Heart So Hungry

by Randall Silvis

  “But I am … I am not a writer, Mina. That isn’t my trade. I lack Leon’s talent … his gift for words.”

  “You are a man of education. You will not find it difficult once you begin.”

  “But Mina, really, quite honestly I haven’t any notion about how to construct a book. I’m sure it’s not simply a matter of…”

  “Of telling the truth?” she asked. “I am sure that it is.”

  Now he leaned forward again—sagged forward, she thought—almost appearing to collapse in upon himself.

  “I am prepared to pay you, of course. And with that money you can, if need be, hire a professional writer to assist you. You will have Leon’s field notes and photographs and his journal as well. These, along with your own and George’s recollections, should more than suffice.”

  He was shaking his head now; he looked up at her with plaintive eyes. “My education is not—”

  “Your education,” she said, and her voice grew unsteady, quivering as it rose in pitch, “is of secondary concern here, wouldn’t you agree? Secondary to your obligation to my husband and your friend? The man to whom you claim to owe your life?”

  Wallace closed his eyes. The sunlight pressed upon his back and made his spine ache with the weight of the inevitable.

  “He must be remembered appropriately, Dillon. You know that I am right.”

  Still he could not open his eyes. She was crying now, he knew it though she made not a sound, knew it by the sting of tears behind his own eyelids. He had come to the cottage hoping that after this morning the ordeal would be behind him, the whole regrettable experience, nearly a full year of his life. After this morning he would return to his practice and the unchallenging routine of a lacklustre existence. But the grip of Leonidas Hubbard was too strong. It held Mina fast and always would. And now it was taking hold of him again. It was pulling him into what felt, for all the world, like another kind of abyss.

  “You owe him your life, you said. Or did I mishear?”

  When Wallace finally opened his eyes again the room seemed too bright, too small. A small woman dressed all in black sat staring at him. He held a white china cup of cooling tea, blue enamelled flowers beneath his hand.

  It was unavoidable, all of it, and he knew it. The request she was making of him. The demand. He had no choice but to surrender to it.

  And with that decision came a semblance of peace. A phrase came into his mind then, recited in Leon’s voice, four lines from Kipling’s “The Young British Soldier.” The words smelled of a chilling stream and willow brush and the smoky fragrance of a campfire. Wallace spoke the words out loud, smiling, strangely calm now:

  When first under fire, if you’re wishful to duck,

  Don’t look or take heed from the man that is struck;

  Be thankful you’re living and trust to your luck,

  And march to your front like a soldier.

  His voice was breaking by the time he finished, his heart was breaking, and Mina was sobbing, doubled forward over her teacup, pinning it in place so that the tea did not splash out, her entire body shaking.

  Wallace leaned over and clasped her hands in his. She raised her head, looked up at him. In this manner, their contract was made.

  The months passed, every minute a trial of endurance. The pleasure Mina had once taken in simple things had vanished. Reading and gardening no longer distracted. Cooking held no delight when it was for herself alone. Just to peel a potato was a chore.

  She had related to the world through Laddie, had felt no shyness when at his side, no uncertainty. But now that nexus was gone and she trudged through each day like a sleeper struggling to wake herself. In Laddie’s presence life had glistened with clarity and freshness. Now all was obscured, every breath sour with grief.

  All summer long Mina admonished herself to get on with her life. That fall she registered for classes in nearby Williamstown, meaning to finish her high school degree. But still she dressed in the black of deep mourning. And still she wrote long letters to her Laddie, still she prayed to him nightly.

  In daylight hours she felt besieged by vultures. Scarcely a week passed that some journalist—the very profession her husband had so respected—did not publish his malicious opinion as to Laddie’s lack of fitness as an expedition leader. Such writers were to her no better than parasites. When they attacked her husband they were tearing away at her own heart.

  Even Laddie’s so-called friends could not resist the temptation toward self-aggrandizement at his expense. Did they think that by questioning Laddie’s choices they made themselves appear wise?

  Caspar Whitney got into the game through his columns in Outing. He first wrote a piece called “An Appreciation,” in which he praised Laddie as unselfish, brave and cheerful, “a manly man and a good friend.” But he could not leave well enough alone, and in a later piece he absolved himself of all responsibility for Laddie’s death.

  “His equipment, party and arrangements,” Whitney wrote, “were not only entirely of his own choosing, but even unknown to us. In this respect Hubbard took neither Outing nor its editor into his confidence.”

  Most galling of all was a contradiction Mina detected in Dillon Wallace, the very man she had commissioned to memorialize her husband. The letter he had written to his sister while recuperating in Labrador, published in the New York Times, gave her no little cause for concern. This letter had been the first full report of the tragic expedition, and Mina did not pick up on the contradictions it contained until well after speaking with George and Dillon following the funeral.

  During her conversations with Wallace he had remarked upon his disorientation throughout his final days alone in the wilderness, how he had become delusional when searching for Laddie’s tent, how he had walked in circles, out of his head with hunger, cold and exhaustion. George too had told her the story, for it was the one Wallace had told him. But in Wallace’s letter to his sister the account was far less dramatic. “… after walking up and down several times where I thought the camp must be,” he had written, “I was at length compelled to give up the search, and headed toward Grand Lake.”

  According to his verbal rendition, he had never given up but had been rendered ineffectual by a temporary insanity produced by the adverse conditions. According to the letter, he had tried several times to find Laddie’s tent but then, flour bag in hand, had made a conscious and deliberate decision to give up. Not until later had he become delusional and started hearing “a woman’s voice.”

  Moreover, in his letter Wallace seemed to go out of his way to identify Hubbard as the weakest member of the party. He wrote, “Before we began our retreat from the big lake I had lost thirteen inches in waist measure. Our bones were sticking through the skin. We had not shaved or cut our hair, and our appearance must have been pitiable. I know the others looked, especially Hubbard, like walking skeletons.”

  Especially Hubbard. Mina knew how her husband would have hated being described as pitiable. Worse yet to be singled out as the most pitiable of the group.

  “We had several miles to run on a small river with dangerous rapids,” Wallace wrote. “Hubbard tried to manage one with George, and nearly wrecked it. Then George and I ran the rest, and took desperate chances, always, however, with success.”

  And more: “At length one day Hubbard could not carry his little pack into camp, and I made him put it down and follow without any load. I returned and got his pack.”

  At the end of that same paragraph: “Hubbard gave out.”

  And later: “I sat up nearly all night keeping the fire going to warm Hubbard.”

  It seemed to Mina that throughout his letter Wallace portrayed Laddie as a pathetic creature who required caretaking, but painted himself as the strong, devoted friend who uncomplainingly shouldered the burden.

  Most infuriating of all, and the baldest of his criticisms, was this, early in the letter:

  I will merely say that we plunged madly into the interior of an unknown country, in
to regions never before trod by white man, with almost no provisions. For our trip we should have had 550 pounds of flour—we had 120 pounds; we should have taken 200 pounds of bacon or pork—we had 20 pounds; and so on all down the line.

  How easy it was to say, at the end of the journey, how the venture could have been improved. But had Wallace voiced any of these concerns before the expedition began? Had he predicted the especially brutal weather or the atypical lack of game? Each time Mina read his letter, her feelings for him darkened a little more.

  Mina and Wallace met again a few days after Thanksgiving. He arrived at her door a changed man, all eagerness and grins and several pounds heavier than when last he had visited. She found his ebullience more than a little repugnant, but he was beside himself with “happy news.” He had finished the manuscript, the book about Leon. Here it was, hers to read. The writing had gone much more easily than he had expected, he said. It had been just as she had promised; once he got started it all came back to him, every snowflake and gust of wind, every ripple on the water.

  He placed the manuscript in her hands as if it were something precious, something miraculous. But no, he could not sit still while she read, he would take a walk into town, have some lunch, allow her adequate time to work through it.

  And when he returned hours later, cheeks glowing, wearing a grin of anticipation, he found Mina’s cheeks flushed as well, though not a hint of smile graced her mouth.

  “Kindly explain to me,” she said, even as he was taking his seat on the sofa, “kindly explain to me how it serves my husband’s memory to give voice to his critics.”

  Wallace was momentarily stunned. All he could think to say was “I beg your pardon?”

  “Right here,” she said, and jabbed a fingertip on the manuscript’s final page. Both her finger and her voice quivered. “‘The critics,’”she read, said that Hubbard was foolhardy, and without proper preparation he plunged blindly into an unknown wilderness.’”

  “But Mina—”

  “‘Others tell how fish-nets might have been made from willow bark.’”

  “But if you read further—”

  “‘It has been said that, even had Hubbard succeeded in accomplishing everything he set out to do, the result would have been of little or no value to the world.’”

  “I only point out the criticisms so that I can refute them.”

  “‘Doubtless some will see in his life’s struggle only to win for himself a recognized place as a writer and expert upon out-of-door life.’” Her voice was high and tight as she read, her face ghostly pale where not splotched scarlet. The irises of her eyes were wide and dark.

  “Mina,” he said, and considered reaching out to her, calming her with his touch. But the rigidity of her posture kept him at bay. “How can I refute the criticisms if I do not first acknowledge them?”

  “To acknowledge them at all is to give them credence!”

  “I cannot agree. It is my duty as a writer to—”

  She laughed out loud, an explosive syllable of derision. A writer, indeed! How dare he think of himself in those terms? Her Laddie was a writer, but this hackneyed thing she held in her hands, this was the work of no writer.

  She drew from beneath the manuscript a piece of folded newsprint, which she unfolded and held up for Wallace to see. “This,” she said evenly, “this, I have come to realize, was the beginning of the problem. There would not now be such an onslaught of criticism against Laddie had you not propagated it yourself.”

  Wallace leaned forward to better see the newsprint, his brow knitted. “I assure you that I said nothing to disparage him. I never would.”

  “Have you forgotten the letter you wrote to your sister? The one that appeared in the New York Times?”

  “I haven’t forgotten it, no. But I said nothing—”

  “‘ … we plunged madly into the interior of an unknown country,’” she read. “‘For our trip we should have had 550 pounds of flour … 200 pounds of bacon or pork … and so on all down the line.’”

  “That isn’t criticism, Mina, it’s … it’s hindsight.”

  “‘Hubbard tried to manage the canoe through one with George and nearly wrecked it. Then George and I ran the rest, and took desperate chances, always, however, with success.’”

  Wallace looked at his hands. “Again, Mina, it was never intended as criticism.”

  “‘ … Hubbard could not carry his little pack into camp, and I made him put it down and follow without any load. I returned and got his pack.’”

  “It’s what happened. I wrote about what happened, that’s all. Naturally, if you emphasize certain words, it is going to sound like something other than it really was.”

  “The Times referred to your letter as ‘the first authentic information of the death of Leonidas Hubbard Jr.’ So when you, in your own words, condemn Laddie for a lack of preparation, then portray him as an incompetent canoeist and a weakling whom you, the brave, successful canoeist and devoted friend, were forced to coddle … how could you not foresee the kind of public criticisms that would follow? Every one of them merely echoes what you yourself have said!”

  “Perhaps, when I wrote that letter … I don’t know, maybe I merely wanted to reassure my sister of my own well-being.”

  “Then here,” she said, returning her attention to the manuscript, thumbing quickly through the pages. “Here you write, ‘He was just a boy, really.’ A boy, Mr. Wallace? You dare to call a man of his accomplishments a boy? Was that for your sister’s benefit as well?”

  “I only meant that, him being ten years my junior—”

  “What you meant is certainly not what you wrote. Is that how a writer functions?”

  “If I failed to make myself clear, I will certainly take all necessary steps …”

  She flipped the pages over, returned to the beginning of the manuscript. “‘It will have to be taken into consideration how hard pressed Hubbard was by the fear that the short summer would end before he had completed his work.’ By this statement you imply that the Naskapi River was missed because my husband failed to take proper time to survey the lake.”

  “Nothing could be further from the truth. Why, just a few lines earlier I make it perfectly clear that the—”

  She strode forward and dropped the manuscript onto his lap. “It will have to be redone, Mr. Wallace.”

  Again he found himself at a loss for words. “If there are a few places, a few phrases you object to—”

  “There are numerous places! Dozens of ill-chosen words! You will find each and every one of them marked with my pen.”

  He leafed through the manuscript. At least one of her marks—an underlining, a circle, a comment scribbled in the margin, a whole paragraph crossed out with an X—could be found every few pages.

  “You can begin with the dedication,” she told him.

  She had circled the entire thing, then drawn an X through it, then driven a thick blue line from start to finish. Here, b’y, is the issue of our plighted troth.

  He tried to explain himself. “It harks back to the toast we made one another in your presence, Mina. When Leon and I first agreed to undertake the venture together.”

  “I thought then and I think still that your words were poorly chosen.”

  “How so?”

  “I am his betrothed, Mr. Wallace. Not you.”

  “I only meant that we made a pledge to one another, that we … entered into a partnership as …”

  “As enduring as marriage? As sacred as the vows of matrimony?”

  He could not bring himself to look at her. Her voice was like a knife in his ear, an ice pick, so cold and sharp. He stared at the first page of the manuscript on his lap. The words swam before his eyes, broken bits of blackened leaves aswirl on frothy water. Mina turned and crossed to the door, threw it open and stared out across the empty yard, the long and empty horizon, her heart beating wildly, the blood hammering in her head. Never in her life had she raised her voice in this manne
r.

  It seemed to her an eternity before Wallace finally pulled himself to his feet. With the manuscript tucked under an arm, he came to stand beside her. “I think, Mina, that when you have had an opportunity to reconsider your remarks today—”

  She glared at him. “Your last line,” she said. “Exactly what did you mean by that?”

  He knew it by heart, had laboured over it for quite some time. Perhaps it is God’s will that I finish the work of exploration that Hubbard began.

  “It was his suggestion.”

  “You intend to make the trip again? The trip that he conceived of and planned?”

  Not for my glory, Wallace thought. For his.

  But before he could find his tongue she told him, “I wish to have his notes and photographs returned to me at the earliest opportunity.”

  As a lawyer, Wallace knew well the advisability of a measured response. He took two steps past her, across the threshold, out onto the small covered porch. Then, only half-turning, refusing to meet her gaze, he said, “I’m sorry, Mina. I have need of those.”

  Her hand tightened around the glass doorknob. “I will look forward to a revision of the manuscript.”

  He was about to say I have no intention, but she stepped back and closed the door, careful to close it softly lest the entire planet be made to rattle with her rage.

  Only when she heard his footsteps going down off the porch, slow and halting, did she unlock her fingers from around the faceted knob and place those stinging fingers to her mouth and allow the flood of tears to come again.

  Mount Repose Cemetery in mid-December was grey and cold. The trees were bare and the only scent carried up from the river valley was that of chimney smoke. Gusting winds blew swirls of snow along the hillside. Behind a fir tree near the top of the hill Mina stood huddled in a long black woollen coat, her hands in a fur muff, a cloth hat pulled low over her forehead. The spreading branches of the fir tree, its needles frosted with snow, shielded her not only from the wind but from the eyes of any passersby on the road below.