During the long dark winter there was a ploughed airstrip illuminated by lighted oil drums, but in summer only float planes serviced the settlement.
A Greek immigrant, the pilot had been told in Yellowknife about Henry. He had thought, understandably, that they were pulling his leg. He had been seated in the sour-smelling Gold Range, knocking back two and a juice with some of the other bush pilots and miners when a Yugoslav foreman from the Great Con had said, “He’s been all the way to Boothia with a dog team and he knows King William like the palm of his hand.”
“What’s he looking for?” the Greek asked, soliciting laughter. “Oil?”
“Brethren of his who have strayed too far from the sun.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re not expected to.”
The nurse was there. Thinner than he liked, older than he had been told. “I brought you something,” he said.
“Yes,” Agnes said, “they usually do,” and she turned and walked away from him. If he followed, all right, if he didn’t, all right. It wasn’t in her hands.
Henry, approaching the Sir Igloo Inn Café, a corrugated hut, saw a tangle of kids cavorting in the dust. As he drew nearer one of the kids squirted free, black hair flying, and disappeared behind an aluminum shed. “Isaac!” Henry called after him, abandoning his cart to pursue his son. “Isaac!”
He found him hidden behind an oil drum, chewing greedily on a raw seal’s eye, sucking the goodness out of it. “You mustn’t,” Henry chided him, tenderly wiping the blood off his chin with a handkerchief. “It’s not kosher. It’s unclean, yingele. Trayf.”
Isaac, giggly, his coal-black eyes bright, accepted an orange instead. “Aleph,” Henry said.
“Aleph.”
“Beth.”
“Beth.”
“And next?” Henry asked, pausing to pull his ear.
“Gimel.”
“Bravo,” Henry exclaimed, pushing open the door to his pre-fab.
“Nialie,” he sang out, “it’s here.”
His wife, an uncommonly slender Netsilik out of Spence Bay, smiled broadly. “Kayn anyhoreh,” she said.
Together they lowered the zinc half-trunk to the floor, Henry unlocking it, taking only the bill of lading from the Nôtre Dame de Grace Kosher Meat Market, in Montreal, to the rolltop desk that had once belonged to his father. There were two bullet holes in it. “We’ve got a new pilot today. A Greek. Agnes came out to meet him.”
“Then he will find something wrong with his engine and he will stay the night.”
“That’s enough, Nialie.”
At three A.M. the lowering sun bobbed briefly on the world’s rim.
Henry, who had only ten minutes before it would start to climb again, stood and turned to the east wall, the one that faced Jerusalem, and began his evening prayers. Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.
Henry’s faith, conceived on the shores of another sea, nurtured in Babylon, burnished in Spain and the Pale of Settlement, seemingly provided for all contingencies save those of the Arctic adherent. So Henry, a resourceful man in some matters, usually improvised, his religious life governed not by the manic sun of the Beaufort Sea, but instead by a clock attuned to a saner schedule. A southern schedule.
Henry slept for six hours, waking the next morning, Friday, to find Nialie salting a brisket that had defrosted during the night. She allowed the blood to drain into the sink, even as her grandmother had learned to do it as a child during the season of Tulugaq who had come on the wooden ship with three masts. The sabbath chicken lay trussed in a pot, the braided bread was ready for the oven.
His morning prayers done, Henry shed his talith, folded it neatly, and removed his phylacteries. Immediately after breakfast he sat down at his desk to write a letter to Moses Berger.
By the Grace of G-d,
15 Nissan, 5734
Tulugaqtitut, NWT
Dear Moses,
Have you heard that since February photographs taken from a satellite have revealed fractures in the Tweedsmuir Glacier? My charts show the Tweedsmuir to be 44 miles long and 8 miles wide. Since February it has stepped up its pace as it marches across the Alsek River Valley. In fact the glacier, which has been creeping southeast at a rate of less than 2 ft. 3 in. a day, is now heaving forward about 13 feet daily. At peak periods last winter Tweedsmuir was moving an astonishing 288 ft. a day. I realize this sudden restlessness is not without precedent and could be an isolated, freakish matter. But I would be grateful if the next time you see Conway at the Institute you had a word with him and checked out the movement of the other glaciers. I am particularly interested in any changes in the habits of the Barnes Ice Cap where, all things considered, it might begin again.
Conway, as you know, has no time for loonies like me, but you might point out to him that in the last 15 years there has been a marked increase in precipitation on the Barnes Ice Cap, especially in winter.
Nialie sends hugs to you and Beatrice and so does Isaac. Isaac (somewhat late in the day, it’s true) is making gratifying progress with his aleph beth. I would be grateful if you would write soon. We worry about you.
Love,
HENRY
The last time Henry had seen Moses was just after he had been fired by NYU. Henry, in New York to consult with the Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, had gone to visit Moses in his apartment. A fetid basement hole on Ninth Avenue. Furniture you couldn’t unload on the Salvation Army. Empty Scotch bottles everywhere. On the bathroom sink a bar of soap resting in slime with indentations made by the teeth marks of mice.
Four o’clock in the afternoon it was and Moses was still lying in bed, his face puffy and bruised, a purple bloom on his forehead. “What’s today?” he asked.
“Wednesday.”
Henry rented a car and drove Moses to the clinic in New Hampshire.
“He looks like he ran into a wall,” the doctor said. “Who did he get into a fight with this time?”
“That’s unfair. He was mugged. Look here, Moses has never been violent.”
The doctor extracted a typed sheet from a file on his desk. “On a flight to New York a couple of years ago—unprovoked, according to eyewitnesses—he tried to punch out a couple of furriers and had to be forcibly restrained by crew members. Your friend is filled with bottled-up rage. Shake the bottle hard enough and the cork pops.”
Moses’s last letter to Henry had been bouncy, even joyous, which was worrying, because in the past that had always been an alarm signal. He and Beatrice were living together again, this time in Ottawa. Moses, who was lecturing at Carleton, didn’t dare disgrace himself again, but he seemed well aware of that.
… and I haven’t had a drink or even risked anything as intoxicating as coq au vin for six months, two weeks, three days and four hours. Bite your tongue, Henry, I may have been through that revolving clinic door for the last time.
Beatrice is in Montreal this week, writing an ode-to-Canada introduction to the annual report for Clarkson, Wiggin, Delorme. It’s a grind, but surprisingly well paid. She says Tom Clarkson (LCC, Bishop’s, Harvard MBA) is an insufferable bore, but, hell, he’s putting her up at El Ritzo. For all that she’s lonely, so I just might surprise her and fly into Montreal one of these nights in time to take her to dinner.…