Afterlands (35 page)

Enough, sir. Do come with me, sir.

Hannah! he says.

His panting breath smells of coffee and cloves.

Some while later she asks if he would see himself out. In an agony of self-consciousness he is fumbling to re-tie his black cravat; whatever she tries to look at becomes the spindle around which everything else whirls and slurs. She feels she can’t move from where she lies under the sheets. Move or meet his serious brown eyes, which for their part seem unable to meet her own.

I shall ask her, sir, she says. When I meet her again.

Hannah? He kneels beside her, his pale brow furrowed.

I shall ask her if it was the piece she was playing. When I meet her again, in my people’s
quvianaqtuvik
. And she thinks: For I’ll not be permitted to enter the white one, not now.

Hannah—I’ll call on you, to, to. Tomorrow. If I might.

Tavvaavutit
, she tells him, as a goodbye. Though in fact the word is only a general form of salute; in her tongue there is really no word for goodbye.

By the next morning something has changed. Her lungs feel bloated with a damp, cold humour, like thickly settled salt fog. The fever is worse, her sputum streaked with blood. She is aching, too weak to launder the handkerchiefs, as on the ice floe, how difficult it was to keep clean, when she was on her moon, at least before the hunger stopped the bleeding. The shame of it sometimes. As if in punishment, she thinks, this weakness … though the fever’s drift makes it seem that her strange liaison with Mr Chusley was but a figment. Or is this punishment, again, for stealing on the floe? Her mind struggles to keep occasions and causes separate. Famished on the ice, on the shores of sleep, there was this same oblique, floating, phantasmal quality to her reflections on her theft of the stores. Such reflections were rare, and the awareness of her actions would always come over her like a surprise recollection—a surprise that would seem to
want
to be forgotten, that would insist on its own fragile implausibility. This cannot possibly be you. (But for this child, there is no law I would not violate, no consequence I would not face.)

A rapping comes, the distant front door, a week’s journey from the bed, through the bedroom door, along a tedious sequence of cold and richly appointed, palatial rooms, then down a series of corridors, rounded like gloomy iglu tunnels, to the parlour. It will be Pretty Mother Sarah, bringing the mail. Tukulito cannot face her. Again the thought of yesterday comes, and of her present weakness, which feels vaguely shameful … everything vague now. Here in the South she has always had to be stronger than any strength, observed as she is by those who expect so little of her colour. She tries to cough but she is too weak, or the thickening fog in her lungs too heavy, a new condition, she can only wheeze. They think of Indian squaws and Esquimau women as weak—weak in virtue. For years she has been interpreting the insinuations and aboard ship overhearing the men. If Mr Chusley should report anything, it will bring further shame on herself, her family, her people. Yet this fear lacks immediacy, seems muffled in sacks of bedstraw. Her thoughts are thinking or dreaming themselves, at two or three removes from her, like some other woman’s thoughts infiltrating the cavities of her ears. … Yet that woman can only be herself. A woman alone in a way she has never felt before. The Americans will turn from her, surely, and she is lost to her own people; yet this too seems to matter less and less, she is drifting free of all human concerns on the shrunken, private ice floe of the bed, which is yawing, listing on its sea of fever. The bedroom door gapes, Mrs Budington fills the threshold, dark and large, in her hand a yellow envelope. Hannah! Pretty Mother, come in. The woman stoops awkwardly, sits heavily on the side of the bed, sets a cold dry hand on Tukulito’s forehead. Lord help us. Hannah? Do you hear me? I shall be back soon, with the doctor. The room is empty. Then, as if only a moment has passed, the room is full, it’s not a large room, with Mrs Budington, and the physician, and Mr Chusley, him as well. The physician wears spectacles too little for his stout pink face, he is stripped to shirtsleeves and a shad-bellied waistcoat. How perfectly round and healthy the body packed into his waistcoat! By the door Mr Chusley sits stiffly, a crease between his widened eyes, his derby in his hands, kneading and twisting the curled brim; as though he is attending the bedside of a neighbour’s child whom he has run over in his shay. A thoughtful man, always. She sees he will say nothing. Oh, sir, you must feel no guilt in this matter.

I think, think she may be a. Awaking, Dr Schader.

I believe not, sir. This is the worst case I have seen in much time.

Shall I bring more water, Doctor? Pretty Mother’s voice, subdued.

Per per, permit me. Please.

If you would, sir. The doctor’s accent is heavily German.

Can you hear me, dear? Hannah?

Yes, she whispers. Pretty Mother. Forgive me.

Hannah?

She feels Mrs Budington’s face inclined to hers. The surplus heat it contributes is too much, she is burning up so, wanting space, cool space and water.

Please, she tries to say, a further towel.

Is he bringing the water yet, Doctor?

Ja, ja
, he is at the pump, I see him.

Forgive me, Mother. The food I stole.

Hush, my dear! You, ever steal a thing? It’s only the fever.

Tukulito opens her eyes. Mrs Budington’s bitten lips part expectantly.

Not from Mr Daboll, Tukulito tries to say, but only the last word comes clear.

Daboll’s shop? Rest, dear, please! You are the most honest creature God ever made!

She may have said Devil, the doctor says in an undertone perfectly clear to Tukulito. They are quite superstitious, these people, one hears. Thank you, Chusley.

You are mistaken, Dr Schader, Mrs Budington says. Hannah is different.

But, she has here in the bed with her this fetish!

It’s an Esquimau doll, Doctor.

It was her daw, daw, her
daughter’s
doll, Mr Chusley tells the doctor, with force.

Put one other pillow under her back. Like so. And he whispers: If she cannot cough, she will drown from within. Chusley, bring more camphor oil.

It’s in the kitchen, by the washbasin, Mrs Budington says.

God help her, the doctor mutters.

Some would call
that
a superstition, Tukulito hears Mr Kruger remark, as plainly as if he were here in the room by her ear.

Could they be, Mother? The ones from the ice. I do hear him. And the lieutenant …

Don’t you fret about Tyson, Hannah. You must try to cough.

But the cloths, they all be soiled, Mother!

Here I have a clean one, my dear.

Ah,
qujannamiik!

Her English is regressing now, back through the years of steady, laborious gain, much as Punnie’s speech regressed near the end, the child reverting to words and making sounds that she had not formed since she was six, then four, then two—sounds she had entirely forgotten—as she retraced her way backward to her birth time, and the absence before birth, her mother, helpless, watching her recede.

Odd sounds are coming from inside her. When things go badly wrong, naturally one wonders about broken taboos. Now one would listen to an
angakoq
’s words, as much as this physician’s, although the whiter, southerly districts of her being still mistrust those primitive ways. The borders between districts are breaking down, however. All moments, past or near-present, are now present, like the hours of her conversion, which she undertook partly for Father Hall and partly because she loved the Baby Jesus so, in the stories.
Sweet Jesus … Lamb
, she whispers experimentally, and Pretty Mother loudly, as if in triumph, relays the words to the others: Sweet Jesus, come, she said!

Some time after the birth of King William, her second baby, she and Father Hall discover a woman entombed in an iglu. Queen Emma, the woman is called. She has given stillbirth to a tiny infant, hard as soapstone, and has tried to conceal the birth, burying this little statue in secret, and so she has been entombed with three ancient women of her tribe who are chanting to her night and day, forcing her to fast, to purge her of her transgression. She is dying. Father Hall tries to intervene, hectoring them about the White God’s forgiveness and the cruel error of their superstitions, and Tukulito translates it all to the crones, at first diplomatically, muting the man’s bluster, but later, as Queen Emma sinks into delirium and as she, Tukulito, comes to agree with Father Hall and
to deplore these savage rituals
, she translates directly and with passion. To no avail. The woman is dead. Angry and defiant, Tukulito resolves to accept Father Hall’s repeated advice and abandon some of the tight constraints on her own diet as a nursing mother, beginning to take cold water and bread and coffee along with the traditional stewed caribou meat. Hall is elated with this victory of civilized good sense over brutish shamanism, though when little King William himself sickens and dies, Tukulito endures agonized second thoughts, allowing the vindicated and spiteful
angakoq
to punish her.

Some time has passed, a new mist of voices in the room. The feeling in her chest is colder and thicker, sluggish, less like fog than like the grey pash of melt-ice. The Reverend Cowan is here. From far away a faint, drilling hum, as of massed paper wasps, then horses and a vehicle, hoofs clapping, the shimmering tinkle of bells, and though she cannot open her eyes, memory furnishes the scene, on disembarking with Mr Bowlby in Hull after crossing the ocean, she fifteen years old, Ebierbing eighteen, and among all the marvels that throng their eyes in the crammed hours that follow, none can rival the spectacle of enormous horses, a twosome drawing the buggy of a merchant, the sun flashing on the bend of their arched necks and gleaming along their glossy sides to curve again on their great, round haunches. The biggest, most
naked
land-creatures they have ever seen: slim legs moving quickly, like trotting caribou, hoofs scratching sparks off the ground which is floored with stones like a tight-cobbled beach. Turf-coloured manes and tails dancing in the wind, their harness trimmed with small brass bells and yellow tassels, while behind them, scarcely less marvellous, a shining machine clatters, a sort of dogsled high up on wheels, like the wheels of the cannon on Mr Bowlby’s ship, but larger, blood-red, webbed with bone-like rods like a bloodstained crystal of snow … and this wondrous sled has a glistening black roof as well. …

Soon after their wedding in Mr Bowlby’s vast parlour they are in a room even grander, in London, seated at a gleaming table around which half of the folks they knew in Cumberland Sound could have been gathered, dining with the Queen and her husband, the German Consort, and the two men are silent, Ebierbing because he considers his English too poor, the Consort because it is his nature to say little, or so Tukulito interprets, while the Queen, who is just a little taller than Tukulito and similarly large of head and small of shoulder, asks question after question about herself and her country and her impressions of England, then listens to her brief, careful answers with unblinking interest, her head cocked slightly to one side and her small hands holding her cutlery still, just above her plate, till Tukulito has finished speaking. We wish to know all of our subjects well, she says, and you are the first whom we have met from the northerly parts of our America. Tukulito is fascinated and a little amused by how the Queen seems to speak both for herself and for her silent husband. She likes the Queen and can feel the Queen’s liking for her, although the woman has a peculiar way of smiling, somehow keeping her upper teeth covered with the skin above her lip, which barely moves even when she is talking. And were you afraid in Her Majesty’s presence? she is asked later by Mr Bowlby and by others. This question she finds puzzling. But the Queen, she be a kind lady, she answers in her still-imperfect English. Her house be a very fine place, sir, I assure you.

Hannah.

Mrs Budington is peering down, her cheeks ruddy and her hair hung around her face in wisps. Lamplight. It seems to be near dawn. Somewhere a ripple of thunder, the burdened clouds clearing their throat.

Mother, Pretty Mother. Care for the house. For Ebierbing.

Oh, Hannah, my dear! Sydney is here now … you’ve been another daughter to us.

Hello, Hannah.

Sir.

Don’t try to speak, girl, he says slowly, as if to a foreigner or a child. Cough.

You be all so kind.

She is observing the moment from a high corner of the room where a spider has worked its mansion of a web, and there she is, tiny under the grey coverlet, lungs crackling, Pretty Mother on the bed next to her, sidesaddle, Mr Budington behind his wife, standing, his stovepipe hat gripped behind him and his free hand—red, knob-knuckled, gold-ringed—on her shoulder. A penny-smell of whisky. Everything is so clear. The yellow envelope with the cochineal postmark on Father Hall’s escritoire. The doctor bunched over in the chair where Mr Chusley sat before, the tiny spectacles tucked in his waistcoat fob, elbows propped on his knees, steepled fingers rubbing the bridge of his nose between tight-shut eyes. Other voices from the parlour. The thick smell of coffee, like turned brown earth. (It is hot here under the roof, enmeshed in the web.) She wishes she could see who is in the kitchen. He loves fresh coffee, her husband does. Has he returned then? Her blood bounds for the joy of it but then comes the thought that there is some reason she should not rejoice in his return, although the reason evades her. There is too little food in the house; he always returns famished.
Very spare and gaunt the Wolf is
. A peculiar verse on the label of the small, flat tins of lobster meat that she purchases from Daboll’s, twelve cents the tin,
To the Full Moon in the Marshlands, through the Warm Night sang the Bullfrog: Very spare and gaunt the Wolf is: LOBSTER is a Fish delicious!
As a child she would sometimes help the women gather mussels from the seabed under the ice. The tides were high in Qaquluit so that at low tide, in certain ledged places along the shore, you could chisel open the ice hole they would use all winter and slip through and crouch along under the ice, then stand fully, the adults holding small qulliqs for light, and attentively you would wander in that gloomy-green underland, searching the fluted, crusting seabed and icy tidepools for mussels and dulse, fronds of bull kelp, gathering them in sealskin bags. Sometimes the adults would pry open a few shells for the children and let them slurp the mussels fresh, salted with brine. The sound of the withdrawn sea like a distant wheezing, repercussing through the caves and chambers formed farther out by the reef and the boulders of the sea floor. An impatient, constant, predatory sound. As the women stoop down and gather, faster now, the smaller children cling near, within the wall-circle of the qulliq’s glow. This is their playhouse, large and flat-roofed like the empty warehouse built by the whalers, or they are Nuliajuk’s little ones, in a room carved in the foot of an iceberg, in fear awaiting their mother’s return, for she is always vexed. The louder growls and whooshing alert you, the tide is stealing back, wave by sly wave, and the roof’s creaking like spars or rafters and sometimes, look up now, the lamplight will show a blue seam that darts through the ice like lightning, that miracle her people see but once in a decade. Something, Pretty Mother’s hand, is cool on her forehead.
Put me below with my daughter
. That other night’s near-bitterness is dissolved, for these people have indeed loved her, after their fashion … and did she not just realize her husband was here? She must have heard him, before, so as to realize such a fact. Her being is tiny, is shrinking, a collop of gristle wrapped in layered furs.
Ja
, I am sorry. You must now take your leave of her. The voice could be Mr Kruger’s but she seems to remember that he is far away, perhaps aboard the
Tigress
, still whispering certain things to her, before his kiss,
No, please, never say that, Tukulito, I believe you have saved us all
… and in the still air his words hover like a fog of cotton but his face despairs and passes and he is not here under the ice with them, rapidly gleaning mussels, although something else, what is it, is deeply amiss, but now Punnie appears out of the dark where she has been lost for many hours, scooting up the mud slope from the lower caves and chambers where the tide is clawing in, her small face solemn with fear, thin-lipped and big-eyed, as her mother kneels in joy on the cooling seabed and opens her trembling arms.