The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [3]
Panicked—what’s to become of him, what will he do? what will he do if she continues to refuse to see him?—he forces himself to let a day pass, and then another. He makes himself wait for what seems to him a long time, enough time for a woman to recover from whatever has upset her. Then he returns to her door.
But he finds it unlocked and inside her house nothing, just a pale spot on the floorboards where her bed used to be, and another under the missing stove. In one corner is his gramophone and, stacked neatly in their glassine envelopes, the Caruso and Tetrazzini recordings that he cranked the handle to play for her.
He walks around her two rooms. He runs his fingers along the walls until he comes to the place where she tacked up an illustrated advertisement for corsets, the fourteen styles available from the American Corset Company in Dayton, Ohio. Why she put it up or what she thought of it he cannot guess.
He stares at the advertisement, touches it, mouthing the names of the styles—Delineator, Posture Fix, Widow-Maker. He turns and with his back against the wall, he slides down, staring from one empty room into the other. He starts to cry, stops himself when he hears the choked noise he is making in the silence of her house. So small, so inadequate for the grief he feels.
PART ONE
JULY 10 , 1915 . He arrives in Anchorage without so much as a heavy coat or felt boot liners. Without matches, knife, or snow glasses. Having never held a gun. Sent north by the government, he makes the mistake of assuming he is going somewhere instead of nowhere: a field of mud under flapping canvas tents, two thousand railroad workers and no place to put them, a handful of women, and hour-long lines to buy dinner or a loaf of bread. A vast cloud of tiny, biting flies has settled in like fog, and mosquitoes swarm in predatory black columns. After a week he doesn’t itch anymore, but his skin feels thick, and the mirror in his shaving kit shows an unfamiliar face, cheeks puffed up red and hard and eyes narrow like a native’s. “Bigelow,” he says, to hear his own name. Silently, he tells the red face not to worry. Not to worry so much. Who doesn’t feel disoriented when he moves to a new place?
The surveyors who come north for the land auction look at the official blueprint he carries with him, stamped in one corner by the Weather Bureau, and then roll it back up and drop it in its tube. They give him a parcel of land by the creek and some advice on how best to spend his meager building allowance.
“Hire Indians,” they say. “And don’t pay them in liquor.”
So he uses a crew of Chugach to knock together the two-story station, a square room on the ground for bed and stove and table, and above it a square observation room outfitted with windows on all sides. Getting the carpenters is easy. For a fee, an agent negotiates the wage and the length of a workday. Directing the five men is another matter.
Given to understand, both by the Weather Bureau and by friends in Seattle with experience in Alaska, that Chinook is the lingua franca of the north, Bigelow owns a pocket dictionary of the jargon. Including translations of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Pledge of Allegiance, it is no more than a booklet, and he memorized the few hundred equivalents on board ship as he sailed toward his new home, expecting to make himself understood by Indians, as well as by Russians and Swedes, anyone he might encounter there. But either he speaks it incorrectly—mispronouncing the words, stringing them in the wrong order—or the Chugach pretend ignorance.
“T’zum pe-pah tum-tum.” Bigelow shows them the government station plan. Picture idea is what he’s said, the closest he can get to blueprint, a drawing he wants them to follow.
The men don’t answer, they don’t nod. Instead, they laugh, as if they’ve never seen anything as funny as the weather observatory he intends for them to assemble from the piles of lumber he’s bought from the mill.
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