Inukshuk

by Gregory Spatz

  Some crewmen and officers, he knew, would be glad for Crozier’s ascendance to commander. They’d never say so publicly. Most of them had been hoping for some time now that Crozier would win his campaign to get them off the ships and at least partially entrenched onshore, stone tent circles built, supplies cached, cookstoves in place, so on, just in case the ice never broke up, in case the ships went down or, at the very least, so they’d have another place to overwinter and a change of scenery. Some relief from the constant drear of being entrapped belowdecks—the terrifying noise of the ice pack. According to some of the more experienced sailors, the ships couldn’t last another winter, frozen in. They had to go down. They’d mourn Franklin’s loss, of course; all of them would, but they might, some of them, feel relief. And hadn’t he, Edmund Hoar, had his own little part in spreading some of that word, fomenting the talk among crewmen, sharing with them details from exchanges he’d overheard between officers at mealtimes? Of course. They all had, all the stewards. Trouble was, none of it was half as neat or black and white as what he always heard later coming back from the men: Franklin says he’d sooner die than abandon ship . . . says we got food for twelve more years in a pinch. . . . Fitzjames’s with Crozier and the ice masters and them; word is, he wants to double our rum rations for winter. . . . Gore is a Franklinite, says the ships won’t ever sink. Half-truths at best. And the questions. Says the whole Anglican liturgy at every mealtime? The reason for the confusion . . . partly it was the men themselves and their tendency, retelling a story, to embellish and distort. Draw wrong conclusions. Spin yarns. But there had always been something of Franklin you just couldn’t impart—some aspect of his manner and comportment. What might appear as carelessness or feckless privilege was something else . . . was really a way he cared more deeply, more personally for the crew as individuals than did any other of the officers—more than any high-ranking officer Hoar had ever encountered. It set him apart, always, gave him a glow that could seem dandyish or silly. Removed. Could too easily be misread anyway. But Franklin never missed a thing. He knew every detail of every one of the crewmen’s lives and had cared for them....

  The ice would break up soon. It had to. Then they’d sail. Maybe Crozier would shift quarters to Erebus, take Franklin’s quarters, and there he’d be, Edmund Hoar, first in service still to the commander of the greatest Arctic expedition of all time, current tugging them out finally, free and homeward-bound. Yes, things were all about to take a turn for the better. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the good. Wasn’t that how it always worked? Better to believe than not. Believe on Him and His will be done.... Franklin’s words.

  He slid from his perch back onto the track, walking to keep warm and pumping his arms. No way to guess the time. Maybe hours left before reveille, maybe minutes—anyway, what was the point of going back belowdecks and trying to sleep when so much was about to change? The sun had pitched farther above the horizon, bloated white disk of light and no heat, glaring eye, medallion, locket, a summons to all his young blood: no sleep, no sleep, no sleep. Wake up, he wanted to shout. Come on everyone! Up! There’s no time left! Franklin’s gone. His feet crunched over the ice and cold magnified the sibilance of his breaths in and out. A shiver ran from his gut to the sweating, cold top of his head. Maybe he was the one asleep and all of it, the endless sun and cold, himself in it, Franklin belowdecks dying, all of it, just one long bad dream.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, THE COLD RETURNED. He could tell from the ache in the joint of his left big toe (bone spur, ingrown nail, or callus, precursor to arthritis—he didn’t know, and didn’t necessarily want to know)—a small discomfort he’d happily and instantly forgotten with the Chinook. He rolled onto his side and drew up his left knee to reach the offending joint, rubbing through the ache with both hands and occupying several planes of awareness simultaneously. One involved the cold, which he felt now not just in his foot but beyond the walls and through the hot air blown over him from the furnace. Yes, it was back. Winter. He could almost make out trees swaying and backlit against the dim Calgary-lit predawn glow on the horizon. Shadow of something vaguely human-shaped there as well beside them, erect and flickering in and out sight against the wind. Fence post? No, there was no fence post there. The notion of one materializing suddenly, magically, or of his own sleep-muddled disorientation causing him to misidentify whatever was really there (trick of shadow and light projected onto the plastic-covered glass?), pleasingly beguiled him. He almost didn’t want to know any better what he was seeing. Just beneath this was another layer of thought, this one having to do with Moira, and again her imaginary presence beside him—because once, near the end of their days together, Jane had awakened in the middle of the night with leg cramps, and he’d been amazed at how fast the years of their intimacy trumped all the tension between them and her unshakable resolve to leave. Without a word, he’d gone to work holding her legs, pushing back the cramped toes, soothing and massaging until, still half-wrapped around each other, they’d both fallen back to sleep, as if nothing were wrong. He’d known then as certainly as he also knew she would be gone in less than a week that this would be the thing he missed most in her absence—this silent companionability and the assumed kindness between them; the automatic, unquestioning doing for each other. Nothing needed to be said about it. If Moira were here? It would be like that again, yes . . . but different. Better? So maybe, sure, it was time after all—as Devon had put it: Get off the pot. Just beneath this thought stream were the dreams that had absorbed him until the sudden pain: a fake oceanic surf sound, female figure morphing from Jane to Moira and back again, sound of someone singing. And with those recollected sounds and images, the sudden revelation that, no, it was not a voice that had awakened him, nor was it the dull, sticky pain in his foot; it was an actual sound. A door. The downstairs back door opening and then blowing shut hard. He’d known this without really knowing it even as he’d heard it in his sleep. And that . . . that was no fence post below his window, but a human figure. His own son. His son was standing outside in the backyard, doing something weird.

  Upright, fingers on the plastic seal overlying cold glass, he tried for a better view, simultaneously pulling on pants and then slipping into a sweater. Yes, the kid was outside, naked, it looked like, a blanket around his shoulders, and ducking and weaving his head and shoulders as if he were in a slow-motion boxing match against someone. Sleepwalking? But he hadn’t done that in years. Again, Franklin held a hand flat to the plastic-covered window. Cold. Very cold. Imprint of condensation surrounding where the fingers had been. Closed the hand and rapped futilely at the windowpane, through the plastic, to get Thomas’s attention. “Thomas!” He leaned into it, considered the work of resealing the window in plastic, and stopped just short of clawing through to pull up the sash. “Goddamn kid,” he said, and went down the hall for his coat and shoes. Out the back door.

  Cold, but not terrible, and instantly his eyes were tearing. Underfoot, the ice-encrusted grass broke oddly, collapsing under his weight and dampening his bare ankles, causing him to widen his gait and walk stiff-legged over the yard. “Hey,” he said. “Thomas!” From previous experience with Thomas’s sleepwalking episodes, he knew better than to expect the boy to rouse instantly. They might carry on a full-fledged, if completely illogical, conversation about aliens or swimming pools under the house before the boy was really himself again—usually not until they’d gotten him laid out in his bed again, back to where the sleep-induced physical transmigration had begun. Only then his eyes might snap open suddenly and he’d ask what they were doing here in his room, what was going on? Sometimes not even that. Sometimes he never wakened out of it at all. How many years now since the last occurrence? Several anyway. Since the house on Beverly. One of Jane’s theories: She’d likened it to a form of faulty reception—like an old TV getting too strong a signal on the wrong channel. Another: He’d been dosed incorrectly with general anesthetic while having two cavities filled at age three. A kind of latent a
utism triggered by the anesthetic. Franklin wasn’t sure what to believe, what was true or false, and he was pretty sure neither he nor Jane had ever had a similar problem growing up, but he’d been thankful when it all appeared to have resolved itself and gone away. The sight of Thomas at five and six years old stumbling trance-footed down a stairway, bumping into banisters and walls, pj bottoms soaked to the cuffs with urine, it had more than once sent him almost over the edge of panic. With this was another recollection: Jane walking the mostly asleep Thomas to the toilet on Beverly Street and instructing him, as loud-voiced as possible, Wake up, T! Are you awake now? Good. Lift the seat now, honey. No, not yet! Pj’s first! Are you awake? Point it down, honey. No! Down. And watching as she suddenly, tenderly but with exasperation, took hold of Thomas’s penis at the last second, cradling him back against her waist and pointing the stream of his urine into the toilet bowl. Watching and sharing with her amused looks of frustration, and not for the first time registering his gratitude that this woman, his wife, the one with whom he’d chosen to bear and raise children, did not have any of the weird moral scrupulousness or twisted foibles regarding sexuality that had, in his opinion, more or less ruined his parents and so many other people from his parents’ generation. A penis was a penis. No big deal, nothing to be ashamed of.

  Meanwhile, here was Thomas, almost man-aged and standing in their backyard, evidently asleep, and covered in nothing but a thin blanket. Barefoot.

  “Honey?”

  He wasn’t up to this. This was never supposed to have been his job.

  “Thomas.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Hi. Thomas. Are you aware that you’re standing in our backyard in your Skivvies on a winter night?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Good. You are. That’s good. Then you’re probably also aware that it’s not such a good idea?”

  Face-to-face now, he saw Thomas had done something to his hair; he couldn’t tell what in the half-light—maybe just the way he’d been lying on it, asleep, but it appeared as if he’d been fully shorn on one side. His nose ran freely over his lips and mucus dripped from his chin. His neck, too, appeared wet. Crying? Had he been out here crying?

  “OK, Dad. But I liked it.”

  “Pretty cold, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Cold, yeah.”

  “OK, then. Let’s go back inside. Get a little hot milk in you?”

  “No milk. See—bad for my health.”

  “OK. But you agree we should go back inside?”

  “They were going to bury him, I think. Right here.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You know.”

  “I do?”

  “Sure.”

  “OK. I—”

  “And they needed our help.”

  “Help. With . . .”

  “Well, I don’t know yet. They’ll tell us when they need it.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  He turned Thomas to face the house and, hands on his shoulders, pushed him along step by step back across the yard.

  “Just some guys.”

  “‘Some guys,’” he repeated. “And when do you figure they’ll tell us if they needed our help?”

  “I don’t know. Soon as they’re ready.”

  “But how do you know they needed our help at all?”

  “Because. It’s obvious. And they said so.”

  “Right. Here come the steps. Easy, tiger. One up, next one.” When it was happening more often, he’d read some of the articles and books on somnambulation. He’d heard of people breaking bones in their sleep. The mind could anesthetize itself well enough, apparently, you could walk right off a curb or stair, twist an ankle, and keep going. Crash a car and never wake up. He didn’t think any of this would happen to Thomas, but all the same, he worried. Now, as when he’d been younger, Thomas was remarkably compliant and agreeable—easy to direct—but not really in control of his body. “No. You’ve got to lift first, here, and then step up.” Thomas had stopped moving forward. Both feet on the second stair going up to the back doorway, he seemed intent on shuffling forward without raising his feet. Franklin tried again. “Up. Honey? Are you listening?” And when Thomas still didn’t move, he drew him back, tilted, caught him in his arms and lifted, staggering up and sideways through the open doorway, and inside.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Thomas. Are you awake yet?” The boy was surprisingly heavy, dense and awkward to carry, and it didn’t help that once they were inside, heading for the couch, where Franklin intended to dump him, only then did Thomas start fully coming to his senses. He stiffened in Franklin’s arms and tried to bolt, crashing back with his head and nearly clipping Franklin’s chin. “Stop! Can you just wait—”

  “What’s going on here?”

  “You tell me.”

  “PUT ME DOWN NOW THIS INSTANT.”

  He angled Thomas floorward.

  “What were you doing, man?”

  Briefly, they faced each other in the darkened living room. Thomas’s hands were in fists and he looked poised to strike—a reflexive, meaningless stance, Franklin was pretty sure. Thomas had never hit anyone in his life. Probably. Maybe Devon once or twice, and then in self-defense.

  “Easy there. You were sleepwalking, kiddo. Outside. OK? I had to get you in.”

  “What the . . .”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Thomas straightened and breathed once in and out. Combed fingers through his hair and flopped it side to side until, to Franklin’s relief, it all appeared more or less proportional. Good. So he hadn’t done something ridiculous to himself with scissors or a knife. “Sleepwalking,” he said. “But I don’t remember . . .”

  “No, you never do.”

  “Did I say anything, though, like what I was dreaming?”

  “They were going to bury him, I think you said, and they needed our help. Something like that.”

  He nodded. He seemed vaguely pleased by this, or amused—at pains to conceal an embarrassed pride, and attempting to overcover that with puzzlement. Like he had an unfair advantage over Franklin, a secret, but didn’t want to have to say so. “Yes,” he said, still nodding. “It’s coming back now. Only, they didn’t bury him. It was a concrete cairn. I’m pretty sure of that.”

  “Let me guess. Franklin?”

  Thomas nodded.

  This was getting ridiculous. So many things he could say now and so many different tones in which to say them—dismissive, chiding, jokily concerned, mad—he couldn’t choose. Could not chart a course or deduce ahead of time what might give him any leverage. “Thomas,” he said. Just as likely none of his words would ever make a difference. He turned and started out of the room. “That back door is still unlocked. Would you mind, please, locking before you head to bed?” Turned again. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  Thomas shrugged. “Fine, Dad. All’s well.”

  “To bed, then. And stay there.”

  2

  KABLUNA

  ALWAYS, IN THE LAST TEN MINUTES of second period, it happened, as if some hitch in the day’s passage hung him up and kept him from engaging until he’d bumped past it—some internal thermostat cued to the school clock’s minute hand ticking infinitesimally ahead, 10:05 . . . 10:06—Thomas’s blood suddenly, unreasonably released, moved faster, his bladder filled, and his head swam with good feelings. He couldn’t help it. Always the accompanying thoughts and emotions were more or less the same: He’d survive. The day had passed its hump. He was safe. He’d even occasionally tried not looking, keeping his eyes down on his open math book and the sheet of graph paper on which he was supposedly working out the evening’s homework problems, straying only as far as quick sideways glances at the desk to his left or right. It made no difference. Clock or no clock, he knew.

  Tick. A new lead opening into the rest of the day.

  He’d be all right.

  This day, waking up over what should have been a set of inequalities and was instead turning
into yet another sketch of Franklin’s hand, this time holding a spoon, a series of sketches, actually, morphing from the outer edges of the page ever inward, two things occurred to him almost simultaneously. One was that his feet hurt. He’d been registering this all morning—a new tenderness in the balls and sides of his feet—without giving it his full attention or really identifying what it was or how it had come to exist. Something related to the sudden change in temperature and his depleted vitamin C levels, he’d figured. But now, as he came awake, he knew what had caused the pain and what it signified: It was from walking barefoot outside the night before, sleepwalking, over their backyard of frozen grass and rocky soil. Maybe, if he thought hard enough about it, he could even read backward from the sore spots and abrasions on his feet to retrace his exact movement across the yard—remember where he’d gone, what he’d been dreaming. Picturing it—the seldom-used picnic table by their property line, the old apple trees, bumpy ground and frozen grass—the second revelation came, the thing he’d never considered before: He could walk. Like the men. To suffer as they’d suffered and know their miserable end without having to endure it himself, he didn’t need just to starve himself of vitamin C until his gums swelled and bled and his skin turned black; he could walk. Walk north from here, say to Edmonton, or west to Banff. Somewhere tragically, heroically far. A few hundred kilometers, sleeping outside and hauling a heavy weight of some kind, eating nothing but tinned meat, jerky, and chocolate.