So her father, besides making journeys of his own, liked to read about those made by others. Presumably he approved of people who had adventures. She likes Joshua Slocum’s account of sailing around in the world alone in his little oyster sloop, the Spray, feeling like a planet unto himself. She would like to feel that way.
Her very favorites, though, are the accounts of the far north and the far south, where ships’ rigging sags heavy with frost and blue icebergs drift freely, arched and spired like frozen cathedrals. She reads accounts by Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen and about the vanished Sir John Franklin but is not satisfied and brings back more books from the library, gorging herself on the deprivations suffered by Ernest Shackleton and Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Bravery at the poles seems appealingly simple. If you go there, or try to, you are brave. She comes across an etching of narwhals crowding a patch of open water amid Arctic pack ice, tusks clashing in the air like sabers in a battlefield melee. From the corner behind the stove, she retrieves the long horn and goes out across the snowy yard to the main house.
Wallace is up in his studio, Beethoven on the phonograph. He takes the book into his lap and studies the image. “Yes, I see,” he says. “I think you’re right.”
“A narwhal tusk,” Marian says. “Here in Missoula, Montana.”
He looks at the etching again. “Are they fighting?”
“It says they’re breathing. You don’t think my father killed the one this came from, do you?”
“I think he probably bought it.”
“Why is it,” she asks Wallace, leaning on the spiraled tusk, her long pale braid pulled forward over her shoulder, “that both the north and the south are so cold? Why are their seasons flip-flopped, and why is it sometimes always dark and sometimes always light?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He flips through the book, passing images of Eskimos and dogsleds and icebergs and grimacing whales flapping their tails. He wonders if his brother had seen all those things. Marian does not seem like a child to him, nor like an adult. She has an avidity that unnerves him.
She goes back out across the snow, toward the cottage suspended in the dark like a lantern hanging from a bowsprit. More than two years have passed since her father’s brief stay in it. She hopes more of his belongings will be explained by the books, that by the time she has read them all, she will know what he knew. In a way, then, she will know him. And later, when she is grown, she will go to the places she has read about, see things for herself.
Nights and days, summers and winters.
Barnstormers
Missoula
May 1927
Three months later
The morning was cold, but Fiddler’s barrel warmed Marian’s legs. She rode bareback, reins loose, ducking under pine boughs that swept through the early gloom. When Fiddler paused to snatch wisps of grass, she pressed his ribs with her bare heels.
Most mornings since last September, when she’d turned twelve, she’d risen before dawn and bridled the horse. Jamie seldom came along anymore, maybe because he sensed she preferred to go alone. Depending on her whim, she and Fiddler might follow the banks of the Clark Fork or Bitterroot, or they might wander through town, watching the plodding circuit of the milkman’s wagon, the lonely homeward transits of night workers and wandering drunks. If there wasn’t too much snow, she might ride up one of the mountains or canyons.
This day, she had turned away from the Rattlesnake, ascending Mount Jumbo as the last stars winked out and the sky blued and glowed. Fiddler swung into a trot up the steep rise to the summit, where he stopped and immediately began to graze. Low silver fog lay on the valley floor, pierced by roofs and treetops. From behind her, the rising sun’s rays played over the ranks of mountains across the valley, tilted slowly down onto Missoula, dispersing the fog until ordinary tidy daylight glinted off the river.
Thrusting her feet forward to hook the reins, she lay back on the horse, hands behind her head on Fiddler’s haunches. She was almost dozing when she heard the distant sound of an engine. She took it for one of the local aircraft, rickety surplus Jennies and Standards sold cheap after the war and flown mostly by hobbyists. The sound was coming from the east. Louder. Louder still. She pushed herself up just as a red-and-black biplane roared over, as abrupt and magnificent as an announcing angel, passing so low it seemed she could have touched the wheels.
* * *
—
The Flying Brayfogles. So it said in looping white script on the tails of their Curtiss Jennies. They were Felix and Trixie, refugees from Wilton Wolf’s Flying Circus, which had gone defunct after the government decided the festive local air shows that had sprung up everywhere after the war involved too many people plunging festively to their deaths and tightened regulations. The Brayfogles were heading west, to Hollywood, to find stunt work in the pictures.