The Seal Wife (7 page)

He was supposed to be a help, but there was something the matter with him in the country. He wheezed all the time, and his grandmother put him to bed. When the twister came, neither of them could get the cellar door unlatched, it was swollen tight with rain, and she got under the covers with him, shoes and all, and they watched windowpanes break and the curtains blow flat against the ceiling. It was true what they said about twister weather; the light was green.

Because she wasn’t frightened, he wasn’t, either. She told him stories about past storms: chickens dropping naked from the sky, alive, with every last feather torn off; a field planted with a burst sack of seed corn, not in rows, of course, but, “tidy,” she said, “you’d be surprised how tidy and even.” To hear her talk it was as if tornadoes were invented for amusement, the redistribution of tools and toys, improvements in landscaping.

“Good,” she said the next day, looking into the hole where the cottonwood had been. “I never liked that tree. Took up too much sun, and now I can plant flowers closer to the house.”

The dust was so bad that Bigelow could hardly breathe, but he picked up shingles and shards of glass, he swept and stacked and helped her hang her gate back on its post. “I’m all right,” he told his grandmother, but she made him lie down in the parlor.

She gave him the almanac to read, and he looked up the date of the twister.
Fair skies return,
it said, and it called the day
favorable for planting root crops
and reminded readers to set their strawberry plants. He showed her the page and she laughed.

“There’s not a soul who can predict the weather,” she said.

On the farm down the road, a man had died, tossed with tables and chairs into the hungry sky. He came down, and they put him in a box and put the box on a wagon. Bigelow and his grandmother came to the gate and watched the wagon go by. A woman was driving, holding the reins in her white church gloves. Sitting next to the box were the man’s three children, silent and scrubbed, wearing their best clothes.

“They have no shoes,” Bigelow said, referring to the children. He pulled at his grandmother’s sleeve. “How can they go without shoes?” He tried to imagine himself, barefoot, at his father’s funeral. His mother’s gloves were dark gray, almost black, with three buttons at the wrist. He’d watched how she held her hands absolutely still; they didn’t move at all.

His grandmother didn’t say anything. Behind the wagon’s wheels, dust rose and then settled.

He saw his grandmother without clothes. He still remembers that. It was late and she thought he was asleep, she didn’t shut the door to her room. She was skinny and wrinkly and didn’t seem to have a proper backside, and immediately he confused her with the rain of plucked chickens.

Even now he can’t think of her without seeing her drop naked from above.

THE DAY BIGELOW CHOOSES for the maiden flight, September 8, is so warm he walks up the bluff without a coat, wading through high yellow grass, carrying a handheld anemometer in a rucksack on his back, as well as theodolite, pen, and his field book in which to record notes—wind speeds, line lengths, angles of incidence. With these numbers, and factoring in the curve of the line based on the speed of the wind, he’ll use a sine table to estimate the height his kite reaches.

The shed and launch platform look sturdy, and Bigelow congratulates himself on their construction, all those nails pounded straight on the rock outside the station door. The reel isn’t finished, and the piano wire he ordered has yet to arrive. He won’t send up instruments, because what’s the point? He doesn’t have what he needs to get the kite high enough to collect data.

What he does have is gut, the same that the island people use for fishing. Not smooth like the strings of a tennis racket or a fiddle, but strong—it bears the weight of a seal fighting for its life. And it’s cheap. Bigelow buys several thousand feet worth, testing each inch, running the oily lengths of it through his fingers, holding down one end with the toe of his boot and pulling as hard as he can on the other, tying and retying the knots. He uses red paint to mark off each hundred feet, and then spools the whole fishy-smelling, lumpy expanse onto a windlass that he’s secured to the launch platform. Good enough for a trial ascent, anyway. How much longer can he wait? The kite’s been assembled, locked in the shed, for nearly two months.

When he gets the thing out, he has to hold it tight—so buoyant, it wants to be off. Lucky he had the foresight to adjust the leg lines while it was still inside, sheltered from the breeze, otherwise he’d never be able to tie a decent knot. To roll it in and out of the shed he’s attached bicycle wheels to the bottom corners of the aft cell. Mismatched, they work well enough, each held with a cotter pin that he can easily remove.

The kite jerks Bigelow away from the platform and onto the bluff, pulling his feet out from under him. He struggles to keep it on the ground to double-check the leads, the angle the harness presents to the wind. But why bother to consider physics? Without encouragement, the air takes the kite from his hands. He’s looking around for the best point from which to release the counterweight and pace out a few yards of line, when it sails up as if enchanted, carrying seventeen pounds of ballast with it.

The clumsy windlass unwinds; the boards of the platform creak; oily, lumpy gut slithers through his guiding hands—they must be hurting, but Bigelow doesn’t feel them, consumed by the ecstatic rise of the kite. So graceful, so assured and swift. Watching it, he forgets to make note of line length, doesn’t bother to measure angles.

What is it that tugs at him, as if it were his heart itself un-spooling? One minute the kite is before his face, large enough to blot out the rest of creation; the next it is far, far away. A handful of sticks, a shroud of white linen, the conceit of altitude. Flight.

Up in the sky, all the line played out, it appears as a little house: white and perfect. The sun ignites one of the faces of the forward cell, makes it so burningly bright that he can’t look at it for long, can’t watch it fly the way he wants to. Yet neither can he look away.

Bigelow touches the line to feel it again, the tremble—unlike anything else—the pull on the end of the line. Alive.

Amazing that this thing he built should fly so perfectly, so absolutely horizontal and steady, resting on an invisible current of air.

But why is he surprised? He has pages of calculations relating lift to the sine of the angle of incidence, pages more on the ratio of inertia to viscous forces. He’s plotted everything out on paper with variable dihedrals, going a half degree at a time from thirty-two to thirty-eight degrees—and graphs of drag coefficients, of lift coefficients, of laminar versus turbulent wake. It isn’t magic, after all, it’s science.

So how to explain the effect on him of the one white face, so bright, like sunlight on the surface of the sea, throwing spangles into the air? How to explain the catch in his chest, the sudden spill of tears?

THIS TIME, when Bigelow pushes his way into her house, he sees that a silvery-green patina of lichen has spread over the surface of her door, and pretty as this is, the sight makes him desperate, it marks the passage of time. How long has she been gone? No longer weeks or even months: a season. So he is all the more surprised by the warm air inside the house, by the sight of a stove where hers had always been, a table, a chair, a bed piled with furs. Tea and tobacco on the shelf, a glass of water on the table, half full, grease fogging its surface. At last, she has come back!

He picks the water up, remembering the sheen on the woman’s mouth as she ate. Is it because she never spoke that such details have assumed importance? Bigelow slowly tips the glass so that the water rolls up to its lip, then rights it. The grease hangs on its side before slipping back down. He drinks the water and replaces the empty glass on the table, sits in the chair to await the woman’s return, imagining the errands that might occupy her.

The longer she is gone, the more he is tempted to go out and find her, but small as the town is, they might miss each other, so he waits. He sits, he paces, and at last decides to lie down on the bed, a presumption he hopes won’t offend her, but he is suddenly so tired—it must be an effect of excitement—he can’t hold himself upright in her straight-backed chair.

She has a new skin, a wolf, and the bed frame is new as well. She must have traded the old one with its creaks and groans, its one short leg.

The force of desire, the effects of loneliness, the toll of displacement: all of these are so strong that Bigelow never considers the more likely possibility, that the house has a new occupant, with a new bed. Under his cheek the smell of wolf is unfamiliar, but he falls asleep quickly, lying on his side, his knees drawn up.

In the dream, he dismembers her. It’s easy enough; he’s learned from watching her skin and cut up game. And there is no blood. Instead, a stream of writing spills from her veins, letters and runes and symbols he doesn’t understand. They pour out in order, like a Weather Bureau teletype, a cipher he is to translate into meaning.

Except he can’t fathom the writing inside the woman. He’s killed her for nothing.

Bigelow wakes disoriented from the nightmare, reassuring himself that he can’t have killed her, for people bleed blood, not language, and where is the knife he used?

A lamp is burning on the table, and a man sits in the chair watching him. His arm balances on the stock of a shotgun. “Have a good rest?” he says, when Bigelow doesn’t explain himself.

“What are you doing?” Bigelow answers.

“What am I doing?” The man is older than Bigelow, with a typically Alaskan beard, unbarbered and grizzled, his left eyebrow jigged through by a scar that continues up to his hairline.

“What have you done to her?”

“What’ve I done to who?” He leans forward, a posture more curious than predatory, and Bigelow, still suffering the effects of his dream, stands and points at the bed he was lying on.

“Her,” he says. “She. The woman—her bed. The woman who lies here.”

“There isn’t a woman that lies there. Wish there was,” he adds.

“There is. It’s hers. The tobacco. The kettle.” Bigelow points at things, and each time the man shakes his head. “Mine,” he says each time, until finally Bigelow understands. The woman hasn’t returned.

He makes an abrupt lunge for the door, but the man blocks his escape, and the two of them stand together, close enough to embrace. Bigelow, too ashamed to speak, looks at the floor. Slowly—slowly enough that, were he to try, Bigelow could elude him—the man reaches out and takes hold of the front of Bigelow’s shirt, making him aware of how his heart is pounding under the fabric.

The man holds him like that until he can feel Bigelow’s humiliation, until Bigelow, defeated, allows himself to sag inside his clothes. Then the man pushes him backward out the door.

STANDING ON THE BLUFF as the line plays out, peering up into the limitless and empty sky, he feels he can’t catch his breath. He sinks to his knees and turns his face from the vastness above him.

Caruso sings, outsings wind scraping over rocks. Bigelow has carried his gramophone up the hill for company, a human voice, loud and triumphant, even if the language isn’t one he understands.

But it’s not working. Kneeling on the ground, eyes closed, panting as if he’s been running, he can’t stop himself—he wonders where she is, and why she left him.

NOVEMBER 19, 1916: 13 degrees; barometer 29.90, falling; .09 precip, Wind: ESE 22 mph. November 30, 1916: 13 degrees; barometer 30.00, falling, Trc. precip, W: NE 27 mph. December 2, 1916: 2 degrees; barometer 29.80, falling, 1.02 precip, W: 0 mph. December 17, 1917: –4 degrees, barometer 29.60, falling. 0 precip. W: SE 3.5 mph.

Barometer falling, barometer falling. How can it be that the barometer is always falling? Wouldn’t it have to rise sometimes? Years later, remembering his second winter in Anchorage, Bigelow’s impression will be that the pressure continued impossibly to plummet, and that the long nights were (every one of them, despite notations to the contrary) unrelieved by the rising of the moon or the appearance of stars.

He uses more kerosene than he can afford, buying extra lamps and keeping a circle of them burning around his table as he works, getting up to crank the gramophone, to set the kettle to boil, to stamp his feet, change his gloves, examine his blood-shot eyes in the mirror propped above the basin—anything to distract him from solitary nights twenty hours long. Inside his moat of light, the maps he draws have the smudged and amateurish look of those he produced as a novice, their quality sacrificed to disruption, inattention, his sudden inability to sit and focus as the work requires.

But what does it matter? Tracking storms in order to forecast the weather: isn’t this just another conceit? If hail destroys crops, if drought produces fires, if another hundred ships are lapped up by the tides—well, tragedy is humankind’s one talent. Without elements to oppose, they invent their own disasters. Look at Europe, digging herself into rat-infested trenches.

Bigelow paces and sighs and yawns. He opens the door to the stove and kneels to watch as a log collapses into coals, sits on the floor with his chin propped on his knee and lays out game after game of solitaire, never winning but starting over and over and over again. He reads through his crate of books and then reads them again, failing to enter their pages, tumbling through lines of words only to fall back into his desolate station, with its door hinges furred with frost, nail heads bristling with ice crystals.

Not that the cold is unmanageable, not along the coast, anyway, where temperatures may rise or fall thirty degrees from one day to the next. There are dark mornings when he opens the door and the air he inhales is so frigid it makes him gasp and cough, when urine freezes before it hits the ground. But there are reprieves as well, warm enough that the sun’s flattened arc brings icicles under the eaves. On these days it’s almost suffocating in a bed piled with blankets. And Bigelow is spending too much time in his bed, unsatisfied lust consuming his attention as it hasn’t since he was sixteen.