Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  Mostly I want to say that we are fortunate and the future looks bright. I’m already feeling the sadness that will come from my father’s passing, but he demands that my mother and I live at the very marrow of life when he is gone—he’s read too much Henry David I suppose. I love you and miss you so. Be safe and return as quickly as possible. My father might live a day or a month, we cannot know for sure. If by some chance you could come home early it would mean the world to me. Wire me when you make American landfall. I hope I haven’t botched that maritime usage!

  Your loving, future wife—

  Adelaide

  Owen folded the letter and stood by the open porthole. Outside and above he could hear the first mate bellowing orders and the captain stumping on the windward side of the poop. With the anchor weighed, the bark heeled to leeward and headed down. Owen had told the captain to sail toward New Guinea but that was before he’d read the contents of the letter. A stint in New Guinea—the German or Dutch territories—would mean another six or eight weeks before turning back. It was already December and they’d been gone three months. He couldn’t make sense of the complicated emotion battering through him. Tenderness, longing, an eagerness to see Adelaide, to comfort her, that was all there, but so was a flickering scheme in which he would adhere to the New Guinea trading course and simply tell her that he’d never received the letter. He felt a wave of self-loathing at how effortlessly this idea occurred to him.

  Slumped on the iron cot with the letter still in his hand, he lit a cigarette and watched the smoke siphon out through the porthole. The thought of marrying a woman of independent wealth terrified him. It felt too easy, like cheating. Before, he supposed now, there had been the threat of a family inheritance, but he’d envisioned years of relative scrimping, the boom and bust of life between voyages, before the golden hammer came down. He was braced to endure the summer-house visits in Maine and the old blood horse’s New England condescension—how else would he feel about the son of a housewrecker from the prairie states?—but he was also, or had been, resolved to quietly stand his ground. There would be months at sea, an intermittent hermitage that prepared him for the seasonal role of loving husband and devoted father. Now the future rushed to meet him and seemed intent on cutting him off from his own vision. What he feared most was being unmoored, of not living up to his father’s pragmatic example. Without the combustion of needing a livelihood, of plying a trade, he might turn to laziness or vice; as it was the taverns of Little Cheyenne seemed to hold his interest when he was back on land. How to explain that he lived like a monk at sea, barely fraternized with the men, but found it necessary to be among their rowdy, drunken cousins when at home. Did he belong entirely in either of these worlds? And how would he justify leaving for months at a time if they didn’t need the money?

  The tone in Adelaide’s letter—he reread some of the passages to affirm this—contained something new. Was it wifely insistence? God, was she pregnant? No. She would have written it plainly and issued a summons. Nonetheless she was firmly staking her claim, marking the channel with red and green buoys to bring his ship home, and she had every intention of keeping it there. There was no choice but for the Cullion to head north and east, to begin a winding course home. Whatever trade could be salvaged would have to do. Owen got off the cot and studied the island charts that were tacked to his cabin wall. He began circling his index finger east of the Solomon Islands, making small orbits around the equator to find mentionable specks of land. Argus would have ideas about where to go for homebound trade, but heading northeast would also mean saying goodbye to him and his sister.

  He drew on his cigarette and ran his gaze along the map’s equator.

  What were their chances now of recruiting a family of Melanesian tribesmen to return to Chicago, especially if the ship made only perfunctory trading stops? Maybe he should settle for the Christianized boy and his muslin-frocked sister. He entertained the idea that had floated somewhat dimly until now. The contract demanded a number of natives, preferably related by the bonds of blood, and two was certainly a number. Would it be less morally repugnant to Adelaide—and to himself?—if he brought back two already-tainted natives rather than a family of purebreds? This would fulfill the collecting contract, secure his own independent windfall, a reasonable sum, while diminishing the moral transgression. Adelaide’s conscience hovered above his own, like a hand above a tabletop.

  Looking into the circle of ocean outside his berth, Owen wondered whether Argus and Malini could be persuaded to come. Perhaps Argus could act more tribal than Presbyterian, wear a loincloth instead of starched trousers, and Malini might wear a grass skirt. Hale’s planned exhibit demanded an indigenous spectacle—dreadlocks and tomahawks and all the rest of it. But Owen would present it to the siblings as a business proposition, not as playacting. Six months to a year in Chicago with a monthly retainer and guaranteed steamer passage back to the islands. Surely it was infinitely better than going to the sugarcane plantations in Queensland . . .

  Owen ascended to the deck and told the captain to luff up a while. Terrapin gave him an imperious stare followed by a sunward squint. Owen apologized, told him he would have a new course by evening and to bear northeast. The first mate stood by, already filling his lungs to boom directions and insults aloft. The seamen trimmed the sails and the Cullion headed up into a close haul. Owen scanned amidships for Argus and climbed down to the quarterdeck. On his way he passed Malini. She was standing by the railing and looking out at the diminishing islands, a Japanese parasol shielding her face from the tin-white sun.

  Jethro had been confined to the orlop for two days and he was lightheaded from its drowsy, high chemistry—formalin, methylated spirits, camphor oil. A lock on the companionway served the same purpose as it did in times of quarantine: to keep the malodorous funk from the rest of the crew. This had been the captain’s proclamation as he and Owen Graves colluded to keep Jethro down below. Technically, he was told, he would be allowed on deck when the ship was under sail but so far that hadn’t proved true. Couldn’t run the risk of the naturalist slipping ashore, no, as if he were some larcenous criminal and most of the crew weren’t San Quentin parole jumpers. An awful lot of fuss, he thought, over a field specimen. And it was beyond ironic that he was being kept prisoner on a ship that his own father had underwritten. Perhaps Hale was in on it. Another of the old baron’s attempts to teach his son the ways of the world. Jethro chafed at these would-be lessons; they were levied by an aristocrat reared on foxhunting, who’d read at Oxford, but nonetheless—Jethro suspected— thought the word rectitude referred to a kind of hemorrhoid. His father might have committed swaths of Keats and Coleridge to memory but only so he could crib a line for an anniversary card or a club member’s eulogy. Knowledge was opportunity for Hale, nothing more. Jethro couldn’t help the white rage that clamped over his thoughts when he closed his eyes. As a distraction, he returned to the journals of Joseph Banks, spreading them before him in the tallow candlelight. The audacity of the young and wealthy Banks continued to impress him. Here he was at sea, collecting and naming his way across the Pacific in his mid-twenties, already the overseer of a large estate back in England, blending batches of Sower crout to protect the seamen against scurvy. But there was also a sense of absolute entitlement in the journals, the hunger of a noble touring his realm for the first time. On one page he spoke of copulating species, recited bird kills like a Latin prayer (“Calm this morn: went out in the boat and shot Tropick bird Phaeton erubescens, and Procellaria atrata, velox and sordida”), and a few days later he spoke of the island girls with that same hint at possession. Anything could be obtained; it was merely a matter of logistics.

  Our cheifs own wife (ugly enough in conscience) did me the honour with very little invitation to squat down on the mats close by me: no sooner had she done so than I espied among the common croud a very pretty girl with a fire in her eyes that I had not before seen in the countrey. Unconscious of the dignity of my companion I beck
ond to the other who after some intreatys came and sat on the other side of me: I was then desirous of getting rid of my former companion so I ceas’d to attend to her and loaded my pretty girl with beads and every present I could think pleasing to her: the other shewd much disgust but did not quit her place and continued to supply me with fish and cocoa nut milk . . . .

  Was this what the captain had in mind with the native sister? Was he plying her with gifts to weaken her guard? No doubt he was making inroads and it was a grievous affront to Jethro. Maybe it was the bottles of embalming fluid all around, or the etherlike cloud seeping through a hundred cork stoppers, that made him envision, in vivid detail, the hundred ways by which their pairing might occur. There was the question of morality, of course, but more than this the thought of the slobbering captain spreading her coppered thighs kept him awake at night. If anything he was the savage and held the potential to ruin her native innocence. He’d stared into the man’s porcine face the night his personal belongings were ransacked and seen the lechery there like a cancer of the soul. Smelled it like the blackened, mucked bowels of lust so that he couldn’t help picturing Malini astride the captain’s blotched, paunchy middle or him pounding behind her like a ramrod, her face pressed into the Turkish pillows but her bottom swagging in the air like a tupped ewe. Nature, especially in the spring, brimmed with this kind of bestial ravishment but Jethro liked to think it was the ghastly exception to the rule. He closed Banks’s journal and removed his glove. His finger throbbed. It was a poisonous blue around the tip and there was a warbling line of pain that backlit his every thought, like a seam of lightning behind a cloud.

  He got up, cinched the glove, and retreated to his specimen shelves. The birds had vigor, that special inflection of flight in the weft of their wings. He was gifted at taxidermy. It was obvious. The bottled subjects were less impressive—coiled snakes without eyes, inverted frogs with separated hind legs, starfish and jellyfish floating in miniature seas of brine that were littered with particles of their own strange flesh. The fern case and the blotting sheet of desiccated beetles, the moths colored like chaffs of dead wheat, were nicely ordered and well labeled. All told, it was a middling collection, but Jethro felt sure that he could end up with something distinguished. First, he would have to sort out this nonsense about being shipbound when the Cullion was at anchor.

  He returned to the swabbed and splayed bird specimen on the workbench—a Rufous Night Heron. The inversion of the skin had taken place; he had carefully detached the delicate membrane of the ear from its cavity in the skull and cut through the nictitating white membrane of the eye socket. The wings had been skinned down to the wrist joints, the leg tendons cut, the oil gland removed from the base of the tail. He’d been careful not to damage the feather roots as he worked. He prised the skin from the body and placed it wrong side out in a shallow tray of powdered arsenic, working the poison into the denuded wings and the base of the bill. This procedure required the removal of his fencing glove from his left hand but he kept the injured finger above the fray. The arsenic could easily be absorbed into fissures and tiny cuts and this demanded caution—although the powder was mixed with enough alum so as not to be fatal in its present form. Luckily for the captain the poison was in a muted form, or he might find his rum tasting like bitter almonds one evening. Jethro shook his head in the sputtering candlelight; he was no more suited to the role of assassin than he was to the role of insurance company president.

  A set of footsteps stopped outside the companionway and Owen Graves came forward with a lantern. “Are you still alive in there?” The unlocked door let in a shaft of slightly cooler air.

  “Is this amusing to you?”

  “Not really. But neither is the thought of five men being killed in the islands because you failed to observe the local warnings.”

  Jethro washed his hands in a clackdish of bloodied water. “Am I free to go above? I haven’t seen the sun in two days. I admit I acted a little hastily on the island.”

  Owen edged into the orlop proper, the museum of dead and pickled animals. “I’ve come with a chance for you to redeem yourself.”

  Jethro pretended to busy himself with dissecting instruments. “Is that so?” He wiped his hands on a cloth, working his fingertips.

  Owen watched him daintily dry the injured finger. “Has the doctor seen that?”

  “The barber, you mean? The culinary genius who turns maritime flesh into bonemeal? I’d rather lose my finger than let that blunderbuss come at it.”

  Owen pressed his lips together, stifling a laugh. How was this man ever going to get on in the world? If he someday helmed the insurance empire there would be a policyholder revolt, not to mention striking file clerks and secretaries. “We are heading northeast, beginning the trip back.”

  Jethro was surprised to hear this and felt briefly overjoyed. The house on Prairie Avenue, the thought of entire Sundays reading in bed, the breathtaking image of Danish pastries arranged on a paper doily, all these things seemed suddenly within reach. Then he remembered his mission and what did or didn’t wait for him back in Chicago. It was from this stronger burning sentiment that he spoke. “Why so soon? We’ve barely begun. What do we have to show for our efforts?”

  “Actually, I’ve already amassed a sizable collection that I think will please your father. And we’ll make a final stop before heading up to Hawaii. Argus has told me about an island about two hundred miles east of here. His father and other Poumetans made annual trading pilgrimages out there when he was a boy. It’s an outlier of the Solomons, past the Santa Cruz group, at the cusp of Melanesia and Polynesia. From a collector’s standpoint it sounds promising. Remote enough that it’s had very little contact with whites.”

  Owen watched Jethro cover the skinned Night Heron with the hand towel like some avian coroner.

  Jethro noticed his stare and said, “Keeps the mites out until I finish the preparations.” He arranged some implements on the table. “What you’re describing is also a naturalist’s dream, Mr. Graves. If you think I’m going to sit idle in this suffocating lair while you go ashore then you’re sadly mistaken.”

  Owen looked around the orlop, took in the spread of specimens. “That is something we can discuss.”

  “Ah, I see, I am to be placed on probation.”

  “Something like that.”

  Owen took out a cigarette—his fifth in the hour since reading the letter—and held it at bay. “I’m afraid to light up for fear of an explosion.”

  Jethro didn’t give in to the slouching, pally tone.

  Owen said, “You mentioned at the beginning of the voyage that you had some reels of Chicago.”

  “Nothing really. Some footage taken inside the Loop and elsewhere before we left. I was trying to fathom how the contraption worked.”

  Owen blew smoke into a pause. “I’m going to ask Argus and Malini to return to Chicago with us.”

  Jethro folded his arms. “I see.”

  “This was part of your father’s proposal, to bring back some natives. I had hoped for better samples, as it were, but we’ve had to cut the trip short on my account. A family crisis.” He looked at the backs of his hands.

  Jethro had no choice but to appear sympathetic. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Of course there were arrangements with his father to which he had not been privy. It had always been that way.

  “I take it you didn’t know about the native cargo.”

  “My father has a habit of not confiding in me. But I’m surprised you’ve been taken in by one of his schemes. Are you bringing back the savages like a couple of tomahawks?”

  Owen hesitated. “I believe it can be done ethically.”

  “I’ve been studying them in my fashion, their bearing and culture. But sooner or later, as with all live specimens, the choice is simple—put them behind glass or release them into the wild.”

  “You make them sound like wild birds.”

  A brief silence. They regarded each other.

&nbs
p; “I haven’t told the captain or the crew either. We’re idling at the moment until I ask Argus and Malini outright if they’ll come back.”

  “And what are you waiting for?”

  “Some enticement. It would be a way for you to gain some much-needed goodwill from the crew and the captain if you showed some reels of Chicago. We’ve been at sea long enough for them to be homesick. And if Argus and Malini saw it for themselves, the glitter and bustle, maybe they could be tempted to come back with us. Of course, I’m expecting they’ll need to playact a little to fit with your father’s designs.”

  “And what designs are those?”

  “A rooftop exhibition. He has some notion of displaying a tribal village up there.”

  Jethro smiled ruefully. “Two people is hardly a village, Mr. Graves.”

  “True. But better than nothing. Will you show the reels?”

  Jethro considered; the entire ship had been alive with secret dealings from the get-go. The cook bribed to administer chloroform, the captain to allow the primitives to sail, and now this wager that a few minutes of film could inflame the native mind as if it were a nesting magpie before a shiny spread of coins and tassels. He would happily study the natives further, even back in Chicago, but he resented being caught up, pawnlike, in some larger design of his father’s. Would he ever be trusted in his own right? “I’m the salesman, am I? Show the blackies a few skyscrapers and they’ll be champing at the bit to come along? I’m not so sure.” He circled the workbench, rising to a theme as vaporous as the fetid air, elbows jutted. “I’m certainly not going to stand in the way of my father’s wishes. That would be irresponsible of me. But, in due course, rather soon, actually, I will expect a return favor.”