CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
What the chest holds, oddly, is a mess.
Jumbled papers. All sorts, all types- tickets and stubs, carbons, letters of payment, of acceptance and discharge, most of them typewritten, none of them remotely personal. Mixed in are folded maps, a few of them old enough that monsters swim the borders of the woodcut seas. One of these maps, the largest, is covered in penciled lines and crowded notations, all in Seamus' leaning script, and in places the map is hatched grey with marks. Some ports are shiny with the years of routes to and fro. Outside of Australia is an island with an X marked through it, and a notation covered over with India ink.
I'm looking for names- any names- but at a glance the notations are merely numbers and nonsensical words and it takes me a moment to realize that, naturally, he doesn't write in English. I try sounding out aloud and see, my breath quickening, that there are names- dozens and dozens of them- interspersed within the fine script. Just as quickly I realize that the names are, almost without exception, women's.
I suppose reactions, being involuntary, are blameless, but still I notice my heart sinking and am irritated by that. A list of women, and dates, many years' worth. Astonishingly blunt, too; just above my thumb is a date with the callow inscription Beitidh Grimsby- Leid n floor, and my eyes narrow, but then the words resolve themselves and I smile at myself- 'Betty,' Grimsby Port, lead and flour: what I am looking at is his past, yes; but these notations are ships' names, their cargo.
So it was true. Or partially true. He's twenty-eight, a year older than I; that gives him, by his own account, fifteen years at sea, an account which this map bears out. I scan dates. Beginning to end there are fifteen years on this map: here he is crossing the world, over and over, but here also are significant gaps- routes where his journey ends and does not immediately merge into another, and all these gaps appear to be the summers, and they all appear to end in the Northern seas; not, interestingly, in Orkney, where he says he was born. Instead, Båtsfjord. Murmansk. Nuuk. The edges of the Arctic Ocean.
What strange places to choose to stay one's summer. Isolation, unbelievable cold. Then I recall the expression on his face, floating in the pond.
The other papers' most interesting feature is that there are a multitude and none appear worth keeping. Interesting especially because he is not a man to hold on to unnecessary things. Also of note: in this repository, not a single photograph or letter. Where are his letters? Or any of the ephemera of a life, links to the chain of society: a certificate of birth, of baptism, of schooling, anything at all. There is nothing. A life's worth of travel but no souvenirs. A life's worth of hard work and no money. Not even the conventional things men might hide- no dirty novel, no photographs of girls. It's almost deviant, this anonymity. My hands are lifting to scatter the papers as they were and that's when my eye catches the nailhead in the bottom corner. It's shiny from being touched, and the wood around it stained dark, for the same reason.
Now that the clue is exposed the rest is obvious. These papers are simply cover; they're meant only to distract from how shallow the chest's cavity is. A false bottom. This is why the chest has no lock. A lock implies value, invites curiosity; better to have none. Clearly what the false bottom hides is of value enough that it required a decoy.
I get my thumbnail under the sliver of metal and it pries up with a creak and first I can see only dark underneath. My breath catches. I almost drop the plank of wood. But no, it's not an animal, just fur, a pelt folded up in a neat bundle in the bottom of the chest. Thick, pliant, glossy fur, a full skin's worth. Mottled and silvery. Cool to the touch. I caress it against the grain. It's strange, shorter than but as spiky as beaver. It is also beautiful, and heavy in my hands as I pull it out into my lap. Greenish salt crusts the hair along one edge. I'm tense, holding it, and in a breath I understand why. Packed in silk bags in my mother's closet were a row of furs but they didn't smell like this one; they were sad things, mummies stinking of perfume and embalming fluid, only the barest trace of their origin wafting up from deep in the skin. This one is different. It's leaving its scent in my hands, a rich oily animal reek. It smells alive.
Turned over, the skin side looks oddly fresh, a rawness to it, as though it had just recently been scraped away from the flesh. I run my hand over that, too. Soft and pliable like suede, or, I suppose, like just what it is, which is skin.
It's from this, from the skin side of this pelt, that the unnameable scent of far-away I've been smelling has come from. Up close it's strong, rich, a strange, living smell. I leave the false bottom tilted, the barest crack, as I replace it, because of this. So that the fur can breathe if it needs to. I recognize the notion as eccentric but somehow the pelt reminds me of a facet of myself, and I don't like being locked away either.
Before I close the door I turn and run an eye over the cottage to satisfy myself that I've left it exactly as I found it. And there, lying right in the center of the swept, packed-earth floor, is a glint of shell. A button. Mine. From the left cuff of my shirtsleeve which I rolled up earlier in preparation for digging through his belongings. I scoop it up and put it in my pocket and am both grateful I caught it and astonished at myself: it's as though I'd wanted to be caught.
I nearly was, anyhow. I've just made it to the kitchen garden when I see a figure loping up the lane, a box on his shoulder: Seamus coming home from the grocer's.