by Cormac James
17th May
For days now Petersen had lain unconscious. In the main mess, in quiet moments, they could hear every amateur breath. In the evening the men flung down their cards more noisily. For once they were glad when Tommy cried. Otherwise, someone was always tinkering on a whistle, or tinkering with a song. They were smothering the dying man. They were shouting him down.
Finally, on the morning of the 17th, they woke to a sinister silence, and no one said a word, afraid to disturb it, as often they had been afraid to wake the sleeping child. They said it was a relief, a deliverance. They reminded themselves of how much he had suffered. They said he was better off now.
They hauled the bundle ashore. They stood in silence facing the wall of rock. Inland, the first bruises showed now on the south-facing slopes. MacDonald read something from the Bible and improvised a speech. The man had been a brother in adversity, he said. He had been party not only to their fleeting doubts, but to their enduring hope. They planted a small marker deep in the pile of rocks, almost to the cross-tree, to keep it straight.
20th May
Waking early, he felt a nice kind of tiredness, one that wanted to be indulged, and he would have liked to stay in bed all day. But that was a bachelor’s fantasy. He could hear her already fluttering about next door. He could hear the fuss of hammers and saws, too – last adjustments to the sledge – that came gnawing through the ship, calling him up. Still he did not move from his bed. He had not the courage yet. He remembered the haul to Beechey, and hardly knew how to approach it, the idea of starting anew, of making a like effort all over again. It seemed a mockery of what they’d done on that trip, to presume it could be reproduced, mechanically. There would be nothing new out there, the second time. Only the same scenery, the same weather, the same work. The thousand tiny laws of that other empire, and the rigour with which they were imposed. And here, now, in a warm ship, in a warm bed, it felt harder than ever to brush the thing up, make it shine. Here, now, his body believed it had found its final home, its final comfort and its reward. Even as it tried to tell him so, he knew it was wrong. On the far side of the planks The Pack was alive, gathering strength. The world was circling the sun. The clock was counting down, rushing towards consequence, as it had been for the past two years. A mere two years of his life, but it felt now like a squandered inheritance.
He left her door ajar, to let in a little light. He stood watching a long time. Tommy had rolled onto his back. A hand was clawing at the empty air. The mimic of a dream? Morgan stood in silence, listening. Soon he too was drawing in deep, greedy breaths. The air of that room was flavoured with something deeply familiar, that he could not name. He could not separate it from the rest. Even from his own clothes now there came a troubled song.
The hair was longer now, starting to darken, and starting to curl. Morgan leaned closer, approached the knife. The hand that held it was trembling. Fear was bearing its lamp into all the dark corners, driving every living thing before it, out into the open. He touched the edge of the blade to the little tress, began to saw back and forth. The first strands curled into the air. Gently, he told himself. Another minute was all he needed, before she came back.
He had brought one of DeHaven’s tiny glass specimen jars. ‘No luxuries’ had been their new commandment for the past several weeks. Ever so gently, he lifted the curl of hair. He had succeeded. Still the boy slept carelessly. Outside, the sun was rising, and the world was in decline. On the maps, in the drawers, the vast unfolded space. The long days and nights, the seasons, had brought him to bloom. He was floating in the darkness. The solid world had fallen away.
And then all that was spoiled.
Morgan heard it even as he spotted it, in the very corner of his eye. A fly. Here. Now. It was not possible, he thought. It was perfectly possible of course. He listened, tried to find it in the dark. It was a worn metallic spinning, meant to irk, to chafe.
He watched it drift down. It wandered blindly back and forth across the face, the eye. Morgan watched it feel its way. He could hardly believe its audacity, its contempt. He wanted to crush it, to hear that tactful little noise. He took a towel from the bed, knotted the end, but he could not strike. It had settled on the forehead. The legs were working fiendishly. The boy refused to notice, could accept everything, even this indignity. He lay perfectly still, poised, as for an illustration. He would wake easily, in a familiar place, needing nobody, enjoying himself. Morgan stared helplessly. It could not sting, could not feed, could not lay. How many days had it left? What was the point?
His hand swept silently past, and the threat lifted it into the air. It swam frantically on the undertow. He willed it to quiet and settle again. He found it on the locker, the marble top. He slid closer, assassin. He began to lift his arm – a crisp thump, he thought, a purple streak – but it was too late, the fly was gone.
He pulled the door full open. The light might draw it out. Maybe he could herd it – waving comically, like a shipwreck – out into the corridor.
The crew were all gathered out on the ice. The sledge party all in furs. Several with gutta-percha masks. Banes and Blacker and DeHaven were stamping around in a circle, laughing at the tracks they made. Their new boots looked like the boots of giant men. Morgan stood apart looking south, at their new home. He knew what was waiting for him. The space was vast, made them small. The rewards seemed more doubtful than ever now. All he had to cheapen the bitterness was the trial to come. At least they could not be accused of taking the easy way out.
This trial now before us – , he announced. He could not see their faces. They could not see his. As we turn to face it together, he said, I call on every man now fully to indulge his faith in the resilience and courage of his companions and captain, and reassure himself that whatsoever men can do to attain their object will be done by them. The rest we leave to powers higher than our own.
He could hear the boy crying, felt himself begin to gag. She had gone back down to see to him. It was as good a moment as any to start.
PART V
20th May
They had whitewashed the name of the ship on the cliff face, in letters twenty feet high. The word was waiting for them, soaking through the twilight, as they approached. The ice lay in devastation all along the shore. The best path, he had decided, would be along the bottom of the cliffs. That narrow ledge was scattered with boulders and broken slabs of ice, so much rubbish deposited there by the last, incomparable storm. Nothing was level and nothing straight. It would have been easier, of course, to abandon the boat and carry everything on their backs, except that they would need the boat when they came to the open sea.
As a general rule, he wrote, the mornings are worst. The great thirst, he wrote. The great pains in the soles of our feet. Offshore, great pillars of steam rose up out of the cracked floe. They slouched along at once resentful and penitent, and the sweat froze on their faces even as they pulled. The horizon marched ahead of them, at whatever pace they set. Already, he wrote, it seems a ridiculous way to proceed. Time after time we must empty the boat. Time after time we have to hack our way through a solid wall. Often, at such moments, I have been tempted to pipe them down. He did not. He was desperate, those first days, to put as much distance as possible between himself and the ship.
They stood straining in the traces, mouths pumping smoke. From every footprint, ste
am. The fine slick coating on everything was very like sieved flour. The frozen air rustled incessantly. With an endless groan the runners dragged over the hard snow. They were all waiting for the first man to complain. Then there would be a chorus, he knew.
He usually called a halt about midday, for about an hour. He would have preferred a shorter stop, but they needed all that time to erect the tent and get their food at least lukewarm. Had they brought her along, he told himself, they could have set up the conjuror in the boat, under the housing, let her nurse the flame even as they were on the move, to have the food heated by the time they stopped. They could have given her the frozen tins to keep under her furs with the boy, to thaw.
This afternoon, he wrote, at the moment of departure by some shrewd instinct I turned around. The man directly behind me was Cabot, and at just that instant he was pushing a handful of snow into the middle of his face. The picture softened me an instant, I confess. I have experienced personally the dry heat of the Afghan desert, and now rate the Arctic a fair rival.
He could not help but stare hatefully at what was being stuffed into the open mouth. Cabot froze, and the snow scattered down the front of his smock. Morgan made no comment. There was no point. It would soon be running out of the man. It is everything their precious religion tries to teach them, he wrote that night. Desire and surrender, fleeting joy, then long painful punishment.
Three times that day the men had to gather around Cabot, to form a shelter from the wind. They turned their backs on him, and listened as he emptied his bowels again. By the end he could barely stand, and could not haul, regardless of any threats Morgan might concoct. Neither then nor subsequently did I make the slightest rebuke, Morgan wrote. I am no longer the enemy. They have enemies enough out here, is what I want them to understand.
23rd May
They would halt at the next headland and put up in the lee of it, he announced. To continue due south from there would take them off the island, and out onto the floe. This would be their last chance of proper shelter for some time.
The day was clear. Under the cliffs, the shadows were blue. To the west a sprawl of fog. At the foot of the cliff they found a circle of stones about as wide as the tent, each stone about the size of a man’s head. Placed there ten or a thousand years before. To date, it was the only evidence the land had ever before hosted any of their own kind.
As it was still early, he might have ordered a snow-house built for better comfort, but he did not want them familiar with better comfort out here. In any case, he liked the notion of doing exactly as their predecessors had done, setting up tent in the same spot, weighing down the edges with the same stones. As a boy he had liked to sneak into his father’s bed, as soon as his father was gone and sure not to return. He enjoyed the warmth, and the perverse satisfaction that it was somehow stolen. His father, in a certain condition, always slept on his back, arms and legs spread, star-shaped, and the boy he had been always liked to spread himself similarly, stretching to try to find and fit the trace left by the larger man. Shifting a foot here, a hand there, always trying to map himself faithfully to the heat that other body had left in the sheet. Now the temptation was the same, a fond voice saying it must be warmer here, where other men had once slept. The real warmth, of course, would be afterwards. The memory of the shared bed, a bolster for days to come.
The next morning, beaded on a frozen rope, he and Daly and Banes crawled up the slope. This was the most prominent piece of land they’d seen in a year, and had Franklin passed this way here was where he would have left word. Also, Morgan wanted to reconnoitre their road for the day. The road, he called it. It was the word and nothing else. It was whatever lay between them and where he wanted the land to be.
The snow about them glowed pink. As the sun lifted off the horizon, they watched the colour soak down the slope, towards the tent, like cordial through crushed ice. The smudge he’d seen yesterday – what he wanted to be another island – was now gone. In its place, a lone grey hair had drifted down from the heavens, settled on the surface. It looked like the slightest breath of wind would carry it off. It did not matter, he told himself. It was due south. The rest of the page was blank. There was no other way home.
Far below, back at the tent, he could see the little specks moving about. They seemed of little consequence, destined to be crushed. He admired and pitied them.
With no small trouble, he wrote, we built a cairn to house a short narrative of how we came hither, and why. It is posted with hope overreaching expectation, in a place known by Christian or pagan neither one, and must remain unread until others’ emulation of the trials we ourselves have undergone. HM brig Impetus wintered these two years past some 50 miles north of this point, the note read. On the 20th of May, 9 of the crew left the vessel with the purpose of seeking aid for those remaining aboard, who have not the means to quit it independently. Since leaving Beechey Island in September of 1850, in the course of our travels north and west of the Wellington Channel, we have seen no sign of any vessel except our own. From here we travel due south, by boat and sledge, in the hope of striking the northern shore of Melville Island, and travelling from there to the depot at Cape Dundas, which we believe is our closest relief.
By the time they got back to the tent, his right hand was dead. There was no pain at first, no feeling at all. It seemed someone else’s hand, that was all. The fingers were the colour and consistency of cheese, and looked so strange – so unlike flesh – that he was tempted to hold the thing up to his nose. It was not altogether unlike waking up with a dead arm. It would be hours before the first furious tingling began.
With his left hand, he slipped a chunk of frozen meat into his mouth. He sat there grinding it down. In his mind, he saw her secretly slipping just such a chunk into her mouth, letting it take her own heat, to blood temperature. He saw her chewing patiently, before feeding the pulp to the boy, as to a baby bird. He could imagine – himself almost taste – the thing as it thawed, gave, came to life. What he tasted was warm blood. It would not be the first time the ragged edges had cut him open. Perhaps it was not her mouth imagined, but his own.
As he chewed and swallowed, he watched Banes eating sullenly. To make the cairn, to hold the note, it had taken almost an hour to hack enough stones from the frozen ground. It may direct others to the ship, Morgan told the man. Should we ourselves, by some misfortune, be unable to do so.
24th May
The next morning he was first to wake. He dressed quietly, crawled out. Ahead of them the ragged crust was a mouldy pewter. To the far south it was crushed green glass. Day by day since setting out, his urine had darkened. By now it was the colour of claret. He would have been afraid he was somehow injured, but that the other men all left similar stains in the snow.
They packed up. He watched Cabot trying to lift a bread bag. Back at the ship, he had been able to lift one alone. Now, without his even asking, Daly came and took the other end. It was as simple as that. They were weaker than before, from cold and want and work.
It was the 24th of May. The spring tides had not yet managed to boost and burst the bay-ice, and they could head straight out from the land, due south.
At noon they stopped by a block of ice that the wind had sculpted to a distinctly human shape. While they were eating, someone put a hat on his head, gave him goggles, a nose-shield, a pipe.
&nb
sp; Ask him has he seen any other sailors pass by, Blacker said.
Ask him how he got so goddamned gross and healthy-looking, said Banes. Ask him where’s he squirrelled away all his grub.
Ask him has he seen any women, Leask said. Christian, heathen or pagan. Tell him we’re in no way particular.
Just then a flock of geese came cruising low over the derelict floes, braying, mourning. They had been summoned north. Morgan lifted his head to watch, and for a moment left off chewing, out of respect.
Today the road was too hard and too dry, and the runners stuttered along, a dry finger on a polished table top. Their steps echoed loudly on the hard crust.
It sounds like tympani, Cabot announced. Don’t you find? In France, he said, you know how they make them, those drums? No one answered, but no one objected, and he seemed determined to talk. They have two even four horses pulling the skin, he said. In all the opposite directions.
Sounds more like a medieval torture, DeHaven said.
To make it so tight, Cabot explained. He seemed overexcited. I have seen it done, he said.
To Morgan, their steps on the surface didn’t sound like a drum. It sounded like other men marching nearby, in greater numbers, with greater purpose.