Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

  “Samoa is no different from any other little outpost,” Moors had said. “Once the big powers put money in a foreign place. So they insert themselves into local politics.” The trader pointed toward the ship. “Mind you, it wasn’t more than a year ago there were six men-o’-war out there, all of ‘em spoiling for a fight.” He snorted. “A hurricane settled that tiff. Tossed those ships over like toys in a tub. Killed two hundred sailors. That’s when the Powers figured out they were three big dogs fightin’ over a mighty small bone. They had their Berlin conference; the Germans put their puppet, Malietoa Laupepa in the king’s seat; and they agreed to send over a ‘chief justice’ to settle disputes among all the parties.” He put a plug of tobacco in his cheek. “It can’t be done.”

  Moors’s knowledge of tribal rivalries and the financial interests of the Powers had been useful in Louis’s letters for McClure’s newspapers. Better yet was the trader’s knowledge of the island’s hidden wonders. He had already led Louis on afternoon rides through the bush to blue lagoons where locals bathed, and to lava caves where swiftlets swooped past them in the darkness, calling out to each other in clicks.

  As Jack turned toward Vailima, Louis saw bare-breasted girls along the road, beautiful brown girls wearing flowers in their hair, bead necklaces, and scanty kilt-like lavalavas tied round their waists. He smiled at the notion that his eyes had grown accustomed to such naked beauty. What would Baxter or Colvin do upon encountering such females? Fall from their mounts, no doubt.

  The air grew silent and the path rougher as he rode beside a high lime hedge, then ascended the hill into the bush. On either side, ropy vines wound around thick trunks, knitted themselves through branches, and hung down like fat snakes from the great canopy to the thick scrub below. Louis passed through a tiny village just below his own land where a family was drinking kava in their open-sided house. The lanterns were already glowing. “Talofa!” someone greeted to him from beneath the thatched roof.

  At a bend in the road was a clearing where he often stopped to look up at Vailima and down at the coastline. To the west of Apia lay a string of German settlements that continued along the coast until they reached Mulinuu, the official seat of the Samoan king. Louis could see distinctly the coconut and cacao plantations owned by the Hamburg company with a very long name that everybody called “The German Firm.” “It might as well be an arm of the German government,” Moors had groused.

  In Apia and to the east, English and Americans populated the coast. It was a cruel irony that while the natives preferred to live along the water, whites had claimed the harbor section of Upolu’s northern shoreline. Forced to live away from the town in areas where decent roads and basic amenities ended, the native people moved through Apia as foreigners. That center of commerce was run by white administrators for the white settlers and was immune to the rule of the native king. But the white kingdom was not a happy one. The town, jointly held by whites of different nationalities, was divided into bickering camps.

  Louis shaded his eyes and studied the coastline. All around the island, the surf crashed up and over the coral reefs. He turned toward Vailima, where he saw a windowpane in the new house glint copper gold as it caught the sun.

  They had been living on the island for three months, sheltering in the cottage. The house was a simple structure, a two-story clapboard with three main rooms on the first floor and five bedrooms upstairs. The house’s size made the locals gasp. He and Fanny didn’t think it was too big; they would use every square inch of it for their extended family. What made it extravagant was the fact that all the building materials had to be imported, either from the States or from Australia and New Zealand. Everything: nails, window glass, doorknobs, redwood boards. The German Firm had taken the contract and gotten the materials from the harbor to Vailima by dray horse and cart, up the treacherous, furrowed road from Apia.

  Dinner will be waiting, he thought, such as it is. There was a provisions shortage that Moors insisted would be temporary, caused by the fact that the men-o’-war hadn’t come into Apia harbor for extended stays of late. With the reduction in population, suppliers were not shipping food into the town as they once did. Fanny’s garden would soon be producing, but in the interim, they ate a lot of breadfruit. The night before, he and Fanny had shared one avocado for supper.

  When the conch shell was blown to call in anyone out in the fields, it would be he and Fanny who gathered at the table, along with Henry and Lafaele, two Samoan members of the household. Henry Simele was a bright, strong, plain-faced fellow who oversaw the day workers and did whatever job was required. When he began working with them, he’d asked Louis to teach him how to speak more complex English, or “long expressions,” as he called it, in exchange for Samoan-language instruction. The two met every evening for a mutual lesson. Henry always arrived freshly bathed, his chest decorated in fern garlands or a flower wreath. It turned out he was a chief on his own island of Savaii, but he had to work at Vailima to earn money for all the feasts he was expected to host.

  Fanny was especially fond of Lafaele, a loyal fellow whom she was trying to turn into a gardener. He was a fine-looking man: muscular, with curled hair gone red from using slaked lime on it. Louis suspected the name to be a version of Raphael, so he called him “the Archangel.” He was that—good-hearted, and a great believer in the supernatural.

  Both men seemed to regard Vailima as home. Louis was touched when Henry said, “Our house is a gentle house.” At one of the early social gatherings he and Fanny attended in Apia, the wife of a diplomat advised Louis to treat his servants like family: “You’ll get more work out of them.” Louis had been offended by the crassness of her remark, though he’d already witnessed the nugget of truth in the statement. His familiarity with the Scottish clan system helped him make sense of Samoan life. The extended family was at the heart of both cultures. Everyone knew his role in the scheme of things, showed the proper respect for superiors and elders, and drew identity from the clan.

  In a couple of months, once they were in the big house, Lloyd would return with the contents of the Bournemouth house, Louis’s mother would join them, and if they could persuade Belle, she and Joe and Austin would take over the Pineapple Cottage, as they called the little place they were living in now. When it was finished, the new place would look like a barracks. It was not a Highland country house—the sort of building his countrymen might picture as the ideal home. But it would be enough for him. And the prospect of his own extended clan settling around him in Samoa was enormously comforting. He wouldn’t be lonely.

  “Talofa,” Louis called out when he saw Henry standing at the gate of the paddock.

  “Hello Tusitala,” Henry said.

  Tusitala. Louis smiled to himself as he rode his horse to the barn. His new native name pleased him. Teller of Tales.

  CHAPTER 69

  Four A.M. and I am wide awake, thanks to a noisy honeyeater singing out in the forest. Reverend Clarke tells me the natives believe that when that bird sings in the middle of the night, it is warning that a ghost is near.

  As the hurricane season approaches, we work against the clock to get the house finished and seeds in. With Lloyd in Britain, where he is arranging the sale of Skerryvore and collecting Louis’s mother, it is just Louis and me, and of course Henry and Lafaele, and a few day workers.

  Of these 300 acres, we will clear only about fifteen at most. It is all we can ever manage, I think, for the jungle reclaims cleared land quickly. Louis says we should grow cacao. I think coffee and have begun a large number of cuttings in small pots to be planted out soon. I have made a plan to divert water from a mountain stream to pipe into our house as well. We are building the reservoir just now. There is plenty to worry about, but there are gifts, too. Last night when we sat outside, Louis said, “These are the real stars and moon, not the tin imitations that preside over London.”

  Now, when I get up in the morning, my legs do not feel like jelly, as they did on the boats. I am so gratefu
l not to be sick to my stomach and terrified, the way I was nearly every day at sea. It’s not the staying but the coming that I object to.

  I could not have conceived two years ago that the solution to our search for a home where Louis could regain his health would be Samoa, of all places. But indeed, I believe we are at last on solid ground.

  Fanny set aside her diary, closed her eyes, and listened to the sounds of insects and birds awakening. It was always a single triller who started the morning music, but in a minute thousands of creatures would join in, sending up swooping ribbons of coos, chirps, and clicks into the black morning air. How they must love the sound of their own chorus! They wove their ribbons together intentionally, she was certain of it, because every once in a while they would all stop at once—insects and birds alike—as if on cue, as if to catch their breath and listen to the silence.

  When the sun tore an orange line through the clouds and lit the hillside, the music slowed. There would be individual songs called out here and there, but she wouldn’t notice a chorus again until dinnertime, when the frogs took over. They sang so loudly that Louis complained he might be losing his hearing. A booming glee club, they were. Fanny was so enchanted by the frog song that she didn’t care if she missed the end of someone’s sentence.

  At dawn, too alert to remain in bed, she went by lantern light to her toolshed. Fog was rolling up the hill, puffing across the clearing like pale smoke as she pulled out the things she would need for the day. Her ambitions for Vailima grew by the hour. She had three pigs—a white boar and two sows—and she wanted many more. She saw a big farm: a real, producing farm from which she could feed her family and work crew. There would be more horses and eventually a cow for milk. And more gardens, profuse with every vegetable she might crave. She saw a plantation operation with cash crops that would eventually support Vailima. Maybe she would grow both coffee and cacao and make a run at a perfume business as well, since Henry had found ylang-ylang trees on the property.

  She could tell other people had lived on this land. Henry came upon evidence of a banana plantation in a soggy area of the bush. Excited, Fanny made a muddy foray into the swamp to have a look. To think she had so much of her own property to explore—three hundred mysterious acres! Never in her wildest dreaming had she considered the possibilities of such a canvas.

  There had been the most basic beginnings to make: a fowl house for her Cochins, a paddock to clear, a barn and pigpens to build, and seeds to plant, starting with the buffalo grass she’d ordered from the States.The tough buffalo grass would keep out weeds once it was established. Today she would follow behind the tiller, planting grass in the morning and vegetables in the afternoon. Thinking of the seeds she’d ordered from Australia made her heart thump. Long green beans, peas, radishes, melons, corn, artichokes, eggplants, tomatoes. When a neighbor gave her six lovely pineapples, she planted their tops in hopes of having her own grove.

  All the books she had ever read on botany and gardening and landscape design seemed to have been driving toward this moment in her life. She thought of the Englishwoman, Gertrude Jekyll, whose brother, Walter, used to visit them at Bournemouth. Fanny once visited her house in Surrey and nearly fainted when she saw corn stalks growing in the woman’s extraordinary flower border. And I thought I was the only gardener in England with corn between my roses. When Walter saw Fanny’s garden at Skerryvore, he said to her, “You plant in strokes, as Gertrude does. She is a painter, too.”

  The woman was an artist with plants, and Fanny had in mind a flower garden at Vailima that would equal Gertrude’s. It would not be easy to imitate such an effect in the space around the house. A beautiful garden was a three-dimensional composition made up of ephemeral materials. It was far harder to make than a painting; she knew that firsthand. But what she had in mind was even harder: a vast architected landscape of flower and vegetable gardens, ponds, and plantation crops moving out into the hillside.

  As Fanny began hoeing a new section, the fog thinned and the damp world around her turned silver-bright. In the field beyond, she saw the brown earth was marked with shimmering green lines where her beans had begun to quicken with life. After an hour, covered in sweat and already sore, she went back to the cottage, where Louis stood on the little porch, drinking his morning coffee.

  “Good mornin’, Weird Woman,” he called out. It was his latest pet name for her, no doubt in reference to her recent fascination with Samoan superstitions, as well as her appearance this morning. She was wearing the wide brim of a hat—only the brim. She had separated the crown and tossed it away so that her scalp could catch the occasional cool breeze.

  “Louis, do you think we are still on friendly terms with Walter Jekyll and his sister Gertrude?”

  “I suppose. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m thinking about writing to Gertrude to ask for some seeds, but I don’t know if I dare.

  I’ve never had a sense of how they felt about us after you borrowed their family name for the story.”

  Louis shrugged. “At least it wasn’t Dr. Hyde and Mr. Jekyll.”

  They stood together, contemplating the clearing near the house, where dozens of burned tree stumps poked up from the dirt. Fanny envisioned a great sward where the family could play lawn tennis, but the ugly black things reminded her how far they had to go. “What would Gertrude do with those stumps, do you suppose?” Fanny wondered aloud.

  “Why, set flower pots on ‘em, girlie!” Louis said.

  Fanny savored this part of the day, when they talked of what they intended to get done on the land. In the past, such planning would have been unthinkable, but Louis was joyfully well. For hours on end, he waged death contests with the wretched sensitive plant—green murders, he called his battles—and emerged invigorated, whooping like a warrior and shouting, “I love weeding!” He cut swaths through the bush to make paths, returning filthy and triumphant. He rode his horse back and forth to Apia at a terrifying speed, given the condition of the road. He rejoiced in the muscles growing strong in his thighs. When she massaged the back of his neck at the end of a long workday, she glimpsed lines of white skin hidden within furrows of brown. “You are turning the color of the earth,” she told him.

  It gave her peace to see Louis so vigorous and happy. She occasionally found him standing still in a spot, listening to birds in the forest. “Do you hear that? They’re chuckling like children out there.”

  Fanny worked so hard some days that her arthritic knees would not come up off the ground. When Henry found her stuck between her garden rows, he would lift her by her middle and move her to the next section that had to be planted. Louis worked just as hard.

  Before dinner, they went to the pool near the house that was surrounded by orange trees; there they bathed among water lilies. Standing in the waterfall that poured over a rock ledge, Louis called out, “This is a fairy story!”

  A few days earlier, while Louis was in town, he was approached by Mr. Sewell, the U.S. consul, who asked if he might bring a pair of famous Americans up to Vailima. “John LaFarge, the painter, and a historian named Henry Adams,” Louis told her. “LaFarge is a friend of Will Low. But I never heard of the other one.”

  “Their timing couldn’t be worse,” Fanny protested. “What will we feed them?”

  “I told the consul they should bring their own food.”

  “You are the best attraction Sewell has to offer on this island, I suppose. The equivalent of Queen Vaekehu’s tattooed legs. ‘Not to be missed!’” she teased.

  Next day, Adams and LaFarge appeared in the clearing with Sewell as their guide. While Louis greeted them, Fanny ran into the cottage to wash her arms and feet and put on shoes. It was afternoon. They had spent the morning installing a stove in the outdoor cookhouse, and they were both covered with black grease. There was no time to bathe or change. Both travelers were balding fellows, slightly older than Fanny, and pinched in aspect. LaFarge was polite, but Adams could not conceal how appalled he was by the spectacle in
front of him. He appeared thunderstruck as he gaped at poor Louis, who was wearing grease-streaked white linen trousers with a brown sock on one foot, and a purple sock on the other. In the space of a minute, Fanny was fairly certain she loathed Henry Adams.

  Louis, on the other hand, was beside himself with joy. It was almost embarrassing to see how excitedly he approached the men. He was like a puppy, eager to play, jumping around a more reserved dog who is not done sniffing, as indeed Adams was not, for his nostrils were flared from the moment he arrived, and they seemed incapable of deflating. Louis toured the men around the cleared property, talking of their plans. Later, over a simple meal on a table outside, he pitched one topic after another at Adams and LaFarge, seeking to spark the kind of brainy repartee he’d so missed since leaving his old friends in London. The painter was clearly cultivated but politely reserved. Adams was more forthcoming, promptly revealing that there were two American presidents in his family tree. In his Boston Brahmin accent, he expanded on his own interests, in particular how American education was producing a crop of young people ill prepared for the coming century. “Second-rate” was a phrase he used to dismiss any number of people, places, and ideas. Sewell turned the talk back to Vailima, and the herculean task of building a house when the materials had to be imported. The historian’s snobbery seeped through his every remark. “One must lower one’s standards in the tropics, of course.” Adams sighed. “Lord knows, Henry Adams certainly has.”

  Fanny engaged the man’s eyes. “We don’t stand on too much ceremony here,” she said. “A simple way of life thankfully preserves us from that burden. Someone without imagination might look at this place and see squalor, but we see possibility,” She smiled sweetly. “And we are grateful to be living in Samoa, among people with truly humane manners.”