The Seal Wife (4 page)

WHEN HE TEARS the side of his parka, it is the woman who repairs it, unfastening the coat and taking it from his shoulders as she did on the day he followed her home, then stepping outside her door to shake the dry snow from the fur.

As he watches, she unwinds a length of heavy black thread from a spool and cuts it with her teeth before drawing it back and forth over a bar of yellow wax. Then she coaxes its end through the eye of a long needle and begins, using the heel of her hand protected by a disc of bone to push the needle through the skin. While she works, he holds the wax, rubbing his thumb over its scored surface. His eyes follow her industrious fingers. There is an impersonal quality to her labor; it seems not so much a gift to him as it does a habit of northern housewifery. Furs must be kept in repair. A torn parka, otherwise valuable, is next to useless.

Her stitches are small. The needle makes slow progress. Oddly, when its bright point emerges and then disappears back into the dark fur, he feels a tightening in his chest, and he gets up from where he is sitting silently next to her on the bed and paces, yawning and sighing, until she has finished.

Contrary to what prejudice has taught him to expect, she is not uninhibited. He’s heard how native girls mature earlier than whites, how mothers and fathers send their daughters off to be initiated by uncles or friends. But she does not betray the evidence of such an education. There is a whole list of affectionate gestures she will not tolerate.

While she keeps still for a closed-mouth peck, if he attempts a more penetrating kiss she quickly turns her head, leaving him licking her cheek. She moves his hands away from her neck, her feet, her hair, and her genitals. But, once he’s inside her, she lies under him with a rapt smile, eyes closed and fingers busily agitating her own flesh without regard for the rhythm he’s established. When she comes, her arousal is keen—she arches her back, she cries out—but private. He cannot induce her to sit astride him or to allow him to enter her in any manner except what is understood as missionary. And perhaps this is the explanation, as the Aleutian Islands have long been colonized by Russian Orthodox.

She skins a rabbit with a grace and attention she doesn’t seem to waste on him. Why doesn’t he resent this? Instead he watches, intent, as she bends its ears and opens the cleft in its lip to see how young it is, how fresh. Then she girdles the skin around its hind legs and, holding its back feet in her left hand, strips the hide down over the body with her right, so that it comes off inside out, as quickly as if she were removing a glove. The parting of silver-gray fur from tender new muscle reveals an elastic integument of faintly iridescent blue, like the raiment of a ghost, and once, when he reaches out to touch it, she pulls the animal quickly from under his hands. She takes off the head and saves it with the skin, saves the entrails as well, washes and butchers the carcass. As she works, the muscles play under the smooth skin of her forearms, and otherwise invisible sinews stand out on the backs of her small hands.

Every meeting is the same, as ritual as his walks to and from the telegraph office, his entering observations into a log. He watches as she prepares the food he has brought; he eats with her in silence; they lie together on her bed, a fur blanket beneath them; he waits until she cries out and arches her back, then allows himself release.

When he lets her go, she sits up. She leaves the bed to retrieve a tin tub from behind the stove and she fills it with water left hot in her two big kettles. Then she opens her tin of tobacco, readies her pipe, and sits cross-legged, smoking in the tub while he talks to her, propped on one elbow, wondering at his gabble and yet helpless to stop it.

Later, walking home to the station or lifting his head from the work on his table, he asks himself if it is some failure on his part: the lack of spontaneity. It isn’t he who imposes the order, but perhaps in some way he doesn’t understand he is its catalyst.

He devises little tricks—puerile, at once irresistible and shaming. He stands on his hands and knocks at her door with his heel, he opens his mouth to reveal a button on his tongue. But this doesn’t provoke her, she doesn’t even blink. Instead, she removes his coat to look for the spot on his shirt from which he’s torn it, she takes the button from his mouth and stitches it back, tight, where it belongs. It’s as if she anticipates his nonsense and hardens herself against it.

She opens for him, yes, but only her legs, and all the rest that she does—preparing food, mending furs, even waxing his boots—strikes him as an elaborate decoy, a way of distracting him from her deeper self, her deep
est
self, all that he wants most to penetrate.

She.

Inside her is a name, a word he wants to know. To possess.

RIVERS EMPTY INTO COOK INLET: the Susitna, the Chakachatna, the Matanuska, the Yentna, and others, whose native pronunciations Bigelow hasn’t yet mastered. Ringed by sand and clay cliffs, the inlet’s water is clouded in spots by swirling, silty spirals of sediment, glacial detritus hammered by the ocean’s tide.

Exploring the land around Anchorage, searching for the ideal place from which to launch a kite, Bigelow discovers a cove fed by an eddying backwash. He picks his way through a litter of splintered boats and bridges, of lost tents and snapped tent poles, sleds and whips, the occasional drowned dog tangled in its harness.

Spring breakup is fast, fast enough to strand wolf and caribou on the same raft of ice. He’s heard stories of hurtling floes, frozen islands with a surface area of an acre or more speeding downriver with tents pitched on top and campfires still burning. The cove debris curls and bobs in a yellow lather of briny froth, deposited on the shore, licked back into the water, then rolled onto the beach again, hundreds of miles downstream from its sudden, accidental departure.

Snowshoes of varying degrees of workmanship. A fistful of matches still dry in their waterproof can. A wooden tripod. A needlepoint cat stretched taut in its frame. A broken-necked ukulele. A statue of the Virgin with her nose sheared off, her blue dress faded to the same limy gray-green as the water that brought her. Two brooms and one bowling pin. A shard of mirror left in the corner of a gilt frame. An oak headboard with carved pineapple finials. A braided switch of blond hair. A hasty plank grave marker, the dates 1872–1911 burned onto one side. Walking bent over along the water’s edge, Bigelow examines each object, keeping whatever seems useful, the matches and the shard of mirror, the tripod, and two snowshoes that might work together. He ties them on, tests their weave on the sand, thinking of his own possessions, what little he packed and brought north. Maps and instruments, clothes, although not enough and not the right ones, a box of books and a few sentimental trinkets, and his work, of course, calculations—thousands of them— copied meticulously into notebooks.

Standing on the shore, swaying on the long shoes, Bigelow imagines these things in the water, his among what others have lost, his maps and equations and longings erased by the tide.

TO SLOW HIMSELF DOWN, to give her time to come, he has to stop moving altogether.

He has to call upon his whole repertoire of calming images, one especially, he has no idea its source, of an empty chair in a road—a simple wooden chair, the kind you’d expect in a kitchen, and yet it sits alone, without table, lamp, or occupant, in the middle of a straight, paved road, a road going nowhere. Green fields on either side and a range of mountains in the distance. An altocumulus, maybe two.

Once he adds the clouds, he runs through classifications of their forms, starting with the lowest, the nearly earthbound stratus and fractostratus, up through cumulus and nimbus and all their subclassifications, even those textbook clouds that he never sees, like altocumulus-castellus, up and up through all the layers of the air until Bigelow reaches the high, high cirrus, clouds spread at thirty thousand feet like a frayed veil between earth and heaven, between coming and not coming.

Aloft, he swallows his breath, in control now, almost.

The habit of ice.

The habit of ice.

The habit of ice will hold him where he wants to be held, frozen at that most delicious point. The basic pattern of ice is hexagonal, a union of six tetrahedra, but the formation of crystals varies with temperature. From zero to negative three degrees centigrade, it is the habit of ice to form thin hexagonal plates. With the subtraction of one or two degrees, needles result. Take away three and get hollow prismatic columns. From negative eight to negative twelve: thicker hexagonal plates. The dendritic forms—fronds of ice, like botanical growth—occur from negative twelve to negative sixteen.

Bigelow keeps his eyes closed until she cries out. He wants to watch her as she comes, the way she seems for a moment to swim beneath him, her legs kicking in some rhythm he can almost understand.

But she’s too quick; it’s over before he has a chance to see.

“THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a balloon and a kite is that a balloon can be blown off course.”

He sits across from her at the table as she examines the raccoon he has brought. It’s still warm; he shot it in the station, cornered it under his bed, where he keeps—used to keep—his cornmeal and his sugar.

“And,” he says, “to fly a balloon, you need good weather. That’s not true for kites.”

Her clothes are off, folded on the chair. She has only the one dress, and sometimes removes it before cutting up game. He’d like to believe this is to please or tempt him, but she’s no more flirtatious than she is modest. It must be that she doesn’t want to get it stained. He watches as she picks up the carcass, turns it over, looking for the place where the shot entered, a way to predict how it will bleed when she butchers it. Her breasts move with the rest of her, not so small that they don’t sway prettily when she stoops to retrieve a fallen knife. Still, he knows better than to interrupt her when she’s working.

“The first thing that was wrong with the Nairobi experiment was the balloon, because balloons have no line, no line angles to measure, so they could only estimate the height, they couldn’t calculate it. Besides being wasteful, because you have to send up five balloons for every one you reclaim. They just deflate. Or they burst and fall, and that’s no good—not here in Alaska, the population’s too sparse. Around Nairobi there’s a million people who will retrieve a balloon, but here in the territories I’d never get my instruments back.

“Anyway, a kite’s better. With the length of the line and the angle it presents, I can determine the exact height. It’s a standard equation, Pythagorean, using a sine table for the—

“Look,” he says to the woman, and he pulls her away from the table, the raccoon divided into a bowl of entrails, a pan of meat. He steps around the pelt, set fur-side down so as not to stain the floor. She’ll scrape it later, after he’s gone.

With a hand on either shoulder, he sits her on her bed. Then he opens his rucksack. She leans forward, curious. Has he brought another, different animal?

White fabric. He pulls it out, unfolds, unfolds, unfolds. It covers her lap, her bed, her table; it falls in rippling layers and washes up against the doorsill.

“A hundred and eighty square feet of muslin,” he says. “Lifting surface. And that’s just one cell’s worth. Do you know how much that is?” He throws his arms open. “Six by nine by twelve. Six feet tall, nine feet long, twelve feet wide. There’s never been a kite this big. Not on record.” He picks up the end of the fabric and wraps it around her naked shoulders, looks at her black eyes. She indulges him for a moment, holding still before shrugging it off so that it crumples around her on the bed.

Bigelow picks up a corner. “Every night I make myself sew another seam. God, but I’m slow. I don’t know how you do it. An hour every night, and not half, not a quarter as neat as you.” He finds the spot where he left off and pushes it into her hands. She examines the place, smudged gray, where his fingers gripped the cloth. The muslin is puckered in spots, and she pulls at the fabric, trying to smooth it.

“I found a tall fir. Dragged it two, maybe two and a half miles to the mill and had it cut. Thirty-four spars. The kite takes twenty-eight, but they can crack, sometimes they break in flight. And I’m nowhere near finished sanding.

“Here’s what I need,” he says. “I need to build a reel that includes some kind of timing device. A stationary reel that I can set to pause at five-, maybe ten-minute intervals. Then instruments can record at selected altitudes. The Nairobi balloon, it was—well, it was famous. Written up in all the papers . . .” Bigelow trails off.

“What I need,” he says after a minute, “is line that’s strong enough to go up for miles. And a reel that’s bolted down to some kind of platform. Because you can’t control a kite this big. Not manually. It would pull you off your feet.”

The woman hands the muslin back to Bigelow, and he sees a fleck of blood on it, from her hands.

“Silk. I thought silk,” he says. “But silk might fray on a reel. So it’s got to be metal, but flexible. Piano wire. Maybe that would work.

“It’s going to change everything. Forecasts—it will make long-range forecasts possible.”

He folds the muslin, folds it tight to fit back inside his rucksack. “See,” he says, laying the bag aside, “what they did in Nairobi was measure the air temperature over the equator. And found out that it isn’t hot.”

He takes her fingers and gives them a shake. “It isn’t even warm,” he says. “It’s
cold.
Cold the way you’d expect air to be here.
Freezing.
”

Bigelow releases the woman. He throws himself back on her bed, chewing his lower lip, thinking. “Everyone knows that winds move eastward around the globe, because of the earth, the rotating earth. That’s obvious. But it’s also true that heat rises.” He gets up, walks to the stove, holds a hand above its surface. “So you’d think air over the equator would be hot. Hot like it is near the ground. I mean, Nairobi! But. But.”

Bigelow steps out of his boots and onto the chair, and from chair to table, avoiding the bloody bowl and the knife. He reaches to feel the air near the ceiling, jumps down before she can begin to scold. While she watches, he moves the chair from one part of the room to another, standing on its seat to test the air overhead. Then he sits down next to her with his pen and notebook and sketches her square room, floor, walls, stove, and ceiling. “See,” he says, and he draws arrows coming up out of the stove, arrows that move toward the middle of the ceiling and down the opposite wall, across the floor and back, big, spiraling circles. “That’s the way a closed system of air circulates.”