Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

1973. Following his hurried descent on Washington and his frustrating trip to North of Sixty, a weary Moses returned to his cabin in the woods. Strawberry, he discovered, was in a sorry state. He had put in ten days painting the Catholic church in Mansonville and had yet to collect for it. He was not only out his pay, but also the cost of the paint and the fifty dollars he had forked out to rent a spray gun. The new priest, a sallow young man, had assured him, “Your money is safe. It’s in the vault.”

“Let’s get it out, then.”

“There is a problem. The cleaning lady has thrown out the paper with the combination written on it.”

“Doesn’t anybody know the combination?”

“Not since Father Laplante, who preceded me here.”

Father Laplante was locked up in the Cowansville jail.

“But don’t you worry, Straw. I have written to the good people who installed the vault in 1922. Meanwhile your money is safe.”

Legion Hall rolled into The Caboose, bellied up to the bar, and asked Gord to bring him a quart.

“You buying?” Strawberry asked.

Without bothering to turn around, Legion Hall lifted a fat droopy cheek off the bar stool and farted. “I got good news for you, Straw. I just dumped a load of gravel at the church in Mansonville. Father Maurice is real upset. The company that installed that vault for them went bust in 1957.”

Moses was no longer listening. He was totally absorbed in a page of Time he had opened at random.

“You’d better drive me home, Straw,” Moses said, staggering to his feet.

Moses curled right into bed and slept for something like eighteen hours. Waking before noon the next day, he settled his stomach with a beer bolstered by two fingers of Macallan. He showered, shaved with his straight razor, nicked himself only twice, ground some beans, and drank six cups of black coffee, shivers breaking through him in diminishing waves. Then he defrosted a couple of bagels, shoved them into the oven, and prepared his first meal in three days: an enormous helping of scrambled eggs with lox and potatoes fried in onions. Later he made another pot of coffee and sat down to his desk. A good start, he thought, would be to blow the dust off his pile of mimeographed copies of The Prospector and file them in chronological order. The Prospector (a weekly, price ten cents) was Yellowknife’s first newspaper. In the issue of February 18, 1939 Moses read that Mountain Music with Bob Burns and Martha Raye was playing at the Pioneer Theatre. The Daughters of the Midnight Sun were planning a dance at The Squeeze Inn.

Moses found the item he wanted in the issue of February 22, 1938. A big banner headline announcing:

No imp leaning on a malacca cane appeared in Cyrus Eaton’s biography and there was no mention of him in all the material Moses had collected about Armand Hammer, another tycoon who had made his first millions peddling cough medicine during Prohibition.

Fragments. Tantalizing leads. Tapes, journals, trial transcripts. But so many pieces of the Gursky puzzle missing. Take Aaron Gursky’s case, for instance. Moses had been out west many times, seeking out old-timers who might remember Aaron, who had died in 1931.

Such a nice Jew.

A real good guy.

Some hard worker.

So far as Moses could make out, Aaron had been no more than a hyphen, joining the Gursky generation of Ephraim with that of Bernard, Solomon and Morrie. A shadowy presence, inhibited in the first place by his father’s mockery and then by the turbulence between his sons.

Then there was the problem of Ephraim. The Newgate Calendar entry aside, Moses could find little hard evidence of his sojourn in London or his voyage out with the doomed Franklin.

Ephraim couldn’t have been at ease in London, circa 1830. Henry Mayhew wrote of that time and place, “Ikey Solomons, the Jew fence, buys in the cheapest market and sells in the dearest.” He noted two distinctive races among the London poor. The Irish street-sellers, a numerous and peculiar people, with “low foreheads and long bulging lips, the lowest class of costermongers, confined to the simplest transactions,” and then of course there were the Jews. Mayhew deplored the prejudice that saw the Jews only as “misers, usurers, extortionists, receivers of stolen goods, cheats, brothel-keepers,” but he did allow there was some foundation for many of these accusations. Gambling was the Jews’ chief vice, he observed, just as the extreme love of money was their principal characteristic. But the Jews, he wrote, were also known for their communal spirit, contributing generously to Jewish charities, so that no Jew ever had to die in a parish workhouse. Remarkable, he concluded, “when we recollect their indisputable greed for money.”

Once, while he was still living with Lucy, Moses took her to Westminster Abbey to show her the memorial to the foolish but intrepid Franklin, the epitaph composed by the explorer’s nephew, Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

An afternoon in Sir Hyman Kaplansky’s library had been sufficient for Moses to determine that luxuries of a sort were not unknown on the Erebus and the Terror. Each of Franklin’s ships had a hand organ, capable of playing fifty tunes, ten of them psalms or hymns. There were school supplies for instructing illiterate sailors, mahogany desks for the officers. The Erebus boasted a library of 1,700 volumes and the Terror 1,200, including bound copies of Punch.

For the voyage through the Northwest Passage the officers packed all the finery appropriate for a ball. But, unlike the natives, they had no animal skins that could be worn in layers, providing ventilation to prevent sweat from freezing on a man’s back. Putting in at Disko Bay, on the west coast of Greenland, they did not bother to acquire any teams of sled-dogs. Neither did they take on board a translator or a hunter, though none of their company knew how to take a seal or a caribou. So, in their last extremity, Franklin’s men were driven to boiling each other’s flesh. And seemingly not one of them, save for Ephraim, survived their northern ordeal.

A framed copy of the notice that appeared in the Toronto Globe on April 4, 1850, hung over Moses’s bed.

Why, Moses wondered, returning to the riddle again and again, hadn’t Ephraim told his tale, claiming the ten-thousand-pound reward? Why did he deny intelligence of either the Erebus or Terror to McNair, pretending to be a runaway off an American whaler?

There was another problem.

Neither Ephraim Gursky nor Izzy Garber were listed in the Muster Books of the Erebus or Terror (available at Admiralty Records, Public Records Office). But they had been there Moses knew, oh yes Ephraim Gursky had been there, and Izzy Garber as well.

Two

Following his arrest, after his ill-fated bug-hunting expedition with the Sullivan sisters, it was Newgate for Ephraim; and in that dark and fetid hole—as he told Solomon some seventy years on, a raven perched on his shoulder, the two of them warming themselves under the shifting arch of the aurora on the shores of Great Slave Lake—he met the man who met the man who would lead him and now Solomon to this place. Ephraim shrunken now, but still frisky, saying: “He was an old Orkney boatman with a bad milky eye and a spongy grey beard and he stirred me as never before with his tales of his journey to the shores of the Polar Sea with Lieutenant John Franklin, as he then was.”

It began innocently enough, Ephraim explained, when he cursed the jailer who once again had served them rancid sausages. This roused what at first glance appeared to be a sack of bones flung into a corner of the communal cell in the felons’ yard, causing it to splutter and sort itself out, assuming the shape of a tall emaciated man, his lips chalky, his hair matted and his beard a filthy tangle. “Young man,” the boatman said, “you are looking at somebody who was once grateful for the putrid powdered marrow bones and horns of a deer that had already been picked over by the white wolves and the black ravens of the barren land.”

“Tell the lad what brought you here, Enoch. Why it’s bound to be a leap into the dark for you.”

“A Jezebel of a daughter bore false witness against me.”

“I thought it was poaching on the Tweed,” another voice called out.

“Poaching,” somebody else put in, “but not on the Tweed.”

“His son-in-law’s slit it was.”

Ignoring their lascivious laughter, the boatman sucked sausage into his all but toothless maw. “Why, when there was no tripe de roche to be had we boiled scraps of leather from our boots and praised the Almighty for providing it. And such was the cold that when we still had it our rum froze in its cask. Aye, and all that time we had to keep watch on the Canadian voyageurs, a thieving lot, and that Iroquois heathen, the treacherous Michel Teroahauté. But the worst of it was we did not know whether poor Mr. Back, lusting after that Indian harlot, had perished on his trek or would return to us with supplies.”

Seizing Ephraim by the elbow, turning his own face aside the better to fix him with his good unclouded eye, he told him how the white wolves bring down a deer. “Those ferocious predators,” he said, “assemble in great numbers where the deer are grazing. They creep silently toward the herd, and only when they have cut off their retreat across the plain do they begin to race and howl, panicking their prey, tricking them into fleeing in the only possible direction—toward the precipice. The herd, at full speed now, is easily driven over the cliff. Then the wolves, their jaws dripping saliva, descend to feast on the mangled corpses.”

The boatman’s eyes flickered upward and in an instant he was asleep, his mouth agape. Ephraim shook him awake. “Tell me more,” he said.

“Have you any tobacco?”

“No.”

“Gin?”

“No.”

“To hell with you then.”

The next morning the boatman’s only response to Ephraim’s questions was a bilious glare. He was intent on the lice in his beard, flicking them into the flame of a candle.

Out for exercise in the men’s courtyard Ephraim, ignoring his cellmates, strolled up and down, surveying the rough granite walls of the enclosure. He sighed at the sight of the revolving iron spikes near the summit, possibly fifty feet from the ground. It would be impossible, he calculated, for him to squirm between the chevaux de frise and the masonry. And even if he could manage it, the cunning bastards had implanted yet another barrier above. A row of sharp, inward-projecting teeth rising from the top of the slimy wall. Hopeless, he thought.

Later in the day an anxious Izzy Garber hurried to Newgate and arranged to meet with two of the turnkeys at the George. The chaplain of Newgate, the Reverend Brownlow Ford, was already in place, soused, lolling on the sofa with the hangman Thomas Cheshire. Old Cheese, recognizing Izzy, raised his glass to him, his eyes charged with rancour:

Ignoring him, Izzy fed the turnkeys ribald stories and stuffed their pockets with guineas. As a consequence, Ephraim was tossed a straw mattress that evening and discovered he now had a line of credit in the prison taproom. He promptly loosened the old boatman’s tongue with gin and tobacco for his pipe.

The Orkney boatman, his voice hoarse, complained to Ephraim about the ruinous addiction of the Cree to spirituous liquors, and how they had become debased by their undying thirst for the noxious beverage, cursed to live out their days without any of the consolations which the Christian religion never fails to afford. A vain, fickle, and indolent race, he said, given to seducing each other’s wives.

The boatman, given to fits of shivering, obviously feverish, would doze fitfully from time to time, coming abruptly awake to demand more gin and to resume his tale as if he had never let off. “I have seen reindeer too numerous to count, the herd extending as far as the horizon, and learned to eat its flesh raw.” The staple food for the voyage, he said, was pemmican, buffalo meat, dried and pounded with melted fat. But there were times, the boatman allowed, when fish and fowl were plentiful. River salmon, jack fish, the singular and beautiful gold eye, which could be caught in nets in the spring at Cumberland House. There was also ptarmigan, Canada grouse, mallard and wild swan.

Ephraim, who had never heard of such things, hungered for more details, but dared not interrupt the cantankerous boatman’s flow.

If the boatman disapproved of savages, he also pitied them, his unbridled contempt reserved for the Canadian voyageurs, a riotous lot, lazy and complaining, who thought nothing of wintering in the fur forts with Indian wives of twelve years of age, whom they often bartered for a season to one or another of their rude companions. “When the cold abates, which you—in your ignorance—might consider a mercy, and the sun prevails day and night on the barrens, then do the mosquitoes begin to swarm everywhere, flying into your ears and mouth, a hellish torment, and the only thing for it is to light a fire, dampen it, and fill your tent with stinging smoke. Without a doubt, it is the land God gave to Cain.”

“Then why did you undertake such an arduous voyage in the first place?”

“I had no way of knowing.”

“True.”

“For my sins, of all the men assembled in Mr. Geddes’s house on June 14, 1819, I was one of the four who agreed to join the expedition, tempted by the promise of adventure and a wage of forty pounds annually as well as free passage back to the Orkney Islands. I was most impressed with the Christian character of Mr. Franklin. He bore with him a translation of the Gospel of St. John in the Esquimaux lingo printed by the Moravian Society in London. He also carried with him gifts to conciliate any savages we might encounter. Looking-glasses, beads, nails, tea kettles and so forth.”

In that stifling cell that crawled with lice, cockroaches, and sewer rats, that stank of excrement and urine and reverberated with the hacking of men already taken with typhus, Ephraim dreamt of a cool white land where the summer sun never set and herds of reindeer extended as far as the horizon. He was jolted awake when one of the boatman’s tormentors crept close to him, pretending to be the Bellman on his eve of execution visit. Ephraim lunged at him, grabbing his hand. Then, even as the man cried out, Ephraim gave his hand an even sharper twist, seemingly determined on uprooting his arm from its socket. “Tell me the name of your companion in the far corner.”

“Larkin.”

“Well now, he was with me in the Steel and he can tell you about me.”

In the morning, after another discouraging stroll through the exercise yard, Ephraim wakened the old boatman with gin and filled his pipe with tobacco.

“I want the sodomites’ sausages when they come,” the old man said.

“And you shall have them. Now tell me more.”

“I would also find a straw mattress most beneficial.”

“Take mine.”

Coughing, clearing his faltering lungs of phlegm, the old man told him that they had espied their first icebergs some ninety miles off the coast of Labrador. A day later the brilliant coruscations of the aurora borealis appeared to them. “We did not encounter any difficulties until we quit York Factory in a small boat, bound for the interior. Then we couldn’t make progress on that damned Steel River by sail. The current was running too fast for using oars so we were bloody well bound to commence tracking.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Then you are blessed. What I’m saying is that we had to drag the boat by a line to which we were harnessed like beasts of the field. This is not easy at the best of times, but these were the worst for anybody but a mountain goat, considering the steep declivity of the high banks and the soft slippery footing. Aye, we were fortunate indeed to advance at the rate of two miles an hour. Are you for the dance upon nothing?”

“I’m too young. And then?”

“And then the water in the Hill River was so low we were obliged to jump into it, though it was freezing, and this we did several times a day to lift the boat over our shoulders. And next came the sprouts, and we were leaping in and out of the boat all day, working in wet clothes in freezing temperatures. I take it you’re a Four by Two.”

“Yes.”

The old man began to chortle. “Gin. Tobacco. Steak-and-kidney pie. The turnkeys dancing attendance. I thought as much.”

“Did you now?”

He held out his tumbler for more gin.

“You’ve had enough.”

“I want more, lad.”

“Then tell me more.”

It was the long trek back from the interior that really exorcised the boatman; a time when they had to contend with fearful famine and cold, the thieving of rations by the Canadian voyageurs and the unspeakable treachery of Michel Teroahauté. “We ate the skin and bones of deer and the storms raged without and within. Don’t you see? Mr. Franklin had to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Separate them. Hood and Back. Sending Back on his long trek.”

“Why?”

“How can you be such an idiot?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“Hood had already got a savage with child at Fort Enterprise and now he lusted after the little Copper Indian harlot—after Green Stockings—who couldn’t have been more than fifteen years old. But Back, an even worse whoremonger, was also smitten. That brazen girl would bathe in cold streams, displaying her cunny to the officers on the bank, inflaming them. She lay with both of them in turn. They took her from behind, like a bitch in heat.”

“And how would you know that?”

“Why, if not for me those two midshipmen would have fought a duel. I consulted with Dr. Richardson and then I removed the charges from their pistols. Then it was that Mr. Franklin sent Back away for the winter.”

“You were spying on the girl.”

“I did no such thing. Mind, I did stumble on them fornicating in the bush once. Aye, and it was a disgusting sight. Not to you or your kind, perhaps, who have denied Christ. But you must understand that my Christian upbringing stood me no matter how far from civilization.”

“Though not necessarily when you came back to it.”

“I am here falsely accused by my daughter and the court will see that soon enough. Now I must get some sleep.”

Prowling the men’s courtyard the next morning, cursing the chevaux de frise, Ephraim loitered once again under the water cistern that protruded immediately below the revolving spikes at the corner of the yard. And once again he saw that the turnkeys did not keep a constant watch on it. Back in his cell he roused the old boatman with gin and tobacco and pleaded with him to resume his tale.

“But where was I?”

“Mr. Back had been sent off to search for supplies and the rest of you were driven to eating deer skin.”

“Aye, for we had been abandoned by vile Akaitcho and his band of heathens. And by this time poor Mr. Hood was much inconvenienced by dimness of sight, giddiness, and other symptoms of sin, and we had to make frequent halts. Now did I tell you that Belanger and Ignace Perrault, unable to go on, had been left behind in a tent with a gun and forty-eight balls?”

“No. You did not.”

“That was the case. And then one morning Michel Teroahauté claimed that he had seen a deer pass near his sleeping place and he went off to chase him. He couldn’t find him. But, he said, he had come by a wolf which had been gored by a deer and he brought portions of it back to camp. Only after we had eaten it did we grasp that it must have been a portion of the flesh of either Belanger or Perrault, both of whom the savage had slain, and then gone at their frozen bodies with a hatchet.”

Such was the failing boatman’s increasing agitation that the rest of his tale was too garbled for Ephraim to comprehend, but he did sort out that in the days that followed the gale was relentless. Teroahauté, left alone with Mr. Hood in a tent, apparently murdered him with a shot of his gun. The priapic Mr. Hood died by the camp-fire, Bickersteth’s Scripture Help lying next to his body, as if it had tumbled from his hand at the instant of his death. A raging Teroahauté then heaped scorn on the rest of the company. Dr. Richardson, alarmed to see Teroahauté now armed with two pistols, and an Indian bayonet, took advantage of an opportune moment and killed him with a shot through the head with his own pistol.

The boatman suddenly clutched at Ephraim, his good eye bulging, a rattle rising in his throat, and then fell back, dying, his tale incomplete. Searching his person Ephraim found a soiled and torn sketch of a beautiful nude Indian girl, whom he would learn years later was Green Stockings, the daughter of Kesharrah, the prize that made such unforgiving enemies of Hood and Back.

Also years later, once he himself had become familiar with the barrens, Ephraim would discover that it was the vile Akaitcho and his Indian band that ultimately rescued the starving party, bringing them dried deer meat, some fat, and a few tongues.

Before parting with the survivors of Franklin’s party, Akaitcho, denied his promised reward of goods, said to them: “The world goes badly, all are poor, you are poor, the traders appear to be poor, and I and my party are poor likewise; and since the goods have not come in, we cannot have them. I do not regret having supplied you with provisions, for a Copper Indian can never permit white men to suffer from want of food on his lands, without flying to their aid. I trust, however, that we shall, as you say, receive what is due to us next autumn; and in all events it is the first time that the white people have been indebted to the Copper Indians.”

Hours after the Orkney boatman had died his body was dumped into a cart and taken to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital to be privately dissected.

The next morning in the exercise yard Ephraim saw that the wall by the water cistern was still unattended. Back braced painfully against the rough stone, he slithered up the wall, just as he had once been taught by a sweep’s climbing boy. He grasped the cistern and shot over its crown. His back badly torn, he then made a grab for the rusty bar supporting the chevaux de frise and edged along it until he came to the Press Yard buildings. There he risked a jump of nine feet to the roof, spraining his ankle, but still managing to hobble clear of Newgate and the adjoining buildings. Emerging on the sloping roof of a house on a nearby street, he rested briefly, concealed behind a chimney stack, hugging his throbbing ankle. Then he slid down a drainpipe to the street and made directly for Izzy Garber’s lodging in Wentworth Street, where he could count on a healing salve for his torn back, a warming fire, meat pies and wine, and ribald stories.

Three

Four

Ephraim showed Lady Jane the letters commending Isaac Grant’s skills and Christian piety. “The surgeon I’m speaking of is also a naturalist of some distinction,” he said, as he proffered yet another letter, this one signed by Charles Robert Darwin. “Mr. Grant has long admired Sir John and would endure any hardship to sail with him on this bold venture. And I, who am forever in your debt, most revered lady, would take it as my duty to serve Sir John.”

Lady Jane, enchanted to see the redeemed lad again, was willing to plead his cause, but she explained that he was, alas, too late. “Unless,” she said, warming to the prospect, “you made directly for Stromness Harbour.”

“Exactly my intention. And I would be happy to wait,” he said, “if you cared to address an epistle to Sir John.”

The letter in hand, Ephraim hurried back to Whitechapel, where a desperate Izzy was hiding out. “We’re for the Orkneys,” he said.

“I dare not leave here. They’re looking for us everywhere.”

“They will be watching the ports, expecting us to make a dash for Ireland or the Continent.”

“Even if we got there safely how could we expect to get ourselves included in the ship’s company?”

Ephraim was already steaming open Lady Jane’s letter. The ink, he established at once, would be easy enough to duplicate. He had the nib she had used in his jacket pocket. He practised her spidery script for more than an hour before he risked adding the post scriptum, imploring Sir John to accept Ephraim, their Van Diemen’s Land foundling, and Mr. Isaac Grant, admirable as he was devout, among his ship’s company.

The rap on the door startled Izzy.

“Not to worry,” Ephraim said. “That will be the Sullivan sisters. Dorothy and Kate are coming with us.”

Once in Stromness Harbour, the gloomy dockside public house where the crews gathered was easily found. Many of them were fearful they would never see home again. Dangling the Sullivan sisters like bait, spending lavishly, it did not take Ephraim long to ingratiate himself with the sailors. He settled instinctively on those he took to be the most jittery, regaling them with tales of his late father’s overland journey to the shores of the Polar Sea with Franklin in 1819. “Why, there came a time,” he said, “during their third year on the barrens, when they were driven to eating the putrid powdered marrow bones of a deer that had already been picked over by ferocious white wolves and black ravens. Mind you, my father was one of the few fortunate enough to survive, though my poor mother hardly recognized him on his return. His teeth lost to scurvy and all of his toes amputated. Not much use to her, which probably accounts for her running off with Mr. Feeney.”

The night before they were to sail, Captain Crozier of the Terror wisely refused his crew shore leave, worried that some of the men would jump ship. But Captain Fitzjames of the Erebus allowed his lot the usual liberty. All of them reported back at the required hour, but then the randy assistant surgeon appropriated a small boat and had a sailor, a lad fortunate enough to be fancied by Kate, row him back to land. There the two of them joined the Sullivan sisters, the assignation having been hastily arranged while Ephraim was ostensibly busy elsewhere.

According to the official records, the miscreants rowed back to the Erebus at three A.M. The third lieutenant, whose watch it was, hardly recognized them, but then it was a dark night, the moon and stars obscured by clouds, and he was somewhat the worse for drink himself. The sailor, sporting a silk top hat, was jabbering in some unknown guttural tongue with the assistant surgeon, the two of them lugging sacks of personal provisions on board. Certainly against the rules, that, but they had been sufficiently thoughtful to bring the third lieutenant a bottle of rum.

Franklin had no luck. Unknowingly, he set sail for the Arctic in what would subsequently prove to have been one of the most relentlessly cold cycles of the last 1,000 years. He went to sea with some eight thousand cans of preserved meat, supplied by one Stephen Goldner, the lowest bidder, and canned according to his new-fangled process called “Goldner’s Patent”. The meat was vile. Cans found on Beechey Island by a perspicacious anthropologist more than 125 years later had imperfectly sealed seams and bulging ends, evidence of putrefaction, supporting his theory that expedition members had suffered from lead poisoning, which can lead to debilitating fatigue, anorexia and paranoia. But Ephraim and Izzy, given their secret hoard of Jewish soul food, were not as infected as the rest of the company. True, the bulk of their supplies gave out during the first year, but the schmaltz herring, an indulgence Izzy limited to the sabbath, lasted them well into the second. And even then, the ever resourceful Izzy, by now an intimate of the cook, was able to leaven their intake of poisonous meat with delicacies that he had shrewdly held back. So one Friday night they might gorge themselves on kasha fried in chicken fat and the next on rice prepared in a similar fashion.

Trying to reconstruct Ephraim’s interminable winters in the high Arctic, the sun sinking below the horizon for four months, Moses had to rely on conjecture and the accounts of other nineteenth-century explorers. Then there were the fragments from Solomon’s journals, those tales told by Ephraim on the shores of a glacial lake, man and boy warming themselves by their camp-fire under the shifting arch of the aurora.

Navigation in the Arctic Archipelago was limited to eight weeks. Then, confronted with the melancholy prospect of yet another winter, the men would either blast or saw their ship’s path into a safe harbour, where they would be held hostage in the pack ice for ten months. They would set to cutting the ice for fresh water and constructing an ice wall around the ship, piling snow against the hull for insulation, and erecting canvas housing on the decks. The officers, intent on maintaining morale, diverted the crews with foot races on the ice, cricket matches, schools, and theatrical performances, the temperature on stage below zero for the Christmas pantomime. “No joke,” the saucy Lieutenant Norton complained, “when you are wearing petticoats.” Cabin boys and the more comely of the able sailors and marines took to demanding exorbitant fees for their favours from smitten officers.

Solomon noted in his journal that Ephraim attended classes in astronomy, becoming proficient in reading the stars, and never missed a lecture by Mr. Stanley, the surgeon on the Erebus.

“The science of medicine has now arrived at such perfection in England,” Mr. Stanley said, “that we have almost forgotten the crude beginnings out of which our present knowledge was evolved. But from our pinnacle of learning, it is interesting to observe the darkness in which the wild Esquimaux still tolerates a class of medicine man whose pretensions to perform all kinds of miracles are of the extravagant character. These shamans say they can and do make themselves larger and smaller at will, or change themselves into some other animal, or enter into a piece of wood or stone; that they can walk on water and fly through the air; but there is one indispensible condition—no one must see them.”

The officers laughed appreciatively.

“Alas,” Mr. Stanley continued, “the matter is serious. The shamans, to take one example, have absolutely no understanding of the nature of delirium. When a patient becomes delirious, as in severe fevers, they take him to be mad, possessed of an irresistible desire for cannibalism.”

Franklin, his death foretold, was buried on June 11, 1847 in the British ensign Lady Jane had embroidered for him. And when the longed-for summer dawned at last, its feeble sun was insufficient to free the ships from the ice floes.

The men, their teeth swimming in their bloodied mouths, were put on even shorter rations, Ephraim told Solomon. Scurvy, Solomon noted in his journal, claimed twenty of them in the winter of 1848. And then the Erebus became the place of darkness between Earth and Hades. Men tore at each other’s faces over a chunk of tainted meat and performed acts abhorrent to them for the sake of a ration of tea or tobacco. Officers wept as they wrote letters of farewell. The captain of the forecastle sat at the organ for hours, playing hymns, praying for deliverance from the sunless frozen sea. A demented, feverish Philip Norton, wearing a wig, his cheeks rouged, his lips painted, paraded below decks in a ball gown, attended by admirers, pausing to pinch Izzy Garber’s cheeks or caress Ephraim’s buttocks, speculating aloud on which one would taste most tender in the pot, warning everybody that it would come to that soon enough. One morning he had Ephraim led forcibly into his tiny cabin where, in spite of the intense cold, he lay on his bunk wearing nothing but a black suspender belt and stockings, singing softly as he combed his pubic hairs with a toothbrush. “The time has come, my dear, to reveal where you and Grant have your secret store of food.”

Hallucinating crew members, fearful of being butchered, were never without a weapon to hand. Those who had spit out their teeth long ago and were now too weakened to move, ridden with skin ulcers, coughing phlegm and blood, slid in pools of diarrhoea in their hammocks. Those who were still mobile but with gums already livid, their mouths tasting of death, split into rival gangs, each suspecting the other of nourishing themselves on hidden caches of food. On the prowl, armed, they organized flash searches. Officers were openly jeered. An alarmed Crozier and Fitzjames met in the wardroom of the Erebus, two Royal Marines standing guard at the door.

Moses Berger, his annotated Franklin library all but definitive, found that more than a hundred years later scholars were still puzzled by why the expedition men, having decided to abandon their ships, sickly and inadequately equipped as they were, elected to strike out, by way of Back’s Fish River, for Fort Reliance, some eight hundred miles away. “Certainly only some grave factor or combination of circumstances,” wrote Hudson’s Bay Chief Trader William Gibson, FRGS, in The Beaver (June, 1937), “could have precipitated such a hazardous and daring decision.”

The grave circumstance, according to Ephraim, was Crozier’s conviction that mutiny was imminent.

Scholars were even more baffled by the amazing variety of articles strewn about the lifeboat found by Hobson near Victory Point. Silk handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, toothbrushes and hair-combs. That is to say, just about everything required for the toilette of the demented “Dolly” Norton and his entourage. Neither could scholars understand why the lifeboat was pointed in the direction of the abandoned ships.

Ephraim told Solomon: “Crozier and Fitzjames had departed with the men they ajudged to be loyal or at least sane. They induced Norton and his band to separate from the main body, bribing them with stores of tea and chocolate, and allowing them to take me and Izzy with them. Prisoners for the pot. But as God spared Isaac from the knife at the last moment, providing a ram in his place, so we were saved by that polar bear they shot on the ice. Norton and his bunch immediately set to gobbling the liver raw, sparing not a slice for us, and that was that.”

Hypervitaminosis, a toxic reaction to an overdose of Vitamin A, its severity heightened by the absence of Vitamins C and E, is acquired by eating the liver of a polar bear or bearded seal. The disease is so rare it is not even listed in Black’s Medical Dictionary. Its symptoms, Moses noted on one of his file cards, are as follows:

Ephraim told Solomon: “The Eskimos who had been with us for four days had gone, and we were still camped some seventy miles from the ships, unable to move on, the men vomiting and shitting themselves, blaming it all on the seal they had shared with the Eskimos. Izzy was feverish. And Norton, wearing his ball gown in the tent, warmed as it was by a feeble fire, swore he would have me for his catamite. When I began to curse, he ordered his followers to lower me to my knees, arms twisted behind my back. Thrusting himself at me, he raised his skirts and lowered his silk panties, and then it was he saw fragments of his own skin and hair fall into the snow. His privates were red and raw. Crazed now, he lowered his stockings, sobbing as strips of skin peeled off his legs. The other men, determined to examine themselves, let go of me. Oh, there rose such a wailing in that tent, and threats of murder for me and Izzy, who had not been affected. With the greatest of difficulty the quarrelsome, failing men managed to turn the lifeboat round on the sledge, intending to head back to the ship and rest there until they recovered, butchering me and Izzy for food. However, they were so weakened by dysentery by this time that it did not take much for me to leap at Norton from behind, topple him, slit his throat, and retreat from the others with Izzy in the direction the Eskimo band of hunters had gone, dragging our things with us on a makeshift sled.”

There was a gap in Solomon’s journal, and when he next took up Ephraim’s tale it was to recount the story of his grandfather’s contest with the shaman in the camp of the hunters. The hunters were Netsiliks. One of their number, Kukiaut, had served on an American whaler for two years and was able to both translate for Ephraim and teach him Inuktituk.

The contest was over a sickly child, keening women dancing around him in the igloo, crying, “Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya.”

The boy had fallen through a scalp of ice into freezing water. His cheeks were burning hot, he was delirious, but Ephraim guessed he was suffering from nothing worse than a bad case of the grippe, and offered to treat him with medicines from Izzy’s sea chest. But Inaksak, the wily old shaman, denounced the usurper, a bloodthirsty interloper, who would bring storms and death into their camp. The old man, mocking Ephraim, pranced about him, snarling, flaunting the amulets hanging from his belt: rows of seal and bear teeth, the head of a tern carved in soapstone, the penis of a walrus. The child, he proclaimed, was possessed by an evil spirit, but the mighty Inaksak, with the help of the ghost of Kaormik, would draw it out of his body, curing him.

“Gottenyu,” Izzy said, “have they got dybbuks even here?”

Crouching, covering himself with a caribou skin, Inaksak went into a trance. Then he advanced on the boy, rolling his eyes, groaning, flashing his snow knife.

Izzy, recognizing another professional, nudged Ephraim. “Careful, old son. He’s bloody good he is.”

Sucking at the feverish boy’s stomach, Inaksak reeled backwards as the evil spirit struck him. Staggering about the igloo—thrashing—thrusting with his snow knife—he wrestled with the spirit. Finally, blood trickling down his chin, he spit out a stone at Ephraim’s feet, pronouncing the boy freed, and fell down in a swoon. But, within hours, the boy was worse, and a rueful Inaksak declared that he was possessed by too many tupiliqs for him to vanquish, the evil spirits having come with the kublanas. He ordained that the hunters must now build a small igloo and abandon the boy and the intruders there to freeze to death, lest the blight overwhelm everybody in the camp.

Once the sentence was translated, an outraged Izzy had to be restrained from leaping at the shaman. He appealed to Ephraim. “Explain to the silly buggers that the old fart drew the blood from his mouth by lancing his gums with the stone.”

Instead Ephraim said that he and Izzy would be pleased to accompany the boy to the igloo, providing they were allowed a stone lamp and fuel and food for a week, and in that time Ephraim would cure the boy, proving that he could perform greater magic than Inaksak.

Ephraim told Solomon: “Worse luck. The day I brought the boy back, shaky on his feet, but obviously on the mend, our return was followed hard by a blizzard. Inaksak, that cunning old bastard, danced up and down, saying my magic was bad. I had angered Narssuk, god of the wind, rain and snow.”

Narssuk’s father, a huge double-toothed monster, had been slain in a battle with another giant. His mother had also been killed. When still an infant, Narssuk was already so large that four women could sit on his prick. He flew into the sky and became an evil spirit, hating mankind, restrained from mischief only by the thongs that held his caribou skins in place. However, if women kept silent about their menses or other taboos were broken, Narssuk’s thongs loosened, he was free to move about, and tormented the people with blizzards.

“Now, because of the kublanas, I will have to fly into the sky,” Inaksak said, “and fight Narssuk, tightening his thongs, or there will be no good weather for the hunt and we shall all starve.”

But once the hunters and their women and children had gathered outside it became clear that Inaksak’s flight had become unnecessary. The storm had abated as suddenly as it had started. Ephraim then noted the position of the moon bobbing on the horizon. Hoping against hope that his calculations were right, he said, “I am more powerful than this foolish old man, or even Narssuk, and to prove it to you I will soon raise my arms and lead the moon, who is my servant, between you and the sun, bringing darkness in the season of light, and then, unless you obey my smallest wish, I will turn myself into a raven and pluck your eyes out one by one.”

Once this was translated by Kukiaut, the Eskimos, vastly amused to have such a braggart in their midst, sat down to wait.

Ephraim disappeared into his igloo and emerged again wearing his silk top hat and his talith. He sang: “Who knows one? I know One: One is God in Heaven and Earth. Who know Two? I know Two: Two is the Tablets, One is God in Heaven and Earth.”

He rolled over in the snow, simulating convulsions, froth bubbling from his lips. Then he stood up, and at the rising of the moon he lifted his arms and the eclipse began. The astonished Eskimos cried out, falling to their knees, pleading with Ephraim not to become a raven and pluck out their eyes.

And Ephraim said unto them:

“I am Ephraim, the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me.

“Thou shalt not bow down to Narssuk, whose prick I have shrivelled, or to any other gods, you ignorant little fuckers. For the Lord thy God is a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”

He enjoined them not to steal or kill, unless ordered to do so by Ephraim, and instructed them not to take his name in vain. “Six days shalt thou hunt, providing meat for me and Izzy, and on the evening of the sixth day thou shalt wash thy women and bring them to me, an offering—”

Izzy stamped his foot.

“—and to my priest here. And on the seventh day, which is my sabbath, thou shalt rest.”

In the days that followed, the women lying with him under caribou skins on the snow platform, the men gathered round, Ephraim told them, “In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth.”

Ephraim enchanted them with stories of the flood, Joseph’s coat of many colours, and his ten plagues, the latter tale a favourite of the hunters.

Ephraim set and mended their broken bones, he tended to their sick, and when a female child was born he would not allow them to strangle and then eat it, and when a male child was born he showed them how he was to be circumcised.

Ephraim promised them that their seed would be as numerous as the stars above. He told them that one day he would have to leave them, but, if they continued to behave themselves, he would send them a Messiah in another generation. The Messiah, a descendant of Ephraim, would return their ancestors to them and make the seal and caribou so plentiful that nobody would starve again.

Ephraim also bestowed on his followers a version of Yom Kippur, telling them that this was his holiest of holy days, and that from the time the sun went down, until it rose and went down again, any of his flock who was thirteen years old or older was not to fuck or eat any food, but instead must pray to him for forgiveness of his sins. He laid down this law in a foolish and absent-minded moment, overlooking the fact that his faith provided for all contingencies save that of the Arctic adherent.

In the years to come, followers of Ephraim who wandered too far north in search of seal in October soon discovered that they were in bad trouble. Once the sun went down they were obliged to remain celibate and fast until it rose once more several months later, not sinking below the horizon again for many more months. As a consequence, some sinned against Ephraim, the men stealing out of camp to eat, their women seeking satisfaction among the unclean. But most stayed in place to starve, dying devout, unless Henry, that good shepherd, found them, and hurried them south to the sun and deliverance.

Five

“You’re taking it wrong, Bert. Nobody’s asking you to leave. But as I now have a professional to handle all the repairs and you can’t afford the going rent, it’s only fair you should move into the small room in back.” Mrs. Jenkins, standing on the throw rug, shifted her weight from one foot to another, her ear cocked to the floorboard’s answering squeak. “Loose board,” she said.

“I’ll take care of it,” Smith said.

“I’ve got a couple would take this room on Monday and pay me forty dollars a week in advance.”

Quitting the house in a rage, Smith hurried down the street, passing neighbours, not one of whom greeted him with a wave or even a smile. Grabby cheeky foreigners. Bloody ungrateful, that lot. If one of their women got on the same bus as he did, never mind she was merely an ignorant cleaning lady, pilfering from her betters, he immediately offered her his seat. Why, once he had even carried parcels home from the Metro for Mrs. Donanto. But if he ever slipped on the ice, breaking an ankle, the neighbours would probably cheer. Certainly they would leave him lying there with the poo from the Reginelli dog who did his business anywhere.

Smith went to the bank, withdrew his weekly two hundred dollars, and then treated himself to coffee and a blueberry muffin at Miss Westmount. He had his pride. He would not submit to the indignity of that two-by-four room with a slit of a window overlooking the rats feasting on the garbage in the back lane. Instead he popped in on Mrs. Watkins and inquired about the vacant room in her house. Then he splurged on lunch at Ogilvy’s and went home for a nap.

“Thinking of moving out, are we, old buddy of mine?”

Smith, startled, felt the room begin to sway.

“Go ahead. Make my day. The reason Mrs. Watkins has a vacant room is an old guy conked out in bed. Probably froze to death. Or didn’t you know she sets her thermostat at sixty-five?”

“I have no interest in your back room.”

“Guessy guessy why Mrs. Watkins phoned the minute you left her cockroachy place? Because she’s put up with old fusspots got one foot in the grave before and she wanted to know did you pee in bed?”

“Have you quite finished, Mrs. Jenkins?”

“Mrs. Jenkins is it now? Ha! I found an empty Laura Secord box in your wastepaper basket last week as well as a takeout bag from the Shangri-la and three Lowney’s Nut Milk wrappers. Where did you get the do re me, Bert?”

“None of your business.”

“Well it’s my bee’s-wax if you’re shop-lifting or maybe peddling dope to school kids in the Alexis Nihon Plaza and the cops will be coming to my door to make inquiries.”

Smith didn’t emerge from his room until noon the next day. After looking at a number of places, he settled on something in N.D.G. in a rambling old house that had been converted into self-contained one-room flatlets, each with its own bathroom and a cupboard kitchenette with a two-plate electric burner. Feeling sinful, he bought a small refrigerator and a colour TV and an electric blanket. Then, exhausted, he took a taxi home, slipping out at the corner, only to be totally undone when he discovered that his key no longer fit the lock to his room. Worse news. His increasingly frantic struggling with what was obviously a new lock wakened somebody inside. A whining feminine voice. “Is that you, Herb?”

Before Smith, dizzy with despair, could answer, Mrs. Jenkins was there.

“We moved everything into the back room for you nice and tidy. Even your precious strongbox full of marijuana and dirty postcards I’ll betcha.”

“I’ve got to get into my room.”

“But everything’s here,” she said, leading him to the back room.

“Please,” Smith said, “I’ve got to get into my room.”

“This is your roomy-doomy-do now. Besides, Mrs. Boyd is in bed with the grippe, poor kid.”

Smith shut the door and subsided on to his bed. Shivering under his blankets even though the radiator was on the sizzle, he realized that he couldn’t move out tomorrow as he had planned. He would have to wait until Mrs. Boyd got better, went out shopping with her husband, and he could break into the room to retrieve his money. Meanwhile, he calculated it was safe. They would never look under the floorboard. But it squeaked. Oh, God.

Early the next morning Smith opened his door a crack. Soon enough he was rewarded with his first glimpse of Betty Boyd, a frail creature in a faded nightgown, hurrying to the toilet, a hand cupped to her mouth. Morning sickness, Smith thought.

Betty couldn’t have been more than seventeen years old. Herb, easily ten years older, was a big man, his hockey sweater no longer stretching over his beer belly.

MONCTON WILDCATS

Eat McNab’s Frozen Peas

Herb had a job at Pascal’s Hardware and came straight home from work every night with a pizza or a couple of submarine sandwiches, a six-pack of O’Keefe, and a quart of milk. Except for hurried flights to the toilet, Betty lingered in bed all day, playing her radio loud. The Boyds had only been installed in Smith’s old room for a week when he contrived to run into Herb in the hall. “You ought to take her out one night,” he said. “Put some colour in her cheeks.”

“She don’t like you peeping from behind your door when she has to crap.”

Two nights later Smith saw them leave their room. He waited until he heard the outside door open and shut and then he reached for his hammer and screwdriver. Mr. Calder in number five was out. So was Miss Bancroft. Bingo night. Mrs. Jenkins was watching TV in her parlour, but what if she heard the door being forced? Or what if the Boyds had only gone to the corner store and would be back in five minutes? Smith decided to wait for a night he could be sure they had gone to a movie. Meanwhile, he would time how long they stayed out. But when he fell asleep at two A.M. there was still no sign of them.

It was seven A.M. before Mrs. Jenkins opened the door to the room with her master key and saw that the Boyds hadn’t taken anything with them.

A stricken Smith joined her.

“Don’t touch anything,” she said. “Fingerprints. They could be the victims of foul play.”

But Smith knew, without even looking, that the Boyds had lifted a squeaky floorboard and were now on the road to Toronto richer by two thousand three hundred and fifty-eight dollars.

Still mourning his loss, Smith arranged for his things to be picked up while Mrs. Jenkins was out having her hair done by Lady Godiva. He left a brief note and two weeks’ rent on the table, but no forwarding address, and his last best hope was that she would slip on the ice, breaking an ankle, and there would be nobody to take care of her when she got out of the hospital.

Good riddance, Mrs. Jenkins thought, crumpling the note, and then she stepped right out again, stopping for a banana split at the Alexis Nihon Plaza and then going to a movie, The Day of the Jackal. It was ruined for her by two glaring flaws. The assassin, crossing from Italy to France, never could have spray-painted his sportscar so easily. Another scene began with the sun at twelve o’clock, but ended with it at three, though the scene only lasted a minute, if that. Filmmakers must think everybody is an idiot.

Installed in his new flatlet, his colour TV and refrigerator in place, the photograph of his parents in Gloriana sitting on the mantel, Smith prepared his breakfast, gratified that he no longer had to respond to how many Newfies it took to screw in a light bulb or how do you tell the bride from the groom at a Polish wedding. It was a pleasure to have his own Gazette delivered to the door, not a crumpled copy, pages stuck together with marmalade. There were other benefits. He didn’t have to wipe the blood off his butter, because she had shoved her leaky lamb chops on the shelf above his own, instead of putting it in the meat drawer. Neither was he obliged to spread paper on the seat before sitting on the toilet. Tomorrow, he decided, he would have his phone disconnected. He didn’t want Mrs. Jenkins coming round to snoop just because he was listed in the book. Let her worry about what had become of her best friend in this vale of tears.

Lionel Gursky beamed at him from the front page of the Gazette. His newly established Gursky Foundation (yet another tax dodge, Smith thought) would offer a hundred university scholarships to needy students across Canada. This, in everlasting memory of Mr. Bernard. “My father,” Lionel said, “loved Canada and everybody in it.”

Said the call girl to the judge, Smith thought, a pain shooting up his arm.