curious meat

The sick men are encamped at a distance, far from their shipmates and further still from the visitors. TheNetsilik family hadn’t stayed long, and the news they brought with them hadn’t been good. A little fresh meat, a little sinew, and the local goings-on — poor hunting, a hard season. They had helped carry Mr. Hickey down the hillside, even the little ones had helped — only a family hunting for game, not a war party, and the women had wept for him in a panic. Billy can’t weep for him now.

A collapse, Thomas Farr had called it: Mr. Hickey had undergone a collapse, and a great outpouring of blood from the mouth and nose. And for some peculiar reason he had taken off all his clothes — why had he taken off his clothes? Why in God’s name had Cornelius done that? He must have gone mad. Gibson knows that he is going mad too; he knows that he forgets things, out here on the stones for the slow haul and that when he sleeps he dreams of the fever coast and of dogs barking and of great black rats rushing into the sea. Mr. Goodsir has retired to his lonely posting on the fringes with the Netsilik woman to scribble inky notes in that dictionary of his, neither doctoring nor surgeoning a single English soul, and it is Gibson who keeps watch over the sick men.

Gibson had sent the head of the Royal Marines loping away stiff-legged hours before — the shaggy fellow in his red coat always seems to haunt the sick tents even when he’s not wanted, perhaps he feels the loss of the Marine called Heather too keenly and wants to involve himself in matters better left to surgeons and stewards. He’s nursed men before when the circumstances require it, and the others seldom give any trouble — they need a warm drink, or help finding their prick to piss with, or a dispassionate set of hands to wrap a dressing. They lie like dead men, only stirring themselves to tug the worn rugs closer with scabrous fingers. Tending them is easy; most nights they sleep, and it keeps him close to Hickey.

Cornelius is in less disrepair than any of them, and at first, he looks better for it. His eyes, when they are open, are bright. His teeth are firmly embedded in his jaws, and his cheeks have an enduring pinkness. Yet he is dying, just as David Young had died, just as peevish John Torrington had died, he is dying like a boy. The disease has only intensified his pinkness and his paleness, the sharpness of his features, the lankness of his hair. Perhaps he will die tonight, or he will linger for a week, or he will rally and then collapse again in a profusion of blood.

Hickey coughs through the night; the sound of it can be heard even from the far encampments. Once, if you’d told Gibson that he would recognize a man’s voice by the timbre of his coughing, by the way he clears his throat to spit, he’d have laughed.

Their draughty shelter is scarcely broad enough for two men if one of them is a long-legged man like Gibson is; if Hickey won’t last the night, then at least he won’t die alone, or with a common soldier for company. Gibson wipes the damp away from his eyes, and dries the film of sweat from his chest before it can freeze — by God, he has a beautiful body. Even now it has only begun to waste away and the sight of discernible differences in his limbs give Gibson a pang. Wetting a cloth, he begins to wash away the grime from Hickey’s body — his arms are gray with dirt, and the little bit of hot water only seems to shift it around a bit. He has no tattoos, no workmanlike scars but the wounds of his flogging still crisscross his narrow thighs — the thought of them makes Gibson’s throat tighten, and he lifts him only gingerly from the shabby bed. They have not mended well, and it isn’t good for a man to lie in filth.

This man has been flogged for his sake. For the sake of Gibson’s impugned dignity, and his lie — the lie that had sent Lieutenant Irving into such a paroxysm of sympathy and disgust, the breach of his fine moral sentiments. Thirty lashes is not such a great number, but he will go on hearing the sounds in his dreams, the sound of each blow and of Cornelius’ awful sobbing breaths, the sound of the spittle rattling in his throat as he had nakedly wept.

Gibson does up his clothes again, quickly as to not leave skin exposed to the air, but the clumsiness of the act gives it a funeral feeling. Gibson pulls the comb through Hickey’s hair — it is too dirty to look red any more, but it is still soft as it ever was. If Hickey knows who it is that serves him, or even that someone else is there, he scarcely shows it. Fever has rendered him weak and strange; sometimes it seems as if he is listening with eyes closed, and other times he murmurs strange things. The comb makes white tracks of scalp, visible through the plough-furrows of its teeth.

Gibson has some dull memory of someone else combing his hair when he was a boy — the memory of some womanly presence wielding the instrument, it could only have been a mother or a sister. He had liked the feel of it, of someone else’s fingers making a neat parting in his hair and the stern rasp of the brush across his scalp. It had nearly sent him off to sleep. It had been a peaceful feeling.

Hickey’s rest is punctuated by bone-rattling fits of coughing, and the polished horn teeth of the comb judder against his scalp when his head jerks in Gibson’s lap.

Once Gibson had felt too good for the company of these men, the same men who lie a-dying now around them — he’d seen more of the world than your average ranking, he was better than stokers and carpenters and ships’ boys, he deserved better things for his effort and experience. Who could believe that now? What kind of fool believes himself too good to die? Each man’s station may be dictated by rank and role, but every man is mortal. If the crew should never return — if they never return to England, then his father will never know what has happened to him, he’ll never know what his son has become. Gibson knows what his father is and what he will be; he will never be anything but a debtor and a failed husbandman, just as Gibson will never be anything greater than a lesser steward. The pair of them have brought nothing but shame to one another in all their years, father and son—

Gibson lifts Hickey down again, taking pains to be careful of his head.

“Are you awake?” Gibson asks, in a low voice.

Say yes, Cornelius. For God’s sake, say yes.

And in a miracle greater than anything in all scripture, Hickey reaches out for him, blind as a kitten; his bony white hand darts into Gibson’s lap, and finds its way through sheer blind awareness into the warm place beneath his waistcoat. Gibson is horribly, treacherously aware of their closeness — he is aware, too, that they are alone as they have never been alone before. He still wants him, even now, even as they both lie here half-dying — there’s no chance that his prick will work, but his soul wants him. There is a terrible buzzing throbbing fullness of feeling not in his loins but his chest and throat. A dreadful hope.

Gibson leans in as close as he can stomach; the butcher-shop smell is strong, even in the cutting air, and not sweet. “How are you feeling now?”

Hickey’s voice is an unpleasantly wet rattle like a man just rousing from sleep. “Sort of all-overish, like. Cold. Come lie next to me, Billy.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not? Is Lieutenant Irving about, shining his lantern of virtue?”

The first time he speaks in nearly three days, and it’s to make a mock of an officer. Perhaps he will live, after all.

“The lieutenant is an ass. He won’t come near you. Shocked he was willing to patrol with you when you might have leaped upon him at any moment.”

“Ah, well.” There is the suggestion of a smile at the corners of Hickey’s mouth, a sly and secret smile. “Who am I to defy him?”

Gibson swallows, and all the warmth in his belly turns sour. He would never have defied a gentleman, not face to face, when Irving’s eyes had fairly brimmed with compassionate tears — he had wanted to believe that Hickey was the sinner, and Gibson his hapless victim, and Gibson had done nothing to sway him from that notion lest it make him angry. That’s virtue for a steward, and it’s as a steward that he’s even been suffered to come this far from the sweating malarial coasts — they wouldn’t have taken him on as an ordinary seaman, he must play a servile part.

Gibson’s eyelids are dry and dropping now; he has not slept, he cannot. The figure of Irving is fresh in his mind: Irving and the women lugging the blood-spattered sledge, with Hickey on it.

“He’s frightened of you, you know. He called you an agitator, once. At the officers’ table.”

The skin around Hickey’s eyes creases in confusion. “An agitator against who? When have I ever agitated?”

But this is playing innocent, and they both know it. If Hickey were to stir up trouble in earnest, there wouldn’t be a man aboard who wouldn’t know it. Lieutenant Irving jumps at every shadow and sees vice even where it isn’t. Of course he saw treachery where it wasn’t. Back on the groaning bellies of those ships, even the idiots and the blue-lights knew to be frightened, and fear must be the better half of all mutiny.

“What he meant was that you weren’t a man who acted as if he knew his place. And he’s right; you never have. You could be lieutenant if you wanted to. Or captain.”

Hickey gives a surprised, hiccoughing laugh. “There’s a surprise. You’d be whipped for mutiny, but not for buggery. I admire your grit sometimes, Billy, but you are a strange sort.”

Gibson sets aside the comb and takes up his knife. “No, not for buggery. There was a man on the Wanderer who asked me to go below with him to see about some mending. I was scarcely down the ladder when he had his prick in my hand and a finger in my arse.” Gibson’s mouth folds in an involuntary grimace. “I was green as grass and he told me he’d fuck me and I’d thank him for it. That was my induction into the ranks of the buggers.”

That first man on the Wanderer could not have been more different from Cornelius if the two of them were drawn to be an exercise in contrasts — he was a big man and sullen, with coal-black hair and a scowling mouth, and Gibson had wanted so desperately to please on his first venture at sea that a flogging would have meant nothing compared to disrating and disgrace. If he’d fought him tooth and nail, he wouldn’t be here, but some shadow-part had wanted it — to be kissed and touched, to be pressed close in the dark.

“You never told me that, Billy.” Hickey’s begrimed face is perfectly smooth. It is a void of emotion, except for those eyes.

“It’s not exactly parlor talk, is it. I’ve done well enough since then, and at any rate, he’s dead now; typhus.”

“We all do what we must when the time comes. It doesn’t matter how you came by it, only that you know it.”

He’d thought Cornelius might think less of him for it — might needle him about it, for being such a fool, for being so ready to offer himself up to a man with a little bit of power. The shame stings him and stiffens him — to speak of it or even to think of it is like extending a sprained limb for the first time after favoring it, but just so it is queerly necessary. To tell another man, and not to hear jeers of laughter.

“Thank you for that,” Gibson says, pathetically humbled. “Do you need a drink of water? There’s cocoa in one of the patent bottles, but it’s gone cold.”

Hickey crooks his arms behind his head. “Let me tell you a story, Billy, sing you to sleep. Once, I was put away at the Salford New Bailey. My morals were beyond salvaging when they took me in, I was a right little reprobate. I couldn’t have been more than twelve years on God’s green earth, but by my reckoning, I was a man like Jack Sheppard. They recommended me to mercy on account of my youth, and gave me to hard labor for two months.”

This does not square with Billy’s own notions; he’d fancied Cornelius some kind of Marine Society waif, half-schooled in seamanship and half-wild, but not a felon. “What was the offense?”

Hickey doesn’t tell him. Lying there like Christ, his speech emerges from a thickened slur and takes on the jauntiness of a born storyteller, some humorous tale with dirty bits suitable for telling at the mess tables. Gibson pares his nails for him, one by one.

“There were other boys, and we walked the treadmill alongside the men, and slept beside them when there were too many. There are silent prisons these days, and there are separate prisons; in those days, the New Bailey was properly neither, but a look at your fellow man would bring the screwsmen down on you like hellfire. Every prison is silent at night, and the sounds men make that fall short of speech—” (Hickey is on the edge of laughter, as if prompting him by example to laugh, but Gibson’s throat is dry as a stone.) “—you can imagine, Billy, lying in your hammock aboard ship and hearing the groans, what I heard that first night. I heard the other boys bawling, myself all unmoved, and I thought I’d have the running of the place before the month was out.”

His rising amusement cannot keep pace with his ragged breath, and the sound of his ruined voice compels Gibson to lean in closer, even as he itches to stifle it into silence. This is not decent talk for a sickroom, where other men might wake any moment and hear. Gibson does not like where this story is going, he does not like the arc on which these themes may connect. He has an intuition.

“Cornelius?”

Hickey’s hand is on his wrist now, in a companionable way; his thumb worries at the knobbly corner of the joint there, and it’s enough to make Gibson drop the knife. Some silent stab of pain convulses him before he speaks again, puncturing his good temper as though a steel bolt has pierced his lungs; when he next speaks, there is a rime of red blood on his teeth.

“I was certainly popular enough. I couldn’t have been much to look at, they cut my hair down to nothing, like a stubble of grass, but if a warder took a particular fancy to me I let him do what he would. It wasn’t any worse than an hour walking the treadmill, and when I grew up I found I didn’t mind it anymore. That was how I came by it, and I turned it to my own use in the end. So I don’t blame you for it, Billy.”

Gibson cannot stop staring at the blood. More blood, yellow-red on a dirty tooth. He cannot look away, he cannot drive the picture from his mind of a small boy with a cropped head.

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Gibson says lamely. “That’s a — a foul thing, to do with a child.”

Hickey furrows his brow petulantly, and a deep line springs up. “You’re missing my meaning, Billy. I was never a child. I meant to make you feel better.”

“Cornelius, I’m not joking. Why didn’t you tell the chaplain?”

“So he could come and have his turn? You’re too tender-hearted, Billy. I only meant to show you, you mustn’t let these things set you back.” His voice is hoarse but still light. “We all do our dealings the way we know best. Each of us does with his body as he pleases.”

Hickey has never been shy about touching him — laying a hand on his shoulder, or a knee nudging into the soft part of his thigh, half-belligerent and half-friendly. He touches him differently now, desperately now, and Gibson clutches back at him, feeling the bones of Hickey’s shoulders under his hands.

Cornelius shuts his eyes.

“When I die, I want you to have my things. My clothes won’t be much use to you, but you should have my knife and my woolens. You’ll need to wrap up warm for the march down the interior, and you’ll need meat. Do you think they’ll have dogs, to pull the sledges?”

He won’t indulge him with more dark notions.

“It’s not so grim as that yet. You’ll rest up and be hauling again before you know it.”

Gibson disentangles from him long enough to wring out the bloody cloth. He goes to wipe Cornelius’ chin with it, but Hickey bares his teeth at him like a dog.

“I need you more than ever now, Billy. I haven’t always done well by you, but I owe you the truth of that now. I thought it would shame me to say it, but it hasn’t. Now, don’t lie to me.”

Hickey has never shown fear, not as long as Gibson has known him — not once. He does not sound frightened by the prospect of his own death. He sounds angry.

“You’re a good man,” Gibson says. He knows he is lying, but he does not know the words for what it is he means. His eyes are smarting, his voice is thick. “You’re a brave fellow, Cornelius. Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”

Hickey’s face creases with undignified anger. “I wasn’t sick. I’ve never been sick in my life, I’m healthier than any man you can name, I hate filth, I’ve always scrubbed up at the basin. Have I ever gone to see the surgeon? Have you ever known me to run a fever?”

“I know you’re a fine liar. How would I know what you were keeping back? You’d scarcely spoken to me for the better part of a year.”

“After you had me whipped for despoiling you. You wouldn’t say a word against an officer, but you’d paint me as black as you like, is that it?”

The next words spill out tight and pinched, in a dry whisper too low to carry. “Lieutenant Irving was a gentleman, and I would have told him whatever he wanted to hear. I thought I’d done it well enough to save your skin, and I was wrong. Is that enough? I’m sorry for it. I’ve been sorry for it ever since.”

“Hang Lieutenant Irving, and hang your apologies. I don’t care what you told him. I don’t care what he thinks of me. They’re going to bury me here like the Hartnell boy, and the rest of you are going to die before we make it a dozen miles. If I’d wanted to die of a consumption, I’d have done it back in Seven Dials.” Hickey sinks back a little, as though the brief flash of anger in him has burned out. “I wanted to see the islands.”

“It wouldn’t have happened in England,” Gibson says. Not with real food, and real quarters, and city air. “Christ, I wish we were back there more than anything. Just you and I, and hang the rest of them.”

The climate and the filthy food on this expedition would be enough to kill a dog. Not for the first time, Gibson wishes he were sailing malarial shores instead — with a sunburn peeling across his cheeks instead of the thick callus of frost, sweating through his shirts and praying for death in hotter weather. He wouldn’t wish that on another man, but he knows what he’d prefer to this bitter cold.

Cornelius smiles at him crookedly, and it’s almost like old times. “What would you do for me back in England? Nurse me on milk? I thought you didn’t want a life with me. I thought you wanted peace, and a nice warm spot by the fire.”

The two of them are wedded, as surely as any two people ever were; theirs is a marriage of the soul, officiated by their own two bodies and sealed with a trinket. If any two men ever loved each other, ever sweated and agonized and wept for each other in the private darkness of a polar night — perhaps Cornelius never did weep, but Gibson has gone about his business with a bleared eye.

Gibson sets a mitted hand on the bed’s edge. “I would sail away with you, someplace better. We could sail to Australia for all I care and keep sheep. We could take up mountaineering.”

Hickey laughs, then coughs. It seems like a fearfully long time before he begins to recover his breath, and the red spatter runs down his beard.

Gibson ducks his head and turns away — it is a gesture of habit, perhaps, that way of swivelling about to make a record of unfriendly eyes. His hands are shaking when he withdraws the bottle from his coat.

Hickey swallows a lump of matter and raises his head. Voice interrogative, hoarse yet suddenly sharp: “What’s that you have there?”

“Tincture of opium. I want you to drink it and get some rest.”

He has received no order to portion out medicine, but Mr. Goodsir will never miss one bottle from the great wooden chest he keeps. He does not know whether he means to kill Cornelius or to ease him to sleep, and what is worse, he does not care. He must really be going mad, to think this way — but Hickey would have done it for him just the same, no matter the method. Kinder than a knife, or a smothering hand.

Hickey wrinkles his forehead, mouth turning. The fever-sweat is cooling on his brow; soon it will freeze. “I’m not taking anything from you.”

“Do it for my sake. I haven’t slept in days.”

Let me rest, he wants to say. No one’s forced him to keep vigil, it is only the pain that forces him into wakefulness, and the shame.

Gibson kneels beside the pallet, feeling the stones shift under his knees — his knees ache now, always, and the pain in his joints makes him slow and gingerly, like an old man. Despite his protests Hickey squirms closer like a child to accept a measure of medicine — no, not like a child, what a loathsome thought. He has always been just the way he is now. It would be so easy to tip the bottle into his mouth and let the medicine carry him away — there is some other way to do for himself not far off, Gibson is sure of it. Sleep forever, eternal sleep, a pair of frost-mummies bound up in the rags of each other’s arms.

Gibson wants to hold him forever. They have leisure now, here in camp, and no man will question how they spend their last hours.

Hickey presses his hand through Gibson’s hair — his grip is still strong, for a man so weak, and he gives his curls a tweak like he used to. Gibson buries his face against Hickey’s shoulder and feels him inhale a sharp breath, his clogged lungs swelling. His small neat solidness had always been a constant before — his stubborn way of situating himself between Gibson and his egress, the shove of his body. Now he seems fearfully insubstantial, like a man eaten-up.

“I fear I’m used up, Billy. I wanted to show you a better time than this.”

Gibson squeezes his hand. “I’ll be gone before you are.”

He means it to be kind.

The wind will wear away the tent-canvas, in spring the animals will come and carry away their soft parts along with their woolen gloves and soft leather boots, some hunter will come and take the wooden spars of their roof for a sledge-runner or a knife-handle, but their bones will lie here forever. Man intermingled with man — whose thighbone, whose tooth?