Marcel Theroux - Far North

It’s a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god’s handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There’s not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?

But that plane in flight didn’t pump and lurch like a big bird does. It moved steady and level, and faster than any bird I’ve ever seen.

The truth is, I half-expected its crew to be gods.

And what would they know of us? What had they seen from the sky? What would men like that make of the brutal facts of our life at the base?

I thought they would feel about me the way I felt about the simple understanding of the Tungus, with their shamans, and spirits, and chuchunaa.

*

I rode back into the bush to wait that night and ponder. I am rash by nature. I act best in the heat of the moment. Given too long to think, I can fall to brooding.

More for company than anything practical, I set a small

fire, and fed it with long, slim twigs, holding onto the ends of them until they were almost consumed by the flame.

A dry wind blew and fanned the embers to orange.

Over the years since I’d seen the first plane, it had become my North Star. Just knowing about it was a comfort to me. I’d touched its hull with my own hands. I’d buried what was left of its crew. I had poured all my wishes into it. It was a vessel that held everything my world was not.

But now that it came to dealing with the living, breathing people that were on this new one, my nerve had failed.

All sorts of bewildered feelings were stirred up inside me.

Part of me was dying to know more. But another noisy part was saying it was better to leave now, knowing the first one wasn’t a fluke, and not go further, which was bound to lead to ugliness and disappointment.

Big as the plane looked to me, hope was too heavy a cargo for it to carry.

I still wonder if there could have been anything on the plane that would have made what I’d gone through seem worthwhile.

It’s so hard to think now what might have been on it, instead of what was.

*

What happens lays down a steel track over all the flimsy forms of what might have been .

I’ve been around this many times. I see myself in the wood, feeding the twigs into my solitary fire. And I see the empty plane sleeping by the gates of the base. I move myself, like a picture on a memory stone, until I’m riding backwards to Polyn, giving Shamsudin the kiss of life on the way, trudging backwards to the base with Tolya and the prisoners, the years of confinement, the months of work retuning Boathwaite’s garden to a wilderness.

Back and back I go, to before Ping’s death, to when this city had life in it, to before the bad years, until I’m standing at the Bering Sea with my father, watching the Chukchi pack the innards back into a walrus and set him adrift on the water. And at each moment, I think, here? Or, here? Is this the choice that set the points for what followed?

Whatever way I come at it, it always plays out the same.The bad thing happens. The city burns. Those I love die. The plane crashes. I search for another. And when I finally find one, it has Eben Callard on it.

HE WAS OLDER, of course — yet somehow that surprised me. And even after spending some time with him, I found that his face was still overlaid by the younger one that I had spent so many hours remembering.

‘I knew a Makepeace once,’ he said. He snapped his fingers for someone to pour him a drink. The blind can have a bossy way about them. I lied and told him I was from a different city.

He sat in the chair behind Boathwaite’s tin desk wearing a dark broadcloth suit, staring straight past me with those cloudy eyes. His shirt was white and newly pressed.

‘Your voice is familiar,’ he said. ‘It must be that settler accent.’ He never gave any hint that he might have known me. ‘Boathwaite spoke highly of you.’

I still had the dust on me from my long ride. Six of his men were posted around the room. They were armed. Two wore bandoliers. They’d patted me down for weapons when I’d come in.

At dawn, I had ridden up to the gates. The itch to know had overcome any thought I had for my own safety. If I’d had any inkling who’d been on it, of course I would have made straight for home. But I never connected that plane with anything in my own past. In my mind, it came out of the orderly world of my parents with a promise as straight and green as the twig in that dove’s beak: dry land this way, turn your ship around.

The sentry knew me by sight, but another man, one of Eben Callard’s it turned out, was standing guard beside him.

They called someone out of the guardhouse to take the horse. I didn’t know the boy. There was straw in his hair and his face was crinkled from sleep.

I was sorry to see the horse go. There was no easy way out of there without her, but my desire to know about the plane had overmastered every other thought.

All the omens were poor. The sentry gave me a sly and uneasy look as he hauled the door open. And on the far side of the parade ground, a rough wooden cross had been dug into the dirt, and from it was dangling a body.

The wind had sprung up, and when it blew, it caught him like a sail and made the joints of the crosspiece creak.

Though the face was black and swollen, I could see from his build that it was Boahwaite. There were wounds to his body and head, and his arms had been nailed through the wrists. His belly was all bloated with gas.

From the manner of his death, I guessed the prisoners had chosen it themselves.

He looked like he’d been dead at least two days. They must have turned on him in a fit of revenge soon after the plane landed.

I’ll confess I was taken aback. I’m no lover of mob justice. People making their own law is an ugly sight — and it’s not what I had expected of the men in the plane.

Shamsudin had said that civilization meant city life. I wasn’t sure about that. To me it meant streetlights, plumbing, schools, and things worked out by reason. I can’t see the reason in deliberate cruelty. It makes a fetish of what’s most base in us.

But I had to trust that the men in the plane were wise enough to know what they were about. No one else had died. The walls were intact. The place had not been razed. Maybe the body on the cross was the price of that order.

*

Whatever upsets there had been, I still held my old rank as a guard. My room was just as shabby as I’d left it. The dust on the window looked like milled gold in the sunlight.

Out of the window, I watched the place coming to life. First the reveille and the weary prisoners dragging their chains out the bunkhouse. How ragged they looked.

After fifteen minutes, one of the new guards came in and said Mr Callard would see me. By the time I reached the office, I had a pretty good idea what I’d find.

On the walk over, his man said to me that he’d lost his eyes defending a woman’s honour. That made me smile.

*

The first meeting was short. He wanted to know where I’d been. How come I’d survived. I told him as little as possible. They excused me to go back to my room and clean up.

Someone brought food and water and a change of clothes. They gave me a rough towel with a tablet of green soap on it. I scrubbed myself and cleaned my hair with it in the washroom. I could only think that it had come on the plane. It had been so long since I’d seen any. We used to make our own in Evangeline. Fat and lye is what you use to do it. Jezebel .

There was a little scent in this one. It seemed to make my hair go stringy. As I washed, I thought of how I would escape. First light. I’d take another horse. I’d take two.