Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  They tacked for three days across a southeasterly headwind, the air swinging north in short, turbulent bursts. Fifty miles from Tikalia, the skies turned crystalline and china blue, a rarity for this zone of sail and time of year. With the winds bearing fifteen knots and the Cullion on a close reach, one of the men in the high rigging sighted another ship. Terrapin took up his spyglass and winced. It was an iron-hulled clipper uncanvased down to the lower topgallants, dragging fathoms of seaweed from her stern, the mainsails torn and billowed to rags. She lacked steerageway, idled to leeward. A drowsy strip of white smoke came from the foredeck. Terrapin told Mr. Pym to bring her abeam and the Cul-lion headed down. The seamen crowded at the bulwarks, already speculating about the ship’s predicament: that she’d been pillaged by murderous Algerines, or quarantined on account of some tropical malaise—never mind the lack of white flags—or the cannibals of Tikalia had stocked their bamboo larders and sent the empty brig out into the voided ocean.

  Owen and Argus waited at the rail with the rest of them as the broadside of the Stately Hope edged closer. They secured lines and boathooks to steady her prow, turning her into the wind, back-winding what was left of the ragged jibsails. Terrapin came down onto the quarterdeck. He said the sight of the unmanned ship made him nervous and he suspected the mariners lay in the hold with their throats slit or their tongues bloated white with pox. The clipper eased up into the wind, the Cullion’s hull flush and groaning beside it. The white smoke continued to draw up from the forehatch.

  Terrapin knotted a kerchief around his mouth and nose and prepared to board. He asked the second mate to join him and they began to climb onto the bulwarks. There were captains who sent their seamen on errands such as this, but Terrapin prided himself on having come to the stateroom with calluses on his hands. Owen volunteered to join them. One leg over the side, Terrapin stopped short. They all felt the heat rising from the Stately Hope’s hull. The captain crouched down and placed a palm close to the ironclad siding. Straightening and casting his eyes amidships, he said, “She’s on slow fire from the coal inside her guts. The whale-boats and dinghies are gone.”

  The seamen held out their hands to the iron hull as if warming themselves by a hearth.

  Terrapin said, “Flares deep down in the cargo bay is my estimation. Probably carrying her cargo from Sydney to South America when it caught. Coal will rumble along for months sometimes. Captain and crew must have abandoned ship too soon and let her drift. They panicked because they left most of her sails up. Poor bastards might have rowed to Antarctica by now. She’s so fuckin hot I bet she glows at night. You could cook omelets on that skillet of a hull. They couldn’t take it no more.”

  “What should we do, sir?” asked Mr. Pym.

  “Let her drift. She’ll end up beached or reefed somewhere or maybe the coal will burn a hole straight through her crotch. Release at your leisure, Mr. Pym.”

  “Shouldn’t we make sure that no one is left on board?” asked Jethro, emerging from the group of men with sudden indignation.

  “Be my guest,” said Terrapin. “I have all the information I need to know that not a living soul is on that smoldering scow. Mind you don’t burn your slippers when you clamber aboard, lovelace.”

  The men scoffed at the suggestion of boarding the smoking brig.

  Owen said, “He’s right. We should make sure no one is left aboard.” It was the right thing to do, the moral thing, but he was also aware of a thought running parallel—that the ship was filled with left-behind trinkets if all the men had abandoned ship. Couldn’t an action be both moral and expedient? “I’ll go along with him.”

  “And me as well,” said Argus.

  Owen added, “There might be provisions we could use.”

  Terrapin formed a big, sarcastic grin before turning for the charthouse. “Let me know if you find any victims or rheumy wayfellows, gentlemen. I reckon they might have a spot of fever by this point.”

  Owen steadied a plank between the two decks and asked one of the men to hold it. He balanced his way forward, followed by Argus and finally Jethro, arms out like a tightrope walker. The smell of charcoal was overpowering and they felt the heat through their boots. It had once been an elegant ship—carved bulwarks and flemishes on the coiled lines, oiled timberheads, the deckhouses painted and trimmed in oyster-white. All of it now in varying degrees of spoil. They walked toward the smoking forehatch and Owen told them not to touch it. “If you let the outside air in there the whole thing will blow. There might be fifty thousand pounds of coal down there.” They entered the forecastle and saw the abandoned iron bunks and the sailors’ lockboxes unhinged. Whatever could be grabbed had been taken en route to the whaleboats, but countless personal items remained—nickel shaving dishes, decks of cards, birthday telegrams, coins, framed photographs of wives and children, pocket-knives, compasses, journals, monogrammed handkerchiefs, ditty bags with needle and thread. Owen told Argus to load it all into a pillowcase.

  Jethro turned and looked at him. “Stealing from the dead?”

  “They might not be dead,” said Owen. “But they won’t be coming back for any of this.”

  “All the same,” Jethro said, blinking.

  “Are you going to lecture me on proper conduct? After all I’ve seen you do on this trip?”

  Jethro stooped through the forecastle doorway in reply.

  They continued to the main hatchway and climbed down into the tween decks and the hold. The farther they penetrated the hotter it became. They wended through the companionways, the berths and cabins like smoldering wooden grottoes. They found the armory, its metal doors flung wide and empty down to the last cartridge. In the galley a pot of ancient coffee sat blackened and smoking on the swing table, the air so stifling that the paint was beginning to flake off the walls. They retreated deckside to approach the captain’s stateroom from above, glimpsing the room first through its brass-framed skylight as if looking down into a murky, frozen pond. They went below and came through the companionway. Inside, it was the kind of master’s cabin Owen had imagined all those years ago, standing mesmerized in the stacks of the public library—a pilastered bed, scrollwork on the maple walls, maps of antiquity hanging above the massive, iron-legged desk. In the extreme aft, a pair of French doors opened onto a balcony that cantilevered above the gudgeon and stern-piece. Through the doorway, Owen could see the clipper’s errant wake written across the sea, a veering, undulant line.

  Inside, the captain’s orderly possessions were relatively unscathed by the heat—being as far from the forehatch as the ship’s length would allow—except for an uncorked bottle of blue ink giving off a cloud of vapors. Owen opened a mahogany armoire, a nag’s head carved into its crown, and saw two sets of clothing—the captain’s jackets and trousers, but also a number of frocks and blouses. Either the captain had a secret or his wife had been aboard. It was a hen frigate. Owen looked around the cabin for feminine adornments and saw empty vases and china figurines, could feel the marriage battle that had played out in the weave of the rug and the tasseled bedspread. It was clear that no one had won the battle decisively because the décor remained democratic, hedging between masculine browns and lacy, effeminate fringes. The thought of a woman fleeing the burning ship changed the clipper’s predicament in his mind. It struck him now as sadder somehow, more poignant. There was a Japanese parasol hanging forlornly from the hat stand, its rice paper edges curling from the heat. To lift his mood, he imagined Adelaide rocking gently in her sleep under a stateroom skylight, saw her waking beside him to watch the stars dot westward. He wondered if she would ever come aboard a ship. He told Argus to load whatever he could manage from the stateroom and they came back out onto the deck, their arms laden with clothes and their pockets full of foreign coins and porcelain dogs. Jethro was made to carry his share and he almost toppled into the swells as he wobbled back across the plank-bridge between the ships. He managed to drop several items, so that when Owen crossed he looked down to see a flotsam of ladie
s’ undergarments and loose-leaf papers floating among the dredge of seaweed.

  23.

  Where does night come from? Why do marsupials sleep in caves? Why do women no longer have beards? These were among the riddles of Poumetan mythology, the stories woven into Argus’s childhood memory. Every myth began with long, long ago and ended with this is how it came to be. The stories about their distant cousins, the Tikalia, were no different. Long, long ago, there were two brothers and their two wives. All were banished and went to sea. They paddled a single-hulled canoe for many weeks but no other island would take them in. They paddled a month more and finally reached an island so remote it was uninhabited and bore no name. They called it Tikalia, the Poumetan word for far away, and built bamboo huts on the white beach. There were limestone mountains that rimmed a deep lake and freshwater eels with eyes that glowed at night. Food was so abundant, and the needs of the four so basic, that mangos and coconuts rotted where they fell. Bonito fish schooled into the shallows along the coastline and allowed themselves to be caught with bare hands. Wild pigs slept on the beach at night and were easily killed. Because the outcasts didn’t need to work for their food, they began making bark paintings and music, necklaces and babies. Soon there was an entire village of people who had rarely hunted but knew how to make tortoiseshell armlets and bamboo panpipes.

  Word of Tikalia’s plenty traveled back to Poumeta and, after a hundred years, it was decided that some of the warriors and fishermen should see the island for themselves. A voyage was mounted and it lasted a season. When the party finally returned they carried hundreds of ornate armlets and necklaces, pearl-shell bracelets and amulets. They told stories of sheer white cliffs that dropped into a lake a thousand feet deep, of open fields of breadfruit and canarium almond forests, of clans living in cave houses with floors of tawny hibiscus. The island was very beautiful but for six moons of the year it was ravaged by terrible hurricanes. The Tikalia, who now spoke their own language and barely understood Poumetan, took shelter in their caves and didn’t seem to mind the storms a bit. There were no yam gardens to rebuild and they sat by their hearth fires, making handicrafts and telling stories, while outside the world broke apart. Only twenty of the thirty Poumetans returned from Tikalia and the villagers didn’t know whether the missing warriors were dead or now dwelling in caves with their distant cousins. The mystery remained but every two years a voyage to Tikalia was made anew. The Poumetans loaded their canoes with items of trade up from the other islands and set out. The circumcised boys went along with their fathers, and each time some of them did not return and were never spoken of again. In this way there was always an excess of Poumetan brides, enough to trade with the tree-dwelling Kuk. This is how it came to be.

  Argus mulled over these myths in his mind from behind the bulkhead, the Cullion plowing through the brilliant field of waves. Tikalia specked the horizon between swells, a chalky ridge blinking through the morning haze of salt. There were the legends of the past, spread like vellum pages of scripture, and then there was the living dream of the past, the moments he carried, as real as the silver napkin ring in his portmanteau—the smell of his father searing white wood for a canoe, or the taste of guava and wild meat during a feast. He had failed his father long before being invited to make the voyage to Tikalia and it felt strange now to be approaching the island in a pair of trousers and leather boots. He wondered if he might encounter all the boys who did not return from the voyages of his youth. Far from being dead, they might greet him on the beachhead with music and garlands of mimosa and he could teach them, as a sideline to trade, the catechisms of truth and veneration. Like the earliest missionaries in medieval Scotland, St. Ninian or St. Columba, or the New World brethren with Mohawk Bibles wrapped in their saddlebags, cantering across the ungodly American plains, he might be the first to bring them the good news of the Son and the Ghost. From the prow he also thought of David Copperfield going to London and wondered what they would find in Chicago. Instead of ending up in a blacking factory like David, he might work in a bishopric with a rose garden and his sister might nanny in a mansion of singing children. The future was different from the past. The reverend had written that it was all the same to the islanders, that clansmen swam in a broth of eternal present, but Argus knew the future by the way it made him feel. The past was sealed in envelopes, pockets, memories. It had been picked over, the Almighty’s plan already revealed and known. The future, though, was still being made and furrowed into the minds of heathens and catechists alike, and Argus could sometimes feel the plowshare as God pulled him along, the revelation of who he might become. A different life was being sown for him.

  He wasn’t sure his sister saw it this way or that she understood the point of the moving pictures in the messroom. They had been invited to America, to the city of Chicago, which was a thousand miles from the sea. He sounded these words in his mind. They had the same revelatory bent as Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. If the white men in Chicago couldn’t pronounce his surname of Niu then he might call himself Argus Copperfield. Or maybe Argus Blunderstone or Argus Trotwood, names that carried within their open, flowing sounds some hint of rookeries and hamlets and forests of English camphorwood. They had been invited to America and before they could answer formally the storm had driven them east. Argus had seen Owen tracing their course on a map in his cabin. They were now closer to Fiji than they were to New Guinea. It was written into the charts—the answer was yes.

  He turned from the approaching island and went to find his sister. As usual, she was tending the menagerie of stowaway animals on the quarterdeck—feeding a handful of oats to the wallaby, dried apples to the tortoise, a paste of dried fish to the Siamese cat. The mongoose had taken to climbing the rigging with the men, catching dragonflies and moths in its snapping jaws, but was also taken by the sailmaker into the belly of the ship to catch mice and rats. As a consequence, the mongoose, now named India, was never hungry and skulked a wide circle around the other feeding animals. Terrapin and Nipper watched the feeding from the elevated poop, the dog’s bark growing perfunctory.

  “We are almost there,” said Argus. “Our father made the voyage here many times in his life. Now we can see where he went and what he saw.”

  “It is taboo for Poumetan women to set foot on that island. I am not leaving the ship,” she said. She let the wallaby nuzzle into her skirts.

  “Do you know where we are going next?”

  She straightened and beckoned to the cat. “And I will not live inside a museum with dead men’s skulls and poisoned arrows. I want a house to work in if we go anywhere.”

  Argus watched the Siamese purr around her bare feet. It was even more occult looking than most cats—eyes that suggested supernatural malice as well as cool indifference. “Who told you we would be living inside a museum?”

  She glanced up at the poop deck, where the captain squinted, slack-mouthed, into the bright morning. There was no word for captain in Poumetan except headman or chief, so she called him chief of the big canoe. “He says that they will keep us behind glass windows so that clayskins can put us in their books. He says that he can get me a cooking job on another island.”

  “He wants to keep you, Sister, behind his own window. He has halfblood children all over the ocean. Owen Graves told me this. Their days of birth are written on his arms.”

  “You don’t know him. You are not allowed in his cabin without an invitation. He has never touched me.”

  Argus closed his legs so that the cat couldn’t circle through them. He said, “Did you see where they want to take us in the pictures?”

  “I saw too many lights and fat women with ostrich feathers on their heads. I am not for that place. You can go because you are already half made of clay and Bible song. You want to be in their books.”

  “Only for a short time and then they will bring us back. You will work in a mansion, which is a ho
use of many rooms.”

  She said nothing further but they watched the mongoose emerge from a shadowy nook with a mouse in its teeth. It was apparently too full to eat; it left the tiny corpse for the cat to investigate. The cat did little but paw at it and, after a few minutes, Malini threw the dead mouse over the railing and into the ship’s wake. For the second time since the sea burial she thought of Dickey Fentress in his body sack, twirling and spinning his way to the bottom of the ocean, where he would rot or be eaten by whatever dwelt there. What a grotesque ritual, she thought. He wasn’t even important enough to burn, not even a finger bone was nailed to the ship’s tall trees up among the fluttering canvas. He had been forgotten altogether. The sea was deep and filled with bags of sailors’ bones and there were sharks and whales with strands of human hair coiled inside their stomachs. This was something she would never understand.

  The Cullion skirted the island, looking for anchorage. Terrapin leaned at the helm with Owen at his side. There was a wide fringing reef, a series of brown coral ramparts that extended for a quarter-mile. On the leeward side, the sheer cliffs plunged into a volcanic bowl, the lake suspended cuplike over the white beach. Above the massif a rim of stunted trees bent seaward before the slopes gave way to jungle rioting—stands of Tahitian chestnut, tree ferns, casuarinas, coral trees kindled with scarlet flowers.

  “Not more than fifteen square miles is my guess but she’s a fuckin fortress,” said Terrapin. “Skirt of gnarling coral and not a channel or place to find bottom.” They held a starboard tack, rounding the northern tip. Without the caldera’s wind shadow the bark sallied into a gust and was pushed leeward, closer to the fissured heads of coral. Then, beyond the point, they saw a boneyard of shipwrecks hulked on the windward reef—a nautical museum of broken brigs, sloops, and barks. “Come about!” he yelled to the first mate and within seconds the Cullion tacked through the eye of the nor’easter and away from the wreckage. When they had passed about eight boat lengths toward the open sea, Terrapin drew breath. “The charts are wrong, Mr. Graves. There is no island at this latitude. Just a graveyard for scuttled ships. The Lady Cullion will not anchor here.”