The Expeditions (31 page)

“No. No, I don’t believe I will. I don’t believe I need to.”

She seemed relieved by his decision. “You are right. You don’t.”

Elisha held the woman’s gaze for a while longer, then he smiled and tipped his hat. He started back to the camera. When he turned she had disappeared onto Woodward Avenue.

The day’s light yellowed and weakened as Elisha sat on the dock’s edge. Onlookers lingered then drifted away, frustrated by the boy’s inactivity, until eventually he was alone. He let his feet dangle over the river, watched thin gray foam slap and break against the pilings.

A stevedore trundling a barrow of slops came whistling down a gangplank and overturned his load onto the dock, a spill of bloody ice mingled with fish entrails and spoiled vegetables. Elisha moved beneath the curtain and adjusted the camera’s pose. The scene’s confusion pleased him: the heaped-up crates and barrels and bales, the thicket of masts at dock, the rubbish slicked across the weathered planks. There would be a moment, he knew, when the sun’s low glare would set the scene alight, and the soot and mud and grime would vanish into shimmering, golden light, unlike anything else in nature, unlike anything except itself.

Elisha stood beneath the curtain, his hand on the lens shield. He would wait for that moment.

ALSO BY KARL IAGNEMMA

On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction

THE EXPEDITIONS

A Dial Press Book / January 2008

Published by

The Dial Press

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 2008 by Karl Iagnemma

The author would like to acknowledge the use of material from the following sources:
The Cholera Years
by Charles Rosenberg,
Life, Letters, and Speeches
by George Copway,
The Leopard’s Spots
by William Stanton, the sermons of James Walker,
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction,
and
Godey’s Lady’s Book.

The support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the MIT Council for the Arts is also gratefully acknowledged.

Map by Robert Bull

The Dial Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Iagnemma, Karl.

The expeditions / Karl Iagnemma.

p.                            cm.

1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. United States—History—1815–1861—Fiction. 3. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3609.A35E96 2008

813'.6—dc22                                                                                                             2007018324

www.dialpress.com

eISBN: 978-0-440-33738-6

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