Antarctica

by Peter Lerangis

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n —” Bardsley said.

  “Silence!” the man shouted, his eyes fixed on Jack. “I be Coffin. Captain Rhadamanthus Increase Coffin.”

  “Jack Winslow,” Father said without flinching. “My son, Colin, and Master Philip Westfall.”

  “A deep pleasure, I’m sure, Your Highness,” Philip said. “Er, Holiness — Captaincy —”

  “They’re in fine workin’ order now, Cap’n,” Bardsley insisted. “Able seamen, all three. But y’see, there’s just a few more of ’em a-stranded on a cove not very far from ’ere at all —”

  “You nattering chowderhead, more crew means more sailors to pay!” Captain Coffin thundered.

  “Exac’ly wha’ we told ’em, Cap’n,” Harkness quickly said. “No pickin’ up strangers wha’ are starvin’ in coves. Cap’n Coffin wou’n’t allow it, no, sir — we knew we could speak f’yer, Cap’n, seein’ as we knows yer mind —”

  Liar.

  Colin bolted up from his seat, but Jack held him back.

  Captain Coffin shot Harkness a look that could slice steel, then turned back to Jack. “I can’t pay ye but an eight hundredth lay — a thousandth each to the boys — but don’t let me hear ye complain. Y’oughter be grateful ’tain’t nothing!”

  “Fine!” Philip blurted out. “Quite reasonable indeed.”

  “Have ye a bath and a shave, ye look like somethin’ wha’ escaped the madhouse.” Coffin turned away, his cape billowing out. “Now, Harkness, let’s bag us a whale or two — and on the Sabbath day, ye’ll set us on a course to find those other men!”

  As the Captain stomped abovedecks, Harkness gave Colin a smile and wink.

  24

  Andrew

  February 10, 1910

  THIS IS HOW IT ended.

  Silent and shivering under a miserable icy overhang that barely protects you from the wind, a leeward pressure ridge to extend your life just a bit longer.

  Not with a heroic fight, a stirring speech, a pledge of “courage to the death!,” a noble tableau at final curtain.

  It just ended. Without dignity, redemption, or flair.

  One man dropped away without a word. Then another.

  You went through the motions of trying to find the missing. Because knowing was better than not knowing. But you knew they wouldn’t be found. They were gone. And you envied them.

  Andrew held tight to a guy wire and reeled it in. The wire had been tied to another and another, and finally to the entire length of line in their possession.

  On the other end, Petard and Stimson were out looking for Nigel and Captain Barth.

  The captain should have traveled on a cot in the boat. He should have been resting, not leading the trek. But he believed in heroics. He thought he could set an example and stir the troops.

  He hadn’t been ready. In the thick of the storm he’d lost his way for reasons unknown. His line had snapped and the blowing snow had been too thick for anyone to find him.

  Petard and Stimson had been out for an hour before they’d given Andrew the. signal— five tight pulls — and now they were headed back.

  As the wire curled at Andrew’s feet, he heard Lombardo snoring from beneath the Raina. Along with the tents, the men were using the upended boat as a shelter. No one spoke of repairs anymore. And no one bothered to come out and keep Andrew company.

  Soon Petard’s and Stimson’s shapes emerged from the blizzard, slumped and slow-moving. Ice clung to their beards like tusks, and their eyes drooped with exhaustion and disappointment.

  “Nothing,” Stimson said.

  Barth was dead. And Nigel. But Andrew felt no grief. He felt no emotion at all.

  Petard knelt and began to pray softly. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …”

  As if by signal, the other men filed out of the tents and gathered in a circle. Petard looked out toward the bleak landscape as he spoke.

  “… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort …”

  His words trailed off.

  Poor Petard. Even he, the spiritual rock, was torn apart by this. Andrew put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  But Petard was staring intently into the storm.

  A hulking shape moved toward them, a misshapen creature grotesquely thick around the shoulders.

  Andrew remembered talk about the yeti. Nigel was convinced that it existed somewhere in Antarctica.

  Silly, superstitious talk.

  “What on earth is that?” Andrew murmured.

  The creature staggered to a stop.

  “Don’t just stand there, you blithering imbeciles!” it cried.

  “Nigel?” Petard said.

  The men ran toward him. As Andrew came closer he realized why he hadn’t recognized the profile. Nigel had something on his shoulders.

  “Take this, will you?” Nigel said, slipping Captain Barth down into the snow. “You find the strangest things in them blasted caves.”

  25

  Ruskey

  February 13,1910

  SANDERS LOOKED SKELETAL. THE sun had made deep pools of his cheeks and eyes. Behind him, O’Malley brought up fragments of the Iphigenia that had washed up on shore. His jacket was cinched around his waist, which was the size of a thigh. The caption cried out: Slow Death on Two Feet.

  Snap.

  Three shots left now. Last roll.

  “Will you put that thing down?” Kennedy said. “You’re gettin’ on my nerves.”

  The vest-pocket camera was junk, really. He missed his big Hasselblad, with its capacity for huge panoramas, its aperture and shutter-speed settings that allowed for resolution down to the individual grains of snow. But alas, no blank plates, no Hasselblad. Everything lost in the wreck of the Iphigenia.

  Couldn’t agonize over spilled plates. Had to keep on.

  The little camera did have its virtues. It caught candid, day-to-day life. People. Motion. Progress. It would be a record of what went on here.

  Besides, it kept him busy.

  And sane.

  Sanity was precious. Already some of the men were cracking. O’Malley had tried to make soup out of snow, wood, and stones. (He had a theory about edible algae and sloughed-off seal nutrients. But the soup had tasted like wood and stones.) Talmadge was taking weather readings by the minute, recording the tiniest changes in temperature. Ruppenthal was picking fights. Cranston was writing notes in his journal, ripping them out, and tucking them into rocks in the cave. Kennedy had lost his sarcastic sense of humor. That was scariest of all.

  Hunger had changed them all, turned them into scavengers. It was a constant companion, tearing at their insides until they thought of nothing else. It made walking cadavers of once-burly men.

  It made good photography.

  Windham, on lookout shift, had dug himself a deep, full-body indentation in the cliff, banking the sides to protect himself against the wind. But he had fallen asleep there, standing up, his soot-blackened face turned to the sun. His lips, thin and parched, had curled back over his teeth, and he looked like an Egyptian mummy unearthed in its sarcophagus.

  Pharaoh of the Frozen South.

  Snap.

  Two shots left.

  Rivera, pacing a figure eight, his footsteps wearing a path in the gravel. Dr. Riesman’s eyes, feral and desolate, peering from the shadow of the cave.

  Eternity’s Limbo.

  Frame, angle, composition.

  Snap.

  One left. Last shot.

  It would have to be good. The best.

  Ruskey began to shake.

  He thought of the sign he’d painted over his studio door back home, the dying words of the poet Goethe: More light.

  Light was life. It illuminated and nourished. If light died, life ended.

  He imagined his finger pressing the shutter, the final image imprinting itself on the silver nitrate, the aperture snapping shut for good. Forever.<
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  The camera vibrated as Ruskey lifted it to his eyes.

  He couldn’t do it.

  He couldn’t not do it.

  If someone ever found this place, they would need to know what happened. They would see. And if they saw, they’d know. They had to know.

  One shot left. No blanks aloud.

  Take it while you’re able.

  He slowly panned, taking it all in: men, boat, cliff, pathway, rocks, shore, sea, ship …

  Ship?

  He blinked.

  It was impossible.

  26

  Andrew

  February 27, 1910

  “ ‘SCATTER, AS FROM AN unextinguished hearth/Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!/Be through my lips to unawakened earth — ’ ” Andrew glanced up from his book. His voice was killing him.

  Only Oppenheim was listening. Most of the men sat listlessly on the ice. Captain Barth stood, scanning the landscape with a spyglass.

  The sight of Barth still amazed Andrew. The fact that he was alive — that he’d been found and rescued by Nigel, of all people — was a miracle. It had lifted camp spirits tremendously.

  But most of the positive energy had dimmed the day after the rescue, when the sun finally emerged. It revealed that the men had not trekked inland at all. They’d gone in a semicircle, more or less parallel to the ice’s edge.

  During the days since then, the camp had remained under the same pressure ridge while Barth recovered. The experience had changed him and Nigel. Neither would talk about what had happened, why they’d wandered from the boat, why Nigel had cut his line. Both seemed quiet, frail, haunted.

  The weather had turned warmer over the weeks — summer’s last gasp — and the ice edge had crept steadily closer. But no one had the energy to move camp inland. For that you needed real food, not a diet of melted snow, an occasional bird, and on some glorious days a lost penguin or seal.

  Soon moving would be inevitable. Until it became so, Andrew had been determined to pass the time reading aloud. To introduce beauty into this bleak, most unpoetic of places.

  “Come on, finish!” Oppenheim blurted out. “The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,/If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’”

  Andrew smiled. “You know that poem.”

  “ ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ Percy Bysshe Shelley,” Oppenheim replied. “All my students had to learn it.”

  “Those poor kids. Ain’t you guys got any songs?” Lombardo said. He twisted his lips into a strange sideways shape and honked, “ ‘Ohhh, my w-i-i-ife’s a corrrker, she’s a New Yorrrker, I give her everything that moneeeey can buy —’ ”

  “Roowoooooo!” squalled Socrates from inside the boat tent.

  “Stamàteh, vre!”Kosta scolded.

  “ ‘She’s go-o-ot a pair of le-e-egs just li-i-ike two powder kegs — uh-ohhh, that’s whar my money go-o-oes!’”

  “Knock it off, Lombardo!” Captain Barth shouted.

  “I got a thousand more,” Lombardo said.

  “Well, swallow the other nine hundred ninety-nine,” Nigel snapped, “and let us perish in peace.”

  Lombardo shrugged. Andrew closed his book. Nigel returned to his gloom.

  Back to normal. No motion, no voice. No wasted energy.

  The noise, for a moment, had felt good.

  Captain Barth put down his spyglass and walked back to the tents. His face was gaunt and hooded, his beard scraggly and thin. He looked like an old, old man.

  “Thanks, Winslow,” he said softly. “I liked that poem.”

  “I got a thousand more,” Andrew said.

  “We need one about moving. About picking up and moving camp when nobody cares.”

  “Just give the order, Captain.”

  Barth nodded wanly, as if to say, Fat chance. The fire in his eyes was out. The incident in the snow, Andrew realized, had done that. Being put in the position of having to be saved by Nigel was a defeat, a humiliation — a reminder that he had been unable to save Nesbit. To Barth, these were two failures in a life that didn’t permit such things.

  Andrew knew the feeling.

  From the boat tent came a soft, keening sob. Kosta’s. Another dog had starved to death. Demosthenes, most likely. They were down to five now: Socrates, Iosif, Nikola, Panagiotis, and Kristina.

  To the east, a loud crack resounded. The ice was breaking not far from them. Captain Barth stiffened.

  Another crack. To the west.

  Andrew felt the floe shudder.

  “Up!” Captain Barth said. “On the double, men, we’re moving out!”

  A few of the men looked up. Robert, Petard, and Dr. Montfort stood.

  “I mean it — move!” Barth tried again.

  No one budged.

  Barth turned to Andrew, his eyes the color of fear.

  “What’s going on?” Andrew shouted. “You’re all just giving up?”

  Brillman shrugged. “In the end, the land always wins.”

  “Victory to Antarctica,” Bailey muttered.

  “Victory to the bottom of the world,” Siegal grumbled.

  “To the bottom,” Lombardo added.

  CCRRRRAACKKKK!

  Andrew fell backward. The ice had split.

  The dogs ran out, baying at the sudden change.

  The men, one by one, sat in a rough circle, shoulder to shoulder. All except Captain Barth.

  Andrew understood their action. Herd instinct. They were animals, gathering in some primal, communal death impulse. The land always won.

  He fought to see. He fought to think.

  Instincts:

  Fight.

  Hunt.

  Defend.

  Attack.

  Ideas:

  Plan.

  Foresee.

  Outwit.

  Prevent.

  No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

  Tried. Failed. All.

  Something. There must be something. Every crisis yielded to the right question. Jack always said that.

  But what? What to do? The basic questions didn’t hold anymore. Andrew had asked them all. He had run out.

  What would Colin do?

  Andrew took a deep breath. His vision cleared.

  He looked out at the ice. He saw a dark spot on the horizon.

  Quickly he gathered up whatever wood he could find. Then he ducked into the boat tent.

  He grabbed a match.

  27

  Jack

  February 27, 1910

  JACK DIDN’T RECOGNIZE IT at all. None of the landmarks were there. The entire geography of the Ross Sea had changed in a month.

  “’Ave ye seen it yet, aye?” called the second mate, a crusty harpooner named Henry Fee who had just emerged from the deckhouse.

  Jack shook his head as he continued slowly to scan the horizon through the ship’s binoculars. The location of Camp Perseverance was anybody’s guess.

  His feet were numb from standing on the cross-trees for such a long time. At first the whalers had gathered below him, cheering him on, enjoying the excitement and the break in routine. But now most had wandered off to their various chores. Even the dogs — Maria, Ireni, Stavros, Martha, Kalliope, Fotis — had lost interest.

  Besides Fee, only Harkness, Colin, Mansfield, and Philip remained.

  “Not meanin’ t’be rude or nothin’,” Fee continued. “Just in the manner of warnin’, mind ye — but ye been up thar a long time, and the Cap’n’ll be expectin’ ye to bear fruit, else we must needs shove off, on account o’ time bein’ money, and it’s a sure bet the whales be a-grinnin’ at their great good luck —”

  “Will ye pull in yer scroll, Mister Fee?” Harkness interrupted. “I can’t ’ear meself think.”

  “Nothin’ to ’ear, ’n’ that’s a common fact!” Fee retorted.

  “We’re jibing hard to southeast,” Colin reminded him. “Our position changes by the minute.”

  “The angles open up, the pressure ridges reveal hidden places,” Mansfield added.
“We can’t stop until we sail the entire sea.”

  “Exactly,” Philip said, “and if your charming leader can’t understand that, he’s not worth the water he tacks through.”

  “I’ll tell the Cap’n you said such,” Fee snapped.

  “Tell him it is our humble request,” Jack called down. He looked sharply at Philip. They were guests. With a man like Coffin, you remembered your place.

  Colin and Mansfield were right to ask for more time. What they hadn’t said was that the ship had nearly traversed the whole sea already. The sailors were keeping the Nobadeer at a safe distance, not wanting to be stuck in brash or worse.

  And if you allowed yourself to think about it, to use logic and sense, you realized this was a fool’s errand. In the end, after the effort was made, the right and compassionate thing to do was face the truth and turn back.

  Now the Ross Sea’s eastern shelf loomed off the starboard bow. It would soon be time.

  Jack whispered a good-bye to Andrew, and in the binoculars’ orbs saw a dream image of a frightened little boy who’d hid when Jack was courting his mother. Who’d cried through the wedding and the move to New York, refusing to call him Father even though his own father never spoke to him. Who, when things overwhelmed him, would lose himself in literature, adventure stories, and poetry. Who’d faced his mother’s death with flint and courage. Who’d conquered the Antarctic to save a man’s life and had never given himself credit.

  The image of the boy faded, and Jack saw nothing clearly. The enormity of his mistake settled thickly over him. Half his crew — his own stepson — lost. Not one soul besides Horace Putney aware of his location. His own life — Colin’s, Philip’s, and the other men’s — saved only at fortune’s whim, a chance crossing in a stormy sea.

  He had failed to reach the South Pole. He had failed to exercise a plan of rescue. He had failed in his one ironclad promise, the safe return of his crew. He had failed at being a leader, a father, a husband. And he would pay for it the rest of his life.

  His hands shook.

  “Father?” Colin said. “Are you all right?”

  “Still looking,” Jack replied.