The Seal Wife Read Free

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.
    The only way he gets them to settle down to the job is by playing Caruso recordings, a tactic he discovers by chance when he unpacks and cranks his gramophone, just to see: does it still work? Yes, the tenor’s brazenly rich voice pours from the horn with effortless splendor, and all five of the Chugach sit down on the ground in shock, as if an especially potent and invisible medicine man has announced his presence. Placed on the flat rock Bigelow uses for table and desk, the black box of the gramophone shivers as it plays. One of the crew—the strongest, whose face has the bland and amiable quality of a prize steer—crawls under Bigelow’s tent flaps and refuses to come back out, not even after the gramophone’s needle has been lifted. When his brother at last coaxes him into the light, he makes a wide and terrified berth around the bewitched mechanism and runs back toward the town site. On subsequent mornings, all Bigelow has to do is slip the black disc from its envelope, and the remaining crew jumps to attention and begins hammering.
    Grateful for his accidental success, Bigelow still finds something awful in it. Perhaps what he fears is true: he’s arrived in a land that will insist on its strangeness, where not only a dictionary but everything he’s taught himself will prove useless.
    Blueprint discarded, Bigelow relies on explanatory charades, which work well enough—the men follow his gestures—but it doesn’t matter that he won’t pay them with alcohol. His carpenters spend their wages as they want; and while they arrive each morning ready to work, on time and seemingly sober, as the weeks wear on, the station they build gets drunker and drunker. Not a beam is level, nor a corner square, and the staircase, especially besotted, collapses before the top floor is finished. Lacking proper stringers, it falls down in the middle of one windy night, stricken timber groaning before the treads begin their precipitous descent. Awakened in his tent, Bigelow lights a kerosene lamp and carries it outside and through the open door. He is looking for a foraging bear—the only explanation he has conceived for the noise. But the station is empty, the stairs have fallen under the weight of their own instability, and Bigelow holds up the lamp to watch as shrouds of golden sawdust blow over their remains.
    The next day, he fires his crew and they depart hastily, their termination having been accomplished by back-to-back performances of Verdi and Leoncavallo. It’s another month before Bigelow reassembles the stairs, the project slowed by a shortage of nails that plagues the entire settlement. Two crates of them are to arrive on the same ship that brings Bigelow’s windowpanes, but once unpacked, both boxes are discovered filled with misaddressed nutmeg graters—useless in a place without even one imported kernel of the spice; the Chugach buy the graters cheap and sew them to their dance rattles, and the nails that hold the crates together (along with nails salvaged from every other packing box on board) sell for ten cents apiece, nine cents more than Bigelow can afford.
    But the conditions under which the territory’s official meteorologist sleeps and eats and works make no difference to the weather. Bigelow’s anemometer turns and clicks in the wind; his ground thermometers are sunk into the earth to the official standardized depths of 30, 60, and 120 centimeters; his copper siphon rain recorder, complete with tipping bucket and weekly float gauges, bolted to its thirty-centimeter platform. He has adjusted his aneroid barometer to reflect