Inukshuk (5 page)

The movie, that was it. She always liked hearing his ideas about that, the history, and his imitations of the sailors' voices. She even somewhat seemed to believe him about being related to Franklin.
Our ancestors, maybe they camped out in one of Franklin's pastures
, his father would say.
Shoveled his horses' shit and squatted in one of his stables. The name, that's about all we have in common. You need to divest yourself of this delusion, Thomas. This mythologizing. Do you figure we're related to Benjamin Franklin now, as well? Why stop there—how about . . . Aretha Franklin?
But it was more than the name, he was sure—too many other coincidences and little overlaps in interest. Anyway, it didn't matter. Related or not, if he wanted to believe himself a part of John Franklin's lineage and legacy (the explorer, not the high school teacher), then he'd believe it. Once, he'd even told her about the dead sailors visiting him in his sleep, stumbling around his bedroom comically with their dead feet, bleeding gums, and frostbitten faces, looking for food and a way out of their misery, asking him about the lamppost at the end of their walkway and the lights downtown.
Flying lights with machines attached! Did you see 'em? Blimey! Where'd they come from?
She'd bought that as well, or seemed to, or at least found it funny and engaging enough to keep listening.

His house was in sight. There was the lamppost and the bank of mailboxes under the tree at the corner.

“Yeah, like the summer right before Franklin hit Peel Sound and froze in for good. It was the warmest weather on record for hundreds of years. Totally false. Everything melting. No wonder they thought they'd just steam right down and through the passage in two weeks.”

She nodded.

“So I had this new idea for the opening sequence today.”

She nodded again. Made some noise in her throat that might have meant
Go on
, or might have meant she couldn't care less.

“There should be, like, a fight scene to set up Braine's death. He thinks it's because of a fight—like cracked ribs and stuff, so he can't
breathe right, but it turns out to be pneumonia, so he's down there in sick bay, all cheesed off at everyone all the time, especially the guy that hit him. Loses his appetite and wastes away. But really, it's the lead poisoning. Makes you paranoid, so he's, like, going crazy and stuff, blaming everyone, and no one can figure out what's wrong with him. Him and the other guy, Hartnell—both of the guys who died out of nowhere the first winter on Beechey.” Already, he was picturing some of the shots involved. Braine with Hartnell in sick bay. Someone hatcheting open a new tin of canned beef for them and heating it. Braine spooning it up from a nice china plate. Lying back. Pinwheel eyes. Yelling. Throwing the plate. Collapsing. Close-up of food splattered on the sick bay's wall and floor. Fancy tinned beef and split peas. No—no, wrong, because they'd only ever get rice in sick bay:
Sick bay rations limited to rice
. But here maybe a little poetic license was in order, to show the real culprit—the Victorian decadence and desire for a proper English meal wherever you were, which meant tons and tons of deadly tinned and contaminated provisions.

“Duh. They knew about lead poisoning.”

“No. They didn't, in fact. I told you. That's why they soldered all the tinned provisions with lead. They put lead in, like, everything then—kids' toys, paint, dishes, glass, wine. You name it. Even some medicine. They even made guys take
mercury
back then. They had no idea. They thought it was good for you. But the amount of lead in those cans and in their water-purification systems. . . .” He croaked and did a little spastic death pantomime. “Lethal.”

Two V-shaped dents like check marks appeared in her forehead, one above each eyebrow, and he wondered if he'd lost her, said too much, or been a little too enthusiastic in his death act. “I thought it was that other dude”—she snapped her fingers—“what's his name, that died first.”

“Torrington?”

“Him.”

“He came on board with TB. They knew that. They figured it was, like, therapeutic to send him on discovery service to the Arctic?
Good for the lungs? Then they had the bright idea to set him up as chief stoker down there in the engine room shoveling coal all day. Doh! Killed him right off. But Braine and Hartnell . . . totally mysterious. It
looked
like TB, but TB would never kill you so fast. Takes a while. Maybe botulism. Botulism is kind of like drowning. Your lungs quit and then you basically, you just . . . you suffocate. So says Devon.”

“Why do you
know
so much of this stuff? It's, like, weird.”

“I just read some books. That's all. There's nothing wrong with it.”

“I didn't say there's anything
wrong
. Just there's other
things
in the world.”

They'd reached the mailboxes and the walkway up to his house. Thomas stopped, but Jill kept going. She turned and walked backward, seeming to hurry from him now. He had the sense he'd scared her or hurt her feelings again. Maybe too much death talk.

“You need to wash with green soap. Your face. With a good green soap. And gargle salt water. No canoodling. It'll make the bleeding start again.”

“Oh, so you . . .” She turned and kept walking. “Hey,” he said. “So I guess . . .”

“See you later.”

He raised a hand, half-waving, though he knew she didn't see.

“Later,” he said, and turned to face the mailboxes.

Mom in the mailbox. Pop-up Mom in a square red or blue or bright green envelope bearing exotic canceled stamps, scentless and fat with paper. He'd seize it lightly in two fingers, as if not to touch any part of it too intimately, as if to keep his impulses in check, one of which veered toward an insane desire to rip the envelope open and pour all his attention greedily into her words, the other, with equal intensity, toward a desire to rip it
all
apart, tear print from paper if he could, and stomp the pieces into the grainy, icy snow without reading a word, because whatever she said, it would not be enough. The letters unfolded a larger window within the window of the envelope, all of it almost too electrifying to bear, none of it giving him anything like what he wanted. He didn't understand himself in the presence of
such strong emotions—knew only that he wished, right now, there would be no letter at all. Or wished there would be many, many letters, better, more personal letters with pictures and kind words, and much more of her than that.

Deep breath.
Please
, he thought, and turned the key for their mailbox—familiar
tocking
sound—and peered in.

Empty.

Barren, gleaming little square Quonset hut, like where she might be staying right now—someone's makeshift sheet-metal hovel at the edge of a melting glacier maybe, watching and waiting. So the mail hadn't come yet. “
Yes,
” he said. “Beat the mailman.” He slapped the little door shut and pocketed his key. Safe another hour or two, until his father returned and came in the door braying orders and asking where he was, what was he doing, had he finished his homework, practiced his piano, remembered to take out the garbage, empty the cat's litter, start dinner. He was off the hook. He'd make some hot chocolate, or just eat some plain squares of it like the sailors, followed by canned tuna on Ritz crackers. Unwind a little with solitaire on the computer. Drop a note to Devon on his Facebook page. Dive into his storyboard notebooks awhile and see if he could draw some of the fight scene into frames—Braine versus Work. Hartnell in some of the background shots. It was too bad about Jill, yes—but probably a good thing, too. Skinny-legged Jill with her bare shins swallowed up in her black plastic snow boots and that blue-brown-red stain down her face. A kid, too young for him. Anyway, he'd survived plenty of afternoons without her already. He'd survive plenty more.

 

 

ONE THING HE'D LEARNED from his son's obsession with their namesakes, the Franklins of Arctic lore: Lady Jane, Sir John's wife, once traveled as far north as Muckle Flugga, in the Shetland Isles, then considered the northernmost point in the British Isles, in order to gaze longingly to sea after her husband's lost ships—to be as close to him as she might get without leaving British soil. A publicity stunt to gain attention and fund yet another search party, Thomas assured
him—she'd even (according to rumor) invited her new friend Charles Dickens and her nephew Alfred, Lord Tennyson, along to write about it for the
Times
—but John Franklin the school-teacher imagined it differently. He'd been to Shetland once himself and knew you didn't make that sick crossing without a genuine incentive. His own had been a girl, of course, decades ago—a Dutch girl he'd traveled with for weeks through Spain and the UK, when without warning she'd given him the slip. Left him a note at the hostel's front desk, saying he should catch up with her when he was ready, and the address. Baltasound Unst. So he had his own picture of Lady Jane just north of Unst, prelighthouse, and staring out to sea from a deserted pile of wave-encircled rocks after Sir John. For him, it was not just more lore of the explorer: He'd seen those rocks and heard the gulls and looked straight north to nothing but more and more open sea (the Dutch girl, of course, long gone). Regardless, factual or mythic, because of his personal connection with it, the story of Jane and Muckle Flugga formed a kind of emotional touchstone for him, icon, whatever you wanted to call it, like his father's absurd dashboard Jesus figurines: something to look at and conjure as needed, to set on the horizon and steer yourself toward. Also a way of giving his own refusal to leave Alberta and move back to California a shape or explanation. (His mother's words to him just the previous week:
Honey, you're north of North Dakota! No, we're not visiting this year. You just come on home when you're ready.
) What kept him here? An oath, a personal resolution he mentioned rarely, if at all: He would not leave until Thomas had finished high school; he would wait at least that long so as to protect Thomas from having fully lost his mother, and to leave open for Jane the possibility of return. The chance for Thomas to visit her, too, though as yet that hadn't happened. If he pictured Lady Jane at Muckle Flugga, looking north after John, still hopeful after how many years, it almost made sense. So long as he and Thomas were here, they were that much closer to her. One day's travel instead of three. There was still the chance of patching it up.

Now he was in the parking lot at the end of the school day, done his classes, done the debate team, done grading, done with
everything until tomorrow morning—familiar, happy release into the evening—hearing the wind bang and buffet the streetlight beside his car, the school-yard flagpole bare now but the halyard still chiming and chattering spastically against the pole, and thinking about Jane and Muckle Flugga and personal resolutions, because Moira had been text-messaging him every half hour or so since just after the end of classes. Three times, to be exact. Once just to pass him her number—a new one. Then the messages.
Call here when u can. Not urgent. Maybe urgen now yes, pls call now. Not the home number. Dial this #.
Picturing himself there at the point of his internal Muckle Flugga, gazing north, he wondered how much of it was dedication and adhering to an oath after all; how much was just stubbornness and being hooked on the romance of separation—the poignancy, stalled longing, frozen miles away from Jane—and how easily might Moira spring him from all of that? He'd sworn, too, when Jane left, that he'd never follow after her, even to visit, and had already broken that vow, months after she'd gone, though he hadn't actually managed to see her—his own fault for having flown up spontaneously, unannounced, while Thomas was back east visiting relatives. Three days he'd passed standing on the balcony of his rented room and getting drunk on ten-dollar well drinks in the hotel bar with some of the locals he'd run into, asking after her. He'd watched the sun circle endlessly, and once, on a one A.M. jog to the outskirts of town, thought he might be on the verge of appreciating something like the enchantment of the place, the bitten-down, inhospitable whatever it was that had lured Jane there and kept her. He'd stood at the top of a rise, alone and swarmed by mosquitoes, until some inchoate realization connected with the wind-tipped dwarf pines and the light so endless it seemed to come from the earth, felt as if it had worked its way through him, then turned and jogged back. Flying out, he'd been amazed, again, at the foreshortened strangeness of the perspective—the trees too stumpy to calculate height or distance, the land and water continually interrupting each other, so the higher you went, the more it looked like a swampy, cratered patchwork of endless puddles and waterways in which it would be
impossible to ever know your way. And he'd felt relieved beyond all expectation to be home again and returned to hours of darkness and night (and somehow, consequently,
color
)—had known, too, he would not go back. It was enough, having seen where she was. If she'd heard from any of the locals that he'd been up there looking for her, she'd never let on.

“Moira, Moira,” he said. Checked the callback number and hit
Dial
. Backed his car in a reverse arc from under the streetlight and headed out of the lot as digital ring pulses fluttered in his ear, connecting them.

She answered just as he was turning and accelerating onto the access road. All sand and bare pavement now, no snow. Just an incredible amount of sand. He couldn't remember—November? October?—when he'd last seen it this snowless.

“John! Hang on a sec,” she said, and then moments later: “Back again. I'm so glad you called.”