The kinsmen ignored him. They had heard about and dismissed the clayskin god long ago. “We want to know the names.”
Argus said, “This is Owen Graves and I am Argus Niu.”
One of them said, “No. We want to know names of the big-fella’s place. We change names depending on the houses we live in and the gardens we work. A man can have ten names during his lifetime. His name changes when his father dies.”
Thus began a brief lesson on Tikalia nomenclature and the rules for naming children. It was places, not people, that bore permanent title. Men belonged to houses and gardens and reefs. Children were named after streams and trailheads. And every Tikalia word sang with embodied meaning so that the word for wheel was itself a sonic revolution—takiri-karika. Argus knew the term for this was onomatopoeia but kept this recognition to himself. Next came an introductory course on Tikalia obscenities and curses, and the clansmen all agreed that may your father eat filth was the best and most flexible form of profanity. They asked Owen to say the names of places he knew and he began with the names of American states and presidents but soon got down to the curbstone poetry of Chicago streets—Adams, Monroe, Jackson, Polk, Van Buren, Madison, La Salle—so many of them named after men of note, ancestors and patriarchs now that he thought of it.
“Do you name your children after the big chiefs?”
“Yes. I know three Madisons and two Monroes.”
They all appraised the dying fire. A few Tikalia legends were offered to the flames at this point, one about the woman who gave birth to an eel, another about the ocean-dwelling ancestors who roamed the seafloor and kept sharks as doglike pets. Owen, still emboldened by kava, thought of Chicago’s finest myths, of the slang fables George Ade put in his newspaper column—Once upon a Time there was a slim Girl with a Forehead which was Shiny and Protuberant, like a Barlett Pear, or Once there was a Bluff whose Long Suit was Glittering Generalities, or the baseball fan who arrived home every summer evening to tell his wife that the Giants made the Colts look like a lot of Colonial Dames playing Bean Bag in a Weedy Lot back of an Orphan Asylum, and they ought to put a Trained Nurse on Third, and the Dummy at Right needed an Automobile, and the New Man couldn’t jump out of a Boat and hit the Water, and the Short-Stop wouldn’t be able to pick up a Ball if it was handed to him on a Platter with Water Cress around it . . . Owen knew there was no way to translate any of this. The stuff of city legends was as inscrutable to an outsider as Oriental philosophy.
A moment of silence passed.
The chief said, “Are those all your goods or do you have more in the big canoe? When is it coming back for you?”
“In two days. This is all we have to trade. From here we are going home.”
“To the land with the lake as big as an ocean?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have things from other islands?”
“Yes. Weapons and handicrafts.”
The chief said, “We need more feathers for making weapons for other islands. The long-tails have killed many of our birds and they have stopped flying here. Rats or birds. This is the choice we have.”
“We can get you more feathers,” Owen said. He was thinking of Jethro’s dead-bird aviary in the orlop.
“And the kanaka. Is he going back to the lake? His tribal scar says he is Poumetan. One of the great canoe voyagers and our cousin.”
Owen nodded. The Tikalia looked at Argus’s shark-toothed wrist and then at his face with a mix of admiration and pity.
The chief gestured to one of the men to bring forward a woven saddlebag. It was set beside the chief and he produced a rusting typewriter and laid it on the sand. A sheaf of papers was produced and a list of typed names. From what Owen could tell it was the names of visiting and wrecked ships, their crew itemized, some with an X beside their Christian names.
“Who typed these?” Owen asked, pointing to the X’s.
The chief ignored him as if this were a rhetorical question. “I want you to masin the names in my clan. The chiefs of the island and also the garden and house names.” He moved the typewriter toward Owen and stood, preparing to dictate his lineage. Owen wondered what use a genealogy of typed names was to tribesmen who couldn’t read but nonetheless complied. He took the typewriter in his lap and began to hunt and peck his way through an incantation of chiefs and dwellings, the ribbon dull and powdery with old ink, the headman circling the fire with his hands behind his back. The others corrected him if he misspoke or skipped a generation. Argus looked on, slightly appalled that Owen didn’t know how to play the typewriter keys the way the Reverend Mister had taught him. Owen’s fingers halted across the keys.
After an hour and six typed pages, the chief told the other clansmen to fetch the horse and bring it forward. The mare hobbled over and lay again in the sand, its eyes filmed with cataract. It was breathing heavily, ringed by cats. If they thought he was going to trade for this decrepit animal they were sadly mistaken. Surely the gift of recorded genealogy was worth something. He was just about to have Argus convey this idea when the chief said, “We have been keeping one of your gods for you.”
Owen double-checked the translation. The chief squatted to caress the haggard mare on the flank. “Many years ago the animal swam ashore after a shipwreck. We did not know the word horse then and called her the big hog. Now we know. We have kept her beautiful and fed her but she is old and of no use to us. She is worse than a dog and it’s time you took her away. We will give you everything on the barkcloth in return for your goods and if you will take the animal from this place. We think the horse god is ready to die and it will be bad luck for her to become a ghost here. We have poured the kava libations to the ancestors and asked for this.”
Owen saw that the typewritten names and the ferrying of the horse were the real asking price. The traders had little interest in what he’d assembled on the tarpaulin. They wanted some feathers for fletching and little else. He told Argus to agree to the terms of trade but insisted on walking them through his inventory. As the traders loaded their woven bags with zinc pails and snuff boxes and rifles, with a hundred trinkets and tools, he told them that the kerosene lanterns would draw many more flying fish from the waters at night. They nodded politely, said they’d already tried this but ran out of fuel, and took their leave. They packed their typewriter in its bag and left the god-horse on the beachhead in the custody of their welcomed guests. For a full fifteen minutes Owen ran his fingers over the bartered goods, taking inventory of his boon through the eyes of Hale Gray, keeping the thought of removing the horse from the island as distant as possible. Terrapin’s gall at having to transport a glue horse would be a revelation. Finally he turned and saw the mare strain to its feet, saw the whites of its walled eyes in the moonlit night, then watched it follow in the direction of the vanished kinsmen. Argus followed behind and led it back by the fire. They tethered it in a copse of trees where it could feed on tufted grasses, but the animal brayed all night like a god bereft of worship.
25.
It was dusk already and Jethro—still fuming from being left on the ship—came into the apprentice quarters to finish out the workday. He’d spent most of the daylight mounting insects and reading about the fertilization of orchids in the orlop. But the fug below had made him qualmish and he’d come above in search of fresh air. He opened the cabin porthole and spread his books and blotting paper on his iron cot. He lit the slush lamp and it rocked and swayed with a jaundiced flame. He tried to pin a brown beetle but, after three attempts, pricked his snakebitten finger so that a dot of blood broke to the surface. He punched the wall in a burst of anger and momentarily enjoyed the camouflaging pain in his left fist before the finger reasserted itself. His mind was not right. The taste of sulfur and iron was the first indication that he’d placed his bloody finger in his mouth. He thought he could taste the poison. He turned back to his woefully pinned beetles. How could any naturalist be an expert in ornithology, entomology, conchology, and all the rest of it? He was a dabble
r at best, he thought. A tourist of the sciences and arts. Where was that resolute self he’d glimpsed in the early days of passage? The poems of ascent. Did every man come to sea in search of some figment?
The Karlsbad pins were too long and flimsy—German skewers where an English short pin was required. And anyway, when pinned through the thorax of a Hymenoptera specimen—an ant, wasp, or bee—the pins were eventually overcome by verdigris, corroding with the secretion of the insect’s bodily acids. Or maybe it was Coleoptera and Diptera specimens that turned the pins gangrenous. If only he’d brought along short, japanned pins for this particular use. His preparations now seemed hasty. At least he’d had the foresight to visit a Chicago tinsmith and commission field containers of various dimensions. This ensured the separation of insects by size and species; otherwise the bigger ones devoured the smaller ones within hours. And he’d taken the time to make a cyanide bottle, which he picked up now, removing the cork. The ingenuity of this killing device could not be overestimated—a two-ounce quinine bottle with cyanide of potassium in the bottom and mixed with plaster of Paris. The word Paris made him think of organdy ribbons and bunting and he imagined for a second that cyanide had penetrated his body via the pinpricked finger, saw a flashing vision of his own sea burial, then somehow thought of Keats writing tubercular poetry in Rome, before the briny taste of his own blood brought him back to the cabin. He removed his finger from his mouth and held a vibrating honeybee with a pair of tweezers. He placed it slowly into the cyanide chamber. If you left them in the bottle too long the yellows of the Hymenoptera turned reddish and were ruined for the display case.
Through his open porthole he heard the seamen on watch talking about their exploits with women. The mating habits of hominids, he thought. Harvey McCallister, with his brawny shoulders and clipped Irish accent, was talking up a sexual typhoon. The recounting of bestial acts on foreign shores. Coital plunder north and south of the Line. The ravaged divas of Asia Minor and so on. Jethro remembered the surprise in Harvey’s eyes as he’d socked him in the jaw, sending him to the planks; he would have liked to frame that incredulous grimace behind glass. He set the insects and blotting paper aside and turned to Darwin’s The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects. But instead of being a distraction from the escalating bawdiness outside his porthole it seemed to augment the general slant of talk. Darwin sometimes gave over to botanical descriptions verging on the sexual; more than pithy aphorisms and the refrain of Nature’s beautiful contrivances, he spoke of the orchid’s surging labellum with its secretions of nectar, of the way the flower courted flying insects and trapped them in its darkly folded lips.
One of the seamen said, “Tonight’s the night. Odds are six to one in favor. Which way are you going to bet, Harvey?”
“I already bet.”
“Which way?”
“That the kanaka gets her sails reefed tonight. Five dollars on landfall credit. Captain’s been circling for weeks but I see it in his eyes. What with the brother gone and the trader, too. Full moon tonight, lads. With a bit of luck we’ll hear them howling like alley cats sparkin it hot.”
They moved amidships and Jethro couldn’t bring himself to turn another page; suddenly he was holding in his shaking hands a pornographic treatise on orchids. Something had been happening all this time. The corruption infecting the ship, radiating from the stateroom just as poison issued from his own rotting finger. A kind of savage lust had taken hold, blooming like verdigris on a straight pin. Who would take a stand to protect the native girl’s station? Here was a chance, he thought now, for resoluteness, to become the figment evoked in those early poems he’d written in the crosstrees. Wasn’t character ultimately a question of action? History was full of fledgling men who reached across the way with a single act of defiance. He waited until he heard the seamen go about the business of the anchored watch and went below to the orlop. Unsteadily, he lit the lamps and unwrapped his collecting pistol from its muslin. He loaded two .32-caliber shells, each filled with the mixture of grade D American wood powder and buckshot that was ideal for larger birds, for hawks and eagles and herons.
Terrapin played a sonata with all his big racehorse heart, his ham-knuckled fingers lighter and quicker than they had any business being. Malini danced in slow circles, eyes closed, moving through a cloud of ambergris. The perfume was a present from the captain—from the dark of a whale’s stomach he’d told her—and she was wearing somebody’s dead mother’s frock, something red and too big, but she didn’t care. For dinner she’d had bacon and pudding and tinned cherries. Terrapin watched her dance, nodding in appreciation, swelling beneath his cotton sarong. He stopped playing and handed her the jug of rum. She drank up, like she really meant it.
Somehow they ended up on the piano bench and he was teaching her “Chopsticks” or something else for children. He watched her fill with girlish delight as she tapped it out. Looking at the relief of her breasts against the neckline of the frock, her slender, sun-bronzed arms, he said, “Here’s church if you want it.” Malini shrugged, moving her fingers into an atonal scale. He stood up, nodding again, providing encouragement for the two-fingered playing. Standing behind her he looked down into the dimming abandon of her brown cleavage, his calloused hands resting on her shoulders. He began rubbing her shoulders while she chopped away at the black sharps and she angled her neck to one side, the piano slurring a little. He inched a hand down her neck, running over the lamplit gloss of her collarbone, the tinkling still in motion. It wasn’t until he had a breast cupped in one hand that the piano stopped. It went dead silent in the stateroom—the hush of all those Bedouin draperies and carpets. Malini swallowed against the crook of his arm, against the tattooed list of begats and halfbloods. The pause that followed was complicated. His hand went limp and he said in a whisper, “You’re a lovely thing . . .” She sighed and played a handful of bass notes to indicate that her allegiance was to the music, and the piano wires were still humming dark when Jethro Gray burst into the cabin with his long-barreled pistol. Terrapin straightened and let his arms go loose. The naturalist was red-eyed and rabid with something. The captain saw that he was clearly out of his head.
Terrapin took a step back from the piano bench and Malini adjusted her dress, face down. “Steady on, lovelace, let’s ease into this together.”
Jethro advanced, the pistol aimed at Terrapin’s chest. The bulbous finger was biblical in its fury and proportions. He said, “Everyone has turned a blind eye, until now. The girl is coming with me.”
Terrapin set his jaw. “This is mutinous, understand that. You have entered the master’s stateroom without permission, wielding a firearm. This won’t look good in the log, peanut.”
“I’m tired of the way this ship is being captained.”
“And do you intend to relieve me of my office, Mr. Gray? Because if you intend a mutiny you better find a man who won’t come with me in the whaleboats. Those men would have shoved a golden rivet up your arse if it wasn’t for me. Ungrateful fucking dandy! I will wring blood from your spleen for this little trick. Mark my words.” Terrapin’s voice wavered in anger.
Jethro kept his voice low. “This is not mutiny. I intend to protect the native girl in the orlop for the duration of the passage home.”
Malini could feel humiliation burning in her cheeks. She took a step back, furious that her brother had left her behind in this mess. Her choice was between a lecherous old man, who could probably be persuaded to keep his hands to himself, or a ghost of a man who now stood with a gun, blinking wildly.
“Go on then, love,” Terrapin said to her.
Malini picked up her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. She petted the sleeping dog and went to stand beside the skinny bird-killer, her eyes down. Terrapin smiled at her and said, “Don’t worry we’ll work this all out in a jiffy.” Jethro backed out of the stateroom, gun muzzle raised and pointed, Malini at his side. Terrapin didn’t bother following. He took his time putting on hi
s favorite peacoat and belting a pair of trousers before going to consult the first mate in his cabin. He told the bleary-eyed Mr.Pym that he wanted to discuss the strange and supernatural pleasure he would take in Jethro Gray’s downfall. It was like a prayer on his lips, he said, brimming with a vengeance so pure it was holy.
All the way down the long run of companionways Jethro kept telling Malini to hush. But she wasn’t making any noise. A few sailors noticed the pistol and backed away. He flashed the weapon through the underworld of the ship, spinning crabwise. He grabbed Malini by the arm and led her into the orlop, barricading the door with workbenches and sawhorses and the wooden faldstools the carpenter had made him. Malini hadn’t been in here since her recovery from the lancing of the boil and it reeked of dead birds and lizards. There were stuffed and hanging corpses, white cotton bulging from their mouths, frogs limp in briny jars, ferns pressed and mounted, jellyfish bobbing with the ship’s rocking sway. A horned beetle, pinned in place but still alive, was trying to scratch its way up a sheet of white blotting paper.
He made her a bed of wadded cotton on the floor and smoothed it out with his hands. The gun was still at his side when he handed her a drink of brandy. She knew she was still drunk from the captain’s rum, could feel it buzzing away in her arms and legs, but she took the drink because all she wanted now was sleep. It tasted funny, more bitter than the captain’s bottle. She drank it down and went to lie on the cotton bed. She wanted the dog in her arms and wished her brother would return at once. The wooden cave of dead things started to move all around and she couldn’t feel her body. She closed her eyes and thought of treehouses draped in wild flowers.
Jethro watched her on the floor, her legs crossed at the knees, the dress slightly splayed in the rear. She’d been at the point of nervous prostration, he told himself, and the laudanum in the brandy would ensure a restful sleep. It would be a long night and he would stand guard by the door. He sat by the bed on a stool and alternated his gaze between the blocked companionway and the bed. He listened for the sound of footsteps, for Terrapin’s cavalry, the gun square across his legs. After some time he dozed off and woke with a start, a single lamp burning. Still nothing. He got up and placed a glass beaker on top of the furniture blockade so that it would announce a forced entry. He took up the lamp, quietly removed his shoes, and lay down on the bed next to her. The dress was unbecoming and he draped her legs with a square of blanket. Her breathing was easy and light. He thought of all the anthropological measurements he’d penned in his leather note-book—the circumference of her head, the incline of her forehead, the breadth of her mouth. He thought of the way Nature kept receding. This game of advance and retreat kept him off balance. What was it to know a thing with absolute certainty? A poem allowed doubt but natural history required something declarative. He ran his hands across the plane of her back, scientifically, across the dark skin that overlaid an armature of bone no different to his own. He blew out the lamp and felt something mount within him in the tallow fumes. It was so quiet beneath the waveline. The ocean pressed against the ship’s gently groaning ribs. He thought of Darwin and his orchids full of nectar, of the proposition that a flower’s extravagant beauty served nothing but insect courtship. In the dark he felt invisible, unmoored. Slow-wheeling thoughts moved through the submarine dark, loosed, somehow, from his own mind. His hands edged beneath the blanket and he searched out everything that was obscure and unknown, everything that Nature was keeping at bay.
Bright and Distant Shores Page 31