter from his mother for sure. But . . . well, given that weird strangers were still wandering around asking for his father, he didn't much feel like going back out for it. Whatever. He'd get it later or tomorrow, or let his dad. Now it was time to get busy. Forget everything. Snack on something quick and head upstairs. Hide away. Draw. Because pretty much everything he'd done to this point must be wrong. He was sure of it. Or, if not wrong, badly in need of a redesign. The men needed to be funny, like wandering zombies, losing blood and teeth wherever they went, heads like rotting watermelons, like seed-blown dandelions, stabbing each other for laughs, gnawing on each other's arms and legs. Clumsy and impervious and indefatigable. Broken, bent fingers. They needed a total do-over.

Still numb but not as chilled, he headed for the washroom. Flipped on lights and was about to lift the toilet seat to piss, when something in his reflection stopped him: on his neck, like a tattoo of a bug or a spider, not quite loonie-size and blackish at the center, lined with pink ridges and serrations.
What the . . .
Remembered Jill's words:
Got you a good one there.... Hickey
. That was no hickey. He moved in closer to be sure, breath steaming the glass, colors in his own eyes splitting spirographically, pupils wide as canyons, puffy redness around his lips. The skin had ruptured and underneath was nothing but more crumbling, broken skin. Painlessly putrefying. He reeled back from himself, blackness creeping up in the corners of his sight. Held on to the sink edge. This was not what he'd pictured, not how he'd envisioned it. Too real. He swallowed to control the nausea and looked again. Tore off his shirt for more perspective, to see how it contrasted with the rest of his flesh and to learn if there were any more on him anywhere. Watched the breath swell and lift his rib cage, bones almost showing, the ancient pockmarks around his nipples from chicken pox, mute little fish eyes. He leaned in close again and raised his lips, opening his mouth for a look inside: gums pink and healthy still, but his right incisor . . . no, he was not dreaming this. It had come loose. Wobbly in its roots. If he pushed with his
tongue from behind, he could see it surge out of line with the others, a bright pinching pain with that shooting from his cheek up his nose to his eyes and causing them to water. Again he leaned away. That sore would not be covered except with a collared shirt buttoned up all the way. Or a turtleneck. But he rarely wore collared shirts, never buttoned them to the top, and he did not own a turtleneck of any kind. More blackness seeped up in the corners of his sight and he had to lean his head into the sink basin until it passed. “Oh God,” he said aloud. “All right. Uncle. I get it. Enough's enough.”

Forgetting to pee or even put his shirt back on, he lunged out of the washroom and up the hallway, pausing to reset the thermostat from eleven degrees to twenty-eight, thinking,
Fuck you Dad, heat miser, I'm cold
, and up the stairs to his room, where he collapsed face-first in bed, dead asleep almost before he'd landed.

HIS WHOLE FOCUS AND AWARENESS of the world and himself in it had narrowed to his feet, burning, numb to the calves, and the immutable sledgehammer force of the harness shoulder straps cutting in, step after step, hauling the longboat on its sledge over ice and rocks and slush and snow. He was a pair of eyes and ears floating impossibly, imperviously above or through this excruciating assemblage of physical pain and numbness and cold: Franklin's ideal of spiritual transcendence but somehow still not dead yet. Around him the sounds of men breathing, cursing, Armitage to his left, singing again—
Oh the sea, the sea, the open sea, it grew so fresh the ever free
—feet slipping on ice, curses, flashes of cleated boot soles, rope pulled taut, shedding water. From the front, Fitzjames's voice leading them on, apologetic and uncompromising:
Here we go, lads. One, two, three . . . pull. And one, two, three . . . pull. Ready again, lads. One, two, three....
Occasional thudding sounds as one or another man slipped to his knees or fell through a break of softened, half-melted cornmeal ice, bringing down with him the man behind or ahead. Seemed they'd been aimed at the same elliptical crest on the horizon for going on two days now, or maybe it was two hours or
two weeks. Impossible to tell with midday forever spinning in place overhead, behind you, in front of you. Always noon. Hammer-blow pain through his shoulders and collarbone, the resistance of the harness; as ever, the sailor ahead of him, crazy old Harry Peglar, singing with Armitage, and another behind them somewhere joining in with their ribald made-up shanty lyrics. Again, Peglar pitched his weight too far to the outside, forcing Hoar to counterpitch, all for another six inches of ground. Eight inches. Another foot. Breathe. Breathe. Rest. Fitzjames's voice, still tired and apologetic in the lead, drawing them on.
Ten more and we break. Here we go. One, two, three . . .
The songs might have helped if they'd ever made enough sense to Hoar that he might join in. Only the call and response parts—
Oh the sea, the sea, the open sea
. The rest of it, an extension of some ongoing joke between the older sailors, topsail master, gunmaster, with their backward talk and stories about tropical beaches, brown-skinned girls, Comfort Cove in Trafalgar, where they'd once been quarantined en masse (Comfort being code for a unique, specific agony known only to them), turtle soup, and favorite dogs. Exhausting even to contemplate, let alone follow.

Suddenly, they were at the top of the ridge and going down, Peglar again lunging ahead of Hoar to the outside but never correcting himself back into the traces. No, they weren't at the top of the ridge, either. The sledge had, for whatever reason, sprung loose behind them, sped forward suddenly as if on waxed runners before grabbing again, stopped as hard as ever and sinking through the snow. Still, Peglar didn't straighten back into the traces and pull; he dangled there, drawing Hoar with him to the side, and the man ahead, as well. Voices rising behind them:
Back in line, sailor. Where do ye think ye're a-goin' anyway. Make it bleedin' hard on the rest of us. . . .
He set his teeth and pulled, jerked on the line, but Peglar would not be shifted.
Man down
! someone called finally, and Hoar fell to his knees, thinking,
But I wasn't down. I'm all right. I'm fine
, until he realized. Peglar. Oh. Old Peglar was down. And no sooner had he realized than Peglar thudded face-first in the snow beside him, inches away, unmoving.

Men circled, Armitage first, followed by Fitzjames, mirror held to Peglar's mouth, and next Gibson, all the older sailors who'd known one another from prior service. But Hoar didn't need to see the mirror to know, didn't need to witness Fitzjames trying and trying again, holding the mirror closer, pinching shut the dead man's nostrils, repositioning himself to get closer, saying,
All right, the joke's done now. It's gone long enough. Ye can stop
. But it was no joke. Peglar was gone. Where he'd been a moment before, alive and singing, pulling the sledge, there was a wet body. Mere seconds was all the difference.

Finally, shaking his head, Fitzjames stood, hands on hips, kicked once at the snow and whirled away before composing himself. In his best imitation of Franklin but lacking Franklin's conviction and natural religiosity, he addressed them:
Men, come now, men. Harry Peglar gave his life in honorable service. No time for a proper burial, but we can return later . . . and now let's pray together.

Peglar's nose crushed to one side from the fall and his eyes stuck open with that thwarted, upward-looking expression, no beneficence, no divinity, no final delivery into light, broken teeth, cheeks black from scurvy and frostbite. Hoar was unexpectedly affected. Drawn out of himself and possessed of something he didn't understand. Had an idea where its root source must lie—in Franklin; in those days and hours he'd spent brushing lint from Franklin's uniforms, polishing his silver, hearing Franklin calmly intone on the eternal hereafter and earning grace and salvation through Christ—but didn't understand beyond that. He stood and removed his snow glasses as the others had and, in a voice that surprised perhaps him most of all—keening, but not distraught; desperation in check—he began the prayer:
“Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?”
Narrowed his eyes to slits, blinking away tears from the incessant glaring light, or grief, or both.
“The sting of death is sin. ...But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.... and forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. . . .”
As suddenly as he'd begun the prayer, he found he couldn't remember any more of it. If there was more. Maybe that was it.
Here lies Harry Peglar
.

Heard men muttering back,
Amen
.

Amen,
he said.

Done.

He glanced again at Peglar and watched as Gibson bent abruptly to extract the booklet of secret backward writing and drawings everyone knew Peglar had kept in his coat pocket, stowing it in his own breast pocket.
Safekeepin',
he said, and winked at the others.
E'd a wisht it
. Nothing was real or right anymore: Here they'd just finished the prayer and already friends were picking the dead man's pockets and winking about it. No one stopped Gibson; no one cared. No more respect for the dead. As Work had said before they'd separated, going on a fortnight now,
Right soon it'll be every man for himself, every man just waiting to find out who dies next. You'll see
. Hoar should put it right. He should stop Gibson. Say,
One day they'll find us! Dead or alive they'll find us and know what you done here. You should have some respect. Put it back
. But looking up too fast and starting after Gibson, he was confronted with a bleached, static expanse of white, through which he could not make out much detail. Armitage's face, a ghost of an arm, Fitzjames approaching, an outline of his own distorted feet, the sledge, the traces. Remembered then to resist the instinct that would surely blind him in full . . . close the eyes, don't open them wider.
Close, close
, he told himself, and breathed slowly, waiting for the seared blood-flower patterns on the insides of his eyelids to abate. Stood still. Slid his snow glasses back on and placed a hand over his eyes, and dropped to a seated position, head between knees, whispering to himself,
Sea, the sea, the open sea, it grew so fresh the ever free,
and waiting for the return of sight.

It all came to the same thing. Older sailors were saying it more and more: With Franklin gone and only the nine officers remaining, Crozier never answering anything in detail, always
Onward, onward, must press on
, spirit in the heels of his boots, anyone could tell, what was left? Why go forward? Why stay? Why do anything? For Hoar, the answer was obvious enough—as obvious as Crozier's grimness and refusal to specify plans was his final vanguard and reserve, beyond which nothing else lay: So long as he had one foot
to put in front of the other and energy to do so,
onward
it was.
Because
there was nothing else, not because he hoped any good might come of it. He drove himself upright, hands on knees, and squinted, eyes open. Blinked back the blurred, sun-haloed shadows of black-faced men reclining in ice, waiting, resting, some still within the traces, one gnawing a chunk of hardtack or bone and spitting it back into his palm, trying again, cursing his hunger and lack of teeth, and again licking at the bloody lump of food, shoving it in. Blood in his beard and down his neck. Without chewing, he swallowed and thumped once on his chest, and again, to make it go down. Coughed and leaned, retching. Grabbed handfuls of snow, which he tried to eat as well but mostly spat back out, scrubbing his hand on his leg. Hoar was lucky; he knew it. Preserved by good fortune, a natural adversity to scurvy, maybe, or his stolen extra partial rations of currants and other fresh food from the captain's table all those winter nights, he had his teeth still. Some loose and overgrown by the gums, but all there still, and his joints ached. Bad signs. Stomach always sore and queasy to the root, also bad—but otherwise he was nowhere near as afflicted as most men.
Captain's whore,
they called him sometimes, speaking to one another.
Stole his pearl falsers, and who knows what else besides
. He didn't care.
That's Master Hoar to you, sailor
, he'd reply if any said it to his face, but none did.
I wouldn't steal nothing from Captain Franklin
.