The Wedding Picture

I must tell you, Captain, that he put no blame anywhere but on himself, all that night, except once. Near dawn he said, without preamble: "He kept the picture. The ballgame photograph went into an evidence drawer with Danny's coat, and a year later it was on the sill in its place—he could only have carried it there himself. He was showing me he could have been anywhere. That is the reading I choose. I choose it because I have to choose one."

That is the captain in me talking now, not the stenographer. Take it for what it is.

Ward told the last of it on the fourth day, when the Meridian cracked loose into a lead of open water and we thought—briefly—we were through. He told it standing up, at the window, watching the floes come down on us again from the north.

"The Bering was closing early that year too," he said. "I took a boat out of Teller with two hundred miles of fuel and a rifle I never once loaded. I bought the boat with the house money and the rifle because I could not explain to the man in the shop why a man alone might want a boat in October and no rifle at all. I had the planning of a whole navy when I started, and by the end I had a man on a floe ahead of me and weather coming down, and I understood that the pursuit was the last thing he had given me, and that when it ended, whatever it ended in, I had to be the one who ended it. I caught up to him in the pack off Icy Cape. He was standing on the ice with his back to me, and there was no sledge, no fuel, nothing, and I stepped off onto the floe with the rifle, and I said, 'Turn around.'

"He turned around. Captain, he was starving. I have seen famine in the faces of men pulled off freighters, and I have seen it in the eyes of my own brother in his last photographs, and it was in his face, and under it, plain as the seams on his hand, was relief.

We stood ten feet apart on the ice while the swell worked underneath, the floe rising and falling in long slow breaths. He was thinner than my scaffolds had ever drawn him, and the seams had gone the color of old rope, and he favored the left shoulder where the river pellet still sat, and he stood the way men stand in courtrooms, weight even, hands open. The rifle hung from my hand pointing at nothing. I had rehearsed accusations across three thousand miles and found, on the floe, that I had none—not one that he had not already entered against himself.

"He said, 'You came.' And then, while I stood there with an unloaded rifle I had been carrying three thousand miles like a contract, he said: 'I want it in the record that I am done. I have taken everything you had, and I find it buys nothing. I did it for a world that showed me a window and a rifle in the same week. You made me able to suffer, and you made me unable to die of it, and I am here to undo the second thing, since the first cannot be undone. But you should know—' and here, Captain, my hand failed me for the first time, because he smiled—'you should know that when I burned the shed, I saved three books first. I have carried them the whole way. Whatever else was done to me, I read, Captain. Nobody can take that back off the ledger.'

"He walked to the edge of the floe as he said it, and he lay down on the ice face-up, in the sensible way of a man in a bath, with his hands folded on the seams of his chest. 'The current will do the arithmetic,' he said. 'You have one duty left and it is to live long enough to be asked about this, and to answer it honestly. That is your trial. The Adam Trial was never me.'

"The floe took him south past the point. I stood on the ice until the wind moved me. And there, alone with the rifle I had never loaded, the old Tuesday question surfaced at last—this beats—does it live?—and I knew, watching the water where he had gone, that the answer had been yes from the first breath, and that I had spent twenty years refusing to read my own instrument. I do not remember the next two days. The whaler Amarok pulled me off the pack on the second of October, and here I am, and there is the ice, and Captain, my chest has been wrong since Tuesday, and I know the sound it is making. So hear the last of it while I can say it."