Inukshuk (24 page)

 

 

DAYS LATER—HOW MANY? WEEKS?—again partially snow-blinded but pretending full blindness in order not to have to serve or to witness, he sat in ice. Sounds of slurping and contented, barely restrained sighs of relief from men around him. Dead man from
Terror
. Some comfort in that. Dead less than a few hours. Didn't know him, refused to remember a name. Able-bodied Seaman Somebody. The taste was not new, somehow—like much of the fresh game he'd eaten here and at home, bear, marmot, boar—a pungent, metallic blood flavor with rank overtones. At first, he had worried he wouldn't be able to choke it down, but he found, as soon as it was
gone from his mouth he craved more. Bitter aftertaste, and too fast his bowl was empty, heat causing his sinuses to flood.
Over here,
he said, bowl raised.
More here. Please
. Licked grease from his lips. Waited for the liquid weight of it in his bowl, misted droplets burning his wrist.
Here,
he called.
More here, please
. All around him lame and weak and snow-blinded men were saying the same, bowls uplifted.
Food here
. He squinted an eye open and again instantly shut it, willing himself not to take in the bloodied, pink snow, trampled around the kettles hung on makeshift spits over burning pieces of disassembled sledge wood; meat strips curing on the bowsprits of the two longboats that would be hauled no farther, others emptied of provisions and turned on their sides to create shelter. Tomorrow, Crozier and any men still able to see or to walk well enough to help in hauling the remaining longboat would leave.
Forty men at most
, he'd said.
The rest of you overwinter here and make it through as best you can. We'll return for you
.

This was their farewell dinner—last fortification and final full-muster mess.

Watch out there, sailor.... Straighten yer bowl.
He knew the voice. Squinted open an eye to be sure: Thomas Work with a pot and a ladle. Was he so unrecognizable that he no longer warranted a personal greeting after these summer weeks (or was it months?) separately encamped? Or was it just more of the general madness—the fear and hallucinations afflicting them all, distancing them from one another?

There you be, then. More for you
.

Obliged. God bless you and keep you from harm
. He heard something extra splash into the bowl.
I thank you for that, too, Thomas! God loves you, Thomas
.

God's nothing to me anymore
.

He was there still. Hoar felt his presence, unmoving before him. Again he opened an eye. Blinked and let both eyes remain open long enough almost to give himself away. Like the others, Work's cheeks and nose had blackened, the gums had grown over his teeth, swelling and disfiguring the lower half of his face, and sores
showed around his coat collar, under his beard. Each of his knuckles lay open, pink and scabbed.

Are you with us, then, tomorrow, on the march out, or are you dyin' here with this lot
?

I will walk if I can
.

Around them other voices raised in protest.
Food here, too. Food here. More. Fill me up, I say
.

Be a fool not to. Crozier knows his way
.

So I hear
.

He nodded and raised bowl to mouth. Again, the choking first taste of it superseded by hunger pure as hatred. A chunk of something vaguely sausagelike bumping his teeth; he sucked it in and bit down once before swallowing, already longing for more, raising his voice with the others.
More here. Please. More food here
.

 

 

GUTTERING ORANGE-BLACK LIGHT on interior ice walls. Sexless, hairless old person, Inuit, in furs, rocking, speaking, smiling, two teeth showing. In her hand a silver plate, a coin, a pen, a boot with brass cleats:
Kabluna means big eyebrows
. Laughing, she points at her eyebrows.
Crazy big black eyebrows. Big white-face man, crazy big eyebrows. We see him around sometimes, sure. “Hey, Crazy Kabluna! How is it going? How is your hunting? How are your women?” It's a joke, because he can't hunt. Can't live alone and he can't live with others. He eats them all. Everything, everyone he meets. He don't fish, either, and don't hunt the seal because he don't know how. Never caches his food. Maybe he don't know about that, either! Won't eat any dovekie or the fishes. We bring him some once. We tell our children, “Go bring him food.” And we tell them stories, too, to scare them sometimes, and maybe do some things to make them believe, but mostly they are good children. “Look out, here he comes! Kabluna! He eats everyone in his path! Watch out! He eat you, too!” Some of our women go to him another time with seal and whale blubber, but he say no. Kept one of the women for himself instead. The others, they got away. Some time ago there were many others like him, too, many, many kabluna
on tall ships—tall kabluna, big eyebrows, black faces. Too many kabluna to feed. So after a while, they eat each other, and now there's only one—Crazy Kabluna. The rest are in his backpack. All chopped up. He eats them. He wears them on his shoulders and carries them with him everywhere and some more he drags behind him in the snow, arms and legs and heads. Sometimes we hear him at night, outside, munching—crunch, crunch, crunch go the bones—but it's been a while now and most of us think maybe he's gone south, or else dead. He should be gone forever! But we can't say for sure. Kabluna! If you're listening . . . don't come back anymore! OK? Are you listening? We don't want you. Go away! Shoo! Shoo!

JOLTED AWAKE IN FULL DARKNESS, Thomas was momentarily unable to place what had wakened him or to piece together his last few actions before dropping, unconscious, on his bed. Heard the furnace kick on in the basement, and seconds later warm air rattling a piece of paper caught in front of the vent. Homework? A drawing from one of his storyboard books? He'd been dreaming that sound, trying to recollect what caused it or to guess what might be written on a misplaced piece of paper, but it wasn't what had wakened him. Pieces of his dreams fell aside, and he remembered: the man in the front yard—
Looking for John Franklin
—and the reflection of himself in the downstairs bathroom mirror, the men outside exclaiming over a pair of headlights, Jill with her blue marks everywhere.
Not everywhere, duh
. With that, the sound that had woken him from his sleep: a door closing suddenly: downstairs or upstairs? People talking—and, incongruously, words from one of his resource books. The sea shanty from Harry Peglar's diary,
O the C, the C, the open C, hit grew so fresh and ever free . . . O death whare is thy sting . . . remember Comfort cove and the dyer sad. . . .
Couldn't remember which book he'd seen it reproduced in, but he pictured it exactly now: words scrawled in a circle, backward, forward, surrounding a drawing of a giant lidless eye, and given the mysterious heading
Lid Bay
. No one had ever managed to explain. But aside from Crozier's and
Fitzjames's botched and cryptic final notes appended to Gore's much sunnier one and hidden in what might or might not have been Sir Ross's cairn on Victory Point, this was the only written documentation from the Franklin expedition ever recovered: Peglar's notebook, found on the corpse of an unknown seaman with a steward's brush and a silver plate—evidence of lead poison-induced dementia, some said; period-specific parlor-game antics, said others. But why those words now? What time was it anyway, and where was his father? What had woken him?

He rolled upright, shivering, and felt around his sheets for a shirt to put on, overcome suddenly with nausea. Weird, hollowed-out nausea, as if his belly had been blown full of poison gas; it drove every other thought aside.
Water,
he thought,
must drink water,
and he staggered out of the room and across the hall to the washroom, where he turned on the tap for cold and lowered his face in the stream, drinking. Belching, drinking more. And as he drank, he reconstructed further: the pills from Griffin. How many had he eaten? Two to start and another one sometime later. A final half as he'd stood outside Jill's house, watching her and her parents through the glass. That was probably why his stomach felt like this: no food, too many pills. Just thinking about it made him want to puke, but he forced himself to keep drinking. Then staggered down the stairs, cold water soaked into the carpet fibers seeping through his socks to the edges of his feet at every other step. Weird. Why was there water on the stairs? Was it maybe the stalker man? In the kitchen, he went immediately to the fridge and leaned in. Milk. Bread. A moment's hesitation. No it was time: time for the fast to end. Strawberry yogurt. Jam. Stale old rhubarb pie. He carried these things to the counter. Turned on the light by the sink and piled jam on the bread with a spoon and rolled it like a wrap. Gone in two bites. Another. Gone in three bits. It made his eyes sting, that joyous sweet-tart C-soaked flavor.
Ohmygod,
as Jill would say. Here was where he'd been headed all along really: not scurvy, but its logical antithesis—the proof to himself of his own superlative control and mastery of his body, drawing back from the brink of madness and disease at the last minute.
Of course. He mopped milk from his chin with the bottom of his T-shirt and then opened the cupboard beside the coffeemaker to locate the C lozenges. C supplements. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I'm doing this,” swallowing four 500 mg pills in one mouthful. Thumped his chest where the pills felt to have lodged momentarily. Onto the pie. With ice cream.

But as he carried his steaming plate of microwaved Thrifty apple-rhubarb pie back to the counter where he'd been eating, two things caught his attention. First was the time: 12:44 A.M. So his father had come home and ignored him or chosen to leave him asleep, unfed, facedown in bed. Weird. Or, weirder, he'd never returned at all. But where would he be? The next thing was the letter from his mother, open on the counter beside the sink, pages half-folded back, torn envelope beside it:
Mr. Thomas and Mr. John Franklin, 223 Rattler Way
. This settled the question about his father's whereabouts anyway, and possibly explained why he'd never wakened Thomas: Distraught or distracted by what was in his own portion of the letter, or wishing to protect Thomas from whatever was said, he'd decided to leave Thomas sleeping. Deal with it tomorrow. Thomas stood in the middle of the kitchen, all senses positively attuned, as if he were the brain and central nervous system of the house and feeling through its floors, beams, joists, and walls everything that had happened here and that would happen next; as if his superattunement gave him control of time, which allowed him to foresee and thereby stall all of his next actions indefinitely. If he wanted. If he chose to.

He did not choose to.

He ate the pie. Scraped the plate for every last crumb and smear of ice cream and went to the sink, where he ran it under a stream of water and then turned and began reading. Not in order. The words might have been put down in sequence, but his understanding of them would never be sequential or logical. Without his mother's voice, they would never register with him that way.
Dearest!
she began.
Because of my dreadful habit of hoarding these letters to you, adding a little more and a little more every day, by the time you read this, I'm sure the days will be hours longer, and the ice outside my
window. . . .
He skipped ahead.
I hope you'll remember the important thing to keep in mind there with girls is that you must never censor yourself and never hide from them your wildest most wonderful feature which is your IMAGINATION. . . .
Again he skipped down the page.
I could write you pages and pages and swear I'd never gotten it exactly right. Depending on the light—did I mention the glorious return of light?!?!—the angle of sunlight if there is any, what might have appeared translucent ice with a brown undercast of muck or murk could suddenly shift on you, glowing green-blue or blue-green, with a sparkling underlayer of silt. Most beaut-a-licious! I do wish you could see. The oldest pieces of course calving right off the glacier's edge.... A column today as tall as a house and whipped around the top to the shape of widow's walk or maybe a set of organ pipes, positively stunning. Like the finest fluted . . . Next time I'll send pictures. PROMISE.... Osprey and two eagles. The beavers are asleep with the little beavers in their dens and. . . . But what a relief! No bugs! . . . ice underwater has its own marble and silver patina quite unlike anything and ice that has set for an eon on a rock wall quite another corked and metal-tinged. How I miss you my boy. You may call at ANY time, you know, except you may not reach me while we're encamped. Number's here.... Tell your father I. . . . Your brother may have mentioned his plans to visit which I. . . . It will aid in his studies, I say, as there is so little to do here, most times, beyond read and study and observe.... One day maybe we'll get farther east, Greenland I hope, where it's said the thaw should begin revealing unnamed heretofore-unmapped islands any day now. Imagine your explorers of old rushing off to name them all! Sir So-and-So's Sound, Lady Bla-Di-Bla's Cove, Heroic Old Man's Island, kabloona, kabloona. So sad if it weren't also the littlest bit exciting, but we shall see.... Two auk and ptarmigan. Large bear but she turned and ran before we could get in range for a shot of her. . . . average temperatures last week consistently 2–3 degrees above normal. Weather permitting, in a few days we leave Tuk for hunting and fishing—seminars with kids and instructors in Inuvik as well, if any will have them, and the ongoing CEAP observations, so I am forever one woman facing two directions
simultaneously, like your drawing of me which I think I will bring with me so I can see it every day and think of you. . . . Here's a joke for you: Why did the polar bear . . .