What the Ice Keeps

He died at 0400 on the sixth of October, in the bunk in my cabin, without fuss. The medic wrote cardiac failure on a form and I signed it and put the form away, and at noon we committed him—the sea committing him, rather, from the stern gate, in the custom of this service, with a ensign and eleven hands. My second mate said a Psalm. The ice stood all around us like a jury that had already voted.

At 0200 the next morning, the watch called me down. There was a man in the after hold.

You will take this the way I took it, which is to say with a hand on the rail. He was sitting on a coil of hawser in the dimness with the ship's cat—the ship's cat, Captain—sitting against his knee, and the light was coming from the passageway behind him, and there was meltwater in his hair, and a smell of pond ice, and every seam on him shone like pewter. I did not reach for anything. It did not occur to me to reach for anything. He said, "You are the captain. He said you would be the one who listened," and my answer, whatever it was, must have satisfied him, because he bowed—a courtly, terrible bow—and said:

"I saw the ceremony from the floe. I came to correct the record, since I asked him to keep one, and he kept it by dying, which was never the plan." He turned his hands over, and looked at them, seams and all, the way a man looks at tools he is finished with. "I am the flaw in his craft. I have been called many names by the people who met me and fewer by the people who did not. I will not burden you with the arithmetic. I will say the true thing, which is this: he was the only man on earth who could not be surprised by me, and I have spent the whole of my life looking for a second one. But you are owed one line of the arithmetic, since the ferry has been keeping it for me: Danny Okafor's death was mine. His question on the water—whose trial is this?—was the last question anyone ever asked me without first seeing my face. There was a window, Captain, in an orchard, and an old man said I could borrow his name for a day, and that hour was the rent I got for all the rest of it, and it was enough, it would have been enough, if I had let it be enough."

The cat got up and stretched and left, which is a judgment of sorts.

"I am going onto the ice now," he said, "north, the way he came, and I will build my own pyre of it, and no one will write on it, because no one will find it, and that is the correct sentence for both of us. You will be asked, one day, what happened out here. Tell it honestly. Tell the lake and the window and the Tuesday in March. Tell them he built a man and ran, and paid, and that the paying was the man's doing and not the maker's, and that the maker, at the end—" and here his voice did something I have no word for— "at the end, the maker answered honestly. It is all he ever owed me. It is the one debt I saw collected.

"Good-bye, Captain. You have a ship to turn."

He went up the after ladder past the watch, who saw him or did not, and out onto the pack ice by the stern gate, and he walked north between the floes, and the fog took him in less than a minute, and I have spent every hour since the fog lifted deciding what I am permitted to tell you, and this notebook is the decision.

We came south through the strait in seven days of open water, which the older men are calling the year's joke. In the hold, in the dead man's sea bag, we found three paperbacks, water-stained, read to shards—the bag's mouth had been unpicked and restitched with a stitch no hand aboard could teach—and a slim book of poems with a ferry ticket for a bookmark, and one photograph of a ballgame with a crease through it, and a notebook of his in which the last page says only: If found, tell it honestly.

I am telling it honestly. The rest is between you and the year, and the ice, which keeps what it keeps.

One thing more, and then this notebook closes. There was a sealed envelope in the dead man's sea bag, addressed in a careful hand to Professor Ansel Roth, Chandler University, Cambridge. I have not opened it and will not; I will post it when we make port. A man who declines to be your alibi is owed your confession, and it is the only mail left to either of them. If there is an answer, I will paste it into this notebook. If there is none, the notebook is the answer.