The Big Why (24 page)

I think, Mose, youre enjoying this.

We kept a watch for five days, but never had to sleep on the ice. One night from the deck we watched the horizon flash. Mose called it an ice-blink, beyond the blue drop. On the morning of the fifth day the ice relaxed. It lost its determination and eased back. The space around the floater gently filled with cold sea water. It had squeezed its hands together for five long days making a plan, and now it released us. The captain ordered the stores back on board. Hoist the spanker, he said. That’ll make her smarter.

We were safe but lost. The captain took a shot of the sun with his sextant and brought it down to kiss the sea. Then he pointed us in a direction that he knew would make us hit land. A coper sailed close by. We waved him over.

Where are we? our captain shouted.

You got the Cook map aboard?

Yes.

Well, look at the
E
in Newfoundland. Youre right under the
E
.

What I like about the name Newfoundland: how many other places are named so repetitively, redundantly. Yes, it is land. Yes, we found it. And yes, it is new. The only place that has new in it that does not refer to an older place. After Ireland it was England’s first colony. When so much land is named after benefactors. No one got the nod for this one. Perhaps no one wanted the responsibility. But Bartlett and Peary named things in worse places than this. Peary named an entire mountain range after Jenny Starling’s father: Crocker Land. And a thing imagined can never be fully unimagined. And Newfoundland, its descriptor telling of time, discovery, and substance.

We put in at Turnavik. The nose of our steamer curled in to the pier. There were many rocks the ship had to manoeuvre around. Sunkers, Mose Harris called them. Lethal to sailors.

Me: I guess the skipper knows where every rock in the harbour is.

Mose Harris: No. But he knows where theyre not.

As we docked there was a hymn in the air. From a distance a brass band. I could not see the band. There were blubber barrels on the stagehead and Inuit women pounding out the hard blubber. Then, on the hill, this unfinished church. Mose Harris said, That’s the Moravian mission. Moravians, I said. Did you know that when Tolstoy was a kid, his older brother told him they would all be ant brothers? He’d misheard the word
Moravian
, which sounds like
ant
in Russian.

Mose: Yes boy. Right on.

Then I saw them. Standing in the rafters of this unfinished church. Figures dressed in sealskin, playing big polished brass instruments. They swayed at the hips. A tuba and cymbals. They were Inuit women and men welcoming us to Turnavik.

I think, I said to Mose, I’m being converted.

Children stood in a barrel without ends, tipping it. Dogs running amok, dogs that had leapt from the floater into the sea before it reached the wharf. Dogs sick of being on the water.

The stagehead filled with livyers. Looking for supplies, for family and friends. This is where the Harrises put in.

Mose: We’ve been fishing out of Turnavik since I was eleven years old.

And this is Bartlett’s station?

This is where he parks the
Morrissey
.

And where he docked the
Roosevelt
. To pick up fifty pairs of sealskin boots, and whale meat for the dogs, on their way to find Crocker Land. This is where they returned, five years later, and made their claim by wireless for the pole.

They use hook and line, no traps. Mag, she does the cooking. We have a room, just an ordinary fishing room. More of a summer resort, Mose Harris said. We have a dwelling house and salt store that we share with Baxter Hodge. You can stay with us if you like.

I said Rupert Bartlett was taking care of me.

Well yes, you’d want to stay with Rupert.

But I’d love to see you work.

I walked with them to the brother-in-law’s fishing rooms. Baxter Hodge. Their stage was about sixty feet long and sixteen feet wide. A fair-sized stage. It was rundown. Can’t afford to keep her up, Baxter Hodge said. But the salt store was in good repair. The men shook hands.

Baxter Hodge said he came down on the
Kyle
and in the fall he’ll leave the boat on the stages. Just turn her over and pile some boughs and longers over her. He left Brigus in mid-June. They had their boat in the davits of the
Kyle
. Last year, Baxter said, we got two hundred and ninety quintals of fish. That almost paid our account. It would have paid, but my fish got mixed in with some cullage aboard the coaster that we was shipping to St John’s on. I wasnt too happy about that. I make good fish and there they were loading it in with cullage. I wanted to have it placed in piles, and so I had a kick with the captain about this.

Captain Bob?

Yessir that cunt.

Mose: Be easy, boy.

Mag: Rupert’s easier. Rupert’s here now.

Baxter: I give Bartlett my fish and it was to be subject to the St John’s prices. I wanted that to appear on my receipt. After they culled my fish I had roughly a quintal left over. A man who broke his arm on one of the steamers asked us for some fish to help him out — it is customary for us to help one another out down there if we can do it. I gave him this extra hundred pounds or so, and a man aboard the
Hesperus
told me that he sold that same quintal of fish in St John’s for forty cents more than what I got. If I had got the extra forty cents a quintal, I would have been able to pay my account.

I stayed with Rupert Bartlett. He oversaw the operation. In his office there were photographs of animals arranged by frozen taxidermy. Polar bears in the moment of swiping the shoulder off his brother, Bob. Peary’s head inside the tusks of a walrus, like he was planning a jailbreak. Peary spearing a char, letting it freeze on the ice, shattering it, then eating the chunks like they were pink strawberries. I wanted to be with the men. I was excited by the work of labourers. Paperwork bored me. So I went with Mose and Baxter and Niner Harris and helped them land twenty-three barrels of fish in a day. Then we split it and washed it before nightfall. One day’s work. Enough fish to last a family a year. We were all cleaned up by seven oclock and then a man came in and told Mose he could have thirteen quintals more. We took it and by nine-thirty it was all stowed away. Then we had a drink of rum.

A good fisherman, Baxter Hodge said, can do a lot in one day.

I’m realizing the very same.

That is, a fisherman who understands his work. Lots of men go fishing just for something to do. They are not real fishermen. Use makes master of any trade.

Judge Prowse had told me that there might be much demand for Labrador fish this year, and that the Bartletts werent taking a big risk outfitting. The demand would come if there was a European war.

Baxter: You met the judge?

Mose: He was right chummy with him all the way down the shore.

We left him, I said, in Cartwright.

Youre a ballsy one.

I asked Baxter Hodge what he thought of Labrador fish this summer.

I am afraid to say anything, he said. It may be all right — in fact, I really do not know enough to say anything just now. It might not be worthwhile touching it. Whether the market is going to be any better during the next six months you cannot say. It cannot be any worse. If there is less fish caught, it should be better still.

The next day was Sunday and I walked up to the new church with Rupert. Inside there were Bibles in the pews, but all the covers had been torn off. I asked about this. Dogs, Rupert said. They came charging down that hill last winter. They were ploughing mad through the snow. Made a beeline to the church and dove straight through a window like it was open. They took over the church, starved out of their minds. There were dogs with Bibles in their mouths, the whites of their crazy eyes, reeling drunken-like over the pews. Dogs madly tearing the covers off with their back teeth. They ate everything leather in the place.

I asked about the Dobies. Yes, Rupert said. That was an awful case. That winter was too bad to talk about.

He showed me the house where it had happened. The house was empty now. No windows and no door. Inside, the hearth and the roof open above it. No chimney. There never was a chimney, Rupert said, just a wooden funnel. Along the walls were benches to sleep on. Where Robert Dobie had shot himself.

I said goodbye to the Harrises. Mose was talking to an Inuk named Anasqasi. Her three young sons. The sons looked tall, something strange in their faces. They looked like me. There was a young black man too. I took Mose Harris aside. How did he end up here. That’s Henson’s child, Mose said. Matthew Henson? He nodded. And Anasqasi’s boys? Those are Peary’s.

I stared at their faces, their height. I’ve met Peary and you could see parts of Peary breaking out on the faces. Eruptions of cheekbone and eyelid and earlobe.

The American men, Mose Harris said, they all took on Inuit wives. Even the black man, Henson.

Me: And Bartlett?

Mose laughed. No, Bartlett stayed true.

Stayed true. To who.

That’s a good question. He never had no time for women. They were three years in Greenland.

What Henson wrote: On this day the son of Ethiopia, the sons of Asia and of Europe, stand here representing humanity at the top of the earth.

In Peary’s book: I felt almost nothing. It all seems so commonplace.

I bought my wife a sealskin coat. I bought it from the Greenland Eskimo Anasqasi, a beautiful woman who convinced me that Greenland was a place I had to visit. I confess I did not spend every night under Rupert’s roof. When I went to see the Eskimo coats I stayed over. I ate with Anasqasi’s family. I was exhilarated with their language, their faces and eyes. The texture of their hair and how we spoke in sign language, their humour. I was fascinated, and when I’m so entranced I forget the rest of the world. I wanted to absorb Anasqasi’s world for the short time I had.

I was not watching the time, and then the time came to retire. They assumed I would stay, and I spent the night with Anasqasi.

Did Rupert know this? Perhaps. And I was not happy that he would have to bear the burden of this information. He liked my wife. He did not wish to be complicit in my behaviour. He was happy when the steamer arrived to take me home. I’ll see you soon, he said. A telegram had arrived. His brother was safe. He’d found the
Karluk
survivors. He was steaming back to Turnavik to pick up Rupert and the
Morrissey
.

It took us another ten days, owing to ice and fog, to sail back to Brigus. Judge Prowse boarded again at Cartwright. He was consoling a man with a broken leg whom he’d met below deck. He’d given up, Prowse said.

The man was fifty-one years old now and first went fishing when he was twelve. I can’t recall, the man says, a summer when we didnt come away with a voyage of fish. I was twenty-six years old when I left my father and went for myself. It’s a hard thing for a man to give up what he is used to. A man that got any kind of fair play at the Labrador fishery, there’s no better way of making a living.

I came back to Brigus. The children were there with Emily Edwards. Kathleen stood over me as I tugged off my boots. She pushed me up against the door to my studio. She said, Rockwell Kent, I’m pregnant.

I kissed her. I stroked her stomach. I put a hand under her heart. I have a coat for you.

She loved the coat and the fact that I’d thought of her. There was a moment when we recognized each other and pushed away the ordinariness of pretending to live original lives. And in the background Emily Edwards on the floor with the children.

Kathleen was a tall woman. Dark hair and quiet. But a surprise, like this pushing against a door, her heel lifting out of her slipper. This ability to deliver a secret. She told me once that she didnt like people. And that stuck. Even after, when I realized that what she meant was a type of people. She did not enjoy artists. Or ideas. She was not swayed by words that a particular time conveyed to be the truth. She was too aware of prejudice. But she enjoyed talking to Mrs Pomeroy about hens. Or the children with bits of nature. She admired Emily Edwards for both her brashness and how she cultivated a true sense of the seasons and the mystic nature of the sea and wind.

I loved Kathleen for this graceful disposition. She sat with her back slightly erect. I watched her take steps and it was as if each time her foot landed it was to feel the texture of the step in the sole of her shoe. Every move was considered. We married and my love for this movement lasted three years. It’s true that I marvelled that foot-testing for three years. We call that early love. And then those same mannerisms began to annoy me. Why does she always look like she is entering cold water.

Gerald, a shit disturber. A woman at a party had said, There are no men. Gerald: Kent has left his wife. The woman was interested. So interested that Gerald had to retract: It’s not true.

But the idea was planted. A lazy lie takes on a bit of the truth. It was the same with Alma. The reason she left Gerald. He’d had a tightening in his chest. He’d said, Call an ambulance. He was working upstairs. What? A cab, call a cab.