Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  Rooftop Springtime Spectacle Opening Soon!

  Highest Building in the World!

  Soon to Arrive, Savages of the South Seas!

  Come Enjoy Refreshments and Observe Island Customs

  in Genuine Re-created Village

  And Don’t Forget to Consult Your Friendly Life

  Insurance Broker!

  Margaret yammered something about the wind at such a height and perhaps they should abandon the quest for the stationer because there was always tomorrow. Adelaide felt her shoulders harden in the cold. She’d suspected this might be afoot and had offered Owen a chance to confess on their last night together. Now here was the proof. That Owen hadn’t told her about bringing back natives was a betrayal, a deceit. He’d lied to her face, knowing that she would be dead against such a thing. She’d even mentioned something about Boas, her former boss, persuading Robert Peary to bring back Inuits from Greenland. The six Esquimaux were studied in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but all had fallen sick and ended up at Bellevue Hospital. In a letter from Boas’s new secretary—a woman with whom Adelaide had struck up a correspondence—she’d learned that the wife of the museum president planned to adopt the recovered seven-year-old Inuit boy as an experiment in educating the uncivilized. The rest were expected to die before the year was out. Hadn’t she told Owen all of this?

  She saw her face next to her mother’s in the window’s reflection. In the hard set of her jaw, in the imperious regard she now weighed at the sign, it was Margaret’s long-suffering countenance settling over her. It was not the first time she had been angry with Owen but it was the first time she’d felt hollowed out by his deceit, furious over his absence and the way she would have to nurse this hurt until he returned. He was implicated in this, regardless of who was funding the voyage. She turned from the giant window, shopping bags swinging wildly, and hailed a hansom in the slushy street. “I’ll pay if I have to, Mother, but I am not walking another block!” she yelled above the bustle.

  22.

  For days the Cullion malingered without a glimpse of sun or moon or stars. The wind had died off but the sky remained a blighted gray. Without view of the celestial bodies, Terrapin couldn’t take his sightings and angles and was therefore ignorant of the bark’s exact latitude. They were adrift. At dusk and at dawn he paced the poop with the sextant still in its case, waiting for a break in the ulcerous sky that would allow a shot at the sun burning above the horizon. The twin chronometers were running perfectly in the hold—one with Greenwich and one with local time—but without angles their location was a hundred-mile wedge of ocean on the map. Terrapin fell back on dead reckoning, studied the current, leeway, wave action, and the helmsman’s yawing to get some sense of their position. He consulted almanacs and admiralty charts, cross-referenced his own deck logs from previous voyages. None of it gave more than a pale illumination of where they were.

  On the second day adrift Terrapin ordered a sea burial for Dickey Fentress. Regardless of the ship’s ghostly latitude, proper custom had to be observed, the apprentice committed to the deep for fear he might haunt the ship and worsen her luck. Sailmaker Fennimore Jauss and carpenter Giles Blunt had taken the body below for due preparation. Jethro offered up the orlop for the funerary preparations and they found themselves scrubbing the jeweled blood from the boy’s crown with muslin rags used for wrapping dead birds. Dickey’s face was waxen and pale, his lips parted as if in speech. Jethro stood by with embalming fluids and tins of excelsior cotton, but the sailmaker insisted that he was following, under captain’s orders, the procedures outlined in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer circa 1662. They lifted the body onto a shroud of retired sail and Jauss placed two lead weights by the feet. He sewed the shroud, starting at the feet, then up the middle above the sternum. As per custom, he hooked the final stitch through Dickey’s nose because this assured the seaman was really dead. Giles Blunt wept openly at the sight of this maneuver. When he regained himself he went above to signal the body was ready.

  Eight seamen carried the canvased body on a mess table. It was draped with the red ensign but also decked in flowers from Terrapin’s stateroom: hibiscus and frangipani and something resembling a native rose. In matters of funerary rites, as in all observances of religion, philosophy, and inebriates, Terrapin took a blended approach—leaned on the Anglicans for wherewithal and procedurals, stole from the Hindus for their flowers and oil lamps, borrowed a few ceremonials from the U.S. Navy. This was only the tenth man he’d buried at sea in three decades—a low trade average he was proud of—and he liked to think each seaman had been dispatched with tenderness and form. The bark was hove to, the topgallant yards were a-cockbill, topped up in mourning. The bosun and the mates stood at the head of the lined-out men, dressed in their church clothes, the entry port open on the starboard gangway. As the body came out of the hold, the officers held burning cressets at the incline of parade swords. The seamen clutched rifles brought up from the armory.

  Argus and Malini watched from the quarterdeck, apart from the official assembly. The body came forward. I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, Terrapin said. Argus recognized the prayer as St. John’s and mouthed the words and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Malini held the captain’s dog in her arms but was stone-faced, wondered why guns were part of a ceremony to bury the dead. Poumetans and the Kuk would never bring a spear to a funeral. Terrapin said, He brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The bosun ordered ship’s company, off hats and the seamen doffed their serge caps and broadbrims.

  The captain read psalms in his best oratory but Argus couldn’t help cringing at Terrapin’s dry inflection, the way he chewed over quickening spirit and sown in weakness and raised in glory like so many stale crackers. At the conclusion of the psalms, as the pallbearers prepared to upend the mess table and slide the canvased body overboard, Argus began to sing a Presbyterian hymn. They all turned to hear his voice climbing the notes of “Take My Life and Let It Be.” Far from being affronted, the captain raised a palm to cease the pitching of the corpse.

  Take my life and let it be

  Consecrated, Lord, to Thee

  Take my moments and my days;

  Let them flow in ceaseless praise,

  Let them flow in ceaseless praise.

  Take my hands, and let them move

  At the impulse of Thy love . . .

  Standing beside the tearful carpenter, Owen reflected on the boy’s life cut short. He remembered Dickey’s face as he plunged to the deck, a look of apology in the startled eyes. In falling, Dickey had wanted to say he was sorry for not being more adept in the upper rigging. He was more afraid of the men’s faltering opinion of him, of being called a lubber, than of the afterlife rushing from below. An orphan on a ship full of men and none of them had been the least bit fathering. Owen had extended a timid hand to the boy, offered him a smattering of advice, but had waited for a sign of true worthiness. He withheld his affections out of some wager with his own past, revisiting his thirteen-year-old self on the grimy stoops of Chicago tenements and feeling, anew, that he’d been abandoned by God and life. Did he expect Dickey to climb out of that same pit without help? He imagined Dickey’s self-pity and kept him at arm’s length. To make amends, Owen came forward to offer a eulogy. The seamen nodded, glad that he would say some words on their behalf.

  “We all failed him in a way,” Owen said, surprised by the tone in his voice. “We all assumed that he was already fully raised, capable of shouldering against the driving day on his own. What was he? Fifteen? None of us extended an example. Least of all me. He was ripe for guiding. Wanted it, in fact. Anyway, he should never have been up there with his hearing shot. We should have looked out for him.”

  The seamen looked down at the deck timbers.

  Owen continued: “I’m sure in his own time, Dickey Fentress would h
ave become a first-rate sailor. Someday a captain, perhaps, if he applied himself. But he’s gone now and we commit him to these waters with our gratitude and blessings. Rest easy, Dickey. And forgive us.”

  The seamen looked over at Owen, uncomfortable with the sudden air of culpability. One of them stepped forward and added, “Goodbye, Dick. We’ll miss you, little mate!”

  Argus finished the hymn’s last verse with a flourish, arms held to the heavens and rigging above, his voice at the edge of wavering. The men waited a beat and the captain gave the signal for the body to be committed to the sea. We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body. They retained the ensign but the canvas sack slid into the waves. The body turned, sank, and was gone. The sky was still cancerous and brooding. From the foredeck the ship’s bronze bell sounded and the seamen fired their rifles three times into the air. Teddy Meyers played his rusty old bugle and the men were dismissed, half of them reporting for the afternoon watch and the other half going to the forecastle to get soused.

  All that night the weather stayed ominous. Owen leaned against the mainmast halyard during the middle watch and saw the sky fissure with lightning. The seas stayed calm but the monsoon was clearly in the offing, the hemisphere’s turn for the wet. He could see Jethro holding on to the rail of the foredeck and wanted to stay clear of him. Dickey’s fall, he knew, had been partly caused by his dulled hearing, which in turn had been caused by the close discharge of Jethro’s collecting rifle on the island. A sailor’s sense of hearing was everything, part of his instrument for fathoming windshift, for deciphering the barked orders from the first or second mate. It gave him balance in the rigged treetops. Owen pictured Dickey aloft during the storm. The kid had heeled to one side, faltered on the ratlines, ignored Owen’s calls from below. Perhaps that look of dismay just before Dickey fell to his death wasn’t an apology after all but him feeling the ship’s auditory pulse slip away. Perhaps for Dickey Fentress the world went silent before it went black.

  Sometime in the small hours of the night the main and mizzen-masts gave off an electrical discharge and the captain was called above. He insisted on being roused for any display of unusual weather or nature and St. Elmo’s fire was no exception. The atmosphere was thick with electricity. The trucks and spar-ends of Baltic fir were alive with corposant flares and this was further proof, Terrapin told the men, that they were under the auspices of a metaphysical Dog Star. Whether it was the apprentice’s stymied soul or the humors of a poisoned latitude didn’t much matter. The result was the same. He took a tin cup of rum on the poop and did not sleep the rest of the night. “I feel another blue funk coming on,” he told the helmsman. “Taste it like an iron hobnail on my tongue . . .”

  Meanwhile, in the doorway of the forecastle, Argus recounted the trials of St. Erasmus, now called St. Elmo, to the men of the watch. They regarded the flickering spars with unease. It was fortunate there were no winds to be caught, because none of them would go into the rigging with the masts seemingly ablaze. Argus spoke of Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors, who was persecuted by Roman emperors, spat upon and besprinkled with foulness, thrown into a pit of snakes, boiled with oil and sulfur. “Erasmus went on thanking and loving God, this man of big forbearance, and then the angels sent lightning and his torturers were electrocuted. Then came another emperor who put him into a pan seething with rosin, pitch, and brimstone lead but he did not shrink from his punishment and continued to say the Gospel in a high preaching voice.”

  Harvey McCallister hollowed his cheeks and made a sucking sound through his teeth. “Tough son of a bitch, that Erasmus.”

  The others agreed.

  Argus did not encourage the blasphemy with a glance. He continued, “His teeth were plucked out of his head with iron pincers and they carded his skin with metal rods and roasted him upon a gridiron.”

  “Sounds a little like sailing round the Horn,” a veteran offered.

  “But the angels saved him in the end,” Argus said. “Some scripture books say he went to Mount Lebanon and survived on what the ravens brought him to eat but Reverend Mister used to end the story with the holy man having his intestines stripped out and wrapped around a windlass. Reverend Mister Underwood didn’t like happy endings.”

  “And he protects all men at sea?” asked one of them, suddenly earnest and rum-flushed.

  “Yes,” said Argus. “He also looks out for colicky babies and women in labor and old men with rotgut, which is why the Reverend Mister knew all his woes. Stomach of sulfur and pitch is what he used to say when he had the Johnny-trots. One time I heard him praying to St. Elmo when he was resting a long time in the outhouse.”

  This got a big laugh and the men craned up at the flaring masts with more wonder now than fear.

  In the days that followed, the cloud dome broke apart and the wind freshened. Terrapin confirmed by sextant what they had all suspected—that they were back in the Doldrums and had drifted badly off course. The island of Tikalia, a cashew-shaped spit of land on the charts, was two hundred miles to the southeast. With Terrapin’s bonus hitched to the final leg of trade, the captain agreed to head south for the island. Besides, Owen suspected the captain didn’t want to part with Malini anytime soon. They ate dinner together at night in the stateroom and she had begun to laugh at his ribald jokes. The Cullion came about and headed south and Terrapin told Owen that he would anchor no more than three days at Tikalia.

  “And then we’ll engine back directly?” asked Owen. The need to head south again reminded him that he was failing Adelaide in her hour of need.

  “Last time I checked, the hatch was full of coal and the engines were greased-up nice. We can trot through the unwinded Doldrums and Horse Latitudes like a bitch in heat if you give the word. Mind you, we’re in full hurricane season now so we take our chances. Only madmen and pirates are out here this time of year. Coal by the yard is the contractual arrangement for reimbursement, I believe.”

  Owen turned to descend from the poop.

  “And Mr. Graves, there will be no more savages coming aboard. Two is plenty with all the menace they might bring upon us. Heaven forbid if one of them gets sick. I know these people and I know my maritime jurisdiction. I should have been informed from the outset what was intended.”

  “My apologies.”

  “Well, the skyscraper magnate will have to be satisfied with the brother and kanaka princess. Understood?”

  “Of course.”

  Owen left the captain and went to take inventory of the remaining trade items. He’d already justified that two natives was a lesser crime than a whole family, but wondered if he might have erred without the captain’s edict. Would he have been tempted to find others on Tikalia? He stood at the rail for a moment, watching the bark ply through the swells, the men singing overhead. He remembered his father, swallowed by debt, a man so burdened by the past that he could speak only of the present, of meals and weather. The kissed fingers that touched the daguerreotyped wife on the way out the door each day—this was the only gesture toward the wreckage that lay behind them. They lived in a bare room on the South Side, their clothes in packing crates. They lived, it seemed to him now, as if they had just emerged from a burning teardown and were expecting the same calamity to befall them at any moment. He knew where his material hunger came from. And not just for objects or money, but for respect, acknowledgment, a foothold. He was a gambler making a calculated bet—that the potential yield on Tikalia was worth the risks, that the delay would mean nothing to Adelaide in the long run, that two natives could be brought to America and safely returned. He would fill his children’s mouths with food from his own endeavors, at the very least. He understood that the bet had been placed some time ago; he was merely waiting for the cards to be turned over. He pushed off the rail and headed toward the foredeck.

  He found Argus and took him on a tour of the bark, scouring for trade items, for objects that would strike the tribal fancy. A
rgus had showed him how to see the second life within an object, how a candle or mirror held more value if it could be traded as sorcery as well as for illumination and reflection. They walked all over the ship, from the underworld of dank compartments to the painted deckhouses. They stood in the orlop, Jethro somewhere above, and stared at the Bausch & Lomb microscope with something that could only be described as object-lust.

  “He would never let us have it,” Owen said. “Even if we paid what it was worth.”

  “No matter. If the Tikalia thought their seawater was swimming with invisible animals all the time they might give up fishing and live in the jungle forever.”

  For now, they left the brass instrument and continued to forage for trade currency throughout the bark, begging and buying trinkets from the seamen and the idlers.