The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (10 page)

When I awoke, in Faron's bunk, Terry was in the kitchen. I watched him perform efficient strokes with a wire brush. One by one he scrubbed and inspected an array of glass and aluminum components, laid them out on a cloth, and then assembled them into a funny little decanter. From a Mylar pouch he spooned out a precise measure of black dirt, filled the decanter with the last of our distilled water, and arranged the rig on a gas ring. In a few minutes the hut filled with a sweet mulchy odor.

Two berths over I heard Sylvia moan and shift on her springs. Not wanting her to catch me in bed with my brother, I slipped to the floor. The decanter popped and hissed like the scramble vat at Airplane Food.

“You are in for a rare treat,” said Terry, not looking up from his work. I had never before seen that man chipper. It bothered me. He danced around the range in a knee-length yellow jumper, clucking two tin mugs together. With a long brown flourish he poured one for him and one for me.

I looked back at the bunks, hoping someone else might be awake. Umma slept peacefully in Pop's great arms. The collar of Sylvia's sack framed her solemn face. Mae farted.

“Coffee!” Terry exclaimed, scooping handfuls of steam into his perfect nose. He dosed the dark fluid with a squirt of sugarcane gel and watched me till I took a sip. I spat it back in the cup.

“Dead shit!”

“One of the delicious perks of archaeology,” said Terry. “Occasionally you unearth a truly precious artifact.” Coffee would give me strength for the job I was about to perform. “Bottoms up!”

“Job?” I said.

Would I kindly go out, he asked, and fetch a pail of water? He laughed at the accidental nursery rhyme.

“Haven't you got a spigot?”

Terry had firm ideas about how I should dress. An orange snowsuit, cinched about the waist, and a football helmet with a visor duct-taped across the face mask. When he hung a rucksack on my shoulders, I had to catch myself from falling backward. This was all part of the analog: an ad hoc space suit, a pack weighed down like an oxygen tank.

Terry removed a few large stones and said, “There!” He spun me around and kneaded my shoulders. “Like a proper astronaut!” He handed me the Heat Poke. Over my shoulder he slung the Bushmaster. “Be smart, son.”

The wind that had been trying to get in all night pitched past me when he opened the door. Terry had to catch his hairpiece. I asked wouldn't it be safer to go out in teams.

Behind the hut a sled and ten-gallon drum lay under five feet of packed snow. I worked so hard digging that I didn't have the strength to pull it. As I lay down to rest on my lumpy backpack, I thought, only a minute or two.

When I opened my eyes Terry stood over me with his poisonous mug. “If you sit too long in this cold,” he said, “the blood will freeze in your tubes.”

He made me drink. It was still wretched. I drank some more, emptied the cup, as Terry watched, expecting a reaction. It came. I felt my spine splay out like pinfeathers, felt capable of flight, stood, and set to work. Coffee.

Terry told me to look for the blue ice. Hot springs bubbled up from cracks in the shale. Where the ice showed blue, it was warm water percolating below. I retraced our path across the scrawny peninsula, dragging the heavy sled, until I found myself back at the airstrip. Fog hung everywhere, so it was not entirely clear where the island ended and water began. Behind me the rutted seashell of the Quonset hut had vanished altogether. I was alone. An aberration. A silly orange grub afloat in a bowl of milk. If Europa was worse than this, it might be better to die right here.

In the fog I couldn't see anything resembling blue ice. I tried a few spots, but the probe turned up only mud and shale. I dropped my bag of stones and looked around. At the far end of the runway stood a pale mound of ice and rock, a natural formation Nguyen called a salt dome. Similar features, he said, might be found on Europa.

From the summit I could look out over the island. The roof of the hut surfaced through the fog. A magic rope climbed out of the chimney pipe into the low sky. Warmth and companionship waited inside, soon as I filled the water drum.

Sure enough the salt dome was blotched with blue, frozen carbuncles. I lanced one with the Heat Poke and it slipped from my grasp into a simmering pot. I dipped in my ladle and drank. Burnt matches was what it smelled like, but clear and sweet on the tongue.

Pop met me at the door and together we rolled the heavy drum inside. My brother put up the sled while Mae dried, oiled, and broke down the Poke. I brought a mug of Terry's elixir to Sylvia's bunk. She wrinkled her nose. Her eyes cracked open. “Get that shit out of my face before I bite you.”

Faron came in from the cold and stuck his frozen hands inside her sleep sack. Sylvia shrieked and fell off her bunk into my arms.

I was proud to see Pop boil the breakfast porridge in my spring water. We ate big bowls of mush with strips of dried rabbit, and the grown-ups finished off the last of the coffee. Umma slept in, her face to the wall. When I was done, I scraped the bottom of the porridge pot into my bowl and brought it to her bunk.

“Leave her,” said Pop. “Your mother just needs the rest is all. You know how travel takes it out of her.” I did not know. The farthest we had ever gone was Sparkle Town to Miamy.

Umma had been looking at a bright future in textiles before Pop stepped onto her father's cutting-room floor. If she'd stayed put, she could expect to manage the sewing room in a few years' time. That noisy narrow hall would be her own chiefdom. There would be minor thrills and mishaps. A new girl would need to learn how to wind a bobbin, how to keep a straight seam, how to guide the muslin over a throat plate just so. She would have to handle crying jags, of course. Some girls would keep secret boyfriends and not be entirely honest with her, but she would give them a cup of tea and let them sob until the whistle blew. Every year she would note less and less the mocking chatter of the machines, the steady march of needle arms, until one day their noise would fill her head and she would hear nothing else. It happened sooner or later to all the girls in the sewing room. Her father would put her on bed rest till the chatter faded and she could return to work.

Umma had something to look forward to. Then along came Pop. Young, thick-armed, hair long and brightened by the Floriday sun. He called it his “Fire Mane,” and the seamstresses whispered about how nice it would feel to braid it. They said the new boy smelled of oranges. He had slept in the groves, after all, and fed on nothing but fruit.

Mainly Umma couldn't believe how preposterously big he was—bigger than her father. Coylan Howard hated Pop on sight but needed the muscle. On his way from the warehouse to the cutting table, Pop always found an excuse to wheel his unwinding truck through the sewing room. He was in the late stages of a kindly patch, polite and eager to help. When Umma complained about her job at the mill, he told her she didn't have to. He wrote those words for her on a slip of pattern paper that she could pull from her apron pocket whenever she felt a need.

One afternoon a bully old cutter switched the tags on Pop's bolts just to see if the big friendly boy had a temper. While the daughter of Coylan Howard watched, Pop went at the cutter with a pair of pinking shears. That was it; she was in love. She didn't have to, and that is why Umma ran away with Pop.

*   *   *

Every morning on Melville Island it was someone else's job to fetch water in Terry's makeshift space suit. Pop kept Umma out of the rotation for two weeks. Give her time, he begged Terry. “She'll come around.”

I told Sylvia and Faron about the salt dome, and we all agreed to keep it secret from the grown-ups. Pop and Mae worked it out somehow, but poor Bill Reade showed no talent for divining. When he banged into camp with an empty water drum, Faron made sure to greet him at the door with a kind word.

The rest of each waking day we devoted to natural inquiry. A paper journal was provided and in it we made observations on local flora and fauna, of which there were two, moss and geese. We measured precipitation, tides, and wind speeds in knots. After dinner we radioed our findings back to the empty Launch Control at Cape Cannibal. Practice.

Weeks passed and Umma scarcely left the hut. At last Terry informed Pop that she would have to go out, next morning. He expected her to participate. If she couldn't make it in Canaday, Europa would kill her.

I looked forward to sleeping in that morning, but Pop shook me awake. The Reades were asleep, and the hut was dark, but Faron was already zipping his parka. I said, “Where is Umma?”

Her bunk had been empty when Terry went to rouse her. Her parka and boots hung in the locker. Terry reported with relief that the Bushmaster was safe and sound under his bunk. The heat poke lay in its case by the door. But her canvas bundle was missing, although I did not understand why this mattered. I dressed. Faron took the rifle from Terry and we three filed out into the cold sunset morning.

The wind was light and spitting snow so fine, I thought it was sand. You could see clear to the salt dome. We walked toward the sun and I tried to imagine it right overhead. I turned the gray sea into Biscane Bay. A flying wedge of geese became pelicans. And the figure that lay on the slope of the salt dome was only a sunbather on a sand dune.

Pop was halfway there before I began to run.

Umma wore thermal long johns. The ribbed fabric pressed faint lines in the rime-frosted rock that recorded her final contortions. For a time she'd lain facing the hut, then turned her back to it. One hand she'd wedged for warmth between her thighs. Her right cheek rested on the ice. Broken veins bloomed over her nose and around her mouth. One eye was rimmed in black, open.

My father was not skilled in restoring life, only in cutting it short. He fell upon his wife as if the very mass of him might stir her blood and set her heart to pumping again. I gathered up the implements that had fallen from her canvas bundle—the syringe, the strap, the glassine envelope emptied of fink—repacked it, and slipped the bundle in my pocket. Pop lifted her off the ground, like a boy holding his puppy run down in the street. He carried Umma back to the hut when the sled would have been easier.

 

10.

For what she did to herself my mother had a cause too dark to tell. She had sorrows enough, as anyone could see. Her fugitive marriage, the father she'd abandoned; a family reduced to caged rabbits kept only for meat. But many endure worse and do not choose such a hateful exit. It must have been bad, whatever pushed her to the top of the salt dome with her plungers and her strap. Some unrevealed horror that swam in her blood. She fed just enough fink into her tubes to kill it off.

The morning we found Umma heavy snow fell over Melville Island, but a naughty wind never allowed it to land. It took two days for the bush pilot to reach us, during which time Pop did not sleep nor sit still.

Mae wrapped the body in a bedsheet. Terry and Bill made a casket from the water drum, although it took some cleverness to fold my mother inside. Knees up, head down, Umma was a tight fit. They topped her off with sea ice and pulled the drum by sled to the airstrip. Pop could have done so alone, but out of respect Terry did not ask the big man to lift his wife's body into the hold of the plane. That job was left to me and Faron.

We transferred to the cargo jet at Fort Churchill. All the way down to Cape Cannibal my father sat in back holding the water drum steady as the clumsy vessel skipped across the polar jet stream. It did not matter that the drum wasn't going anywhere. Bill had strapped it to a railing and taped down the lid. Pop rested his head on the side, listening to the melting ice shift around Umma's body.

He had lost a fight to bury our mother in the So Caroline peach field where the young couple had enjoyed their last period of unqualified happiness. Terry offered a choice of funeral arrangements: ditch her body over the Atlantic or bury her in the shallows of Broadaxe Creek on Cape Cannibal. My father was sickened by the second option, his lover's flesh picked apart by crabs, like ladies with plastic tongs at a salad bar. Bill said it would be quicker to open the cargo door and give the barrel a hard shove: we would be too high up to see the splash. But in the end, Pop needed a place to put flowers, so he agreed to lay her to rest in the creek.

Back at Cannibal Terry stored the water drum in a hydrogen cooling tank at Launch Command. He said it would take a day or so to make the arrangements. Mainly this involved finding the keys to a front loader and buying dress shoes for the ceremony. Nguyen would not contemplate a funeral without decent footwear.

While Umma awaited her burial, Vansters came and went like carpenter bees. In yellow coveralls men swarmed over the launchpad, shouting to one another on walky-talks, writing on clipboards, and generally ignoring us grieving astronauts. Typical Bosom men, busy-looking and proud. When we were on Melville Island they had raised the Orion capsule, Habitat, and Penguin from the pit and installed them in the nose of an SLS booster rocket. Now, as Faron, Sylvia, and I watched from the bleachers, the vessel made its slow crawl across the tarmac on a pair of flatcars. Rollout, a quarter-mile ride that lasted twelve hours. A hydraulic lift stood the rocket on end, and as huge gantry arms hugged it tight against the tower, Sylvia leaned on my brother. They looked at each other with eagerness, as if a whole new life awaited them.

Now and again in my trailer I would start at the sudden hiss of the fire trench snorting out clots of fog. The crew was running test firings, bringing Orion to life out there on the launchpad. In three weeks, on a Tuesday, we would perform our final fit-in and dress rehearsal. As the day approached, Sylvia's parents vanished for hours inside Launch Command to learn what all those switches and keys could do. Bill acted like the rest of us were too dense to understand, but there wasn't much to it. In their last days the Astronomers had foreseen the depths of future ignorance. They had automated the works, staging, launch, navigation, and landing. A toggle switch on a power strip, a string of code tapped on a keyboard, and away we'd go. “Plug and play” was the phrase Dr. Padma Ridley used, though it did not seem like my sort of game.