Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

“It’s not a question of credit,” Erasmus said. Although he felt a wonderful sense of pardon, hearing those words. “Only — I want the chance to have one voyage go well. I want to discover things Wilkes can’t ruin. And — you know, don’t you, that my sister is engaged to marry Zeke?”

“I didn’t,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “I had no idea. Commander Voorhees never mentioned… you’ll be brothers-in-law?”

“I suppose,” Erasmus said. “Of course.” He picked up the scrap of string, unsure whether he should speak so personally. “My sister’s very dear to me,” he said. “Even though she’s so much younger — our mother died when she was born, I helped raise her. I came on this voyage partly because she wanted me to watch over Zeke. He’s so young, sometimes he’s a bit… impulsive.

“So he is,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “You’re a kind brother.”

Was that kindness? He’d lost the person he loved; he wanted to spare Lavinia that. Surely that was his simple duty. He asked, “Do you have brothers and sisters, yourself?”

Dr. Boerhaave smiled wryly. “One of each,” he said. “Both in Sweden, both married — excellent but completely unremarkable people. They’ve never been able to understand why I wanted to travel, or why I should be so entranced by the arctic. We write letters, but almost never see each other. They’re very good about looking after our parents.”

He was cut off, Erasmus thought. Cut off from home; or free from ties to home. What did that feel like? “And in Edinburgh,” he asked, “… does someone wait for you there? A woman friend?”

“Friends,” Dr. Boerhaave said. Not boastingly, or in any indelicate way; just a simple statement. “Now and then, between trips, I’ve grown close to someone, and I stay in touch with them all. But every few years I go off like this, and it never seemed fair to get too entangled with any one woman, and then ask her to wait. I’ve been alone for so long it’s come to seem normal.”

He turned his head to follow a string of murres spangling, black and white, across the bow. “I love those birds,” he said. “The sound their wings make. What about you? Are you… does someone wait for you at home?”

“No one but my family — not since my fiancee passed on.”

“Such a pair of bachelors!” Dr. Boerhaave said.

There was a moment, then, as the murres continued pouring past them, in which anything might have been asked and answered. Erasmus might have asked what Dr. Boerhaave really meant by “alone”—with whom he shared that aloneness, and on what terms. Dr. Boerhaave might have asked Erasmus what he’d done since Sarah Louise’s death for love and companionship: surely Erasmus hadn’t dried up completely? But the moment passed and the two shy men asked nothing further of each other. Erasmus didn’t have to say that he’d lived like a monk, except for brief entanglements that had left him feeling lonelier than before; that he’d not been able to move past the feeling that if he couldn’t have Sarah Louise, he wanted no one. Or that, despite his love for his family, he’d often felt trapped living at home but hadn’t been able to move. Where would he move to? Every place seemed equally possible, equally impossible. His father had tried to be patient with him but once, irritated by an attack of shingles, he’d spoken sharply. Erasmus, he’d said, was like a walking embodiment of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Set moving, he moved until someone stopped him; stopped, he was stuck until pushed again. Just like you, Erasmus had wanted to say. But hadn’t.

THAT NIGHT HE lay in his bunk, mulling over what he’d revealed. Perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned that voyage at all — yet how could Dr. Boerhaave know him if he didn’t share the biggest fact of his life? All those wasted days. While he’d been stalled a host of other, younger men had thrown themselves into the search for Franklin. Now that search was also his.

Back home he’d resisted the frenzy surrounding any mention of Franklin’s name. That men sold cheap engravings of Franklin’s portrait on the streets, or that because of Franklin he and Zeke had been interviewed in the newspapers and had gifts pressed in their hands, had nothing to do with him. The syrupy letters of a Mrs. Myers, saying she lived on a widow’s mite but wanted to donate three goose-down pillows to aid in their search; the way, when he ordered socks in a shop, clerks came out from behind their counters to ask questions in breathless voices, as if not only Franklin and his men were heroes but so were he and Zeke — that puffery had made him uneasy. He’d focused on the practical, the everyday. Still there might be men alive, living off the land or among the Esquimaux; he and Zeke searched for them, not just for Franklin.

As he’d told Dr. Boerhaave the story of his earlier voyage, he’d seen how different it was from his present journey. This one was worthwhile. This one meant something. And when he finally slept, he dreamed he saw a column of men walking away from a ship. The ship was sinking, slowly and silently; the men turned their backs to it. Erasmus could see faces. A blond man with a broken nose, a short man with dark eyes and a mole on his chin. But not Franklin, nor any of the officers; no one whose portrait had been reproduced in the newspapers. Simply a group of strangers, waiting for help.

The dream both embarrassed and delighted him. Since the days of his first expedition, he’d not let himself admire anyone, nor been willing to bend his life to follow something greater. But he woke rejuvenated, feeling as if a great hand had reached down and brushed him from an eddy back into the current.

AS THEY CONTINUED to struggle through Melville Bay, Zeke rolled off the names of the headlands they passed and said wistfully, “Wouldn’t you like to have your name on something here?” Around his berth he’d built a rodent’s nest of maps and papers. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to discover something altogether new?”

At night he pored over the accounts of Parry and Ross and Scoresby, sometimes reading passages aloud to the men while he paced the decks and they worked. He showed little interest in the amphipods Erasmus found clinging to the warping lines, or the snow geese and terns and ivory gulls that swooped and sailed above them. Nor was he interested in the miraculous refractions, which painted images in the sky near the sun. Sometimes whole bergs seemed to lift themselves above the horizon and float on nothingness, but Zeke no longer raptured over them. And Erasmus noticed that Zeke’s journal — a handsome volume, bound in green silk, which Lavinia had given him — showed only a few scrappy entries.

“You’ve had no time?” Erasmus asked.

Zeke shook his head. “I keep meaning to,” he said. “Lavinia made me promise I’d write in here, for her to read when we get back. But it’s so large, and water spots the cover — and anyway I have this.”

He showed Erasmus another notebook; he’d been keeping it for several years, he said, under his pillow at night and in his pocket during the day. Erasmus stared at the battered black volume, troubled that he hadn’t known about it before.

“I started it when I began wishing I could do something to find Franklin,” Zeke said. “It’s where I keep notes on things I’ve read, little reminders to myself, and so forth.”

He held it out and Erasmus read the pages where it fell open. The titles of four books Zeke meant to read and seven he’d recently read, a letter to the Philadelphia paper praising Jane Franklin’s continued quest for her husband, some thoughts about scurvy and its prevention (FRESH MEAT, underlined twice. In the men, watch for bleeding gums, spots and swollenness of lower limbs, opening of old sores and wounds), a recipe for pemmican, a drawing of a sledge runner, a Philadelphia merchant’s quoted price for enough tobacco to supply the crew for eighteen months.