The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [11]
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.
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.
Snowshoes of varying degrees of workmanship. A fistful of matches still dry in their waterproof can. A wooden tripod. A needlepoint cat stretched taut in its frame. A broken-necked ukulele. A statue of the Virgin with her nose sheared