by Cormac James
That day it was almost eleven o’clock before they packed up the tent. Banes had begun to complain again, louder than ever, for DeHaven’s sake. Alone, Morgan would have let him suffer, but did not interfere now as DeHaven saw to his eyes – rinsed them and wrapped them up. Afterwards, Morgan told Banes to rig up beside him, at wheel. Today he rigged them in unicorn, and put DeHaven in lead, the hardest slot.
They watched Cabot wriggle out over the ice, down on his belly, arms by his side. The others crouched behind the sledge, Petersen ready with the gun. She came across the floes at a fearless stroll. Neither paused nor hurried, nor acknowledged her admirers in any way. The frost-smoke lay in loose bales beyond her.
Just as Petersen had told him to do, Cabot kept honking, wobbling, flapping his elbows. And still she came steady and straight. And still no one said a word. Finally they heard Petersen’s hammer cocked – a smart, elegant sound. She hoisted up onto her hind legs, pompously sniffed the air. Then turned and set off in a blundering run, back the way she’d come.
At lunch, he watched Cabot eat. In his tin was a small lump of mush. Cabot prodded it with his fork for some sign of life. He put a forkful in his mouth but didn’t bother to chew, didn’t swallow. It was in there, slowly melting. Morgan sat opposite.
I still say we should have shot the seal, DeHaven said.
They say it tastes very like man-flesh, said Morgan.
Mix it up with a tin of soup, you wouldn’t know the difference.
One less mouth to feed, Morgan said. Now that we have a mouth extra.
Less matter to haul.
More space in the tent.
A bigger share of the prize.
And what better proof, to those at home, of the extent our trials?
Still Cabot showed no sign he heard.
Sighting that tiny fleck in the far distance, Morgan had been fearful. His first thought was that someone had been sent to call him back, to prevent him from leaving her behind. Hearing DeHaven’s voice, he had been relieved, and the relief had surged through him as the fear had, through the selfsame channels, showing him what he had refused to see clearly until then, that part of him did not want to return. Perhaps it was because he secretly wished to do the same that he had not immediately condemned DeHaven for abandoning the ship, for wanting to push on with them to Beechey, and remain there.
The advantages were too obvious to push from his mind. But it was hard to see how it could be managed with five other men at hand, for witnesses. He would not know how to explain it. He barely dared explain it to himself, the thing was so simple. He did not want to go back to her, that was all. He did not want to be present when it arrived, for her to hand it over, the debt he could never discharge. He had not asked her to follow him. That was not what he’d come out here for. That was not the trial he’d planned.
He wondered in what way precisely he would be misunderstood, what would be the terms of the judgment, if he did not return. The worst they could say, of course, would be that he’d been using her – it – as an excuse, a chance to escape the hardship of a long winter in the ice. That would be the most ingenuous version, and the most cruel. He did not think he could stand it. The mere thought of it was a challenge to go back, regardless of all the promises calling him to Beechey.
The day was bright again. Today he rigged them in unicorn, with Banes in lead. Leading, you could not merely blink your eyes open now and then and feel a way with your feet.
All day they pulled towards the Devon Island shore. Three times they watched Banes stumble and fall, and each time Morgan had to grab hold of Daly’s arm, to stop him helping the man to his feet. With the wind in their faces, they scraped all the way to Cape Osborn, the nearest point of the Devon shore. By evening, Banes’s eyes were swollen shut. They propped him against the cliff and unwrapped the head. On each side of the nose, the tears had trickled into his beard and frozen in a little lump.
In the tent, he watched DeHaven dribbling the spoon into the blind man’s mouth. The lips were shrivelled and cracked like old varnish in the sun. Afterwards, they put him into the blanket bag, in a hood.
Unwrapped, the other faces too were anguished, sorrowful, yearning – seemed less in physical than in moral or mental pain. Inches from their heads, the tent was rattling frantically. Outside, the grumbling ice. Legs folded under him tailor-fashion, Morgan hunched over his bowl. He was studying them secretly, his slaves.
The cold tunnelled through to him early. It was Sunday. Overhead, glazed with breath, the canvas was frozen stiff. It was a wedge driven into the wilderness, with walls that were wafer-thin.
After breakfast, as it began to brighten, he left the tent. From the top of the headland, he named the points north and south. He named the capes and the inlets, and the tiny islands, some that were little more than rocks. Others had always named such things after fellow officers and ice-masters, retired captains, sponsors, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. The lights and shadows they wished to walk in. But Morgan named them after his wife, and his wife’s sister, his mother and his father, his dead cousin, his favourite dog. His forgetful friends, his first wound, his first whore. He was bringing them out here with him, and finally fixing them in a definite place, from where they could no longer follow.
Had the lost expedition travelled this far north, up this particular channel, he wrote – He wondered how best to state his case. There were certain conclusions he had to avoid, try not even to steal a glimpse at them. In their place, he would have left some definite sign of his passage, and would have left it precisely where he was standing, here, the highest point for miles. There was nothing, of course.
From Cape Osborn they would now haul round to the north. Those were Captain Myer’s orders, he reminded them – to haul round to the north and inspect the adjacent bay, about which Captain Myer entertained some considerable hope, that it might in fact be a passage back east to Jones’s Sound, and the head of Baffin Bay, from whence they had come.
I’m impressed, DeHaven said. You’re already on short supplies, you’ve an extra man to feed, and now you’re going to stretch yourself even further for that fool? Chapeau. He was blindfolding Banes with a length of boot-hose. You haul straight down the Channel for godsake, write it up how you like in your journal, and who’ll ever be any the wiser?
The idea was tempting, but Morgan did not yet want to turn south. Turning north, he was putting his decision off.
If you want to go south, go south, I’m not going to stop you. That’s why you came out here, isn’t it? Morgan said. DeHaven, he knew, could not reply. With no tent, no heat, and no supplies, he would not last two days.
How many searchers have been lost, down through the years? DeHaven asked him, straight out.
A great many.
More than the number of those they were searching for?
Undoubtedly, Morgan said. He thought of his heroes. Franklin, Parry, Ross. Many was the night he’d turned the pages, sifting through their torments, their failures, that he hoped to rival with his own.
And what did it ever get them? DeHaven had asked. All their backbreaking labour and all their lost fingers and toes?
Morgan did not know what to say. He did not know why, even now, away from
the ship and everyone in it, within safe sledging distance of Beechey, he wanted once again to veer north. He did not know why so many men had come to chasten themselves so high up in the world.
They had a hefty breakfast of tea and rum and pemmican. They had provisions remaining for twenty-two days. North of the headland the flat beach stretched as far as the eye could see. Every mile or so a line of rubble ran straight out from the land.
It was the 24th of October. All night long the wind had been roaring over the beach, sweeping everything off the surface, hosing it horizontal. They lay there in the dusk, smoking their pipes, murmuring conspiracies. Banes in silence, behind his mask. DeHaven seemed to be asleep.
How does it look? Cabot asked. There had been another lull.
Once more Morgan poked the glass through the flap. This time it snagged on what looked like the ghost of a cairn, far to the north. He made the mistake of telling them what he saw. Then watched Daly begin to bother himself with hope. Who else could have made it, Daly said, but the men they were searching for? Morgan could not contradict him. If cairn it be, its appeal was made directly to them, the searchers – first imagined, afar; now real, and so close.
The conjuror was lit for their midday meal. The heat woke DeHaven. Morgan watched the steam come off the man. He watched Petersen picking at his ear, and admiring the extract. Outside, the scouring was merciless. They had half an hour to kill, waiting for the food to thaw and warm. Waiting, they watched DeHaven rigging little lengths of wire to two bones he’d found at their last campsite, what looked like the upper and lower parts of a jaw.
Some species of whale, he said. Stiffly, he closed the contraption, with a decorous clack.
With teeth? Morgan said.
There are whales with teeth. Petersen will tell you. Tell him, Chinaman.
There are whales with teeth, Petersen said.
Each bone held a long neat row of them, tiny as a baby’s, but razor-sharp.
The pelvis, DeHaven told them. That’s the key. The keyhole, if you prefer. He set the jawbones yawning on his lap. He held aloft one of the bread bags, queerly stuffed and tied. Head up, head down. Back to front, back to back. Those are the possibilities, he said. He was gently wrestling with the doll. Head down and back to front would be best, he said, for mother and child alike.
Morgan wondered had he done anything to deserve an alternative. He could not say. He did not know how he registered on that particular scale.
DeHaven was holding the doll against his torso. Below, the open jawbones lay waiting on his lap. To DeHaven, apparently, the thing was going to be ridiculously easy, ridiculously fast. In his other hand he was holding pink leggings of some kind. The cloth was thin and quite elastic, ready to stretch to almost any size. They watched him pull it up over the head.
The uterus, DeHaven said, drawing it up over the body, inch by inch. It’s like any other muscle, he said. It stretches and it contracts. That’s what pushes the baby down. He bunched the loose end in his fist and began to squeeze, like a pâtissier piping cream. The dilation of the cervix allows it, he said. The contractions oblige it, if you will.
He had put the head into the open jaws. They watched in silence as the doll was piped through. To Morgan this was merely a puppet-show, a bundle of rags bumping against bare bone. There was no flesh, there could be no tearing, no bleeding, no pain. DeHaven had spread his legs a little, the jaws gaping on his lap. Once the head is through, he said, the midwife will normally assist in the extraction first of one shoulder, then the other. He reached his hand down outside his leg, and up under it, to take hold of the head.
The midwife, Morgan said. Or the doctor.
If the lady concerned happens to have a certified physician attending her, she can count herself extremely fortunate, DeHaven said.
The head, he kept saying. The cervix. The shoulders. The uterus. They sounded like specimens, each in their own separate jar.
The hand that had reached up between his legs to catch the doll now pulled it through, brought it back around and sat it on his lap. It had been a quick and simple birth, apparently, taking only the time needed to describe it.
If it’s so simple, why does it so often go so wrong? Morgan said.
The great difficulty is the size of the head, DeHaven said. I mean, in relation to the size of the pelvis.
The shark’s mouth.
The whale’s mouth. Exactly. Some women’s hips are simply not big enough.
What about Kitty? She’s not exactly the biggest woman in the world.
I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen worse that have got away with it.
And if the hole, the gap, whatever you want to call it –
The passage.
If it just isn’t big enough?
If that’s the case, there’s no point whatsoever in trying to force the issue. It’s merely a great deal of time and effort wasted, DeHaven said.
The day passed. Again and again he undid the tie and slid the glass through the gap, hoping for a better view of the cairn to the north. It was a useless temptation. The wind was coming on harder than ever now, and there seemed no hope of ever again getting away. They would lie here calmly and dumbly, he told himself, and let themselves be frozen, or slowly buried alive. As always, his mind was rushing ahead, to catastrophe. These were his last companions, it told him, in his final home.
Late in the afternoon the wind died enough to let him crawl out. The low sun came skimming over the ice, let him admire the storm’s handiwork. The gale had carried off the youngest layer of snow, and now a long row of footprints led right to the tent door, standing up out of the ground a good six inches, like columns of wind-worn stone. Each a little memorial to their passage, the weight of their boots stamping the snow, step after step, making it far more solid than the powder. What impressed him most was the detail, even to the grooves and grips of each individual sole. The sledge, too, had left raised rails stretching to the southern horizon – curious, useless, and exquisitely tooled.
By midnight the wind had died, but out in the Channel the ice was on the move. Between the explosions, it sounded like an army on the march. He could not sleep. He struck a match. The eyes were glistening in the dark.
By morning the wind was barrelling over the beach again from the northeast, so hard he feared they could not face it. But face it they did. It was the 26th of October. They all leaned into their load as a prop, hauling blind. Step by step they hauled north along the beach, and could not tell – hardly cared – whether or not they had veered off course.
The wind was scorching. Under the scarves and veils, his face felt raw. Inside his head, a small sure voice was mocking his every step. With every step his mind was growing sharper, testing, searching for flaws in his reasoning. Flaws so flagrant as to invite ridicule. It was not resolution but stubbornness, this refusal to cede. And the stubbornness, it said, was the product of a weary, fearful mind. He had to keep reminding himself of the rush of pleasure it would give the others, to hear themselves ordered down. The wind was dying now, the sky beginning to clear, and it was another two hours before he could let himself say those words. They had made about four miles, he judged. In such weather, it was a good day’s work, and felt like tot
al defeat. That was the price, apparently.
As they were setting up, he walked out alone to look at a bump on the spit nearby. It was another silly hope he needed to snuff. It was nothing. He stood up on top of it to consider the world. He could see the coast to the north much more clearly now. It was obviously a continuation of the beach. The opening Myer had imagined did not exist. Their cairn seemed no nearer. Lone flakes were wandering through the air, like flakes of ash after a fire. He himself was the tallest thing for miles. Here, there were no more excuses, no version but his own, and for a moment he was thankful that Myer’s plan had hustled him so far north. He was the lawmaker here, with what felt like a lawmaker’s heart – one now answering gladly to the power of a mute, raging world.
Inside the tent, he found DeHaven kneeling over Cabot, who was laid out on his back.
It’s his feet, DeHaven said. Says he cannot feel them either one.
Morgan asked how long it had been.
Perhaps an hour, Cabot said. I thought they might come back. I didn’t want to slow you up.
Morgan hung his head, as if in shame. It was not shame, it was anger. He had explained the rules twenty times.
Already DeHaven was drawing out his skinning knife. Banes, he said, boil up a quart of snow. He was wrestling with the laces. His fingers were numb, would not obey. He nodded to Morgan to come and kneel beside him. He touched the tip of the blade to the top of the boot, let it fiddle back and forth. A little V opened up, an invitation, as Morgan pulled the sides apart.
Harder, DeHaven said.
Patiently, the blade worked its way down.
I’m sorry, Cabot said. He was lying on his back, could hear their work. I thought I would certainly feel it. If really it was so very bad.