Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  The dead man’s property was destroyed—his trees were cut, his nuts and yams thrown into the bush, his feasting bowl broken, a favored pig or dog slaughtered and buried alongside him. The women began the lamentation and Argus extracted the meaning from an elder—Ancestor, my mother has come, I come back to thee, through the deep sea. The dead man was taken away. His relatives would shave their heads and fast for twenty days. Water, my mother. Argus heard the elder say that a youth would have to be bought as a ramoa sacrifice for the chief’s death and that his body would be cooked and eaten . . . taboo of the dead, I rest from weeping. He did not offer this information to Owen and his men; although these heathens were alien to Poumetans and God, he liked their graceful bearing, the way they sang lamentation and observed custom. He thought of Jeremiah 9:20 and the instruction to teach your daughters wailing. He was sure if they were offered the Catechism of Christian Truth correctly they would come to embrace it, learn to trade their winged serpent Hatuibwari for the Holy Ghost.

  After the burial ceremony was completed there was a feast and the landing party prepared to depart. Jethro returned the cinématographe to its case and began looking for reptile and avian trophies. Owen sat with Dickey and Giles, passing a cigarette back and forth, admiring the dead chief’s canoe. It was slender-hipped and inlaid with pearl. The smell of tobacco brought a few onlookers but Owen failed to interest them in trade. Argus watched Owen mime, point, gesture with his hands to a circle of implacable faces. He remembered the exact moment he had won the Reverend Mister’s affections. Not five days into his post as houseboy, after studying the ritual of a palmful of Darjeeling into the china teapot, of counting the minutes for the steeping of boiled water, then the sequence of stirring, kneading, and baking flour that resulted in soda-scones, he had come out onto the verandah one morning with the preacher’s breakfast on a lacquered tray. The fleet Scotsman was pulled by gratitude to his feet, the closest thing he knew to Calvinist joy registering in his features. Ye cannae know how you’ve pleased this ol’ Glaswegian, boy. It was a brief but definitive anointment and Argus never looked back. Now he wanted that same recognition from Owen. He didn’t understand all the stations and offices aboard the ship, but he knew now that the trader was higher in rank than the tall, single-gloved one, that his own future was somehow bound up with service to this man.

  An idea came to him as he listened to the villagers argue about whether the chief would return in malice. There were itemized grievances, occasions listed when the chief might have felt slighted. Argus picked up Owen’s spyglass, told several of the dead man’s relatives to follow him, and walked down to the beachhead. The villagers flanked him as he pointed from the shoreline, raised the telescope, and glassed the horizon. He was unsure whether the island of Maraba was a physical atoll or a mythic transit for dead souls, so he scanned a series of distant coralline islands with the spyglass. The pidgin phrase for telescope was glas blong look-look big and he repeated it as an incantation each time he glassed the blued distances. The old widow stood by with her shaven head, squinting into the east. Slowly he positioned the telescope for her and covered her left eye so that she could make out the shimmering atolls in the circle of light. Several times she plumbed the distance with her naked gaze, then raised the spyglass to the horizon, her mouth opening in skepticism or awe, it was hard to tell which. The chief’s brother, of some political clout, took the telescope and repeated the process.

  Soon there was a delegation of elders on the beach. A shaman was brought in for consultation. Argus knew they had seen spyglasses before but perhaps they had never found a metaphysical application for the instruments. Other villagers wandered down to see the pilgrimage route of the dead magnified and brought under scrutiny. The telescope was handed down a line of bereaved relatives. Argus suggested that the spyglass and other goods could be swapped for the chief’s canoe and the skulls on his clubhouse. It sounded ridiculous, even to him, but there was no denying the revelation on the shoreline, the sense that they might steel themselves against supernatural whim. Owen, Dickey, and Giles listened from the periphery as the new headman and shaman held forth. Argus could tell from the undercurrent of Melanesian cognates and pidginized slang that there was some advantage in his proposal. The canoe, like the rest of the chief’s property, was slated for destruction, the prow was to be removed and placed as a headstone, and the skulls were kill trophies from a previous generation. The headman was happy to be rid of them, to gather a festoon of new skulls that might seal his own reputation. Argus chimed in with enticements of additional goods. To the white men, he gave the impression of deft salesmanship when, in fact, he mostly repeated key phrases and arguments of the lobbying shaman. He felt Owen’s approving regard at his back.

  By nightfall a deal had been brokered—the canoe and skulls in return for the spyglass, three fathoms of calico, six tins of wax matches, and half a dozen tomahawks. Dickey and Giles paddled the dead chief’s boat out to the Cullion like Polynesian warriors, shirtsleeves hitched, hamming it up in the slender prow and stern with full-armed strokes and bloody war cries. She was tippy and lean over the swells. Dickey put his back into it, his hair diamonded with spindrift in the falling dark. Giles picked up one of the skulls and raised it to eye level in the stern. He botched a rendition of Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” speech—a mash of gorge rims and infinite jests. Jethro winced from the other boat. Why was it that the common man always yammered, Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well instead of I knew him, Horatio? Jethro watched the native boy rowing with considerable gusto, facing Owen with a smile. Some shift had occurred. He had hoped to make a naturalist of Argus, to bring him onto the confluent streams of art and science. Perhaps there was still time. Unlike the traders, Jethro’s day had been a bust, a few desiccated insects and skinks in his creel.

  They arrived back at the ship and the crew took turns paddling the canoe through the light swells. Owen consulted with the captain and Terrapin pronounced that due to lack of space on the quarterdeck, the canoe would have to be towed astern. Jethro went below to drop off his equipment before going to check on Malini. On his way to the poop deck he passed Argus, who was carefully loading the skulls into the bosun’s store. They exchanged a careful glance. Jethro could see Terrapin standing at the wheel, a slouch hat pulled low and Malini at his side, reclining in a wicker deck chair with Nipper asleep in her arms. She was dressed in a frock made of muslin and gingham, eating a stick of saltwater taffy.

  Just as Jethro put his hands on the railing and started to climb the stepladder, Terrapin said, “Officers only, cupcake.”

  Jethro stopped, dropped his hands by his sides. “I was just coming to check on the girl.”

  “Sure you was.” Terrapin cast a glance back at Malini. “She’s in fine spirits. I had the sailmaker hem her up something from the slop chest offcuts and he’s quite the seamstress, don’t you think? I’m calling it Bush-and-Bodice . . .”

  “Very nice. Perhaps you can have him make some extra blankets. It’s awfully dank in the hold at night for the native girl.”

  Terrapin turned the wheel to port with his extended thumbs. “No need. I’ve asked first and second mate to share a cabin so the kanaka princess can have her own quarters. That seems like the proper and Christian thing to do, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Gray?”

  Jethro turned to the weather side of the boat just so the captain wouldn’t see his face blanch. “Indeed.”

  Terrapin jutted his chin to windward. “All up, a nice little agreement we made the other night. And let’s just say that when you wants to study that dark race behind me that it’s by appointment only. Due process, it is. Good day, now, Mr. Gray.” Terrapin threw a cracker into the air and caught it in the enormous grotto of his mouth.

  One of the skulls in the bosun’s store was larger than the rest and contained a gold tooth. The first mate claimed it belonged to an Englishman from the Royal Yacht Squadron who’d gone missing several years prior. The gold-crowned maw had been perched under the
binnacle and Mr. Pym gestured to it with his foot as he lobbied the captain from the leeward side of the poop deck. He wasn’t happy about sharing a berth with the second mate. Owen waited for his turn to speak.

  Pym said, “We should be weighing the mudhook, captain. Before them savages come at us one midnight. Sitting targets we are in this bay. Ruddled as sheep before slaughter.”

  Terrapin looked up at the high, cirrus sky and considered. “I’m as superstitious as the next mariner, Pym . . . I know that seabirds are the vanquished souls of dead sailors, that the bark lightens under the magnetic draw of a full moon—so of course an Englishman’s gold-toothed cranium augurs bloody ruin.” He looked at the skull, then at Owen. “But these waters are proving tradeworthy, so let’s linger a while and reinforce the middle watch, Mr. Pym. As a precaution against night ambush.”

  Mandrake squared his jaw into the easterly billows and gave a curt nod.

  “And Mr. Graves,” the captain continued, “three more days should do the trick. You should think about where we’ll be heading next.”

  “We’ll work our way north through the island chain. But we’ll head next to the government station in Tulagi. I’m expecting some correspondence.”

  “Ah, yes, I’ve seen you writing letters in the moonlight . . . must be a beloved. Any man who pines in the epistolary form has yet to have his life plundered by a woman. They wait for us ashore, like goddesses juggling severed heads . . .”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Terrapin told the first mate to have the topgallants trimmed.

  Jethro overheard all this from the quarterdeck railing, a sketchbook in his hands. He was elated that they would be visiting Tulagi. The Resident Commissioner, Charles Woodford, was the author of A Naturalist Among the Head-Hunters, a first edition of which graced the little orlop library. What a boon to have a naturalist reach such a distinguished government office. If there was going to be a collecting frenzy in the next few days, Jethro wanted to be a part of it. So far he had managed to gather a good supply of reptiles, birds, and marine life but he was sadly lacking in the way of mammals.

  As if willed by the thought of mammals, Malini came down from the poop deck with Nipper trotting and panting at her side. He wondered if he might gain her interest. Wasn’t he owed a debt of gratitude? After all, it had been he who’d stood up to the sous-surgeon with his medieval bone hatchets and knives. He’d given her the civilizing tonic of laudanum to ease the pain. And the captain—now her seeming protector—had been ready to kick her off the ship before she could walk.

  The seamen were whipping lines aloft and they watched her descend to the quarterdeck as if she were a doe edging out of a copse of trees. The hobble was gone and she had been returned to full, sorrel-skinned health. Part of her daily regimen was feeding the native stowaways. She crouched beside the wallaby and fed it oats from her hand. When it was done eating she rubbed the hem of its pouch and the marsupial nuzzled her arm. The men watched this display of tenderness and thought of their mothers and girlfriends, of sisters with a soft spot for lapdogs. Nipper was learning restraint: if he growled or barked at the wildlife, Malini removed the hibiscus flower from behind her left ear and tapped him on the end of the nose with its stem.

  She placed some sliced mango onto the deck for the turtle and saw Jethro’s long shadow spread over her. Along with the ship’s brass bell, his shoes were among the shiniest objects on board— twin suns winking on burnished leather domes. The shoes were called Balmorals, which was also a place, Argus had told her. He made some lines in his notebook and handed it to her. It was a likeness of the turtle, down to its sharklike eyes and granulated skin.

  “A present,” he said.

  She knew that word because the captain had been teaching her English—I am full, thank you, swimming is good for the heart, you are very pretty. Then Jethro said some things she did not understand. She could remember the sight of him and her brother sketching and painting in the hold. But she could also remember him spooling a strand of her hair and pressing against her wound with his nail-bitten fingers. He was like somebody’s unmarried uncle come up from the coast for a feast, staying too long and eating too much; the Poumetans used the expression gives pebbles but wants stones to describe his sort. She chased after Nipper, who was trying to corral the mongoose, a sport that would not end in his favor. Argus was arranging things at the front of the boat and she went to talk to him, the dog in her arms.

  “Whose heads are these?” she asked, peering into a tea chest.

  “From the islands.”

  “What do they want with them?” She ran her fingers through Nipper’s fur.

  “They will take them to a museum in America.”

  “What is museum? A kind of church?”

  “It is like a clubhouse with many tools and weapons. You can look at other people’s things.” Looking square at the dog, he said, “What does the captain tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I see you have moved into a cabin.”

  “He gives me presents and teaches me English. We listen to a woman singing in his wooden house. I like the sound of her voice.”

  Argus reached into the tea chest, his words sounding hollow. “Make sure he does not touch you.”

  The mongoose had retreated to the forecastle and Malini set the terrier back on the deck. “You have never been married or initiated, little brother, but you give me advice like an elder. I am widowed and childless and he likes to give me things. There is nothing dishonorable about that. He is old and fat but also kind.”

  Argus straightened to look at her, but before he could say anything she was retreating for the shade of the chartroom.

  Owen went to inspect Argus’s stowage. He was wrapping skulls and artifacts in muslin and newspaper, tagging each with a square of cardstock that listed the date along with the island and tribe of collection exactly the way Owen had demonstrated. The boy was methodical and thorough and even the roughened seamen had taken a liking to him. One evening Owen had come from below to find Argus reading David Copperfield aloud to the starboard watch in the forecastle, an emphatic hand marking the orphan’s trials in the salty air while the seamen listened rapt and boozy in their tiered iron bunks. Whether they saw him as an apprentice or ship’s mascot, Owen couldn’t say, but they made their affections known with hanks of cloth, cigarettes, nips of brandy. It was also a statement: that this tribal deckhand was much closer to being a brother than the Harvard dandy could ever be.

  “You’re doing a fine job, Argus.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Owen.”

  “Owen.”

  They smoked a cigarette together, Argus producing a tin of Bryant & May wax matches from his trouser pocket.

  “Do you think my sister is safe with the master of the ship?” Owen hadn’t brought this under full consideration; he’d been too distracted by the business of trade. He wasn’t sure if Terrapin’s interest was lascivious or paternal, simple lust or some misplaced desire to be a surrogate father, to summon an ill-begotten native child from one of his tattooed forearms. “I’ll keep an eye on her and make sure she’s not dishonored. Her cabin is right next to mine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We are heading on in three days. Be sure to get plenty of rest. It will be a lot of work.”

  “Where will we go next?”

  “North through the islands but then to New Guinea.”

  Argus forced a smile. Since boyhood he’d been told that the New Guinea highlands flowed with rivers of blood. But perhaps he could read the villagers psalms while trading for basketry and shields.

  Owen said, “First we have to go to Tulagi for some mail.”

  Argus smiled. “Are you expecting a letter from your wife?”

  “Fiancée.”

  “You are betrothed. What is her name?”

  “Adelaide.” It was the first time Owen had spoken her name at sea. Naming attachments made you vulnerable among seamen.
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br />   “I was supposed to marry a girl but I left Poumeta.”

  “Maybe someday you will marry. You’re still very young.”

  “First I will need brideprice. The islanders say that one eyetooth of a dog is worth fifty coconuts. Maybe you should give your fiancée a dogtooth necklace instead of diamonds or pearls. It would be like giving her a forest of coconuts.”

  “Porpoise teeth are more her style.”

  They laughed at this. Owen was surprised whenever Argus enjoyed a joke, never at anyone’s expense but sometimes in gentle disparagement. And he seemed to know Owen’s mood at a hundred paces, the way it registered in his face or hands or gait, ready with a comment to lighten or augment what was already there. Owen handed him the half-smoked cigarette and went below to consult the island charts.

  Argus continued his winning streak among the Solomons in the days to follow. He always seemed to hold something in reserve, knew when to stand his ground. Not satisfied with merely listing the items of trade, he evangelized on their relative merits, the way things could be put to better use. There was the usual exchange of calico, beads, wax matches, knives, and tomahawks, but he also managed to swap clothes for handicrafts and tribal weaponry. The local term for whites was men with the body of a parrot; this referred to the colorful peacoats and weskits that spilled from the anchored brigs and missionary sloops. Since clothing for the villagers was more ceremonial than practical—there was a hinterland chief who wore a ragged admiralty jacket to annual festivals—it stood to reason that its value depended on the need for status and prestige. Owen had Fennimore Jauss, the sailmaker, tailor a range of gaudy attire from the slop chest and they took it ashore. Argus convinced one of the shamans to model the clothing, dressed him in patched gingham and retired sail canvas. The elders and the children, anyone not working the taro gardens, made him parade around and doff his plug hat like some tribal court jester. Argus told the elders that trousers ensured a better price during trade negotiations with whites. Then they all watched as Argus taught the shaman how to shave with a hand mirror and soap, the old man nicking and bleeding his way through the afternoon to delighted cheers. Mirrors had other applications as well, Argus reminded them. A man could use them to see who was walking behind him on a pathway. For every objection to trade he had a prepared response, just as the Reverend Mister had an armory of fixed rejoinders for every flavor of heathen doubt. The trick, Owen saw from the sidelines, was to imbue each item of trade with an expanded significance. Wax matches were more than a convenience; they could be used to light funeral pyres or conduct sorcery so that the brand of Bryant & May could be spoken aloud like an appeal to the twin ancestral gods of fire and light.