Consumption (48 page)

OFF THE COAST OF CALIFORNIA
, thirty-four degrees north, they picked up the trades, which Alvah had been speaking of for weeks. A week later Pauloosie was still marvelling at the warmth and steadiness of these winds out of the northeast. Where he had lived, the weather always came out of the setting sun. He had assumed that it was so everywhere—if something as fundamental as that was changeable, what wasn’t?

And, as they moved south all the constants fell away. In this world, the sea stretched without confinement, either by ice or by land masses. Waves, Alvah told him, born a thousand miles away in the winter storms they had fled, shuddered south and were appreciable as long, slow ripples under the boat, even now. South of the equator, the waves from the storms of the Southern Ocean, fiercer even than what they had left behind, rippled northward. Before there were compasses in this part of the world, when it was overcast, sailors navigated by such signs. Here were fish that flew like dragon-flies, skimming the water for hundreds of yards, arching and wheeling upon it with perfect control and grace, before slipping below the surface again. Tuna swam at sixty miles an hour and possessed meat as dark and rich as that of a seal; seabirds soared on wings ten feet long. There were albatrosses that flew out here for the first seven years of their lives, never alighting on land, before finally returning
to one of the rocky islets, to mate. All these creatures he could not have imagined on the ocean he was from. If the differences in the water and the air weren’t enough, the differences in the animals that dwelt there made the point clear.

By the time they crossed the equator, the unchanging stars themselves had changed entirely. The Southern Cross rose up before them and the Milky Way, brighter and more viscous, stretched across the sky looking exactly like the ribbon of glowing water they trailed behind them in their wake—another unfamiliar phenomenon, sprung from the vitality and unexpected warmth of the sea. And the big bear slipped entirely below the horizon. The first night Pauloosie looked up and could not see it or the North Star, he felt vertiginous. The southern constellations rose from the horizon in front of them as the bear settled astern, and Pauloosie marvelled at an entirely different set of patterns in the night sky than what he had known, all those months of night, out on the tundra.

Both men, after their lonely winters, were finished with the idea of that sort of solitude. Still, they did not speak easily with each other. “In December,” Alvah finally told Pauloosie, “the RCMP visited me, on Marble Island. They wanted to know if I had seen either you or this schoolteacher who was missing.”

Pauloosie looked up from the starlit water toward him. It was too dim to see his expression.

“What did you tell them?”

“That I hadn’t.”

Pauloosie looked back at the water.

Alvah continued, “Did
you?”
Pauloosie kept looking at the water. After an hour Alvah went below and fell asleep.

When the trades failed, they did so in an instant. A thunder squall moved through, just like a dozen others had that week, and then when it pushed on an hour later, it left them behind in motionless water. The two men and the boat sat together for the following week bobbing slowly in the swell, water as glistening as spilled mercury,
until finally a breath of wind appeared and the boat eased over to one side and began nosing her way south. The southwest trades built slowly over the next few days and soon the men and the boat were shuddering their way south.

When Hiva Oa, the easternmost port of entry in French Polynesia, finally showed itself above the horizon, it appeared like a brown arrowhead poking through something elastic. After two months at sea, the idea of land seemed hardly credible. It seemed much more likely that this was water jutting up into the sky, a stationary wave of some kind.

As they approached, Ua Huka bulged up over the horizon as well, and then the smaller rocks of Moane and Maeretiva, all flat brown and arid-looking, the islands clustering together in the otherwise millions of square miles of empty ocean like herding land mammals seeking solace. When they rounded the eastern tip of Hiva Oa, on the windward side, the island abruptly took on a verdant aspect that astonished Pauloosie. Even in the brief vigorous flowerings of the tundra, lushness like this was never seen. Then the smell of the island struck them both and they were intoxicated. Wood fires, orchids, and the sap of a million trees and vines: all these gave off scent like nothing previously.

By the time they approached the mountain, it was dusk and they could see the lights of the village, the occasional headlights of trucks and cars and scooters, winking their way along. The
Umingmak
bucked sharply in the short, steep waves bouncing off the island, and Alvah and Pauloosie stumbled in this unfamiliar rhythm. It was too dim to make the entrance to the harbour and so they anchored in the wide and exposed Atuona Bay. In the morning they set their dinghy in the water and rowed ashore and walked to the gendarmerie. Pauloosie had not known trees like this before. He stared at the thousand-metre volcanic spire rising jungle-clad into the clouds. The Marquesans chattered to one another as they passed. “That’s what Inuktitut sounds like to me,” Alvah said.

“That sounds nothing like Inuktitut,” Pauloosie laughed.

They were so far away from the place they had left.

TWENTY-SEVEN

WHEN HE DISEMBARKED
the
Avarui
in Taiohae Bay, on Nuku Hiva, Balthazar veered drunkenly along the jetty abutting the sea. He had not eaten anything solid in the week he had been on board, and his clothes hung loosely off him for the first time since he had finished his residency. He saw the priest standing at the front of the jetty from a hundred yards away and took time to compose himself before he approached the old man. They were both old men now. When they had met he had thought of the priest as belonging to the generation before his, but now, he realized, he was the older of the two. He had caught up with and passed Father Bernard like a bicycle racer.

He watched the priest looking out at the horizon, likening this harbour to Rankin Inlet, the same comparison that presented itself to him. They were both at that moment recalling the handful of late-July days that had been as warm as this in Rankin Inlet; they both remembered how the children had squealed as they ran into the river water, still cuttingly cold. They watched these children in this place, who seemed like the younger brothers and sisters of those in their memories, leap into the sea off the jetty, noses plugged, legs bicycling, and water erupting in great geysers over their friends.

He was almost upon Father Bernard, and thinking the old man had gone blind, or addled, when he asked without turning his
head if the
docteur
had had a good trip. Balthazar replied that he had.

“C’est magnifique, hein?”

“It is,” Balthazar replied, staring out. “It really is. So much larger than the Arctic Ocean.”

“All those islands, hemming it in.”

“The trip here, from Papeete, was like nothing I’ve ever done.”

“I thought you would enjoy it. That’s one of the last of the copra schooners in this part of the ocean. You met the captain, Armande?”

“He introduced himself the first night out, as a friend of yours. I was sleeping on deck and he came looking for me.”

“I travel with him to the smaller islands when he goes there—the Australs, the Gambiers. He has been very kind to me since I arrived.”

“He asked me if I knew your friend, 1
’esquimau.”

“It is a small place, and newcomers are uncommon. Everyone has heard of him.”

“Has he done well?”

“He has married a woman here, a
Marquesienne
, and he is thought to treat her well. He is liked.”

“How does he spend his time?”

“He is a fisherman. He harpoons mahi mahi.”

“Whales?”

“Fish. Dolphin-fish. You likely ate it en route.”

“The white fish.”

“Yes. It might have been his. Armande buys whatever Pauloosie has to sell, when he is in port. He approves of adventurers.”

“What happened to the
Umingmak
?
”

“Alvah moved on. He was headed for the Cook Islands, but who knows where he ended up. He was not as well liked. They considered him deranged here. Always alone.”

“How long has Pauloosie been here?”

“Two years.”

“Looking to becoming a permanent situation.”

“It appears so.”

“Does he talk about the north?”

“Not to me.”

“How did you find him?”

“I wasn’t looking for him. I decided it was time to leave Rankin Inlet a few months after you did—I missed your jazz, I missed what the people there had been—and I told my bishop I wanted to retire. He told me to come here—it was the same, he said, but different.”

“Yes,” Balthazar said, looking around.

“When people learned where I had come from they immediately began repeating stories they had heard about this man who looked
Polynesien
, but could not speak their language, who had come ashore on Hiva Oa, with an unusual technique for fishing for mahi mahi. People had supposed he was
esquimau
, but he didn’t speak of his origins. I thought he was likely Melanesian, and fleeing trouble, and didn’t think very hard about the story. Then a baptismal certificate crossed my desk, from Hiva Oa. A little girl had been named
Iguptak.”

“Bumblebee.”

“Yes.”

“How extraordinary.”

“We will go visit him.”

“I’d like that.”

That night Balthazar sat on his hard bed in the rectory of the church and marvelled at the scent of the air. The northeast winds sliding over the mountain carried with them the aromas of drying vanilla beans and rotten papayas and mango blossoms and ripening guavas—vitality sublimating off the volcanic rocks themselves and into the air.

He had not heard from Victoria since he had left Rankin Inlet. He had written her a few times, hoping to rekindle something of their friendship, but she had not replied. He had not really expected
her to. But he would have liked to have known whether she read his letters, whether she knew that he had bought a house for him and his niece to live in, how he helped her raise her twin daughters, watching them while Amanda worked as a dental hygienist down the street. It was closer than he’d ever imagined he would come to being a father. But there he was, at fifty-five, changing the little girls’ diapers and preparing meals for the four of them and feeling as much of an imposter as he had felt himself to be when he had worked in Rankin Inlet. He still worked on his journals, and his reading: stacks of the
New England Journal
, and
JAMA
, and the British
Lancet
crowded his rooms just as they had in Rankin Inlet. Though without any possible application to a sick person, this knowledge was less electric, stimulating him now only as an abstraction. When he had received Father Bernard’s letter inviting him to visit, and alluding to Pauloosie’s presence in the Marquesas, he had leapt at the chance.

And now he was here, and it appeared it wasn’t all an elaborate joke. And even as he contemplated meeting the boy, no longer a boy at all, he thought about the words he would choose in writing to Victoria, to tell her where Pauloosie had ended up. Father Bernard hadn’t written her himself, he said. He thought it might be better to come from Balthazar and did not elaborate on what he meant by that. Balthazar took him to mean that it would be better for everyone concerned if the forgiveness was across the board. The priest seemed to think that the way things had been left was a lingering calamity—firstly, for Balthazar. The priest was right. It was all he ever thought about, and had been for three years. Who could have guessed that there would be a chance at reconciliation?