Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  “Christ on high, we got a real showboat here,” one of the men said. “Never seen a pickaninny in a cravat before.”

  Another said, “E’ll get that pretty little hat knocked awf in the cane fields, but.”

  Argus looked out from under the hat’s brim, trying to make out the faces before him. The cat mewed warily from the leather satchel.

  A man in a flannel jacket, evidently the recruiter, came forward and said, “You-fellow work-em sugar place?”

  Argus straightened his cravat against his celluloid collar, stroked the cat’s protruding head, and said: “I’d like to buy a passage to the western islands, out by the Bismarck Archipelago, or as far as you’ll take me. I’ll pay extra to keep the cat with me. And can you bring the rowboat up on the davits? I’ll need a way to get about once I’m there.” He put his hand in his pocket but thought better of showing his shillings and pounds. He would negotiate a fair price, just as the reverend had taught him.

  Ten seconds of silence as they took in the sight of the bush dandy speaking the Queen’s English. Finally, a voice said, “Don’t he speak like a book? Say something else. Say us a joke or a limerick. Dressed like a fuckin duke, he is. Go on, little blackie, speak.”

  5.

  Argus shared the second mate’s cabin, a nook that smelled of wood bloat and lime powder. The schooner drifted toward New Ireland, canting a wake through a procession of lowland atolls. There were tiny beaches rimmed with green underwood and bights of coral. They stopped at the larger islands, the ones with wide bays or cloud-capped volcanoes. The recruiter told the coxswain where to anchor and a party rowed ashore with guns and glass beads. At each place it was the same ritual: the boys and young men assembling on the shore, the settling of goodbye payment, the fathers paddling their sons out to the ship. A flotilla of canoes with burning husk torches surrounded the ship as it weighed anchor. The new recruits were signed on, handed a stick of tobacco and a blanket, and sent down the hatchway below deck. By the time the schooner reached the Solomons, there were sixty boys aboard.

  The kanakas slept in the bunkroom and whenever they saw Argus on deck with the petulant cat they called him gnat-gnat or trouser mary. Argus sat up on the bulkhead with his Kipling and Dickens, watching the ship hands clew up the square sails or lean against the halyards in beleaguered silence. He sketched the broken backbone of islands, the sun paling away the distances into faint blues and greens. He worked a sketchpad with a cut of charcoal; the Reverend Mister had taught him about the unbending laws of perspective and vanishing points, about the imagined zenith floating beyond any scene like heaven itself. Argus drew the shadows of clouds passing over receding tidal flats, the darkened bulwarks of sea turtles rising to the surface, the seabirds pinned to the updrafts. He had a surge of memory about being at sea with his father, an outrigger pounding through the surf, spindrift wetting his face, the beat of slit-gongs and his father chanting to a drowned uncle from the stern. He’d been woken without warning, tranced half sleeping down to the black shore where the boats bobbed against the narrow ribbon of daybreak. He was being taken along on a trading voyage, auditioned for manhood and betrothal. He would someday need to sponsor his own voyage and return with enough shell armlets to win a girl he had never seen but whose name he had known since the age of three. But when the outriggers stopped to fish in the shallows, he dropped a net and spear over the side and was made to dive in after it. After that, his paddle was taken away and his father did not speak to him for the rest of the voyage.

  Now he watched the islands pass, the basalt cliffs and mangrove swamps, trying to remember the contours of Poumeta, its reefs and stony beachhead. There were the tiny surrounding islands where porpoise teeth were strung between trees and the bones of enemies lay bleaching in the sun. The pile houses were clustered by clan around the lagoon, canoes tethered beneath. He remembered following the women on the beach after his failure at sea; he’d been given back to his mother. He trailed behind her as she bent with a hoop net, flinging his reed spear at the silver clouds of minnows in the tidal pools. He lacked dexterity and accuracy and it wasn’t until his mother taught him how to harvest fish by suffusing shallow pools with poisonous leaves, waiting for the stupefied fish to rise to the surface, that he caught anything. From then on he waited in the shade of a fern tree, watching the fish float up one by one, a dozen silver ghosts making the transit. He’d wondered if they possessed a vapor in their chests, whether they left their bodies during sleep. Had he been marked for religion even then?

  He went with the Reverend Mister not only because his father was dead, not only because his mother and her in-laws offered him up like a machete boy for the sugar fields—one less mouth to feed and an ungainly bugger at that—but because he understood the revelation of Christ-the-Son, had understood it on first gleaning. At twelve, Jesus came to him as a half-demon conceived by an ancestral ghost. Sometimes He took the form of a wild pigeon. Why not walk on water? Why not infuse the hard lump in a man’s abdomen with righteous fury? And then there was the blunt object of faith, something that could not simply be tutored and schooled but had to be uncovered like a turtle egg in the sand. Reveal the yearning for God, the jewel waiting on the mudsill of the heathen mind.

  The Reverend Mister had begun the process of digging, unpeeling, molding. At suppertime, Argus sat straight-backed in starched cotton while the preacher taught him manners, clipping the boy’s knuckles with the edge of a butter knife when he dropped his cutlery or let his elbows touch the tabletop. Argus listened to the rumble and drone of English with all its verbs and names until it furrowed in his mind, until the world was cleaved in two. Everything doubled, multiplied; he knew two words, two explanations where there used to be one, understood that yaws and measles were diseases of imperfect men cast down from heaven but also the result of vengeful ancestors, spurned uncles, strangled widows. He knew that a church service was a kind of séance, that the reverend administered the Lord’s Supper just as a woman with a dead son could administer a call to guardian spirits. The blood of Christ and the armlet containing a piece of a murdered man’s rib. The chalice and the gourd, both raised to the vengeful dead. Not just the holy revelations, either, but the practicalities of daily life. He learned to cook rice and kippers, to soft-boil an egg. He sliced toast into little spears and placed them around the edge of the reverend’s china plate.

  And somewhere along the way he’d learned to covet things, despite the Reverend Mister’s homilies about simplicity and the emptied cup of man. In his portmanteau there were books and drawings, a watch that ran slow, shirts and ties, a spare pair of trousers and flannels, clean socks, a gun rag with money coiled inside, a gilt-edged Bible, a set of cutlery and a silver serviette ring. He remembered his boyhood on Poumeta and how the children played with bark, raffia, and reeds, keeping them only as long as the game itself, improvising dams and sailboats on the muddy river. They watched their fathers return from their epic trading voyages to the island of Tikalia, hundreds of miles to the east, armlets and dogteeth gathered in the bows of the outriggers. They rushed to the beach to cheer for the bounty. But for Argus it was playacting. He had never understood the thrill of the bracelets that connected them to the distant island. They were frequently tarnished and chipped. His father recited the provenance of each strand of shells, naming the hands through which it had passed. Meanwhile, the children kept twigs and leaves for half a day, never once amassed a bowery of fish spines or gold-flecked stones. They watched the women wash each other’s hair, bathe in mallow-scented pools, and argued in the shadows over who was the tallest, oldest, or fastest. They watched the adult affairs of the village with a dedicated lack of interest. The dull litanies to the dead, the stupid haggling over pigs and brides. They were allowed to stay out until dark and were beaten only if they damaged property. The water pots and limed jugs, the shell and tooth empire, so many things were hallowed and beyond reach back then. He leaned against the schooner bulkhead, wending his way home after six years, his
new life revealed in the props he carried, in the leather suitcase that belonged to a dead priest.

  6.

  Argus came upon Poumeta just before dark, the rowboat winking through the dusk. The Lady Duncan had taken him within five miles of the island, the coral reefs preventing closer passage. The seamen had lowered the rowboat from the starboard davits, the maudlin cat whining from the stern, the kanakas on deck to wave and snigger. Argus leaned into the oar strokes, into the familiar slap and draw. He had often rowed the Reverend Mister out to visiting ships or to satellite islands to interrupt séances. He could scarcely remember paddling a canoe anymore and the motion of the oars, of traveling with his back to the approaching destination, felt entirely natural. He rounded the first of the islets, coming upon the coral skirt that fanned out from the main island. A shipwrecked brig lay hogged up on the reef, its mizzen-mast slanting through the falling light. He hadn’t heard news of the island in several years and he wondered how long the ship had been there.

  He tried to make out the estuary and the mouth of the lagoon that led to the village. He looked for signs of hearth fires, for slats of light coming through the walls of the pile houses. But he could only make out a campfire on shore, just east of the river. Perhaps there was a feast, a cousin having his ears pierced or a celebration for a returned voyage. He turned a course for the beach, keeping the cat’s reproaches and the slapping of the oars downwind. The waves nudged the boat into the reef channel and he used one oar to steer the boat onto the beach. He took off his shoes and socks, jumped into the knee-high water, and dragged the boat up. The fire surged beyond the mangroves, between his landing and the village itself. He tied the cat by its collar to the iron bowring with a piece of twine. If his cousins heard a cat in the darkening thicket during a call to ancestral spirits, they might just send a bamboo spear into the undergrowth for good measure. He stashed his portmanteau in the bushes, buttoned his alpaca coat, and set off in the direction of the firelight.

  Within fifty yards he heard men’s voices. He crouched amid the banyans and edged forward, staying low, the voices dying away then rising again through the thicket. It was English—gruff, bawdy, sibilant, the spitting doggerel of British seamen. In a bowl of firelight the men gathered, twenty or so, torn weskits over bare chests and beards grown in, reclined against a ship’s salvage—barrels of rum, crates of tinned food, an ash-smeared divan, powder kegs, crates of ammunition, a canvas sail laid out like a carpet. They passed gourds and green bottles and cigars back and forth. A suckling runt was turning over a spit and yams were baking in the coals. A dozen tents were pitched in the shadowy background, spread among planks and scantling. The taffrail had been removed from the ship and was set up like a tavern bar in a grove of trees. The men were armed with weapons of every description—rifles, old muskets, flintlocks and carbines but also bamboo spears, iron tomahawks, stone daggers. They sang in the firelight, gunmetal glinting, the bower filling with bawdy limericks and hoary ballads.

  Argus leaned against a tree trunk and saw that some of the men had adorned themselves in the style of natives, ochre and vermilion lines beneath their eyes, patches of turmeric-yellow cloth over buckskin boots, shell armlets and dogtooth necklaces over torn sailcloth shirts. There were gunnysacks cinched up with kinked human hair. A black and mushroomed ear hung around a deckhand’s neck. A line of smoked and shrunken Melanesian heads, eyes hollowed, mouths stricken, lay spiked on wooden stakes. On the filthy divan two Poumetan girls slumped, their eyes closed, naked except for their grass skirts. A sailor sat between them, arms slung around their necks, a breast cupped in each filthy hand. Argus felt the wind go out of him. He thought of the Reverend Mister’s pigeon rifle and wished now he’d brought it. He thought of his sisters and mother and was up and running low toward the village.

  He came up behind the lagoon where the folds of red clay fingered out to the ramparts and houses. The boggy trail was still there, weaving a narrow path between the broken reeds and rushes, and his feet pounded the mud as he ran. He could smell the reeking desolation long before he saw the burnt-out village. The carcasses of gutted dogs and maimed human bodies floated in the brackish water. A few houses remained, ramshackle and stripped bare on their pilings. He climbed up the stepladder to one and found a rummage of wool blankets and straw bedding. The floor slats had been pried up for kindling; clay pots and earthenware jugs lay in shards. Defecation was heaped in the corners. It was the aftermath of biblical tribes, the marauding Amalekites or Hittites, Old Testament infidels.

  Argus continued on to the men’s longhouse on the other side of the lagoon, his mouth open, eyes stinging, the blackened smell scorching his throat. The tambaran, hewn from teak and sandal-wood, was the place of men’s business. It had been decorated with an armory of engraved weapons, famed knives and murderous spears, but also the finger bones of warriors from a previous century, from a thousand moons prior; in the rafters the cauterized hearts of mortal enemies hung like roosting bats. Now it was piled with the bodies of village children. They had come up here in terror, he could see, for only an apocalypse could drive them up into the taboo dwelling, ominous on its leaning stilts, high above the swamps and coral gardens. They lay slender-armed and ball-fisted, faces stricken, huddled behind a useless armada of ornamental shields.

  Argus staggered into the bush, fell to his hands and knees. He cried out once, with his face buried in his hat. Turning on his back, he looked up into the canopy, the moonless dark pinned above a clearing. He tried to gather his thoughts but his mind felt stripped. He was aware of the coarse volcanic dirt against his fingertips and his unblinking eyes and the taste of ash in his mouth. Did the Christian soul wait behind the bludgeoned senses like a camphor flame behind mottled glass? He tried to think of something distant, concrete, and particular—the knife and fork and serviette ring in his portmanteau, the reverend’s pigeon rifle, the memory of his mother teaching him to catch fish with poisonous leaves—but these grappling half-thoughts were run through with the dead children’s faces. He lay breathing, staring up, formless. He whispered the begats—Rehoboam begat Abijah, Abijah begat Asa, Asa begat Jehoshaphat—not as prayer but to still his heaving breath.

  There was a sister who’d moved away—Malini. It came to him like an awakening. She had married into a village up on the caldera. The Kuk were shy and untrusting; they had been driven into marginal lands by the warring Poumetan fishermen. They came down off the volcano only to trade several times a year, swapping sago, hardwood, and betel nut for barramundi and snapper, for twists of Louisiana trade tobacco pilfered from missionaries. He had not seen Malini since before he was ten, since the time of the child’s republic, when they stayed out until dark and held reed-spear battles in the swamps, since before her head was shaved for the wedding and she’d had to cover her face when the timid Kuk father-in-law came to fetch her. Argus remembered them walking single file up the hill, a cloak over her face to avoid the taboo of seeing her husband’s father’s face.

  Argus would walk through the night to find her. First, he would retrieve his shoes and portmanteau, drag the boat up, and tie the cat in the woods until morning. He stood and fumbled through the dark, listening to the break of surf to make his way.

  7.

  Argus reached the outskirts of the bush settlement in the dawning light, the raucous birds teeming overhead. He stumbled forward with his portmanteau, sleepless, blundering through the vines and fledged leaves, the hardwoods strangled in fig. His feet and hands were blistered, his throat raked with thirst. He shambled out into a clearing with his ivory shirt oranged by clay, the alpaca coat strewn about his shoulders. From above him came the piping sound of roused voices and he remembered that the Kuk lived in treehouses. He craned his neck to see shadows flitting between rope walkways. The houses were carved into the bowls of trees, timbered and thatched, wound taut with sennit and rattan. The tree-dwellers called above him, chittering back and forth, house to house, until four of them emerged from the woods. The Kuk were sho
rter than the coastal folk and their faces were caught up with their mountainous isolation, their features narrowed and scornful, their eyes myopic from lack of visible horizon. They had matted pompadours and the septa of their noses were pierced through with crescents of pearl shell; they wore rope belts and penis gourds and carried rifles and iron tomahawks. In the days of Argus’s childhood they were known for their blowguns and arrows fletched with bowerbird plumes. The guns had no doubt been traded up from Poumeta, come ashore from trading voyages, swapped for canarium nut and virgin brides.

  As they approached warily, Argus put his hands in front of him and looked at the ground, signaling submission. The warriors sidled up crabwise, guns poised. One of them slowly removed Argus’s straw hat, exposing the brilliantine worn to dull wax. They stared, spat in the dirt, considered his ravaged church clothes. Was he a black missionary flung out? A deranged Malay halfblood wandering alone on the caldera? A vengeful ancestor, a ghostly bastard from the smoky lagoons? He could see it in their whited eyes. Argus pointed to his left wrist, where a tribal scar ridged against the surface—a shark tooth singed into the flesh, its jagged contours like the head of a delta where the veins met and divided. It was not an initiation scar but a brand of clan affinity. The Poumeta were known for catching reef sharks in rattan nooses then clubbing them in the shallows. Shark teeth were among their most prized objects. One of the warriors recognized the mark and said, “Poumeta fella?”