The Seal Wife. Kathryn Harrison

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СКАЧАТЬ wet surface of her eyes, and forgot what he had been saying. Oh, yes, he’d come north for the government land auction and he’d built the weather station from the same green lumber from which her house was made. But while she had only one window, he had windows all around. If she’d come outside with him, come with him to his station house, she’d see that the panes were six feet wide and as thick as this. To illustrate, he held his thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

      But the woman, who allowed him to enter whenever he pleased, would not follow him so much as a foot beyond her door, and so they never walked together, never even stepped outside to watch the birds fly overhead.

      Because it is his vocation, he often spoke to her of weather and its measurement. He is building a kite, a box kite as big as her bedroom, and to show her he paced off its dimensions. It will go up for miles and tell him what he can’t determine from instruments on the ground.

      There are tornadoes in Missouri, he told her, his finger stirring the air before her face, and he told her that as a child he walked through fields sown with shards of his grandmother’s plates. A storm took and emptied her cupboards, carried off spoons and bowls and jars of peaches, and spun them over rivers and across roads, clear into the next county. “What do you think of that?” he said.

      In Alaska, he’d traveled as far north as Talkeetna; he went with a trapper who accepted ten silver dollars to serve as his guide. The journey inland took three weeks, but coming back the wind picked up, and the trapper stuck a sail on his sled. They whistled down the frozen river, his ears singing with cold inside his parka hood, and he tried to keep his eyes open, because what he saw was not like anything he’d seen before: pink snow and blue forest, the kind of thing you expect in a dream but not while awake.

      “Bigelow,” he said, pointing to himself, clapping his hand on his chest, but he couldn’t get her to repeat his name.

      “Promise me something,” he said. They were sitting side by side on her bed, dressed only in their boots, and when he stroked her knee, she looked down at his hand. In his mind, Bigelow ran through women—girls—he’d known. Karen, to whom he’d written a letter each day; Molly, very pretty, often looking past him to find her own reflection; Rachel, too tall, but it hadn’t really mattered; Anne, reading a novel. They seemed even farther from him than the cities where they lived, and it was the attempt to conjure their faces that measured this distance. How tiny they were, like well-wishers waving from a shrinking dock.

      Five days to sail north from Seattle. Bigelow disembarked in Anchorage, and by the time he’d thought to turn himself around and look back toward the ship that had brought him, it was gone. Anchorage—a place for ships to pause, to drop anchor for only as long as it might take to disgorge freight and passengers. To fill their holds with otter, mink, and sable, skins so fresh they still bled, packed in salt to keep them from spoiling.

      “Promise me there’s no one else.”

      This time he whispered the words, and the woman looked at him. She frowned and she put her fingers to her lips. The knuckles were so smooth, so sleek, that he wondered if northern people weren’t, like the animals, insulated against the cold by a layer of yellow, silky fat.

      October November December. January February March. April May. Half of June. Long enough for him to begin to take it for granted: he would knock, she would open.

      Whatever else occupies him, Bigelow’s thoughts return to the Aleut woman. He imagines their reunion, his passionate reentry into her house, into her arms, her body. But these fantasies don’t get as far as the bed, the bed piled with skins. They’re interrupted by the picture he has of her, sitting, staring, her hands folded in her lap, her thick black braid hanging over one shoulder.

      Panicked—what’s to become of him, what will he do? what will he do if she continues to refuse to see him?—he forces himself to let a day pass, and then another. He makes himself wait for what seems to him a long time, enough time for a woman to recover from whatever has upset her. Then he returns to her door.

      But he finds it unlocked and inside her house nothing, just a pale spot on the floorboards where her bed used to be, and another under the missing stove. In one corner is his gramophone and, stacked neatly in their glassine envelopes, the Caruso and Tetrazzini recordings that he cranked the handle to play for her.

      He walks around her two rooms. He runs his fingers along the walls until he comes to the place where she tacked up an illustrated advertisement for corsets, the fourteen styles available from the American Corset Company in Dayton, Ohio. Why she put it up or what she thought of it he cannot guess.

      He stares at the advertisement, touches it, mouthing the names of the styles—Delineator, Posture Fix, Widow-Maker. He turns and with his back against the wall, he slides down, staring from one empty room into the other. He starts to cry, stops himself when he hears the choked noise he is making in the silence of her house. So small, so inadequate for the grief he feels.

PART ONE

       Chapter 1

      JULY 10, 1915. He arrives in Anchorage without so much as a heavy coat or felt boot liners. Without matches, knife, or snow glasses. Having never held a gun. Sent north by the government, he makes the mistake of assuming he is going somewhere instead of nowhere: a field of mud under flapping canvas tents, two thousand railroad workers and no place to put them, a handful of women, and hour-long lines to buy dinner or a loaf of bread. A vast cloud of tiny, biting flies has settled in like fog, and mosquitoes swarm in predatory black columns. After a week he doesn’t itch anymore, but his skin feels thick, and the mirror in his shaving kit shows an unfamiliar face, cheeks puffed up red and hard and eyes narrow like a native’s. “Bigelow,” he says, to hear his own name. Silently, he tells the red face not to worry. Not to worry so much. Who doesn’t feel disoriented when he moves to a new place?

      The surveyors who come north for the land auction look at the official blueprint he carries with him, stamped in one corner by the Weather Bureau, and then roll it back up and drop it in its tube. They give him a parcel of land by the creek and some advice on how best to spend his meager building allowance.

      “Hire Indians,” they say. “And don’t pay them in liquor.”

      So he uses a crew of Chugach to knock together the two-story station, a square room on the ground for bed and stove and table, and above it a square observation room outfitted with windows on all sides. Getting the carpenters is easy. For a fee, an agent negotiates the wage and the length of a workday. Directing the five men is another matter.

      Given to understand, both by the Weather Bureau and by friends in Seattle with experience in Alaska, that Chinook is the lingua franca of the north, Bigelow owns a pocket dictionary of the jargon. Including translations of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Pledge of Allegiance, it is no more than a booklet, and he memorized the few hundred equivalents on board ship as he sailed toward his new home, expecting to make himself understood by Indians, as well as by Russians and Swedes, anyone he might encounter there. But either he speaks it incorrectly—mispronouncing the words, stringing them in the wrong order—or the Chugach pretend ignorance.

      “T’zum pe-pah tum-tum.” Bigelow shows them the government station plan. Picture idea is what he’s said, the closest he can get to blueprint, a drawing he wants them to follow.

      The men don’t answer, they don’t nod. Instead, they laugh, as if they’ve never seen anything as funny as the weather observatory he intends СКАЧАТЬ