Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

ON MARCH 14, Erasmus and Alexandra stood at the three tall windows of her family home: Emily with them on the left; Browning and Harriet and their new daughter, Miriam, in the center; Jane and little Nicholas on the right, gazing from the second floor down onto Walnut Street. There were neighbors below them, strangers above them, more strangers up on the roof— Browning had rented out these viewing spots for a fee — but everyone was silent and the street itself was empty. Erasmus could hear the drums, but the procession hadn’t yet come into sight. A light rain, falling all morning, had soaked the crepe hanging from the balconies of every house; in windows people huddled against the wind while on the rooftops black umbrellas sprouted.

The street looked like an endless dark tunnel. And beyond it, Erasmus knew, the entire route was similarly shrouded. He was cold and his toes hurt, or the place where his toes would have been. Behind him, on a small cherry table, a stack of newspapers detailed the journey of Dr. Kane’s body across America. In his imagination Erasmus saw all the routes preceding this final one, spreading like a jet-black labyrinth across the country.

From Havana, where Kane had died, to New Orleans by packet boat; the casket had lain in state in City Hall. For a week, while a steamboat conveyed the casket up the Mississippi and the Ohio to Louisville, people had stood on levees and wharves to watch Kane pass. In Louisville Kane’s arrival had been announced by the tolling of bells and the firing of guns; more formal ceremonies, another procession; a lying-in at Mozart Hall. Halfway to Cincinnati the steamboat was met by another boat, crowded with memorial-committee members wearing mourner’s badges. In Cincinnati the procession had wound from the wharf to the railway station; at Xenia people had swarmed the tracks, delaying the train’s slow progress; all throughout that afternoon and night, crowds had waited silently at every stop. At Columbus Kane’s body lay in the capitol building, silent focus of more long speeches. In the smaller cities of Ohio and West Virginia, where the casket remained on the train, people had gathered at railway stations while more bells tolled. In Baltimore there had been huge crowds and the grandest procession until today’s.

On Monday the funeral car had arrived in Philadelphia, where it was met by a guard of honor: city police, an artillery company, and a dozen memorial committees from various civic groups, none of which had included Erasmus. The hearse had been accompanied by eight of Kane’s companions, who’d spread the flag of the lost Advance over her commander’s coffin and then, at Independence Hall, added Kane’s ceremonial sword and a mound of flowers. Until this morning, people had streamed through the hall to pay their respects. Now, at last, the procession was coming into sight.

Policemen, more policemen, then the companies of the First Brigade and, flanking the hearse itself, the Philadelphia City Calvary. The sight of the horsemen so excited young Nicholas that he wriggled halfway out the open sash and had to be pulled back and scolded by his aunt. The funeral car, Erasmus saw, was marked at the corners by golden spears bearing flags. Above the casket a black domed canopy kept off the rain; the silk ribbons that stretched to the spears drooped and the horses shone with moisture. Emily said, “There’s that horrid father of his,” but Browning murmured, “Not today.”

The drums beat, the car moved slowly, waves of people marched. Erasmus crumpled the newspaper’s guide to the procession in his hand. Almost every Philadelphian of distinction had been invited, from Kane’s companions to the mayor and the aldermen, the members of the Philosophical Society, the medical faculty and students of the University of Pennsylvania, the Odd Fellows, the Fire Department and more, so many more.

“The Corn Exchange?” Browning said. “Why would they ask the members of the Corn Exchange?”

Erasmus had no answer. In all this great crowd, he thought, no place had been made for him. Nor for any of his companions: none of the living and nothing to honor the memory of the dead. At least the Toxophilites, he’d heard, honored Zeke at each monthly meeting.

Alexandra pressed his arm and he reached over and squeezed her hand gratefully. She was all he had to lean on; his brothers were comforting Lavinia, who’d refused to leave the house since Kane’s body entered the city. Her presence at the procession, she’d said, would be an act of disloyalty to Zeke.

As if she knew what Erasmus was thinking, Alexandra said, “I’m sure it was only a wish to protect your health that kept the committee from asking you to join them. For you to walk so far, in this weather and with such a crowd…”

Erasmus looked down at his cunning shoes. “I manage very well with the walking sticks,” he said. “As you know.”

The funeral car was almost out of sight; below him were the members of the Hibernian Society and the St. Andrews and Scots Thistle Societies. They would pass for hours, he thought. At the church the procession would march past the casket, set up on a bier on the stone steps, and then all who could would crowd inside to hear the service. Words and words about Kane’s goodness and glory and skills. As if Kane had not also lost a ship; as if his voyage had not also been marked by strife and rebellion. Someone, he noted from the program, would sing a Mozart anthem. One prominent minister would give an invocation and another the eulogy, which would be printed in the paper tomorrow but which Erasmus could already hear:

“We are assembled, my friends, to perform such comely though sad duties in honor of a man who, within the short lifetime of thirty-five years, under the combined impulses of humanity and science, has traversed nearly the whole of the planet in its most inaccessible places…. Death discloses the human estimate of character. That mournful pageant which for days past has been wending its way hither, across the solemn main, along our mighty rivers, through cities clad in habiliments of grief, with the learned, the noble, and the good mingling in its train, is but the honest tribute of hearts that could have no motive but respect and love.”

More prayers, more singing; a dirge and then a benediction. The arctic coastline Dr. Kane had explored and named, the ice he’d fought and the Esquimaux he’d discovered; the dark winters of his entrapment and the heroic journey by which he’d brought most of his men to safety — all of this was admirable and yet why should it have eclipsed Erasmus’s own journey? He’d brought men home himself, he had done what he could, he had tried… he pulled his hand from Alexandra’s.

“Lavinia was right to stay home,” he said. “I can’t bear to watch any more.”

He withdrew from the window, moving cautiously to the davenport. In the damp lines of his palms he found the visions he’d been fending off since his return: Zeke dying, Zeke dead, all alone in that vast white space. Death coming violent or quiet or both — a bear, a slipped razor, a fall through the ice; tumbling iceberg or slow starvation; fury or resignation. He heard the ice cracking beneath Zeke’s feet; he saw Zeke searching for a hand to grab, a line to grasp, where there was nothing but a field of fractured floes. Then Zeke looking up into the sky and sinking, his arms at his side. Above there was no one to rescue him, no one even to watch. Just a fulmar, perched on a walrus’s skull and regarding the bubbles of his last breaths and the skin of ice beginning to seal the hole.

Against this great mourning for Kane stood Zeke’s unwitnessed final days. I should have been there, Erasmus thought. Somehow, I should have been with him.