The Navigator of New York

Home > Other > The Navigator of New York > Page 12
The Navigator of New York Page 12

by Wayne Johnston


  This ice was nothing like the inshore ice, the “young ice,” which was clean, thin, flat, almost transparent. This Old Ice looked old, a jagged scree of pieces many feet thick, as if a vast field of wreckage from some world-altering catastrophe was floating by. It was hard to believe that all that caused what lay before me was the start of spring, the warming of the air and the water by a few degrees, the lengthening of days.

  Hard to the coast from which the snow was long gone, where the grass was bright green and the trees were thickening with buds and even leaves, was pressed this other world, where abruptly, it was winter—where everything was so white that on clear days the ice shone like a second sun. It was hard, in that ice-field, to distinguish one shape of ice from another. Even the icebergs were hard to make out, except the ones so far from land that they stood out like clouds against the sky. From the scree of ice, a berg so large its underside must have been ploughing the seabed ahead of it like snow reared up, vast, incongruous. This was not winter as I knew it but some absolute of winter. The snow of which this ice was made had not fallen from the sky but was ancient and prevailed like stone. It was as though all of Greenland had broken up. It was hard to believe that the whole thing would be repeated the following year, that there was any ice left where this ice had come from.

  I went up on the hill to see the ice as often as I could. I felt as though I was standing on the brink of the new life I was soon to begin with Dr. Cook. I imagined myself down there on the ice, side by side with Dr. Cook on the runners of a sled pulled by a team of dogs. I could think of no greater thing than to be an explorer, the epitome of my most cherished belief, which was that a man’s fate was not determined by the past.

  But word was soon going round that I was paying some sort of obsessive tribute to my mother, whose body had been found at the edge of just such ice as I was looking at, a mere few hundred feet below. It was said, I overheard it said, that I was keeping some sort of delusional vigil for her and for my father.

  I was looked upon as the son of parents whose sheer oddness had brought about their deaths, a boy who had inherited that oddness and was probably doomed by it to a fate much like theirs.

  “Right there where he is standing now, that’s where they found the horse and carriage,” one man who stood right beside me told another one day. It was as if he believed that because he was not speaking to me, I could not hear him. “She started down the hill right there. He stands there every day, just staring.” The two men seemed to believe I was oblivious to scrutiny, that the riddle of Amelia and Francis Stead could be solved by a close examination of my face.

  I came downstairs one night when I heard my aunt and uncle talking. I stopped outside the front room, assuming that they had heard me, and that Aunt Daphne would soon ask me what I wanted. But they went on talking.

  “Taking after his parents, people are saying,” Uncle Edward said.

  “Oh, they’ve been saying that for years,” Aunt Daphne said.

  “He goes up on the hill and stands for hours every afternoon looking at the ice. Other people go up there once a year. With him, it’s every day. No matter how cold it is, no matter how hard the wind is blowing, there he is, as still as a statue, looking out across the ice. Obsessed, they’re saying. With where his mother … fell in. They say he has told people that his father is not really dead, that someday the ice will bring him safely home, that he will walk ashore from it and everything will be the way it was before he left.”

  “Whoever said that made it up,” Aunt Daphne said. “He never speaks to anyone about his parents. Not even me. It’s perfectly normal for him to think more about his parents than he used to. It will pass. He’s only now really beginning to understand what happened to them. Or to realize that he may never understand it.”

  How guilty it made me feel to hear so much sympathy and understanding in her voice. I wondered how Uncle Edward felt, having to feign ignorance of what he knew, being unable to tell her that her sympathy and understanding were misplaced, that I was undeserving of them. And he knew only that it was Dr. Cook’s letters that had set me to keeping vigil on the hill. He did not know what was in the letters, and not knowing was working on his mind. Not knowing the contents of the letters, he had no way of predicting what I might do, what Dr. Cook might do.

  His state of preoccupation rivalled mine. Yet he couldn’t resist telling her about the gossip, even at the risk of making her pay closer attention to me, which I was sure she would.

  One night, after I went to bed, I noticed that the moon was full and saw a faint glow from the ice between the Narrows. I remembered the photograph of the Belgica, the ship moonlit, haloed and white with frost. Dr. Cook had often spoken, in his letters, of the endless Arctic night. I had so far seen the ice only by day, only as, in the Arctic, it looked for half the year. I had yet to see how it looked during the other half, the half that took the greater toll on expeditionaries, especially their minds. I went to my stash of letters and searched through them for the one in which Dr. Cook had written about what he called “night never-ending.”

  “Imagine,” Dr. Cook wrote. “The sun goes down, and though you know it will not rise again for ninety days, you cannot help hoping each ‘morning’ that it will.” His putting morning in quotation marks made the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. Three months without mornings. Three months during which morning exists nowhere but on your pocket watch and in your mind. “Temporal disorientation is not uncommon,” wrote Dr. Cook. “For a few days, there is zodiacal light, the blue corolla that traces the horizon after sunset and before sunrise. And after that, the most you can hope for by way of light is what I call illumoonation. If there happens not to be a moon, you are left with the feeble light of stars. And should there be an overcast, not even that …”

  Another section of the letter: “You have not really heard the ice until you hear it late at night. There is no room for the ice to expand, but expand it must and so it seems that the whole mass of it begins to stir. I once heard what I would have sworn was the weary tramp of footsteps, the slow going-round of wooden wheels and the clopping hoofs of horses. I had been reading War and Peace and so was ‘hearing,’ out on the ice, the French plodding west across the frozen mass of Russia after their defeat outside of Moscow. There is no end to the tricks the ice plays on the ears at night.… ”

  I realized that I did not have to wait to see and hear such things as he described in this letter.

  The next night, a Friday, Aunt Daphne and Uncle Edward went to a charity ball, a benefit for the still-ongoing rebuilding of the parts of the city that in the fire of 1892 had been destroyed. They told me they would not be home until late.

  There would be no one else on the hill at such an hour at this time of year. And I could easily be back home before Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne. I prayed, looking out the window as I waited for them to leave, that the sky that now was clear would stay that way.

  After they had left, I waited until twilight. Up north, in summer, this was how it looked at the twin times of least light, at the nadirs of the morning and the midnight suns.

  In the pantry, on the bottom shelf, there were two oil lanterns that had not been used in years, lanterns Francis Stead had hung on his hansom cab when he went out making house calls after dark. I filled one of them with seal oil, the oil of last resort, which Aunt Daphne kept for emergencies in metal cans in the shed behind the house. I quickly skirted the city streets just after dark and, the lantern lighting my way, followed the narrow road up Signal Hill.

  The sky was cloudless, the moon almost full. All that remained of the wind that all day had been blowing from the west was a faint breeze.

  I stood on the hill, looking down at the blue-white ice. The ice. A world in which everything was made of the same substance. I tried to imagine a world of wood. A world of rock. A world of salt. A world of coal. The closest thing to it was the desert, but the desert did not have this infinite variety of shapes. Like a great city in the early
stages of construction. Or the late ones of disintegration.

  It was an eerily beautiful sight. Would it still seem so halfway through “night never-ending”? For a man whose mind was in such a torment as Francis Stead’s had been, to be part of a small band of expeditionaries with nothing but that as far as you could see in all directions might be unbearable. To be, to believe yourself to be, the one thing in the universe not made of ice. I could not help thinking of Francis Stead out there alone in his last moments, wandering about on the ice, oblivious, dazed, caught up in the panic that for men lost in the darkness and the wilderness meant the end was near. He had risen from his pallet on the floor of Redcliffe House and, without waking anyone—Dr. Cook, his fellows in their sleeping bags, the Pearys in their room behind the drapes, the dogs outside, the Eskimos whose cluster of igloos you could see from Redcliffe House—had walked off onto the glacier.

  I told myself that I should stop thinking about Francis Stead and think instead of Dr. Cook and all the other men, and of Mrs. Peary, who had not walked away from Redcliffe House.

  Facing away from the lighthouses at Fort Amherst and Cape Spear, on the far side of the Narrows, I listened. I heard a drawn-out creaking, then a snap, as if a tree had been slowly bent until it broke. A series of booms from somewhere down the coast as a fault line formed. What might have been a massive sheet of glass smashing into pieces, then a scattering of small explosions as shards of ice at intervals fell back to earth. So many sounds it seemed there should have been some corresponding lights, but there were none. Only the ice, the strange blue-white cast of it. Illumoonation. The lighthouse beacons flashed and the ice was for an instant super-illuminated, as though it had been photographed.

  “There is no end to the tricks the ice plays on the ears at night.” I doubted that any listener had ever been more receptive to such tricks than I was. It was as though a mass of animals that by day hid themselves among the caves and warrens of the ice were moving about, rearranging things to suit themselves or tending the ice in some seemingly random but necessary fashion, compelled to do so by an instinct they were helpless to resist.

  I held up my lantern and swung it like a censer, back and forth, as people did on stormy nights to signal ships at sea.

  I remembered more of Dr. Cook’s letter: “The city-dweller imagines the polar night to be a misery, but the unbroken darkness has its charms. The pleasure of feeling on one’s face a draught of warmth when one goes indoors. The sight, from outside the ship, of the lights within. The sight, from outside an igloo, of the light within, which makes the dome of ice translucent, opalescent. The moonlight silver on the seas of ice, the clarity of stars. There is a naked fierceness in the scenes, a wildness in the storms, a sublimity of silence in the night that one appreciates despite the gloom. The attractions of the polar night are not to be written in the language of a people who live in a land of sunshine and flowers. In the polar night, one occupies a world where animal sentiments take over and those of the timid human are forgotten.”

  I could still see the moon when it began to snow, so I assumed that a sea-effect flurry was passing. There were more and more sounds from below, as if the ice creatures, able to see the end of their labours, were making one last concerted push. From all directions came the sounds of eruption and collapse, of creaking, as if beams of ice were being hoisted up or, top-heavy, were snapping off and landing with crashes that gave rise to new effects.

  I swung the lantern, raised it higher and swung it in a wider arc.

  The wire slipped from my hand and the lantern fell, the flame in it still burning until it hit the rocky slope below. I heard the glass break, saw a small spurt of flame, a patch of rock uplit for an instant, and then it was dark again and silent, except for the droning clatter of the ice.

  I looked up and could not see the moon. Snow was falling heavily now, straight down because there was no wind. It, too, was invisible, but I could feel it on my upturned face. I could see nothing, not the lights of the city or those of the two quarantined hospitals halfway down the hill.

  I would never find my way back down safely without a lantern. Perhaps not even with one. If I wandered too far left, I would step straight off the cliff, too far right and I would wind up in the woods. Or on one of the ponds, where what was left of the ice would not bear my weight. Even if by chance I kept to the trail, the slope was so steep and rocky that to stumble and pitch forward to either side might prove fatal.

  I shouted “Help” as loud as I could, thinking that I might be heard by someone in the fishing village called the Battery, which lay in the western lee of the hill. But there was no reply.

  It was cold already and would get much colder, too cold to spend the night without some shelter. I thought of the blockhouse from which the signal flags were raised. I knew it was off to my right, though I could not make it out.

  Remembering that there was a small fence around the blockhouse that extended to the ridge, I got down on my hands and knees and felt my way along the ridge with my left hand. After a few minutes, I nudged the fence with my right shoulder, felt my way along the fence to the gate, which I opened, and then stood up. I knew that I was within a few feet of the blockhouse, but still I could not see it. I walked slowly forward with my arms raised until my hands brought up against what turned out to be the door.

  With a stone that I pried loose from the ground, I broke the lock on the door and went inside. Feeling my way around in the dark, I found a still-warm woodstove and, beside it, a small supply of kindling, but no real firewood. I threw the kindling in the stove, from which there was soon light enough to see. On a table against the near wall, there were lanterns, some candles and a box of matches. I considered lighting one of the lanterns and attempting a descent, but thought better of it. I lit a candle. The fire in the stove would not last long. There was a day-bed, a bunk where, on their breaks, the men who ran the blockhouse must have taken naps. I sat down on the bunk with my back against the wall. In the middle of the floor was a ladder that led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. I presumed the men climbed up there to hoist the merchant flags. In the far wall there were slit-like windows from which they must have scanned the sea for ships.

  I told myself that I was not lost, just temporarily stranded, knowing exactly how long I would have to wait, certain that what I was waiting for would come. I was not even in such straits as I would be in daily on my first trip up north with Dr. Cook. I recalled with pride that I had not panicked when the lantern fell from my hand. I hoped that one day I could relate this feat of self-preservation to Dr. Cook.

  What to tell Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne the next day, that was all I had to worry about. But what could I tell them except the truth?

  I slid farther down on the bunk until my head was on the pillows. It was cold, so I crawled beneath the blankets. What would Aunt Daphne think, what would she do, when she got home and saw that I was gone?

  I fell asleep and had no dreams. Perversely, my body did not wake me until later than it did at home. When I awoke, the fire in the stove was out. But there was light at the window in the wall that faced the sea, and not the faint light of dawn, but that of morning.

  I got up and looked out the window. The sky was overcast. The ice, like the foothills of some mountain range, stood out in stark relief against the sky. I guessed, from how fresh it looked on the ground, that the snow had only recently stopped.

  Just as I turned around, the door of the blockhouse swung open. A portly, long-bearded man in coveralls looked at me, then at the unmade bunk.

  “You’re the boy they’re looking for,” he said. “The Stead boy. Tried to run away, did ya?”

  I shook my head and told him about losing the lantern.

  “Why’d you come up here in the first place?”

  To see the ice, I almost said. To listen to the ice. I thought better of it. I shrugged. He did likewise.

  “Well, I s’pose I’ll have to take you home,” he said.

  He did so by
a circuitous route through the streets of St. John’s, presumably so that as many people as possible would see that it was him who had found me, had found “the Stead boy,” so that he could tell his story to as many people as possible with the living proof of its veracity right there by his side.

  I sat beside him on the buckboard of his wagon. I would have bolted from it, except I knew that I would be pursued and it would serve only to enlarge my reputation.

  “Who’s that with you, Charlie?” an old woman asked.

  “The Stead boy. Found him in the blockhouse. There all night, he was.”

  “In the blockhouse. What was he doing in the blockhouse all night?”

  “Wouldn’t say,” Charlie said.

  “Is he all right?”

  “Seems to be. As all right as he ever was.”

  “That’s a sin for you.”

  “Are you all right, Devlin?” a man in a bowler hat like Uncle Edward’s asked, saying my name as if he knew me, though I did not know him. I presumed he had heard of the search. I nodded.

  A man riding horseback drew up beside us.

  “Is that him?” he said.

  “That’s him,” Charlie said.

  “I’ll go on ahead to Dr. Stead’s,” the rider said and went off at a gallop.

  Word of where I was found, and that I had been missing all night, spread quickly after that.

  “In the blockhouse. All night long. Went up there after dark,” one woman told another, as if discretion would be wasted on me.

  “What were you doing all night in the blockhouse, Stead?” a boy I went to school with asked. I ignored him.

  “That’s Devlin Stead,” a small boy said, as if he had heard of me many times but had never seen me before.

 

‹ Prev