Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  ‘I told you there’d be some poor bugger in that pot! You’ve misled me!’

  ‘I did not mislead you! You asked if it was that Brown fellow, the Texan who’d gone missing from Destruction City. It wasn’t him. You misled yourself.’

  ‘Well, anyway. The second grave, please.’

  ‘So. The second grave proved harder to open than the first: groundwater had seeped into it and frozen hard, and the lid of the coffin was welded shut by the ice. But he found a slim crack between coffin and plank and slid the axe blade into it, and after a little jimmying he had prised off the lid.

  ‘The second corpse had not yet been scavenged. It was that of a white man, dressed in the plain woollen cassock of a Russian cleric. He had a full white beard and a broad, Russian face, much lined by the years. His eyes were closed as if in sleep, his hands folded on his breast. In them he clasped the remains of a book, a Bible, most of which had been ripped away.’

  The man on the bed nodded quickly, hurrying the narrative on. ‘A missionary or mystic hermit. Or a pious envoy of the old Russian–American Company. But what was he doing so far east of Alaska?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the writer impatiently. He was caught in the grip of his own story. ‘The first grave was longer than the priest’s grave. At one end a little wall of stones separated the grave itself from a smaller excavation, also flooded, in which two square depressions chipped in the ice showed where the two tin boxes had once been buried. Covered over with the rocks, this little compartment would have looked from above like part of the grave. When in fact it was, Ivan realized, really a cache, a hiding place.’

  The man on the cot nodded quickly. ‘Very good. So what happened next?’

  ‘Ivan did the right thing. He put the things back in the boxes – the message tube and journals. He kept the pistol for the dead men’s sake: a gravedigger must have his tip, or the dead will have no luck on the other side . . . Ivan would also have liked to keep the axe, but you can’t take a man’s last axe: it must be buried with him.

  ‘After saying a silent prayer he laid the icon and the loose pages of the Bible on the dead priest’s breast. Then he closed both coffins and replaced the stones. When he was finished he turned and looked at that silent, ghastly house. Though he had felt no breath of wind the weathervane had moved to a little north of east, the way he had wandered all through his days. It was past noon, and the weathervane cast a long shadow on the snow, a fraction east of north. Thirty years before, Ivan had kissed his mother goodbye on the porch of their warm little izba. Each step he had taken since, a little north of east, or a little east of north, had brought him to this place, to this silent house in a desolate clearing so like the one he had left. He knew now that his journey was over. He would turn and go back. Facing east and north for the last time, he gazed into the watchful trees which crowded round the clearing: what, after all, were they hiding? What was beyond them? He re-erected the two fallen crosses, shouldered his pack and went back to Destruction City, where he did not tell the others about what had befallen him. He did not want anyone to find that hidden place again.’

  ‘The crosses,’ said the man on the cot. ‘Did he say if there was anything written on them?’

  ‘He did. There were names on them. But he couldn’t read them. They were both written in Roman letters, not in Cyrillic.’

  ‘That’s rather odd . . . So whoever buried them there, and cached the valuables, wasn’t Russian . . . Did he say anything about finding any instruments?’

  ‘Instruments?’

  ‘Navigational instruments. Map-making tools – sextants or compasses or chronometers or the like.’

  And where, wondered the writer, might these questions lead? But there was something about the man on the bed, some quality of imperviousness, that prevented him asking. This fellow is somehow special, he realized: I don’t want to scare him off. ‘No. Nothing like that. Just the maps and the tube and the journals. And the icon, the pistol and the axe.’

  ‘I see . . .’ The man on the bed tipped his mug up, draining it, then fixed the writer with a straight look. ‘And your story is true?’

  The writer laughed at the directness of the challenge. ‘Is it true? Who can say? But it’s true that Ivan told us all that – well, almost all of it – that night in the cabin on Bonanza Creek. And those were the last words I ever heard him speak. The next day he took his pay and bought a Tagish canoe and set off alone down the river. Some say he crossed back to Siberia. He was never seen in the Yukon again.’

  ‘So there’s no way to find him now. No way to confirm his story or get directions to that cabin?’

  ‘No . . . There’s no proof at all . . . But he did show us the gun.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He showed us the gun. The pistol he took from the cabin. The one he used to kill Weatherbee. As I say, he brought it away as his gravedigger’s tip. He showed it to us that night in the bunkhouse. It was very old – a cap-and-ball black powder Colt five-shooter. It’s a wonder it would still fire. Yet it would have been worth a fortune when it was new – revolvers were a wonder when they first came on the market. And this one was clearly a valued possession – its owner’s initials were engraved on the receiver.’

  ‘Really . . . I don’t suppose you remember what these initials were?’

  ‘Oh yes. I took a note of them for my short story. “F.R.M.C.”.’

  ‘F.R.M.C. . . . F.R.M.C. . . .’ The patient lay back on the bed, moving his lips silently. He’s memorizing the initials, thought the writer. He won’t write them down while I’m watching.

  The man on the bed sat bolt upright again, struck by some private revelation. ‘F.R.M.C.!’ Then he remembered the writer, and what he’d just said. ‘Your short story? What story is that?’

  ‘I write fiction, you know. It’s my main living. I only dabble in journalism: the San Francisco Examiner made me an offer so generous I couldn’t say no.’

  ‘And you think this silly old yarn would make a good story?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Well . . .’ The patient was rubbing his eyes and his face, as if trying to massage some thought into them. ‘Well . . . Don’t you think it’s a bit far-fetched? All these Russians and corpses and cannibals and suchlike? It would strain credulity.’

  ‘That surely doesn’t matter if it’s true.’

  ‘But people won’t think that it’s true. Not only will they think you’re making it up, they’ll think you’re overdoing it. It’s a new century, you know; that sort of Gothic, sort of supernatural thing, is going out of style. Everything is very plain and modern now.’

  ‘I happen to know that most readers love the Gothic and supernatural stuff.’

  The patient rubbed his face some more, then stopped and smiled at the writer. ‘It’s just that if you hone that story down there’s a better story hidden inside it. More in tune with the twentieth century.’

  ‘Like what?’ And why, thought the writer, would I take his advice on how to write stories? He doesn’t seem the literary type.

  ‘Well . . . Well . . . How about this: what if you take out Ivan and the cannibalism and the maps and all that? What if you just have Cuthfert and Weatherbee alone in the cabin, slowly going mad from isolation and mutual loathing, until finally they crack up and kill each other?’

  ‘Where would that get me?’

  ‘It would make it a much starker story. Much more modern. That way, it’s about how silence and isolation find the cracks in a character, the points of weakness, the things which truly define a man, far more than his strengths do, and how they use those weaknesses to tear him apart. It’s about how we rely on a very thin layer of civilization to hold us together. That sort of thing.’

  The writer thought about that, sighed, then poured them both another brandy. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think you might be on to something. If Ivan hadn’t
stumbled into the scene, Cuthfert and Weatherbee would have killed each other anyway. As far as their story is concerned, the Russian is just another detail too many.’

  The man on the bed nodded vigorously. ‘So cut him out. He gets in the way . . . But you could still have the lonely unexplained graves outside the mysterious old cabin. I like that part, so long as they’re not dug up. And the weathervane emblem is good, though to be honest I don’t know what it means. Not that I ever do . . .’

  ‘The next morning the Japanese dragged London off with the rest of their tame correspondents. Two days after that I set out for Alaska.’ Meares was talking to himself by now: Hugh, drunk on three swallows of whisky, had lost the thread of the story and was trying not to nod off. ‘I went back through the Russian lines and found a ship to the East Cape. From there I crossed the Bering Strait and went up the Yukon River and then across the divide. I searched up and down the Rat River but I never found that cabin. If it weren’t for one or two details I’d swear that London had made it all up . . .’

  The alarm sounded on the telegraph board, jerking Hugh back to full wakefulness. It was Esquimalt again. Meares pulled an old envelope out of his pocket and placed it on the table beside Hugh’s typewriter. ‘Write it here,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any impressions left on your ribbon.’

  Hugh transcribed the Morse into a pencilled message then offered it to Meares.

  ‘I can’t see in the dark without glasses. Read it aloud.’

  ‘ “Your accusation absurd. Stop. William Forbes Sempill is courtier Etonian peer Highlander. Stop. Desist”.’

  Meares tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He became very still. Watching him, Hugh had a notion he might have stopped breathing. ‘Do you want to send a reply?’

  Meares opened his eyes again. ‘No. No reply. There’s nothing to say . . .’ He stood up, patting his pockets to make sure he still had his flask and his cigarette case. He looked tired. ‘I’ll slip out the side door while you lock the office. I’ll be waiting in the car. It’s parked on the corner.’

  ‘I still have my bicycle.’

  ‘Your blessed bicycle . . . Where would we be without it? . . . I can put it in the back.’

  Part Six

  The Amundsen Gulf

  70º30’N 122º30’W

  Inuvik, North West Territories

  The last time Nelson had seen Bert was at their mother’s funeral in Grande Prairie, Alberta, three years before. The previous time was at their father’s funeral, also in Grande Prairie, a year before that. The time before that Nelson couldn’t remember.

  Their parents both ended up in the same nursing home – their father was crippled by arthritis, among other things, while their mother was mad. They were kept on separate wings because Charlotte Nilsson no longer spoke to her husband, whom she believed had helped to abduct her from her true family, the Romanovs of Russia. He had stolen a princess from history, and her history from her.

  Bert paid the bills but he lived in Ontario most of the time and seldom visited. Nelson only saw his parents in the seniors’ home once, when he was driving up the Alaska Highway and couldn’t think of an excuse not to stop by. He went to see his mother first but she wouldn’t talk to him, or accept the box of her favourite liquorice that he’d bought at a speciality store in Edmonton. ‘I don’t like liquorice,’ she said, and smiled at him sourly, as if she’d just made a crushing point.

  ‘Well, hold on to it anyway,’ he said. ‘Next time Bert comes by you can give it to him. He loves liquorice.’

  ‘Who’s Bert?’ She made the smile again. But he knew damn well she was mad, not demented.

  His father had been delighted to see him, at least at first. But the longer Nelson stayed, the quieter his father became. He wants to escape, thought Nelson. When he saw me at first he thought – or couldn’t help hoping – that I’d come here to spring him. And for a few lovely moments he let his mind run with that notion: just him and his old dad, sticking together, muddling along, happy together at last, until they came to whatever end fate had in store for them. He saw it as a road movie. But the happy moment passed. His dad was too old and too sick to live in a car with him. So they talked for a while longer, about anything other than what was glaringly obvious, the chasm between them, between the two of them and Charlotte, between the two of them and Charlotte and Bert. Then Nelson told his father some lie about the job he was going to up in Dease Lake. His father nodded politely, knowing that his son only ever lied out of kindness, and the two of them then said goodbye. They both guessed correctly that they wouldn’t meet again.

  Their mother wouldn’t come to her husband’s funeral. A year later, she was buried by his side.

  Nelson remembered being happy as a boy. Their house had been small but warm in the winters. He remembered, when he could have been no older than four or five, how a Chinook wind had thawed their front yard just after he and Bert built a really good snow fort. To cheer them up their mother drew a smiley face in the steam on the window. She used to sing to us. He remembered his grandfather buying them ice cream, his parents holding hands.

  From that to this. All he knew for sure was that Bert had grown silent and his mother distant. His grandfather died and his father was very sad about it. Little gaps appeared in the family and were widened by time. He started getting into trouble at school. Teachers said he was bright, but he couldn’t do his homework. He would look at it until his head and chest hurt and then he’d have to push it away. To make up for this failure he would stick up for Bert, who wouldn’t stick up for himself, and that led to other problems. After a while, with all the tears and the threats and the shouting, you had to decide for yourself that you were basically on your own. You had to put your head down and charge at life, fists flailing. And when you finally calmed down enough to pause and look around you, you had proven yourself right: you really were alone.

  When his father died he left the money from the sale of the house to Charlotte. When she died a year later it turned out she had already given most of it away, writing cheque after cheque to charities she found in the day room’s old magazines. Bert and Nelson would have only six thousand dollars to split between them. But it would take a while for the estate to be probated, so Bert gave Nelson his half in cash right after the funeral. Nelson hadn’t asked for it, Bert just did it off his own bat. He couldn’t tell Bert how grateful he was. All he could say was: Let’s go for a drink.

  It was one of the very few times they had ever gone to a bar together. Nelson suggested a favourite old dive, to see if they still remembered him there, to see if by some miracle he was still banned. But the head barman was just a kid and there was no one there he knew.

  They sat at the bar and ordered beer. The place was quiet. After he served them, the barman went back to restocking shelves with glasses and bottles. The only waitress sat reading a book by the service counter. Nelson watched Bert pour his beer in a glass then sip it like he thought it might hurt him. He’s still frightened, thought Nelson, and felt his chest flood with pity. He’s lived with that all his life, wherever it comes from. And yet when you think of all the things he’s done . . . Well, Nelson had lost track of that a long time ago, but he remembered that his brother had once passed a winter at Alert, the most northerly inhabited place on the planet, had spent several seasons in Antarctica, had done fieldwork alone in the barrens of Keewatin . . . Nelson could never have done that. He had never been afraid of anything much, but he knew early on that he would never show any practical guts.

  ‘Two whiskies,’ he said. When they came he drank his in one go while Bert watched him sadly. Bert’s face was lined now. His hair was thin on top. It had once been brown with licks of red but the brown was all gone so it was now red and grey. But his beard was still red: Nelson was glad he had shaved his own beard the year before: when they were younger, they looked too much alike.

  ‘So,’ said Nelson. ‘How
’s Ottawa?’

  ‘I’m leaving it. I’m going to live full-time in the north.’

  ‘New assignment, huh?’

  ‘I’m switching jobs. I’m going to teach geography in a high school in Inuvik.’

  Nelson didn’t know where Inuvik was. ‘Teach high school? Aren’t you a little over-qualified?’

  ‘They get a lot of over-qualified people up there – teachers and civil servants who move up from the south before retirement. It’s up in the Arctic, so you get special tax breaks plus northern pay rates. It bumps up your final pension.’

  ‘But that’s not why you’re doing it.’

  ‘No.’

  At that point Nelson could have asked Bert why he was doing it. He did want to know. There would, he was sure, be an interesting answer. But he had just noticed again the weight of three thousand dollars counted in hundreds in his inside jacket pocket.

  Bert hadn’t asked him any questions. He hadn’t asked where Nelson was living. He hadn’t asked what he did with his time, where he got his money. Bert had gone to the bank and taken out three thousand dollars of his own cash to pay off Nelson’s half of the will and he had done it without asking. He hadn’t asked how little Lizzie was, which meant he knew that Donna had kicked him out for good, that Nelson had lost them. Donna must have called him. Or Bert had called her.

  Bert hadn’t drunk his shot yet, had hardly touched his beer. Fuck him.

  ‘Two more whiskies,’ Nelson said to the barman. He didn’t look at Bert. ‘Drink up. I’m buying.’

  Nelson made breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. He would have added bacon but the bacon was all gone. Fay ate at the desk in front of the computer. She turned her swivel-chair so he couldn’t see her face as she read from her book. From time to time she put down her fork to check something on the internet. When the book was face down he could see the cover: it was the book that Rose had given him the night before: Men of Ice. By Leif Mills.