Inukshuk

by Gregory Spatz

  But Thomas did not openly fight or run. Consequently, with Devon out of the house for college, Franklin had mostly (and instantly, happily) forgotten these particular alarms and responses—light careening harshly at the corners of his sleep-deprived eyes and the sudden knowledge that something had gone wrong in his off-hours and he was now about to face an outcome he was too late to do anything to fix or stop. The house was a sieve—a sinking ship, a junkyard full of stuff no one wanted anymore, graveyard from which everyone but him, it seemed, longed to escape. If he’d ever truly been the one in charge, it was long past the time he should resign and walk away.

  Instinctually, he knew why she must have frozen ahead of him and was now pointing, staring toward Thomas’s room.

  “Is that . . .” she began.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’d be Thomas.” Looking past her, he saw Thomas, apparently passed out, facedown on the floor. “He does sleepwalk sometimes. Let’s just hope . . .” He crossed to Thomas’s room, noting as he did the lights left on downstairs as well as upstairs. Wrong. All wrong. A lit-up sieve. He should have known.

  SEPTEMBER AND ALREADY THE NIGHTS were well below freezing, gale winds bringing up black clouds on the northern horizon and bouts of stinging snow and ice. Nothing anymore, but this flat white cusp of world—no trees, no hills, barely any shape to the land. Only rock and snow. Icy, refrozen serrated edges of drifts. Bare slick patches that crunched underfoot or broke open, engulfing him to the knee, slicing at his ankles. Slushy wet snow piled on the back sides of drifts stuck and soaked through the torn bottoms of his boots. Once, breaking through, he’d found himself up to the knees in slushy half-frozen meltwater. Funny, he could still feel it enough to panic, though he wasn’t sure whether or not to care. But he did. Enough to pull himself out and trudge on. And two days later, breaking camp, reoutfitting himself in his same wet boots, wet woolens and skins as the day before and the day before that, he’d dared to look. The toes were black and red, nails gone, except the big toe on his right foot, flesh rubbed away between most of them, one little toe bent and twisted back over the others, and though he’d pried it into place again, it wouldn’t stay. Dead. Broken. Everything from the ankles down swollen unfamiliarly to the size of his brother’s feet, his father’s. Well, if they made it through, he’d have to get the toes all cut off, to be sure. Learn to walk with canes. The older sailors said it could be done, but your days at sea were surely finished. A frozen finger or two, easy. But a man who couldn’t walk, couldn’t climb a ladder or rig a sail, he might as well try to marry a dog as sign on for service again. Life of begging under bridges, or maybe a desk job with the admiralty. And what would she think of him then, a man stuck behind canes, hobbling up and down stairs? A cripple.

  Five days he’d been allowed off sledge-hauling duty and still he couldn’t easily keep up. East. Why were they headed east now and how much farther? He tried to remember. The plan had been to walk inland, away from the worst of the coastal weather and straight south down King William’s Land to Back’s Fish River, where, Crozier assured them, they’d find game to shoot. Eskimo to barter away trinkets and silver, guns if necessary, for fresh seal meat, whale, and caribou. But here was the frozen sea before them, crammed with pack ice. If not for the sun, they’d have supposed it a misreading—compasses gone awry from the proximity to magnetic north again. But no . . . it was an unmapped inlet, deeper and wider than any others known on King William’s Land, so they circumnavigated, three days now, maybe more, and with every weary step went sideways of their goal . . . east. Every step forward doubling the number of steps toward their destination.

  Through the layers of woolen gear, he touched his few remaining possessions. The notebook from Harry Peglar taken off Gibson weeks ago when he died in his sleep. His steward’s lint brush. A pen from Jenny, for which he’d long ago run out of ink to write her. And the silver plate stolen from one of the abandoned sledge-hauled longboats, rightfully his—the gift from Franklin. He couldn’t say why he kept any of these items anymore except that knowing what they were and why they were on his person reminded him he was alive and had some hope and could still place one foot before the other.

  Ahead of him, the men in traces had stopped and broken out, collapsing to either side of the last longboat. Crozier stood to one side of them with another sailor, likely ice master Reid or one of the petty officers, getting another reading on their coordinates. Crozier lifted his spyglass and faced away from the men and spun again, pointing, saying something to Reid.

  Hoar seated himself by Work and waited.

  “What’s he after?” he asked.

  Work shrugged and lowered his head on his knees. Turned his face to the side and stared past Hoar. “Seen some tracks a ways back . . . dog sledge and Eskimo. Crozier’s hoping they got meat to barter.” Still he stared past Hoar. “Half a mile ago now should have been the end of the inlet, by my reckoning. These officers”—he coughed and lowered his voice further—“it’s like they been soaked in gin every night and got no wits about ’em anymore. Dizzy stupid they is. We’re headed north again soon or my name’s not Thomas Work.”

  “What are you sayin’—north?”

  “I’m saying we gone the wrong way.”

  “Where should we go, then?”

  “Straight across.”

  “The inlet?”

  He nodded. “It’s no inlet, Edmund; that’s your Northwest Passage. Tallurutik.”

  Still Hoar didn’t understand.

  “It’s an island,” Work said. “We’re on a bloody island. King William Island. It don’t connect with the mainland at all. This right here is the southern coast, and that”—he pointed with his chin to the inlet before them—“is the goddamn passage. Behold the great watery byway—future of English commerce we turned ourselves to walking corpses to find. Just remember you heard it from me first.”

  Hoar turned. Positioned himself with the sun in his face to be sure, and looked south. Ice. Gravel- and ice-covered rock running down to the frozen shoreline, and beyond that the white humped shapes of pack ice frozen treacherously in place. Glints of water farther on, but no real open leads. Too far to see across, but now at last he understood: not an inlet after all . . . which meant, as Work had said, it was the final missing link, the last unmapped stretch of open water connecting east and west along the top of the North American continent. The passage. Right there.

  “Thomas.” He searched his inner layers for the silver plate. Handed it to him. “If you make it home, please take this to my mother. In Portsmouth. Like I told you before,” he said. “But if you need it to barter. . . .” He shrugged. “God bless you, Thomas, and keep you.”

  “What are you off about, then?”

  “I’m not going with ye’s across. I’m done for. Right here, in sight of the passage. I don’t think I’ve got that many hours left me anyway. I’ll find my own way.” From some of the older sailors who’d gone to the brink and back again, he knew it was an easy-enough death they had to fight against themselves not to succumb to its temptation—peaceful and restful and by the time ye’re done for ye don’t even feel the cold so much. You don’t feel a thing. Like fallin’ asleep in your mother’s arms. Like fallin’ asleep in your dead mother’s arms. He could just lie out in the open and let the cold take him. “Tell the others I gone to see what’s over top of that rise there.”

  Work stared between his feet. “I won’t, either, Edmund. You go now before anyone gets an idea. We got meat for another day or two at the best and there’s talk of another.... I don’t want to be the one cutting you meat-from-bones, let’s say, but I will if I have to.”

  “Godspeed, brother.”

  He pushed himself upright and walked, singing under his breath. At the top of the ridge, he turned and kept on, the open sea always in his sight. And when he’d gone far enough that the others were out of earshot and hidden behind the ridge, he sat in a crusted drift of snow, propped up and facing south, arms open—a flesh and blood inuks
huk. He dug in his heels and tipped his head back at the sky to watch the northern stars wheel into view, and sang.

  When I was on old England shore,

  I like the young sea and more and more,

  and ofttimes flew to a sheltering place

  like a bird there to seek its mother’s case,

  and a haven she was and oft to me for I love

  I love a young and open sea . . .

  oh the sea, the sea the open sea, it grew so fresh the ever free.

  YEARS LATER, THOMAS WOULD REMEMBER it as the morning he came back to life. He’d picture his father and the woman in the white hat staring gravely at him as if from a distance, space stretched and telescoped, so they seemed below him somehow yet still looking down. Their expressions of consternation and desperate worry a cause of amusement at first, giving him more of the happy, buzzed, and sloppy-sleepy feelings that had held him down so long, face-first on the floor, dreaming in a pool of blue drool. Incongruously, his father’s feet were prodding him and then his hands and the two of them, his father and the woman with the seal-looking white hat, were touching him up and down the torso, saying things to each other, and then he understood. Scurvy symptom number three: old scars reopening. Old chicken pox scars on his chest blistered and bloody, and the cut on his neck, not from Jill after all—now he remembered: It was a rope burn from an incident with Devon years earlier that he’d picked and picked at ceaselessly, never allowing it to scab, until it was an issue. Infected. Now reopened and hemorrhagic. Scurvy, he wanted to say. Brag, even. Look at that! I did it. But he could not be sure he’d actually said any of it, and anyway, they seemed not to understand.

  “WHAT DID YOU TAKE?” his father yelled, and this time Thomas was able to hear it, though still as if it were coming from far away. “WHAT ARE YOU ON, THOMAS? ARE YOU SICK?”

  Man, I don’t know.

  They lifted and hauled him to the bathroom, forcing him to walk, and tilted him over the toilet, their fingers in his mouth, prying, one of them holding it open, the other gagging him until all the wonderful food—all the good pie and ice cream and jam and C-soaked deliciousness—came up in a syrupy mess. It flooded his nose and caused his eyes to burn and also brought the world of sound closer again.

  “Let’s clean him up,” his father said, and they were swabbing his face, his neck with a wet facecloth.

  “What is wrong with you?” his father said. He had Thomas by the jaw and squeezed painfully, rattled his head from side to side. “What have you done to yourself, please! TELL US. And HOW MUCH?”

  “Scu . . .” he tried to say. His tongue was too thick and swollen. Numbed. That was it. Wouldn’t curl to the roof of his mouth for the r sound. He tried again. “Scurvy.”

  Now his father seemed irate. Flapping his hands and yelling, yelling, though somehow (thankfully) Thomas was not able to attach most of his words back to their meanings. “ . . . old enough now to . . . this sailor crap . . . . Good God! Please tell us. . . .”

  He shook his head. Swallowed a mouthful of spit and mucus. Moved his tongue unsurely. “I . . . ’m . . . not kidding.”

  His father just glared and continued yelling, hopping from foot to foot.

  “Devon,” Thomas said at last, only it sounded more like Vevah. He nodded. Tried again. “Call . . . Devon. He’ll . . .”

  The seal-hat woman touched his father’s shoulder and leaned to whisper something in his ear. This was not someone he’d ever seen before or met. She reminded him of his mother a little, also of lemons—lemon meringue pie with the hat on. He could see why his father would like her, but who? Some kind of on-call Viking nurse? How had his father found her? What was she doing here? “You’ll be all right,” she said loudly. “Can you understand me?” Together, they walked and carried him to his room again—the door opening too fast, too wide, crashing into the edge of his desk with a sound that made him laugh and want to say whee.

  WHETHER THERE WAS ANY SENSE trusting Moira’s assurances in parting that all would be well for Thomas, he decided to wait until first light to call Devon. Hear whatever it was he had to say and then decide whether or not to make the trek to the clinic in Okotoks or Houndstitch, possibly the ER. He wasn’t actually sure where would be best. Since coming here, they’d had no medical emergencies, and it wasn’t something for which he’d planned or laid in an advance course of action. That had always been Jane’s turf—kids’ health, knowing where to go, when. And though he’d turned first to Thomas’s storyboard notebooks for clues and explanations, anything giving him a window into what had happened and why, the sense of wrongness and violation of T’s privacy in perusing those words and drawings, the page upon page of ink-wrinkled squares warping the paper, and dialogue in his crazy all-caps print running from corner to corner, notes and asterisks in the bottom margins, barely a space between words, dizzyingly unreadable, was soon outdone by his realization that there were truly no secrets here anyway—no designs or hints that might let him into whatever had gone wrong. It was just the movie. Thomas’s imaginary movie world as solidly real and all-encompassing for him as Franklin’s own Sule Skerry, but bound in ice, not water. And more copiously inked. Where Franklin had looked to the ends of his lines, his handsome, stair-stepped, wordless blank spaces sidling down the right sides of pages, to contrast and pull through buried rhymes, enjambments, eye rhymes, subtly opposing thematic tensions, Thomas had poured down more and more ink and pencil lead. Covered the page. Regardless, there was nothing revelatory here; nothing of a personal nature.

  He shelved the notebooks as he’d found them and lifted instead the black leather zip pouch of all the boys’ old D&D dice—weighty, cryptic things, not meant to be understood by adults. How many? Thirty sets or more—he couldn’t count—all manner of shapes, sizes, and colors—red, black, purple, four-sided, six-sided, twelve-sided, and so on—some probably quite expensive, all bearing numbers or mysterious symbols. What had been the spell these dice held over the boys anyway? he wondered—the hours spent together in Thomas’s room, nights and weekends, rolling, talking, plotting on graph paper—what was the secret? How did you even read the things? It’s like storytelling, Dad. Kind of build-your-own adventures, with some generic ready-made stuff, and cumulative character points and just shit tons of rules.... Was what had happened to Thomas all part of some more advanced, stranger necromancy Devon had put him up to—some graduated dungeon master for life pact or scheme between them? Probably so. Ask Devon, Thomas had said.

  As light crept over the kitchen windowsill, he called. Leaned elbows on the sink edge and looked outside, waiting as the ring tones pulsed and fluttered in his ear. The snow had stopped, but it looked to be a bleak, windswept day ahead, gray and cold.

  On the fourth ring, Devon answered, clearly awakened from sleep. “Dad.”

  “Wake you?”

  Devon puffed an exhale, possibly a yawn. “Little bit, yeah. Late night. It’s OK though. I was going to”—here he yawned openly—“sleep till like nine at the latest. Got an exam at eleven. What’s going on there?”

  “What’s going on here.” He stood back. Gripped the edge of the sink. Watched the sky in the east brighten a shade redder and more orange. “Gee, I don’t exactly know, Devon. That’s kind of why I was calling. I was hoping maybe you could tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “This morning, I woke up to find your brother passed out on the floor of his bedroom. We can start there.”

  “What in hell would I have to do with anything like that? I’m, like, five hundred kilometers away, or did you forget?”

  “Yes, well, it’s my question, too, what you could possibly have to do with it. But the one thing, after my . . . A friend of mine who was here and I, we managed to get Thomas upright and in the bathroom and evacuated of whatever nonsense he swallowed, so he was mostly awake and talking, and Thomas said . . . at least what I think he said was, ask Devon.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Well he seems to think he has scu
rvy, the best I can make of it, and that you had something do with it.”

  “Man, oh, man, Dad. I had nothing to do with that. Holy fuck.” It sounded like something had struck the phone; then Devon’s voice returned closer, crisper, and certainly more awake-sounding. “That little pussy. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the brink of blowing his cover or just dropping some good, obvious hints so you could be on the lookout, but . . . man. It’s pretty hard to tell from here how serious anything might be, hey? Maybe it’s all a bluff; maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s a partial bluff. But he’s my brother, you know, and he’s having a pretty tough go of it lately, so if he comes around with some so-called top secret experiment he’s doing and needing a little advice about it, what am I supposed to do? I’m not going to rat him out or tell him no. But you gotta believe me, too, every single time we talk, I tell him to eat some goddamn lemons. Every time. Lemons are cool.”

  Franklin released his hold of the sink edge. Slumped forward, forehead in his palm. “So . . . it’s not something you put him up to?”

  “Put him up to? Are you on glue?”