James Morrow: This Is the Way the World Ends

‘It’s good to see you again, ma’am.’ Despite the cold, the waves of well-being managed to reach him. ‘I was certain your little sailboat would be swamped.’

‘The documents barge picked me up.’

‘You saw the trial?’

‘I caught your part. Don’t worry, George, nothing you could have said would have changed the verdict… So, tell me, did Leonardo’s painting predict the future?’

‘I saw my daughter again.’ He fixed on the dark effluvium coming from the Cat’s tailpipe. ‘But it wasn’t her – it just seemed like her. You shouldn’t have raised my hopes.’

‘ You raised your hopes.’

‘I went to that marble city like you said I should, and I found Professor Carter, and he made me fertile, and it didn’t matter.’

‘That’s the way things go in these post-exchange environments. Remember the good old days, when you wrote those epitaphs for me in Massachusetts? “She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here,” right?’ She pointed her ice cane toward the Cat. ‘It’s warm in the cab, and we have work to do.’

They drove past a dozen deserted ice limbos and ten thousand bereft scopas suits. Once the Cat was atop the glacial tongue, Nadine headed for the eastern face of the nunatak and drove up the slope. Five ice-sealed corpses swung on their living gibbets.

The Cat stopped before Brat Tarmac’s remains. Drops of frozen blood hung from his bullet wounds like tears leaving blind eyes. George climbed to the roof, a hacksaw wrapped tightly in his glove. He peeled off the belt that held the general’s man-portable thermonuclear device, buckled it around his own waist. He went to work on the cable. The grinning blade groaned and shrieked. Brat tumbled to the roof. George laid him out carefully, as he had seen them do with the deceased at the Montefiore Funeral Home.

Nadine drove to the next tree. Overwhite’s beard was a fretwork of icicles and frost. George sawed him down.

Then Randstable. Sparrow. Wengernook, who looked nervous even in death.

After stacking the heavy, rigid bodies in the back of the Cat, he returned to Sparrow’s tree. Had his eyes tricked him? No, there it was, a little Bible, frozen solid. He picked it up.

Latitude: 79 degrees 38 minutes south.

Longitude: 169 degrees 15 minutes east.

Pushing up from the ice was a stone reminiscent of the megalith George had inspected at the Snape’s Hill Burial Grounds. On this spot, only eleven miles from supplies, Robert Falcon Scott had perished after failing to become the first human to reach the South Pole.

The inscribed monument left George with the impression that Scott felt worse about being bettered by a Norwegian than he did about starving to death.

‘Of course, he might just as easily have been born the Norwegian and Amundsen the Britisher,’ said Nadine, ‘in which case Scott would have been glad that Amundsen won.’

‘Not if Scott was Norwegian, no.’

‘Why?’

‘Because then a Britisher would have won.’

‘I don’t understand.’

A pick swayed from the rear door of the Cat. George assaulted the Ross Ice Shelf. Sub-zero winds bore away the sound of metal striking ice; white sparks shot into the air. Gradually the pit expanded until it was large enough to admit all five bodies. With Nadine’s help he lowered his friends into the darkness. ‘Do you hate them?’ he asked.

‘I hate their bad ideas,’ she replied.

‘We should say a few words.’

‘Go ahead.’

For ten minutes George struggled with the frozen Bible. Trying to open it was like trying to rip granite. At last he made a fissure slightly beyond the middle – on Ecclesiastes, a set of existential essays that had been included in the Bible by mistake. It was a favorite with Unitarians. Poor Reverend Sparrow would no doubt have preferred something more tumultuous – Ezekiel, Zephaniah, the Revelation – but this would have to do.

‘Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard,’ George read. ‘Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good,’ he continued. ‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the perfumer to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly outweigh wisdom and honor,’ he concluded.

‘That was very nice,’ said Nadine.

The tomb inscriber climbed into the grave, unzipped Reverend Sparrow’s suit, and placed the splayed book against his heart.

Once George was back on the surface, they filled in the hole with ice and snow, Nadine all the while reminiscing aloud about her husband Nathaniel, each nugget of memory receiving detailed review, Nathaniel Covington the poet, Nathaniel Covington the great lover.

From the Cat’s tool box the old woman procured a hammer and a chisel. It took George an hour to wipe the Scott Monument clean. Nadine held the lantern steady as he laid down his guidelines with chalk. Tongue pressed firmly against his mustache, he began to ply his trade.

The hammer pounded. The chisel danced.

He did a fine, professional job – Nadine said so. The characters all had serifs.

Later, as the old woman lay propped against a hummock, her voice fading, her flesh expiring, George asked, ‘Why did you entrap me?’

Nadine attempted to lever herself to her feet using her ice cane, thought better of the idea, settled back against the hummock. ‘If they hadn’t sent me to Wildgrove,’ she said softly, ‘they would have sent someone else. When I saw what name the McMurdo framers had picked, I volunteered.’ Mischief glinted in her eyes. ‘I wanted to see you as you were before the war. I had to meet you, George, touch you. And Holly.’ She moved her shriveled head toward him. ‘Look at me. Do you see it? My face, your face, my face…’

He did.

The old woman’s smile was a triumph of determination over materials. Missing teeth, weak face muscles, but still she beamed.

‘You’re my granddaughter, aren’t you?’ he said.

They fell into each other’s arms.

‘Holly was your mother,’ he said.

‘The only tolerable moments of my unadmittance came when I watched her at nursery school. I wish I’d gotten to baby-sit for her.’

‘And your father was…?’

‘John Frostig’s youngest son.’

‘Rickie?’

‘Nickie.’

‘The hamster killer?’

‘He would have grown up.’

‘Just like Holly.’

‘You would have been proud of her, Grandfather.’

‘She always said she wanted to be an artist.’

‘She became a teacher. To the first graders she was Socrates and Mother Goose combined. There’s no way she could ever see all the good she did – more good than if she’d become an artist. She was better than she knew.’

‘I wonder if she ever got to see the Big Dipper.’

Nadine kissed his ragged beard. ‘I’m sure she would have.’

‘I’ll bet you’re a hell of a baby-sitter,’ he said.

‘A world beater.’

‘First grade?’ he said. ‘A worthy profession, don’t you think? Honorable. Challenging. Yes, that’s perfect. First grade… If you were to have an epitaph on your monument, what would it be?’

She coughed. ‘I don’t want an epitaph, or a monument either. We did not get in. Don’t pretend that we did.’

‘All right.’

They held hands, scopas glove pressed against scopas glove. Her rough and lovely cheek melted beneath his lips like butter. He saw her suit deflate slightly, felt tissues and bones leaving her glove. He stood up.