What Bones Rest in the Ivory Yard

There was a time in Robert Warren’s life when a dream did not exist if it could not fit in the small black daguerreotype that made him his living. He was simple and any dreams that went beyond that were simply impractical. He liked to take photos, he liked the methodical patience of striking poses and developing plates in the back room of his apartment which was kitchen, bedroom, and chemist’s disaster. He liked the sanctity of the black curtain on his camera which hid his face and eyes, even while it bent his back. He was susceptible to the light, to the sun. He was born in Indiana and worked in Boston, and until he’d met Grace he’d never had any dreams at all.

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Grace lived in England. He found out that she worked in Oxford, she had short brown hair, like amber, she liked bluebells. Warren decided he liked her. He was in England visiting a great-aunt, but he much prefered the museums and their slideshows. He met Grace in a showing room, and he followed her for the next two months. Grace often pointed out the purple under his eyes and would say that Warren ought to sleep well, and he’d say it’s just the dark. She’d take him for lunches in the park, the one with the bluebells, when she wasn’t curating. 

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By the end of his jaunt, he’d signed a contract with the trustees at Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. He’d be going to the arctic, west of Greenland. He’d take pictures of anything they wanted; glaciers, Inuits, sea serpents, unicorns. He’d told Grace he’d like to see her again, to which she laughed. It was a charming laugh, like she’d run her hand over the bright end of a piano. She agreed. And that was his dream. He held onto it tightly, for what followed was a slow torment; dreams incite lunacy, they lead down dark paths. 

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‘Go back to your America,’ they said. Warren met with three trustees as they raised pre celebratory crystal to cover their yellow smiles and make handsome their balding white heads like Indiana wheat in frost. The movements of their upper lips were unintelligible beneathe their waxed moustaches, and Warren thought that as much as he hated most other people in all the world and thought them boorish, he could bear the company, the going away, the bright lights of the arctic, to come back to Grace. ‘The north passage is old news, what we want now is culture, something for the curators to excite themselves and the public laymen. We’ll finance a charter,’ they said, ‘you can meet him in Maine, we know a man, he’s got a good record for these things, and a good steamer. If you find something extraordinary, a monster of the deep,’ they chortled, ‘you’ll be more than a backwoodish photographer, you’ll be making a name for yourself. This is the chance of a lifetime, lad! You’d be mad to turn it down!’

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Warren returned to America. He looked out over Portland, Maine, a city yet untouched by the burning fires of civil war, and Warren thought himself either unshakably melancholic or plain unlucky. The sky seemed to frown as Fate might frown on a day by chance, by omen, like the scowl of a patchy painted figurehead: always and forever doomed to face the storm. The sun glowered at the edge of the bay like a fish’s pale gleaming eye and Warren squinted away from it. Every sidewalk seemed to lead to the Old Port, he found, and every pungent monger lingered there, seemingly to have risen from their beds with the sun as the waves do rise with the moon. And the waves were rising. 

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“Bobby! Bobby, man!”

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A crass fellow met Warren on the pier, a Mr. Reaves, a biologist, fond of the equally blubbered mammalian species. He grabbed Warren by the arm, and with him blew in the tidal smell of so many spoiled fish. One of those black-backed gulls flinched away at his approach, one foot catching in a tangle of fishing line.

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Warren frowned into the rising sun. “It’s Mr. Warren, Mr. Warren, please. We aren’t on a cruise, this is work.” Warren did despise how Reaves’ bottom row of teeth protruded like the browning tusks of those walruses the man was so fascinated in.

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“Well, we are, aren’t we, Bobby, on a cruise around the north? What a day.” Reaves laughed and smacked Warren’s shoulder, the faint tinkle of glass bottles rattling from inside his messenger. “What have you forgot? What’re you bringing aboard, not your flashy little box? You know, the daguerreotype is running out of fashion.”

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Warren sighed through the stench. Steamers lined the docks. They walked down the pier between the gangplanks and deckhands, men Warren thought to be crude, with more honest character in their crusty boots than in their calluses. “I’ve my plates here, and the mercury. I wouldn’t trust some dullard with my equipment.”

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“That’s rough, Bobby. These fine folk, they’ll be your crew and mine for, how many months, you guess? They don’t want your silver.” But Warren doubted that.

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“I want to be home by October. I’ve got plans.”

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“October?” Reaves garbled out another laugh like a choking seal and spat into the water. The bubbles and the waves festered. “You’re a dreamer, Bobby. We’ll not be home before the winter. The ice floes, they’ll come for us, they’ll be on us before the auroras. But I’ve faith, you can get us a good picture, can’t you Bobby? Here she is, the old girl.”

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The PS Ars Moriendi loomed in iron armor, scarred by barnacles. She was a tall decked sidewheeler, three masts and a smoke stack above her boiler, with her bow and stern lines straining to rip the cleats from the pier. She’d be good for crushing ice, Warren thought. But she was an old model, however faithful. He’d never seen the ice fields and mountains, the world erased in white and floating into more miles of nothing. Few could have claimed to have seen that dark winter, and sailed out again with the whole of their body or soul.

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“Aye. I’ll get a good picture.”

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“That’s it, man. We’ll be on our way yet.”

 

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