Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

All that winter, while the lawyer lay wrapped in blankets on a porch facing south, simultaneously basking in the sun and freezing in the subzero wind, he’d taught Ned his letters, so that Ned could read to him and eventually take dictation. During Ned’s second winter a new cook had been hired, so that Ned might spend all his time with the lawyer and his books.

“It was a great thing he did for me,” Ned said. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”

“Why did you leave?” Erasmus asked.

“He died,” Ned said.

He was twenty, and in an hour’s conversation he’d said, they died, she died, he died, he died. Rising to return to the galley, Ned explained in a few more sentences how he’d drifted south to Philadelphia, been unable to find any clerical work, and ended up cooking at the wharfside tavern where Mr. Tagliabeau had found him. He said nothing about the fight that had led to his dismissal.

“I couldn’t seem to settle down,” he said. “Everywhere I went, I missed my family.” He paused for a moment, not sure how to say what he meant. What could where he traveled matter, when he had no hope of ever seeing Nora or Denis again? In a way, wandering like this was what gave him hope; he’d seen Denis die with his own eyes but Nora had simply disappeared, and if he kept moving it somehow seemed possible that she wasn’t dead. That she might be wandering, like him.

“It’s a strange thing,” he said, “knowing you don’t have a single living relative in all the world — how can you pick a place to live, when you’re a stranger everywhere?”

Dr. Boerhaave smiled, as if he knew exactly what Ned meant. Both of them, Erasmus thought, had cut their ties to home in a way he still couldn’t imagine.

“One thing I liked about the wharves was that all the men who came in were strangers too,” Ned continued. “I was beginning to think about shipping out on a merchant ship and seeing the world, since I had no ties to anyplace. But then you all showed up, and look how well everything worked out. Commander Voorhees took me on, and here I am: in a place where hardly anyone has ever been. Where we’re all strangers, except to each other.”

Outside the sun shone and shone, and inside the relics obtained from the Netsilik, neatly boxed and stowed in the hold, shed a quiet radiance. Filled with purpose and caught up in his work, Erasmus was slow to register the mood of the men around him. They were fifteen people, isolated except for their brief time among the Netsilik, and they’d begun to tire of each other. Small habits loomed large: the way, for instance, that Zeke fed Sabine from his fork at the dinner table. Or Zeke’s bored, superior gaze when Erasmus tried to tell him what he’d learned about Ned.

“Well, of course,” Zeke said. Sabine sat on the chair beside him, following his hand alertly as it hovered over the plate. “Ned told me all of this ages ago.” When had that happened? Erasmus wondered. When Zeke was brooding over Fletcher Lamb’s death? Lately Zeke had seemed even more secretive than usual.

Several of the crew who’d quarreled at Boothia over women nursed those rivalries into fire again. On the voyage out, it had often been Joe who was best able to cheer and calm the men, entertaining them with his zither and his stories. But Joe had been glum since their departure from Boothia: so glum that, when a fistfight broke out between Scan Hamilton and Ivan Hruska, Joe left them to Mr. Francis’s harsh discipline and came above, to hang listlessly over the rail where Erasmus was perched with his sketchpad.

“They’ll get over it,” Erasmus said. “They’re restless, they’re all thinking of home. Really we’ve been incredibly lucky so far. Everything we learned from those Esquimaux…”

The biscuit Joe tossed over the rail was caught in midair by a fulmar. “What makes you think those Esquimaux were telling us everything they knew?”

“Because — they didn’t tell us, at first,” Erasmus said, startled. The fulmar flapped away with its prize. “We had to dig out the truth for ourselves. We had to pry it out of them. If Ned hadn’t seen those cooking kettles…”

Joe made a disgusted sound. “They told that story for their own reasons,” he said. “To get the ship to go away, and the men to stop hunting their caribou and preying on their women. Couldn’t you see that? They told us what we wanted to hear. And if Commander Voorhees hadn’t been so blinded by his own anger and his desire to find something, he would have realized just how ambiguous the situation was.”

“You’re saying they lied?” Erasmus thought back to the look on Joe’s face when he’d translated Oonali’s revelations about the ship’s boat. He’d assumed, then, that Joe was simply mortified by the earlier deceptions.

“Not lied,” Joe said crossly. “There was surely truth in what they told us. But they knew what we were looking for, and what it would take to satisfy us, and so perhaps they bent the truth a little. Shaped the story to our desires.”

“But you’re the interpreter” Erasmus said. “It was your job to figure that out, and convey to us what was accurate, and what misleading.”

“I shouldn’t have to interpret gestures,” Joe said. His hands, brown and broken-nailed, clamped on the rail. “If Commander Voorhees had looked more closely at Oonali, instead of at me — if he’d paid any attention to Oonali at all — he would have understood how to weigh the information.”

Oonali, Erasmus recalled, had pushed two girl children behind him as he spoke at the feast, and shooed others away from the gathering of the men. Uneasily he said, “What did Oonali say, that you didn’t tell us?”

“It’s not what he said — it’s the way he said it. It’s the context in which he said it. I translated every word as accurately as I could. But I was also paying attention to other things. And you were not. Commander Voorhees was not. If you were in a negotiation with your people back home, you’d notice other things besides the words.”

“Do you think there was no boat, then?” Erasmus asked. “But where did they get those kettles, the pieces of wood — everything?”

“Of course they found a boat. Dead sailors, too. What I’m not so sure of is that all the traces of them are actually gone. But they had every reason to discourage us from overwintering there, and from searching the island in the spring. Who knows what we might have found, if we hadn’t been satisfied so easily with their tale?”

He paused and picked at the dry skin around his thumbnails. “Oonali’s wife told me something awful,” he admitted. “When we were standing apart from the others for a minute. She said at that boat, near the dead sailors — they found human parts that had been… interfered with. Bones with the marks of saws and knives. Skulls with holes smashed in them.”

“Dr. Rae’s report,” Erasmus murmured, remembering the story he’d told Ned at the start of their voyage. “That’s just what the Esquimaux he met told him.”

“These stories are worse,” Joe said. “Oonali’s wife told me she found a sailor’s boot, which someone had been using as a kind of bowl. There were pieces of boiled human flesh in it.”

In his bunk, beneath his bookshelf, Erasmus had driven a tack and then wedged his secret scrap of leather between it and the shelf s lower side. The one thing he’d kept for himself; still no one knew he had it, not even Dr. Boerhaave. Later, perhaps when they were home, he might offer this as a last surprise to seal their friendship. Something separate from Zeke, and from the goals of the expedition, which only the two of them would share. Until now that scrap of leather had seemed like a symbol of courage, a weary foot moving across the ice no matter how tired. Yet perhaps Oonali’s wife had meant it to signal something quite different. Perhaps it was the sole of the same boot she’d told Joe about… or perhaps these tales were horrible lies, and all Joe’s worries unjustified.