Afterlands (31 page)

Helplessly deflected by the praise, Tyson allows himself to be led off.

Groton, Connecticut, March 1877

L
AST NOVEMBER THE CHILD’S WALNUT COFFIN
was lowered into the clay of Starr Hill, like a small lifeboat over the side of a foundering ship. March is the mirror-season of November. Same winds, stripped hardwoods, scuttering sepia leaves, stubble fields; each year the funeral will have two anniversaries. She has not been up to Starr Hill for several days, and this morning she missed the Reverend Cowan’s Sunday service. Through her parlour window a baluster of thin, late afternoon sunlight slopes in. The window looks onto Pleasant Valley Road, near the Four Corners, on the town’s scattered outskirts. Across the road, beyond a split-rail fence, an acre or so of Mr Copps’s farm: a fallow hillside with gravelly snow lingering in the hollows.

She has been too tired to walk up to Starr Hill. Just a mile there and back. The cough is steadily gaining on her, as it did on the child, and the grieving part of Tukulito (and what part of her, really, is not grieving?) almost welcomes this progress. True, there’s still the corner of her heart that hopes to see her husband again, yet at the same time she fears his grief, fears to relive through him the first week of her own wild grief, when her heart, it seemed, was being footed out, the way the hunters of Cumberland Sound, having killed a mother caribou, will kill the fawn: running it down, then pressing a boot firmly over the ribcage until the pressure stills the heart.

On Monday afternoon Mrs Budington comes to her with a letter from Mexico; for the last few weeks the woman has been picking up any mail for Tukulito, at Daboll’s store. This is a favour Tukulito can accept because she can repay it with immediate hospitality. As they sit in the draughty parlour sipping tea, served with the currant scones Tukulito has baked for the visit, Mrs Budington attempts to interest her in the envelope’s odd, furzy yellow paper, and the cochineal postmark, which looks, she says, as though it were made with a child’s potato stamp. (Tukulito’s throat narrows and throbs.) A former schoolma’am, she’s very tall, big-shouldered and -bosomed, with a warm brown tone to her unwrinkled skin. She wears hefty schooner-like hats over chestnut hair streaked with grey, and leans well forward over any table as if impatient to be right upon her companions as she condoles, exhorts, instructs, protests, her gaze fervent and fixed. Forgetting herself she will wrap her large hands around her teacup, as if for warmth, while Tukulito always holds the little handle as she learned to do in England: pinched lightly between thumb and forefinger, the pinkie daintily extended.

Do open the letter, Hannah! the woman finally says, with an almost manic vivacity. Our poor Mr Kruger—driven out of his adopted country by that awful liar! But
we
shan’t be driven off, shall we, Hannah?

No, ma’am. Tukulito has learned to say nothing of Mr Tyson, simply allowing Mrs Budington to purge herself of the gathered acid until her natural warmth of character returns.

Well, let us hope he never gets home from his next voyage. He don’t deserve to! Maybe this time his crew will do for him properly. If only he’d taken
Micks
last time, instead of Dutchmen!

Do you care for another scone, ma’am?

They’re very good. Will you not open the letter, my dear?

Tukulito elects to interpret this pushiness as benevolent, an aspect of Mrs Budington’s desire to divert and encourage her, not the nosy fascination of a gossip. Besides, the woman can have no idea of the sentiments Mr Kruger expressed to her on the ice, and aboard the
Tigress;
nor, for that matter, of her own sentiments.

Not that his letter will make any clear reference to such things.

Ma’am, I am most anxious to hear our friend’s news, and I shall read his letter to you when next you visit—but for now I should prefer to save the letter, until such time as I have but my own poor company for amusement. Your presence here is too welcome to interrupt.

Mrs Budington’s calf-brown eyes brim with affection, but also, it seems, with admiration of Tukulito’s diplomatic eloquence. Admiration flecked with the usual surprise. The same look Tukulito used to translate from local faces when Punnie would perform her Mendelssohn.

After Mrs Budington’s departure she still does not open the letter. She will save it. She has piecework to finish: a pair of sealskin kamiks for a clam fisherman in New London, for which she has just finished chewing the skins, in the Inuit fashion, to soften them. Now she must cut and sew together the parts on her cherished machine, a Howe & Singer with a webwork cast-iron treadle. This wondrous American invention shares the front parlour, the house’s main room, with a table and chairs, the box-like cast-iron stove that she no longer troubles to keep properly fuelled, and Punnie’s spinet, a gift of the Budingtons before the
Polaris
voyage, when the Budingtons were still fairly prosperous. She may have to sell it before long. She cannot sell it. Nobody has touched the keyboard since Punnie’s death, not even the child’s piano teacher Mr Chusley, on his occasional visits, when he sucks on cloves and blushes and fidgets with his saucer and can hardly stammer more than a word.

In the two months after Punnie’s death, and especially around Christmas, visitors came often, neighbours like the Budingtons, Mr Copp, the Reverend Cowan, Mr Daboll, Dr Steiger, and Miss Crombie, the schoolma’am. The Walker sisters, Punnie’s classmates, would sometimes stop by, bringing their mother’s fresh bread-loaves and soda biscuits. But over the brunt of the winter these visits died off. A cruelly cold winter. She feels this seaboard cold in a way that she never felt cold in the north. Or could it be her increasing thinness? And Punnie alone in that snow-clad earth, wrapped in her counterpane but unprotected by her own mother. … At some point she began to avoid the front window in the morning and late afternoon when the children would chatter past on their way to and from the Skunk Lane School.

On Tuesday Mrs Budington brings another letter. On foot, she’s on her way to visit an ill friend.
Another
ill friend, is how she actually puts it (eyeing Tukulito with conspicuous concern) before catching herself, biting her underlip, her embarrassment obvious in a childlike way that both moves and amuses Tukulito, as it often does. The woman then turns her gaze sharply on the letter, which she holds by its corner like a soiled handkerchief.

If he means to invite you to return north again, do repeat your refusal, Hannah. Enough of us have set a curse on that ship, he’ll be lucky to clear Nantucket before he goes down.

I shall stay near you, Pretty Mother. (Her old name for Mrs Budington.) Won’t you come in?

But she can’t, not today. After a hurried exchange she bustles off, swift despite her size, leaning forward over the road with her skirts hiked as if fording a gutter, showing high black buttonhook boots turned out like a soldier’s as she walks.

Tukulito assumes this letter from the lieutenant must contain money, the immediate help that he promised at the end of his lecture. She feels she must not accept it. She took the train up to Hartford not to seek his help but to hear him tell their story again, and to hear him mention her Punnie, which he did, twice. And how her heart had flown at each utterance, as if at a sunlit flash of the beloved face. In a much smaller way it pleased her, too, to see the lieutenant’s own face again. She bears him no real grudge over anything he wrote in his book. She knows how the madness of winter confinement and hunger can turn any tongue strange and baleful; and in the later, crucial time, he had acted like a man, and led them all well. As for his slander of Mr Kruger, she feels that the lieutenant has hurtfully leapt to conclusions, but she also believes that Mr Kruger has made too much of things. True, he lost face, but that was several years ago: and did he not always suggest that the opinions of society meant nothing to him? In some mental crevice, perhaps, it satisfies her to find that even he cannot bear being set apart from the tribe, in shame. For now more and more she feels there is nothing but the tribe, only blood and kindred, the little nation of one’s firmest affections. And foreigners, even such good folk as her neighbours here in Groton, can only help for so long. They don’t quite understand, in the end. In illness she is losing the strength to keep her feet planted in two worlds—on two different floes. More and more difficult, to interpret herself to others. Some things she can say only in Inuktitut. Surely this is what a tribe is for.

She is adrift, then, waiting for her husband.

She opens the letter from Mr Kruger, written just after the New Year in a place called Maria Madre.

Dear Madam
,

I send my most sincere wishes for your good health, & for the renewal of your happiness. May your Husband soon return from the North to lend you the company for which you must long, in such days as this! As best I can, I share your loss & mourning still
.

As for me, I can not say where I am likely to arrive; for now, I am content to be just a traveller. It is odd that having travelled to this place so very different from the North, I am nonetheless strongly reminded of it, & of some of the people I met there, by certain sights and events, from time to time. And so dear Madam, this letter to You, which I do trust will reach Groton, & find you in the very best of Health
.

As ever, I remain your most loyal, & obedient
,

R. K
.

She reads the letter several times, then folds it and places it back in its envelope and neatly sets it down.

After some moments she carefully slits open the lieutenant’s letter. It contains a piece of vellum cardstock, tightly folded. When she opens the card, a ten-dollar bill slips out.

Dear Hannah
,

I am told you are facing certain difficulties at present. I hope a small gift will be of some help. I shall certainly write at once to the Secretery of the Navy to urge they should see to your needs better! For few have served more loyally than yourself & Joe. Again
I offer you a berth on my Florence, we sail out on June the
21.
If Joe be sailing south at the same time, the odds that we should miss him are slight, as we shall be on just the same rout & shall certainly hail & speak any other ship we incounter
.

I shall await your reply, & whatever it be, please believe Madam, I am all ways your

Most humble & devoted servant

Geo. E. Tyson

But the gift is impossible, a frustration. The sharing, the receiving of fleeting bounty that seems appropriate and utterly unshameful in the North seems unacceptable to her here. Living in the white world—even now—she must live as a white woman, asking and accepting no special favours. She is a sort of emissary, an emblem of her people, who will be judged according to her actions, perhaps even reconsidered. She knows the white world conceives of her people as brave, but also lazy, dirty, greedy, improvident. This ten-dollar bill feels like a further test of her providence and self-reliance.

Also a deep temptation. It has been months since the U.S. Fish Commission, on one of whose boats her husband now serves, has dispatched a letter with some money. The Budingtons seem all but ruined and she would not accept cash from them anyway. Meanwhile a small mortgage remains to pay on the house. Maintaining this modest house—robin’s-egg clapboard, with a parlour, a kitchen, a small bedroom and a workroom on the ground floor, a dormered-gable bedroom above—for her husband’s sake, for his homecoming, seems one of her few remaining duties. He must not return to a graveplot on Starr Hill, a few feet of earth, and nothing more.

She turns her thoughts back to him whenever the impulse to end her own pain overcomes her. If he should return to nothing but
two
graveplots! Although at times she thinks it would be no more than he deserves. To add her own death to his beloved daughter’s. She was raised to see a hunter’s chronic absences as a fact of life, but Ebierbing did not need to leave here, he had work enough as a carpenter and a fisherman; no, he wanted to go, he was restless, partly, she knows, for Cumberland Sound and partly, no doubt, for its women. His philandering has always hurt her, and was the thing that first made her determined to try living in the South, where such adventuring would be impossible—so she had confided to Father Hall. But now he is gone again anyway. And the government agency that was to have sent her a monthly portion of his pay is silent. She is afraid of what this could mean. His ship might be missing, feared lost.

She cannot bring herself to write a note of inquiry to Washington, both out of pride in her independence, and for fear they will confirm the worst—and with this recurring fear, her anger resolves back into the love she has borne for him since a girl of twelve, twenty-six years ago. Again she sees that she must not hasten her own death. Not that it would be a sin, in her own people’s eyes. In their vision, heaven is not unlike the Christian heaven, a bright and joyous realm high above, a place of eternal song and festivity, while hell, far below, is always gloomy and sunless and bitterly cold. The kind people of Cumberland Bay go to heaven, the unkind to hell. But their Afterlands differ from the white realms in one important way: any Inuk who dies by suicide will certainly go to heaven.

For some minutes she sits staring at the ragged bill, grainy, almost fuzzy with age and handling. Mr Franklin’s eyes are worn to a look of ancient blindness, as if by cataracts. At last she picks it up along with the lieutenant’s letter and passes through the small kitchen into the downstairs bedroom, where the restored escritoire—Father Hall’s writing desk—waits under the window. She can see her breath. She sits on the adjustable stool, takes one of her last envelopes from a sliding over-drawer, slips the bill into the envelope and coughs violently, too suddenly to cover her mouth, so that flecks of bloody sputum strike the front of the envelope like a spattering of red ink. She pulls a handkerchief from her apron-fold and dabs her lips, places the barely stained envelope in the wicker trash basket, and gets out another. From the lap-drawer she takes a notecard, a small bottle of indigo ink and a pen.