Free Heart So Hungry by Randall Silvis Page B

inconceivable that he could agree to this plan.
    When he looked at her he could see the flames from the fireplace dancing in her eyes. Softly she told him, “I want you to think about the consequences, George, if we do not go to Labrador. They will be far more severe, I think, than if we go.”
    “How’s that, missus?” he managed to ask.
    “If Mr. Wallace completes his journey, everyone will believe the lies he has written. They will believe that the first expedition failed because of my husband. That it was his own shortcomings—not the weather nor the unusual absence of game nor even simple bad luck, but his personal shortcomings—that brought about his death. Is that what you believe, George?”
    “No,” he said. “It was all those other things.”
    “Precisely. But we are the only people who can prove that. Mr. Wallace will not. His only ambition is to prove himself the better man.”
    Never before had George felt such a sense of suffocation. He felt utterly boxed in by her logic. Nor did he possess the words to refute her, or the strength to try. It would be easier to die in Labrador, he decided, than to argue with her.
    “When did you figure on leaving?” he asked.
    “In June,” she told him. “Just as Mr. Hubbard originally planned.”
    All through the winter and spring they kept their secret. It was harder than George had thought it would be, especially after he returned to Missanabie at the end of January and went back to working for Mr. King at the Hudson’s Bay Company. Offers came in requesting his services as a guide for hunting and fishing excursions planned for the summer, but he turned them all down as politely as he could. His friends wanted to know why.
You got something against making easy money?
    What could he say? The art of deceit eluded him. “I’ve had my fill of that kind of work for a while, I guess.” And it was true, as far as it went. He certainly had had his fill of the kind of work that could starve a man, steal his strength, rob him of his life. His closest friends, those who knew how the experience with Leonidas Hubbard had changed George, thought they understood. But others continued to badger him. Here he was a famous man, written up in papers from St. John’s to New York City.
What’s the matter, George? Afraid to go into the bush again?
    Plus there were all those letters from Mrs. Hubbard to explain. In a place like Missanabie, if a letter arrived from the States, everybody in town soon knew about it. Mina wrote frequently to tell George about the plans she was making, the provisions she had ordered, the contacts she had made with a publisher eager for abook about her expedition. Now and then she included a newspaper clipping about Wallace’s preparations. From these George learned of Wallace’s attempt to give his trip the imprimatur of science. He had signed on a young geologist to help him scout the area for mineral deposits, a young forestry student and an Ojibway guide.
    Mina also wrote to ask George’s advice. Should she order this or that? How many of each? Could he fill out the crew with a couple of good men who could be counted on to hold their tongues about the plans?
    She wrote to inform him that certain people, the necessary people, had been informed of her expedition—friends of hers or Mr. Hubbard’s who could be relied upon for financial support. But she had been careful to tell them something less than the full truth. A dissimulation, yes, but unavoidable. She had told them that she planned to visit Labrador for the purpose of gathering information for her book about Mr. Hubbard, that she would travel only as far as the North West River Post to conduct interviews. She seemed, in her letters, to take some delight in this charade, and in the admonishment of her friends that even a modest foray into that brutal peninsula might well prove the undoing of such a delicate lady.
    But George’s worst moment came the day he received a letter from Dillon