Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

Dr. Boerhaave joined Erasmus in the storehouse one dark morning when he was counting the tinned soups for the third time. “This isn’t your fault,” he said.

Erasmus shook his head. “Then whose fault is it? If I’d planned better…”

“Blame Commander Voorhees,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “It’s his expedition, as he never fails to remind us.” With his mittened hands he pushed aside a sack of flour and sat on a crate of salt beef.

Erasmus looked down at the array of tins. “I can’t… don’t put me in that position.”

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “I admire your loyalty — I just don’t like to see you blaming yourself. He doesn’t listen to anyone, he’s so preoccupied with his own ambitions that he doesn’t think things through. If he’d told us from the beginning we were going to winter up here… how could you know what to plan for, if he didn’t tell you?”

Erasmus fiddled with the smoking wick in the lamp. “I have to do the best I can,” he said. “I promised my sister.” One end of the wick sank in the melted blubber, reducing the light to a flicker. “But why didn’t he just tell me?” he burst out.

“Why indeed?” Dr. Boerhaave said. In the gloom something scuttled along the wall; perhaps a rat. “He sits in there with his papers and leaves you to sort out his mistakes.”

Erasmus tried to think of something positive. “In the fall,” he pointed out, “he was wonderful about organizing the men.”

“And since Sabine’s death,” Dr. Boerhaave said, “he’s been lost in his own world again.”

IT WAS TRUE what Dr. Boerhaave had said; some days Zeke seemed to have abandoned his command. Yet even with this to worry about, Erasmus was sometimes peculiarly, privately happy. The animals had disappeared and the landscape was empty: not a plant, not a creature, not an insect or a particle of mold. The only living things he saw besides the men were the rats infesting the brig and the storehouse, further diminishing their supplies. But one day he stood with Dr. Boerhaave and saw sheets of light undulating like seaweeds in the sky. The ice where they stood was bluish gray, the immobilized icebergs a darker gray, the hills in the distance a friendly, velvety black. As he and Dr. Boerhaave discussed what they saw, the arctic’s simultaneous sparseness and richness seemed to unfold. In his mind the long journey they’d made, and the plants and animals they’d collected, fell into a beautiful pattern. The dwarfed low willows and birches, hugging the ground to evade the blasting winds; the great masses of mosses and lichens and the sorrel growing like tiny rhubarbs; the small rodents skilled at burrowing—”It all forms a kind of rhythm,” Erasmus said, and Dr. Boerhaave agreed. The fact that they didn’t fit into it made it no less beautiful.

In Lavinia’s journal — what could Zeke’s contract mean now? — Erasmus began making extensive notes for a natural history book. Meanwhile Dr. Boerhaave wrote in his medical log:

These signs of scurvy so far—

Captain Tyler: abdominal pains, swollen liver, gout in right foot. Mr. Francis: tubercles on three finger joints, accompanied by pain and stiffness. Mr.Tagliabeau: rightpremolar lost, other teeth loose, bleeding gums. Seaman Bond: purpurae on forearms. Seaman Carey: left fyiee grossly swollen; reports a sprain there as a child. Seaman Forbes: bleeding gums. Seaman Hruska: serous discharge from old lance wound. Ned Kynd: excoriated tongue, bruises on both arms.

Mr. Wells has those bruises on his side; now I have a few myself. Our lime juice is almost exhausted. I’ve been prescribing vinegar, sauerkraut, and a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid: all I have left by way of anti-scorbutics. Our commander, who has no symptoms at all, prescribes daily exercise on the promenade. And a cheerful attitude.

He closed the log and picked up his journal. Still he loved to touch it; a smooth tan spine, with elegant marbled paper on the boards. He’d brought it with him all the way from Edinburgh. Whatever he put here Zeke would read; he couldn’t put anything he meant: he copied into it six pages of Thoreau’s essay “A Winter Walk,” just for the pleasure of hearing the words in his head, shaping them with his pen. He put his head down on the cover, amid creamy moons haloed with red and green swirls, and slept.

ROBERT CAREY WAS crying. Erasmus found him wedged between two crates, his knees tucked under his chin as tears rolled down his face. To Erasmus’s gentle questions he said nothing. Hours later, when he still wouldn’t stop crying, Dr. Boerhaave gave him some laudanum and carried him to bed. Then Ivan Hruska said no one ever paid attention to him, that his fellow seamen ganged up on him and teased him mercilessly. Everyone preferred Robert, Ivan said, everyone coddled him; he rolled himself in his hammock and refused food until Dr. Boerhaave threatened to put a tube down his throat. Scan and Thomas got into a fistfight. Barton let the galley fire go out. There were arguments, then long tense silences.

One night Erasmus, alone in the cabin, heard from the other side of the stove an unfamiliar, nasty, muffled laughter. He stepped through the gap in the partitions to investigate and came upon a reprise of the Christmas skit, transposed into a coarser key. Isaac, as the successful suitor, had opened his fly and was waving his thick erect penis at Scan, who was rolling his eyes in maidenly shock. In the background Barton, as one of the jealous sisters, was swishing his hips. “Give me some of that,” he was hissing, while Isaac gasped with laughter. “Let me…” He fell silent when Scan, who saw Erasmus first, elbowed him in the chest.

“Just having a little fun,” Isaac said. He tucked himself back in his pants. “Can’t hold that against us, can you?”

Erasmus didn’t know what to say. Between the cold and the stress and the hunger his own penis felt like a tired leather tube, shrinking away from his hand each time he tried to urinate. What was all this urgent flesh? Before he had time to wonder if the playacting was play, or something more serious, Zeke stepped around the stove and joined him.

“What’s going on?” he said. He blinked as if he’d just awakened.

The men were silent, apparently abashed.

“Nothing,” Erasmus said. “Just a little… a little quarrel.”

Clumsy lie.

“I won’t have that,” Zeke said. “We’re all uncomfortable. But we must stick together, we must be cheerful.” When he turned his back, Isaac grabbed his crotch mockingly.

ON JANUARY 24 the southern horizon glowed reddish orange, before fading away in a violet haze. This hint that the sun would return seemed to rouse Zeke at last, although not in a way Erasmus would have chosen.

At dinner Zeke said, “We’ll have sun in another month and a half, but we won’t be able to free the brig until July, at the earliest. I propose we occupy the spring months with sledge trips north. It’s unfortunate about the dogs. But we can pull the sledges ourselves, and the ice belt along the shore will be in excellent shape in April and May. We can examine the coastline north of here, we can follow the trend of the Sound and look for the open polar sea.”

Captain Tyler laughed wildly. “If you think we’re going to pull sledges like draft horses, that we’ll go one inch further north with you…”

“You will go where I say,” Zeke said. And left the cabin, to walk the promenade in the dark.

Erasmus threw on all his clothes and followed him, too angry to feel the cold although the thermometer outside the observatory read fifty below. “Why did you do that?” he shouted, even before he’d reached Zeke. “You couldn’t have made the men more anxious if you’d tried.”