by Esi Edugyan
“They will not have taken the captain’s barrels, then?” I said.
Titch smiled down at me, his breath visible in the cold. “I expect not, no.”
We did not speak of it, but with every league through those waters a sense of lightness, of freedom, took hold in us. It was as though the great emptiness allowed us to forget. Sometimes our eyes would meet, and we’d give a quiet laugh, with no sense or reason for it.
And so onward we went, northward. Titch had arranged our passage to a trading company’s outpost on the western line of Hudson Bay. The weeks passed, and the sunlight lay dazzling on the ice, the snow dunes sculpted into strange feathered shapes by the wind. Seeing them, I began to feel strangely solitary, alone. It seemed we all did, for the four of us, Titch, Captain Holloway, Mister Ibel and I, seemed to turn away from each other in that icy climate, as though the cold had entered more than just our flesh; as though we longed for a solitude unreachable in the tight confines of that ship. My mind kept casting itself back, and I found myself thinking of Mister Willard, of Mister Philip, of my long years at Faith—the way the red dust would gather in my throat, the itch of sweat in the small of my spine as I hacked at the cane, the feel of Big Kit’s hot hand gripping my shoulder in affection.
* * *
—
FINALLY WE NEARED the Bay, and the trading post.
The black waters were calm and still speckled with chunks of ice. Titch bade Captain Holloway and Mister Ibel good fortune, heartily shaking hands. Then we climbed into a small cutter that rocked as we disentangled ourselves from the rope ladder.
We were rowed towards the miserable, leaning wood shacks that made up the post.
Inside the trading post a young white-haired trader greeted us, reeking strongly of whisky. He leaned his thin arms on the plank before him, the skin at his wrists cracked and scabbed with rash. He narrowed his glassy pink eyes at us. “Who did you say?”
Titch stepped forward, his clothes rasping with ice. “James Wilde, the Englishman, the naturalist. He was said to have died at one of the westernmost outposts. I am not certain it is so.”
The trader swiped at his running nose. “What?”
Titch frowned in impatience. “Wilde. James Wilde. Surely there are not so many gentleman naturalists in these parts?”
The trader grunted; he peered roughly at us. “Is it he you are meaning, or some other body?”
“Wilde,” Titch said sharply. “Wilde. Now if you will direct me to the location of his last encampment, I will be grateful.”
The trader stared silently at us, his eyes a fierce pink in the hazy glow of the lanterns.
Titch glanced at me in exasperation, then back at the man. “Did you hear me?”
Without speaking, the trader turned suddenly around, and in a loud bark called to a lone man standing some paces outside in the snow. “Him,” said the trader, slurring his words at us, “he knows the way like he knows his own arse. He won’t take you wrong.”
Titch looked nervous, caution in his eyes. He watched as the dark figure absorbed our glances, suddenly aware of our attention. Slowly, like a shadow unattached to any entity, he began to drift towards us.
“He won’t take you wrong,” the trader repeated. “He and the old hermit have an understanding.”
“An understanding?” Titch murmured in distraction, his gaze still fixed on the man crunching closer through the snow. He appeared to be a tall Esquimau with a long knife tucked into his belt.
The trader ran a thick, rash-riddled wrist under his leaking nose. “This one’s his slave, I think. Or his wife. It’s something like that. Been here so long he’s half-savage himself. You can’t think like a savage and still be a man.”
He said this cheerfully, not sparing me a glance.
Titch, to my surprise, thanked the man, and began to walk backwards over the snow.
Without another glance the man returned to his drinking.
I rushed after Titch. In dread I watched the far-off man approach, his thick, slow steps puncturing the crust of snow. I glanced up at Titch, hoping for some sign that we might run, but he only paused in the cold, brutal air, his eyes narrowed against the wind.
How alarming the stranger was! How large and spectral. His oiled caribou skin creaked with ice, the reek of old frost and mud coming off him. He was tall and reed-thin, his cadaverous cheeks chapped with wind, a livid beard of grey hairs raging from his face. His complexion was mottled with fleshy brown moles, and to the right of his high-arched nose stood a vicious, glistening boil that looked painful and full of poison. His eyes were as grey as his hair, and they regarded Titch with a blunt, vicious judgment that unsettled me.
And then all at once Titch was gripping the man’s hands, and with a look of shock and even anguish the man grabbed back at him, and they held on, laughing quietly to each other. The man’s laugh was like a seal’s bark, sharp and pleasant. He did not speak and Titch also said nothing.
It was Peter House himself. By chance he had been at the outpost collecting goods. I watched Titch step away from him and begin to make strange, elegant gestures with his hands. The man gestured back, slapping at his chest and torquing his fingers into wondrous shapes. His hands were wrinkled, with a spray of grey hair matting the knuckles. Titch nodded and nodded his understanding. I stood like a simpleton, staring at both in wonder.
Titch blinked viciously, swiping at his eyes. But I could see he was relieved, even happy, and I knew then that the death was a lie.
Before I could say any word, Peter House was frowning down at me, assessing me with frank, pale eyes. He smiled brusquely so that I almost did not see it, and reached for the sack in my hands, which held all our provisions. Then he turned and began crunching through the sullied snow towards a sled in the distance, the pack slung over his shoulder.
“Peter will take us to the camp,” said Titch as we followed him. “Wash, my father is alive. He is alive.”
Hearing it spoken aloud, I shivered at the eeriness of it. “But did he tell it to you, the man?”
“Peter is dumb, Wash, he does not speak. He talks with his hands.”
His voice was tinged with relief, and yet there was an air of exhaustion and sadness to him, as if the revelation had drained all his energies. He placed a cold, thin hand on my shoulder, staring ahead at the awaiting sled. In the distance we had not noticed the dark-faced Esquimau guide standing there. At our approach he acknowledged us with quiet, intelligent eyes, and took the pack from Mister Peter to lash it fast to his sled. Then he bade us climb on, like baggage ourselves.
The guide cried out a command to the enormous dogs. We lurched sharply forward, and then we were on our way, into the great, echoing domes of snow.
6
AH, BUT THE COLD. I dreamed about that cold for years after. It had a colour, a taste—it wrapped itself around one like an unwelcome skin and began, ever so delicately, to squeeze. My healed ribs started to ache. I could not catch my breath.
We journeyed in a strange sled-like contraption drawn by a team of wet-jawed dogs. Titch, Mister Peter and I sat in the bed of the sled; the guide stood behind us, crying out hoarsely to his creatures. The long blades of the sled jounced and bumped across the packed snow. I listened to the runners scrape and hiss as we went. We were wrapped and blanketed until we could not move. In all my life I had not dreamed such a place possible, had not thought snow could be so solid, so vast. The knifing winds carved it into towers, sharpened it to precipices and chasms. And all this, I thought, squinting through raw, frozen eyelids—all this is only water, nothing more.
I had been warned by Mister Ibel that snow was white, and cold. But it was not white: it held all the colours of the spectrum. It was blue and green and yellow and teal; there were delicate pink tintings in some of the cliffs as we passed. As the light shifted in the sky, so too did the snow around us deepen, find n
ew hues, the way an ocean is never blue but some constantly changing colour. Nor was the cold simply cold—it was the devouring of heat, a complete sucking of warmth from the blood until what remained was the absence of heat. When the wind stirred, it would scythe through the skin as if we were the cane and the wind were our terrible reaping.
North we went, north and then west, and then north again. We stopped to rest the dogs; our guide tethered them to stakes he had driven into the ice, to keep them from attacking each other. They sat, hunched white mounds of fur ruffling in the wind, their eyes slivered shut. I made a quick, vivid sketch in pencil, wondering at their ferocity. Our guide passed us a small cube of what Titch explained must be blubber. It tasted rank, oily, but I did not complain.
And all the while we spoke very little about what we were venturing towards, or what we were leaving behind. I thought of my life at Faith and it all seemed a figment, a distant, vicious dream.
* * *
—
WE HAD LEFT in the dark hour of the morning, and we rode swiftly all day, stopping on occasion to rest. We finally arrived very late in the afternoon, as the darkness was descending again. I had observed an increasing uneasiness in Titch as we travelled, as though he were not yet ready to meet with his whole and living father. I understood we had arrived when our guide drew the dogs to a halt at the centre of five large snowdrifts, the blades of his sled hissing to a stop. Mister Peter stepped down from the hold, his beard full of ice, and began unpacking the wooden crates that made up our backrest. Titch and I shifted uncomfortably, not speaking as the sled was gradually disassembled.
My tongue felt huge and cold in my mouth. My voice creaked after the long, frozen silence of the sled. “Are we here?” I asked Titch hoarsely. “Is this your father’s camp?”
For I saw now they were not snowdrifts at all, but domes of ice, five of them, arranged in a rough pattern. I was astonished to see these habitats; fear cut through me, as though I was gazing upon the site of a resurrection. As we slid down from the sled, struggling to our feet, I glimpsed hides draped over the entrances. Mister Peter made rapid gestures with his fingers, then pointed to the third dome.
“They are called igloos, Wash,” Titch said through his oiled sealskin, his voice wavering, nervous. “The ice acts as an insulator. It keeps the inside perfectly warm.”
I doubted this very much. But I had seen enough strangeness to understand the world was unfathomable. Titch, I knew, would find such a notion unscientific, but it mattered very little to me from where I stood, a child of the tropics, half-obliterated by a cold that made my mended ribs ache. I turned and studied the darkening snowfields around us. Mister Willard felt like a haunting from another life entirely. Truly, we were at the ends of the earth.
Titch was already crunching through the snow towards the third dome. He paused at the entrance, and as he glanced back to Peter, I glimpsed the uncertainty in his face. But Mister Peter and the Esquimau were already disentangling the dogs from the harnesses, staking them in a row.
Titch hesitated a moment longer, then squatted down on his hands and knees to draw the hide curtain to one side and crawl through.
I ran over the snow, slipping, and slid to a stop abruptly at the entrance. My heart clapping in my chest, I drew a breath and went in too.
The inside was bright but smoky, a stink of burning fat in the air.
“Hello?” I heard Titch murmur. There was a clatter from within, and then stillness. “Is anyone here?”
I remained crouched on my hands in the entrance, straining to see past Titch.
And then I glimpsed him, a man rising from the shadows: like a figure from myth, the great patriarch of the Wildes, Fellow of the Royal Society, recipient of the Copley Medal and the Bakerian lectureship, the man whose learning had kindled his son’s mind and never burned down, the man who had drawn us north through icefield and hazard, against what odds, oh, that man, whose very treatise on the icy nature of comets once left the Sorbonne in chaos, whose learning could be expressed in twelve languages, who admired the jokes of the Tartars and the salads of the Inca, who had instructed his three-year-old son to scoop when his hand held a knife and to cut when it held a spoon, for no person ought to assume a tool’s use is determined by the tool, the man of a thousand lifetimes, who had set his heavy English leather boots on the soil of five continents, and collected the mud from each—I saw him, and I kneeled dripping in the low entrance, staring. For he was short, fat, and under his scraggly whiskers was a face very much alive and quite brutally ugly.
He peered out at us, a light frown on his hard, round face. I saw he had his four front teeth out, upper and lower, and in their place were wooden ones.
* * *
—
I COULD NOT SHAKE the sense that we had come to meet our own deaths.
Titch was in a paralysis of astonishment. He hugged his father, held on with a kind of anguish, while Mister Wilde patted at his back, openly embarrassed by his son’s affections. Then, swiftly disentangling himself, Mister Wilde gestured for us to follow; sparing me no glance, he slipped gracefully out through the igloo’s entrance. I trailed after Titch, and Titch followed his father, his steps ambling, sloppy, like those of a drunk. More than once he almost slipped, so numb with shock was he. How I felt for him, in his state. To actually witness his father alive, after months of believing him dead—I could hardly fathom the distress of it.
We were led back outside to the fifth igloo, where inside we found a group of Esquimaux eating some pale, whitish repast. They raised their faces to us, their eyes gliding past Titch to fix on me. What an improbable creature I must have seemed to them, a boy black as the winter sea and ruinously burnt. They followed me with quiet eyes, chewing.
Only when we’d settled in amongst the men did Titch attempt to speak.
Mister Wilde raised a sharp hand. “I know why you are come.”
Titch hesitated, glancing at the other men there. “I do not think you do, Father.”
“You are come,” said Mister Wilde, his bright eyes wide and light-filled, “because you believed me dead.”
Titch and I glanced quietly at each other. The days of nervous anticipation had exhausted us both, and in the flickering brown light of these cramped quarters Titch appeared haggard, used up. The heat in here was most oppressive, smelling blackly of animal fat, the main sound that of the other men’s jaws working moistly. The men were part of Mister Wilde’s small encampment here, for though he and Mister Peter craved isolation, it was impossible for two white men to live alone in these plains. Mister Peter came and went with his Esquimau comrade, and together they supplied Mister Wilde with all the goods and tools he needed from the outposts. One sensed Mister Wilde had little to no communion with the Esquimaux himself—they were a necessity only, insurance against death. Mister Peter was his intermediary, and indeed the only man with whom he seemed to converse. They sat in the near silence of the igloo, their active hands casting shadows in the warm orange light. With Mister Peter he was affectionate and even tender. He touched him a great deal, even once tugging the greying hair at his nape softly. Titch often looked at his own hands as they spoke. He grew flustered and appeared flushed in the unnatural light. Mister Peter stayed but a short while, then left again with one of the Esquimaux on an errand.
“I knew there was much rumour,” Mister Wilde said when Titch attempted once again to explain the full impact of the fraud. “I was first made aware of it when Peter received a letter from a colleague in Mexico asking after my death. We did not think much of it until a second letter arrived from Germany—a friend in Heidelberg lamenting my passing. But I had no notion of the rumour reaching you and your mother. It seems I rather underestimated the intrepid nature of human stupidity. I am horrified. If I’d anticipated how widely it would spread, I would of course have sent word dispelling the falsehood. In fact I will need to post a note to your moth
er at once.”
“But who concocted the lie? How did it reach us?”
“Has the altitude impaired your hearing, boy? I have just said I do not know.”
Titch was silent.
His father’s top lip twitched painfully over his wooden teeth, and I realized he was attempting to smile. “I do thank you, Christopher, for the sentiment you have shown in coming all this way, though you see now it is a fool’s errand.”
Titch stared down at his hands, and for some moments the only sound was of the men shifting in their thick clothes.
Then Titch said, “Please do not mention I have come here, when you do write to her.”
“Stolen off again, have you?” Mister Wilde chuckled, scratching at his chin. “Ah, Christopher.”
I listened sleepily to their halting voices, and it was as though both belonged to ghosts, so gauzy and hollow were they.
Abruptly I was awoken, and Titch and I were given heavy furs for sleeping and a small dish with a seal-fat candle for light. The floor was laid with furs and wooden planks underneath, though I could not imagine where wood had been procured in this wasteland. Perhaps from a trading vessel at the outpost.
Stacked against the far walls were wooden crates with numbers burned into them; these we did not disturb. I lay down, and almost at once felt a wash of exhaustion come over me.
“Titch,” I mumbled. “What did you think when first you laid eyes on him? You must have been very shocked, and very happy.”
“Rather more shocked than happy, I think. Indeed, it is difficult to get beyond the shock. And being again in his presence, I am reminded of how—well, how complex he can be.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I did not think his camp would be so big.”
“Yes.”
“He has been here a long time, hasn’t he?”
“A lifetime, I think. Even before he came here, he was here.”