Andrea Barrett: Voyage of the Narwhal

“I think we’ve covered our tracks,” he told Ned. Although his feet had prevented him from taking an active role, the plans had worked smoothly so far, and they were his. “But none of this could have happened without you — how can I thank you for all your help?”

“It’s not a problem,” Ned replied. “I told you I’d help any way I could, and I meant it.”

He bustled around the small kitchen, avoiding the knees of his guests. “I’ve found a house for you, about a mile from here,” he said. “It’s pleasant, and quite isolated, but it won’t be ready until tomorrow. We’ll have to stay here tonight.” He watched his guests look around his tiny home. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’ll be all right. I’ve borrowed some extra bedding from the hotel.”

“Of course it will be fine,” Alexandra said. Her dark hair and strong features reminded him of his sister, Nora, as did the way she leaned toward the boy every few minutes and stroked his back. “You were good to take us in like this. And it’s wonderful to see you well, after you were so sick in Philadelphia. I understand you have a fine job now?”

“It’s good enough,” Ned said. How could he tell her that he was in danger of losing it? The time he’d had to take off, while he searched for a house to lodge his guests; the flurry of letters arriving at the hotel, which had made the owner suspicious; the letters he’d had to write back and the supplies he’d had to purchase: all this to help a boy he’d never met. The tone of Erasmus’s letters had been so distressed, though, and the tale he’d told so upsetting, that Ned could not deny him anything. I failed his mother, Erasmus had written. I can ’ t fail Tom.

Ned walked toward the grubby, silent boy, the source of all this trouble. Searching for some words Joe had taught him before their trip to Anoatok, he introduced himself haltingly in the boy’s language. To his surprise, Tom opened his eyes — and then his mouth, as if he might scream again at the sight of Ned’s nose.

Ned had no more Esquimaux phrases, but Erasmus had written that Tom could speak and understand English. He thought about his own arrival at Grosse Isle, when he was just a boy himself: when he and his brother had been torn from their fevered sister and packed like cattle on a crowded barge, then shipped upriver and cast on the kindness of strangers. Who hadn’t been kind, and hadn’t spoken any language he could understand. The rippling, incomprehensible flow of French, which he’d never heard before; the English so different from the English he knew; and never a word of Gaelic, never a taste of home. Never a story he could recognize, nor a person willing to take responsibility for him. He looked into Tom’s dark eyes, reading there help. Can you help me?

“We were on the ice, in a great storm, in terrible weather,” Ned said. He tapped his eroded nostril. “In the darkness the innersuit appeared from behind the rocks and swept me away to their hiding place. They took my nose and forced me to stay with them, but I prayed for strength and at last was able to escape them. When I was returned to my people, this man”—here he pointed to Erasmus—”this man, who was our angekok, did magic and my nose was returned to me. But a piece was missing, a scar by which the innersuit let it be known that I was once captured by them.”

Tom unwrapped his arms, straightened his legs, and reached forward to touch Ned’s nose. “It is painful?” he asked; the first words he’d spoken since leaving Philadelphia.

“Not anymore,” Ned said. “Will you eat something?” From the cupboard he pulled a tray of roasted ducks he’d prepared at the hotel.

“The innersuit tried to take my mother,” Tom said. “But she conquered them.” He bent over the tray.

“What now?” Ned asked Erasmus.

Erasmus lowered himself onto a chair. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve gotten this far, and that’s something. Thanks to you we have a place to stay. The rest — I don’t know yet.”

While they talked Tom finished the first duck and started on a second, pushing aside the baked bones; the heat made them brittle and ugly, useless to him. But around the walls, just as in the place from which he’d come, there were also skeletons: bat, fox, serpent. Later, after everyone had gone to sleep, he would steal a bone from one of the bat’s wings.

THE HOUSE NED had found for them was drafty but large, set amid a stand of hemlocks at the base of a mountain, not far from the trail that led to North Elba through the meadows. Six days a week, drawn by Tom’s lonely eyes, Ned took a long detour on the way to the hotel and breakfasted with the little band of runaways. As he got to know Torn better, he brought a clasp knife, a hatchet, rabbits’ feet. On his days off, he took Tom for rambles in the forest. Erasmus asked several times if he’d like to join their household, but he preferred to keep his own place. After his time on the Narwhal he’d sworn he would never again share living quarters with people not his family.

“Would you think about it?” Erasmus said. “Anytime you wanted, we’d make room for you.” Ned brought strings of fish for breakfast, but continued to say no.

While the weeks slipped by, Erasmus tried to understand what he should do next. He walked and thought, thought and walked — a pleasure that had grown unfamiliar. At least they were safe here. With the snowshoes Ned had made for him he could cast his sticks aside; the broad netted platforms restored his lost toes and as long as it snowed he was free. A few miles from the house, he might have been in another country. The forest was dark and unbroken; he saw wolves, deer, panthers, loons: otypol{, fast ice. Snow glazed the fields and sealed off the mountain peaks. All around him, in every tree and stone, he felt Annie and Dr. Boerhaave. Once he stood in the meadows, after a snowfall, and in the moonlight saw the dark abrupt peaks casting shadows onto a plain that resembled a frozen sea. The shadows took the shape of his dead friend’s face, and then of Annie’s.

Sometimes he met a trapper, and once he stumbled on a hermit’s cottage, but away from the river valleys all was emptiness. He could see why Ned had been drawn back here; the settlers kept to themselves and asked few questions. Remembering Ned’s evasions, he invented an ice-fishing accident to explain his feet, and also new identities for his little group. Even Copernicus wasn’t well enough known to be recognized here in the wilderness, so he didn’t bother to change their names. But to the people he met when he fetched supplies, he lied cheerfully. He claimed they were from Baltimore; that he was a journalist and his brother a painter, who’d both spent years out west. The boy with them was an Indian, whom they’d adopted. And Alexandra was his wife. He paused over that: his wife? Copernicus’s wife? Then chose what seemed most believable.

Through the astounding cold of winter, he and Copernicus and Alexandra worked as they had at the Repository, writing and painting and drawing. Copernicus built a small easel for Tom, and gave him brushes and paint; Alexandra gave him paper and pencils. They taught him how to read and write.

“Show me how to make my parents’ names,” he demanded, and Alexandra wrote NESSARK in large block letters and, not knowing his mother’s true name, ANNIE. Tom gripped a pencil in his fist and covered sheets of paper: NESSARK ANNIE NESSARK ANNIE NESSARK ANNIE ANNIE ANNIE. Around the names he drew hundreds of stubby birds. He ignored the brushes Copernicus gave him but he liked the paint, and after the first messy experiment Copernicus stocked up on turpentine and gave Tom a smock that covered his clothes. Tom painted with his thumbs, feathering the color with delicate strokes. The same scene again and again: an icy white plain, a jagged cliff, some low dark lumps that might have been huts, smaller dark dots. Two-legged dots and four-legged dots: people, dogs. Erasmus said, “This must be his version of Anoatok.” Alexandra, watching Tom’s efforts, said nothing but one night drew a carefully simplified dog and left it on Tom’s bed.