Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  Owen regarded the angled masts of the wrecks, weathered and pale as driftwood, the spars and sails long gone. He looked amidships, where Argus had prepared their trading cargo for loading. Owen said to Terrapin, “Can you get us near the edge of the reef and we’ll row from there?”

  “Because you intend to join the shipwrecked and the drowned, Mr. Graves? What’s my payment if I come back without a trader? A kick in my corpulent arse?”

  Owen looked off into the blue-white distance. He found himself on the verge of confiding in Terrapin and then he was saying: “I don’t know when I will be able to come to sea again. My livelihood depends on whatever I can get off this island.” It sounded true enough, though there was the small omission of a looming inheritance. That would never seem like his, though.

  Terrapin handed the wheel to the helmsman and took a step toward the cataclysm of yawed hulls. “Nine,” he said. “I count nine ladies hogged up.” He stood with his hands clasped over his ponderous belly, a bootlace untied, a fazzolet knotted around his ruddy neck as if for dinner. His breath was redolent of aged cheese. “You must really want a bamboo harp, Mr. Graves, because this is lunacy of the empirical order.”

  “Come back for us in three days, at noon. We’ll take our chances.”

  “And where am I supposed to take the ship for three days?”

  “Half a day north there’s another island. The men can rest before the trick home.”

  “Yes, and that island was probably shot out of the same cannonical mud-dick as this one. Understand that an island without anchorage is no use to me. A ship likes to sleep in bays, sandy bottoms, channels, that drift of thing.”

  “We can row from here,” Owen said in a tone of appeasement. “It’s just Argus and me, and the rowboat can be lowered quickly.” Since waking that morning he had been aware that Jethro would be jettisoned from the trip to Tikalia. His unpredictable behavior would hamper their odds of success. No, if he was going to attempt a final boon, he was going to do it in a precise and ordered fashion. Everything needed to be under his control.

  Terrapin nodded, letting the trader’s scheme settle over him. “I imagined that the carpenter and the dead-bird collector were going along on this jaunt. That’s the precedent that’s been struck. ’Course, with the apprentice dead I wasn’t going to give you another seaman. Does the wraith know he’s not going along? Seems he might be a little miffed . . .” A smile played on his lips.

  “I can’t risk it after the run-in on the last island. It’s just me and the boy. No one to slow us down. I would have liked to take a whaleboat because I can fit in more trading supplies. Any chance of that?”

  Terrapin puckered and leaned forward against an invisible weight. “Like you, Mr. Graves, I’m hedging my bets. And after the weather I’ve seen pissfiring out of this particular sky, I can’t risk being caught short on lifeboats. You and the kanaka lad can have the dinghy and that’s all. But if you want extra stowage, I recommend hauling something in the rear. The carpenter might have some old planksheer or something you can float behind to carry more loot.” He stepped back to the helm. “Mr. Pym, bring us on a skirting line, six boat lengths from the edge of the reef so the trader and his boy can row ashore. Noon three days hence, then.”

  Owen nodded, retrieved his duffel bag, and descended to the quarterdeck to help Argus load.

  In the fug below, Jethro was preparing his field kit, waiting for the definitive jangle of the anchor chain against the cathead before going above. The trip was winding down and at this final island he would go after something unusual, a gun-gem of the tropics. He was coming to think that Nature, in all her thrashing abundance and delicate recoil, was governed by a secret language. A cryptology that murmured just below human perception. His finger throbbed in the lamplight; was it trying to send him a message with its metronomic insistence? The body pulsed with electricity and it seemed his moods, even his thoughts, emanated from that poisoned blue tip. If it thrummed angrily, he was surly. If it fell into spasm, he was erratic. In the middle of a meditation on, say, avian flight or the armature of a wing, the finger would cut him off like an impetuous guest—I am here, I am here. And like some muzzled dog, more and more the finger objected to being imprisoned inside the glove. It wanted air, attention. He covered it with a piece of cloth and tried to run free with his thoughts. Consider the silkworm, he said to himself, aloud, surprised by his own voice. There was a half-written poem on the workbench that described a white mulberry with its thousand silking tenants. He took up the poem and found a pencil. He had been trying to finish it for days but it evaded him just before the last stanza, at the point where he compared the tree to an ancient citadel. What about the Chinese Tree of Heaven? Could that be in the next line, and then the stanza could continue:

  Living inside their filament-spun caves

  Then every cocoon plucked and boiled

  Lest the worms sprout moth wings and ruin the harvest

  It was passable, for now, even showed promise. He sometimes wondered if his poetry wasn’t better than his ornithology. Then his finger burned through with pain and he was on his feet, pacing, practically loosed from his senses. He wanted to scream obscenities. He waited and waited for the ship to come about, for the clanking river of the anchor chain.

  24.

  The Tikalia lived in wattled huts and limestone caves. They burrowed into sea cliffs on the windward side of the island. There were chieftains and headmen on both sides of the island but no dogs. Women held sway over the gardens—Poumetan mythology was wrong about Tikalia’s lack of agriculture—and the forests were patched with yam and sago plots, fenced in by poles kerfed with whale teeth. The beardless men rubbed their faces smooth with pumice and cut their hair with shards of flint. The children, unlike their distant cousins on Poumeta, were among the best artisans, their small hands adept at stringing bows or pulling wefts of barkcloth through a loom. The broad, surrounding reef had led to more than a century of shipwrecks and the Tikalia had never suffered for lack of contact. They borrowed or stole whatever improved their lot. Over the years, the Chinese and Malay traders and the white men had all been rescued by passing ships or found a way to decamp the island but the sugar slaves, the hundred kanakas on their way to Queensland in the bosom of the Sea Foam in 1875, had mostly stayed on. As a result, Tikalia was a crucible of cultures and languages and innovations. Pidgin was the lingua franca but there were ornamental styles from every region of Melanesia—the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Santa Cruz and the western Solomons, the Admiralty Islands, even the New Guinea coast and highlands. The immigrants were mostly men but also a few women. Long ago they’d passed themselves off as boys to go caning, lined up for the blackbirders with their flat chests and shaved heads.

  Because of their isolation and lack of safe harbor, the Tikalia had never been raided or missionized. There was no smallpox, typhoid, or malaria. For these same reasons, the population had spiraled to over a thousand, all within sixteen square miles. Far from being a Pacific idyll, its populace lived at the brink. They schemed ever-new ways to trim the island’s inhabitants, sponsoring dangerous trading voyages far afield, elaborating complex marriage rules, allowing garden plots to pass only to firstborn daughters. There was a village perched a thousand feet above the lake that prided itself on no new births in ten years. The last nubile woman was only a few years from barrenhood and this was cause for great celebration.

  So when the Tikalia saw two men—one black, one white— dragging a laden dinghy across the mudflats at low tide, they were less than welcoming. Households were rationing their sago during the early monsoon season and the wait at the communal oven houses was obscene by any measure. Not being accustomed to warfare—their own fledged weapons, outside of trade, being more decorative than martial—there was no flotilla of warriors paddling out to deter the uninvited guests. Instead they gathered on the beaches by the hundreds, staring out at the damage that was being done to their weirs, to the stone pens that caught fish at low tide
without an hour of human enterprise.

  Argus saw the kinsmen flank the beach, more people than he’d ever seen assembled in one place before. They waited gloomily for the next thing to happen, entire clans and lineages, bare-chested and girdled in barkcloth, more of them sifting through the trees in pairs. They waited in the slatted blue shade of the palmwoods, chewing betel nut, or they stood in the blaze of exposed sunshine, squinting through cupped hands. Even the children were immovable; they toed the sand, calabash gourds in hand, implacable at the sight of two grown men hauling through the mud. Argus had tied a rope through the iron ring of the small wooden bow and they had plowed a deep groove across the flats. It seemed like miles but was no more than a few hundred yards. Owen turned to see the mud-wake and noticed the damage they’d wrought to the islanders’ fish weirs and stone corrals. This was not an auspicious beginning. He saw the Lady Cullion in retrograde, glimpsed through the rotting prows of the shipwrecks, heading northwest on a run, already a tiny apparition on a quieted sea.

  When the rowboat was on actual sand, monstrous footprints and the boat hull swaled in the mudflat behind, the islanders walked down to meet them. Owen was caked to his rib cage and Argus had fallen facedown on their final heave-to. A wide circle formed and a few villagers ventured farther to inspect the contents of the boat, the begrimed seafarers more of an obstacle to inspection than anything else. Argus reached for some pidgin, fingering the pages of the reverend’s phrase book in his mind, but all he could commute was the word for low tide—draiwara. The obviousness of the statement didn’t seem to warrant a reply but then a child piped up with draiwara dripmen, which, ported into English, meant low-tide vagabonds. There was general agreement, languorous nodding, something like the murmur of bees. Then, finally, the crowd erupted into laughter. Part of the problem, Owen thought, was that there seemed to be no one in charge. If he could find the chief he would ask for permission to land with due ceremony and a doffed, muddy hat. But no chief was forthcoming and therefore they were not officially guests.

  Owen, in desperation, said, “Tell them we have lucifer matches and calico. Show them a deck of cards.”

  Argus complied and held up an ace of spades like a stage magician. The children clicked their teeth in disgust. Then one of the older boys stepped over to the dinghy and held up some tinned food—peaches then beef then mussels. This drew the circle in, though not for the reasons Owen assumed. The Tikalia had no direct interest in the tinned food but were relieved that the strangers could feed themselves. Argus asked them where they might set up camp and whether they might venture into the villages for trade. The responses were tepid and contradictory—sleep on the beach, sleep up the mountain, there is no wood for fires, rent payment levied for all guests to the island and extra for coming into the villages. Argus scanned the faces as different voices rose above the heads of the front-row children. He wanted to find a familiar face, a cousin from his days of reed spears and fish-poisoning. Instead he heard a series of complaints about foreigners who showed up looking for trade with nothing but matches and mirrors.

  “What did they say?” asked Owen. The mud on his forearms was drying to a second skin.

  Argus tried to summarize their welcome by saying, “They want us out of the way and we have to pay a fee to enter the villages.”

  “Hospitable, aren’t they?” Owen muttered. “Tell them we’d like to trade for handicrafts.”

  “I told them already. They said it depends on their mood, our luck, and what we have in the boat.”

  Owen slicked some mud off his forearms and said Jesus low enough to avoid Argus’s prudish stare.

  Argus summarized some more: “Many islanders come here for weapons. The Tikalia do not go to war themselves but they make excellent spears and shields for other islands. In a month there are men coming from far away for daggers and arrows. They will be bringing a giant raft of chickens and yams. They want to know why we didn’t bring chickens or pigs?”

  Owen turned to regain sight of the departing ship. The tide was still receding and he could feel his drive ebbing with it. The rules changed on every island and all of them were designed to vex and confuse the white trader. No wonder curators and private collectors were willing to pay a premium to avoid the penance of going into the field; anything to avoid its moiling rituals and fevers. He summoned a tight-lipped smile and told Argus to relay their thanks and their determination to be invisible until the ship picked them up. This last sentiment faltered and was relayed as a promise to remain as ghosts for three days.

  Darkness fell and the fishermen took to their outriggers with coconut-sheath torches. The tradition was to burn the torches on the night tide and collect the flying fish as they leapt toward the light. The fishermen chewed sandalwood and gingerroot while they worked but never jinxed the catch with song or whistling. The competition was fierce and only the quickest hands could fill a canoe before morning. The closest the Tikalia came to bloodshed was a rammed prow if someone violated an ancient fishing protocol, the ornate tribal laws that determined who fished which reef head. Owen and Argus watched the canoes float in haloes of torchlight as they moved out past the breaking waves. They had set up camp by an estuary that flowed across the sand. Because they wanted to preserve the tinned food for trade they ate hardtack with jam and dunked it into bowls of sweet coffee. The cookfire was small for lack of wood—the beach and foreshore had been thoroughly picked over. Argus arranged the trading items by size and type. He had a methodical mind and Owen liked that. The canvas pitchtent was square in the corners with the floor pulled taut. He’d driven the stakes deep into the sand with a stone.

  Owen let his mind slacken, alternating his gaze between the embers and the white starlight above the horizon. He thought about Adelaide’s deathbed vigil in New England and wondered why it seemed so remote to the course of his thoughts. He missed her terribly, but he had to remind himself to consider her impending grief and not just the way in which his fate was being decided in a house with a widow’s walk somewhere in Boston. Papers were being signed, perhaps. Tracts were being deeded. The father was either alive or dead; it was a simple equation. Nonetheless, Mr. Cummings’s death felt like an abstraction, a conjecture. He should have been wondering about Adelaide’s well-being instead of his own fate. But here he was—a housewrecker’s son sitting on a beach at the end of the world. A workingman whose fear was not that life would turn ruinous at any moment but that it would turn comfortable and plush without his own effort. His father was always peering from the pauper’s grave. His scuffed, steel-toed boots, retrieved from the entombing rubble, still sat on a high shelf in Owen’s wardrobe, no less powerful than a warrior’s calcified heart in the rafters of a tribal longhouse. In this regard he was exactly like a Melanesian clansman—his days were forever being scrutinized and judged by a dead patriarch.

  Argus spoke, wrenching Owen from his meditation.

  “In Chicago, do you know of jobs of employment for me and my sister?” Argus said.

  “The man who paid for this voyage would like you to work for him.”

  The fire sputtered in the light breeze.

  “Doing what?”

  Owen took up a stick and reorganized the scant embers. “He would like to set up an exhibition.” He paused. “So that city people can learn about your ways.”

  “I have two ways now.”

  “Yes, and I think he wants to see the island way more than the Christian way.”

  “He does not love God?”

  Owen considered that for a moment. “I’m sure he loves God but he thinks people will want to see you in traditional costume and speaking your own language.”

  Without a hint of indignation, Argus said, “As a savage?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But I am no longer a heathen.”

  “I know. Here’s the thing. Have you ever heard of acting? It’s people pretending to be something they’re not for a show on stage. Entertainment.”

  “The theater. Str
utting the boards, he called it. Reverend Mister said it was godless and pagan.”

  “He may have a point. Well, you’ll be like an actor. Then, after the exhibit, we can find you a job or arrange for you and your sister to come back.” The thought of this conversation had been weighing on him for some time. Grow your beard and shed your Christian, civilized skin was essentially the upshot. He couldn’t meet the boy’s eyes.

  Argus followed Owen’s gaze into the fire. How would a bishop hire him as a servant if he didn’t wear any shoes? How would he meet a Christian wife if he could not walk down the street in a suit and straw hat, a green apple in hand? “For how long do I have to be savage?”

  “Maybe a few months. In all honesty, you’d be doing me a favor and I’ll make sure you’re treated well.”

  Argus asked, “Will there be a salary?”

  “Room and board and a stipend. Not sure I would call it a salary.”

  “We will do it if you will watch out for us. I would like to serve a holy man and my sister would like to be a governess. Will I meet your bride in Chicago?”

  Owen nodded but was caught off guard. “I suppose you will.”

  “You said she works in a museum. Does she clean the weapons?”

  “Something like that. She keeps track of things and types letters.”

  “What is the name of that job?”

  “Secretary. This is a job that girls can do in America.”

  “Ah, yes, I know it. I remember now.” A silence, then Argus said, “My sister likes children because she cannot have any. How many children will you have with your wife?”

  “Lots,” Owen said. “As many as she’s willing. I had no brothers or sisters.”