Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

  But too late, too late.

  And Dillon, her husband’s best friend. He too had set off for help but, half-starved and frozen, his weight down to less than a hundred pounds, he had ended up wandering aimlessly in a blizzard. He too, he told his sister, would surely have perished had it not been for the rescue party George had dispatched.

  But Dillon Wallace had not perished, and by now he was fully recovered from the ordeal. “I will say that I am in perfect health,” he wrote to his sister on December 3, “better health, I think, than ever before in my life—with the exception of a frozen toe that has taken long to heal. … Am very contented and happy here with my good friends.” So how could she feel sorry for him? She had no pity to spare.

  As painful as it was to read Wallace’s delineation of the tragedy, other more hurtful criticisms of the expedition followed. In April Forest and Stream printed a letter from Robert T. Morris, a reader who apparently considered himself an expert woodsman. “It would seem as though the [Hubbard] party was not quite sufficiently skilled in woodcraft,” Morris wrote. He then went on to chronicle the bounty of wildlife and edible flora available in Labrador, with instructions as to when and where to find them:

  Assuming that bears, beavers and caribou were not easily obtainable, although all are inhabitants of the region until the caribou move southward, one would expect to find the following supplies: Porcupines, woodchucks, hares, red squirrels, lemmings and several smaller rodents … trout and chars will bite at any time of the year … one can find almost anywhere collections of ferns … the fruit of the curlew berry and of two cranberries remains upon the plants all winter and in such abundance that one need not go very far without getting a supply … the young tops of caribou moss … poplar buds … the yellow water lily … ptarmigan or spruce grouse. …

  Morris ended his report with what Mina considered unforgivable pomposity:

  If some of us were going over the country traversed by the Hubbard party we would take no provisions at all excepting enough seal oil, salt and pepper, for flavoring the luxuries that we could pick up. … Some of us do not believe that “sad tales of privation and hardship” are often necessary…. Some of us have been in the wretchedest country in the north, with no dry clothes for two weeks at a time … sometimes with not a thing to eat all day long, because the storms were too furious, or no time to stop to get food. … Personally I would rather be there now than to have the best bed and board at the Waldorf-Astoria, although I dine there tonight.

  As infuriating as this armchair criticism of her husband was, it didn’t go as far as the editorial that followed it in the periodical a week later.

  It is not unfair to compare the members of the Hubbard party with little children lost in the woodlot next to the farmhouse, perishing of hunger, while, as Dr. Morris showed in his letter last week, meat and drink were all about them. … Since these young men started off with insufficient food … and since they failed to provide themselves with the knowledge and the means necessary to procure that food … it was a foregone conclusion that if they left the beaten paths they must perish. Of the uncertainties of travel in a wild country they were apparently quite ignorant. …

  Mina read these articles with a cold, stunned outraged. How could strangers who had never met her husband utter such misleading cruelties? So no, she could not meet the Sylvia at the dock, how could she? She could barely breathe. Could scarcely set one foot before the other.

  For over four months now, ever since the telegram, she had known with a horrible certainty that her life was over, gone with Laddie. And not for a moment had the agony of this knowledge subsided. If anything, it swelled with the Sylvia’s arrival. The next day, Saturday, she forced herself to dress for the funeral, shrouded herself in black, and allowed friends to escort her those few miles to Mount Repose in nearby Haverstraw.

  George and Dillon were there, along with Caspar Whitney and some of Laddie’s writer friends, acquaintances from the city. Mina’s friends from Congers. High above the west bank of the Hudson River they stood, all made awkward by their grief, all those wordsmiths tongue-tied. Below lay the Nyack Valley, the forested green and the winding blue.

  A beautiful place, Mina told herself, knowing that Laddie would approve.

  Reverend Howland droned on, and Mina looked from one face to another and felt apart from it all. When people spoke to her it was as if from a distance. Her field of vision was reduced to a tunnel’s view, telescopic, charcoal-black around the edges.

  They will miss him, she thought. Everybody here will miss him. But none like me. Because all of them have survived. All but Laddie and me.

  Somehow the hour passed. She found herself at home again in Congers, accompanied there by a handful of her and Laddie’s friends. A light meal had been served, though she could not remember who had prepared the food or how any of it had tasted. She was alone now in the small room where Laddie’s map of Labrador still hung, the room where he had planned everything, where they had gone over it all a hundred times. She held a cup of tea in her hand, a white china cup with a pattern of tiny blue flowers, Buffalo china. She sat waiting for George to come into the room; she had sent her sister to the parlour to fetch him. And when he knocked lightly at the door, two shy taps, she heard her voice answer, hoarse and unfamiliar, “Come in, George, please.”

  He entered with head lowered, hands hanging low and clasped. But he came directly to her and without hesitation he leaned down to wrap both hands around hers. His face was wet with tears and his nose red, and she was so grateful to him for that, for not hiding his sorrow.

  He said, “He was a fine, fine man, Missus Hubbard. As good a man as any I have known.”

  Better, she thought, but with no resentment toward George. She nodded once, and smiled, then glanced at the tea cart. “Please help yourself to some tea, George. I’m afraid I’m not much good at pouring right now.”

  He poured a bit of tea into a cup, added sugar, took a sip. “I’ll never take sugar and tea for granted ever again,” he told her.

  She asked him to sit. He turned the adjacent chair to face her directly, then waited, gave her time to choose her words. When the question came it was as candid as she could make it.

  “How could it happen, George?”

  “We got lost right at the start,” he told her. She deserved honesty and, besides, it was all he had to offer. “Right off Grand Lake. Took what we thought was the Naskapi but it turned out to be the Susan instead.”

  “And who made that decision?” she asked.

  “It was what we all agreed to. We was told at the post we’d find the Naskapi there at the end of the lake, plain as day. And that’s how it was marked on Mr. Hubbard’s map too. So when we come to what we thought was it, we took it, no questions asked.”

  She nodded. “And in your own mind,” she said, “that one mistake accounts for the tragedy?”

  “We made plenty enough mistakes. All along the way. But most of them, far as I can figure, all come back to that first one.”

  She held the teacup atop one knee but never raised it to her lips. George waited for the next question. He would answer whatever she asked.

  But she could hold only two questions in her mind. She already knew a great deal about the trials the men had suffered, the sickness and hunger, because yesterday Laddie’s journal had been returned to her, delivered by Dillon Wallace himself. She had spent the night reading and rereading every word of it, especially the final passage, Laddie’s final goodbye to his crew.

  George said, “The Lord help us, Hubbard. With His help I’ll save you if I can get out.” Then he cried. So did Wallace. Wallace stooped and kissed my cheek with his poor, sunken, bearded lips—several times—and I kissed his. George did the same, and I kissed his cheek. Then they went away. God bless and help them.

  So there were only two things she needed to know right now. The first—who was to blame?—had been answered to her satisfaction.

  “It was you who made it out,�
� she said, not an accusation but a statement of fact. “You who sent the rescue party back. But if you were able, George, why did Mr. Wallace not also succeed?”

  George was not clear on what she was asking. “Missus?”

  “I am asking you if, in your honest opinion, Mr. Wallace did his utmost to assist my husband in his final hours.”

  “It was me supposed to go for help,” George answered. “Mr. Wallace’s job was to go back for the flour we left behind.”

  “And to return with it to my husband. A task he did not fulfill.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Now it was Mina’s turn to wait. Her question had not yet been answered.

  Carefully, occasionally pausing to search for words, George told her, “We figured it was some fourteen miles or so back to the flour.”

  “Less than half the distance you yourself were to travel.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Mr. Wallace promised to try to get there and back to the tent in three days, whether he found the flour or not. The thing is … we was none of us healthy. Mr. Hubbard had the worst of it, being too played out to even stand. But Mr. Wallace wasn’t much better off.”

  He paused, stared at the map on the wall as if seeing again the little tent by the stream, a frail Hubbard seated in the tent’s opening while George and Wallace made their preparations to depart. “We each of us took but half a blanket,” he told her. “All the rest we left for Mr. Hubbard. And we made him as comfortable as we could, laying in some extra wood and filling the kettle with water and all.”

  “Yes, he wrote about all that in his journal. He also wrote that he gave you the last of his pea meal.” A moment later she regretted the bluntness of her statement, for the tears welled again in George’s eyes, and soon they slid down his cheeks.

  “And every minute since then, Missus Hubbard, I have wanted to throttle myself for letting him make me take it.”

  Her tears came now too. “It was so like him to do that, George.”

  “Yes, ma’am, it truly was. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Because he knew that you needed it more than he did. You would be doing all the work. He would simply be waiting for your return.”

  “I only wish it was me been left behind to wait. Maybe then I wouldn’t be feeling any of this now.”

  “But as to Mr. Wallace,” she said gently. “He had less than half as far to go as you.”

  “It rained all that first day,” he told her. “And the rain was icy cold. Next morning there was half a foot of snow on the ground. And all along Mr. Wallace was having a hard time keeping up. Him not being used to the country and all, and being so weak himself by then.”

  Again he paused. His throat was dry, lips parched, and he raised the cup to his mouth. The tea had gone cold.

  “That second night, after we found the bag of flour, we built a big fire to warm us up a bit. But Mr. Wallace got too much smoke in his eyes and went blind from it. We figured he’d be fine come morning but he wasn’t. He could see but everything was in a haze, he said. But it was fixing to snow again, and I had to be off for Grand Lake, and that’s where we parted company.”

  “I understand,” she said. “But he never made it back to Mr. Hubbard with the flour. And all he had to do was retrace the path that got you to the flour in the first place.”

  George nodded. Yes, she was right. It might have made all the difference. Still, unless you were out there with them, unless you knew the cold and the weakness and the debilitating hunger …

  “It snowed for ten days straight,” he told her. “By afternoon on the day we split up he couldn’t of seen our trail even if his eyes were working good. By the next day the snow was knee-deep. Plus, once when he was crossing a stream he broke through the ice and got soaked up to his armpits. It wasn’t an easy walk for him, missus.”

  “Nor was it for you. But the fact remains that you succeeded and he didn’t.”

  “From what he tells me, he got sick from eating some of that mouldy flour we found. So now besides being half-frozen and half-blind, he starts vomiting too. But he says he kept looking for the tent, missus. He kept walking and looking for the next seven days.”

  With that George seemed to be finished. But Mina Hubbard was not.

  She leaned toward him. “George, I want you to give me your honest opinion on this. Did Mr. Wallace lose his senses out there? Is that why he wandered around lost for seven days?”

  It took George a while to answer. When he finally did, his voice rose barely above a whisper. “When Donald and Bert and the other fellas found him, Mr. Wallace didn’t even have his moccasins on. He was walking around in his stocking feet. He said later that the moccasins kept clogging up with snow, and that was why he took them off. I don’t know what become of his hat either, but he had lost it somewhere too.”

  “Is your answer to my question yes, George?”

  “He talked about hearing his wife out there. Her that’s been dead some three years by then.”

  “In his letter to his sister he referred to it only as a woman’s voice. But he told you otherwise?”

  George answered with a sad smile. “There was this one time, he said, when he had just about decided to lay down in the snow and go to sleep, when she come and told him to build a fire. So that’s what he did. There was other times too when he wanted to quit. But she wouldn’t let him.”

  Mina was shaken by this report. It altered her perception of Wallace somewhat, awakened her to the truth and depth of his suffering. “Thank you, George. Thank you for telling me this. And thank you for answering all my questions.”

  He sat motionless for half a minute or so, then pushed himself up and bent to take her hand again, and again the tears came to both of them, a prolonged and awkward goodbye.

  The next day George went to Grand Central Station and boarded a train for Montreal. Soon he would be home in Missanabie again, back to his life. Except that now, he knew, nothing would ever be the same.

  As for Mina, she met with Dillon Wallace on Sunday morning. He arrived at ten to find her dressed in yesterday’s clothes, draped in black. She did open the curtains in the front room, however, and seated Wallace on the sofa with his back to the bright window. The sunlight on his shoulders and on the back of his skull was warm, too warm, and the small room seemed stuffy to him, overheated and smelling faintly of coal smoke.

  Mina poured a cup of tea for him and another for herself. Seated in the armchair, she stared into her china cup for a while. She hardly knew where to begin. Without Laddie there to guide the conversation, without Laddie as her buffer, every human interaction felt off balance to her, every movement seemed broken. To live without him was as awkward and impossible as reading the time on a clock whose hour hand was missing. After all these months she had not grown accustomed to his absence. Sometimes, as now, she experienced it so keenly that it all but paralyzed her.

  It was Wallace who broke the silence. “You cannot know,” he began, then stopped himself when he recognized the speciousness of the cliché. Of course she knew. Better than anyone.

  He tried again. “I will never forget how he came to me in the hospital in Long Island. How he walked right up to me as if we were old friends, and reached out to me in my misery. We were utter strangers, and yet … I truly believe that he saved my life that day, Mina. Saved me from the abyss that … well … I don’t need to explain it to you, I know.”

  She sat so quietly and without movement, he could only wonder what she was thinking. Her pale face was splotched with red. He knew how easily she blushed with embarrassment, but what had he said to embarrass her? Was she angry with him? For saying something improper? Or perhaps for saying too little?

  “After that day,” he continued, “I always felt that I owed Leon my very life. And I would have given it gladly, Mina, I want you to know that. It is important to me that you know it. No man has ever been closer to me. And after what we went through together up there …”

  The flush spread over h
er forehead, widened on her cheeks. And the set of her jaw—she was angry! But what had he said?

  “I will not abide,” she said evenly, her voice hoarse from lack of sleep, “what the critics are saying of him.”

  With her first few words Wallace had sucked in a breath, anticipating an attack. But now he exhaled slowly, and covered his relief with reassuring words. “The newspapers, you mean? No, no, you mustn’t let any of that bother you. Anything they say is mere speculation. It has no importance whatsoever, no relationship to the truth.”

  “They are saying he was inexperienced. That he didn’t prepare properly.”

  “It’s all nonsense, Mina. Every word of it.”

  She fixed him with a gaze he had never seen from her before, so hard and hot it made his own face burn. “You must never add a single word of support to what they say. You must never vouchsafe their claims.”

  “You know I never would.”

  “In fact you must refute them. It is up to you to prove them wrong.”

  “And I do,” he told her. “At every opportunity.”

  “I am speaking of the story Leon would have written. The chronicle of his expedition. True and complete.”

  Wallace nodded his approval. “I will help in whatever way I can. As, I’m sure, will George. Our recollections, along with Leon’s diary—”

  “I would like for you to write the book,” she said.

  Wallace drew in another breath, sat back against the sofa.

  Mina saw him framed in bright sunlight, and the light was painful to her eyes. Backlit by the morning sun he appeared little more than a shadow, his features softened and indistinct. She could not help but compare his nondescript face to Laddie’s, to Laddie’s sharp chin and angular nose, his eager, intelligent eyes that could blaze out even from such darkness. And now Wallace spoke in a way Laddie by nature could not, stammering with uncertainty.