The Seal Wife (16 page)

It will have changed, he told himself as he walked. Or the eyes that see it, they’ll have changed. Someone else has lived in the house—the trackwalker—cooked in it, smoked in it, slept in it. Put his boots on the window’s sill.

Bigelow has braced himself, but the room is as it was when he first walked in, when he followed her home from Getz’s store. He walks around the stove, placed where it always was, the table with its two chairs. He runs his hands over the rungs of the chair on the left, his, and the other one, hers. Touches the surface of the table, that place where he was once in the habit of rubbing his thumb, a groove made by a knife or an accident of milling, a spot where the saw blade faltered. The other room, too, is as it always was, the loose cap on the bedpost that used to rattle as they moved.

All these heavy things, stove and bed and table and chairs— how has she done it? Who has helped her to transport them? Had he had his wits about him, there are many questions Bigelow might have asked the man.

He walks all around the two rooms, running his hand along the walls. It’s tight; she’s rechinked it so that it couldn’t be tighter. And replaced the corset ad with something equally mysterious, an illustration of a clothes wringer, a smiling woman feeding a cloth into one end of the mangle.

Five minutes: they are up very quickly. He allows himself the trespass of pressing his face into her pillow, smelling it, then he goes.

HE VISITS THE HOUSE AGAIN, creeps along the road, then darts in the door, panting as he looks around the one room and then the other. Peering under a pot lid and tasting what’s left in a cup. Sitting in a chair. Sitting at the table in
his
chair, a fork in one hand, a knife in the other. He knows where to find them, in the box on the shelf. Making sure, after he stands, that he has not left any trace of himself. Wiping the cutlery and putting it carefully away, then returning the chair to its exact place, a hand’s width from the table.

Looking at the illustration tacked to the wall, the way the white fabric goes in one end of the mangle and then comes out squashed, the smiling woman’s hand on the crank. Sitting on her bed and then smoothing it afterward, erasing his presence. Opening the door of the stove to see what’s inside, embers or ashes.

Finding both house and stove cold, he clears out the ashes and lays a fire for her, first taking a handful of dry grass from the basket by the door, then picking among the kindling in the wood box, just as he used to watch her do. But then, walking away from the house, he reconsiders, quickly he retraces his steps, puts the tinder back where he found it, curses at the difficulty of regathering the ash he deposited outside the door. One errant breath of wind and it blows from his hands, scatters on the floor. He has to sweep, then, and sweep again, and sweep a third time, clumsy in his haste. He fairly runs into the town and straight to a bathhouse, where he strips behind the curtain and pays the attendant to beat the ash from his clothes while he washes it from his face and hair and hands.

BUT HE’S BACK the following day. He’s in her house when he hears the noon whistle blow, probing himself for guilt, but all he finds is excitement, ascension, joy. Like the feel of kite line in his hands that first time—the tremble of connection to something alive, alive and exalted. Something flying high high above him.

He pries the lid from the tin where she keeps sweets to see: how many are there? Having checked the first time, he must do it the next, and the one after, can’t not keep track of just how many she eats in a day: one. A week: seven. One each day, without exception.

Of course, he knows this about her. He knows how strict she is with regard to what she allows herself. One sweet. One pipe bowl of inexpensive tobacco. One tub of hot water, filled only enough to cover the mark, a birthmark, on her left hip. Walking around the room, hands shoved in his pockets, avoiding the window, Bigelow thinks about the woman. One carrot, a single slice of meat. One slice of bread to catch its juice. And, lying beneath him, one orgasm.

Strange, the effect on him of her restraint. He cannot quite understand it. And is
restraint
the right word? One slice, one sweet, one long, shuddering sigh: perhaps these are enough. Enough for her.

Bigelow reviews, as he has countless times, the way she unwraps a toffee, prying the silver paper up with her fingernail. While she chews, she smoothes the little square of foil on the table’s surface, then, when it is flat, she folds it. When her teeth stick together, she moves her jaw from side to side to unstick them. This series of moments, each fondled in its turn like a bead on a string: it would not be inaccurate to regard it as a prayer.

THURSDAY, another Thursday that he’s skipping his visit to Miriam. He’ll resolve this mess—how? how?—well, somehow. But not today. A storm is gathering, and the wind is going to lift his kite that last, sixth mile it’s never reached. Bigelow cables and picks up readings, raises his red and black storm flags, draws his map, and gets it to the post office early. He jogs home, sweating under his heavy parka, making a mental list of what he needs to take with him up the bluff. He’ll have to hurry if he wants any light. No time for lunch. No secret visit to the woman’s house. Snow glasses and water bottle and theodolite and field book and—he slams in his door, and there Miriam is, sitting at his table.

She’s washed his dishes, made his bed. The place looks clean.

“Oh,” Bigelow says, trying to keep hold of his list, losing items. Where’s his rucksack?

Miriam hands him her notebook.
Where were you last week?
And the week before? I expected you.

“I have to take the kite out today.” Bigelow sees his rucksack under the drafting table, seizes it, and begins cramming things inside.

What about me?
she writes, and she holds the words in front of his face.
Thursday is my day. Our day.

“There’s a storm, and I have to fly it. I have to fly it now. I can get it up higher if the wind is right. Higher than before.” He tries to move around her, but she gets underfoot, purposefully she steps in his way.

“Look!” he says.

She flips her book open to a prewritten message.
I know
about the woman.

Bigelow doesn’t answer. He goes on gathering what he needs. When she grabs his arm, he shakes her off. “I’m leaving,” he says. “We can talk about this later. Tomorrow.”

Miriam follows him out the door, and on up the bluff. Over and over he tells her to go home, shouts at her and points, tells her that whatever her father said, whatever she thinks he owes her, is canceled out. “By perfidy!” he yells, but she ignores him. She walks resolutely in his footsteps, head down and hands hidden in the too-long sleeves of her parka, and he turns his back, hurrying, hurrying to catch the storm.

When he reaches the shed, the gusts are so strong that they snap the door open, pin it back against the wall. It’s still clear, visibility for three miles at least, but wind whistles and screams over the roof as Bigelow sets the instruments and latches the hood over the module. No time to fuss with the hurricane lamp, he works in half-light, his right hand still clumsy, slow.

“Out of my way! Out of my way!” he yells at Miriam, and he pushes her into a corner. He tries to pull the kite out of the shed, but the force of the wind is too great, so he goes around behind, to the aft cell, and pushes until the front noses out of the door. He barely has time to take out the cotter pins and release the wheels before the kite pulls out of the shed and into the sky.

Bigelow stands panting in the open door, watching as wind sucks wire out of the reel’s mouth. Behind him, kneeling over her notebook, Miriam is writing.

She’s not your secret. I’ve seen her. She’s native. She’s not one of us.

“You shouldn’t be up here,” Bigelow says. He feels in his rucksack for his snow glasses but they aren’t there. Distracted by Miriam, he’s forgotten them, and his water. Lucky he remembered anything. He opens his field book and notes the line angle, the wind speed, and then, leaving Miriam standing among his clutter of tools, he goes outside to sit with his back against the side of the shed. He cups his hands around his eyes to watch the kite.

He’s almost managed to forget Miriam when she steps in front of him, flapping with excitement, pointing toward the reel side of the shed. Bigelow gets up and follows her, sees what she’s seen. Sparks leap off the wire as if from the end of a fuse, blue, mesmerizing.

“Not grounded,” he says. “The line’s not grounded. I told you not to come up here.”

Miriam tilts her head.

“Atmospheric electricity,” he answers. “It comes down the wire.”

Too late to do anything now; he doesn’t dare touch any part of it, not even with insulated gloves. And anyway, as he tells Miriam, “The reel’s mounted on a wood platform. Wood can’t conduct electricity.”

Bigelow watches the kite leap another five hundred feet into the sky and disappear, slip like a pale knife into the belly of a cloud.

“God!” he cries, reaching up. “Beautiful!” He looks at Miriam, but she’s missed it. Either that or she doesn’t care. He turns away, disgusted, hugging his coat closed, considering the situation he’s created. One o’clock in the afternoon and dark as dusk, snow falling, except that it isn’t; it’s blowing parallel to the ground, stinging his face and eyes, no snow glasses, so another hour and they’ll burn so badly he won’t want to open them. At least the air temperature will keep the wire from getting hot enough to damage the reel, all those metal parts.

Miriam goes back into the shed and, after a few minutes, comes out with a question.
Wood keeps you absolutely safe from
electricity?

“Yes,” Bigelow says. There’s something in her lifted face— fear?—and he makes himself put an arm around her. Fifty-six flights without incident, data recorded and copied meticulously into his field book. He was thinking about a new page of entries as he cabled Washington and drew his forecast map, imagining what the kite might reveal as he hurried to the post office to tack up his map. If only he can get it high enough, then he can prove what he knows must be true. The air over the poles is warm—as warm as air high above the equator is cool. A great current moves between them, and Bigelow’s kite will prove this. He’ll get his name in all the journals; he’ll be that much closer to a formula for long-range forecasting.

Miriam ducks out from under his perfunctory embrace and returns to the shelter of the shed, and Bigelow cups his hands around his eyes to watch the end of the line. Say he could change his mind and reel it back. Would he? Would he, when it seems as if he’s got the whole of the sky on the end of a black, blue-sparking wire? Because that is how it looks, he can’t take his watering eyes off it, gorgeous, the line tethered to the sullen clouds, a compact mass of lead gray stratocumulus of an impenetrability more ordinarily seen at lower elevations, ten or fifteen thousand feet.

But there’s nothing ordinary about this day, with the wire jerking wildly, and fire crawling down from heaven. The kite is pitching and pulling, but the kite is hidden, the kite is invisible, and on the ground it seems to Bigelow that he’s contrived to work magic.

He closes his burning eyes, rests them. If everything holds, if the reel doesn’t break, in an hour the kite will run out of wire and begin its automatic descent. So he’ll just have to wait, squat, watch. Dizzy with hunger, he wonders what there might be to eat when he gets home. Has he gone through another sack of rice?

He thinks of the woman when he’s hungry—well, he thinks of her all the time, but especially when he’s hungry. Sees her sleek fingers breaking the blue-white cap of cartilage from a bone, exposing its marrow. The way she considered each morsel fastidiously before raising it to her mouth. No matter how often she did a thing, still he found it worth watching.

Bigelow lifts his head and opens his eyes.

The snow has stopped, the clouds part and then gather, revealing snatches of purple and pink, ethereal and splendid, and
high,
Bigelow thinks,
so high.
According to the reel gauge, clicking reliably, the kite is five and a half miles out. His eyes sting from the wind and snow, tears burn his cheeks with their salt.

Watching the sky, he doesn’t see until after it’s happened. But he hears it, a ringing noise, metal on metal, a bright violent clang that yanks him to his feet—the reel, a problem with the reel. Bigelow pushes Miriam out of the way, brushes past her hand holding his hatchet. What is she doing standing there in the wind, eyes staring wide? Why isn’t she in the shed?

Bigelow knocks right into Miriam before he understands the impossible—the murderous—thing she’s done, still holding the hatchet’s wood handle.
Wood keeps you absolutely safe?

The reel is stopped, and he can see where, after cutting the wire, the blade nicked a tooth off one gear.

He looks up into the sky and sees the line, sees what he thinks is the line, whisking up into the heavens.

It’s gone.
Gone.
His kite, the kite he drew in his station and built on the bluff. The kite he made—like no other thing in the sky, flying alone. Untethered in a high wind, above the storm. No telling what height it will reach before it falls back to earth.

“I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
kill you,
he’s thinking. Bigelow lunges for Miriam, who drops the hatchet and runs.

Slipping and skipping down the frozen hillside, ice and pebbles loosened by her boots.

He lets her go.

Imagining, already, what he’ll say to her father. He’ll shove a finger into his chest.
Even. We’re
even.
Official Weather Bureau
instruments. Sabotaged. You have friends here? I’ll cable Washing
ton, D.C.

Bigelow sits on the reel platform, doubles over, holding his right hand under his parka and shirt, against his bare skin. How it aches in the cold, he wouldn’t have thought it possible.

TWENTY- EIGHT SPARS. 232 square feet of muslin. Five miles of piano wire at $.02 a yard. $.02 × 5 × 1760 = $176.00 = two paychecks = two months = 1440 hours’ worth of piano wire. Barometer, thermometer, and dry cell battery. A hundred nights of sanding. A month of Sundays sewing. A university education. How many trips up the bluff? How many nights of insufficient sleep? How much ink, how much paper? Five miles up = 26,400 feet = Altocumulus = Cirrocumulus = Cirrostratus. Ten cents for a virgin nail, or a dollar for a hundred used ones. Thirty-nine cents an hour to hack up salmon to pay off debts. $176.00 divided by $.39 equals how many mornings of hacking, equals the loss of what? An arm? How much grief can the body withstand? Two dollars and two dollars and two more dollars for the doctor, and seventy-five cents for bootleg that doesn’t stop the pain. How many hours bent over a drafting table? How many equations to determine the impact of wind speed on line curvature? First flight: September 8, 1916. Last flight: October 3, 1917. 390 days. Fifty-seven ascensions, averaging 4.3 miles, adding up to 245.1 miles. If only a person could add success to success, flight on top of flight, climbing and climbing and never coming down. No weather so high, so far from earth. No winds. No storms. 390 days is fifty-five weeks is eleven pairs of bootlaces is $5.50 spent on bootlaces alone. “Don’t pull them so hard,” Bigelow’s mother used to say. All his life he’s broken bootlaces. He has numbers in his field book— times, dates, angles, line lengths, wind speeds. He has records for the heights he reached. Thirty-one spars, if you count the three that cracked and had to be replaced. A seam every night, it took him many hours and his neck was always stiff.