Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

He leapt back as if he’d been burned. He both could and couldn’t remember those objects, and the young version of himself who’d helped gather them. Two members of the Expedition had been killed by those Feejee Islanders. He hadn’t taken part in the retaliatory raid, but he’d known what was happening. From the ship he’d seen the smoke from the burning villages and heard the rifle fire. Wilkes had argued that man-eating men deserved any punishment he might inflict, and although Erasmus had hated Wilkes’s harsh ways with the native peoples, in this case part of him agreed. But that had been before Dr. Rae returned from the arctic with the first news of Franklin’s fate, and those hints of mutilated corpses and human parts found in the British cooking kettles. Before Joe told him about the British boot.

He moved uneasily among the other crates. There were signs describing corals and crystals, cuttlefish and prawns: Notice the Sea Mushroom, one directed. How could he notice anything, with the objects locked inside their crates? He tried to imagine the ranks of display cases finished and gleaming: each case numbered, each shelf labeled, each item on each shelf tagged. How many miles of shelving, if he put every shelf from every tier of every case end to end? On those shelves would be thousands— tens of thousands — of specimens. Snakes and fossils and shards of wood, canoes and skulls and feathers and slippers all jumbled together. Stuffed dogs, stuffed fish. Exotic birds, gannets and toucans: The Booby is so stupid that he will sit still and be knocked on the head.

When all the specimens were arranged, this would be the largest collection in the country. Everything the biggest, the only, the best. Already there was a meteorite here, squatting dumbly behind two crates: The largest specimen in the country, obtained at Saltillo. When found it was being used as an anvil. It is thought to be of lunar origin. Behind it, the sign on another crate: Human Stytlls from the Feejee Islands, New Zealand, California, Mexico, North American Indians &c. One of the skulls is of Vendovi, the Feejee Chief and Murderer.

Erasmus imagined Zeke striding past these crates with Annie and Tom and a crowd of followers, ignoring everything that didn’t touch directly on him. He hadn’t been so different himself when he was Zeke’s age. Vendovi, whom he’d only glimpsed briefly, had killed one of the expedition’s seamen and then been taken hostage by Wilkes in return. He and Erasmus had been on different ships, and Erasmus had hardly thought about him; hardly noticed when Vendovi was carried ashore at New York, to die the next day in the hospital. How had that person turned into a skull, and how had the skull landed here?

None of these skulls, none of those days, had entered into the version of the Exploring Expedition he’d recounted to Dr. Boerhaave when they’d first met. Perhaps he’d been ashamed even then. All the skulls but Vendovi’s had come, he was almost sure, from burial grounds; other men on other ships had gathered them. Not he. Was it worse to capture a Feejee chief and let him die in a strange land than to tear an Esquimau woman from her home and exhibit her to curious strangers? Vendovi’s death pained him now, but then he’d hardly noticed it. He’d gawked at the Feejee Islanders as if they were apes. As Zeke gawked at the Esquimaux, but with less enthusiasm and a colder eye. One more sign caught his eye:

Case 52.

The identical dress worn by Dr. E. K. Kane, the celebrated American Arctic Explorer, and brought by him to this Museum. We quote the following from the account of his travels: “The clothing or personal outfit demands the nicest study of experience. Rightly clad, he is a lump of deformity, waddling over the ice, unpicturesque, uncouth, and seemingly helpless. The fox-skin jumper, or kapetah, is a closed shirt, fitting very loosely to the person, but adapted to the head and neck by an almost air-tight hood, the nessak. Underneath the kapetah is a similar garment, but destitute of the hood, which is a shirt. It is made of bird sfyns, chewed in the mouth by the women until they are perfectly soft, and it is worn with this unequalled down next the body. More than 500 auks have been known to contribute to a garment of this description. The lower extremities are guarded by a pair of bear-skin breeches, the nannooke. The foot gear consists of a bird-skin sock, with a padding of grass over the sole. Outside of this is a bear-skin leg. In this dress, a man will sleep upon his sledge with the atmosphere at 93 degrees below our freezing point. The only additional articles of dress are, a fox’s tail held between the teeth to protect the nose in a wind, and mitts of sealskin well wadded with sledge straw.”

What was this doing here? The one thing Zeke might have noticed, even envied; Erasmus could see now why Zeke had come here on his honeymoon trip. Why he’d found it so crucial to curry favor with the Smithsonian’s officials and scientists and to give his lecture not in one of Washington’s theaters but in the glorious lecture room above.

This was Zeke’s chance, his time to shine. In July another expedition had left England in search of Franklin and his men: Captain McClintock, aboard the Fox, headed with Lady Franklin’s support for Boothia and King William Land. He meant to complete the search that Zeke had started but bungled — and if he succeeded, all Zeke’s feats would be eclipsed except for his retrieval of Annie and Tom. They were his Sioux Indians, his two-headed infant in a jar. Zeke, Erasmus understood, had a tiny slot of time in which to make his name, a window between Kane and McClintock.

Erasmus poked at the crate, but it was solidly built and he could see nothing inside. He tapped it lightly with one of his sticks; then he hit it more strongly. By the time a hand clamped down on his shoulder he was braced on one stick and whacking with the other, as if he might shatter the thick pine boards and find his own life trapped inside.

“You must stop that,” the carpenter said. “Right now. What’s wrong with you? Are you ill?”

His skin was black, much darker than Annie’s. Erasmus could think of no excuse. Weakly he said, “I had a fever earlier this year. I think it’s come back.”

“It rises off the river,” the carpenter said. “It’s running all over the city. The arctic woman and her son were so sick they had to stop the exhibition before it was done.” He led Erasmus to a low box and said, “Sit down for a minute. Calm yourself.”

“You saw them?” Erasmus said.

“Not the exhibition,” the carpenter said. “But I saw the explorer come in with them, and I saw them leave. Four of the scientists who work here were carrying her. Another had her little boy.”

“Do you know,” Erasmus said, “did you happen to hear— where did they go?”

“To one of the towers, I think,” the carpenter said. “Where the young men stay. The assistant scientists — they’re just boys, some of them. When they aren’t out in the field the director lets them stay in the empty rooms up in the towers. All day they sort and label their bones and then at night they drink too much and slide down the bannisters and run footraces here in the hall. They make a mess of things. I’ve told the director he can’t expect me to work like this but he refuses to discipline them, even though last week they broke one of my doors…”

“Could you take me there?” Erasmus asked.

“I don’t speak to those men.” The carpenter fingered one of Erasmus’s sticks, as if checking the quality of the work. “And I won’t go near their rooms. But I’ll tell you how to get there.”

ERASMUS RESTED AT every landing, pinching his nose against the odor of sewer gas that seeped through the walls and permeated the staircase. He was in the largest of the main building’s towers, a narrow rectangular oven that soaked up the sun’s heat. On each landing paneled doors confronted him. These led, he supposed, to hot boxy rooms, and in those rooms were — what? Fervent young botanists and paleontologists, heaps of dusty equipment, spare books; concerns he couldn’t imagine. He wished the carpenter had been more explicit. He heard laughter above him, and climbed another flight.