The Seal Wife

Chapter 2

AT FIRST HE THINKS she might be a deaf-mute, but she isn’t deaf, because she startles at the diagnostic noises he makes, dropping an armload of wood, clattering a pan on the stove. And she isn’t mute, either. She cries out in the bed, mews and moans and even, sometimes, giggles.

It is snowing on the day he follows her home. Small, dry flakes blow like dust behind the lenses of his glasses. Eleven degrees at noon, with a shifting wind, first from the west, then from the north, then west again. On his way from the cable office he breaks a bootlace, and when he bends to fix it, knotting the two ends together, it breaks in a new place. So he stops at Getz’s General Merchandise.

She has three tusks of walrus ivory and a bundle of pelts, red fox mostly, pups and summer skins not worth more than a dime apiece. She leans forward over the wide counter to point at what she wants in exchange—tea, tobacco, toffee, a bottle of paregoric. Her arm up, her ungloved fingers outstretched, she waits until Getz takes each item from the shelf, slaps it down on the counter in a manner intended to convey impatience and condescension.

At Getz’s, payment is accepted in a number of forms: gold, flake or nugget; coins, American, Russian, and Canadian; skins—sable, marten, mink, otter, seal, rabbit, lynx, wolverine, caribou, bear, wolf, moose, fox, lemming, beaver—anything bigger than a rat that has a hide to tan; and miscellany, blankets, boots, eggs, nails, needles, knives. Two walls of the store are devoted to complications of equivalence, and while certain values are not negotiable—gold is gold, and it is twelve dollars an ounce, this is painted on the wall in black—the worth of an egg, for example, goes up and down according to the number of chickens that make it through the winter. And that population depends on how many have worn themselves out laying without cease when days are twenty hours long. So Getz inscribes the cost of eggs in chalk.

“Not un—uh, ornamental,” he says, noting how Bigelow stares at the woman. With one proprietary elbow pinning down the pelts, he ties her purchases together with twine. “If the war paint don’t bother you.”

As if she understands, the woman turns and stares back at Bigelow, her jaw thrust forward, unapologetic, even defiant. In what way does she see him? How does he look to her? He thinks of himself as handsome—handsome enough, anyway—with a broad face, pale blue eyes almost too widely set, a straight nose, and a wide mouth that balances the eyes. There’s nothing sharp in his face, nothing mean. His big forehead appears even bigger because of his fair eyebrows, his slightly elevated hairline. As for her: black braid, black eyes, black buttons on her bodice, and little black lines drawn on her chin. She watches Bigelow watching her, and her pale tongue comes into the corner of her mouth.

Bigelow forgets his broken bootlace and follows her out the door and up the frozen rut in the middle of the street. The three tins swing from her hand, now hidden in its sealskin mitten; the brown bottle gleams in the other. She walks without once looking back at him, without turning her head to the right or the left, neither slow nor fast, steps as neat as stitches, and he stumbling and slipping ten paces behind the back of her parka.

By the time she reaches her house he’s caught up to her, and when she opens the door he goes in after her, sufficiently amazed by his own boldness to leave the door ajar. A dusting of snow collects in his wake. She puts her packages down on the table, picks up her broom, and sweeps the flakes outside before they have a chance to melt.

As if he were not there—her failure to acknowledge him isn’t a refusal, it is nothing so pointed that he can use the word ignore—she hangs her mittens on a nail, she removes her parka and boots, she unties the twine from her tins of tea, tobacco, and toffee. Then she chooses a small log from the wood box, picking through its contents for the piece she wants, and opens the door of the stove to lay it on the embers.

Neither of them speaks, and if he steps in her path, she moves silently out of his way. It is perhaps a quarter of an hour before they touch, and this is only the contact required for her to remove his parka, as it is dripping on the floor. With his heart beating so that he can feel it, he watches her fingers ease the long bone buttons from the loops of leather, he holds his arms out, and the coat’s heavy sleeves slide from them. She hangs the wet fur on a peg by the door, and he sits down in one of her two chairs.

From his seat by the stove he watches her make and drink a cup of tea, then unwrap the foil from around a toffee and slowly chew it. The candy is so adhesive that twice her teeth stick together. To loosen them she moves her lower jaw from side to side, frowning with the effort, and he can see muscle under the smooth skin of her cheek. When she is finished, her pale tongue again emerges, licking whatever sweetness remains on her lower lip. Then she closes her mouth and looks at him.

It’s a long look, not appraising, and not inquisitive. She must know what he wants, but she betrays neither apprehension nor enthusiasm—nothing of what she feels—and he returns her gaze without any idea as to what she might be thinking. She doesn’t appear to find him attractive, nor repugnant. Living on the outskirts of town, she’s seen enough whites that he can’t strike her as surprising or compelling or even interesting.

After a minute, he realizes that he is trying to fill the silence with gestures, lifting and lowering his eyebrows, compressing his lips, sniffing, blinking, touching his face—the visual equivalent of chatter—and he stops.

The light from the window has dimmed. She retrieves a lamp from the shelf where she keeps her tobacco, a hurricane lamp with a spotless glass chimney, filled with fishy-smelling oil that makes the wick sputter and spark. After lighting it, she doesn’t sit but remains standing behind her chair, her hands holding the top rung; and, as this posture seems to Bigelow like a dismissal, he gets to his feet. He pulls on his boots, parka, and gloves, and closes her door behind him.

He feels drunk as he walks through the early twilight, new snow creaking under his boots and the dogs just beginning to howl. His mouth is dry and his heart pounds as if from exertion, but it isn’t that, it’s something else. Suddenly, the streets are beautiful, glittering and blue under a sky stretched so wide it has room for everything: sun, moon, and stars.

Chapter 3

BY THE TIME HE MOVES from his tent into his station house, winter has arrived. November 18, 1915, the sun sets at 2:42 P.M., and Bigelow, bundled upstairs in parka, boots, and discouragingly pungent caribou trousers, watches it disappear across the inlet’s sullen horizon and inscribes the hour and the minute into his log, writing as carefully as he can without removing his gloves. The sun’s descent illuminates the various layers of cloud, inspiring him to annotate their features and relative positions in the sky. A single remaining ray, like a celestial finger, reaches up and points to the blurred belly of nimbostratus, and he watches as it fades. Perhaps it will snow the next day. Bigelow stands, hugging himself against the cold, until he can see no more.

Downstairs, where he can move around without the encumbrance of furs, he has placed his drafting table next to the stove, and he works at its slanting surface during the long dark hours of the season. He has his responsibilities to the central bureau in Washington, D.C., and he has local duties as well.

For the town of Anchorage, in a frenzy of construction, Bigelow is to create a forecast map and tack it to the post office wall every day by two P.M., and he is to fly flags appropriate to that forecast: white for fair, blue for rain or snow, a red pennant for easterly winds, a yellow for westerly, and so on—eighteen combinations to cover all the possibilities, a language of signals familiar to citizens of the United States, but who knows if the local populace will understand it? Still, that isn’t Bigelow’s problem; his forecasts are for the Alaska Engineering Commission and its railroad, for which everyone is waiting.

There’s coal in Alaska—coal fields and diamond mines, veins of gold, silver, copper—and the fastest way to get it out of the territories and sold is by rail. If President Wilson relents, if the United States joins the Allies against Germany, the war effort will demand Alaska’s wealth. No one wants war, and yet everyone is excited by the possibility. Impatient to finish laying track and begin surveying for a deepwater port, the Engineering Commission has already made mistakes, mistakes for which weather was blamed, and Bigelow has been sent north to prevent more of them from happening. Last year, all the equipment shipped up from Panama’s completed canal—steam shovel, dredge, and crane—sank in the inlet. An unexpected storm blew in, the wind hit fifty knots, two barges crashed into floe ice and sank. So now the commission has decreed that no work proceed before the weather forecast is known. And forecasts depend on maps. To the initiated, air has features as clear as land, features that can be drawn, lines that divide one degree from another. Interpretations of those drawings may vary, opinions among meteorologists diverge, but good maps are absolute; they are irrefutable.

The bureau provides large-scale outlines of North America, printed on both opaque and tissue-thin folios. On the opaque maps, Bigelow enters temperature and pressure readings, delineating highs and lows with isotherms and isobars, fancy words for the lines he makes, sweeping over topography in waves and circles. On the translucent overlays, he indicates wind and precipitation, using directional arrows and a code of symbols for rain, snow, sleet, and fog. He plots his own data—readings he has taken and reported to the central office—as well as observations from all the other stations in North America, numbers he decodes from a long, daily cable message. But without a light table like the one at which he worked in Seattle, he sometimes makes mistakes, and even more of them when dogs are howling. Pen in hand, he startles at the sound, rakes its nib across ten or twenty degrees of longitude.

Half wolf, three quarters wolf, all wolf—the sound of sled dogs after dinner is like nothing Bigelow has ever heard before, one howls and then another answers and so it goes until dawn. Horses aren’t much use when snow is four feet deep, and the few automobiles shipped into Anchorage are good for nothing but sport—ice derbies and mud races—and the railroad isn’t finished, it’s barely begun. So anyone who plans on getting anywhere walks on snowshoes or travels behind a team.

When sled dogs aren’t working they’re staked, and Bigelow has grown accustomed to the sight of chains disappearing into the dens the dogs dig in the snow. But, invisible as the animals are when he walks through town, they fill the night with their wailing, like hideous hymns to the devil—once they begin, stars wink out and the bright moon sinks in the sky. Fingers in his ears, wool watch cap, earmuffs, parka hood: he can’t find a way to muffle the howling. Even Rigoletto, cranked up and blaring from the trumpet, is no good, the tenor’s lament threading eerily through the howling of the dogs. The death of civilization, the death of reason, it seems to Bigelow, tearing up one map and then another.

He binds the completed maps in volumes of 120 pages, each holding two months’ worth of recorded observations, paths of major storms extrapolated for comparison to those of years past and hence. Current theories of forecasting presuppose that atmospheric history tends, like human history, to repeat itself, an idea that some meteorological scientists consider facile. And, sometimes, sitting by the stove, feet numb and cheeks burning, Bigelow lifts his head from his task and is struck by its absurdity. He isn’t drawing mountains or rivers or canyons, all those features of the earth that have existed for aeons; and neither is he mapping countries or cities or even streets, the work of centuries. No, Bigelow records ephemera: clouds; a fall of rain or of snow; hailstones that, after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh.

But there are other nights when this seems to him wonderful, poetic. He is recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people, events that, even if noted, are soon forgotten. A storm such as the one that destroyed his grandmother’s home might be represented in diaries and stories, but not accurately. Its character would be distorted, altered by tellings and retellings, made into a myth rather than a set of responsibly reported observations.

As with the shard of blue-and-white china he keeps, the pattern from which he can picture his grandmother’s unbroken plate, after winds blow then still, after clouds vanish, only Bigelow will have the record.

Chapter 4

SHE IS A WOMAN, and women want things. But what? What would she like? Hairpins and combs? At Getz’s store, Bigelow stares at the meager stock of ladies’ notions. Ipswich No. 223 cotton lisle stockings? Black? Double-soled for heavy wear? He doesn’t know.

DeBevoise dress shields. Mennen’s Violet Talcum Powder. Under Getz’s eye, he considers each item, turning cans and crinkling packets in his hands; but he leaves the store without buying anything—anything that might be taken as an intimacy, an intimacy he hasn’t been offered, rather than a gift.

Bigelow pictures the woman’s house, the stove and table and chairs and shelf. What does she need? What might she use? Unable to think of anything better, he goes back to the station to retrieve what he shot that morning, a long-legged rabbit that waited too long to jump.

He walks to her house, carrying the animal first by its ears, then by its hind feet. His stomach twists, as if he’s missed supper, but it’s not yet four. It’s because he’s nervous, very nervous. A handful of women among thousands of men, and of those few, Bigelow is pursuing one he finds not merely beautiful but necessary. Necessary. Is this the effect of loneliness, of deprivation? He’s warned himself against her closing the door in his face, against the sight of another man in the chair across from hers. Over and over he’s told himself that either of these outcomes is far more likely than her inviting him inside. But it’s done no good. And he hasn’t bothered to plan what to do if she doesn’t ask him in—it seems impossible that he could still exist on the other side of such disappointment.

“Kla-how-ya,” he practices as he walks. Klaaa. How. Yuh. His experience with pidgin hasn’t been encouraging, but what other words can he use?

He speaks the phrase when she answers his knock, how are you, and he holds out the gift, the rabbit. Without taking it, she steps aside so he can enter, so she can close the door on the cold.

“Mesika,” he tries, pushing the animal into her hands. Yours. He points at her stove.

“Com-tox?” You understand? Although, inflections for com-tox are tricky. He may have told her that it’s he who understands.

She puts the rabbit on the table. He points again at the stove, and she inclines her head a degree, nothing as much as a nod.

I’m Bigelow. I think you’re beautiful. I can put my mouth on your mouth? What’s your name? How are you called? I want to hold you. Will you take your—dress, dress, what’s the word for dress? He’s forgetting all he knew—Can I take your clothes off?

Bigelow gets out his Chinook dictionary. “Be-be,” he says, settling on something simple. Kiss.

The smallest of smiles, or has he imagined it? She looks where his finger points at the word and its translation.

He has imagined it. She’s not smiling. But she doesn’t look unhappy. She looks—what does she look? He’s about to give up, go home, when the woman moves a hand to her throat and begins with that button.

Bigelow stares as the bodice of her dress opens to show her body underneath. She folds it, then takes off her underclothes and folds them, too, unhurried. He follows her into the other room, bringing the lamp so that he can see her face, search it to confirm that this is what he hopes it is, an invitation.

She raises her eyebrows; he lifts his shirt over his head without bothering to unbutton it. Eager, not greedy. He’s rehearsed this scene more times than he can count, and he intends to be as polite as he knows how.

But he’s barely felt his way between her legs when she takes his wrist and pulls his hand away.

Okay, he thinks, all right, and he scoots down, his legs right off the bed, to insinuate his tongue in that spot.

She pops straight up. Grabs his ears like jug handles to remove his head from her crotch.

“What?” Bigelow says uselessly. “What do you want?”

The woman lies back down and he sits next to her, looking at the smooth, unreadable flesh of her stomach. “Icta?” he translates into Chinook. What?

She closes her eyes and opens her legs a few inches.

He doesn’t move.

She bends her knees, and he arranges himself over her body.

With one hand planted on the bed, he uses the other to guide himself inside her, keeping his eyes on her face to make sure he’s not doing anything she doesn’t like, watching the effect of each careful thrust.

He doesn’t want for her to have escaped behind the lids of her eyes—it seems as if he can see her there, in the dark, folded in a place too small to admit another occupant. He’s getting what he hoped, he tells himself, but it isn’t at all what he expected, and a desolation seizes him. He’s not joined to her, he can’t reach her.

Like a key, the thought of her eluding him turns in his flesh.

He stays hard, his ears ring, a new taste floods his mouth, and he keeps moving, following the thrust of his cock, determined to find her.

Chapter 5

WHEN HE TEARS the side of his parka, it is the woman who repairs it, unfastening the coat and taking it from his shoulders as she did on the day he followed her home, then stepping outside her door to shake the dry snow from the fur.

As he watches, she unwinds a length of heavy black thread from a spool and cuts it with her teeth before drawing it back and forth over a bar of yellow wax. Then she coaxes its end through the eye of a long needle and begins, using the heel of her hand protected by a disc of bone to push the needle through the skin. While she works, he holds the wax, rubbing his thumb over its scored surface. His eyes follow her industrious fingers. There is an impersonal quality to her labor; it seems not so much a gift to him as it does a habit of northern housewifery. Furs must be kept in repair. A torn parka, otherwise valuable, is next to useless.

Her stitches are small. The needle makes slow progress. Oddly, when its bright point emerges and then disappears back into the dark fur, he feels a tightening in his chest, and he gets up from where he is sitting silently next to her on the bed and paces, yawning and sighing, until she has finished.

Contrary to what prejudice has taught him to expect, she is not uninhibited. He’s heard how native girls mature earlier than whites, how mothers and fathers send their daughters off to be initiated by uncles or friends. But she does not betray the evidence of such an education. There is a whole list of affectionate gestures she will not tolerate.

While she keeps still for a closed-mouth peck, if he attempts a more penetrating kiss she quickly turns her head, leaving him licking her cheek. She moves his hands away from her neck, her feet, her hair, and her genitals. But, once he’s inside her, she lies under him with a rapt smile, eyes closed and fingers busily agitating her own flesh without regard for the rhythm he’s established. When she comes, her arousal is keen—she arches her back, she cries out—but private. He cannot induce her to sit astride him or to allow him to enter her in any manner except what is understood as missionary. And perhaps this is the explanation, as the Aleutian Islands have long been colonized by Russian Orthodox.

She skins a rabbit with a grace and attention she doesn’t seem to waste on him. Why doesn’t he resent this? Instead he watches, intent, as she bends its ears and opens the cleft in its lip to see how young it is, how fresh. Then she girdles the skin around its hind legs and, holding its back feet in her left hand, strips the hide down over the body with her right, so that it comes off inside out, as quickly as if she were removing a glove. The parting of silver-gray fur from tender new muscle reveals an elastic integument of faintly iridescent blue, like the raiment of a ghost, and once, when he reaches out to touch it, she pulls the animal quickly from under his hands. She takes off the head and saves it with the skin, saves the entrails as well, washes and butchers the carcass. As she works, the muscles play under the smooth skin of her forearms, and otherwise invisible sinews stand out on the backs of her small hands.

Every meeting is the same, as ritual as his walks to and from the telegraph office, his entering observations into a log. He watches as she prepares the food he has brought; he eats with her in silence; they lie together on her bed, a fur blanket beneath them; he waits until she cries out and arches her back, then allows himself release.

When he lets her go, she sits up. She leaves the bed to retrieve a tin tub from behind the stove and she fills it with water left hot in her two big kettles. Then she opens her tin of tobacco, readies her pipe, and sits cross-legged, smoking in the tub while he talks to her, propped on one elbow, wondering at his gabble and yet helpless to stop it.

Later, walking home to the station or lifting his head from the work on his table, he asks himself if it is some failure on his part: the lack of spontaneity. It isn’t he who imposes the order, but perhaps in some way he doesn’t understand he is its catalyst.

He devises little tricks—puerile, at once irresistible and shaming. He stands on his hands and knocks at her door with his heel, he opens his mouth to reveal a button on his tongue. But this doesn’t provoke her, she doesn’t even blink. Instead, she removes his coat to look for the spot on his shirt from which he’s torn it, she takes the button from his mouth and stitches it back, tight, where it belongs. It’s as if she anticipates his nonsense and hardens herself against it.

She opens for him, yes, but only her legs, and all the rest that she does—preparing food, mending furs, even waxing his boots—strikes him as an elaborate decoy, a way of distracting him from her deeper self, her deepest self, all that he wants most to penetrate.

She.

Inside her is a name, a word he wants to know. To possess.

Chapter 6

RIVERS EMPTY INTO COOK INLET: the Susitna, the Chakachatna, the Matanuska, the Yentna, and others, whose native pronunciations Bigelow hasn’t yet mastered. Ringed by sand and clay cliffs, the inlet’s water is clouded in spots by swirling, silty spirals of sediment, glacial detritus hammered by the ocean’s tide.

Exploring the land around Anchorage, searching for the ideal place from which to launch a kite, Bigelow discovers a cove fed by an eddying backwash. He picks his way through a litter of splintered boats and bridges, of lost tents and snapped tent poles, sleds and whips, the occasional drowned dog tangled in its harness.

Spring breakup is fast, fast enough to strand wolf and caribou on the same raft of ice. He’s heard stories of hurtling floes, frozen islands with a surface area of an acre or more speeding downriver with tents pitched on top and campfires still burning. The cove debris curls and bobs in a yellow lather of briny froth, deposited on the shore, licked back into the water, then rolled onto the beach again, hundreds of miles downstream from its sudden, accidental departure.