by Esi Edugyan
“What will we do now, Titch? Will he hide us here? For how long?”
“Sleep, Wash,” Titch murmured. “There will be time enough to discuss it.”
“Mm,” said I, and wrapped myself deeper in the furs.
“Go to sleep,” he said again.
And I did.
* * *
—
THAT IGLOO, that house of ice, proved indeed a warm and inviting refuge. I awoke cozy and satisfied, and in the easy blue warmth could not wager how late I had slept. Titch was already awake and gone, his furs neatly rolled and set at the foot of his sleeping pallet.
It had snowed in the night, lightly, and I saw where Titch had brushed the sleet from the entrance of our igloo. I could make out the trace of his boot prints leading to the second igloo. I discovered him sitting cross-legged inside with his father, the two of them eating some grey, rubbery breakfast.
“Wash,” Titch said with a cautious smile. “Come in, do. The repast is nourishing, though bitter. Take it in your fingers, like so.”
I watched him eat and smile, but I caught a slight shudder as he swallowed.
“Is there nothing else?” I said.
“It is not fancy, boy,” said Mister Wilde, “but it is enough to keep you alive in a place that wants to kill you. Eat it and keep your wits.”
I glanced at the old, unkempt scientist, but I could not determine if he was joking.
The grey substance had been cut roughly into cubes. I stuck out a tongue, licked at it nervously.
“Do not taste it, Wash,” laughed Titch. “Two quick chews and a swallow and there you have it.”
“The taste grows on you, boy. I did not care for it either at first. But after all this time I do not mind it so.” Mister Wilde chuckled.
“And who introduced you to this delicacy?” said Titch. “Your man?”
“Peter?”
“Your Esquimau, I mean. The one who brought us here on his sled.”
“Hesiod? But he is not our servant.” The smile eased from Mister Wilde’s face, and he gave Titch a strange, disapproving glance. I was beginning to recognize the sudden shifts in his temperament and to dread their swiftness. “I should think you of all men would understand that, Christopher.”
Titch flushed. “Hesiod is not in the employ of you and Peter?”
“He comes and he goes at his choosing. There is no word for ‘servant’ in his tongue. The idea would not make any sense to him.” Mister Wilde frowned and tapped some yellow powder into the ice in front of him. I watched as the yellow seeped through the surface, blooming. “Hesiod is not of the local tribes, Christopher. His people are much further west. He finds our company more agreeable to the degenerates at the trading post.”
“Why degenerates, Mister Wilde?” I asked quietly.
He belched quietly. “Eh?”
“Why do you call them degenerates?” I said again.
“Because they are. They are drunks and petty schemers and they whore out their women to the sailors.” He said this brusquely. I had seen the men in their kayaks during the off-loading of the Calliope and I was not so convinced. Aside from the trader, no man I had yet encountered here seemed anything but dutiful and industrious. But I kept my thoughts to myself.
“Hesiod is a curious name,” I said instead.
“It is not his name. We call him Hesiod because some of the men here consider him a great poet. His true name is unpronounceable.” Mister Wilde stretched his mouth into a grimace and, baring his wooden teeth, uttered a long string of guttural grunts and squawks. “That is the closest I can get to it.”
“Fascinating,” said Titch. “It rather resembles the language of the natives of Borneo.”
“Ha!” said his father in disgust. “Listen to the glottal stops and tell me that again. The Borneo tongue! You have no ear for philology, Christopher.”
“I should stick to aeronautical studies,” Titch said, his cheeks colouring.
“Is that what you were pursuing in Barbados? Lighter-than-air constructions?”
Titch looked somewhat startled. “Erasmus wrote it to you?”
His father shrugged. “He only said you were there wasting his resources. He did not tell me the nature of that wastage.” He chuckled. “Ah, you boys. Always chafing at each other. Now we are speaking of it, I haven’t had a letter from your brother in months.”
Titch frowned. “He thinks you are dead, Father.”
“Ah, that he does. Right.”
I watched Titch shift, clear his throat as he prepared to describe his work, our work. But before he could speak, his father was talking again.
“Peter is my true assistant, not Hesiod,” Mister Wilde said to me, as if he would have the truth acknowledged. “Been with me these, oh, twenty-two years now. It is he who sorts out the particulars of our experiments. Transports the apparatuses, collects specimens, keeps us from walking into the northern wastes and never coming out. He has been for years my truest companion.” As he spoke, I saw a look of mortification pass over Titch’s face; only when his father paused did he glance up.
Mister Wilde gestured a thick, leathery hand in my direction. “Much like what you have with your boy here. Companionship.”
“I should think not,” said Titch archly. He glanced outside at the men passing silently by. “It seems a waste, does it not, to be unable to communicate with all these men, to learn their stories, their histories? You are a man of languages, Father. Why have you not attempted to learn theirs?”
But Titch’s father had already turned and was rummaging through a low stack of leather-bound books, their paper warped.
Now Titch cleared his throat, and spoke to his father’s back. “Father, you will not believe how it was we managed to arrive here. Do you remember when I improved upon your sketches of a cutter tethered to an aerostat? Some three, four years ago?”
“Where did I put it?” Mister Wilde muttered, still sorting through his books.
Titch gave me a quick, uneasy smile, looked again to his father’s back. “My Cloud-cutter, I called it. Do you recall?”
His father rummaged and rummaged, muttering. “Oh. Right—that damnable craft. I remember it. Do not tell me you have actually attempted its construction?”
“Better than attempted, Father—Washington and I completed it. We built it, and launched it from a hilltop at Faith.”
His father turned sharply, his eyes wide and critical. “And where is it, then?”
Titch’s eyes flickered to his lap, and he gave a series of fleeting, tremulous smiles. “At the bottom of the sea, I am afraid.”
“But we should have remained airborne had there not been a storm,” I broke in, shyly. “It was circumstance only, sir. She was as sound and viable a craft as any. You would have been proud to see her, sir.”
Mister Wilde glanced from me to Titch, chuckling into the scraggly black tangle of hairs at his chin. “Well, I do hope you are better haulers than aeronauts. Peter left early this morning. I will need you to carry my instruments.”
* * *
—
THE DAYS PASSED. The hours were short and dark and fleeting, with nightfall coming swiftly. Titch did not mention the Cloud-cutter again, and his father did not ask after it. Instead, they spoke of their family life with a curious detached air. There was a distance, a wryness, in Titch’s manner that did not resemble the man who had grieved at the news of the death on Faith Plantation. I understood this to be his father’s doing—that Mister Wilde was a man with a broken apparatus in place of a heart. It was not, I came to believe, that he did not love; only that he loved intermittently.
They spoke for hours. I listened. I learned of a life and a world I would never have imagined for Titch. I heard stories of his mother, accounts of their travels to Paris. I heard tales of a greenhouse on their estate in England fi
lled with poisonous flowers. And I heard, most strangely, about Erasmus Wilde as a boy, how Titch and his brother would swim naked in the lake on their property and then run through the halls of their house still without clothes, startling the servants. I heard about the night when Erasmus and Titch painted their bodies with the notion of being African priests and made a bonfire in the courtyard out of the dining room furniture, chanting and singing in the firelight until their mother threw buckets of water on both boys in horror. I heard how Mister Wilde had taken Titch to witness an aerial ascent in Norwich from Ranelagh Gardens, the balloon a perfect incandescent orb in the sky before its slow plummet into the sea. I heard how Mister Wilde stood explaining the idea of gases even as the balloonist drowned in the waters, how Titch had begun trembling at the sight of the accident and was not able to stop until halfway back to Granbourne. I heard also of Titch’s tenth year, how he had been ill and frail and lost half his body weight, of how in these bleak days his brother had nicknamed him “Titch,” on account of how tiny he had become. I heard how the doctors had insisted on bloodletting but his mother had prevented them.
“She saved your life, son,” said Mister Wilde, suddenly tender. “A brilliant woman.”
I looked at him curiously, trying to imagine this stout, unwashed, ugly man with his wife. I could not. He had begun to reminisce now of his wife, Abigail Wilde, remembering her youth in Liverpool and how, when they had first met, at a ball, they had spoken until sunrise about the complicated imprecisions in hand-copied maps and the lack of standard Continental measures. He had known from that moment that the solitude he had lived inside for his entire youth might not be his fate. Titch said nothing to this, I noticed. He said only, “Erasmus and I used to watch her as she sat for her Italian lessons in the afternoons. She was the most beautiful creature we knew.”
“You were children,” his father said. “You knew nothing of beauty.”
“Children know everything about beauty,” Titch countered softly. “It is adults who have forgotten.”
7
SOME DAYS the wind hissed across the icefields, the snow blowing in sideways. Mister Peter carved his way out of the camp every morning and returned at nightfall. I imagined it was to the outpost that he was going, but I was not wholly certain. Watching him, I understood him to be a sensitive and intelligent man, quietly pragmatic in his solutions. I could not fathom why he’d elected to surrender his life to the unpredictable whims of Mister Wilde.
Also in the mornings Titch’s father worked at his experiments in the fourth igloo, a space he had devoted to the microscopic study of various kinds of ice. He spoke at length of the tiny creatures he found in the icy waters, and he showed a carefully tagged box of loose bones, describing the monster they had been taken from. A walrus, he called it. He showed me a long, spiralled horn and said it came from a sleek white whale that lived beneath the ice.
One day I sat sketching a specimen. And though I had made many a sketch before, I was suddenly astonished at myself—at what I could create with these thin, tremulous fingers with their nail beds lined always in dirt. The image seemed less a drawing than a haunting, a vision of the specimen’s afterlife, set down in a ghostly lustre of ink. How far I had come these long months; how much I had grown in both art and life.
I sensed a breath at my neck, and turned to find Mister Wilde peering unexpectedly over my shoulder. I jolted, then turned to face the small man, surprised as always to find his face nearly eye to eye with mine, his fish-scented breath rasping in his throat. He bore the same bright green eyes as Titch, but his were smaller, flintier, with odd pinpoints of light in the irises. He stared down at my hands and paper, and it was as though his eyes were finely dissecting every stroke of my sketch.
“Hm,” he said, sounding both surprised and unimpressed. “There is talent there.”
Then he smiled at me, and it was like a flash of violence, all wooden teeth and gums. Seeing it, something shrank in me. I felt both his intense awe and his mockery, as if he were watching some insensible creature perform an unnatural act, as if a hothouse plant had learned to speak.
I left off drawing in the afternoons, and instead would walk with Titch and his father, checking the various small cages and traps Mister Wilde had set around the perimeter. They were, without fail, always empty. One afternoon we came across the deep-set tracks of a polar bear. We followed them for several hours, and when we reached open ice, the trail vanished. Mister Wilde came to himself then; he glanced at the darkening sky and his eyes filled with alarm. We hurried for miles back to the camp, arriving just as everything went black on the horizon.
All this I observed with real interest. But my true study remained, I understand now, the curious person of Titch. He was, I feared, becoming increasingly lost within himself. I suppose there must have been a deep love between him and his father, a love I could get no sense for because of its reticence. But as with most loves, it was shadowy, and painful, and confusing, and Titch seemed to me overly eager and too often hurt.
I could see a sadness coming over him, a kind of slow despair. I understood he was anguished over his father—over his failure to ever impress the man, over how to explain that Philip had killed himself and that we were now in hiding. Each night, as we lay in our furs in the close darkness of that igloo, I listened to Titch breathing, and felt the increasing dread in him, like a heat. I was worried.
Finally I could no longer hold my tongue. “You must tell him, Titch,” I said into the darkness. “He has to know what has happened.”
“Do you suppose it was a trap, all this? That Erasmus and Philip concocted the falsehood of my father’s death so that Erasmus could get away from Faith and trap me there?”
“But that is madness. Consider that your father was aware of the rumour also. No, I do not think it likely.”
“Yes, you are right,” he muttered.
“Please do tell him everything, Titch.”
He lay there breathing heavily in the dark, and did not speak.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I dreamed, for the first time in months, of Big Kit. We were standing at the edge of the cane at sunset and there were tiny flecks of insects feeding in the darkening air. A haze of pale light was furred around Kit’s head, like a halo, and I could not make out her face. She reached forward and held my hand, and her touch was terribly cold. I gave her a pair of thick fur-lined mittens. Then somehow we were standing in the snow, the world so white around us. Kit’s face looked wondrous to me, dark, sombre, beautiful. I studied it.
“You be my eyes, Wash,” she said to me.
And reaching up and with her fingers, she forcibly pressed her own eyes in. A wide blue light shone out from the sockets.
I felt—and this is the peculiar truth—a sense of peace and well-being come over me. I understood a great gift of trust was being extended to me.
When I awoke in the darkness, I was crying.
* * *
—
I DID NOT accompany Titch the next morning when he went with his father to the camp’s perimeter to inspect the cages. Rather, I walked to the edge of the encampment, the eyes of the men there trailing me, and I made vivid, detailed sketches of the igloos.
When at last Titch returned that afternoon from his father’s observation igloo, he sat a long time in the dim light of our shelter, staring at his mittens, not troubling to remove his heavy clothes. I too was dressed for the outdoors, for I could not get warm enough, and I had been fumbling with a needle and thread trying to sew up a small hole in the thumb of my mitten. I glanced across at Titch, but did not speak. For a long time we sat, unmoving, while the weather blew past outside.
At last Titch stirred, rubbing at his reddened face. “Do you know what a family is?” he said bitterly. He turned and met my eye, studying me some moments. “You do not know what a family is, because you have never had one. That
is why you think it matters.” He shifted on his knees and, pulling his pack from beside the low ice shelf, began filling it with provisions.
“You have told him, then?” I said nervously.
Titch continued to stuff our provisions into his pack.
“What did he say? Titch?”
Still he did not speak, only shifted on his creaking knees in the dim light.
“Surely he is not casting us out? I hope you did emphasize it to him that I was nothing to do with it, the death. And that Mister Willard—”
I let my voice falter and drift off.
Titch had paused, was leaning back on his haunches, measuring me. “Do you know what he said, when he learned of Philip’s death? Do you know what his words were? ‘The boy was too thoughtful for his own good.’ ” Titch laughed in misery. “That is who we are dealing with, Wash. That is the man who is my father.”
I hesitated. “Does he understand about Mister Willard? Does he understand what he means to do?”
“He seemed reluctant to inform either Erasmus or my mother of his being still alive. He keeps saying he would not like to startle them. I believe he sees some advantage in their ignorance. If they believe him dead, he does not have to be troubled by them just yet—he can simply continue on with his research, with his life here with Peter.” He moistened his cracked lips, frowned. “I have explained that Erasmus cannot be pressed to remain at Faith without proof of his still being alive. I have explained how my word alone will carry no weight. He pretends not to understand. ‘Far be it from me to interfere in your brother’s business dealings.’ This he actually said. He is fully aware of where the resources funding his research originate.” Titch spat angrily at his boots. “This is who my family is, Wash. This is my blood.” He shook his head. “It would not surprise me at all to learn that he is the very source of the falsehood.”
I stared at him only half-comprehending, my heart shunting in my chest.
