“Dad,” Thomas called. “Dad! Phone! Where’s the phone?”
“I’ve got it,” he said, and stood back from his desk chair.
DRAWING THE FROZEN-IN SAILORS at mess had always presented him with an array of perspective and lighting problems, none of which he’d happily remedied. Midwinter, lightlessness around the clock and then, gradually, the dim twilight of midday stretching up a few minutes, then an hour, a little more, and lingering along the horizon blue-brown for an hour or so longer. The ABs and petty officers all at their one end of the ship, cramped by the cook’s galleys and eating salt pork, pemmican, hardtack, and the occasional peas or pickles or rotten currants, standing around their stow-away rope-suspended tables; later their sleeping hammocks, shoulder-to-shoulder, would be lowered from the same rafters, blackened and dripping, coated in an ooze of frozen coal smoke and condensation. The single biggest problem in all of this: no good available light source. Shadowy orange light. At the other end of the ship, the officers’ mess, four or five courses on good china and served with silver by a handful of stewards, better lit with oil lamps, but still—not easily drawn. Yellow light and shadows. And probably much colder. A little above freezing, if they were lucky. But it was critical to do it right, exactly right, and clearly, because however mundane and daily the activity, it was absolutely central. It was, really, the whole story: food. Food had killed them. First contaminated food and then the lack of any food, which drove them from the ships to King William Island on the death march south for Back’s Fish River, seeking an overland passage to North America. It drove them finally to eat one another. In some ways, the whole movie was just about that: sustenance.
He’d watched Barry Lyndon at least a dozen times for clues—particularly the long interior sequences lit solely by candles and shot on superslow film. Long single takes with few or no edits. He’d read what Kubrick had to say about this in interviews, and though a lot of critics had hated Barry Lyndon precisely because of those long murky candlelit interior segments, Thomas was pretty sure it was the right model for him. Those seasick granulated images exposed almost to the point of distortion, flickering shadows elongated intrusively to the background, they would convey exactly the right mood of claustrophobia, frustration, and exhaustion. Of cold. Then again, considering the length of time his sailors had to spend belowdecks, he wondered if it wasn’t maybe asking way too much of viewers. Might be better to go pure Hollywood, like the night scenes in Jaws, or Titanic, or Pirates: flood the interiors with light and shoot through colored lenses; pretend there would really be anything approaching that level of luminosity for his sailors. Give the viewer a break.
His teachers from the SAIT after-school kids program would probably have reminded him that he was thinking too much like a cinematographer anyway. Camera work is camera work, they’d say. Your job as a director is to direct. Actors act; cameramen run the camera. Directors articulate the vision and move the actors to reveal the scene. They call the shots, but they don’t shoot them. He knew this. Yet left to his own devices, as he’d been this past going-on-two years, he couldn’t stop himself. Couldn’t help drifting to this all-encompassing, all-pervasive stance in the material, always trying to solve every imaginable problem. So, he was viewer, writer, director, cinematographer, soundman, editor, makeup artist, and all the characters. Completely unrealistic and almost completely unuseful. Wasn’t his fault, though. It was his father’s fault for moving them here to Houndstitch, taking him away from everyone decent who knew anything about movies. Check out Denys Arcand, they’d probably tell him right now. Our friend. Get away from the Americans. Why always the Americans? Try Patricia Rozema. Try some French or Italians. Truffaut. See some of the Indians. What’s wrong with Fellini? That’s where to go. Forget Disneyland! Hollywood’s good for two things: pretty girls and loud explosions! Next year when you start with our friends at the Arts High School, we’ll . . . But the rest of that thought was too painful to finish without wanting to stab someone.
The sections in his notebooks dedicated to winter mess were gouged with lines and grooves, easy to flip to because of the extra ink and pencil coating the paper, wrinkling each page at its edge. Back he went, every day at least for a little while, usually when he was at his lowest or least hopeful about everything in general, or just had a few minutes (as now) to kill; still, he hadn’t solved the problems of lighting and perspective. The sailors together at their hanging tables, faces inches apart, some, many, or all showing the first signs of scurvy—there was no good way of positioning himself to reveal them distinctly without falsely alleviating the viewer’s sense of how jammed together they were. There was, literally, nowhere for a viewer to stand or have perspective. And no good light. For a few pages in the middle of one section, he’d solved the light problem by having the cook throw open his oven: Like a sun, it lit the sailors’ oily faces—their teeth at odd angles, gums swollen and bleeding, suppurating hemorrhagic sores on their cheeks and arms. Into this section now he dropped himself, looking for clues on how to solve other related lighting problems later on. Hoar and Work together at the far end of one table.
Work: “Cooked the fat right out of it again, he did! Bleedin’ idiot. Tell us again some of what they has, Commander Franklin and Fitzjames and them. Come on, tell!”
Hoar: “It’ll only make you more miserable.”
Work: “Scones for their tea and raspberry jam. Pearl onions and real stewed beef and soup and flour biscuits. Cream and butter. Bacon and eggs.”
Hoar, shaking his head: “No more of that. That’s all gone now since Greenland, since the tender sailed for home with our livestock. I should’ve never told you anyway. Only makes it worse. Lord knows, it’s all I can do sometimes to keep from pinching a little of this or that, some real pepper and none of this gunpowder, while I’m heatin’ up his bit of bouillon or mulligatawny or what have you on the steward’s cookstove. If I can catch him just right, like yesterday, he’ll give me a bit of a lecture, and then if I swear on me mum’s grave the twelve ways I’m walking with Jesus, he’ll give me a little something extra to go with.” Hoar turns a pocket inside out to show Work a mauled half of a currant scone. “Even if me mum’s alive and well, a little white lie . . . worth the extra rations.”
Work: “Give us a piece then, eh?”
Hoar looks balefully around, shakes his head, but in the end he breaks off half of the scone for Work.
Work (whispered): “Much obliged!” (Full voice): “But why’d he cook the fat right out like that? Till it’s all dry and stringy. Salt pork, salt beef, I’m sick of bleedin’ salt pork and salt beef, pemmican and hardtack.”
Hoar: “Sell you back the fat for a price or give it to them.” He indicates the Royal Marines and petty officers across the way.
Work: “Sick of this bleedin’ dark as well, I say. . . .”
Here, Thomas had run out of steam, and the next pages showed the same two young men on deck and then beside the ship, outside, against a backdrop of towering light spires and pillars of glowing, pulsating celestial smoke, looking skyward, wordlessly, and hearing the wind crack and howl around them. The masts of the Erebus have been taken down and her decks draped in canvas covered over in snow and then sand atop the snow for footing; still, the riggings left exposed to the wind rattle riotously—rattle and yowl like a broken harp beset by maniacal forces. The occasional groan or explosive BANG or RRRFFTTT caused by a shift in the ice pack under their feet and slowly squeezing the Erebus asunder.
Work: “God’s way of reminding a sailor there’s sunlight still in distant lands.”
Hoar: “Have I told you? The dreams I’m havin’ lately?”
Work: “Visions, like?”
Hoar nods.
“That’s the dark and the cold and the rats bitin’ all night, so’s when you finally do manage to drop off for a couple hours, there’s so much light in your head, you think it’s somethin’ else. You think it’s a vision. My first winter in the Arctic, I—”
“I heard that one before, yes. But this is different. I see things, real things I never seen before, so close up, I could almost put my hands on them. Sounds and smells. Lights with flyin’ machines and people livin’ in houses so warm inside, you can strip down to the skin.”
“Do that here all right, too. Might kill you, but . . .”
“And lights in the trees and hangin’ from buildings, everywhere—bright lights, no whale oil or tallow. So many lights, it’s like them Northern Lights only . . . more. Brighter.”
“That’s like I said. The rats and the cold and dark and the scurvy setting your brain afire. Happens to us all.”
Hoar nods. “I’m not myself, I’ll grant you.”
“None of us is.”
“Won’t miss this place none.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Come May, you figure, then?”
“May, June. The channel should open again and then it’s heave and warp our way out of here till mid-August. Should be plenty of time.”
“Figure Crozier’s really in charge, then?”
“Nothing of the kind. Commander Franklin’s is the first and last word, always was, always will be. Them ice masters says it’s all Franklin’s idea we sailed north around Cornwallis when the orders was plenty clear. Go south. Straight south into the channel and off the maps and through. No further exploration, but Franklin had it in his head to see was it an island or no, take his magnetic readings, so around we went. And then south again. If we hadn’t’ve done that, where’d you think we’d be now?”
Hoar shrugs.
“Clear through the passage and homeward bound, they says.”
“Never.”
“Aye, they says.”
“Ice masters don’t know everything.”
“They don’t, but I’ll tell you, when we get off this ship, if we do . . . there’s talk of going overland if the ice don’t break up. But if we do go overland, Crozier’s your man. Stick with him, mate. You heard what happened in ’19 with Franklin’s bunch.”
“Ate their shoes.”
“Their shoes and plenty more besides. He’s good as a commander and all, don’t no one say otherwise, but I wouldn’t stand by him in the ice and snow once we’re off these ships. If we do get off. Don’t know his way near as good in the ice as Crozier.”
“The Irishman, then?”
“He’s your man.”
“Heard he was in love with Franklin’s daughter.”
“Daughter?” Work laughs. “Niece, you mean. The daughter would be a bit young for him, eh? You like ’em that young, Edmund? Nice hairless little twadge?”
Hoar shakes his head forcefully, coloring. “She wouldn’t have him, though, the niece. And why’s that?”
“Sophia Cracroft? Expect it’s because of him being Irish. No other reason.”
“Poor sod.”
“I say, a murian on all things Irish.”
“Why’s that?”
Something peripheral had Thomas’s attention now. He glanced up from the page at his bedroom wall and the hanging corkboard stuck full of pictures of Franklin, Crozier, McClintock, Jane, Rae, and maps of the northern, polar fringe of the territories, with Franklin’s likely path emblazoned through it in purple Sharpie ink—the entry from Greenland through Baffin Bay and around Cornwallis and then south down Peel Strait; two x’s showing the presumed spot where the ships froze in just off Victory Point; then overland down King William Island, more x’s for known burial sites and boneyards, and across the last inlet (and the key to the passage), ending at the head of Back’s River in Starvation Cove. Would Crozier really have wandered off with the Chippewa if he’d made it that far? Wouldn’t he have? Why not? Why go back to England, having already been passed over for commander, turned down by Sophia Cracoft, and then having ordered his own crew to eat one another? There was probably a whole line of mixed-blood Crozier Chippewa somewhere still. Might look something like the stoner bus driver, Cody/Dakota.
And then it hit him—the thing that had been working its slow way through his brain circuitry ever since Devon’s call came in and he’d been waiting for his father to get off the line so he could have a few words before Devon’s minutes ran out: the Facebook message he’d left open and unsent on his father’s computer. Thinking back to the precise moments in which he’d stood away from his father’s desk chair, flung the chair around, that word failure eating at him, clotting the edges of his vision like something that would erase him altogether if he didn’t act, and quickly, get a pencil and paper and just DRAW already, he was pretty sure he’d never closed his screen or hit send. No, he was positive. He even remembered the stair-stepped last few lines he had not been able to knit satisfactorily to any logical, grammatical finish, and the promise he’d made himself exiting the room: Finish that later. Later. Right. He furled upward from his bed and went stealthily to the head of the stairs and down, along the hall to his father’s study. Stood a second in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust, then went in, careful to sidestep the boxes of his mother’s old photos and letters, puzzles, books, and other childhood junk, unsure at first if the hunched shadow aggregate at his father’s desk was father and chair or just chair. Then the shadow was moving, turning toward him and leaning to one side, light from the hallway illuminating his face.
“Yeah, he’s right here, in fact. Just a sec. Good talking to you, kiddo. Right. Love you, too.” He held out the phone.
Quick test: If Devon spoke first, all was well. Probably. If he waited, if he let Thomas wade into it before saying anything, there was trouble. That would be Devon’s style: wait and lynch. Hang back, let Thomas chatter away, and then snare him. The phone was still warm from his father’s hand and smelled faintly of his shampoo and aftershave. His breath. Thomas held it to his ear and breathed once into the mouthpiece and again, quickly retracing his steps back out of the office and up the stairs.
“Ahoy, matie. T! You there?”
“Present.”
“Scurvy dog. What’s up?”
Safe. His father, true to form, had probably never read a word, never noticed Thomas’s open screen or thought to pry. It would not even have occurred to him to do so.
“Same old.”
“True not. Dad says you were treated to a little of Houndstitch’s finest today. Dude. Tell!”
Thomas threw his door shut behind him and sprang onto his bed, plucking up pencils, erasers, and notebook and clearing aside his knapsack of unopened school textbooks before dropping down, back to the wall and pillow across his lap. “What are you talking about?”
“The school-yard fun and fisticuffs?”
“Oh—that. Yeah.”
“That. Yeah. Dude, what planet are you on anyway?”
Together they gave the reply—a joke of long-standing family tradition: Planet T, where the boys have big brains and the girls won’t talk to you.
“It was no big thing. Just some really immature homosadistic jock ritual. Who gives a rip.”
“And what about the girl—what was her name?”
“Jill. From next door.”
“We’re still hanging out?”
“Sure. Whenever I’m in the mood or whatever. Yeah.”
“This is the one with the harelip?”
“Not a harelip! Jeez. I told you! It’s a birthmark, and it’s not that big a deal.”
“OK, OK. Sorry. Lighten up. No big score yet?”
“Fuck off. You’ll be first to know if it happens. Promise. When it happens. I’ll tell you.”
“That’s good. Because I might have some technical advice for you. Pointers, you know, from a procedural standpoint, like how to make sure she gets off, and be sure to put your dick in the right hole to pop her cherry.”
“You’re such a jerk.”
Laughter. “Come on. It’s my role in your life, giving you shit, just like it’s your role in my life, to keep the malicious juvenile side of my brain active.”
“Glad I can be of service. So when’s the visi
t?”
“Actually, I was talking to Dad about that. I’ve got labs and exams right through the last day of the quarter, so I was thinking, on my spring break, I might actually just go up and visit Mom for a few days.”
Ice in his belly and sudden numbness, the clotted dark spreading up at the edges of his vision again. He kicked his legs out straight and clenched his thigh muscles, then knotted a fist around his pant leg and pulled hard, making the material constrict cuttingly around his leg. What? Visit Mom? “You what?”
“Yeah. I don’t know. I figure why the hell not? Right? Catch a ride with one of the mining planes and get someone with a snow machine to haul my ass the rest of the way. Haven’t seen her in an age.”
“Sure. But did you . . . have you, like, talked to her about it?”
“Oh yeah, sure. Of course.”
“When?”
“Couple times. I don’t know. Last week, I guess it was. Week before that.”
“You’re talking to her now?”
“Not all the time. Every week or so since the start of the quarter, something like that.”
He unballed his hand and turned it over on his leg, palm up, stretching open the fingers until they bent backward and the white of bones and tendons stood in speckled relief against the surrounding tissue and blood. Squeezed the hand shut and open and shut again and drove it into his leg as hard as he could.
“Sorry, man. I guess I just assumed. I figured, you know, if she was calling me . . .”
“No.”
“That wasn’t too swift of me, was it?”
“Letters.”
“Pardon?”
“She sends letters.”
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