the heidelburgh tun

“You hold your knife so prettily,” Drax says; his callused paw covers Sumner’s own hand entirely, plucking the blade free by the handle between thumb and forefinger. “But you won’t make much headway working like that. Let me show you.”

Sumner glances around then, wary of a collective humiliation before an audience on the open deck, but the other men are minding their own work with heads down and hands diligent. He’s got eyes to see for himself that he doesn’t work the way they do, these career-long skinners of beasts and slitters of hairy throats; he doesn’t know what possessed him to go about the task like the autopsy of a man, except perhaps the brightness of those open eyes, black as ink and soft as a child’s. Perhaps he’d thought he had a better way of doing it.

After the catastrophe of his last attempt at seal-butchery, its memory half-obliterated by the icy water, Sumner may as well accept the help of Drax as any other man. Where had Drax been when they were rubbing him down with grease and half-boiling him alive to force the animation back into his limbs? Had he taken part, and become part of that undifferentiated mass of hands and voices, or had he been content to watch?

Drax scruffs the dead seal with his other hand, digging into the fat beneath the close fur, and sets it down so as to better suit himself. The thud it makes against the table is like the crack of doom. At such close range the cold air only blunts the smell of Drax’s body, it doesn’t take it away entirely; it’s the heavy woolly wetness of sweat under cloth and of damp fur, all smeared over with the blood of industrious butchery.

He steps in close behind him, heavy boots jostling at Sumner’s feet, and just as sudden presses him with the full length of his body, not the full weight but only the light insistence of a fuller strength not yet disclosed. Like an animal resting its paw atop some smaller creature to amuse itself— a cat, or more aptly a dog, judging from the sight and smell of the man. His arm wraps Sumner around, reaching from behind to position the corpse in front of the both of them.

“Now, grab him here.” Normally these brute beasts are all deemed women, all indiscriminately she — the shift to the masculine gender makes the small hairs on Sumner’s body prickle, even as he obediently does so, fixing the flesh beneath his hand. “Don’t make such long strokes — tug.”

The blade of his knife fits into the tentative gouge that Sumner himself had left — perhaps it had been the memory of an autopsy that had made him sicken, the slip of the metal through subcutaneous fat. The fat of a man is butter-yellow, caught up in clots like a scrambled egg, but seal fat is a queer ghost-white — it seems to lap at Drax’s knife as he carves deeper, opening up the body cavity like a pale-lipped mouth.

“Now you, doctor.” Henry Drax turns over the knife to him with all obsequiousness, better manners than he’s shown him before for sure, but the stub of a handle is slippery now in Sumner’s grasp and the faint rime of fat slicks the palm of his glove.

“I think I have it now, Mr. Drax, thank you.”

“Look at those hands of yours.” His bare blood-brown palm covers Sumner’s gloved one, overwhelming it like an eclipse. “Bet you’d done all kinds of clever work with these, once. Mind you don’t clip yourself now, or you’ll be no good to anyone.”

“Right,” Patrick says, dully. Something about the touch makes his heart quiver.

Sumner shifts uneasily on his feet as he begins; the smell of blood is in his nostrils, cold and clotted, and the heat of another man’s body is at his back. He dislikes any sort of close contact, and he has given ample cue for the man to withdraw, but smiling Drax does nothing of the sort.

“Don’t be afraid to lay him open, now. Open him up and spread him. Go at it like that and it’s not such slow work.”

And so it goes, with Drax advising him closer than any Queen’s College professor ever had — they were a standoffish lot, the men who taught dissections, and they kept their distance from the sorry flesh on the slab to keep the whiff of it out of their nostrils. Swanning around with their filthy pus-stained aprons pinned on like a badge of pride — you’d think they’d see to themselves first and have a good wash. Drax crosses to the other side of the makeshift bench and shows him how to part fat from flesh, how to flense the hide clean of tarry brown remnants — the seal’s viscera are still warm despite the outermost skin stiffening with frost, and rummaging around inside it feels unpleasantly like Sumner imagines it must feel to deliver a child.

Perhaps there’s some trick of it, some patented effort that makes the blade so much nimbler in Drax’s hand and that Sumner can only imitate. Whether such efficient brutality is a craft or an inborn knack, he can do nothing but speculate — if it’s true what the men men say, that Drax has passed some months in a bloodthirsty clime and made himself at home in the company of wild men, then perhaps they’ve taught him their handicrafts as well. Sumner knows better than to credit such accounts of barbarism — white men are perfectly capable of their own barbarity, and they carry it with them all over the globe as they go. It hardly seems worse to kill and eat a man than to kill him and lay him out in the heat of summer to putrefy, to crowd whole families into unsanitary quarters and maim them with rifle shot. Better to learn from a cannibal than an army surgeon.

Drax’s dark eyes are brimming with unsettling amusement all the while, the sort of good humor that’s in fact worse for not being feigned. A man of few words Mr. Drax is not, but his pleasures are simple and thoroughly animal. As a teacher though he is surprisingly capable — perhaps on a good day perhaps you might see him amusing himself by playing sea-daddy, like that great lunatic Otto but any man not already in Drax’s camp like that cheerfully repulsive fellow Cavendish would do well to keep clear of him. Christ only knows what he teaches to the young ones.

Once he has finished with the bloody work, Sumner’s stomach is tight with unease or something like it, and Drax is all but laughing at him. It isn’t clear what’s worse, whether he’s amused at his incompetence at such ugly rudimentary work or if it tickles him to see a supposed gentleman scraping away and sweating with the rest of them.

“Fine work, Sumner. Carry on at that rate and you’ll be done by the time we make port.” He claps him on the back with a bloody hand, near-thumping the air out of his lungs.

“Thank you for the insight, Mr. Drax.” For all Sumner’s suspicions it is more unsettling still to see such a brute contented. Ashamed of his own suspicions, he is compelled to add, “Truly. Thank you.”

“Oh, think nothing of it, man.” Without so much as wiping his hands, Drax prepares for himself a vile-looking pipe — he offers Sumner a pull from it as a seeming afterthought, thrusting it at him with good-natured regard. Sumner is so enervated from the pointless effort that he takes a draw, though the stem is still fresh from that canine lip and carries with it the savor of spit.

Sumner will have that to think on in his cabin at night, pillowed on a river of laudanum — the wetness of another man’s hand and the taste of another man’s mouth.