Afterlands (3 page)

Starr Burying Ground, Groton, Connecticut, 23 November 1876

T
HE SMALL CEDAR COFFIN
has been eaten by the earth. But the gullet of lead-coloured clay remains open, as if hungry still. On the lip of the grave, see Tukulito in her black veil dropping in her handful of dirt. She does not direct it, just lets it slide through limp fingers. Her sobs turn to coughs while she stands swaying, as if to the slow bass of an inward dirge—unable to turn from the hole and walk away. Easier maybe just to topple forward, to follow the dirt now spattered over the bed-like lid of the coffin, homeward. Down there it’s always the Arctic. Her face veiled, a doll in the crook of her arm and standing barely five feet tall, Tukulito could be a schoolgirl playing at grief.

The afternoon is unseasonably warm and so still that the straws of hair poking from the Reverend Cowan’s bald scalp do not stir. The Ground is on the eastern face of Starr Hill so that the light of the sun foundering into the stripped hardwoods on the hill’s crest skims downhill, level with the slope. Shadows of mourners and monuments are fantastically elongated. The beams ignite little bonfires of colour amid leaf-drifts that gales have piled against the west-facing stones.

Beside the Reverend Cowan, the piano teacher Mr Chusley stands dabbing at his nose with a handkerchief. Next, there’s Kruger, in his tight-buttoned black seaman’s overcoat despite the weather, his derby in his hands, mussed hair upright like breaking surf. A rumpled skeptic, but his eyes are red. Beside him Miss Crombie, the schoolma’am, glares upward with a look of perplexity and something like indignation: the look of someone whose beliefs are in tumult, maybe about to change. A handful of the child’s white classmates are clumped around her. The largest set of mourners is the Budingtons: Sydney, who captained the
Polaris
and, although not present on the ice, was also accused in Tyson’s book and disgraced, his wife Sarah, and the Budingtons’ many grown children. For years the Budingtons have been “Hannah and Joe’s” hosts in the South, and after the rescue assisted them in buying their own house, close by. But Joe—Ebierbing—is now absent. After two years’ settled work as a carpenter, farmhand, and fisherman, he grew restless and returned to the Arctic with another expedition.

To think he knows nothing of this, muses Tyson, who’s stationed apart, stiffly squared, as if policing the event, in the dress uniform he has just received as captain of a ship taking yet another expedition north next spring. His tight, guarded eyes like isinglass in his florid face. Greying mutton-chop whiskers. He’s brawny, looks like a man of few sympathies, and yet.
Think of poor Joe peacefully digesting his dinner, picking his teeth with a fishbone, smoking his pipe … my God!
Feeling himself watched, Tyson glances over, again receives from Kruger that fixed, incriminating stare. He looks away past the grave to where the goat-bearded sexton stands by a young elm, hands folded atop the long spade handle, chin propped on his knuckles. He’s humming softly. One soiled boot rests on the blade-back as if on a tavern foot-rail. When he sees Tyson glaring, he straightens up fast.

Tyson is the sort of man who has to be testing his power all the time. He never can resist a test. If none arises, he will find ways of engineering one. Without constant proofs of strength and competence he feels himself fading, shrivelling into something less than himself—less than solid. He must keep ramming himself up against the world to make sure he is all there. He still longs to perform one grand, strenuous feat that will make his name, imprint it on the upper zones of all maps, win him a respect he will no longer have to prove himself worthy of, day in day out—his own misgivings like wind-driven snow filling in the tracks. In leading the floe-party to rescue, then publishing a book on the ordeal, it might seem he has succeeded perfectly. But
Arctic Experiences
has not done especially well. Worse, certain newsmen have doubted elements of his account. And at the naval inquiry after the rescue, Kruger, among others, while praising his courage and resourcefulness, had also embarrassed him.
Yes, on board I saw the Lieutenant when he was drunk like old mischief. I saw him when he could scarcely move along
. (There wasn’t much of this talk, but it’s what Tyson recalls best.) In the battle of narratives that followed, Tyson’s own did prevail, and he is widely revered as a hero, but not in the unassailable way he desires.

Tyson is the sort of man who will always feel himself assailed.

Now Chusley is guiding Tukulito back from the rim of the grave, encouraging her in a mild, stammering voice: Come, Hannah, please, you must. You must have some tea. Some tea now. She moves as if newly blind. Anyone can see he is in love with her: a married woman, dark and rather plain, her head too large for her tiny sloped shoulders. Yet she gains loyal admirers—such as Tyson himself, on the ice. Such as Kruger, who may also have been her lover.

Tyson is pained and also surprised to see Kruger here, having heard rumours that the man had returned to Europe, like some of the other crewmen. Soon after the publication of
Arctic Experiences
Tyson received a letter from Kruger and, deeply offended, had not replied.

To disregard the wishes of the dying can be an act of love—so the Reverend Cowan told Tyson before the burial. The father, especially, will need a body to mourn on his return. And Cowan explained how the Esquimau child, delirious in fever, had made her mother promise to bury her at sea, like a certain crewman who had died of the pleurisy on that sealing ship that plucked them from the ice. The
Tigress
, Tyson said. Yes, he remembered that man. Pockets weighted with shot, body swaddled in his own blanket. While the sealers stood by, bowing rain-drenched heads, the man’s three brothers had lugged him over the gunwale and let him drop into seas still scraping and rattling with ice—slabs and pashy floes and slurry. Tyson had watched, grim-eyed, yet with a survivor’s numb detachment, his belly packed, mind dulled. … Cowan reported that at the time it had not seemed to Hannah that Punnie had noticed the event, yet three years later as she lay burning in bed—fingers scuttering over the counterpane as if at the keyboard—she remembered. Why, she even remembered the dead man’s name: Obadiah Squires. I want to be buried in that cold water, Mama, she’d said in English. She would only use English now. Poor Hannah feared that she was forgetting her mother tongue. But my darling, you are getting better! she’d said, laughing and crying at the same time—you will not need to be buried on land or at sea!

Promise me, Mama.

Hannah, just do as she asks! Cowan had told her. Promise her! Perhaps it will calm her!

And she’d glanced at the physician, who nodded soberly, then at Chusley, who was watching the child’s moving fingers with wide, blood-rimmed eyes, perhaps reading a familiar tune in their motions. The mother was known to all as quietly decisive, but at that moment she seemed utterly lost. At last she leaned close to her daughter’s ear, stroking the freshly shaved head, and gave her word.

They file down the gravel path to Pleasant Valley Road. Mourners will walk more slowly from the grave of a child, but because it’s downhill the numb-legged gathering moves with some clumsiness, faster than it means to, as if fleeing the site. Sarah Budington and Sydney in his stovepipe hat support Tukulito, dwarfing her, one on either side. They help her into the funeral brougham waiting by the churchyard gate and get in after her. Four black horses draw the brougham away. Cowan and Miss Crombie and Chusley and the other mourners climb into chaises and buggies and follow in a straggling procession back to the Budingtons’ parlour.

There will be a wide selection of spirits, knowing Budington, thinks Tyson, who is now a teetotaller. He knows that Budington will be unhappy to have him in his house, but this is New England and the man won’t want to make a scene—at least not until he has absorbed a few drams. There’s also the German to consider. His letter all but challenged Tyson to a duel. Still, Tyson wants to be able to give Tukulito his heartfelt sympathies, and after what they went through together on the ice, he must.

Of course he’s also drawn by the prospect of another test.

He declines an invitation to board a neighbour’s buggy, meaning to walk, then realizes that Kruger, behind him, has already done the same. The final buggy rattles past Tyson and he walks steadily up the middle of the road, inhaling the wheel dust that hovers in the sun’s last amber. The creaking of the buggy’s axle fades. Kruger’s footfalls sound some dozen paces behind. Tyson stifles a cough. It seems important not to accelerate, either. He slows down. In silence the last buggy rounds a curve in the road, vanishing behind a stand of black cypresslike pines.

Tyson stops, plants his feet, pivots from the waist up.

Well, shall we walk the rest of the way together, Mr Kruger?

For a moment it seems that Kruger will sweep past the larger Tyson without a word, but he halts abreast, gives Tyson a challenging look from under his hat-brim, then turns his eyes up the road.

Yes, and why should we not. And he strides on with his rolling, wide-stepping sailor’s gait. The German accent is faint, although he still pronounces
w
like
v
, says
und
for
and
.

Especially on a day like this, says Tyson, catching up. His tone, while hardly fawning, is mild enough to broach the possibility of peace. Why revive finished battles? A sentimental part of him has always yearned to be liked as well as feared.

You’re referring to the weather, Mr Tyson?
The veather
. Yes, a fine day to make amends.

I refer to the funeral of a child who shared our suffering and all but died with us. And I have no amends to make.

As they walk in silence on this road even the tiniest stone has its shadow. For a moment, their stride rhythms merging, they’re in step.

Still, Tyson says softly, the weather is a true mercy. It’s a harder thing to watch a body laid in frozen sod.

Ah, poor Punnie! Kruger exclaims.

That’s it for a while. At last Tyson ventures, I do recall how you would often play with her and the other children on the ship. … German games, were they not?

Children’s games are children’s games. Leave your borders and uniforms out of it.

Tyson bolts a look at him and then down at his own moving, side-striped trousers.
You think a life without uniforms is possible, Kruger? How naïve that is of you. Who would protect our settlers under threat in the West? Who kept this country together, North and South, and emancipated the slaves?

I didn’t suppose you would come, says Kruger.

I shared their snowhut, Kruger.

Yes, and expressed disgust over Tukulito’s housekeeping in your book. Also her habits. I didn’t suppose you would dare coming. You disgraced her too. Disgraced everyone but yourself.

You retain a special concern for her, I see.

Ah, and you not? Kruger’s smile is chilling. You can go to hell.

Tyson holds his composure. Slowly and earnestly self-educated, he feels awkward around the Educated, easily outmanoeuvred, an elephant trying to stamp on a panther. In fact Kruger has little more real schooling than Tyson—who as an orphan went to work in a Newark foundry, then escaped to sea—but Kruger is from a once-bourgeois family with bookish leanings, and his manner on the ice provoked Tyson sorely. But he had to harden himself to insolence out there, where at first the foreign crewmen were armed and he was not, and he desperately hoped to avoid mutiny and get the lot of them home.

The book was a journal, Kruger. We were all of us fighting to survive. Surely you felt moments of disgust with the men of your snowhut?

You said that your journal was lost—there in your prologue it said so, that you had to re-complete it from a few notes. You scarcely took any time at it, either. There were as many stories as there were castaways but you fed yours to the public first. They ate their fill, then they left the mess-hall. You received my letter?

You could hardly have expected a reply. You seemed to be hoping for pistols at dawn, in Central Park.

Kruger actually laughs. Damn lucky for you there was none of that. I seem to be increasingly unkillable. The polar seas couldn’t manage it and last week also the East River failed.

I’ve no idea at all what you’re saying.

But you ought to, you above all! On the ice I kept you alive. Count Meyer wanted a war. There was that time also, the one night when you were about—

Tyson stops, stamps his foot on the road and cries, God damn it, man, have you really come to the funeral of this poor child just to chastise me? I kept
you
alive. I was your ranking officer. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten our last weeks out there!

Kruger stares from under his hat-brim, arms stiff at his sides. For a moment it seems he is trying to nerve himself to draw a weapon from his packed pockets. Well, he says finally, I shall be leaving here—then looks down at his scuffed but polished boots, dusty now, and turns and walks up the road. It takes Tyson a moment to realize that he means he will be leaving the area, perhaps the country, not merely the spot where he was standing.

Tyson walks the rest of the way behind Kruger, who gradually pulls ahead. They pass a grey farmhouse set back in a stubble field. A clutch of crows peers up in silence from a furrow where something intriguing lies out of sight. In a woodlot there’s a teetering rank of headstones, like a frozen demonstration of the force of gravity; Tyson’s sharp eye distinguishes a date brought out by the sun’s last rays, maybe victims of the Indian chieftain, King Philip. The English settlers in this area were exterminated. But they had sprung back. And in June of this year Custer and his bluecoat cavalry were wiped out, but many more soldiers had come after them to drive the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the other hostiles farther back into the wilderness—farther back, Tyson feels, into the human past that is their true habitat. He likes Hannah and Joe very much, he admires them truly, but he takes it for granted that they are unusually advanced members of a primitive, doomed race. The child’s death is a heartbreak, yet in some parlour of the mind it gratifies the vision of racial destiny that Tyson shares with his era. The Esquimau has no resistance to the ailments of civilization, and that is telling.
The native is but an episode in the advance of the Caucasian
. Where did he read that? A recent editorial, perhaps in the
Tribune
. The tone was neither hostile nor contemptuous. It was simply the pragmatism of progress.