The Navigator of New York (15 page)

The sky was cloudless, the moon almost full. All that remained of the wind that all day had been blowing from the west was a faint breeze.

I stood on the hill, looking down at the blue-white ice. The ice. A world in which everything was made of the same substance. I tried to imagine a world of wood. A world of rock. A world of salt. A world of coal. The closest thing to it was the desert, but the desert did not have this infinite variety of shapes. Like a great city in the early stages of construction. Or the late ones of disintegration.

It was an eerily beautiful sight. Would it still seem so halfway through “night never-ending”? For a man whose mind was in such a torment as Francis Stead’s had been, to be part of a small band of expeditionaries with nothing but
that
as far as you could see in all directions might be unbearable. To be, to believe yourself to be, the one thing in the universe not made of ice. I could not help thinking of Francis Stead out there alone in his last moments, wandering about on the ice, oblivious, dazed, caught up in the panic that for men lost in the darkness and the wilderness meant the end was near. He had risen from his pallet on the floor of Redcliffe House and, without waking anyone—Dr. Cook, his fellows in their sleeping bags, the Pearys in their room behind the drapes, the dogs outside, the Eskimos whose cluster of igloos you could see from Redcliffe House—had walked off onto the glacier.

I told myself that I should stop thinking about Francis Stead and think instead of Dr. Cook and all the other men, and of Mrs. Peary, who had
not
walked away from Redcliffe House.

Facing away from the lighthouses at Fort Amherst and Cape Spear, on the far side of the Narrows, I listened. I heard a drawn-out
creaking, then a snap, as if a tree had been slowly bent until it broke. A series of booms from somewhere down the coast as a fault line formed. What might have been a massive sheet of glass smashing into pieces, then a scattering of small explosions as shards of ice at intervals fell back to earth. So many sounds it seemed there should have been some corresponding lights, but there were none. Only the ice, the strange blue-white cast of it. Illumoonation. The lighthouse beacons flashed and the ice was for an instant super-illuminated, as though it had been photographed.

“There is no end to the tricks the ice plays on the ears at night.” I doubted that any listener had ever been more receptive to such tricks than I was. It was as though a mass of animals that by day hid themselves among the caves and warrens of the ice were moving about, rearranging things to suit themselves or tending the ice in some seemingly random but necessary fashion, compelled to do so by an instinct they were helpless to resist.

I held up my lantern and swung it like a censer, back and forth, as people did on stormy nights to signal ships at sea.

I remembered more of Dr. Cook’s letter: “The city-dweller imagines the polar night to be a misery, but the unbroken darkness has its charms. The pleasure of feeling on one’s face a draught of warmth when one goes indoors. The sight, from outside the ship, of the lights within. The sight, from outside an igloo, of the light within, which makes the dome of ice translucent, opalescent. The moonlight silver on the seas of ice, the clarity of stars. There is a naked fierceness in the scenes, a wildness in the storms, a sublimity of silence in the night that one appreciates despite the gloom. The attractions of the polar night are not to be written in the language of a people who live in a land of sunshine and flowers. In the polar night, one occupies a world where animal sentiments take over and those of the timid human are forgotten.”

I could still see the moon when it began to snow, so I assumed that a sea-effect flurry was passing. There were more and more sounds from below, as if the ice creatures, able to see the end of their labours, were making one last concerted push. From all directions came the
sounds of eruption and collapse, of creaking, as if beams of ice were being hoisted up or, top-heavy, were snapping off and landing with crashes that gave rise to new effects.

I swung the lantern, raised it higher and swung it in a wider arc.

The wire slipped from my hand and the lantern fell, the flame in it still burning until it hit the rocky slope below. I heard the glass break, saw a small spurt of flame, a patch of rock uplit for an instant, and then it was dark again and silent, except for the droning clatter of the ice.

I looked up and could not see the moon. Snow was falling heavily now, straight down because there was no wind. It, too, was invisible, but I could feel it on my upturned face. I could see nothing, not the lights of the city or those of the two quarantined hospitals halfway down the hill.

I would never find my way back down safely without a lantern. Perhaps not even with one. If I wandered too far left, I would step straight off the cliff, too far right and I would wind up in the woods. Or on one of the ponds, where what was left of the ice would not bear my weight. Even if by chance I kept to the trail, the slope was so steep and rocky that to stumble and pitch forward to either side might prove fatal.

I shouted “Help” as loud as I could, thinking that I might be heard by someone in the fishing village called the Battery, which lay in the western lee of the hill. But there was no reply.

It was cold already and would get much colder, too cold to spend the night without some shelter. I thought of the blockhouse from which the signal flags were raised. I knew it was off to my right, though I could not make it out.

Remembering that there was a small fence around the blockhouse that extended to the ridge, I got down on my hands and knees and felt my way along the ridge with my left hand. After a few minutes, I nudged the fence with my right shoulder, felt my way along the fence to the gate, which I opened, and then stood up. I knew that I was within a few feet of the blockhouse, but still I could not see it. I
walked slowly forward with my arms raised until my hands brought up against what turned out to be the door.

With a stone that I pried loose from the ground, I broke the lock on the door and went inside. Feeling my way around in the dark, I found a still-warm woodstove and, beside it, a small supply of kindling, but no real firewood. I threw the kindling in the stove, from which there was soon light enough to see. On a table against the near wall, there were lanterns, some candles and a box of matches. I considered lighting one of the lanterns and attempting a descent, but thought better of it. I lit a candle. The fire in the stove would not last long. There was a day-bed, a bunk where, on their breaks, the men who ran the blockhouse must have taken naps. I sat down on the bunk with my back against the wall. In the middle of the floor was a ladder that led up to a trapdoor in the ceiling. I presumed the men climbed up there to hoist the merchant flags. In the far wall there were slit-like windows from which they must have scanned the sea for ships.

I told myself that I was not lost, just temporarily stranded, knowing exactly how long I would have to wait, certain that what I was waiting for would come. I was not even in such straits as I would be in daily on my first trip up north with Dr. Cook. I recalled with pride that I had not panicked when the lantern fell from my hand. I hoped that one day I could relate this feat of self-preservation to Dr. Cook.

What to tell Uncle Edward and Aunt Daphne the next day, that was all I had to worry about. But what
could
I tell them except the truth?

I slid farther down on the bunk until my head was on the pillows. It was cold, so I crawled beneath the blankets. What would Aunt Daphne think, what would she do, when she got home and saw that I was gone?

I fell asleep and had no dreams. Perversely, my body did not wake me until later than it did at home. When I awoke, the fire in the stove was out. But there was light at the window in the wall that faced the sea, and not the faint light of dawn, but that of morning.

I got up and looked out the window. The sky was overcast. The
ice, like the foothills of some mountain range, stood out in stark relief against the sky. I guessed, from how fresh it looked on the ground, that the snow had only recently stopped.

Just as I turned around, the door of the blockhouse swung open. A portly, long-bearded man in coveralls looked at me, then at the unmade bunk.

“You’re the boy they’re looking for,” he said. “The Stead boy. Tried to run away, did ya?”

I shook my head and told him about losing the lantern.

“Why’d you come up here in the first place?”

To see the ice, I almost said. To listen to the ice. I thought better of it. I shrugged. He did likewise.

“Well, I s’pose I’ll have to take you home,” he said.

He did so by a circuitous route through the streets of St. John’s, presumably so that as many people as possible would see that it was him who had found me, had found “the Stead boy,” so that he could tell his story to as many people as possible with the living proof of its veracity right there by his side.

I sat beside him on the buckboard of his wagon. I would have bolted from it, except I knew that I would be pursued and it would serve only to enlarge my reputation.

“Who’s that with you, Charlie?” an old woman asked.

“The Stead boy. Found him in the blockhouse. There all night, he was.”

“In the blockhouse. What was he doing in the blockhouse all night?”

“Wouldn’t say,” Charlie said.

“Is he all right?”

“Seems to be. As all right as he ever was.”

“That’s a sin for you.”

“Are you all right, Devlin?” a man in a bowler hat like Uncle Edward’s asked, saying my name as if he knew me, though I did not know him. I presumed he had heard of the search. I nodded.

A man riding horseback drew up beside us.

“Is that him?” he said.

“That’s him,” Charlie said.

“I’ll go on ahead to Dr. Stead’s,” the rider said and went off at a gallop.

Word of where I was found, and that I had been missing all night, spread quickly after that.

“In the blockhouse. All night long. Went up there after dark,” one woman told another, as if discretion would be wasted on me.

“What were you doing all night in the blockhouse, Stead?” a boy I went to school with asked. I ignored him.

“That’s Devlin Stead,” a small boy said, as if he had heard of me many times but had never seen me before.

In our neighbourhood, the door of every house was open. People were standing outside, arms folded, talking, shaking their heads and saying, “Poor thing,” “Poor soul.” Already aware that I’d been found, they stopped talking when they saw me, looked at me as if I had not so much been found as captured.

On either side of the front door, the lamps were still lit. Had been all night long, no doubt.

I opened the door.

“DEVLIN?”

Uncle Edward.

I said nothing, and perhaps because of that, he did not come out to meet me. When I turned the corner from the vestibule, I saw him sitting in the armchair that faced the door, his face just visible by the light of what was left of the fire in the grate. I felt as if, by not answering when he spoke my name, I had confessed to something.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“Up on the hill,” I said.

“I was out half the night in the carriage, searching the streets for you. Every time I came back without you, she sent me out again.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Up on the hill.”

“Yes.”

“There have been men out looking for you since the sun came up. Daphne, too. She asked me to stay here in case you came back. She said she couldn’t stand to just sit here and wait any longer. I’m not even sure if she knows yet that you’ve been found.”

“I was in the blockhouse,” I said, explaining to him as I had to Charlie about the lantern and having to break the lock on the blockhouse door.

“ ‘The Stead boy is lost.’ That’s what they’ve been saying. All over town. ‘The Stead boy is lost.’ They meant more than gone astray, of course, though they’d never say so in front of me or Daphne. ‘The Stead boy.’ It makes you sound like some sort of freak. It makes anyone whose name is Stead sound like one. They wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that someone found you in the harbour. Nor would I. All night long Daphne kept saying you might be with some girl or you might have got drunk. I felt like telling her that those were reasons for which
normal
boys went missing. But I pretended that both were possibilities. I knew it would turn out to be something like this. Brought home after a night in the blockhouse. Brought home on the buckboard of a wagon at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. Brought home from Signal Hill about the same time they brought your mother home from there. That’s what our neighbours must be thinking.”

“Don’t talk about my mother,” I said.

How easy it would have been to shock him into silence, to ask him why he was so afraid of Dr. Cook or tell him what was in the letters.

“Why did you go up there?” he said.

“To see the ice,” I said. “To listen to the ice.”

“To see it in the dark. To listen to it. To listen to ice,” he said. “Your mother was twenty-five before she started doing things like that.”

“I told you not to talk about my mother.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Why are you helping Dr. Cook and me?” I said.

“I’m not helping anyone,” he said. “Now go upstairs. If I get started on you, God knows what I’ll be saying by the time Daphne gets here.”

When Aunt Daphne came home and was told by Uncle Edward of my return, she ran upstairs and into my room, where I was lying down. She fell to her knees beside the bed, crying, kissing and hugging me all at once.

“Oh, Devvie,” she said. “Thank God. Thank God. Where were you, sweetheart? Are you all right? Where have you been all night? I was so worried. I thought all kinds of things.”

I told her about the blockhouse, about going to the hill to hear the ice. She put her hand on my forehead as if nothing but a fever could account for such a story.

“You weren’t thinking of … you weren’t thinking of doing any harm to yourself or anything like that, were you?” she said.