Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

Joe stared at Zeke and Zeke stared back, until Joe left the deck.

Ned picked up Joe’s knife and Joe’s task, trying to shape pieces that would be appetizing and not resemble fox. Afterward he stood silently at the stove, although he would rather have helped Erasmus prepare the skins. Sew up from the inside any bullet or knife holes, Erasmus had taught him. He’d made notes. Rub on the inside of the skin as much of the mixture of alum and arsenic as will stick there. Wrap a little oakum around the bones of each leg, to keep them away from the skin.

But Erasmus was working away without him, not even asking if he wanted to help. After supper, though, Erasmus joined him on his nightly walk to fetch clean ice from the Follies. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” Erasmus said.

“Do you even know?” Ned asked.

“I know you’re trying to keep Commander Voorhees company,” Erasmus said. “Make him feel less isolated. He’s still angry at me, he won’t confide in me. I know you’re trying to take up the slack.”

“Something’s wrong with him,” Ned said. “He talked all day while we were out, he feels like everyone’s against him. Someone has to listen to him.”

They’d reached the first iceberg; together they began prying off chunks and heaving them into the washbasin. “My father got like this,” Ned said. “Living on dreams, cut off from everyone. Flailing out at anyone around the minute he was criticized.”

“It helps us all, what you do,” Erasmus said. “Whatever you can do to calm him.”

Ned made a face. Each time Ned did something like this, Erasmus realized, even a day’s walk with Zeke, he set himself off both from the other men and from Captain Tyler and the mates. Soon he’d be stranded. As they dragged the ice back to the brig, Erasmus reminded himself that he and Dr. Boerhaave must be particularly careful to include Ned in their activities.

Inside the cabin Captain Tyler, who used to sit almost on top of the stove, positioned halfway between the men and the officers, glanced slyly at Erasmus and shifted his stool all the way to the men’s side of the partitions. He’d been doing this for weeks: murmuring, murmuring — what was he saying?

“Can you hear him?” Erasmus whispered to Ned.

“I can’t,” Ned said. He packed the ice more tightly in the melting funnel. “He never does that when I’m in there.”

Erasmus strained his ears, pretending unconcern when Mr. Francis and Mr. Tagliabeau slipped through the gap as well. Zeke was pacing the promenade, guarding the brig against nothing and no one with his rifle in his arms — unaware, Erasmus thought, that his command was slipping away. There would be no sledge trips, Erasmus heard Captain Tyler telling the men. Was that what he heard? We’ll be out of here the instant the ice breaks up. Low laughter followed. Only when Dr. Boerhaave came in and said, “Are you feeling sick?” did Erasmus realize he was clutching his stomach.

Later, after everyone else had gone to bed, Erasmus and Dr. Boerhaave sat at the cabin table by the sputtering light of a salt-pork lamp. They couldn’t talk about what was going on; anyone might be awake and listening.

“Try to do some work,” Dr. Boerhaave said. “You’ll feel better.”

For a second he rested his hand on Erasmus’s forearm. He was breathing slowly and deeply: in, out, in, out, looking into Erasmus’s eyes. Erasmus felt his own breathing steady into a rhythm that matched his friend’s. He took out his letter case and wrote to Copernicus about that skull, so delicate and troubling; halfway through, he found himself writing instead about Ned’s attempts to calm Zeke. Dr. Boerhaave opened his volume of Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Memmack Rivers. Since Zeke’s punishment of the drinking men, he’d begun using his journal solely to record passages from his reading. Now he copied:

“But continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and ere long it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the after life of those who have traveled much is very pathetic. True and sincere traveling is no pastime, but it is as serious as the grave, or any part of the human journey, and it requires a long probation to be broken into it.”

He turned the journal so Erasmus could read what he’d written. “Thoreau gave me this copy himself,” he said. “He published it at his own expense.”

Erasmus, puzzled, said, “And you copy his words out because…?”

“Because they’re worth learning.” He cast his eyes in the direction of Zeke’s bunk, and for the first time Erasmus understood that Dr. Boerhaave’s journal had become an act of covert rebellion.

BARTON COLLAPSED FIRST, then Ivan, then Isaac; Scan and Thomas were very weak and after Mr. Francis fell down the ladder, tearing a chunk of flesh from his knee, the wound refused to heal and he too was confined to bed. Those who could keep to their feet nursed the others, preparing and serving meals and emptying slops and laundering bandages, drawn together again by their common crisis. They weren’t starving, exactly: they still had food, although it was the wrong sort. Joe stalked a bear but lost it. There were walrus, he suspected, south of the brig, but as yet he’d seen none. He’d had no luck trapping since that anomalous pair of foxes.

Erasmus, moving among the sick as Dr. Boerhaave’s chief assistant, was shocked at how quickly Mr. Francis deteriorated. The wound bled, suppurated, refused to close, deepened; in a week the bone was exposed. Captain Tyler sat with him for hours, and Erasmus was touched by this kindness until the afternoon when, bending over Mr. Francis shortly after the captain left him, he smelled brandy and realized his stupor was not just the result of infection.

Outside, far from Zeke, Erasmus seized Captain Tyler by the arms and shook him. “What are you doing?” he said. “Drink yourself to death, for all I care — but how can you give that poor man spirits? It’s the worst thing for him, the very worst thing.”

Captain Tyler pulled away with a growl. “Lay hands on me again,” he said. “Touch me like that again and… Mr. Francis is a dead man. Why shouldn’t he have some comfort in his last days? Dr. Boerhaave spares the laudanum — for you, for his friends, we’re all going to die up here and he wants to make sure your last days are peaceful. The brandy eases my friend.”

Two days later Mr. Francis died in his sleep. Thomas was too sick to work, but Ned and Robert managed to put together a rough coffin. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, Erasmus, and Zeke carried the body to the storehouse, and Zeke read the service for the burial of the dead, although they couldn’t bury him. Later Erasmus, packing up Mr. Francis’s effects, looked briefly at his journal before handing it over to Zeke.

March 2: Snow and fog. I have no energy.

March 3: More snow. Slept all day.

March 4: Wind, very much wind. Could not sleep and felt tired

all day.

March 5: Snow and wind. Much pain in my knee.

March 6: Clear sky, very cold. The knee is worse and there is a smell.

March 7: Colder. Fainted when Dr. B. changed my dressings.

March 8: Felt very bad.

March 9: Felt very bad. If I could only see Ellen…

THE DAY AFTER that bleak ceremony, Erasmus was chopping ice when five figures appeared near the tip of the point. By the time he’d raced into the cabin, alerted everyone, and gathered those who could move on the bow, the figures had reached the brig and were peering gravely up at them. Zeke greeted the Esquimaux in their own language, although he still needed Joe’s help in interpreting their responses.