Afterlands, page 27
The little church bell peals the matin mass, a silvery chain of sound in the sky, as Kruger and the dog make their way out of town, turning southward along the track to the city. Mateo and his grubby chums, lightly armed with sticks, escort them some distance, nattering in Spanish at Kruger and tormenting the dog, though with little commitment, and turning back one by one until only Mateo remains.
You come back to Purificación, Señor Kruger … ?
It’s not clear if this is a question.
Someday, I hope, says Kruger.
The boy adds earnestly, You must try not to be killed!
Kruger smiles. I’ve always been a bit of a failure in that line.
¿Mande?
Being killed. You go back to the village now, Mateo. Goodbye, Mateo.
And the boy answers in Sina—farewell, or return soon?—with tears magnifying his eyes.
The peaks of the mountains are still in winter, dark timber in the folds. Keep the sierra always to your right, Jacinta told him, drawing from her apron a roll of corn tortillas wrapped in a clean rag. Turning back to her tub of laundry she’d added, Someday you may be sent up here again, to spy over us. Maybe then you can give back what you have taken.
Groton, Connecticut, June 1877
THE AFTERNOON OF MR CHUSLEY’S VISIT is so windless and still that you can hear, through the open front window, the faint clicking and crunching of the paper wasps chewing at the wood of the porch columns. In this heat she is too weary to go out and shoo them away. Her visitor seems not to notice them. The noise, to her, is increasingly pronounced, aggressive as the buzzing of a horsefly trapped in the long funnel-front of the bonnet she always wears outside at this time of year, to keep her face from darkening in the strong, southern sun of New England. She has not been beyond the front gate for some days. The vegetable patch is suffering. Her pallor is not far off Mr Chusley’s; as if this white world is fully inducting her at last, while nature, in the form of the wasps, deer mice, and the scouring effects of another hard winter’s passage, takes the house back to nothing, bit by bit.
It is not easy to concentrate on Mr Chusley’s words. In part this is an effect of his stutter, but also there is her own grasp of English, which seems curiously reduced. Lately, when she speaks to Mrs Budington or the Reverend Cowan, stray words in Inuktitut will insert themselves in place of the intended English. Her skin may be lightening, but that older world is returning for her. She knows she is dying. She assumes her visitors must see it as well. Still, she has dressed properly for this visit, in a brown delaine dress with milk lace collar and cuffs, a brimless hat of black straw, cocked with hatpins at a jaunty angle, a sprig of baby’s breath on the crown. How she will miss her southern clothing, the variety and complexity of it, the slow, delicious ritual of dressing, even the corsets. …
As Mr Chusley chatters nervously, the parlour behind him half-revolves and returns, revolves and returns, as if suspended from the ceiling by a chain. There is the crackle of the paper wasps’ chewing. Beyond Copps’s knoll, now green in young maize, vast-piled sumptuous summer clouds pillow upward over the Atlantic, invisible a mile to the south. I hope he will find his own place down there, in the hot countries. Her visitor is trying to speak, she realizes, about Punnie’s playing.
Now now, now I think I know what it was. The pup, piece her hands were playing, on her, her little coverlet. At the end.
Please have more coffee, sir. I do wish these were better.
No—w—wonderful!
They are yesterday’s. I had no more powder. I have some of Daboll’s soda crackers, if you …
His hand lurches out, apparently to grasp and reassure her own, but then it stops, trembling, tentative, as if looking for something, cream or sugar. He begins to move the short, red-bitten fingers slightly, as if at a keyboard—as if he’d meant to do this all along, a demonstration! She watches the hand in remote absorption. His sentences are clipped as he tries to outrun his stutter.
Even then I knew. But dared not believe. I, I … I had only shown her the music. Schumann! She’d not played it!
Yes, sir.
I’d not taught her, you, you. You understand she’d scarcely seen it! Yet, somehow she …
He looks at her urgently, as if for assistance. His soft brown eyes shine uncharacteristically. Wide and red-edged eyes. Moved now, she extends her hand. She touches the doughy, hairless back of his hand. It’s as if the touch releases him:
Oh—what we have both lost, Hannah!
She looks down instantly, catching her breath, trying to hold herself in.
Indeed, sir.
After some seconds: Forgive me, Hannah. I had no, no. Had no right.
Not at all, sir. Please, I am quite well.
Only, you see. Only—you see when I’m with you I feel. I feel. He pauses, takes a breath, then blurts the rest as if in angry defiance of his impediment:
I feel I am in the presence of something strong beyond my understanding!
After a pause filled with the weird sizzling din of the wasps, she says, I am really not so strong these days, sir. Then she regrets the words, surprised she has uttered them. Perspiration is dewing on her scalp under the hat. She seems to detect the hard cool edge of the hatpin against her scalp.
I’m in love with you, Hannah.
I should not have said that, sir, she says, referring to her own last statement; then his declaration reaches her, seconds late. Mr Kruger’s declaration returns to her, too.
Of course! says Mr Chusley, scarlet to his hairline. Of course I should not have! I am so—I am sorry, Hannah.
That is not what I mean, sir.
She ought to have gone with him, perhaps, into the rope locker aboard the Tigress. For her husband has abandoned her. Perhaps he has a new family up there.
I am sorry, her guest repeats. Please. He rises from his chair— a small, soft, clean-shaven man in a rumpled suit and poorly tied cravat—and stumps across the parlour to the spinet.
May I please, please—may I play for you? Schumann’s “Träumerei.”
Or perhaps he is dead.
Apparently she has answered because her guest is on the bench, hunchbacked over the keyboard, playing with eloquence. Outside a brougham or buggy passes with a clatter of wheels and a beat of hoofs. The tune shifts constantly from major to minor to seventh to suspended chords: not so much like the dreaming of the title as like actual life. This sad bachelor has doted on her for several years—perhaps because she has never shown any impatience when he stutters out his words. Her compassion swells with the tears she constrains as he plays Punnie’s final song, though there are notes besides compassion in this heart’s chord: a clear note of anger at her husband, another of loneliness, notes of listless apathy, surrender and, strangest of all, a faint high note of desire. As sometimes when she works the treadle, thighs rubbing, and feels the hum of the machine deep in her lap. She is almost delirious, worsening. This must be how it feels to be drunk. Uncaring of all consequences. She can see no reason not to be generous to such a kind, and famished, man. The reasons have all disappeared. She rises, still dizzy but not heavy of limb, in fact she feels almost weightless, lets the rolling chords and melody float her across the parlour to Mr Chusley’s side. He looks up, the tune dying under his slowing fingers, as she places her ring hand on his shoulder.
Enough, sir. Do come with me, sir.
Hannah! he says.
His panting breath smells of coffee and cloves.
Some while later she asks if he would see himself out. In an agony of self-consciousness he is fumbling to re-tie his black cravat; whatever she tries to look at becomes the spindle around which everything else whirls and slurs. She feels she can’t move from where she lies under the sheets. Move or meet his serious brown eyes, which for their part seem unable to meet her own.
I shall ask her, sir, she says. When I meet her again.
Hannah? He kneels beside her, his pale brow furrowed.
I shall ask her if it was the piece she was playing. When I meet her again, in my people’s quvianaqtuvik. And she thinks: For I’ll not be permitted to enter the white one, not now.
Hannah—I’ll call on you, to, to. Tomorrow. If I might.
Tavvaavutit, she tells him, as a goodbye. Though in fact the word is only a general form of salute; in her tongue there is really no word for goodbye.
By the next morning something has changed. Her lungs feel bloated with a damp, cold humour, like thickly settled salt fog. The fever is worse, her sputum streaked with blood. She is aching, too weak to launder the handkerchiefs, as on the ice floe, how difficult it was to keep clean, when she was on her moon, at least before the hunger stopped the bleeding. The shame of it sometimes. As if in punishment, she thinks, this weakness … though the fever’s drift makes it seem that her strange liaison with Mr Chusley was but a figment. Or is this punishment, again, for stealing on the floe? Her mind struggles to keep occasions and causes separate. Famished on the ice, on the shores of sleep, there was this same oblique, floating, phantasmal quality to her reflections on her theft of the stores. Such reflections were rare, and the awareness of her actions would always come over her like a surprise recollection—a surprise that would seem to want to be forgotten, that would insist on its own fragile implausibility. This cannot possibly be you. (But for this child, there is no law I would not violate, no consequence I would not face.)
A rapping comes, the distant front door, a week’s journey from the bed, through the bedroom door, along a tedious sequence of cold and richly appointed, palatial rooms, then down a series of corridors, rounded like gloomy iglu tunnels, to the parlour. It will be Pretty Mother Sarah, bringing the mail. Tukulito cannot face her. Again the thought of yesterday comes, and of her present weakness, which feels vaguely shameful … everything vague now. Here in the South she has always had to be stronger than any strength, observed as she is by those who expect so little of her colour. She tries to cough but she is too weak, or the thickening fog in her lungs too heavy, a new condition, she can only wheeze. They think of Indian squaws and Esquimau women as weak—weak in virtue. For years she has been interpreting the insinuations and aboard ship overhearing the men. If Mr Chusley should report anything, it will bring further shame on herself, her family, her people. Yet this fear lacks immediacy, seems muffled in sacks of bedstraw. Her thoughts are thinking or dreaming themselves, at two or three removes from her, like some other woman’s thoughts infiltrating the cavities of her ears. … Yet that woman can only be herself. A woman alone in a way she has never felt before. The Americans will turn from her, surely, and she is lost to her own people; yet this too seems to matter less and less, she is drifting free of all human concerns on the shrunken, private ice floe of the bed, which is yawing, listing on its sea of fever. The bedroom door gapes, Mrs Budington fills the threshold, dark and large, in her hand a yellow envelope. Hannah! Pretty Mother, come in. The woman stoops awkwardly, sits heavily on the side of the bed, sets a cold dry hand on Tukulito’s forehead. Lord help us. Hannah? Do you hear me? I shall be back soon, with the doctor. The room is empty. Then, as if only a moment has passed, the room is full, it’s not a large room, with Mrs Budington, and the physician, and Mr Chusley, him as well. The physician wears spectacles too little for his stout pink face, he is stripped to shirtsleeves and a shad-bellied waistcoat. How perfectly round and healthy the body packed into his waistcoat! By the door Mr Chusley sits stiffly, a crease between his widened eyes, his derby in his hands, kneading and twisting the curled brim; as though he is attending the bedside of a neighbour’s child whom he has run over in his shay. A thoughtful man, always. She sees he will say nothing. Oh, sir, you must feel no guilt in this matter.
I think, think she may be a. Awaking, Dr Schader.
I believe not, sir. This is the worst case I have seen in much time.
Shall I bring more water, Doctor? Pretty Mother’s voice, subdued.
Per per, permit me. Please.
If you would, sir. The doctor’s accent is heavily German.
Can you hear me, dear? Hannah?
Yes, she whispers. Pretty Mother. Forgive me.
Hannah?
She feels Mrs Budington’s face inclined to hers. The surplus heat it contributes is too much, she is burning up so, wanting space, cool space and water.
Please, she tries to say, a further towel.
Is he bringing the water yet, Doctor?
Ja, ja, he is at the pump, I see him.
Forgive me, Mother. The food I stole.
Hush, my dear! You, ever steal a thing? It’s only the fever.
Tukulito opens her eyes. Mrs Budington’s bitten lips part expectantly.
Not from Mr Daboll, Tukulito tries to say, but only the last word comes clear.
Daboll’s shop? Rest, dear, please! You are the most honest creature God ever made!
She may have said Devil, the doctor says in an undertone perfectly clear to Tukulito. They are quite superstitious, these people, one hears. Thank you, Chusley.
You are mistaken, Dr Schader, Mrs Budington says. Hannah is different.
But, she has here in the bed with her this fetish!
It’s an Esquimau doll, Doctor.
It was her daw, daw, her daughter’s doll, Mr Chusley tells the doctor, with force.
Put one other pillow under her back. Like so. And he whispers: If she cannot cough, she will drown from within. Chusley, bring more camphor oil.
It’s in the kitchen, by the washbasin, Mrs Budington says.
God help her, the doctor mutters.
Some would call that a superstition, Tukulito hears Mr Kruger remark, as plainly as if he were here in the room by her ear.
Could they be, Mother? The ones from the ice. I do hear him. And the lieutenant …
Don’t you fret about Tyson, Hannah. You must try to cough.
But the cloths, they all be soiled, Mother!
Here I have a clean one, my dear.
Ah, qujannamiik!
Her English is regressing now, back through the years of steady, laborious gain, much as Punnie’s speech regressed near the end, the child reverting to words and making sounds that she had not formed since she was six, then four, then two—sounds she had entirely forgotten—as she retraced her way backward to her birth time, and the absence before birth, her mother, helpless, watching her recede.
Odd sounds are coming from inside her. When things go badly wrong, naturally one wonders about broken taboos. Now one would listen to an angakoq’s words, as much as this physician’s, although the whiter, southerly districts of her being still mistrust those primitive ways. The borders between districts are breaking down, however. All moments, past or near-present, are now present, like the hours of her conversion, which she undertook partly for Father Hall and partly because she loved the Baby Jesus so, in the stories. Sweet Jesus … Lamb, she whispers experimentally, and Pretty Mother loudly, as if in triumph, relays the words to the others: Sweet Jesus, come, she said!
Some time after the birth of King William, her second baby, she and Father Hall discover a woman entombed in an iglu. Queen Emma, the woman is called. She has given stillbirth to a tiny infant, hard as soapstone, and has tried to conceal the birth, burying this little statue in secret, and so she has been entombed with three ancient women of her tribe who are chanting to her night and day, forcing her to fast, to purge her of her transgression. She is dying. Father Hall tries to intervene, hectoring them about the White God’s forgiveness and the cruel error of their superstitions, and Tukulito translates it all to the crones, at first diplomatically, muting the man’s bluster, but later, as Queen Emma sinks into delirium and as she, Tukulito, comes to agree with Father Hall and to deplore these savage rituals, she translates directly and with passion. To no avail. The woman is dead. Angry and defiant, Tukulito resolves to accept Father Hall’s repeated advice and abandon some of the tight constraints on her own diet as a nursing mother, beginning to take cold water and bread and coffee along with the traditional stewed caribou meat. Hall is elated with this victory of civilized good sense over brutish shamanism, though when little King William himself sickens and dies, Tukulito endures agonized second thoughts, allowing the vindicated and spiteful angakoq to punish her.
Some time has passed, a new mist of voices in the room. The feeling in her chest is colder and thicker, sluggish, less like fog than like the grey pash of melt-ice. The Reverend Cowan is here. From far away a faint, drilling hum, as of massed paper wasps, then horses and a vehicle, hoofs clapping, the shimmering tinkle of bells, and though she cannot open her eyes, memory furnishes the scene, on disembarking with Mr Bowlby in Hull after crossing the ocean, she fifteen years old, Ebierbing eighteen, and among all the marvels that throng their eyes in the crammed hours that follow, none can rival the spectacle of enormous horses, a twosome drawing the buggy of a merchant, the sun flashing on the bend of their arched necks and gleaming along their glossy sides to curve again on their great, round haunches. The biggest, most naked land-creatures they have ever seen: slim legs moving quickly, like trotting caribou, hoofs scratching sparks off the ground which is floored with stones like a tight-cobbled beach. Turf-coloured manes and tails dancing in the wind, their harness trimmed with small brass bells and yellow tassels, while behind them, scarcely less marvellous, a shining machine clatters, a sort of dogsled high up on wheels, like the wheels of the cannon on Mr Bowlby’s ship, but larger, blood-red, webbed with bone-like rods like a bloodstained crystal of snow … and this wondrous sled has a glistening black roof as well. …
Soon after their wedding in Mr Bowlby’s vast parlour they are in a room even grander, in London, seated at a gleaming table around which half of the folks they knew in Cumberland Sound could have been gathered, dining with the Queen and her husband, the German Consort, and the two men are silent, Ebierbing because he considers his English too poor, the Consort because it is his nature to say little, or so Tukulito interprets, while the Queen, who is just a little taller than Tukulito and similarly large of head and small of shoulder, asks question after question about herself and her country and her impressions of England, then listens to her brief, careful answers with unblinking interest, her head cocked slightly to one side and her small hands holding her cutlery still, just above her plate, till Tukulito has finished speaking. We wish to know all of our subjects well, she says, and you are the first whom we have met from the northerly parts of our America. Tukulito is fascinated and a little amused by how the Queen seems to speak both for herself and for her silent husband. She likes the Queen and can feel the Queen’s liking for her, although the woman has a peculiar way of smiling, somehow keeping her upper teeth covered with the skin above her lip, which barely moves even when she is talking. And were you afraid in Her Majesty’s presence? she is asked later by Mr Bowlby and by others. This question she finds puzzling. But the Queen, she be a kind lady, she answers in her still-imperfect English. Her house be a very fine place, sir, I assure you.
You come back to Purificación, Señor Kruger … ?
It’s not clear if this is a question.
Someday, I hope, says Kruger.
The boy adds earnestly, You must try not to be killed!
Kruger smiles. I’ve always been a bit of a failure in that line.
¿Mande?
Being killed. You go back to the village now, Mateo. Goodbye, Mateo.
And the boy answers in Sina—farewell, or return soon?—with tears magnifying his eyes.
The peaks of the mountains are still in winter, dark timber in the folds. Keep the sierra always to your right, Jacinta told him, drawing from her apron a roll of corn tortillas wrapped in a clean rag. Turning back to her tub of laundry she’d added, Someday you may be sent up here again, to spy over us. Maybe then you can give back what you have taken.
Groton, Connecticut, June 1877
THE AFTERNOON OF MR CHUSLEY’S VISIT is so windless and still that you can hear, through the open front window, the faint clicking and crunching of the paper wasps chewing at the wood of the porch columns. In this heat she is too weary to go out and shoo them away. Her visitor seems not to notice them. The noise, to her, is increasingly pronounced, aggressive as the buzzing of a horsefly trapped in the long funnel-front of the bonnet she always wears outside at this time of year, to keep her face from darkening in the strong, southern sun of New England. She has not been beyond the front gate for some days. The vegetable patch is suffering. Her pallor is not far off Mr Chusley’s; as if this white world is fully inducting her at last, while nature, in the form of the wasps, deer mice, and the scouring effects of another hard winter’s passage, takes the house back to nothing, bit by bit.
It is not easy to concentrate on Mr Chusley’s words. In part this is an effect of his stutter, but also there is her own grasp of English, which seems curiously reduced. Lately, when she speaks to Mrs Budington or the Reverend Cowan, stray words in Inuktitut will insert themselves in place of the intended English. Her skin may be lightening, but that older world is returning for her. She knows she is dying. She assumes her visitors must see it as well. Still, she has dressed properly for this visit, in a brown delaine dress with milk lace collar and cuffs, a brimless hat of black straw, cocked with hatpins at a jaunty angle, a sprig of baby’s breath on the crown. How she will miss her southern clothing, the variety and complexity of it, the slow, delicious ritual of dressing, even the corsets. …
As Mr Chusley chatters nervously, the parlour behind him half-revolves and returns, revolves and returns, as if suspended from the ceiling by a chain. There is the crackle of the paper wasps’ chewing. Beyond Copps’s knoll, now green in young maize, vast-piled sumptuous summer clouds pillow upward over the Atlantic, invisible a mile to the south. I hope he will find his own place down there, in the hot countries. Her visitor is trying to speak, she realizes, about Punnie’s playing.
Now now, now I think I know what it was. The pup, piece her hands were playing, on her, her little coverlet. At the end.
Please have more coffee, sir. I do wish these were better.
No—w—wonderful!
They are yesterday’s. I had no more powder. I have some of Daboll’s soda crackers, if you …
His hand lurches out, apparently to grasp and reassure her own, but then it stops, trembling, tentative, as if looking for something, cream or sugar. He begins to move the short, red-bitten fingers slightly, as if at a keyboard—as if he’d meant to do this all along, a demonstration! She watches the hand in remote absorption. His sentences are clipped as he tries to outrun his stutter.
Even then I knew. But dared not believe. I, I … I had only shown her the music. Schumann! She’d not played it!
Yes, sir.
I’d not taught her, you, you. You understand she’d scarcely seen it! Yet, somehow she …
He looks at her urgently, as if for assistance. His soft brown eyes shine uncharacteristically. Wide and red-edged eyes. Moved now, she extends her hand. She touches the doughy, hairless back of his hand. It’s as if the touch releases him:
Oh—what we have both lost, Hannah!
She looks down instantly, catching her breath, trying to hold herself in.
Indeed, sir.
After some seconds: Forgive me, Hannah. I had no, no. Had no right.
Not at all, sir. Please, I am quite well.
Only, you see. Only—you see when I’m with you I feel. I feel. He pauses, takes a breath, then blurts the rest as if in angry defiance of his impediment:
I feel I am in the presence of something strong beyond my understanding!
After a pause filled with the weird sizzling din of the wasps, she says, I am really not so strong these days, sir. Then she regrets the words, surprised she has uttered them. Perspiration is dewing on her scalp under the hat. She seems to detect the hard cool edge of the hatpin against her scalp.
I’m in love with you, Hannah.
I should not have said that, sir, she says, referring to her own last statement; then his declaration reaches her, seconds late. Mr Kruger’s declaration returns to her, too.
Of course! says Mr Chusley, scarlet to his hairline. Of course I should not have! I am so—I am sorry, Hannah.
That is not what I mean, sir.
She ought to have gone with him, perhaps, into the rope locker aboard the Tigress. For her husband has abandoned her. Perhaps he has a new family up there.
I am sorry, her guest repeats. Please. He rises from his chair— a small, soft, clean-shaven man in a rumpled suit and poorly tied cravat—and stumps across the parlour to the spinet.
May I please, please—may I play for you? Schumann’s “Träumerei.”
Or perhaps he is dead.
Apparently she has answered because her guest is on the bench, hunchbacked over the keyboard, playing with eloquence. Outside a brougham or buggy passes with a clatter of wheels and a beat of hoofs. The tune shifts constantly from major to minor to seventh to suspended chords: not so much like the dreaming of the title as like actual life. This sad bachelor has doted on her for several years—perhaps because she has never shown any impatience when he stutters out his words. Her compassion swells with the tears she constrains as he plays Punnie’s final song, though there are notes besides compassion in this heart’s chord: a clear note of anger at her husband, another of loneliness, notes of listless apathy, surrender and, strangest of all, a faint high note of desire. As sometimes when she works the treadle, thighs rubbing, and feels the hum of the machine deep in her lap. She is almost delirious, worsening. This must be how it feels to be drunk. Uncaring of all consequences. She can see no reason not to be generous to such a kind, and famished, man. The reasons have all disappeared. She rises, still dizzy but not heavy of limb, in fact she feels almost weightless, lets the rolling chords and melody float her across the parlour to Mr Chusley’s side. He looks up, the tune dying under his slowing fingers, as she places her ring hand on his shoulder.
Enough, sir. Do come with me, sir.
Hannah! he says.
His panting breath smells of coffee and cloves.
Some while later she asks if he would see himself out. In an agony of self-consciousness he is fumbling to re-tie his black cravat; whatever she tries to look at becomes the spindle around which everything else whirls and slurs. She feels she can’t move from where she lies under the sheets. Move or meet his serious brown eyes, which for their part seem unable to meet her own.
I shall ask her, sir, she says. When I meet her again.
Hannah? He kneels beside her, his pale brow furrowed.
I shall ask her if it was the piece she was playing. When I meet her again, in my people’s quvianaqtuvik. And she thinks: For I’ll not be permitted to enter the white one, not now.
Hannah—I’ll call on you, to, to. Tomorrow. If I might.
Tavvaavutit, she tells him, as a goodbye. Though in fact the word is only a general form of salute; in her tongue there is really no word for goodbye.
By the next morning something has changed. Her lungs feel bloated with a damp, cold humour, like thickly settled salt fog. The fever is worse, her sputum streaked with blood. She is aching, too weak to launder the handkerchiefs, as on the ice floe, how difficult it was to keep clean, when she was on her moon, at least before the hunger stopped the bleeding. The shame of it sometimes. As if in punishment, she thinks, this weakness … though the fever’s drift makes it seem that her strange liaison with Mr Chusley was but a figment. Or is this punishment, again, for stealing on the floe? Her mind struggles to keep occasions and causes separate. Famished on the ice, on the shores of sleep, there was this same oblique, floating, phantasmal quality to her reflections on her theft of the stores. Such reflections were rare, and the awareness of her actions would always come over her like a surprise recollection—a surprise that would seem to want to be forgotten, that would insist on its own fragile implausibility. This cannot possibly be you. (But for this child, there is no law I would not violate, no consequence I would not face.)
A rapping comes, the distant front door, a week’s journey from the bed, through the bedroom door, along a tedious sequence of cold and richly appointed, palatial rooms, then down a series of corridors, rounded like gloomy iglu tunnels, to the parlour. It will be Pretty Mother Sarah, bringing the mail. Tukulito cannot face her. Again the thought of yesterday comes, and of her present weakness, which feels vaguely shameful … everything vague now. Here in the South she has always had to be stronger than any strength, observed as she is by those who expect so little of her colour. She tries to cough but she is too weak, or the thickening fog in her lungs too heavy, a new condition, she can only wheeze. They think of Indian squaws and Esquimau women as weak—weak in virtue. For years she has been interpreting the insinuations and aboard ship overhearing the men. If Mr Chusley should report anything, it will bring further shame on herself, her family, her people. Yet this fear lacks immediacy, seems muffled in sacks of bedstraw. Her thoughts are thinking or dreaming themselves, at two or three removes from her, like some other woman’s thoughts infiltrating the cavities of her ears. … Yet that woman can only be herself. A woman alone in a way she has never felt before. The Americans will turn from her, surely, and she is lost to her own people; yet this too seems to matter less and less, she is drifting free of all human concerns on the shrunken, private ice floe of the bed, which is yawing, listing on its sea of fever. The bedroom door gapes, Mrs Budington fills the threshold, dark and large, in her hand a yellow envelope. Hannah! Pretty Mother, come in. The woman stoops awkwardly, sits heavily on the side of the bed, sets a cold dry hand on Tukulito’s forehead. Lord help us. Hannah? Do you hear me? I shall be back soon, with the doctor. The room is empty. Then, as if only a moment has passed, the room is full, it’s not a large room, with Mrs Budington, and the physician, and Mr Chusley, him as well. The physician wears spectacles too little for his stout pink face, he is stripped to shirtsleeves and a shad-bellied waistcoat. How perfectly round and healthy the body packed into his waistcoat! By the door Mr Chusley sits stiffly, a crease between his widened eyes, his derby in his hands, kneading and twisting the curled brim; as though he is attending the bedside of a neighbour’s child whom he has run over in his shay. A thoughtful man, always. She sees he will say nothing. Oh, sir, you must feel no guilt in this matter.
I think, think she may be a. Awaking, Dr Schader.
I believe not, sir. This is the worst case I have seen in much time.
Shall I bring more water, Doctor? Pretty Mother’s voice, subdued.
Per per, permit me. Please.
If you would, sir. The doctor’s accent is heavily German.
Can you hear me, dear? Hannah?
Yes, she whispers. Pretty Mother. Forgive me.
Hannah?
She feels Mrs Budington’s face inclined to hers. The surplus heat it contributes is too much, she is burning up so, wanting space, cool space and water.
Please, she tries to say, a further towel.
Is he bringing the water yet, Doctor?
Ja, ja, he is at the pump, I see him.
Forgive me, Mother. The food I stole.
Hush, my dear! You, ever steal a thing? It’s only the fever.
Tukulito opens her eyes. Mrs Budington’s bitten lips part expectantly.
Not from Mr Daboll, Tukulito tries to say, but only the last word comes clear.
Daboll’s shop? Rest, dear, please! You are the most honest creature God ever made!
She may have said Devil, the doctor says in an undertone perfectly clear to Tukulito. They are quite superstitious, these people, one hears. Thank you, Chusley.
You are mistaken, Dr Schader, Mrs Budington says. Hannah is different.
But, she has here in the bed with her this fetish!
It’s an Esquimau doll, Doctor.
It was her daw, daw, her daughter’s doll, Mr Chusley tells the doctor, with force.
Put one other pillow under her back. Like so. And he whispers: If she cannot cough, she will drown from within. Chusley, bring more camphor oil.
It’s in the kitchen, by the washbasin, Mrs Budington says.
God help her, the doctor mutters.
Some would call that a superstition, Tukulito hears Mr Kruger remark, as plainly as if he were here in the room by her ear.
Could they be, Mother? The ones from the ice. I do hear him. And the lieutenant …
Don’t you fret about Tyson, Hannah. You must try to cough.
But the cloths, they all be soiled, Mother!
Here I have a clean one, my dear.
Ah, qujannamiik!
Her English is regressing now, back through the years of steady, laborious gain, much as Punnie’s speech regressed near the end, the child reverting to words and making sounds that she had not formed since she was six, then four, then two—sounds she had entirely forgotten—as she retraced her way backward to her birth time, and the absence before birth, her mother, helpless, watching her recede.
Odd sounds are coming from inside her. When things go badly wrong, naturally one wonders about broken taboos. Now one would listen to an angakoq’s words, as much as this physician’s, although the whiter, southerly districts of her being still mistrust those primitive ways. The borders between districts are breaking down, however. All moments, past or near-present, are now present, like the hours of her conversion, which she undertook partly for Father Hall and partly because she loved the Baby Jesus so, in the stories. Sweet Jesus … Lamb, she whispers experimentally, and Pretty Mother loudly, as if in triumph, relays the words to the others: Sweet Jesus, come, she said!
Some time after the birth of King William, her second baby, she and Father Hall discover a woman entombed in an iglu. Queen Emma, the woman is called. She has given stillbirth to a tiny infant, hard as soapstone, and has tried to conceal the birth, burying this little statue in secret, and so she has been entombed with three ancient women of her tribe who are chanting to her night and day, forcing her to fast, to purge her of her transgression. She is dying. Father Hall tries to intervene, hectoring them about the White God’s forgiveness and the cruel error of their superstitions, and Tukulito translates it all to the crones, at first diplomatically, muting the man’s bluster, but later, as Queen Emma sinks into delirium and as she, Tukulito, comes to agree with Father Hall and to deplore these savage rituals, she translates directly and with passion. To no avail. The woman is dead. Angry and defiant, Tukulito resolves to accept Father Hall’s repeated advice and abandon some of the tight constraints on her own diet as a nursing mother, beginning to take cold water and bread and coffee along with the traditional stewed caribou meat. Hall is elated with this victory of civilized good sense over brutish shamanism, though when little King William himself sickens and dies, Tukulito endures agonized second thoughts, allowing the vindicated and spiteful angakoq to punish her.
Some time has passed, a new mist of voices in the room. The feeling in her chest is colder and thicker, sluggish, less like fog than like the grey pash of melt-ice. The Reverend Cowan is here. From far away a faint, drilling hum, as of massed paper wasps, then horses and a vehicle, hoofs clapping, the shimmering tinkle of bells, and though she cannot open her eyes, memory furnishes the scene, on disembarking with Mr Bowlby in Hull after crossing the ocean, she fifteen years old, Ebierbing eighteen, and among all the marvels that throng their eyes in the crammed hours that follow, none can rival the spectacle of enormous horses, a twosome drawing the buggy of a merchant, the sun flashing on the bend of their arched necks and gleaming along their glossy sides to curve again on their great, round haunches. The biggest, most naked land-creatures they have ever seen: slim legs moving quickly, like trotting caribou, hoofs scratching sparks off the ground which is floored with stones like a tight-cobbled beach. Turf-coloured manes and tails dancing in the wind, their harness trimmed with small brass bells and yellow tassels, while behind them, scarcely less marvellous, a shining machine clatters, a sort of dogsled high up on wheels, like the wheels of the cannon on Mr Bowlby’s ship, but larger, blood-red, webbed with bone-like rods like a bloodstained crystal of snow … and this wondrous sled has a glistening black roof as well. …
Soon after their wedding in Mr Bowlby’s vast parlour they are in a room even grander, in London, seated at a gleaming table around which half of the folks they knew in Cumberland Sound could have been gathered, dining with the Queen and her husband, the German Consort, and the two men are silent, Ebierbing because he considers his English too poor, the Consort because it is his nature to say little, or so Tukulito interprets, while the Queen, who is just a little taller than Tukulito and similarly large of head and small of shoulder, asks question after question about herself and her country and her impressions of England, then listens to her brief, careful answers with unblinking interest, her head cocked slightly to one side and her small hands holding her cutlery still, just above her plate, till Tukulito has finished speaking. We wish to know all of our subjects well, she says, and you are the first whom we have met from the northerly parts of our America. Tukulito is fascinated and a little amused by how the Queen seems to speak both for herself and for her silent husband. She likes the Queen and can feel the Queen’s liking for her, although the woman has a peculiar way of smiling, somehow keeping her upper teeth covered with the skin above her lip, which barely moves even when she is talking. And were you afraid in Her Majesty’s presence? she is asked later by Mr Bowlby and by others. This question she finds puzzling. But the Queen, she be a kind lady, she answers in her still-imperfect English. Her house be a very fine place, sir, I assure you.
