Under the Wide and Starry Sky

by Nancy Horan

  Louis’s bedroom was his sanctuary now. Early on in the building of the new house, it had become clear that he had to take for himself the bedroom they’d originally planned for his mother. He set up his office in an adjoining room and most days found the quiet he craved. He was working at a furious pace. Some time ago, he had abandoned the big South Seas book for Fanny’s peace of mind, and for his own, since she nagged him fiercely about it. Discouraged, he’d pulled together some of his letters for McClure and written In the South Seas, then let it go from his fingers out into the world. Nobody would buy it, he was quite sure. It was an imperfect thing, a stunted version of a giant dream.

  Now he wrote realistic stories about the South Seas and wondered if they would bring in any money. At least he’d enjoyed some hilarity in collaborating with Lloyd on his first novel. The Wrong Box was more Lloyd’s book than his own, marked by the boy’s love of mix-ups and false identities. It was a fine example of how Louis’s standards had slid in the cause of mentorship.

  “I don’t like it,” Moors had the audacity to tell him recently. “The Wrong Box, I mean. It isn’t worthy of you. Why do you bother to collaborate?”

  Louis felt his ears go hot and imagined for a moment punching Moors right between his blue eyes. What can the man possibly understand of my life? But he was the trader’s guest, sitting out the afternoon heat on Moors’s balcony, drinking Moors’s beer, and facing a hill that gave Louis untold pleasure to view, a slope reminiscent of Kinnoull Hill in Perth, Scotland, except for the palm trees and native girls in lavalavas who were passing along a path in the distance.

  “I think you know the answer to that,” Louis replied. “Money. And good company. Lloyd’s a great mimic, you know. He can reproduce a man’s style of speaking after two or three sentences, and he has a way with comic scenes. I think the one we are working on now, The Wrecker, will be wonderful.”

  “In the end, you wrote the whole thing over.”

  “The Wrong Box? I wrote the final draft, yes.”

  “I much prefer your own work,” Moors said. He sipped his beer. “This collaboration business is a mistake, as I see it.”

  Louis knew that Lloyd rubbed the trader the wrong way. The boy’s English accent rang false in Moors’s American ears, despite the fact that Lloyd had acquired it honestly. Louis suspected that Moors thought the boy’s taste for fine liquor had come too early, and, by route of his mother’s marriage, too easily. It made Louis cringe, too, when he observed Lloyd at a party playing the high-nosed sophisticate with a glass of fine whisky in hand. Still, he could not tolerate Moors passing judgment on matters in Louis’s life that he did not understand.

  He rose to leave.

  Oblivious to any offense given, Moors patted him on the back in the overfamiliar way a lot of Americans had. “Why don’t you go to Nassau Island with me sometime soon? My cabin is nearly done over there. You can work undisturbed. I won’t bother you until sundown, when I come round with a bottle of rum in my hand. You need a break from those women up there, Stevenson. You’re all tied up in apron strings.”

  They walked through the dining room of the house, where a comely girl washed windows. Her shapely breasts bobbed beneath a flower wreath around her neck.

  “How is it a man is expected not to respond to such a sight?” Louis mumbled when they got to the door.

  Moors grinned. “A man’s a fool if he lives in paradise and doesn’t taste the fruit.”

  Louis regretted he’d ever opened himself up to Moors. Not that he had revealed himself in the same way he always had to Colvin and Baxter. But other than Reverend Clarke, Moors was the closest thing to a confidant Louis had on the island, even though he felt uneasy about some unsavory aspects he’d heard of Moors’s past, relating to the labor trade.

  It was business that had thrown him together with Moors. The fellow was bright, an astute observer of Samoan politics, and willing to help at every turn. He was kind to his wife, though there were the usual rumors that he was not immune to the charms of other island women. Truth was, Louis needed Moors, warts and all. What other English-speaking companions did he have but for Lloyd, or his mother, or Belle? Fanny hardly counted as a companion anymore, so obsessively did she work on the farm. She had become almost a stranger.

  When loneliness had his foot in its trap, Louis mounted Jack and rode the poor horse as fast as he could. The two of them seemed to be in need of the same thing; they soared over pig fences as if they were a pair of coupled birds.

  Some days he rode out to Mata’afa’s camp in Malie, where he talked for hours with the chief and his subchiefs. No longer was he simply gathering information for his letters and books; no longer was he merely observing. The native men were his friends; Louis knew their wives and children, their fortunes, misfortunes, peculiarities. They respected him, he thought, and his status among them had nothing to do with his fame as a writer. He had studied their culture and learned their language. He had tried to wade into their world without manipulating them, except for urging peace. It was disturbing, then, when he sensed that his most outstanding quality was his wealth. For the natives had witnessed the huge wooden crates coming off ships, being loaded onto carts pulled by dray horses that struggled up the hill to Vailima, a palace compared to their own homes. He was a rich man in their eyes, and there was no getting around it. He cringed when he overheard the natives say of him, “Ona.” It occurred to him that despite his efforts to master their language and customs and history, he might always be to them, above all, a rich white man.

  CHAPTER 75

  1892

  Louis has chosen to paint his bedroom pale blue, a chilly, repellent color with which I can do nothing. His bed is made of mats, a wooden pillow, and a blanket. He chooses to have no mattress or sheets. I choose to have both. And my room will be done in the colors I love—sapphire, emerald, and ruby.

  Morning. Fanny got up off her cot and looked for something clean to put on. Her native dresses were all in need of laundering. Louis had invited Mr. Moors in for a tour of the new house, and she didn’t want to greet him in the battered holoku she wore for gardening, all blotted with muck. In between her old gowns hung bridles, horse ropes, and straps. Leather tack seemed to disintegrate in the Samoan humidity. Her room was piled high with the things that she dared not leave out lest they turn to mush or get taken. There were boxes of tobacco, and matches, and a can of kerosene. One corner held spears, a Manihiki drum, tapa mats. On the bureau and trunks and boxes, spread across every flat surface, lay necklaces made of sharks’ and whales’ teeth, shells, bird bones, red berries. Cases of Bordeaux wine rose in a stack above her head. At her feet, a bucket from a Scottish hotel in the Highlands contained her pistol and cartridges. Boxes of things from Bournemouth had started to arrive as well, and she stopped for a moment to pry the lid off one to see what it held. Books. She lifted out her father’s Bible. When she paused in her search for clean clothing to open it, the smell of cigar smoke floated up from its sepia pages as if he were in the room.

  On the Chinese chest that served as her dressing table were her tools—chisels, wrenches, nails, pincers; her toothbrush, a comb, and a pouch full of pearls; and thank God, the bundle of laundry. She high-stepped to get to the chest, where the clean, folded holokus sat atop a box loaded with salves and syrups, pills and powders—medicines she’d collected over time from Louis and the doctors, plus an assortment of patent medicines she’d found useful.

  Her reputation as a healer had spread widely, and now natives and non- came to her for help. With her limited supplies, she could at least treat the pain. She’d helped a man with crushed fingers by soaking them in a mix of water and crystals of iron. When a worker came to her with elephantiasis, she relieved him with Epsom salts, though she knew it was no cure, she intended to write to the Lancet, asking the editor to find a doctor to do a study of the disfiguring disease.

  There was so much to do, and no one else to do it except her. Her mind flew through an unwritten list of proj
ects, great and small. She needed to organize, but she had no time. Worse, she had no idea anymore what was the most important thing. Everything called out to be fixed or cured or solved. Everything felt the same weight as it pressed down. Where to begin?

  With the kerosene. It did not belong in here. If it was going to be stolen from the barn, so be it. She cleared a path to the doorway and lifted the heavy can only to find Mr. Moors standing outside, gazing in with a stunned expression. Fanny quickly pulled the mat across the opening without greeting him. The woven door curtains let breezes in and kept insects out, though they didn’t allow much privacy.

  She lit a cigarette and sank down on the cot. She knew perfectly well what Moors was thinking: Poor Louis, saddled with an old wife, and a dirty one at that. Well, Mr. Moors, there are some things dirtier than mud, she said to him in her mind. Blackbirding, for example. Everybody knows you used to be a cargo supervisor on a boat that “recruited” black boys for the plantations. And you, Louis, you should be ashamed for not confronting your entertaining friend. Where would you run off to, though, if you could not race out of here in the afternoons to go hang about Moors’s store, even though the man overcharges us for every nail and bag of flour we order from him?

  Through the open window, she heard the voice of Belle and Louis’s mother, laughing on the lawn below. Tears welled in her eyes. How thrilled she had been to know the whole family would be together in one place, yet here she was, avoiding them again, feeling like an outsider among them.

  She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a full night’s sleep. Weeks. She snubbed out the cigarette in a coconut shell by her bed, pushed the laundry and medicines to the end of the cot. Ten minutes. I will close my eyes for ten minutes.

  “Fanny?” Maggie Stevenson’s voice called from the doorway, behind the drawn curtain. “I hate to bother you, dear, but you said you wanted to know. Your seeds have come.”

  Fanny looked at the clock. Nearly eleven. She had slept for two hours. “On the way!” she called back, and leaped out of the cot. It was almost lunchtime, but she couldn’t waste another minute.

  Fifteen hundred cacao tree seeds. The number had thrilled her when she’d ordered them. Now it rather horrified her. She had planned to deal with two escaped pigs today and a horse that Joe was insisting had glanders. But the seeds were here, and the seed man said they ought to be planted on arrival. That meant fifteen hundred little pots had to be plaited out of cacao leaves, then filled with dirt, then put out into the field where the cacao plantation would be. It would require all of them—the hired men, Belle, Joe, Maggie, Louis, even little Austin.

  Fanny raked fingers through her matted curls and went downstairs. The first person she saw was Mary, the spotless, corseted, and shoed little ninny whom Maggie had brought over from Sydney to work as their maid. She would be of no use. Wouldn’t take direction from anyone but Louis’s mother. Wouldn’t even take care of Maggie’s veils; one of Fanny’s men had to do the starching and pressing. “Phhh,” Fanny huffed through her teeth when she passed her. She came upon Maggie next, who was wandering around the house winding clocks, one of the ways she believed she made herself immensely useful.

  “I’ll do the varnishing next,” Maggie called out when Fanny passed. “It’s so beastly hot.”

  The varnishing had been Louis’s job, and it was actually a necessary one; it kept mildew and cockroaches out of the books. And books constituted nearly half of their house “furnishings.” Even if she had no household jobs at all, Louis’s mother would never in a million years consent to getting dirty on this project. She didn’t know how to cook or even clean, for that matter. She’d rather be out having tea with church ladies, or leaving her calling card. Such a life seemed utterly boring to Fanny, and the feeling was mutual, she suspected. Since Maggie had come to live with them in Samoa, the two women had learned to give each other a wide berth. She would prefer not to have Louis’s mother involved in the project, anyway.

  Fanny went to Louis’s study next, where she found her husband and Lloyd working together. She heard Louis say, “Make yourself invisible.” Their faces fell when she entered, and she wondered if Louis’s words were about her presence and not some bit of writing wisdom. “I need your help,” she told them. “The cacao plants have arrived.” She noticed Lloyd glance at Louis, seeking a sign that it was all right for him to leave. “Louis may do as he wishes,” Fanny said angrily. “You, Lloyd, will go down there right this minute.”

  When she arrived on the verandah, she found Joe Strong sitting on a rocking chair, a lavalava tied above his leggings, his parrot on his shoulder in a show of style he obviously thought was island bohemian. “I’m all tuckered out,” he muttered when she approached. She almost laughed out loud. Hungover, more like. She had put him in charge of feeding the chickens. One would think that was equal to building a pyramid, by the looks of him. She wouldn’t get much help, but she wasn’t going to let him sit there and watch while the others worked. “I will give you an easy job, then,” she told him. “Stay right where you are.”

  “You no got work?” she called out to Faauma, Lafaele’s pretty new wife, who cleaned house for them. The girl looked like a wood nymph, with fresh flowers woven into the crown of her oiled hair, a white cloth around her hips, and the tails of a red bandanna hanging between her breasts. “You bring Lafaele me,” Fanny ordered.

  In the cottage she and Louis had vacated, where Belle’s family was now encamped, she found her daughter at the sewing machine. Belle was in charge of cleaning the lamps, among other things, but found more pleasure in making pieces of clothing for the workers. With Louis’s approval, she had made lavalavas out of tartan plaid. The natives had given Belle the name Teuila, which meant something like “beautifier of the ugly,” according to Louis. Along with Lloyd and Joe, Belle was supposed to be part of the cooking team who had replaced the terrified Emma after Fanny fired her in exasperation.

  “Belle, round up the men out in the field. Everyone should gather on the verandah. The cacao seeds are here. It’s all hands on deck! Wear your worst work clothes.”

  Belle looked disappointed to have to abandon her sewing. “Now!” Fanny shouted over her shoulder as she departed.

  She knew she’d need her best men to see it through. She had Henry and Lafaele, both of whom would walk into a fire for her. They could be counted on to stay with the project to the last planted tree. She’d had a few whites working for her at the beginning, but all the laborers at Vailima were natives, and almost all Catholic, or “popies,” as the locals called them. That fact rested fine with everyone, except Maggie, who was in charge of Sunday prayers and didn’t know what to do with the popies who lived at Vailima.

  Beyond the Pineapple Cottage, Fanny saw her ten-year-old grandson playing with a worker who should have been out in the field. Arrick had clearly been lured away from his weeding by Austin’s fort, and the two of them were busy constructing a roof out of branches to set upon the walls made of mud and twigs. Arrick’s age was unclear; when he’d come to Vailima, he was a scrawny thing not much bigger than Austin. His chest and back were covered in welts, gotten in his boyhood when he was bled by elders trying to drain his body of poison from an enemy camp’s arrows. Whether he was kidnapped from his island or had put his X on a work contract voluntarily, no one knew. What Fanny could ascertain was that he’d run away from one of the German Firm’s plantations on the island and had been hiding in the bush, nearly starving. Louis was so moved by the young man’s desperate appeal to be hired that he had gone down to the Firm’s office and bought out the remainder of Arrick’s indenture contract.

  Both Louis and Fanny had been curious about how Arrick’s presence would be received by the Samoans who lived and worked at Vailima. Likely they would resent the intrusion of a New Hebridee into their society. Why, the inside help even discriminated against the outside help! Sometimes they didn’t invite them in to the lunch table but sent their food out to them. How would Arrick be treated? To
everyone’s relief, Lafaele and Henry and the others had been won over by Arrick’s sunny disposition, his small stature, and his unlucky fate.

  “Fa’ ape’ape’a le tū,” Henry said sadly. “He is like a swift. Never can rest. No home.”

  Soon enough Arrick was everyone’s favorite. They lavished him with treats, and he had begun to put on bulk, even muscle.

  “Fanny-gran!” Austin called out when he saw her. “Come look at the fort!” Fanny’s anger dissipated at the sound of the boy’s voice. She dropped one knee down, then the other, and crawled into the fort’s opening. “My, but this is fine!” she said. “We’ll camp out here together when it’s done. Now, look, I have a job for a couple of strong men. Can I count on you?”

  By noon, everyone on the property was elbow-deep in the tree project. Fanny sent ten workers into the barn and set them to weaving small baskets. Another four native workers were sent out to the field to dig up dirt and bring it back to the verandah, where it went to Louis, Belle, and Lloyd, who removed lumps of clay and rocks, then filled the leaf baskets making their way up from the barn. Arrick rolled the cacao seeds in ashes to kill any insects. Austin and Faauma, who had replaced her white lavalava with a faded old red tablecloth, carried the seeds over to Fanny, who sat on the floor of the verandah planting a seed in each basket. Joe arranged the little containers close together on the perimeter of the verandah, where they would stay until sprouts appeared and they were ready to be planted out.

  As evening fell, Belle went into the kitchen and produced a vat of hot chocolate so the Samoans could taste what they were, in a sense, making. Even in the clammy ninety-degree heat, the hot drink was wildly successful in encouraging everyone.

  The verandah felt as if it were the site of an Indiana barnraising, with everyone joking. The dirtier they got, the more they laughed.

  Around ten o’clock, Fanny went in to the bathroom Maggie had built for Louis’s birthday; she bathed and put on a clean dress and went upstairs to collapse.