The Solitude of Thomas Cave (9 page)

'Will you play for me, Thomas?'

He took his fiddle down and played a sad slow tune that he knew, played at first as delicately as he knew how, but then he
saw that any kind of music affected her and began to play the most unlikely things: dance tunes, church tunes, the banging
rhythms of bawdy songs, anything at all with sound to draw her away from her sensation. He was a scratcher at the fiddle,
no musician worth the name; if he played for others he played for them to dance and drink and sing, not for listening. He
had no subtlety. Yet here in the small upstairs room before the bed he played and lost himself in it, and for moments she
was lost in it too, and there were moments when the other women were there that from the atmosphere it might have seemed a
celebration instead of what it was.

Each day, once or twice, Kirsten Pedersdatter came by, came without speaking through the shop, where still Hans did not appear
to see her though Cave knew by her word that she had attended on his own wife's fatal confinement, and went up to Johanne,
and felt and pummelled and put her ear to her great drum of a belly to listen for the baby's heart, put her fingers inside
the woman to measure how far she was open, put her hand to her head to feel its heat, looked at her eyes that were mapped
with red veins from the straining. Thomas and the women stood back when she came, sometimes leaving the room and sometimes
watching from a distance, and she did not speak to them at all and barely even to her patient, though she muttered frequently
under her breath, sometimes at such extended length that he believed she spoke some incantation. Once she brought something
and tied it about her middle beneath her clothing, and when the women looked at it later they said that it was the skin of
a snake.

He took courage towards the end and followed her into the street. How it dazzled him; he had not been out for days and there
was sun trying to break through the sea fog.

She looked at him with eyes hard as little nuts.

'Your wife is very weak. The pain has drained all her strength.'

'Is there nothing you can do?'

'You have seen that I do all I can.'

'At least, can you give her something else for the pain?'

'The drugs she has had already are strong. They cannot be taken for much longer without becoming killers themselves.'

11

I
THINK I HAVE not seen here in Greenland - if this island, as I now know it to be, be indeed Greenland
-
snow of the gentle kind we have in our southern latitude. What snow there is, in the depths of this unforgiving winter, is
a hard, mean, constipated snow that swirls about in the wind and strikes like pinpricks on any little patch of eyelid or other
exposed skin. Three days ago I killed a bear, praise be to God for His care of me in this wilderness, a kill in which I had
much luck, the bear being caught astride a steep slope so that though the range was not close a single shot sufficed to knock
him down and disable him. Only that the place was distant from my cabin and it has taken all of these past days to skin and
butcher him and bring in the pieces to hang, the chore performed in stages as my gloveless fingers became bitten with the
cold. Were it not for the new meat my spirits would be very low. There is great anxiety in these interminable days of half-light
and spitting snow.

The snow that last day fell so softly, he remembered, that he had thought it a sign that God had relented. What would he not
give, in this hard place, for snow like that? From dawn onwards it fell, light and thick at the same time, and covered the
filthy ice and the stained drifts about the streets with a thick white down, and when he went out he had turned up his face
to feel the flakes drop like feathers against it and slip away, felt some of them catch and thaw in the crack between his
lips. The chilling easterly had dropped, the temperature perceptibly lifted, and he knew that this snow would not last with
them as the earlier snows of that winter had done, but cover only for a brief time and melt away, and that there was every
chance that the sun would come in its wake. He had a sense of all the warmth and light of the sun being there but only waiting
behind the softness of the snowcloud.

He went to find the Pastor. As he felt the kindness of the snow on him he wondered if it was any longer necessary. The women
had pressed him to it and for a time he had resisted. 'See, she is in agony,' they said. 'She is too weak, she will never
push it out.' There were so many visiting women, so many voices who knew what he did not. 'She will tear,' said an old woman,
some thin crone from up the street on whom he had never set eyes before: 'It will tear her apart from the inside.' Even good
Anna Nielsdatter, the baker's wife, who had looked after Johanne often when she was a child: 'I have borne seventeen children,
two sets of twins, six stillborn, and I have never known a birth like this.' So many voices at him and yet he did not act
until she herself asked and he saw that her hope was almost gone.

The snow clung to the tower of the church, lodged in the carvings of the stones in the churchyard. It lay on the black brim
of the Pastor's hat and in the folds of his cloak as he walked. It fell like petals outside the window of her room so that
when he called her to consciousness that the Pastor was there she asked suddenly if the cherry tree beyond the wall was in
flower.

And they knelt in the room and spoke prayers and the Pastor read from the Bible. The door opened and people came and went
as they prayed, and when he looked round he saw that Kirsten Pedersdatter knelt among them and the daughter who looked like
her beside her, and did not know why it was that he was surprised to see them.

When the Pastor left most of the women left with him, going out and down the narrow stairs with a steady rustle of skirts
like a procession. The grey room seemed to settle behind them as if it was cleared of more than their presence, as if it was
cleared of action, of effort and fear, all the air in it exhausted and exhaled. Only Kirsten Pedersdatter and her daughter
remained besides himself and Hans, who had left his tools at last to take up a place at the bedside.

'Thank you, Mistress Pedersdatter, for all you have done. I know that you have great skill and have worked hard. Whatever
comes to pass is no more than God's will.' In his new resignation he felt that he must settle with her, thank and straighten
accounts.

'Wait. One thing, there is just one thing. If you will allow me, there is perhaps one last thing more that we may do.'

Insistent voice, insistent eyes. As she spoke the spasms racked through Johanne's body again and he did not know that he could
bear any more, let alone that she could.

'My daughter has brought me a drug that was prepared by a friend, a woman who has taught me much. It might yet give her the
strength to expel the child that I know still lives inside her.' Her words were like a drum to his head. Her mirror-daughter
stood beside her, doubling her persuasion. 'I know that it lives, I have heard its heartbeat, weak but still there. It is
a strong child and she is a strong woman. Let me try this, I ask you.' And she brought out from a cloth bag her daughter handed
her a small phial of blue glass. 'I cannot say for sure what it will do, only that I trust the woman who made it more than
I trust myself.'

More hope, more pain. His mind reeled. He looked across the bed to Hans but never had he seen that intent and expressive face
so closed, absent to him. He looked outside. The snow outside fell so softly, covering, blanketing everything, as if no more
effort should be made, as if everything should be blanketed in its soft white cover.

He thinks now that hope hurts more than anything.

These days of false dawns have been anguish to him. He has woken to the beginning of light, to a pinkness in the southern
sky that has spread itself and crept about the entire horizon, all about his vision, the pinkness of a sun about to rise that
holds him expectant through all the hours of a day and then fades and leaves him cheated. At the time that he must imagine
to be midday he has seen brightness and shadow move high on the mountains to the south of the island as the light of a hidden
sun passes across them. At that same hour for each of the past three days he has climbed the mountain at the end of the beach
and looked, and he has thought he has seen the tip of the yellow disc of the sun on the horizon, only to have it flicker and
waver like a mirage and disappear. Now again he fights his way up the mountainside, fights because of the wind that has arisen,
cold as any wind he has known in this desolate place, which comes again and again in icy gusts and tries to push him down.
He climbs bent low so that he is not caught in the full force of it and blown away, and when he nears the top finds that he
must crawl on hands and knees and at last lie flat on the rock that the wind has bared of snow.

He sees the mountains laid out, the crumpled ice of the bay and the fjord, the mountains of the land on the other side, and
far away, the vague stillness of the frozen ocean. Everything has faint colour, the pinkness of the sky everywhere reflected,
the shadows lilac, all quite unreal. For a second he thinks he does at last see the sun, forming all at once yellow and round
distinctly above the horizon and separated from it, and then remembers that that is not at all how the sun appears and understands
that this again can only be a mirage.

Is it the wind or is it the despair in him that whips tears to his eyes and clouds his vision? A blue bottle: more pain. Why
did he let them give it to her? He lets himself stand in the wind and a great gust takes him and blows him away. For an instant
he is blown into air as if he might fly, and then he crashes down on his shoulder, his hip, his head, crashes and rolls down
the mountainside, his limbs thrown about him. Some great distance he falls, he knows only the sensation and the pain, and
then, with sudden extreme awareness, knows that an avalanche has begun to fall with him. So, he knows it now: he is gone,
he will be buried spread flat as he is upon the snow, the mountain itself will bury him where there is no man to do it. And
yet he continues to fall and the snow covers him no deeper than a spray flying back across his body, and he realises that
it is carrying him. He is being carried on the surface of the avalanche like a raft on rapids, the current tossing and throwing
him but all the while rushing him down. Lord, if only there is no rock. If only this will end without a rock. And at last,
with surprising softness, he finds that he has come to rest. He opens his eyes to the merciful snow heaped beneath him and
to the lilac sky. How far he has fallen and yet he is still alive. He had not thought it possible. The Shepherd gathers his
lost sheep and saves them from harm. Slowly he picks himself up, almost as if he must gather the pieces of himself together,
as if he is not sure that they will fit together again. His head has taken a sharp blow: he can feel the swelling on it, the
blood in his matted hair. He has pains too in his shoulder where his weight first fell, in his ankle and in his chest. He
speaks to himself, would speak aloud if the cold had not contracted his lips and reduced his voice to a ventriloquist's whisper.
Slowly now, Thomas Cave. Have patience, man, have care. Hold to the sober way you have always lived, one step at a time, never
giving way to emotion or despair. The Lord has brought you this far; now it is to yourself to bring yourself in. You yourself
are your own witness as much as the Lord. You know your strength, your weakness. By discipline, by reason and by care, you
can control the means of your survival.

Each step he takes hurts him. He counts five, then stops, falls to the ground and lies there without sense of time. No good,
he tells himself, that is not how you save yourself. Keep count, keep track. You have not been here all these months to let
go now. Pick yourself up again, you did it before. Again, five steps. A pause. Five more and he leans on a rock to catch his
breath. Stabs of pain in his shoulder and his ankle, yet the ankle will just take his weight. Next time he forces himself
to a dozen steps and rests standing on his good leg. In this way, stage by stage, he makes his way back to the tent.

He sees the child at once, lit in the glow from the stove. A baby asleep. It sleeps with that serenity seen only in the very
young, such trust in the smoothness of the closed eyelids, the curl of the lashes, the faint curl of a mouth that smiles in
a dream. It is plump and warm, the shawl in which it is wrapped loose about it, basking in a warmth that he enveloped in all
his furs can scarcely imagine. Can this be his son? For the first time he knows what it is to have a living son. He kneels
down, takes in the pinkness of the boy's cheeks, the softness of his skin, his round arms, his little loosely clenched fists,
the dark-gold curls beneath his cap. He removes a glove and understands that even the most tender touch would burn like ice
on that little coiled hand that seems to reach out to him.

What if he were to touch him? Would he wake and cry, a boy's lusty cry to fill the cabin, or would he disappear? He reaches
out in wonder and in horror, holds his fingers an inch away; their tips can sense the warmth that comes off a sleeping body.
If this is a hallucination, he could not have believed one could be so complete, so warm, so alive. Even she did not come
so alive to him.