Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

R uddy and bearded and long-haired, Copernicus swept into the Repository and threw his arms around his brother, squeezing so tightly he lifted Erasmus from his shoes.

“Oh, be careful!” Alexandra cried.

Copernicus shot her a startled glance, then followed her gaze to his brother’s feet. Quickly he lowered Erasmus into a chair.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m so glad to see you!” He bent and grasped Erasmus’s right ankle, then ran his hand along the foot: tarsals, metatarsals — but most of the phalanges gone. “Do they hurt?”

“No,” Erasmus said, smiling in a way Alexandra had forgotten. “Say hello to Alexandra Copeland.”

“Humboldt wrote me about you,” Copernicus said. “What a help you’ve been with Lavinia, and what a good friend to our family. I’m delighted to meet you.” As if, Alexandra thought, he’d forgotten all the times they’d met when she and Lavinia were girls. He clasped her hand and then spun around and said, “But where’s Lavinia? I’m longing to see her.”

“Let me go fetch her,” Alexandra said, hoping Lavinia was up and dressed.

Later, as Copernicus unpacked the crates piled along the garden paths, she would see his paintings: Pikes Peak and the Grand Tetons and the Rocky Mountains; the Great Salt Lake, where the breeze had blown his floating body about as if he were a sailboat; alkali deserts and the Humboldt Mountains; the Yosemite Valley and El Capitan and the Indians he’d met in each place. Astonishing paintings, flooded with light and dazzling color. But for the moment she saw only the smile on Erasmus’s face, and the possibility of Lavinia similarly transformed.

* * *

HAVING COPERNICUS HOME was a comfort, Lavinia confided to Alexandra. After all he was her favorite brother. She began to plan the household meals again: roast lamb with herbs and carrots, chicken bathed in cream. Nothing but Copernicus’s favorites, she said. He’d been away so long. When her work was done, she and Alexandra sometimes joined the brothers as they sat exchanging stories of their adventures.

Each of Copernicus’s paintings had a tale behind it, and a trail that could be followed through his sketchbook. A sort of visual diary, Alexandra saw, during those warm lazy afternoons. Fort Wallah Wallah on one page and a herd of buffalo on another; a group of men drying and pounding buffalo meat for pemmican. Delaware and Shawnee and Osage Indians; Kickapoos, Witchetaws, Wacos. Mormons. The black-tailed deer of the Rocky Mountains. Thousands of sketches and just a few words of description, the obverse of Erasmus’s journal.

In turn Erasmus offered his own pages, Dr. Boerhaave’s papers, and the long letter he’d written to Copernicus during the voyage. The papers cast shadows, Alexandra saw. Sometimes Erasmus would have to retire abruptly, leaving Copernicus alone. Sometimes, when she came down to breakfast, Erasmus would look as if he hadn’t slept and later, in the Repository, he’d admit that all this talking brought him nightmares. Zeke haunted his dreams, he said. In the ice, nailed to the frozen ship, was a list of the dead in the shape of a headstone that he saw again and again. Still, the more the brothers talked, the more excited Erasmus grew. Copernicus showed Erasmus a sketch of the footwear that had protected him during a winter crossing of the Rockies: buffalo-skin boots over buckskin moccasins over thick squares of blanket over woolen socks. Erasmus showed Copernicus the tattered fur suit Ned had made for him and said, “I might write a book.”

It would not be, as Dr. Kane’s effort had been, an adventure tale built from transcribed journal entries, but neither would it be a simple description of the arctic. Rather, Erasmus said, the narrative would pull his readers along on a journey, as an imaginary ship moved from place to place and through the seasons. On the flagstone patio beyond the solarium, he described a sequence of verbal portraits, a natural history that caught each place at a particular time of the year. He wouldn’t be in the story, Erasmus said. He’d be erased, he’d be invisible. It would be as if readers gazed at a series of detailed landscape paintings. As if they were making the journey themselves, but without discomfort or discord.

“Why not include some color plates?” Copernicus said. “I could do the paintings myself.” From Erasmus’s sketches and descriptions, and his own knowledge of glaciers and light — what if he were to make a series of paintings introducing the sections? Each could combine all the important features of one region, all the representative animals and plants — imaginary, and yet a portrait truer than simple fact.

Erasmus reached into his pocket and pulled out a withered slab of leather wrapped in a handkerchief. He unfolded the cloth. “Paintings like this?” he said. “That stand for a whole set of things?”

“What is that?”

Erasmus told him about his last day among the Boothian Esquimaux, and how the wife of the tribe’s leader had slipped him this relic. He didn’t say where he’d hidden it; nor what Joe had told him about the boot from which it might have come.

“Have you shown it to anyone?”

“Just some reporters,” Erasmus said. “When I first got back, and everyone was asking questions and I was trying to explain what happened and what we’d found. Even if all the other things were lost, I said, this was one real bit of evidence that we’d uncovered from Franklin’s voyage. But no one believed me.” He paused for a second. “That’s not true; Alexandra and Linnaeus and Humboldt saw it. They believed me, I think. I’m not sure, I was so sick. I don’t remember much from those first few weeks.”

Copernicus balanced the relic on his palm. “But it’s real" he said. The tips of the rusty, broken screws raised the leather off his skin, so that this thing which had once sheltered a foot now seemed to balance on little feet of its own. “It’s right here.”