Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  “Good. Because that way it won’t matter if my sister doesn’t have any. May I read to you David Copperfield to pass the time until we sleep?”

  “Please,” said Owen.

  Argus stood by the fire and held the book like a hymnal. I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been easily thrown away at such an age . . .

  Owen stirred the fire again and looked out at the fishermen, their nets held wide like jibsails on a run.

  . . . I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby . . .

  Above Argus’s voice, Owen could hear the tiny plinks as the fish arced out of the darkening waters toward the fishermen’s torchlight, toward the certainty of an airy death.

  In the morning they began to explore the island, disregarded for the most part, but waved off if they violated the treaty between wary host and uninvited guest. They carried sample trade items in bulging rucksacks but left most of their goods at the makeshift camp, under the shelter of the overturned rowboat. Unlike the other islands, there were no children trailing behind them with sharpened sticks and mangy, hairless dogs. The Tikalia had no use for dogs but had imported cats over the years to help diminish a plague of rats. The rodents were kept under control but the cats—the kinsfolk called them long-tails—had bred voraciously and had killed much of the island’s birdlife. There were calicos and tabbies of every stripe, sleeping and idling on the trails, slinking and mewing in the thickets. Argus thought of the disagreeable Mr. Nibbles, the mission cat who’d spent his existence licking himself between naps and petulant stares, and wondered whether Tikalia cats had found their very own Eden, the feline equivalent of heaven on earth.

  Stepping across the well-worn pathways, Owen and Argus noticed the sheer volume and variety of houses. The crowded villages had no clear boundaries but bled together, stippled among the dense foliage of the forest. There were dwellings of every sort—daubed huts of yellow cane and palmetto thatch, lashed bamboo lean-tos, caves hollowed into the limestone karst of the mountainside, treehouses of driftwood perched up among the orchids and honeyeaters. The Tikalia slept wherever they could, three and four to a room, curled on the beach in the dry season. They buried their dead beneath the floors of their houses or in graves topped with stone dolmens. When the grave plots were full or the departing spirits were particularly malevolent, they interred the corpses in the shipwrecked hulls, wrapped and laid out in the derelict holds like pharaohs.

  Away from the shoreline the vegetation thickened, the iron-woods draped and corded with vines. The trail zigzagged up the massif, streams flowing out of the high lake and washing across the narrow footpath. There were brief vistas of riparian garden plot below, little arcadias of irrigated croft and groves of shaded canarium. Argus had insisted on carrying the heavier rucksack up the hillside and he thought of atonement and English fenlands in old photographs as he climbed. The reverend had told stories of Scottish summers spent in the Highlands as a schoolboy, navigating a yew maze on the family estate. Each time he got lost, he dropped to his knees and asked for God to light the way. And each time the yew hedges revealed an exit because they were collaborating in divine proof. Later, preparing for bed, he would stand at the high windows of the manse and look down on the maze, a boy of ten, and see the intricacies of the hedge walls, the mandala-like geometry, and he would be struck by the unlikelihood of accidentally solving the puzzle six times in a row. God is everywhere, he would whisper to Argus from the captain’s chair half a century later, waiting to be drawn down by worthiness revealed.

  The sense Owen had as they picked a trail up the mountainside was that the whole population was watching from depths of shade. Their rucksacks bounced with goods as they hiked but no one emerged from the jungle to trade. They continued up to the lip of the extinct caldera, where the stunted trees bent seaward, and looked down into the buttressed lake. Pied cormorants stepped through the shallows and gray ducks floated in a wide V across the lake’s surface. This vantage point gave a reminder of the island’s smallness and isolation—a cup of tranquil water, a volcanic rim as delicate as bone china, and the ocean spread on all sides like a bolt of Persian blue silk. The shipwrecks and the dugouts on the fringing reef were the only things to give dimension and suggest human scale. Argus prayed quietly at the immensity of it all, wondered if it was the first place to see the sun each day, while Owen threw a rock into the fulgent eye of the lake.

  The clansmen emerged as the visitors began the descent. Those interested in trade brought their items to the pathway so that the strangers wouldn’t have to be received in the village. Sanctioned guests had to be fed and offered tobacco and kava, but only if they entered the communal square itself. A party of villagers assembled at a switchback and Owen saw that they had laid out their goods on banana leaves. Owen and Argus trudged farther down the trail and the kinsmen began to play music, not so much in greeting but as a display of hardware. Every island style and technique was represented in the band—flutes and double-row panpipes from the New Hebrides, a bamboo jew’s harp and reed flute from New Caledonia, drums from New Guinea that changed pitch with a smear of wax, wood trumpets from the highlands that were generally only played during nights of tribal bloodshed. Whether the myths Owen had heard from Argus were true, that the Tikalia were renowned for their artistry and received trading parties from as far away as New Zealand, that they once took in wanderers of every denomination, any outcast who muttered the pidgin phrase for banishment— rausim i go longwe—was hard to say. Certainly, white men were not very welcome here and he thought the music had an off-kilter staccato that was filled with menace. A caramel-skinned boy played a friction gong, looking straight at them, refusing to smile.

  The music swelled and subsided. The visitors unloaded their rucksacks and set the items on the ground. To Owen it had the feeling of a long-held ritual, this chess match of competing inventories. Before the haggling could begin in earnest they arranged the brightly colored clothes the sailmaker had sewn from the slop chest as a kind of backdrop, placing porcelain dogs and music boxes and steel knives on top, as if on a velvet-lined display case. Everything had to be first glimpsed in the best possible light. Owen had packed as diverse an array of objects as he could think of, hoping to cover every angle and to give Argus ample opportunity to appeal to their supernatural concerns. Mirrors, candles, whale-tooth amulets, photographs of dead men who might be enlisted in hexes and curses. Owen had decided to leave the guns and ammunition and some of the more elaborate goods in the overturned rowboat, to keep these in reserve. If the islanders saw the depth of your pockets too early, he believed, then it was all over.

  The two trading parties swapped places and inspected each other’s array. Owen knew immediately that he’d underprovisioned. The tribal spread was miraculous in its diversity. It was as if the previous months had been wasted, that he could have just come to Tikalia from the start and cut the trip in half. The island was a clearinghouse, whether accidental or not, for a hundred far-flung places. Pearl- and mussel-shell scrapers, a rasp of wood covered with sharkskin that he’d been unable to purchase near Santa Cruz, another covered with the skin of a stingray, some kind of bludgeon, cordage from the Carolinas made from paper mulberry and the aerial roots of pandanus, strung across mangrove bows, the corresponding arrows fletched with egret feathers, Polynesian baskets of woven rushes with carmine trim used for carrying babies, a spoil of awls and axes and basalt adzes, bamboo beheading knives and carriers with a special loop for passing through the windpipe of a severed head, strings of old Solomon shell-bead money, pearl bridal ornaments, entire outfits of cuirass and plaited cane armor for Bismarck chieftains. The objects came from every region of Melanesia and Polynesia and it occurred to Owen that the Tikalia were as trade-minded and mercenary as he was—that for the right price they would trade anything with anybody, would supply highlanders
with cutting rasps that would someday be used to garrote their distant Pacific cousins. How many colonial muskets had been traded only to be fired against the descendants of the gun’s original owner? Part of his mind was already clicking over with possibilities. If the Cullion had been anchored nearby he would have bought the captain’s piano and rowed it ashore in the hopes of a trading coup. He would have traded the four sticks of dynamite in the armory, the explosives the captain kept on some strange and personal reckoning with his past. He was doomed by this hunger and felt galled by the spread before him; he’d been outclassed and outmatched and the islanders knew it. Already he could hear their mouths tsk-ing, feel them wondering why the vagabonds of the mud tide had bothered to climb the hill.

  Owen tried to save face. He told Argus to suggest a later meeting on the beach. They were welcome to inspect the rest of the articles. This was merely a sample.

  Argus translated this and they stared at his scuffed boots, skeptical. Wanting to test the waters for their eventual conversion to godliness, he said, “Do you want to be washed holy? Because I know the teachings of Matyu and Luk.” They chewed ginger and he could smell it on their breath. They said nothing but quietly packed their things, avoiding eye contact. “Will you come to see the rest?” Argus repeated. Still no response. The instruments were put away and the ornaments wrapped in cloth. The island traders disbanded and Owen watched them descend the hillside, their sniggering restrained until they rounded the first switchback.

  They set up camp under a gibbous moon while an expedition of cats trotted down off the caldera. They mewed for scraps and lay in C’s by the fire. Argus tried to chase a few of them off with a brandished stick but they started then wheeled, circling back to their original positions. The smell of baking fish and breadfruit wafted down from the village ovens while Argus heated up some beans, salt onions, and coffee. Owen laid out the rest of the goods on a tarpaulin. He would not be caught off guard again. The Tikalia seemed fickle and skittish to him and he placed a douceur of rice with as much care as the steel fishhooks or the meerschaum pipes acquired from the forecastle of the burning coal ship. Argus lit oil pots of citronella to keep the few mosquitoes at bay and they ate standing, arranging and rearranging the articles of trade until they were satisfied.

  After dinner, Argus read aloud, this time from Kidnapped. Owen had always been fond of Stevenson—he was part of the reason he first went to sea. The letters that Stevenson published in the Tribune years earlier had suggested that cruising the South Seas was harrowing but filled with pleasures. One account described the author’s ship picking its way through a bedlam of coral reefs and atolls for days but the reader never lost sight of the green mountain-islands cowled in cloud or forgot the ocean-river of the Trades. After a visit to the leper colony on Molokai in Hawaii, Stevenson sent a gift to the disfigured children he’d played croquet with—a $300 Westermeyer grand piano with instructions to the Mother Superior in charge of their care to administer music lessons. This had always stayed with Owen, both the thoughtful, extravagant gift and the fact of his visit to this far-flung place. Stevenson, he knew, had gone to the Pacific on the pretext of his ailing lungs, had brought along wife and stepson, mother and maid, but what drove him to shake hands with lepers, to envision them playing sonatas in their hermitage? What made him sail to the remotest islands on earth? Failing health, surely, but also, it came to Owen now in the coals of the fire, a kind of intractability. He shuffled his family from one island to the next, looking for an idyll, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died at age forty-four. Clearly, the isolation and weather hadn’t cured him.

  Owen knew himself to be capable of such relentlessness. There were few islands more remote than Tikalia and in two days they were headed home, but Owen couldn’t help wondering what lay further afield. Was there an island remaining that no white man had visited? He scoffed at his ruminations, thinking them no better than Jethro wanting to haul spiny sea monsters from the deep and give them Latin names. As he listened to the missionized boy read Kidnapped in his butler’s English, with the righteous lilt of scripture, he couldn’t help wishing for communion with something wholly dark and primordial before his rebirth into civil society and his bearing up into marriage. Argus was a proxy for what had brought him here outside of a paycheck—a chance to step beyond. He’d always known the periphery of life, ever since his father and he had watched theatergoers on State Street as if they were as strange and exotic in their frock coats and gowns as Tapiro pygmies. Objects—found, excavated, traded, sometimes stolen—had been his way to bridge the gap. Or was it a way of forging the gap? He couldn’t be sure. No man is an island was a phrase the nuns at the Tabernacle School for Boys were fond of repeating to the orphans and he continued to doubt the veracity of the sentiment. Almost twenty years later, still prone to romanticizing his own sense of isolation, he’d failed to discover that the quote belonged to John Donne and not the Bible.

  Some hours later, the Tikalia traders descended to the beach. They led an ancient piebald mare down from the mountainside, a hackamore of woven green saplings around its neck. It hobbled forward, unshod and wary, its flanks painted vermilion and pale in the moonlight. Instead of being laden with goods the horse moved unencumbered, strands of sennit and cowries braided to its mane. Owen was surprised to see the men carry the trade goods on their own backs instead of using the horse. They patted her rump tenderly as she hoofed across the sand, fetlocks wrapped in tapa. Was it a clan god painted and decorated for festivals? Did the old mare live in the valley by the volcanic lake, half blind and dim-witted, sequestered like a mendicant until she was bridled and led down under a full moon to dispense oracles? Owen stood and opened his hands in a gesture of welcome. The traders brought the horse forward and the cats looked up momentarily from their fireside naps. The mare proceeded to shit in the sand and nobody spoke.

  The goods were laid out as before but this time the traders showed no interest in examining the visitors’ spoils. They crouched in the sand and held their hands to the fire. The horse was allowed to wander along the beach, its hackamore untied.

  “Tell them we have everything on display now,” Owen told Argus.

  Argus did so. “They have decided to welcome us as guests.”

  “What a relief,” Owen said, sarcastically.

  “They have brought the chief for this side of the island.”

  Owen looked at the man leaning forward on his haunches— he was taller and older than the others. Owen had wrongly suspected this was a chiefless society, some egalitarian chaos ringed by coral. Perhaps the chief had balked from coming forward earlier because it meant claiming them, bearing responsibility for the vagabonds.

  Argus said, “He would like us to drink kava with them.” A moment later, he added, “There is a mission ban on kava so I cannot drink it.”

  Nodding at the delegation, Owen said, “Do whatever it takes to make the trade.”

  Argus went quiet and stirred the fire.

  The chief took out a bundle of dried kava root, removed a stick, and passed it to Owen.

  “What do I do?” Owen said, shrugging in self-mockery.

  The chief chewed the tip of the root and, after a minute, swilled a stream of dark saliva into a wooden bowl at his side. He handed the carved bowl to Owen and waited for him to do likewise. Owen took the bitter root in his mouth, chewed it to the count of sixty, and trailed a line of nut-brown spittle into the bowl. The taste was about what he expected—woody, bitter, tannic. The roots were handed around and each man spat into the bowl until it was brimming. It was then that Owen realized that he would be drinking other men’s saliva in his new role as sanctioned guest. The bowl came to him and he drank with his eyes closed. Now he could taste the peppery root and the swill of spittle gave it a fermented reek and bite on the tongue. It was akin, he felt sure, to chewing wood from old doors and then sprinkling the mouth with Chinese pepper. He watched Argus take a tepid sip at the rim of the bowl, his jaw set against all heathen
ry. After several sips Owen felt the dull narcotic rise through his system like a pale balloon. It started with a gelatinous feeling in his legs. He nodded appreciatively and stirred the fire even though it didn’t need it. The traders produced clay pipes and began to smoke tobacco. Owen rolled several cigarettes and handed them out. They passed an amused ten minutes watching a clansman try to light his cigarette by the campfire. He singed his dreadlocks and eyebrows.

  The Tikalia chief half pidginized something and Argus clarified. “He asked whether you can hear the ocean from your land?”

  Owen said, “We have a lake almost as big as an ocean. But we are very far from the true ocean.”

  “How far?” the chief asked.

  “From here to New Guinea.”

  They all considered this in their pipe bowls and in the red eyes of their cigarettes. “What is in between?” the chief asked.

  The man’s face was smeared with something like kohl and tattooed beneath the eyes—delicate lines of cross-hatching—and in the smoke-filled gloaming Owen thought it looked like fishnet stockings. He could feel the distortion of his own mind in the afterbite of the kava, some kind of playfulness he knew was not native to his mold of thought. He licked his lips, accepted that he had not changed his clothes or bathed in five days, thought briefly and a little guiltily of Jethro in the Cullion’s hold and how he had led the heir to believe he was coming ashore, all of it passing in an instant, before saying, “Land. Great gardens of beans and corn as tall as a man.”

  The chief puckered with amazement. “We belong to the sea,” he said. “When a man has something on his face we say the seaward cheek or the landward cheek. This is all we know. The tides and the big winds. We can teach you these things.”

  Argus said in a quiet voice, “I can teach you gospel songs to help protect the island from hurricanes.” In his inebriated state his pidgin came out with a slight Scottish brogue.