Heart So Hungry (6 page)

“And every minute since then, Missus Hubbard, I have wanted to throttle myself for letting him make me take it.”

Her tears came now too. “It was so like him to do that, George.”

“Yes, ma’am, it truly was. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Because he knew that you needed it more than he did. You would be doing all the work. He would simply be waiting for your return.”

“I only wish it was me been left behind to wait. Maybe then I wouldn’t be feeling any of this now.”

“But as to Mr. Wallace,” she said gently. “He had less than half as far to go as you.”

“It rained all that first day,” he told her. “And the rain was icy cold. Next morning there was half a foot of snow on the ground. And all along Mr. Wallace was having a hard time keeping up. Him not being used to the country and all, and being so weak himself by then.”

Again he paused. His throat was dry, lips parched, and he raised the cup to his mouth. The tea had gone cold.

“That second night, after we found the bag of flour, we built a big fire to warm us up a bit. But Mr. Wallace got too much smoke in his eyes and went blind from it. We figured he’d be fine come morning but he wasn’t. He could see but everything was in a haze, he said. But it was fixing to snow again, and I had to be off for Grand Lake, and that’s where we parted company.”

“I understand,” she said. “But he never made it back to Mr. Hubbard with the flour. And all he had to do was retrace the path that got you to the flour in the first place.”

George nodded. Yes, she was right. It might have made all the difference. Still, unless you were out there with them, unless you knew the cold and the weakness and the debilitating hunger …

“It snowed for ten days straight,” he told her. “By afternoon on the day we split up he couldn’t of seen our trail even if his eyes were working good. By the next day the snow was knee-deep. Plus, once
when he was crossing a stream he broke through the ice and got soaked up to his armpits. It wasn’t an easy walk for him, missus.”

“Nor was it for you. But the fact remains that you succeeded and he didn’t.”

“From what he tells me, he got sick from eating some of that mouldy flour we found. So now besides being half-frozen and half-blind, he starts vomiting too. But he says he kept looking for the tent, missus. He kept walking and looking for the next seven days.”

With that George seemed to be finished. But Mina Hubbard was not.

She leaned toward him. “George, I want you to give me your honest opinion on this. Did Mr. Wallace lose his senses out there? Is that why he wandered around lost for seven days?”

It took George a while to answer. When he finally did, his voice rose barely above a whisper. “When Donald and Bert and the other fellas found him, Mr. Wallace didn’t even have his moccasins on. He was walking around in his stocking feet. He said later that the moccasins kept clogging up with snow, and that was why he took them off. I don’t know what become of his hat either, but he had lost it somewhere too.”

“Is your answer to my question
yes
, George?”

“He talked about hearing his wife out there. Her that’s been dead some three years by then.”

“In his letter to his sister he referred to it only as a woman’s voice. But he told you otherwise?”

George answered with a sad smile. “There was this one time, he said, when he had just about decided to lay down in the snow and go to sleep, when she come and told him to build a fire. So that’s what he did. There was other times too when he wanted to quit. But she wouldn’t let him.”

Mina was shaken by this report. It altered her perception of Wallace somewhat, awakened her to the truth and depth of his
suffering. “Thank you, George. Thank you for telling me this. And thank you for answering all my questions.”

He sat motionless for half a minute or so, then pushed himself up and bent to take her hand again, and again the tears came to both of them, a prolonged and awkward goodbye.

The next day George went to Grand Central Station and boarded a train for Montreal. Soon he would be home in Missanabie again, back to his life. Except that now, he knew, nothing would ever be the same.

As for Mina, she met with Dillon Wallace on Sunday morning. He arrived at ten to find her dressed in yesterday’s clothes, draped in black. She did open the curtains in the front room, however, and seated Wallace on the sofa with his back to the bright window. The sunlight on his shoulders and on the back of his skull was warm, too warm, and the small room seemed stuffy to him, overheated and smelling faintly of coal smoke.

Mina poured a cup of tea for him and another for herself. Seated in the armchair, she stared into her china cup for a while. She hardly knew where to begin. Without Laddie there to guide the conversation, without Laddie as her buffer, every human interaction felt off balance to her, every movement seemed broken. To live without him was as awkward and impossible as reading the time on a clock whose hour hand was missing. After all these months she had not grown accustomed to his absence. Sometimes, as now, she experienced it so keenly that it all but paralyzed her.

It was Wallace who broke the silence. “You cannot know,” he began, then stopped himself when he recognized the speciousness of the cliché. Of course she knew. Better than anyone.

He tried again. “I will never forget how he came to me in the hospital in Long Island. How he walked right up to me as if we were old friends, and reached out to me in my misery. We were utter strangers, and yet … I truly believe that he saved my life that day,
Mina. Saved me from the abyss that … well … I don’t need to explain it to you, I know.”

She sat so quietly and without movement, he could only wonder what she was thinking. Her pale face was splotched with red. He knew how easily she blushed with embarrassment, but what had he said to embarrass her? Was she angry with him? For saying something improper? Or perhaps for saying too little?

“After that day,” he continued, “I always felt that I owed Leon my very life. And I would have given it gladly, Mina, I want you to know that. It is important to me that you know it. No man has ever been closer to me. And after what we went through together up there …”

The flush spread over her forehead, widened on her cheeks. And the set of her jaw—she
was
angry! But what had he said?

“I will not abide,” she said evenly, her voice hoarse from lack of sleep, “what the critics are saying of him.”

With her first few words Wallace had sucked in a breath, anticipating an attack. But now he exhaled slowly, and covered his relief with reassuring words. “The newspapers, you mean? No, no, you mustn’t let any of that bother you. Anything they say is mere speculation. It has no importance whatsoever, no relationship to the truth.”

“They are saying he was inexperienced. That he didn’t prepare properly.”

“It’s all nonsense, Mina. Every word of it.”

She fixed him with a gaze he had never seen from her before, so hard and hot it made his own face burn. “You must never add a single word of support to what they say. You must never vouchsafe their claims.”

“You know I never would.”

“In fact you must refute them. It is up to you to prove them wrong.”

“And I do,” he told her. “At every opportunity.”

“I am speaking of the story Leon would have written. The chronicle of his expedition. True and complete.”

Wallace nodded his approval. “I will help in whatever way I can. As, I’m sure, will George. Our recollections, along with Leon’s diary—”

“I would like for you to write the book,” she said.

Wallace drew in another breath, sat back against the sofa.

Mina saw him framed in bright sunlight, and the light was painful to her eyes. Backlit by the morning sun he appeared little more than a shadow, his features softened and indistinct. She could not help but compare his nondescript face to Laddie’s, to Laddie’s sharp chin and angular nose, his eager, intelligent eyes that could blaze out even from such darkness. And now Wallace spoke in a way Laddie by nature could not, stammering with uncertainty.

“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:

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.”