Afterlands (36 page)

Chihuahua City, Mexico
22
March
, 1877

Dear Madam
,

I hope this Spring may find you in good health, although I fear it may be Summer before this will reach you! I am making my way towards the Pacific Coast, & am finding the road a congenial home still. To be sure this City has its charms, not excluding the welcome anonymity it offers one such as myself
.

But enough. I write again to wish You a return of the contentment you so well deserve, & of course, of your Husband. And, Madam, Tukulito,—if you will pardon this indiscretion, I wish also to tell You that I still think of You often, in spite of the many distractions of travel; indeed, I believe it is not too much to say that I shall think of You often for the rest of my life
.

Wishing you the best in this, as in all Seasons
,

I remain, as ever, your own

R.K
.

In a quiet moment a few hours before the funeral Sarah Budington slits the envelope with a paring knife, and through hazing eyes she reads the letter quickly, several times, before slipping it through the kettle hatch of her stove. Oh, I knew it anyhow, she says under her breath, to nobody.

56°21’N., 57°44’ W., June 27, 1877

A
CHILLY MIDNIGHT
, no fog, firm westerlies, the pewter moon a sliver shy of full. Despite the hour, enough of the day’s light lingers above the horizon to see even without the moon. The stars are faint. The coast of Labrador a rumour of glacial blue along the horizon some hours to the southwest.

The continuous pre-dawn limbo of these June nights generates in Tyson a mood of expectancy. Something is about to happen. He sleeps little, treads the deck at any hour, even when he is not in charge of the watch. Tonight he is in charge. With his naked eye he detects the schooner—another small berg, he thinks initially—when it’s still several miles north and bearing down on them. O’Coin, on watch in the bow, calls it to his notice a few minutes later, as Tyson at the port rail examines it through his spyglass. Her name is difficult to read, but it seems to begin with an R and to be five or six letters long. He goes on pondering the letters. Almost certainly the
Rachel
. Apart from the lantern in her bow, no sign of activity: another ship of sleepers, like his own ship. He’s jarred by a vivid glimpse of Joe in the snowhut, face down, snoring in his quiet and regular fashion, more or less unwakeable. Tyson inserts himself into this vision, waking Joe—or, no, having him wakened—to inform him … of what, now? Hannah is dead now too. He learned the news a few days before his steamer, the
Florence
, was to depart, and he was far too busy with the usual harried late provisionings, preparations, meetings with the Navy and the Smithsonian and the New York Geographical Society to travel up to Groton for the funeral, as he’d wanted to. Well—his absence must have gratified the Budingtons. And here Tyson’s jumpy mind, instead of pursuing the important matter of what he should say to Joe (if indeed he should say anything, having promised Hannah that he would not mention Punnie’s death)—here his mind begins sorting through his various spats and grievances with the Budingtons, the disgraced Sydney even now continuing to write letters to the newspapers, no doubt drunkenly, in his vicious campaign to discredit Tyson and reinstate himself. What sweet reprieve, Tyson feels—despite his memories of the floe—to be steaming north again, away from that America of scurrilous editorial pages, thinly attended lectures, dinners with chattery, effeminate patrons, epic fundraising engagements where everybody is drunk (to the point of thinking themselves charming) except the reformed Tyson (who can see they are not).

He’s also sailing clear of his now insupportable marriage. No man is a champion to his wife, it’s said, yet celebrity always seems to promise a special exemption from the old givens; or, failing that, a chance for another start. And some must be Captain in every room of their lives.

He misses only his son and widowed mistress.

When he was younger, before gaining any niche of command, he used to relish the hushed attention, the fleeting power to be seized and savoured on delivering some item of bad news. For a spell, however short, it would seem to make him the captain of others—even of the ship’s captain himself. He was commanding an audience. Now, out here, where he holds authentic rank, he would much rather deliver good news if possible, for on this voyage he would rather be
liked
, at least from a distance. Yet he knows he must tell Joe about his daughter, now that Hannah is gone, too. Wake and inform him of both deaths. In the snowhut, face skewed into the pillow of his bundled fur trousers, Joe would sleep like a child and wake like a child, face blank, vacated—altogether boylike save for that wispy Mongol moustache and the deep vertical creases from the pillow. Now, as the schooner slowly nears and Tyson makes out the rest of the name
RACHEL
, it strikes him that he can’t do it, can’t steal from Joe a night’s placid sleep, steal from him the last ten days of peace that he will know for a long time. (Is this compassion, or is it cowardice?) Assuming that Joe is aboard the
Rachel
, assuming he’s not dead himself, his state of mind will not be just peaceful but also excited, impatient—or as impatient as an Esquimau can be—to see his home and his loved ones. And Tyson knows that state, has known it: returning with your affections refreshed, heart longing again for the common comforts you’d grown almost to despise. Resolved to be a better man. Tyson almost envies Joe, because he, Tyson, now at the start of a journey, is on the starting side of that lengthy arc, and will never be on Joe’s side of it again. When Tyson sails home it will be to
divorce
his wife. So, like Joe, he will be returning to a lost family, but in full foreknowledge of the loss.

How can he now inflict this grief on Joe—Joe returned to a state of boyhood by slumber?

Tyson walks aft to the pilot house. His step gains steadiness as he goes. He orders the helmsman to turn to starboard.

Ain’t there a schooner out there means to speak us, sir? I heard O’Coin call out. I think I see her now.

I know that vessel, Mr Fluvis, and we shall have to avoid her. Take us two points to starboard. And make steam for ten knots.

Aye, sir, as you ask, sir.

The man’s averted face, lamplit, has a furtive, curious look. But he says nothing. A quiet elder who asks few questions. He ratchets the engine telegraph and leans into the wheel. Tyson strides toward the bow of the turning ship. O’Coin, running back from his post, meets him by the berth-deck hatch.

Captain, sir, why are we turning?

Because I ordered the second officer to steer us clear of that schooner. Tyson speaks in a curt but hushed voice, as if scolding somebody in church. Through the deck the
Florence’s
engines throb.

You don’t mean to hail and speak her, sir?

Keep your voice down, Mr O’Coin. I suggest you return to the bow and watch for ice.

But Captain—we’ve letters to send south.

A note of personal distress here; O’Coin is recently married. Well, Tyson has certain letters of his own to send south. All the same he hears himself improvise: I know this schooner’s captain well. It’s best to avoid him. He sponges food and supplies from every ship he hails. We’ll pass other ships, whalers, to take our letters back, probably tomorrow.

O’Coin remains there with his head to one side, frowning down at the hatch. He wears a wool watch-cap and has large triangular sideburns, a large nose of the same shape. In this light his eyes look beady, hard and black, like a wharf rat’s.

The bow, Mr O’Coin. You are the middle watch.

Begging your patience, sir, this ain’t usually done. Suppose she does really need supplies?

She flies no colours of distress.

O’Coin looks northward over the rail, squinting, as if his captain’s word isn’t enough to settle the matter. Only Tyson’s faint sense of being in the wrong, having just lied, keeps him from chiding the man for this little gesture of insolence. (So Tyson construes it.) The
Rachel
seems to be making to port as if to intercept them, but it won’t work, she has only her sails and the
Florence
will soon be clear of her and steaming on to the northwest, against the wind.

This ain’t a bit usual, O’Coin mumbles from between his shoulder-blades as he turns back to the prow. The wind carries a bell’s frantic, plaintive clanging, the
Rachel
trying to draw their notice.

You’ve something to say, O’Coin?

Nothing, sir.

Tyson pivots on his heel and makes toward the stern.

Naturally the man will relate this incident below decks the next morning. And, over the next fourteen months of compound failure, it will seem to be the hinge point that the crew keeps returning to, superstitiously, recalling how the very next day the fair weather and mostly ice-clear seas they had enjoyed were replaced by unseasonable gales and heavy ice; how for the very next eight days they met not a single whaler or other ship to take back their letters and news; how from that moment on, they succumbed man by man to a baffling fever, only partially regaining their strength, all except for Tyson, whose choleric energy never lagged; how Cumberland Sound remained glutted with ice until a month later than the average, so the expedition’s work was badly delayed; how hundreds of twenty-pound pemmican tins, over half their store, turned out to be ineptly soldered and the meat decayed in the hold; how the contractors had crammed the hold with enough beams and plankage to construct a town half the size of St John’s, but neglected to include enough nails to hold together a privy; how, as the carpenter rushed to fashion hundreds of pine pegs to replace the nails, the food began to run short, along with their time, and Tyson, much against his will, realized that he could never insist they overwinter in the little slaphammer slum they had managed to build.

Not that they would have agreed anyway. The crew, demoralized by assorted disasters and having on hand neither the Secretary of the Navy nor the gods of the weather to blame, naturally blamed their captain. Above all, they remembered his strange failure to hail and speak the last ship they had encountered on their way north. Hunger, fever, increasing darkness deepened their superstitions. Some began to see him as a sort of demon. Not fully human. There was something behind his pale, hot eyes that seemed both dead and preternaturally alive; coldly withdrawn yet thrusting to the fore. How did he keep his health when all others were sick? (Sheer will, in fact.) His abruptly sensible decision to flee the thickening ice and return south did appease them for a few days, but then, toward the mouth of Cumberland Sound, in freakishly premature cold, they were jaw-caught in the worst autumn ice that any of them, including Tyson, had ever seen.
Again, my Goddamned luck
.

So there in the open they must overwinter.

Tyson now passes months in a sort of delirium of disbelief; it is all happening again. But this time, despite all that he and the ship’s doctor can do, he is losing men, about a man a month. By February he hardly seems to sleep at all, only to doze now and then. His determination to return to Mrs Meyers, and not to grant Budington the satisfaction of his failure and death, keep him going. Perhaps neither love alone nor hate alone would have been enough to see him through, but the two together are potent. Fear and tedium are an equally potent mixture, though. Days and nights, weeks, blend together. Then in the middle of March—the Ides of March!—a moment flares to clarity out of the gloomy, coal-lit blur of those months: a figure pads up behind him in a lightless passageway and shoves him headfirst into a bulkhead. He wrenches round to face his attacker. There’s not even enough light to suggest the man’s general shape, or to glint off the blade that now nudges coolly into Tyson’s abdomen, just under the breastbone. He bellows and flails out. The figure seems to retreat—a slight lessening of the dark’s density—then flees with quick spatting footfalls—he’s barefoot or in his socks. With an animal sigh Tyson slides down the bulkhead into a seated posture. His life pulsing rapidly in the wound. With each pulse, pain eats into his flesh like acid. A lantern lights the end of the passageway. Dr Bowen in his greasy nightshirt holds it at arm’s length, squinting timidly. A few of the men appear too, as if rousted from their bunks, tallowy faces peeping over the doctor’s shoulder. One of them is O’Coin. All of them wear boots.

Later, each man will sullenly insist on his innocence, and his ignorance of any plot, so that for the rest of the voyage Tyson—slowly, improbably recovering—will barricade his cabin door and carry his revolver whenever he has to leave the cabin. To him, the crew itself has become that faceless assailant. The
world
itself. Why is it so difficult to be liked?

In mid-June the ice, on its own time, on its own terms, frees the
Florence
, now damaged and leaking. The starved captain and remaining crew, at last unified in intent, work her south at a reckless pace, damn the icebergs, manning the pumps the whole way. For a week they make excellent time, but off the Grand Banks they encounter a spate of tremendous gales that blow them days wide of St John’s and almost finish them. The
Florence
that wallows and coughs into the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the evening of the Fourth of July—spars and hull battered, funnel like a crushed top hat, a squad of zombies staring over the rail—seems a sort of anti-mascot for the national holiday, though the stars and stripes she flies is in sterling condition, Tyson having kept one stowed, along with the midnight-blue dress uniform he is wearing, for the triumphal return.

But how did you know to be here? he asks Mrs Meyers. Nobody else is on the wharf, the crew having fled at a feisty hobble, in search of food and booze. Nobody else is on the wharf because nobody knew they were coming. And who would have been here anyhow? America is off celebrating bigger things. And just now, on this rotting side wharf, Tyson sees his future—how in a land where success is a kind of religion, his latest, crowning failure must sign an end to his dream of fame. Still, with his mouth full of fresh-baked and lushly buttered currant-roll, this fate seems secondary. Mrs Meyers has brought the roll. She holds his hands in hers and leans back, as if to bring him into focus and decide if he’s an impostor, or else in contempt at his wasted state, although he has scrubbed and shaved and puffed himself up for the arrival, in case anyone should be here. She stares undaunted from out of her clean atmosphere of Saturday baths and well-fed health—her terrestrial assurance that life is more than a starved, helpless drift through freezing seas. But then again … surely it
is
more. Her hands are so wonderfully plump, firm-boned, clean and cool. The skin of her cheeks glossed with the evening’s heat, hair pinned back off her neck and blushing ears, she’ll never look more beautiful than now, seen by a man who for thirteen months has looked only at his own face (a pair of sunken yellow eyes above a greying matted beard) and his ghoulish crew’s. Even her nose, upturned, freckled, with large-bored nostrils—the one feature he could never quite love—looks fetchingly made. She’s in her widow’s weeds and a black velvet pillbox cap. And for this one moment, a first time, simply being alive on the earth is enough for him. As the incontestable fact of his return settles through him, down from his head through his thawing heart and into his feet, nailed at last on fixed land, it strikes him that she needn’t always dress for Death. The sooner they marry—provided she still wants him—the sooner they can both rejoin the gaudy, enthralling human parade. I’ll not be returning to sea, he mutters. For surely he needn’t always dress for Death, either. Surely half a lifetime is long enough.