Late Nights on Air (28 page)

Eleanor and Gwen arranged a gathering in Lorna Dargabble’s memory. They wanted to somehow commemorate Lorna’s passing, given that no funeral seemed to be in the offing. They ran a note on the community announcements: anyone who would like to remember Lorna Dargabble’s life would be welcome to come to Eleanor Dew’s mobile home in Forrest Park on Sunday, June 6 between two and five in the afternoon. They had no expectation that the husband would come, and he didn’t. Others came, however. Lorna hadn’t had a wide circle of friends, by any means, yet she was well known, and Eleanor’s home barely held everyone. The memorial was never meant to be anything but simple. There was wine and tea and coffee and pastries. Mortality in the air. And not that much talk, at first.

Almost everyone was grey-haired, veterans of the magic five years—it being thought that if you lasted that long in Yellowknife, you might stay for decades. They’d known Lorna from her previous, happy life, with her first husband. They’d known that in her second marriage she was abjectly miserable. One woman spoke about Irving Dargabble as a
horrible drunken lout, and said she knew Lorna had been “holding it together,” just barely, for years. Another older woman, wearing a bright red vest, said she suspected Lorna just wandered off into the night “which is so easy to do up here.” She herself had been in Igloolik one time, she said, and started to walk back to the hotel and thought if she turned right instead of left, she’d never be found. “The vastness really hit me,” she said with feeling.

There was a young woman who came, too, a young woman in braids. She turned out to be the one who’d stumbled upon Lorna’s body. “Actually, it was my dog who found her. He deserves the credit.” She had tied him up outside before coming into the trailer and pointed to him now out the window, a big brown and black dog named Stan, she said. The young woman joined in the conversation about wandering off and getting lost. She’d heard about blizzards in the eastern Arctic where the wind blows for three days, then stops, and you can be fooled into going outside, only for the wind to swing around from the opposite direction and disorient you totally. Ralph recalled stepping outside into a blizzard in Fort Simpson, and not being able to breathe; the wind sucked his breath out of his mouth. Everyone agreed, however, that on Christmas Eve, when Lorna went missing, conditions were peaceful. A gentler night, Lorna’s last night. No wind at all. But cold, certainly cold.

Gwen listened, haunted by the unexplained light brown hair Lorna was holding in her hand. A chilling detail that wasn’t common knowledge. She’d mentioned it to the others, though, to Harry and Ralph and Eleanor, thereby learning about Eleanor’s lingering suspicion of Eddy, even as she put it to rest.

In the middle of June, just days before they left for the Barrens, the local coroner issued his long-awaited news release. There would not be an inquest into Lorna Dargabble’s death, after all. As reasons, he gave the following: there was no evidence of wounds, injuries, poison, or disease on the body; the pathologist in Edmonton had given the cause of death as exposure to the cold; and the investigation by the police clearly absolved all individuals who might have had something to gain by her death. He concluded that there was absolutely no suspicion of wrongdoing or complicity on the part of any person.

The four canoeists were in Harry’s house, re-packing, rearranging, jettisoning a few things (like the hip waders Ralph had intended to use when he fished in the rapids for trout, like the second bottle of Scotch Harry had planned to bring along). Now that they were within forty-eight hours of having to hoist everything onto their backs, they were being realistic. The evening light poured into the living room as Harry packed an extra sweater and woollen socks. So suicide then. Lorna had walked out on Christmas Eve and consigned herself to the elements. As for the hair clenched in her hand—the investigation had shown it was a lock of hair, cut from somebody’s head, not torn out by the roots. It could have been anybody’s light brown hair. She was a hairdresser, after all. But whose hair? he had to wonder. And why had she taken it with her that night?

He continued to organize his supplies. The day after tomorrow they would fly to the eastern arm of Great Slave Lake, and in a few weeks they would reach the Thelon River
and view the remains of John Hornby’s cabin, the spot where his body had lain undiscovered for more than a year in that wooded oasis in the Barrens. Harry heard Ralph across the room remark that the western sky looked clear, promising, but he felt too preoccupied to respond. The fact of Dido’s phone call had stirred up more unanswered questions, which worked on his mind. At times, the thought of her father-in-law’s letter was consoling. She’d left behind two loves, he thought. His and Daniel’s. Possibly she was saying, It’s not just you, Harry. I’m leaving everything behind. He could feel almost reconciled then, able to carry what he felt for her and carry it easily; he would hear from her in time, he would see her again. But then he would picture her with Eddy—think of her leaving without a word—think of her phoning, finally, but not phoning him—and his reaction was so intense it stopped him in his tracks. And so it went, back and forth, between feelings of love and feelings of anguish.

Just days ago something else had brought her back in an unexpected way. A small package from California had arrived in the mail for Eleanor, who’d shown him and the others what it contained. A Saint Christopher medallion on a chain. Eleanor was wearing it now. It fell forward as she leaned over her impossibly heavy knapsack.
Saint Christopher, protect us
.

ON THE MORNING OF JUNE
17, they loaded their canoes and packs into a float plane and took off from Yellowknife Bay. The pilot flew them to the rugged, uninhabited eastern end of Great Slave Lake. They planned to camp there for two nights, on Charlton Bay, breaking themselves in slowly. Then, following in Hornby’s footsteps, they would undertake the classic route of Pike’s Portage into Artillery Lake, and from there continue on to the Thelon River.

By afternoon they were on a rocky sunlit point of land in Charlton Bay, setting up their tents, judging which spots were warmest and most sheltered by the depth of the moss and lichen. They were alone now. About three hundred miles below the Arctic Circle in almost continuous daylight, facing six weeks in the wilderness.

Chunks of ice floated by. Candled ice, the long vertical ice crystals that form when meltwater on a frozen lake works its trickling way down to the water below, had bunched against the shore. The candles tinkled and chimed, and Gwen taped the sound. Ralph headed off in his canoe, eager to test his muscles and to take his first photographs. Harry gathered wood for a fire, and Eleanor listed birds in her notebook. Lapland
longspurs, gone from Yellowknife two weeks ago, were with them here, where it was colder. The little birds let her walk noisily over stones to within two feet of them, before they hopped away. Twice, Hornby had overwintered nearby, building himself a little cabin, and nearly died both times.

Although they had what seemed like all the space in the world and all the time, they were committed to a definite destination: the Twin Otter would come back for them on July 27 at Beverly Lake, five hundred miles from here. And so time and space were in potential conflict.

The next day, their first full day, they deliberately took it easy, exploring the site of old Fort Reliance near the mouth of the Lockhart River. They paddled to the ruins after breakfast and discovered a site of great loveliness. It was like a park of white and green moss and lichen, with spruce trees arranged as though planted. They followed a path, and then a wider one, almost a driveway through the natural park. The trees had tiny buds. They were heading backwards, they realized, into a much later spring of lingering ice, and fresh snow on the hills in the morning, melted by early afternoon. Eleanor said she could picture Jane Austen walking here it looked so civilized, so groomed. There were three perfectly shaped birches and two graves, fenced with weathered slats, one a child or infant’s grave, tiny, the other larger.

“The past is as close,” Eleanor said to Ralph, “as I am to you.”

Ralph, a man of books and pockets, and pockets stretched out of shape by books, opened George Whalley and read the quotation from J.W. Tyrrell, the land surveyor and mapmaker
who had stood in this spot in 1900 and sung its praises. “Five stone chimneys only now remain of what were 66 years ago three substantial buildings … situated on a lovely level green terrace about twenty feet above the harbour, and two hundred feet from the shore.” Back’s Chimneys they were called, after Captain George Back, who came through in 1833 and used the fort as his winter quarters. He and his men were a relief party on the trail of Sir John Ross, who was on the trail of the North-West Passage
(to have felt snow and ice forever, and nothing forever but snow and ice)
, though in the end Ross, unlike so many, needed no rescuing.

That afternoon Ralph pulled Gwen up the sandbank laughing, and a few minutes later Harry accused him of taking his cup.

“That’s my cup you’re drinking out of.”

“No. It’s mine.” Ralph’s voice was even, easy.

“No, it’s not,” he growled back.

“I brought it up with me from the canoe.”

“No.” And Harry was about to battle on when he saw his own cup sitting a few feet away on the moss. He reached for it, attempted a laugh, and turned to see Eleanor eyeing him critically.

She said, “Watch you don’t slip a cog.”

Afterwards, he asked her to repeat that expression, the one she’d castigated him with.

Slip a cog
. “Poor Ralph was sitting there quietly and I knew it was his cup because I saw him bring it out of the canoe.”

“I don’t feel as cantankerous as I sound.” He managed an apologetic smile.

“Well, it’s good you can laugh about it now.”

He felt reproved and childish and he wasn’t laughing. The mosquitoes were fast. Wilder, or it was just earlier in the year; they escaped before he could slap them.

Pike’s Portage was twenty-five miles long, a series of small lakes and trails that led to Artillery Lake, itself fifty miles long. An Indian route from time immemorial. Its first leg (to Harry Lake, of all places) was brutal, as they knew from trip reports by other canoeists, three miles long with a climb of five hundred and ninety feet, rocky and wooded, when their packs were heaviest and they were least in shape.

The feeling of release once Harry reached the end and sank to the ground and extricated himself from the eighty pounds of torture on his back, was like sprouting wings and floating up to heaven. But the feat had to be repeated three times, first with one pack, then with another, then with a seventy-pound canoe on his shoulders. He portaged one canoe, Ralph the other. Five trips, if you counted the there and back, and more taxing than anything he had ever done before or ever imagined. The only thing that kept him going was stubborn pride. Arms at his sides, fingers swelling up like stubby sausages, he trudged along under his burden, listening for Ralph behind him and trying to keep ahead, or at least not fall behind. He heard footsteps and after a minute Eleanor appeared around the bend, on her way back for another load. Then Gwen. The women had to carry packs that weighed sixty pounds or more. He’d hoisted Gwen’s pack onto her back and she had swayed and he’d steadied her, and then
she’d stepped forward—all five foot three of her and 120 pounds—Hornby’s size, he thought—and started up the trail. Now here she was going back for the second round. Eleanor was a bigger woman, taller, heftier, but they shared the same look of exhausted, dazed determination. The women disappeared and he stopped for a moment, and still he heard the thumping of feet, then realized it was the blood pounding in his head. Mosquitoes abounded. He felt something on his tongue, explored with his finger, and came out with a drowned mosquito. At the end, his legs gave out. Going into the little hollow and across to the rocks, where he could ford the last stream, he felt them go rubbery and only just managed to totter to the finish line of open water, where he let the canoe fall from shoulder height into a cradle of willow bushes. Again, the sweet release.

At the end, after everything had been transported, they bathed in the warm evening sun, their bodies bone white, stone white at the water’s edge, scooping aching cold Harry Lake over their heads.

The next day, June 20, the fourth day of their trip, Harry had an early-morning dream about Gwen. Of coming into her house through the back door and she was in her dressing gown, having called him for help. A stalled car? She went upstairs to change and after an interval he followed and entered her bedroom through the half-open door. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, still undressed, except for panties that were in tatters (her drastic underwear he would see set out to dry on the arctic willows, waist pulling away from elastic, saggy brassiere) but no brassiere in the dream, her breasts round and warm as she turned an undershirt right
side out, her eyes concentrating on the cat’s cradle of what had become a lacy camisole—the undershirt had become pretty in the dream—and all of her alert, attractive, attracted, naked. Was he not about to reach for her breasts and she about to respond when he woke up?