Andrea Barrett - Voyage of the Narwhal

He slept in the last of the square chambers lining the lofty main room in which they cooked and ate and worked: one, two, three, four boxes. Four single beds; four people sleeping alone. When Tom went into his room for long stretches and closed the door the others tried to grant him the same privacy they gave each other. They had to do this, Alexandra thought. Otherwise they couldn’t have lived in this odd, interesting, almost communal way, as if their new home were a miniature New Harmony. Although the local people believed them a family, they weren’t: they were four people sharing a house and chores and work on a book, the three adults also sharing responsibility for the child. Why was this so different from living with her brother and sisters and nephew and niece? Yet it was; every moment she felt as if she were inventing her life. Tom copied her dog drawing again and again, adding harnesses and linking these with a tangle of traces; later, with her help, he drew a sledge. He needed her, she thought. In a way her family didn’t. But he made no demands.

She wrapped two shawls around the man’s overcoat she’d purchased in the village and went out by herself for long walks across the meadows or along the deer paths winding through the woods, exulting in the astonishing cold and the dry snow whipping her cheeks. On the pair of snowshoes Ned had given her, she tromped the trail along Slide Brook to the South Meadows Brook. No one asked her where she was going or when she was coming back. She chopped wood for the stoves and took her turn cooking and wrestling with the laundry, but because Erasmus and Copernicus shared these tasks they felt like pleasures. At home, she thought, she’d felt like a servant doing similar work: because that had been Browning’s household. Browning’s home, somehow, in which she and Emily and Jane and even Harriet were guests. Here no one expected anything. There were rules, lists, things that had to be done — but they all had to do them.

Each morning she woke with a jolt, electrified by all she wanted to do and purely amazed at herself. Where had she gotten the nerve to confront her family and tell such enormous lies? Sneaking up the dark walk to the Repository, Copernicus beside her, she’d pushed open the door as noiselessly and confidently as if she’d been a criminal all her life. Kidnapping: that was the word for what they’d done, at least in some people’s eyes. She’d known just what to say to Tom, just how to bundle him up and slip him into the carriage — as, here in these forbidding woods, she knew how to find her way along the streams without getting lost, how to gather wood, how to stoke the stove. She knew how much sleep she needed, which proved to be very little; how, even, to navigate her way through her feelings toward the two brothers. She kept to her own bed, although she sensed she would have been welcome in either of the two rooms flanking hers. For a while, which she knew wouldn’t last forever, she enjoyed the delicate, teasing tension that kept the three of them afloat like a raft.

None of them knew where they were going next. They would finish the book, they agreed. Or as much of it as they could. After that — after that was a blank page Alexandra couldn’t imagine.

When Erasmus had first approached her with his plan, she’d volunteered to help rescue Tom, and then to help care for him while she completed the drawings for the book. She hadn’t been able to think any further than that. Now the drawings were halfway done.

A letter arrived, which Erasmus read aloud as they sat eating venison stew. Zefe has spoken with the police, Linnaeus wrote. As if Zeke hadn’t kidnapped Tom from his home to begin with. And named you and Copernicus as suspects, but not Alexandra, When I agreed to help I didn ’ t expect to be left in such an uncomfortable position. Don ’ t you thinly you should explain yourself to Zeke?

Erasmus made a face, and Alexandra looked into her bowl. If this was a kidnapping, what were the words for the other things they’d done? The mess they’d left behind in Philadelphia, their angry families, Erasmus’s tangled investments, which were all that supported the four of them yet were still confused — these things were difficult, yet the book was growing swiftly. Around them were mounds of manuscript that Erasmus read to her and Copernicus at night; mounds of drawings she pinned to the walls for the brothers’ inspection and comments; two more of Copernicus’s giant paintings. Each bird and seal and cliff that Erasnjus and Dr. Boerhaave had captured in their notebooks, each whale and swarm of plankton, found a home in them.

“That’s it,” Erasmus said as each corner of Copernicus’s paintings emerged. “That’s what it looked like.”

All of them, Alexandra thought, could envision the book clearly now: the design, the type, the way the drawings and paintings would fall among the words. Beside them Tom watched and listened, making his own words and pictures. He drew his mother, he drew his father, he drew walrus hunts and polar bears. He waited for Ned’s visits. The snow piled up until everything around him was white and almost looked like home.

Sometimes Ned took him deep in the woods, where the traps were set. They caught beaver, muskrat, rabbits; when they found a fox caught in one, growling and gnawing its frozen paw, Ned let Tom kill it. Tom stood on the fox, as he’d seen his father do, pinning its head and feet and then pressing his hands down on its chest so hard that its heart stopped and it died. Alexandra drew the way he skinned it with Ned’s knife and staked the pelt out to bleach and dry. Erasmus and Ned cleaned the bones, reassembled them, and taught Tom their names. From a second fox, they allowed him to keep the leg bones and the skull.

“It’s wonderful what he’s learning,” Ned said to Erasmus. “But how much longer can we keep him here like this?”

That morning Tom had woken to the sound of water dripping: not his mother, seeping through the sky, but icicles shrinking on the eaves. Something happened inside his eyes, as if the fog that had wrapped him since leaving his home had lifted. He gazed at Ned; at Erasmus and Alexandra bent over their tables; at Copernicus busy with a huge painting of the shoreline across the water from Anoatok. He said, “I want to go home.”

Erasmus wrote two more lines and set his page aside. He looked up at Tom. His father, he remembered, had once looked at him with exasperation and said, “Can’t you get over anything! Why do you have to lock yourself up here, just because things haven’t gone the way you wanted?” All this time he’d been waiting for his next move to be revealed to him; here was the point of all his lies and lists. “I’m taking you home,” he said. As if this was what he’d always meant to do. “As soon as the season is right.”

LINNAEUS WROTE AGAIN:

Last week they went to Washington, to attend the ceremony at the Smithsonian; the collections of the Exploring Expedition have all been arranged in the Great Hall, and with them Annie ’ s skeleton in a central display case. Zeke was given some sort of award but I don ’ t know thedetails. Humboldt and I and our families are fine and we hope you are too, but I wish I didn ’ t have to lie to everyone.

Zeke knows you didn ’ t arrive in Liverpool, but no more than that — I don ’ t thinly he wants to know more. After he contacted the police, he figured out that it cast a bad light on him and Lavinia if you were sus pected of wrongdoing. Now he or someone else has started a rumor that Tom, ungrateful boy, has signed on as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. But really no one is interested in Tom ’ s fate anymore. Everyone is tallying, instead, about Zeke ’ s book.