Heart So Hungry (5 page)

“Goodbye, beloved!” her husband called, but before she could find her voice again, the morning haze gathered around him as he stood leaning over the rail, hand raised in farewell.

“Laddie!” she cried at last, but he looked little more than a ghost now, a small grey figure enveloped in grey, her husband of thirty months, her life, enshrouded and fading, and gone.

In frozen January the telegram came.
Mr. Hubbard died October 18 in the interior of Labrador
.

Mina was staggered by the blow, though she had been anticipating such a message since the morning of their last embrace. A vague fear had become suspicion when, that fall, no word had come from him, and the party was unaccounted for at the posts they might have reached, should have reached by the last of August. And with each passing day she had become more certain of it, had read it in the distant emptiness of the stars she gazed at each night.

Yes, she had known it long before the telegram came. But hope, sometimes, is our only defence against knowledge, and since August Mina had been wielding hope like a stick to beat the wolves away.

Now she stood with the telegram trembling in her hand, the words swimming before her eyes. All this time, she thought. He has been gone all this time. October 18. Three months. He has been gone three months now. All of winter. He has been gone all winter.

Not until May 27, a Friday, was his body returned to Brooklyn, packed in salt in a lead-lined wooden coffin accompanied by George Elson and Dillon Wallace. Two months earlier the story of the men’s ordeal had appeared in the
New York Times
. Much of the article was given over to a long letter Wallace had written to his sister in December from the North West River Post, where he and Elson had remained for a while to recuperate from their brush with death. From this article, which included heart-rending passages from Laddie’s journal, Mina learned the haunting details of her husband’s death. She read how, on October 18, Wallace and Elson had left her Laddie alone at the campsite because he was too sick to travel farther; how they had then separated, Wallace marching off to recover some cached flour for himself and Laddie while Elson retreated in search of rescuers. After ten days George had finally succeeded in sending a small party of men back to the campsite. They had come first upon Wallace, wandering around in the snow
“in stocking feet and underwear, hatless and coatless.” He had found the flour but never managed to get back to camp with it. The rescue party then located Laddie’s tent, but too late. By all appearances he had died on the very day Wallace and Elson departed from him.

And now, a full seven months after his death, he was being returned to her on the
Sylvia
. Mina shuddered with the memory of how vibrant, how alive he had been last June when they boarded that ship hand in hand for his journey north.

She told herself that she should feel some pity too for George and Dillon because of their terrible ordeals. But how to pity the survivors? All she could think was that Laddie was gone. According to Wallace’s letter to his sister, George had struggled valiantly for ten days, wading through deep snow with nothing but rags wrapped around his feet, fording icy streams, even building a raft with his bare hands and then nearly drowning when it broke apart, all to send help to her husband.

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:

Morris ended his report with what Mina considered unforgivable pomposity:

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.

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.

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.