Voyage of the Narwhal

by Andrea Barrett

  Sometimes he met a trapper, and once he stumbled on a hermit’s cottage, but away from the river valleys all was emptiness. He could see why Ned had been drawn back here; the settlers kept to themselves and asked few questions. Remembering Ned’s evasions, he invented an ice-fishing accident to explain his feet, and also new identities for his little group. Even Copernicus wasn’t well enough known to be recognized here in the wilderness, so he didn’t bother to change their names. But to the people he met when he fetched supplies, he lied cheerfully. He claimed they were from Baltimore; that he was a journalist and his brother a painter, who’d both spent years out west. The boy with them was an Indian, whom they’d adopted. And Alexandra was his wife. He paused over that: his wife? Copernicus’s wife? Then chose what seemed most believable.

  Through the astounding cold of winter, he and Copernicus and Alexandra worked as they had at the Repository, writing and painting and drawing. Copernicus built a small easel for Tom, and gave him brushes and paint; Alexandra gave him paper and pencils. They taught him how to read and write.

  “Show me how to make my parents’ names,” he demanded, and Alexandra wrote NESSARK in large block letters and, not knowing his mother’s true name, ANNIE. Tom gripped a pencil in his fist and covered sheets of paper: NESSARK ANNIE NESSARK ANNIE NESSARK ANNIE ANNIE ANNIE. Around the names he drew hundreds of stubby birds. He ignored the brushes Copernicus gave him but he liked the paint, and after the first messy experiment Copernicus stocked up on turpentine and gave Tom a smock that covered his clothes. Tom painted with his thumbs, feathering the color with delicate strokes. The same scene again and again: an icy white plain, a jagged cliff, some low dark lumps that might have been huts, smaller dark dots. Two-legged dots and four-legged dots: people, dogs. Erasmus said, “This must be his version of Anoatok.” Alexandra, watching Tom’s efforts, said nothing but one night drew a carefully simplified dog and left it on Tom’s bed.

  He slept in the last of the square chambers lining the lofty main room in which they cooked and ate and worked: one, two, three, four boxes. Four single beds; four people sleeping alone. When Tom went into his room for long stretches and closed the door the others tried to grant him the same privacy they gave each other. They had to do this, Alexandra thought. Otherwise they couldn’t have lived in this odd, interesting, almost communal way, as if their new home were a miniature New Harmony. Although the local people believed them a family, they weren’t: they were four people sharing a house and chores and work on a book, the three adults also sharing responsibility for the child. Why was this so different from living with her brother and sisters and nephew and niece? Yet it was; every moment she felt as if she were inventing her life. Tom copied her dog drawing again and again, adding harnesses and linking these with a tangle of traces; later, with her help, he drew a sledge. He needed her, she thought. In a way her family didn’t. But he made no demands.

  She wrapped two shawls around the man’s overcoat she’d purchased in the village and went out by herself for long walks across the meadows or along the deer paths winding through the woods, exulting in the astonishing cold and the dry snow whipping her cheeks. On the pair of snowshoes Ned had given her, she tromped the trail along Slide Brook to the South Meadows Brook. No one asked her where she was going or when she was coming back. She chopped wood for the stoves and took her turn cooking and wrestling with the laundry, but because Erasmus and Copernicus shared these tasks they felt like pleasures. At home, she thought, she’d felt like a servant doing similar work: because that had been Browning’s household. Browning’s home, somehow, in which she and Emily and Jane and even Harriet were guests. Here no one expected anything. There were rules, lists, things that had to be done—but they all had to do them.

  Each morning she woke with a jolt, electrified by all she wanted to do and purely amazed at herself. Where had she gotten the nerve to confront her family and tell such enormous lies? Sneaking up the dark walk to the Repository, Copernicus beside her, she’d pushed open the door as noiselessly and confidently as if she’d been a criminal all her life. Kidnapping: that was the word for what they’d done, at least in some people’s eyes. She’d known just what to say to Tom, just how to bundle him up and slip him into the carriage—as, here in these forbidding woods, she knew how to find her way along the streams without getting lost, how to gather wood, how to stoke the stove. She knew how much sleep she needed, which proved to be very little; how, even, to navigate her way through her feelings toward the two brothers. She kept to her own bed, although she sensed she would have been welcome in either of the two rooms flanking hers. For a while, which she knew wouldn’t last forever, she enjoyed the delicate, teasing tension that kept the three of them afloat like a raft.

  None of them knew where they were going next. They would finish the book, they agreed. Or as much of it as they could. After that—after that was a blank page Alexandra couldn’t imagine. When Erasmus had first approached her with his plan, she’d volunteered to help rescue Tom, and then to help care for him while she completed the drawings for the book. She hadn’t been able to think any further than that. Now the drawings were halfway done.

  A letter arrived, which Erasmus read aloud as they sat eating venison stew. Zeke has spoken with the police, Linnaeus wrote. As if Zeke hadn’t kidnapped Tom from his home to begin with. And named you and Copernicus as suspects, but not Alexandra. When I agreed to help I didn’t expect to be left in such an uncomfortable position. Don’t you think you should explain yourself to Zeke?

  Erasmus made a face, and Alexandra looked into her bowl. If this was a kidnapping, what were the words for the other things they’d done? The mess they’d left behind in Philadelphia, their angry families, Erasmus’s tangled investments, which were all that supported the four of them yet were still confused—these things were difficult, yet the book was growing swiftly. Around them were mounds of manuscript that Erasmus read to her and Copernicus at night; mounds of drawings she pinned to the walls for the brothers’ inspection and comments; two more of Copernicus’s giant paintings. Each bird and seal and cliff that Erasmus and Dr. Boerhaave had captured in their notebooks, each whale and swarm of plankton, found a home in them.

  “That’s it,” Erasmus said as each corner of Copernicus’s paintings emerged. “That’s what it looked like.”

  All of them, Alexandra thought, could envision the book clearly now: the design, the type, the way the drawings and paintings would fall among the words. Beside them Tom watched and listened, making his own words and pictures. He drew his mother, he drew his father, he drew walrus hunts and polar bears. He waited for Ned’s visits. The snow piled up until everything around him was white and almost looked like home.

  Sometimes Ned took him deep in the woods, where the traps were set. They caught beaver, muskrat, rabbits; when they found a fox caught in one, growling and gnawing its frozen paw, Ned let Tom kill it. Tom stood on the fox, as he’d seen his father do, pinning its head and feet and then pressing his hands down on its chest so hard that its heart stopped and it died. Alexandra drew the way he skinned it with Ned’s knife and staked the pelt out to bleach and dry. Erasmus and Ned cleaned the bones, reassembled them, and taught Tom their names. From a second fox, they allowed him to keep the leg bones and the skull.

  “It’s wonderful what he’s learning,” Ned said to Erasmus. “But how much longer can we keep him here like this?”

  That morning Tom had woken to the sound of water dripping: not his mother, seeping through the sky, but icicles shrinking on the eaves. Something happened inside his eyes, as if the fog that had wrapped him since leaving his home had lifted. He gazed at Ned; at Erasmus and Alexandra bent over their tables; at Copernicus busy with a huge painting of the shoreline across the water from Anoatok. He said, “I want to go home.”

  Erasmus wrote two more lines and set his page aside. He looked up at Tom. His father, he remembered, had once looked at him with exasperation and said, “Can’t you get over anything? Why do you h
ave to lock yourself up here, just because things haven’t gone the way you wanted?” All this time he’d been waiting for his next move to be revealed to him; here was the point of all his lies and lists. “I’m taking you home,” he said. As if this was what he’d always meant to do. “As soon as the season is right.”

  LINNAEUS WROTE AGAIN:

  Last week they went to Washington, to attend the ceremony at the Smithsonian; the collections of the Exploring Expedition have all been arranged in the Great Hall, and with them Annie’s skeleton in a central display case. Zeke was given some sort of award but I don’t know the details. Humboldt and I and our families are fine and we hope you are too, but I wish I didn’t have to lie to everyone.

  Zeke knows you didn’t arrive in Liverpool, but no more than that—I don’t think he wants to know more. After he contacted the police, he figured out that it cast a bad light on him and Lavinia if you were suspected of wrongdoing. Now he or someone else has started a rumor that Tom, ungrateful boy, has signed on as a cabin boy on a merchant ship. But really no one is interested in Tom’s fate anymore. Everyone is talking, instead, about Zeke’s book.

  The bookshops sport great stacks of The Voyage of the Narwhal. At a dinner at the Laurens’ last week a woman bent toward me and, with great seriousness, began describing the differences between the Arctic Highlanders and the Netsilik, just as if she knew what she was talking about. I have to tell you it’s a most interesting work—vivid, well-written, full of adventures. Are you surprised to hear you play a very minor role in it? As do your shipmates. Captain Tyler, Mr. Tagliabeau, Robert Carey and Sean Hamilton visited the city briefly, to settle some question of wages with Zeke’s father. They aren’t happy with the way Zeke portrayed them but said it’s no more than what they expected. When I told them you’d sailed for England they asked me to thank you for forwarding the letters to their families and to tell you they bear you no grudge—they profited from their sealing voyage and leave soon on another whaling ship. Also they said you’d want to know that the Greenlander called Joe is in Denmark, preparing reports for the missionary society and writing something about the Anoatok Esquimaux and their folk-tales. Is everyone writing a book?

  Lavinia hardly speaks to me or Humboldt and I think is very unhappy. Zeke’s father is having financial troubles and had to give up his plans to build them a house; and although Zeke should make plenty from his book there are apparently some debts we didn’t know about. If I hear from you, she says, if I have a way to contact you—how awkward this is!—would I ask if you would consider letting her continue living in your house for the next year or two, or until you return: when are you returning? “Remind him of what he gave me when I was ten,” she says, which I hope means more to you than it does to me. She knows we don’t like Zeke but reminds me that she loves him. What does she mean by love, I wonder?

  ERASMUS MADE ARRANGEMENTS. There would be no special ship this time, no provisions to arrange, no men to interview. After several inquiries he settled on a reliable whaling firm in New London, and a captain whose ship was due to leave mid-May and who didn’t mind conveying paying passengers to Godhavn. The rest of the journey he must make on his own, but he’d settle the details in Greenland. Annie was gone; he couldn’t bring her family her bones and couldn’t imagine how he’d explain this failure. But he could return Tom to them. One last chance; he understood his luck. He wrote to Linnaeus, giving Lavinia permission to stay in the house indefinitely. His father’s house; their father’s house. On the ice, before everything had changed, he’d once built a model of it—and that was how it now existed in his mind. A small thing, blank-windowed and closed and cold. Let her stay there with Zeke.

  He sat down with Copernicus. From the beginning Copernicus had refused to commit himself beyond the next week or month: one painting at a time, he’d said. He’d finish as many as he could. Still Erasmus had hoped he could convince Copernicus to come north. “If you could see it for yourself,” he said. “The ice, the light, Tom’s people in their own place . . .”

  “It’s not what I want,” Copernicus said, startling him.

  In the room’s farthest corner, so absorbed in drawing bowhead whale that the men might have assumed she wasn’t listening, Alexandra made a dark stroke she hadn’t intended and then bit her lip. Of course Copernicus would go, it was his nature always to be going somewhere. His luck to be offered all the chances. Almost she rose, so the brothers could talk privately. Ned came into the room with a muskrat skin and paused as he heard the discussion; when Copernicus gestured for him to stay, Alexandra kept her place as well.

  “I know it’s hard to understand,” Copernicus said. “But I can’t take in one more thing. The West is still in my eyes, and the visions of the arctic you gave me, and now these mountains—this is an amazing place. As wild as the West, in certain ways, and changing so quickly—I could paint for the rest of my life and never get it all down. I’ll finish what I can before you go, but I have to capture what’s here as well.”

  “Are you sure?” Erasmus said. When they were boys, he remembered, a delegation of Indian chiefs had paraded through Philadelphia on their way to Washington. Even then, Copernicus had flown to his notebook and captured their spirits on paper. “Tom and I could use your help.”

  “I know,” Copernicus said. “And I’d love to see those places for myself someday. But I’m here now, and my eyes are full. I have to get this place down while I can. Ned’s going to help me.”

  Who would help her? Alexandra wondered. Never Copernicus, or not more than he already had. He might believe he was staying here in these mountains, but soon he’d be wandering again, alone again. She turned her gaze from him and back to her work. Erasmus turned as well, not toward her—she felt as invisible, among their swirl of plans, as Lavinia had once felt among her brothers—but toward Ned.

  “I was wondering if you might like to come with us,” Erasmus said to his old companion. “With me.” His left foot throbbed and he reached down to rub it.

  “I’m going to be Copernicus’s guide,” Ned said. “I can take him down the rivers and through the lakes, and we’ll make camps in the woods. I know the area well. He’ll paint. I’ll hunt and cook. It will be good for both of us.”

  He didn’t say that Copernicus had offered him a higher wage than he received at the hotel; nor that he had a plan of his own. He’d saved some money and meant to save more. As they traveled the mountains, he hoped to find a site suitable for a small hotel of his own. A resort, not just for hunters but for their families, where there might be healthful outdoor recreations and indoor comforts. Where a fleet of guide boats might glide like gondolas up to sturdy docks, and take those who were adventurous, but not so strong or skilled, down the braided streams. On the side, he thought, he might establish a small taxidermy firm.

  “I’ve always tried to help you,” he said to Erasmus.

  “You’ve been a huge help,” Erasmus agreed. He tried to smile, he tried to show his gratitude. On the Narwhal, he remembered, Zeke had asked for company on his last trip north and been refused. Had that felt like this? To Ned he said, “After all you’ve done—you must do what you want.”

  Through the winter Ned had been plagued by a dream, which he kept to himself. In it he and Zeke and Dr. Boerhaave were lost again among the maze of pressure ridges. Dwarfed by the treacherous heaps of ice they spun in circles, chopping passageways only to discover their own tracks on the far side. Cold and hungry and weak, then weaker, they climbed and fell, burrowed and heaved, and never got anywhere. The dream was endless and without resolution; its only saving grace the fact that in it, the moment never arrived when Dr. Boerhaave slipped beneath the ice. Now he looked into his surviving friend’s eyes.

  “I can never repay you,” he said. “For all you’ve taught me. But when we got back from the North, I swore I’d never set foot on a ship again.” He stretched the muskrat pelt in his hands, turning the fur side toward Erasmus. “Tom asked me for this,” he said. “Is that
all right?”

  “Of course,” Erasmus said absently. As Ned ducked into Tom’s room, Copernicus said, “I feel a bit like him.”

  “Like Ned?”

  “I’ve traveled too much already.”

  Alexandra crosshatched a shadow. Imagine being able to say that, she thought. Too much; when all she’d ever felt was Not enough. He was wrong about himself, he’d always be in motion. No woman would ever hold him more than briefly. In the village, she knew, the shopkeeper’s daughter slipped from her family’s home late at night to meet Copernicus in the woods. Because he never brought her to this house, they all pretended it wasn’t happening.

  “I need to stay put,” Copernicus continued. “I need to work. It’s wonderful that you’re going, though. And not just because of what you’re doing for Tom. It will help the book.”

  “Will it?” Erasmus asked. He’d almost grown resigned to the idea that he couldn’t finish it before he left. Alexandra’s drawings were nearly complete, strong and accurate; the paintings were like windows onto the world he’d once glimpsed and he’d be happy with whatever number Copernicus finished. But the text itself was missing something. As he thought this Alexandra, so quiet while they talked, rose and slipped out the back door and into the sheltering trees.

  “People live there, along with the plants and animals,” Copernicus said. “If you could bring their way of life into the narrative . . .”