Brittle Innings (25 page)
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 crafting 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.
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.
However, in more than one disagreement with nearby Innuit, I effected an outcome both just and favourable to Oongpek simply by shewing myself to our would-be adversaries, as the Philistines had no doubt employed Goliath until his fatal contretemps with David. In this way, as well as in the faithfulness of my service to my clans people, I attained to an almost legendary status among the Esquimaux of my circumscribed region.
“The Hiding Man, Inyookootuk, lives in Oongpek,” hunters would say. “He is a man. He is a bear. He can change back and forth like inyua from the ice days.”
As the years flew, I observed the effects of time on my clanspeople and friends. Asvek died.
Asvek’s wife died. The chief Kegloonek died. Other villagers advanced from youth or middle age into senescence and death. I, on the other hand, did not, but remained, as I always had, a giant of a certain established maturity, ill-featured but neither decrepit nor wizened. Kariak’s parents died. Kariak’s brother drowned in a whaling accident involving an oomiak and a wayward harpoon line. Seal hunters and salmon fishers of the age group that had initiated and taught me fell one by one—like leaves in autumn—to accident, disease, and age.
That I appeared immune to these natural depredations, continuing youthful in my hideousness, did not go unremarked. Many Oongpekmut, especially those of generations subsequent to mine, regarded my persistence among them as uncanny, perhaps even malignantly so. I watched in dismay as they ineluctably withdrew from me their trust and affections. No one used me ill or commanded me to quit the village, but I soon perceived that what had hitherto existed between me and the industrious Oongpekmut could not last.
Further, I could no longer tolerate the cold as well as I once had; each succeeding winter seemed to add to the ice in my veins, to diminish my ability to warm myself when blizzards raged and the urine in our collection barrels froze into amber stelea. On my sleeping platform, at the height of the blasting siroc, I dreamt of sunshine, unruffled water, and lizards basking. These images won my reverence even though I could scarcely conceive their origin.
One day an old man calling himself Kasgoolik appeared in our village. He had journeyed many difficult leagues by dog sledge to tell me something. At length I realised that he was the husband of my former consort, Kariak.
Kariak, he said, had died.
Inconsolable in his reemergent grief, he wept to relay this message, which struck me with the accreting weight of an avalanche. I, too, wished to weep—to pound my head on the frozen earth, to rend my garments like a Hebrew. Instead, I sought to console Kasgoolik, who, knowing that I had loved Kariak unflaggingly, with a devotion equal to his own, had travelled all this way to share his grief.