Afterlands (30 page)

THE COMPANY WHO WERE ON THE E ICE-DRIFT WITH CAPTAIN TYSON.

THREE

AFTERLANDS

It seems to me that the days of the “Innuits” are numbered. There are very few of them now. Fifty years may find them all passed away, without leaving one to tell that such a people ever lived.

—Charles Francis Hall, 1864

The noble man will end by having nowhere to live.

—Ivan Turgenev, 1879

Hoped to shadow the three of you, into the afterlands
of your lives—strange-eyed expatriates (like any survivors)
there for a while in media follow-ups, photo ops, Whatever
Became Of features, but always slipping a little farther
into the public’s visual periphery. Tyson finds
a man can’t eat homage. Tukulito conjures
with a kind of nostalgia the basalt tors
and ice tongues of Baffin Land, as seen from the floe—
for at least from that point in time her family
was unscattered. And Kruger in Mexico:
how history, the world’s memory, seems as difficult
to flee as one’s own—as inescapable as the sea
,
that eternal kiss-taste of salt
.

Hartford, Connecticut, March 1877

I
NDEED, DESPITE EVERYTHING
, I rejoice in this opportunity of returning to those Arctic lands and seas which I have come to know so intimately.

Tyson closes the calfskin folder of lecture notes. Again his hands grip the edges of the rostrum, like a ship’s wheel, to keep them steady. Speaking in public has gotten no easier, although he has done plenty of it in the years—almost four now—since his return from the Arctic. Then again, over the last year or so the invitations have been dwindling. This evening the Main Street Memorial Hall is half empty. That means fewer questions from the audience, at least. Tyson follows a script in his lectures, which are carefully revised by the squinting, priggish snuff-addict that Harper & Brothers assigned to help him with
Arctic Experiences
in ’73, but answering questions is different. The paying audiences for these fund-raising lectures tend to be educated and upper tier. Forced to improvise, Tyson believes that his humble origins and lack of polish are exposed.

The electric house lights flare on. The moderator, in wing collar and tails, is beside him. A grave, long, sallow face.

Now Captain Tyson, hero of the Arctic, will be pleased to receive your questions.

The familiar tickling heat under his naval collar (he’s wearing his dress uniform as captain of the Howgate Expedition, which is to sail for the Arctic in June) blossoms up into his cheeks and forehead and scalp. He rocks slightly from foot to foot, as if itching for crude action: the way he would prefer to deal with certain insolent questions he sometimes receives. It’s not just the old problem of the officer who can’t adjust to civilians’ liberty not to salute and show due respect. It’s a matter of caste, too. If the last few years have taught him anything, it’s that no success can fully atone for the circumstances of your birth. Make something of yourself and the elite will greet you warmly at the door, even invite you into the parlour for the evening—a social exhibit or adornment, a curio!—but their inner sanctums will remain fastened. That’s the world’s way, of course, and if it’s bad here, it must be that much worse in other countries, but he’d believed that an achievement of sufficient greatness would surely topple all barriers, erase all borders.

And maybe it would have, for another man. Maybe
he
is the problem. He knows that some people have the glad capacity to make others like them, even against their will—the sort of man who could seduce somebody’s wife with ease, then charm the cuckold out of a duel or a lawsuit. And how is that done? Tyson wants to be loved as well as respected and feared, but he can’t seem to make it happen. He’s still trying to win the world over by dint of sheer will. Charm would be a better bet. A sort of anti-charm is what he seems to have. His achievement was to have stood in for this missing aptitude, but it takes him only so far: through the front door and into the parlour of other people’s hearts, but not into the inner sanctum.

Yes, please, the moderator intones. The gentleman in the second row?

Captain Tyson, the man says, clearing his throat and rising—a scrawny, elongated man with spectacles and red mutton chops. What measures do you and Mr Howgate intend to undertake in order to forestall, ah, any unrest among the crew of the
Florence?
Have you signed on any foreigners for this voyage?

Foreigners, Tyson begins, a touch stiffly. I guess you mean immigrants by that. And unrest, on the
Polaris
—why, as you know from my full account—I mean to say, if you’ve read it, my book—it was only one or two men, mainly. Meyer, Kruger. There’s always a troublemaker or two aboard ship and only God Himself could know beforehand who. The unrest, uh, it was dealt with effectively. Unrest is maybe not the word, I think … And Tyson blusters on, as if blatantly accused of something.

At the naval inquiry a month after the rescue, he was first made to realize that he could still be demoted to uncertainty, even fear. When the three examiners pressed him, gently and in private, on the matter of his own boozing during the voyage, and whether perhaps the men under his command might reasonably have felt unsure of him, he, George E. Tyson, storied survivor of shipwreck, marooning, exposure, starvation, near-mutiny, assault by enormous carnivores, etc. etc., felt that old unwelcome gut-lurching and chill in the limbs, the quaver of a voice suddenly pitched a few notes too high; the instinctive cringe of a small man, cornered. In this case by powerful authority. On the ice, when threatened, he had been more angry than frightened, but that threat had come in the physical realm, of which he was a citizen in good standing. This was different. This was entrenched society’s old threat of disgrace—its most effective resort, against which even a strongman or champion prizefighter is helpless.
We will cast you adrift on your own private floe
.

And God was gone now, too. The final court of appeal.

Gradually sensing what the examiners really wanted—to minimize any stink of failure and scandal—Tyson had rescinded some of his thornier allegations against Budington, the man who had apparently deserted them on the ice. The examiners were then pleased to drop their admittedly minor complaints against Tyson. Delighted, actually. They needed as many heroes, greater and lesser, as possible to float free of the expedition’s wreckage. The inquiry ruled that no one had been at fault in the matter of the castaways’ stranding; that there had been no mutiny among the crewmen, only some “discord under duress” and a little petty theft; that any drinking among the officers had been minor and had not affected their conduct or command.

The inquiry adjourned without having heard yet from Budington and the thirteen other men on the still-lost
Polaris
. But by the end of the summer they too had been rescued, by a Scottish whaler off the coast of Greenland, where they had been stranded and helped through the winter by the Esquimaux. On their return to America they were brought to Washington. The questioning was brief. The Navy, satisfied with how its preliminary inquiry had concluded, was not inclined to have fresh testimony affect it. The German doctor was briskly exonerated in Commander Hall’s death. Captain Budington was quietly reprimanded for his drinking and allowed to go home, having testified that the
Polaris
was separated from the castaways by a storm (as Tyson had stated himself), after which, he said, he had been in no position to rescue anyone, as the ship was damaged and gradually sinking. The thirteen men who had been with him backed up his story. So did the evidence. Had his, or Tyson’s, drinking on board led to the problem in the first place? The question was not asked.

What society doesn’t whitewash, history whites out, like a polar storm. After his lectures, Tyson is sometimes asked about some of the expedition’s minor characters, who are already fading back to oblivion—mainly Meyer, Herron, Kruger, Budington, Joe and Hannah. He tells what he knows. Frederick Meyer has been interned in an asylum for the insane near Woodstock, in the Catskills. Herron met a young woman in St John’s in their two weeks there after the rescue and has returned to Newfoundland to marry her. As for Kruger, he has fled the area, perhaps the country—Tyson can’t say where to. Maybe back to Germany, like several of his compatriots, Anthing, Jamka, and some of the other Germans, the ones who wintered over with Budington. Budington himself has retired to Groton, his nautical career ended in the wake of Tyson’s book (in which Tyson stood by the allegations that he’d had to retract during the inquiry). As for Hannah and Joe, they also settled in Groton, but in time Joe grew restless and returned north with another expedition. He was absent when the child, Punnie, died of consumption last November. His ship might possibly return late this summer to Groton, where Hannah remains, weaving and also making fur garments for local people gripped by the current interest in all things Esquimaux. The other natives have returned to Greenland. Lundquist has gone west to Wisconsin, Lindermann south to Raleigh, Madsen north to Canada.

Nobody asks about the Negro, William Jackson. Tyson believes he has joined the army and been shipped west to fight Indians.

The moderator says, You, sir. Please rise.

It’s a bald, clean-shaven man seated toward the back of the auditorium, though there are hundreds of vacant seats closer up. The man stands but doesn’t get much taller than before. He has a baby face, squashed-looking and sour. His voice is boyishly high and yet forceful and crisp, like the voice of a conceited little prodigy.

Captain Tyson. One hears that Hannah—Mrs Ebierbing—is not only alone but also ill, and in rather straitened circumstances. Do you know this report to be true, and, if so, what can be done about it? One doesn’t wish to see a guest of this country, who has so loyally served it, having to—

I haven’t neglected Hannah. I’m aware of her condition, sir. In fact I only recently, ah …

I say nothing of your having neglected her, Captain! The man sounds a little surprised. I ask only what can be done.

She is, as you say, she’s not been well, and she’s … (He pauses for what seems to him half an eternity) … I believe she misses her home. I did call on her, last month. I offered to take her north with me when I sail in June, Cumberland Sound being her home country, and, ah. We may find her husband there. But she said she, she … informed me that she wouldn’t leave Groton. I believe that she. … Tyson doesn’t know whether to quote her word for word, his lack of instinctive decorum again vexing him, like an intricate dance he can’t master. Most others seem born knowing the steps. He hears her saying, in a mild and tightly managed voice,
I thank you from the heart, sir, for I would gladly see my husband’s face and my home country again. But I cannot leave the grave of my little daughter
. On the last words her voice barely sustains. He takes her small, rough hand into his. He swallows to keep his own throat from clotting. In his lumbering way he too had loved the child.

Here now, in public, he wonders if her admission is too sacred to convey.

Well … I believe she fears she’ll not see him—her husband. If he returns south as she sails northward.

And her circumstances, Captain?

He stiffens, losing what’s left of his patience. He’s about to reply curtly when he seems to spot Hannah herself, at the very back of the auditorium, a score of rows behind the questioner. Small, in black weeds and black bonnet, dark of face—easy to miss in the dimness. For a second he wonders if his memory of visiting her could be conjuring spectres. He squints out. There’s no doubt.

Captain Tyson? The moderator speaks levelly but with a catch of concern; Tyson has gained a reputation for awkwardness in the question period. Now he answers, I was unaware that she, that her circumstances had become difficult. She said nothing of it, to me. I believed the Navy and the Budingtons were seeing to her needs. But, of course, the
Budingtons
… He stops himself in time, remembering that she cares for the Budingtons very much. I’ll, I shall certainly try to help her out, at once. (He has a commission and a new uniform and a published book, but very little money.)

The audience is dead silent. Hannah’s own silence, stillness, like Banquo at Macbeth’s table, seem to accuse him of various things. Tyson too has a single child he is afraid to leave behind. And now a mistress, a beautiful widow named, of all things, Mrs Meyers. She too wears black, in public. He is never seen with her in public and will not be until he returns again from the north. His one or two years up there will surely complete the rift between himself and his wife that the
Polaris
voyage started. When I sail for the north, he has told Mrs Meyers, I will actually be sailing toward you.

And away from little George, forever.

On this voyage he must achieve something bigger. Only that way will his divorce be publicly overlooked, or even forgiven—who knows?—and his prospects not all destroyed. His prospects must not be destroyed. He will have two households to support.

If there aren’t further questions now, he says brusquely before the moderator can invite anyone else to rise, I’ll thank you for your attendance this evening. Good night.

He remembers to shake the moderator’s flaccid hand and tries to excuse himself—he wants to hurry off, find Hannah, maybe she is here to speak to him, surely she didn’t come up to Hartford only to hear his lecture, she must mean to ask for his help, she may have decided to come north with his ship after all. He prides himself on being in a position to help. And he owes her and Joe at least this much. The moderator’s grip tightens. His other hand on Tyson’s gold-braided epaulette: Captain, they would like to meet with you, several of the audience, fellows of the Hartford Geographical Society, to escort you to their club for punch and sandwiches. Tyson nods impatiently. Fine, thanks, but I must speak to Hannah first. Quizzically the man cocks his head. Hannah, says Tyson—Esquimau Joe’s wife. She’s here. He pulls his hand free and gestures toward the back of the auditorium. People filing slowly up the centre aisle toward the main doors. Tyson can’t pick her out.

Are you certain you saw her, Captain?

Another man in wing collar and tails blocks his road. I do hope you’ll be able to join us, Captain!

It would be a pleasure, he says tersely—the right words, the wrong tone and delivery, Tyson as always yanked between scorn for these pompous landlings and a yearning to be admired by them, inducted into their inner circle. It stalls him now. The man saying, I enjoyed especially your depictions of the polar night and the aurora borealis, sir, which I daresay must have been rather a difficult phenomenon to (etc. etc.), while Tyson nods and tries to smile, glancing around the building in search of her. She’s gone. The seats are empty. The aisles emptying too. Of course—he’d informed the whole Goddamned auditorium that he meant to help her, at once! That drove her away. She is half a New Englander, after all. She’ll have slipped out the doors the moment he finished.
Salvaging my pride at the price of hers
. I did find your book to be the most fascinating and accurate of all such recent volumes, Captain, and there have been a great many indeed, as you will discover at our club, they take up a full wall of our library … (etc. etc.).