“I want to be you,” I said.
“Me? No. Be something better.”
I thought again. “I want to be famous.”
“For what?”
“Does it matter?” I asked with complete sincerity.
“I don’t know,” she responded.
“I suppose I will have to be successful.”
“Maybe not. I think success is overrated. Think of your father.”
And we laughed.
“Sometimes,” she said sadly, “you can be famous for being a magnificent failure.”
“Really?”
She nodded. The snow was drifting up against the house, two feet high against the back sliders. I could see it piling up on the windowsills, sealing us in. “Think of the Donner Party. Do you know of any of the other parties that made it across the Sierras with no problems?”
“No,” I said.
“We remember them because they didn’t make it. Only a few did. The rest died. And they’re famous.”
“I don’t want to die like that,” I said. “Maybe I could be one of the people who made it out. Who else is famous for failing?”
“Do you know who Franklin is?” she asked.
“Benjamin Franklin?”
“He was successful,” she said disparagingly. “I meant Sir John Franklin, the explorer. He was a magnificent failure. He died in the ice trying to find the Northwest Passage. He took all his men with him.”
“What’s the Northwest Passage?”
“Franklin was trying to find a way to get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by going north, rather than south around the bottom of South America. He was with two steamships. They disappeared into the ice and were only found ten years later, on King William Island.”
“Where’s that?”
“Up, up, up north. Somewhere between Greenland and Canada.”
“Tell me about Franklin.”
“Franklin’s first failure was in Canada. He had a plan to go up the Snare River and then down the Coppermine. He was going to find the western entrance of the Northwest Passage, but he really didn’t know what he was doing. He had voyageurs with him—mixed-blood French and Chippewa Indian— to hunt and navigate. And he had a surgeon to fix people. And some English to be English when they found the entrance to the Northwest Passage. It took him a long time. He went up the Snare River in birchbark canoes, then down the Coppermine. At times the canoes had to be carried. Summers were short and he kept getting stuck in the snow. Sometimes it was sixty degrees below zero. He mapped about three hundred miles of coastline, wanting to go further, but there wasn’t enough food to go on. At that point there wasn’t enough food to turn back either, but he had no choice. It was the middle of August when his group finally headed north again. There was snow. The voyageurs were sent on hunting parties, but they found little. One voyageur fell ill and had to be tended to. Franklin broke the party up into three groups. The doctor, two Englishmen, and another voyageur, Michel, stayed behind with the sick man. Franklin pushed on with the other men, then he divided that group into two. The fast people he sent ahead to get help while he walked on slowly with some others. But the third group, the one with the sick man . . .”
“What happened to the third group?” I asked.
My mother smiled and she laughed a little. “It’s a little gruesome and it might scare you.”
“I’m not scared,” I said, but I was and liked it.
“The sick voyageur died and they left him. The doctor and the other two men were starving, as was Michel, but he went out hunting. He said he’d found the carcass of a wolf torn by a deer’s horn. He offered them this meat and they ate it up. But there was no wolf. Michel had gone back and carved up the dead man. They ate the dead man’s body.”
My mother laughed and I giggled nervously.
“Then what happened?”
“The doctor and one of the other Englishmen went out to look for tripe de roche, which is some sort of wild mushroom, and while they were digging around, they heard a gunshot. They rushed back and found that Michel had shot the other Englishman, shot him dead. Michel said it was an accident, that his gun went off. But the dead man was wearing a nightcap and that nightcap had gunpowder on it, which meant that Michel had been holding the gun close to the dead man’s head.”
“So it wasn’t an accident?”
“No. The two Englishmen were terrified that Michel was going to shoot them.”
“Why?”
“Because he was hungry.”
“Oh.”
“So the doctor shot Michel.” My mother gestured for me to get her cigarettes off the coffee table, and I did. “When the doctor and the other Englishmen finally caught up with Franklin, they were stronger than any of the other men. It was impossible for them to have subsisted only on the mushrooms, but no one talked about how they’d made it out of the snow.”
“Why didn’t anyone talk about it?”
“I suppose because they were English. The English don’t talk about things like that.”
The fire snapped and crackled in the grate. The fire shifted and a heavy log fell, throwing sparks onto the carpet. My mother calmly stamped them out with the ashtray. “Franklin went to Tasmania after that, as a governor. Everyone thought his exploring days were over, but then they sent him to find the Northwest Passage from the east, and he died up there, frozen in the ice.”
“What did he die from?”
“I think it was the tinned beef, botulism. Not a very spectacular death. But then Franklin was not a very spectacular man. All of his crewmen died, some on the ship from the tinned beef, others trying to find their way to the whaling camps.”
“They all died?”
“Imagine it, the snow, the ice, and death breathing over them all, one by one. And then the wind, burying them beneath the snow, preserving all the bodies as if the Arctic Circle was a huge meat locker.”
“That’s very sad,” I said. “They must have been very cold.”
My mother stroked my hair. “One man might have made it out.”
“Really,” I said, a bit cheered.
“His name was Crozier and he was tough, not like Franklin. He knew the Arctic well. He was heading for a river with the stronger men, but they were all dying around him because there was no food. The men started eating the ones that had died. Then they were strong and could go on. Crozier ate whatever was there. He headed south and the men marched with him and they died and he ate them and in the end, he was the only one alive. Some people say he joined up with the Chippewas.”
“Is he famous?”
“Crozier? Not as famous as Franklin.”
“Because he was successful,” I said sadly.
“Perhaps.”
I fell asleep shortly after that and awoke maybe an hour later. My mother was fixing the fire and the flames under lit her face, showing her broad cheekbones. Red light reflected in the whites of her eyes.
“Can’t you sleep?” she asked me.
“I don’t want to. I wish it snowed all the time like this. Then I’d never have to go to school and you’d never have to take your medicine.”
My mother sighed. She pulled her blanket around her and looked at me with tenderness.
“What is the most important thing in the world?” I asked.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Love, probably.”
My mother laughed. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t know. Someone must have.”
“Well it’s not,” she smiled. “That’s what people tell little girls.”
“Why?”
My mother stared at a fixed point in the fire. “They tell little girls that so that the little girls will fall in love with handsome men and get married. And the little girls believe them and grow up into old women who take pills and sleep on couches.”
“Was Dad handsome?”
“Very. And he still is, only you can’t see it.”
I thought for a mom
ent, then took up my mother’s cigarettes and lit one, puffing a little and coughing. She didn’t seem to care.
“So what is the most important thing?” I asked.
Mother nodded to someone, not me, an invisible authoritative someone in the middle of the room and all the darkness left her face. She smiled that wild smile that she sometimes had, that made my father rush her home when we were out. “The most important thing is hunger.”
“Hunger?”
“Persius, who was a writer in ancient Rome, said that the stomach is the teacher of the arts and the dispenser of invention. He was right.” My mother looked at me appraisingly and I tilted my head to one side, as always weighing what the grownups told me with appropriate skepticism.
“Know hunger and satisfy it,” she said. “That’s the key to success.”
“But I don’t want to be successful.”
“Then it’s the key to freedom and everyone wants to be free.”
But I didn’t know what freedom was and when I thought about being free I was left with the image of me standing on the side of the road, alone and deserted.
The next morning I woke up with an icy breeze blowing on my face. The back sliders were wide open. A strong wind had swept the backyard, pushing the snow into neatly angled drifts up against the fences, obliterating our little rock wall—created by field-clearing pilgrims—at the back. It was not yet dawn but a near-full moon threw off a blue light reflected on every surface and even the trees, weighted with ice, glowed silver.
My mother, stark naked, was running around the yard.
My first instinct was to get her coat, to cover her up and bring her in, but I didn’t. Instead I watched her clumsy dancing, leaping, spinning and wondered how she could be barefoot on the ice and snow and not feel the cold at all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many books were useful in the writing of this one, especially The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (Hugh Honour, Pantheon Books, 1975), for aiding me in my pursuit of Columbus and Vespucci; The Fatal Shores (Robert Hughes, Knopf, 1986), for introducing me to Alexander Pearce; History of the Donner Party (C. F. McGlashan, Stanford University Press, 1940), for preserving the remains of the Donner Party members; Iceblink (Scott Cookman, John Wiley and Sons, 2000), for knowing what happened to Franklin; Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls (Edward E. Leslie, Mariner Books, 1988), for its canny chronicling of man versus nature; The Custom of the Sea (Neil Hanson, John Wiley and Sons, 1999), which reminds us that the concept of civilization can be brought to anything; Romantic Art (William Vaughn, Thames and Hudson, 1978), for keeping Gericault and Goya alive; Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (Christy G. Turner II and Jacqueline A. Turner, University of Utah Press, 1999), for its perseverance in the face of modern morality; and for the book Goya (Keizo Kanki, Ward Lock, 1970), given to my mother for Christmas once when I was small, which has gnawed on my mind for the last twenty-eight years, with special thanks to Gordana, who was from Split and had the inspiration to give it to her.
Also, I would like to thank Esmond Harmsworth, who braved all sorts of tempests and was willful enough to force the multiple revisions. And to Elisabeth Schmitz, who oversaw the final product with care and intelligence.
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