Read Online Inukshuk by Gregory Spatz - Free Book Online

man’s head for the cheeks and the brains, you make a cut here to break the jaw open first. You don’t want to waste nothing. Listen! It’s important. It could be me dies first and then will you ever wish you’d listened to old man Harry Goodsir. But you’ll tell them for me won’t you, if you make it home, their families that is, I never meant ’em any harm? Not a one of ’em. They was dead already anyway, most of ’em. If you make it home? He’s the man for the job, they says. Wasn’t my choice. Handy with a knife and saw, they says. Just the one then, is it? says I. ’Cause I won’t do another. Aye. Aye , says they. . . .”
    Two-shots and shoulder shots alternated down the page. Thomas lay on his stomach on the floor of his bedroom, face as close to the page as he could get without losing focus to become more deeply engrossed, feet lifted and swinging, spinning the notebook around and around for differing perspectives on the men: Hoar with his handsome, frostbitten blond face, a little like the evil Jeremy Malloy, really; Goodsir, the more he drew him, resembling Cody/Dakota, the proportions on his nose shifting from frame to frame, wider, shorter, longer, the frozen Welsh-wig hat thing on his head like Cody/Dakota’s insane mess of tubular dread-locked hair.
    Hoar: “Only pray with me. We’ve done ’em no harm. No one. They was all dead already. I for one, if it was me and I was dead, and the choice was life or death for my mates, I’d say make a stew of me! Come. Prayer. It’s the only answer.”
    Goodsir: “That’s Franklin talking.”
    Hoar: “No, it’s me. Franklin’s long gone. With Erebus . Died on board Erebus . Remember, sir?”
    Goodsir: “Of course I remember. Who do you think’d remember better? And don’t you be sirring me none, young man. I see right through your type. See right through your cunning, conniving skull. You’re only waiting for your moment. Waiting till the time’s ripe and then smack old Harry in the head with whatever’s handy. Back, I tell you! Back!”

    The next frames showed the snow increasing, each man at his respective end of the longboat again, Hoar muttering prayers, Goodsir just muttering. For a while, Hoar tries in vain to light a fire at the bottom of the boat using pages from a novel (from Erebus’s one-thousand-volume library and hauled all these miles over the snow in hopes of being tradable to the Eskimos for food), scraps of wet rope, and the few remaining slats and wood shards from the deconstructed snow sledge formerly underlying the longboat. Close-ups of Hoar’s hands working the flint. Flames catching and licking the pages, then flickering out; burned, blackened corners of pages. Again he works the flint; flames again, and here’s Hoar’s face in the sudden light of new warmth as he leans closer to blow gently, bringing the fire to life; then for two more frames, the blessed glow of flames strengthening against his frozen and now almost heat-blistering flesh, until—poof—a gust of wind snatches it all away: flaming paper extinguished, blown skyward, nothing but blackened bits of rope and wood left. Again and again he tries, more close-ups of his shaking, frozen fingers, and this time as the camera draws back, Hoar leaning in and curling himself around the failed fire at the stern of the longboat, finally giving up, face frozen in an expression of beatific rest and release; the camera pans backward fast, super-fast, Google-fast, up along the coast of King William Island thirty, forty, fifty miles north, in the path of the boat sledges—barely a trace anymore of the men in their misery, harnessed and hauling the longboats, two tons apiece, through ice, slush, rock snowdrifts—back all the way to Victory Point, the stone tent circle and the ships frozen in going on three years now, stuck dead in the polar ice