The North Water (28 page)

The priest goes outside to check.

“They say a week,” he says. “They're offering you a new set of furs to wear and a fair portion of the catch.”

“Tell them yes,” Sumner says.

The priest nods.

“They're good-hearted fellows, but crude and backwards, and they speak not a word of English,” he says. “You'll be able to act as a good example of the civilized virtues while you're in amongst them.”

Sumner looks at him and laughs.

“I'll be no such fucking thing,” he says.

The priest shrugs and shakes his head.

“You're a finer man than you think you are,” he tells him. “You hold your secrets tight, I know that, but I've been watching you awhile now.”

Sumner licks his lips and spits into the stove. The blob of khaki phlegm bubbles a moment, then disappears.

“Then I'd thank you to stop watching. What I may or mayn't be is my business, I think.”

“It's between you and the Lord, true enough,” the priest replies, “but I hate to see a decent man miscount himself.”

Sumner looks out of the cabin window at the two slovenly-looking Esquimaux and their piebald pack of hounds.

“You should save your good advice for those who need it most,” he says.

“It's Christ's advice I'm giving out, not my own. And if there's a man alive who doesn't need that, I've yet to meet him.”

In the morning, Sumner dons his new suit of clothes and perches himself on top of the hunters' sledge. They carry him back to their winter campground, a low complex of interlinked igloos with sledges, tent poles, drying frames, and other pieces of wood and bone scattered about on the trampled and piss-marked snow. They are greeted by an eager cluster of women and children and an uproar of barking dogs. Sumner is led into one of the larger igloos and shown a place to seat himself. The igloo is lined, top and bottom, with reindeer hides, and warmed and lit by a soapstone blubber lamp at its center. It is dank and gloomy inside and reeks of old smoke and fish oil. Others follow him in. There is laughter and talking. Sumner fills his pipe bowl and Urgang lights it for him with a taper made of whale skin. The dark-eyed children chew their finger ends and silently stare. Sumner doesn't speak to anyone or attempt to communicate by glance or gesture. If they believe he is magic, he thinks, then let them. He has no obligation to set them right, to teach them anything at all.

He watches as one of the women heats a metal saucepan full of seal blood over the lamp. When the blood is steaming hot, she removes the pan from the low flame and passes it around. Each person drinks, then passes it on. It is not a rite or ritual, Sumner understands, it is just their way of taking food. When the pan reaches him he shakes his head; when they press it on him he takes it, sniffs, then gives it to the man on his right. They offer him a piece of raw seal liver instead, but he turns it down also. He realizes that he is offending them now; he notices the flickers of sadness and confusion in their eyes, and wonders whether it would be easier, better, to concede. When the pan comes round again, he accepts it and drinks. The taste is not unpleasant, he has eaten worse. It reminds him of an oily and saltless version of oxtail soup. He drinks again to show himself willing, then passes the pan on. He senses their relief, their pleasure that he has accepted their proffered gift, that he has joined them somehow. He doesn't begrudge these beliefs although he knows they aren't true. He hasn't joined them—he is not an Esquimaux any more than he is a Christian or an Irishman or a doctor. He is nothing, and that is a privilege and a joy he is loath to give up. After the eating is finished, they play games and make music. Sumner watches them and even joins in when he is asked to. He throws up a ball made of walrus bone and tries to catch it in a wooden cup; he artlessly mimics their singing. They smile and pound him on the shoulder; they point at him and laugh. He tells himself he is doing it for the new set of furs, for the promised portion of the seal meat, both of which he will give to the priest. He is busy paying his way.

They sleep, all together, on a platform built up of snow and covered over with branches and hides. There are no distinctions or barriers between them, no attempt to create privacy or hierarchy or enclosure of any kind. They are like cattle, he thinks, lying together in a cattle shed. Sometime in the night, he wakes and hears two people fucking. The noises they make suggest not pleasure or release but a kind of unwilling and guttural need. In the morning, he is woken early and given water by Punnie, one of Urgang's two wives—a square-shouldered, stocky woman with a broad face and a fierce expression. Urgang and Merok are already outside preparing the sledge for the hunting. When he goes to join them, he notices they are quieter and less boisterous than before, and he guesses they are nervous. Probably they have boasted wildly about the white man's magical powers, and they are wondering if they have said too much.

When everything is ready, Sumner gets onto the sledge again and they drive it out onto the sea ice. They track along the coastline for several miles before stopping at a place which seems to Sumner no different from the hundred others they have already seen and passed without pausing. They take the spears off the sledge and tip the sledge over, jamming it hard down into the snow to prevent the dogs pulling it away, then they unharness one of the dogs and let it loose to sniff around for a breathing hole. Sumner watches them and follows after, but they pay him no attention and he wonders after a while if they have already discounted him, whether something he has done or said already has made them doubt his supernatural influence. When the dog starts circling, then barking, Merok grabs it by the mane and pulls it away. Urgang gestures for Sumner to stay where he is; then, holding the spear upright in one hand like a pilgrim's staff, he slowly approaches the breathing hole. When he gets close to it, he kneels down and scrapes away the covering of snow with his knife. He peers into the hole, tilts his head to listen, then pushes the snow back on top, closing the gap he has just made. He takes a piece of sealskin from inside his anorak, lays it down on the ice, and stands on top of it. He bends his knees and leans towards the hole with his hands holding the long iron-tipped spear horizontal against his thighs and his body tilted forwards.

Sumner lights his pipe. For a long time, Urgang stands motionless, then suddenly, as if stirred into action by the silent hailing of some mystical and Quakerish inner voice, he straightens up and in one rapid and indivisible flash of movement raises the spear and plunges it down through the loose-packed snow and into the body of the seal that has just risen to breathe. The barbed iron head, with a looped line reeved to it, detaches from the spear shaft. Urgang grips the line with both hands, digs his heels into the snow, and yanks up against the hidden downward thrashings of the wounded seal. As they wrestle each other, spumes of water pulsate upwards through the cleft in the ice. The water is clear at first, then pink, then bright red. When the seal finally dies, a gout of its blood, thick and dark, rises up out of the breathing hole and spatters across the ice at Urgang's feet. He kneels down and, keeping hold of the line with one hand, takes his knife in the other and chips away at the sides of the hole. Merok runs across and helps to pull the dead seal out onto the surface of the ice. When it is clear, they push the iron spearhead out through the underside of the seal's body, reattach it to the shaft, and then plug the open wounds with ivory toggles to avoid losing any more of the precious blood. The seal is large, a giant, almost twice as big as the norm. The hunters' movements as they work around it are urgent and joyful. Sumner senses their elation, but also their wish to subdue it, to ensure that their pleasure does not confuse the purity of this moment. As the three of them walk back to the sledge together across the corrugated surface of the ice, with the dead seal dragging along behind like a sack of bullion, he feels, deep in his chest, as if in answer to an unasked question, the flickering warmth of an unearned victory.

Later, while the two hunters butcher the seal and pass out portions of the meat and blubber to the other families in the camp, the children gather round Sumner where he stands, tugging at his bearskin pantaloons, touching and rubbing themselves against his thighs and knees as if hoping for a share of the good luck he has brought. He tries to shoo them away but they ignore him, and it is only when the women come out of the igloos that they disperse. The size of the seal, it seems, has confirmed his status. They believe he has magic powers, that he can conjure the animals up from the depths and draw them onto the hunters' spears. He is not a full-blown god, he supposes, but he is a kind of minor saint at least: he assists and intercedes. He thinks of the chromolithograph of Saint Gertrude hung on the parlor wall in William Harper's house in Castlebar—the golden halo, the quill pen, the sacred heart lying like a holy beetroot on the flat of her outstretched palm. Is this any more absurd or improbable, he wonders, any more sinful even? The priest would have a thing or two to say on the matter, of course, but he hardly cares. The priest is in another world altogether.

Later, under the deer hides, Punnie presses herself up into him, rump against groin. He thinks at first that she is only rearranging herself, that she must be asleep like the others are, but then, when she does it again, he understands what is intended. She is short and thick-limbed, broad in the hips and no longer young. Her square-topped head reaches only up to his chest and her hair smells of dirt and seal grease. When he reaches out to touch her shallow breasts she doesn't speak or turn around. Now that she is sure he is awake, she lies there waiting for him, the way her husband waited for the seal earlier out on the ice, poised but without expectation, both desirous and cleansed of all desire, like everything and nothing held together in silent balance. He hears her breathing and feels the soft heat her body radiates. She twitches once, then settles again. He thinks of saying something, then realizes there is nothing he can say. They are two creatures coupling. The moment has no greater meaning, no further implications. When he pushes into her, his mind empties out and he feels a purifying surge of inner blankness. He is muscle and bone, blood and sweat and semen, and, as he jerks and jitters to a rapid and inelegant conclusion, he needs and wants to be nothing else.

Each day the hunters go out and catch another seal, and each night, under the deer hides, while the others are sleeping, he couples with Punnie. She keeps her back turned against him always; she neither resists nor encourages. She never speaks. When he is finished she rolls away. When she gives him breakfast in the morning—warm water, raw seal liver—she treats him coolly, and there is no sign that she remembers anything that has occurred between them. He imagines she is acting out of a heathenish model of politesse, and that Urgang himself has encouraged or commanded this. He accepts the offering for what it is: no more or less. After a week, when it is time for him to return to the mission, he decides he will miss the vacancy of the ice and the incomprehensible jabber of the igloo. He has not spoken English since he left the mission, and the thought of the priest sitting in the cabin waiting for him with his books and papers, his opinions and plans and doctrines, fills him with irritation and gloom.

On the final night, instead of moving away when they have finished, Punnie turns back towards him. He sees through the lamp-leavened gloom her blunt and pockmarked face, her dark eyes and small upturned nose, the line of her mouth. She is smiling at him, and her expression is eager and curious. When she opens her lips to speak, he doesn't realize, at first, what is happening. The words sound to him like noises only, like the low guttural clucks the hunters make when they are soothing their dogs at night, but then, with a shudder of dismay, he understands she is talking to him in a crude but recognizable form of English, that she is trying to say “good-bye.”

“
Gud bye
,” she says to him, smiling still. “
Gud bye
.”

He frowns at her, then shakes his head. He feels exposed and sullied by her efforts. Ashamed. It is as if a bright, burning light has been flashed upon the two of them and their pitiful nakedness has been revealed to the world. He wants her to be quiet again, to ignore him now as she has always ignored him before.

“No,” he whispers fiercely back at her. “No more of that. No more.”

*   *   *

Next day, when he arrives at the mission, it is dark and cold, and the borealis is unwinding across the night sky in peristaltic bands of green and purple, like the loosely coiled innards of a far-fetched mythic beast. Inside the cabin, he finds the priest stretched out on his cot, laid low and complaining of stomach pains. Anna, under the priest's instruction, has placed a warm poultice on his abdomen and brought him castor oil and jalap from the medicine chest. He is badly bunged up, he explains to Sumner, and may require an enema if there is no movement presently. Sumner makes tea for himself and heats a can of bouillon soup. The priest watches him eat. He asks about the hunting trip, and Sumner tells about the seals and about the feasting.

“You encourage their superstitions then, I see,” the priest says.

“I let them believe what they want to. Who am I to interfere?”

“You do them no service by keeping them in ignorance. They lead a brutish kind of life.”

“I have no better truths to tell them.”

The priest shakes his head, then winces.

“Then what are you exactly?” he says. “If that is the case?”

Sumner shrugs.

“I am tired and hungry,” he tells him. “I am a man who is about to eat his dinner and go to bed.”

In the night the priest has a fierce bout of diarrhea. Sumner is woken by the sounds of loud groans and splattering. The cabin air is dense with the velvet reek of liquid feces. Anna, who has been sleeping curled on the floor, rises to assist. She gives the priest a clean cloth to wipe himself and takes the pot outside to empty. When she comes back inside, she covers him with blankets and helps him drink some water. Sumner watches but doesn't move or speak. The priest strikes him as robust and healthy for a man of his age, and he assumes the constipation is a result of nothing more than the usual deficiencies of the arctic diet, bereft as it is of plants, vegetable matter, or fruit of any kind. Now that the purgatives have had their effect, Sumner is sure he will be back to his normal self soon enough.