Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  Call me Onan.

  My lust momentarily deflected, I took more acute note of the walrus society apart from the rutting couple. It charmed and enchanted me. The mothers and their pups displayed a sweet, reciprocal affection, the beholding of which retrieved and intensified the rage I had felt in the Orkney Islands at my creator’s destruction of the female companion he had promised to make for me. Like nearly every other sentient being, I had known loneliness well ahead of lust. My desire for friendship, the consoling warmth of a propinquitous body, antedated and so took precedence over the mating urge. With the mothers and pups of this rookery at least, a kindred longing had found at once its natural outlet and its satisfaction. I envied the affectionate creatures.

  In my envy, my rage subsided. Frankenstein was dead. How, then, expect him to build me a wife? Furthermore, as I must soon or late acknowledge, no one else could accomplish that same miracle. I must abandon by degrees my self-exile and seek a female companion among the children of men. Or, given the vast unlikelihood of success in that endeavour, I must embrace self-control and reform my character. These changes, I hoped, would lubricate my introduction into the human community. As part of it, my gentleness and honesty established, I might draw to me the companion of all my longings’. Or I might not. In either event, I had determined to quit the wilds and to embark upon a career as a devout philanthropist.

  I owed this turnabout to a revelation on the edge of a breeding pround of walruses. Perhaps I had shamed myself there, but I had also come into harmony with the repressed aspirations of my higher natre. Who can condemn me? Who can demand more?

  The sequent era of my life became the happiest I have yet known. As it unfolded, I lacked the inclination to chronicle even its chief events. Thus, I seldom wrote here of either the people or the quotidian occupations that persuaded me I had found my niche in human society. In truth, what I did write I long ago ripped from this log and sank in a polarbear skull in Kotzebue Sound, as latter-day Alaskans now call the inlet. I here reprise this part of my earthly career, in an abridgement painful to indite, to shew the connection between my early resurrection self and the semireclusive citizen I later became.

  For sixty or seventy years, I dwelt with a small population of alternately maritime and inland Innuit, a people whom the Cossacks and other Europeans call Esquimaux. I reached them by stealing an oomiak, or whaleboat, from a trading outpost on the easternmost tip of the Chukchi Peninsula and sailing it across miles of open water in the Bering Strait to an icy spit near present-day Shishmaref. My creator, exhumed from his grotto on the eastern side, sailed with me, but his limited contributions to our crossing scarcely warrant inscribing him on the manifest as a crewman.

  Once across, I hiked westward, dragging my maker on yet another travois, until chancing upon a village near a river southeast of a vast inlet. I had skirted many such villages, but this one recommended itself to me by the cleanliness and symmetry of its houses, fish-drying stands, and sled racks, and by the animation and good humour of its people.

  Let me call the village Oongpek for the snowy-owl totem displayed on its chief kazgi, or men’s lodge, and the people themselves the Oongpekmut after the name of their village. I have no wish to identify more specifically either the place or its inhabitants, who numbered about forty persons and comprised five or six families related by consanguinity or marriage. Oongpek, I determined, would well serve as my adoptive homeplace, and after many a careful survey of the village, I strove to insinuate myself into it as an ally and denizen.

  The Oogpekmut at first regarded me with a suspicion as relentless as that of the Chukchi hunters who had wounded me in Siberia. Dread commingled with this suspicion. The villagers beheld me as if I were an evil spirit given form and substance. I had appeared to them with my travois behind me, and the corpse upon it little advanced my cause. Although I addressed them in Yoopik, their own tongue, pledging to add to their food stores and to protect them from enemies, whether animal or human, my friendly overtures foundered on their startlement and disbelief. I wanted companions, and a place of only moderate esteem in their collective. At length, however, my evident docility and their mounting impatience with my presence gave them courage, and they chased me away with harpoons and clubs.

  Insofar as I could do so, I altered my appearance to approximate more closely their own. I cut my hair at the nape and around the ears to resemble the bowl-like coiffures of the men. I perforated my lower face at each lip corner to make possible the insertion of labrets, stone or ivory ornaments curiously evocative of walrus tusks. I made my labrets of creek stones and wore them daily until I could tolerate their chaffing and pull. I retailored my overshirt, leggings, and boots after the local masculine fashion. I made toys of spruce or willow wood for the village children, storyknives for the girls and carven animals for the boys.

  On my next visit to Oongpek, I left my dead creator in a tree and appeared to the villagers gift-laden and familiarly dressed. I placed my gifts at Oongpek’s edge and danced in the succulent summer grass a modest dance of appeasement and petition. I meantime chanted the conciliatory words of a song of my own authorship. The children greatly desired to collect their bribes, and some of the younger adults seemed to look upon my renewed overtures with favour, if not with unmitigated delight. The village angalgook, or medicine man, who wore as an amulet the mummified remains of a human infant, reviled me as a trickster, an evil bear in the guise of a deranged giant. Two well-respected hunters concurred in supposing it unsafe to allow me any nearer approach. Indeed, the Oongpekmut hectically debated the nature of my identity, agreeing only that trusting my words might invite general destruction.

  Asvek, the medicine man, claimed that his counterpart in a distant village had sent me to forestall an attack of the Oongpekmut upon that village. The other angalgook’s people had abducted a local woman in a raid, owing to an ancient feud, and so Asvek contended that the enemy shaman had transformed a diseased bear into the hideous spirit oracle that sought now to deceive Oongpek’s people. After this pronouncement, no one could concede that I might mean my words or that I had come to them free of my imperfect disguise as a man. Once again, then, the villagers whose companionship I desired drove me away.

  I persevered. As shortly after my creation I had done with the De Lacey family in Switzerland, I became the secret benefactor of this group of Innuit. I did them various unsolicited kindnesses, from providing them with plant food-at best, a marginal part of their diet-to repairing their fishing nets and sealskin boats. Later, I rescued a small child who had wandered unattended into a kenneling area and fallen between the paws of a hungry sledge dog. Braving the possibility of another attack, I walked the child back into the village to her sisters and cousins. When I passed the smiling child into their care, I reiterated to them and several nearby adults my kindly feelings and my honourable intentions towards all the Oongpekmut. I also disclosed myself as the mysterious benefactor about whom much superstitious speculation had arisen.

  By degrees, then, these words and acts brought me into the compass of local regard, including even that of the shaman Asvek. I was allowed to stay for longer and longer periods. When I explained that the corpse I had brought with me belonged to my maker-not my father, as they first wished to interpret my words, but one who had alchemically fashioned me from potions, powders, and revitalised flesh-Asvek and the other Oongpek elders expressed relief as well as astonishment. If the man who had made me lay dead, then I was undoubtedly not the handiwork of a living enemy: I had power over my creator, rather than he over me, and that power I could use, as I had repeatedly sworn to do, on behalf of Oongpek. It also cheered the villagers to note that the mummified Frankenstein little resembled his walking creation.

  That I had kept his body with me for a trek of thousands of miles, however, struck these Innuit as a risible indulgence. The devotion I showed his corpse impressed them as eccentric, if not unhealthy, for they mused but little on the afterlife, in which they believed implicitly,
and sometimes disposed of their dead by leaving them out for wolves. This method obviated any excavation of the frozen tundra and declared to the animal world their feelings of sacred fellowship. It nonetheless appalled me. I much preferred the alternative method of bidding farewell practised by most of the Oongpekmut; namely, the scaffolding of the deceased on platforms in the woods, the bodies wrapped in skins and joined on their death journeys by such favourite belongings as kayaks, bolas, harpoons, and sled frames.

  Beyond the letters I had taken off the Caliban, I had few of my creator’s personal effects. Indeed, on the Chukchi Peninsula he had lost even his eyes. When I found that ravens, owls, or bears might yet eat the dead laid out on platforms, I rejected even that option for Frankenstein. Together, however, the Oongpekmut and I hit upon a method for sanctifying his body that offended neither their sensibilities nor mine. We lacquered him from head to foot with an ointment of seal oil and evergreen resin and sewed him into a caribou hide. This funeral package we carried many leagues to a Stygian chamber in a volcanic cave, outside of which we chanted songs of praise, farewell, and godspeed.

  This duty accomplished, I assimilated myself with the aid of my hosts into Oongpek’s enjoyable round of days. I relaxed my vegetarianism virtually to the point of denying it, nor do I see how I could have remained among these Esquimaux-the word means “eaters of meat”-without adopting this immemorial component of their behaviour. On the grounds of necessity, I forgave myself, for the Innuit had no formal agriculture and thus no ready way to accommodate the rare visitor who spurned their wonted diet.

  Further, and additional balm to my conscience, these Oongpekmut sang or prayed to the creatures they hunted, using them with the utmost esteem, if not actual reverence, and so ritually abstracted their meat-eating from the profane practises of Europeans.

  As I had early sworn to do, I dedicated myself to the welfare of Oongpek and strove diligently on its behalf as hunter, fisherman, kayak wright, net mender, arrow fletcher, and guardian, I thereby obtained the respect and admiration of my adoptive villagers. With them I knew a contentment that had once seemed as ungraspable as frostfire.

  Owing to my size, the people called me Takooka, grizzly bear. Because I religiously declined to shew myself either to Innuit visitors or to any white-skinned trader or surveyor, they also called me Inyookootuk, the Hiding Man. And because I reminded some villagers of a mythical creature, the worm man, that had lived when beasts could change at will into people, others addressed me as Tisikpook. Takooka was by far the most common of my appellatives, but I answered to them all. Indeed, I delighted in the fact that I, a creature once either nameless or marked out exclusively by deprecatory epithets, now had more names than any of my fellows.

  In time I became such a stalwart Oongpekmut that no one complained of or saw as improper my dalliance with one of the village’s unattached women, a small, sturdy person with strong hands and eyes like sparkling stars. Owing to the redness agleam in her hair, the people called her Kariak, or red fox, and she never shied from my attentions. I lay with her, took her to wife, and established with her in a sod house with whalebone roof joists our own domicile. My brother-in-law had wanted us to move into a house with his family, but his wife had argued with considerable justice that a man of my size needed more room. Kariak concurred, and I excavated our new house, with the aid of many other Oongpekmut, to accommodate just the two of us, with room for additional sleeping benches for the children we purposed. I loved this woman, and she in turn loved me, taking a perverse joy in the fact that to make me a parka, or a set of leggings, or a pair of boots, required twice as many caribou skins as any other male Oongpekmut needed for those items. Our great love notwithstanding, my union with Kariak proved the groundlessness of one of my creator’s bleakest fears. His chief ethical concern in crofting me a bride-indeed, his rationale for tearing my intended companion to pieces before animating her-was that together we might propagate a race of “devils.” This conjectural species, Frankenstein believed, would turn its perfidious energies to the indiscriminate elimination of humanity. He need not have feared. Kariak and I conceived no children. Our clanspeople at first attributed this failure to her, for the Innuit suppose infertility a female imperfection-unless someone can shew that a malignant shaman has thrown a spell or that the seed of another man could quicken the childless woman’s womb. Kariak and I had no conspicuous ill-wishers, however, and although Esquimaux husbands sometimes invite male visitors to enjoy, as a form of hospitality, the bodies of their wives, never did I consent to this custom, so possessive was my love and so vehement my uxoriousness. In truth, only in these traits did I offend the Oongpekmut, but they overlooked my shortcomings on account of the services I daily rendered. Further, Oongpik had acquired a reputation as impervious to attack, evil spells, and famine. If anyone begrudged my possessive behaviour, it was Kariak.

  Saying so, I acknowledge, may appear to convict my wife of a fickle heart, perhaps even of faithlessness, but the charge dies aborning. Among the Innuit, children confer status and security. They greatly bless their parents, at first with the flattering exactions of their dependency and later with the active succour of their hands. In hunting, fishing, cooking, sewing, bow-making, and a hundred other enterprises, they make their value plain. It therefore bruised Kariak’s heart to continue childless, and the gibes of her distaff kindred, as perfunctory and mild as they were, grew ever more difficult to bear. She had already suffered many jocose insults, a few of which had nonetheless stung, for marrying so grotesque an interloper, even if I had proved a beneficent influence on the community as a whole. Abruptly, then, Kariak began to badger me to offer her to kinsmen visiting from elsewhere, as a sign of my full adoption of Innuit ways and of my unimpeachable cordiality.

  Again and again, I declined. Instead, I carved from ivory a doll-child only slightly bigger than my hand, as a petition to the inyua, or spirits, and as a charm. This doll Kariak and I dressed and tended as if it were a living infant, feeding it forest celery, wild potatoes, and even a delicacy of porcupine, crushed salmonberries, and seal oil known as agoutak. None of these ministrations served to impregnate Kariak, however, and her unhappiness grew. Once I arrived home from an expedition for snowshoe hare (during which these creatures had moved about as thick as tomcod in the brush) to find that she had broken our doll-child and thrown it onto a midden. I bent to nuzzle her red-tinged hair, but she pushed me away and wept copiously.

  A few days later, three seal hunters from Shishmaref, one a kinsman of Asvek, came to Oongpekfor a visit. Kariak asked me to permit at least one of them to lodge with us during their stay. I refused. I did not wish to share my wife with anyone, much less any of these laughing strangers; further, I intended to absent myself from the village for the whole of their visit. I would play Inyookootuk, the Hiding Man, by retreating to the woods. It would mock propriety for Kariak to entertain a male visitor in our house during my absence, which Asvek or Kegloonek, a respected elder, would impute to my desire to lay out a pattern of game snares.

  As soon as she understood my intentions, Kariak moved out of our lodge, dry-eyed in her leaving, and crossed the Oongpek commons to the house of her sister’s husband. Here, I learned upon my return, she entertained the most dashing member of the Shishmaref party, a full-faced young hunter with happy-dancing eyes. She then departed with him for the coast. Nine moons later, on a night of popping ice sleeves and wolf-cry winds, Kariak brought into the circle of another clan a baby boy with eyes greatly like his father’s. Weeks later this news reached my brother-in-law, and everyone in Oongpek understood what it signified: I, Takooka, was sterile, and Kariak, my erstwhile wife, had endured the malediction “barren,” even if often hurled in jest, for my pride’s sake.

  Oddly, the happiness that her kinspeople now felt for Kariak overrode any resentment of me for the injustice-in which, in fact, many of them had conspired-that I had done her. No one sought either to punish me for humiliating her or to taunt me for my infecundity.
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  I remained among the Oongpekmut as a bachelor in the clan of my departed wife. Another in my place might have suffered a diminishment of status, but I had qualities that offset my shame. No other local woman wanted me for a husband, but I did not lack for willing lovers.

  Two years later, Kariak returned with her new husband and her bright-eyed son for a visit. At the urging of Kasgoolik, the husband, I lay again with my first and last heartmate, and, at the moment of our little dying, laughed heartily in her small embrace. The bittersweetness of this possession without possession prevented me from accepting any further invitations from Kasgoolik during their visit; and when Kariak and her family, after a week’s sojourn, returned to his village, I never saw her more.

  Oh, Frankenstein (I often thereafter lamented), for this you destroyed my first bride, that I might not sire upon her a race of Titanic murderers.

  But suppose, fiend, that your seed had in fact impregnated a female made after your own pattern? (I have imagined my maker replying). That was hardly a chance in which I could easily, if ever, acquiesce.

  My stay among the Oongpekmut, happy but for the loss of Kariak, lengthened into decades. I heard of troubles elsewhere-most notably, between the Azyagmut and the Cossacks at Fort Saint Michael-but my people eschewed active dealings with outsiders and so escaped the anxiety and the physical harm of these periodic upheavals. I heard, too, of the smallpox epidemic that had swept through many Innuit villages, killing hundreds, but the disease never reached our village, and the only Oongpekmut to die of it contracted the pox on a visit to Egavik, on Norton Sound, and died there, far from home.

  By and large, I still declined to appear to anyone other than my own clanspeople, especially Europeans, whom I could trust only to imprecate and abuse me, had they the means to do so. When a small team of white doctors came to Oongpek to vaccinate our people against the pox, I removed myself from the village and stayed away until it had completed its program and departed. When traders arrived, I fled.