Ian McGuire - The North Water

“ Gud bye ,” she says to him, smiling still. “ Gud bye .”

He frowns at her, then shakes his head. He feels exposed and sullied by her efforts. Ashamed. It is as if a bright, burning light has been flashed upon the two of them and their pitiful nakedness has been revealed to the world. He wants her to be quiet again, to ignore him now as she has always ignored him before.

“No,” he whispers fiercely back at her. “No more of that. No more.”

* * *

Next day, when he arrives at the mission, it is dark and cold, and the borealis is unwinding across the night sky in peristaltic bands of green and purple, like the loosely coiled innards of a far-fetched mythic beast. Inside the cabin, he finds the priest stretched out on his cot, laid low and complaining of stomach pains. Anna, under the priest’s instruction, has placed a warm poultice on his abdomen and brought him castor oil and jalap from the medicine chest. He is badly bunged up, he explains to Sumner, and may require an enema if there is no movement presently. Sumner makes tea for himself and heats a can of bouillon soup. The priest watches him eat. He asks about the hunting trip, and Sumner tells about the seals and about the feasting.

“You encourage their superstitions then, I see,” the priest says.

“I let them believe what they want to. Who am I to interfere?”

“You do them no service by keeping them in ignorance. They lead a brutish kind of life.”

“I have no better truths to tell them.”

The priest shakes his head, then winces.

“Then what are you exactly?” he says. “If that is the case?”

Sumner shrugs.

“I am tired and hungry,” he tells him. “I am a man who is about to eat his dinner and go to bed.”

In the night the priest has a fierce bout of diarrhea. Sumner is woken by the sounds of loud groans and splattering. The cabin air is dense with the velvet reek of liquid feces. Anna, who has been sleeping curled on the floor, rises to assist. She gives the priest a clean cloth to wipe himself and takes the pot outside to empty. When she comes back inside, she covers him with blankets and helps him drink some water. Sumner watches but doesn’t move or speak. The priest strikes him as robust and healthy for a man of his age, and he assumes the constipation is a result of nothing more than the usual deficiencies of the arctic diet, bereft as it is of plants, vegetable matter, or fruit of any kind. Now that the purgatives have had their effect, Sumner is sure he will be back to his normal self soon enough.

In the morning, the priest declares he is much improved; he breakfasts sitting upright in the bed and asks Anna to carry over his books and papers so he can continue with his scholarly work. Sumner goes outside to say a last farewell to Urgang and Merok, who have spent the night in the igloo. The three of them embrace like old friends. They give him one of the seals, as agreed, but they also offer him one of their old hunting spears as a souvenir. They point at the spear, then at Sumner, then out onto the ice. He understands they mean him to go hunting by himself once they are gone. They laugh, and Sumner nods and smiles at them. He takes the spear and mimes the action of striking a seal through the ice. They cheer and laugh, and then when he does it again they cheer even louder. He realizes they are mocking him a little now to ease their parting, gently putting him in his place before they leave; they are reminding him that although he has magical powers he is a still a white man, and the idea of a white man knowing how to use a spear is comical indeed. He watches as their sledge disappears beyond the granite headland; then he goes back into the cabin. The priest is making notes in his journal. Anna is sweeping up. Sumner shows them the spear. The priest examines it, then passes it to Anna, who declares it is a well-made spear but too old to use.

They have crumbled hardtack and bouillon soup for lunch. The priest eats everything that is in front of him, but then, almost as soon as he has finished, he vomits it out again onto the floor. He stays in the chair for a while, bent over coughing and spitting, then climbs back into the bed and calls for brandy. Sumner goes into the storeroom and takes the bottle of Dover’s Powder from the medicine chest, dissolves a spoonful in water, and gives it to the priest to drink. The priest drinks it, then falls into a doze. When he wakes, he appears pale and complains of a more severe pain in his lower abdomen. Sumner feels his pulse and looks at his tongue, which is furred. He presses his fingertips into the priest’s abdomen. The skin is tense, but there is no sign of a hernia. When he presses just above the line of the ilium, the priest cries out and his body jackknifes. Sumner takes his hand away and looks out of the cabin window — it is snowing outside and the panes are thick with frost.

“If you keep the brandy down, that should help a little,” he says.

“I wish to God I could piss,” the priest says, “but I can barely squeeze out a drop.”

Anna sits by the bed and reads out Saint Paul’s letters to the Corinthians in her quiet and halting English. As the afternoon moves into evening, the priest’s pain worsens and he starts to moan and gasp. Sumner makes up a warm poultice and finds some paregoric in the medicine chest. He tells Anna to continue giving him brandy and the Dover’s Powder, and to use the paregoric whenever the pain gets worse. During the night, the priest wakes up every hour, his eyes bulging, and howls with pain. Sumner, who is asleep at the table, his head resting on his folded arms, jolts awake each time, his heart pounding, and his own guts twisting in sympathy. He goes over to the bed, kneels, and gives him more brandy to drink. As he sips from the glass, the priest grasps onto Sumner’s arm as if scared he might suddenly leave. The priest’s green eyes are wild and rheumy; his lips are crusted, and his hot breath is foul.

In the morning, when they are out of earshot, Anna asks Sumner whether the priest is going to die.

“He has an abscess inside him here,” Sumner explains, pointing to the right side of his belly just above the groin. “Some inner part has ruptured and his belly is filling up with poison.”

“You will save him though,” she says.

“There’s nothing I can do. It’s impossible.”

“You told me you are an Angakoq .”

“We are a thousand miles or more from any hospital, and I have no medicines to speak of.”

She gives him a disbelieving look. Sumner wonders how old this Anna is — eighteen? thirty? It is difficult to judge. All the Esquimaux women have the same leathery brown skin, the same small dark eyes and quizzical expression. A different man would have taken her to his bed, he thinks, but the priest has tutored her to read the Bible and answer back.

“If you can’t save him, then why are you here?” she asks. “What are you for?”

“I’m here by accident. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Everyone died except for you. Why did you live?”

“There is no why,” he says.

She glares at him, then shakes her head and goes back to the priest’s bedside. She kneels down and starts to pray.

After a few more hours, the priest begins having violent shivering fits and his skin turns cold and clammy. His pulse is faint and irregular, and his tongue has a large streak of brown along its center. When Anna tries to give him brandy, he throws it up. Sumner watches for a while, then pulls on his new set of furs and steps outside the cabin; it is bitterly cold and only semilight, but he is glad to escape from the sour stench of mortal illness and the priest’s constant, grating howls of complaint. He walks past the igloo and looks out east across the immense desert of sea ice to the faint white parabola of the far horizon. It is noon, but the stars are visible overhead. There is no sign of life or movement anywhere; everything is still and dark and cold. It is as if the end of the world has already happened, he thinks, as if he is the only man left alive on the frigid earth. For several minutes he stands where he is, listening to the shallow wheeze of his own breathing, feeling the red muscle of his heart gently thudding in his chest; then, remembering himself at last, he turns slowly around and goes back inside.