Bright and Distant Shores

by Dominic Smith

  Argus saw his own reflection in the glass-fronted cabinet— his dolorous face above the celluloid collar. With each step in the stairwell he had tried to descend into a rage, to loosen the grip of everything measured, watchful, and Christian. Now, standing there with his grandfathers’ weapons in hand, he felt more sadness than anger—for his barren sister and her ordeal, for the man watching him who was clearly out of his mind, for the Poumetan clans who had crossed over into oblivion. There was also, running below that mournfulness, a feeling of utter desolation, as if he’d been emptied out where he stood. His sister, his island, his own boyhood self, they had all been defiled, each in their way. The heir, his sister’s rapist, floated in the reflection of the glass, then he saw his own stricken face once more. He was stranded in thought, rowing between islands in his mind. Finally, he said, “I wish to take these back.” He hadn’t considered much beyond these words and they hung in the room for a long time. The club and hatchet were in one hand; the dagger and shark-tooth haft were in the other. Argus began for the doorway, having no idea what he would do on the other side.

  Jethro sat up in the big leather chair. “I’m afraid I cannot allow that. Those are my father’s and were acquired fairly through trade.”

  Argus stopped and turned to look directly at Jethro. The windows behind the desk shook with the wind and were bloated with nighttime. “My sister wants your blood spilled and it would be right punishment, but I cannot bring myself to do it. Perhaps I am a coward . . . but if you try to stop me, sir, I will bring bloodshed upon you.” These words had the tone of an invocation and there was something biblical in their quiet menace. Argus heard them as if from another room. He had no idea what he hoped to accomplish— they would come after him, repossess the weapons, toss him and Malini out into the street, perhaps put him in jail. But he wanted the certainty of the objects, the possession of that distant time. The heir stood, buttoned his coat, and walked toward him.

  It came to Jethro, as he crossed to the display case, that he’d been outmaneuvered. He’d been preparing to barter for his life, but here the savage was asking for something he didn’t have the right to give away. He stopped a few feet away and slowly placed a conciliatory hand on the native’s wrist, just inches from the hatchet and club. They both stared down at his pale right hand, all the fingers intact, the knuckles whitening. There was no resistance, then a jolt as the boy tried to pull his arm free. Neither of them said anything. It occurred to Jethro that neither of them wanted sloppy combat, that even though he could poleaxe a man in the boxing ring, under the auspices of Queensberry rules, he had no use for a common scuffle. He tightened his grip but again the native resisted. For what seemed an eternity their arms yanked back and forth, the tomahawk whirring, the native emitting little grunts—ridiculously, it seemed to Jethro, they were like two men on either end of a crosscut saw, trying to fell a tree. Then a burst of bright pain shot up his right arm and he winced as he looked down at his arm—it was flayed open, the shark-tooth haft augered into the flesh above his cufflinked wrist. They both watched the welling of blood as Argus pulled the haft free. With that terrible extraction, Jethro felt opened to the air itself, as if the brimming world had rushed into the dozen incisions. He dropped to his knees with his mouth open.

  Argus watched Jethro kneeling on the floor. There was no trembling in the hand that held the haft and the dagger and there was still no anger. He had simply brought his arm down. The action had seemed entirely separate from him, as if he’d watched a gate swing into place from a high window. His shirtsleeve was spattered with blood. He set the weapons down, reached inside the display case, and yanked free a swath of velvet. Kneeling beside the heir, he wrapped it snug around the wound, applying the same pressure he’d learned during his first-aid classes with the mission schoolteacher, keeping the arm raised, the fingertips pink and warm. Argus stood again and gathered up the weapons. The heir looked up at him wordlessly, blinking and cross-legged on the floor now, as if he were waiting patiently for something else to happen. Argus went out into the elevator lobby, the weapons under one arm. It was only when he was in the darkened stairwell that he understood fully what he’d done, saw himself out in the streets under the cover of night, the savage in the celluloid collar, moving down Michigan Avenue with a tomahawk and a shark-tooth club in his hands. He let out a gasp and it echoed down the cavernous stairwell, into the precipice that ran the length of the building. Then, steadying himself, he took up the thread of prayer, already pleading for forgiveness as he began the long descent.

  VIII

  CENTURY’S END

  43.

  Ada Rose Graves, named for Owen’s mother. Her first winter and the storms came off the lake a few days before Christmas 1899. Owen did everything he could to keep the house warm but with all those windows she vented heat and he was enslaved to the woodpile. But he liked this bracing contact with the elements—swinging the axe through the cold, cleaving a cord of firewood every other day it seemed like. A northerly gust felled one of the knobby orchard trees in the fall and the house had smelt like apple wood ever since. Their first Christmas as a family and Margaret would arrive on Christmas Eve with her digestives and tonics. She’d lend the occasion a sense of personal sacrifice, the way they imprisoned her in a Pullman sleeper since Boston, all of it endured so she could hold her granddaughter in the flesh. Owen had half a mind to leave the web-faced effigy right beside the fireplace to keep Margaret on her best behavior. He raised the axe, let it fall, putting his arms and back into it at the last moment to drive the split. The wood let out a breathy punch, a sneeze of sawdust. He stacked the wood into the waiting barrow after each cut, even though he knew this to be inefficient. Porter Graves did it this way because he was impatient for a neat pile and didn’t like splintered logs lying at his feet. We carry dead men in our hands, Owen thought, lining up another log on its end.

  He came upon the house with his barrow of wood and a sadness roused through him. In the lighted window he could see Adelaide and the baby in the rocker. Swaddled in her favorite blanket, Ada Rose was eight months old. It was time for her afternoon nap. The child had to be rocked to sleep every day at three or she would run them ragged all night. Malini stood by his wife with a cup of tea. She was a godsend, like family. More than a nanny, she added to the rhythm of the house. From her green-painted room at the top of the stairs, next to the nursery, she descended each morning cheerful and hungry. She was a terrible cook and they did their best to keep her out of the kitchen. They fed her pancakes until her eyes rolled back in her head and then she would take up the baby for part of the day while Adelaide attended charity board meetings and organized benefits. Malini could be seen carrying Ada around in the plush blanket she took a year to knit, so big that the swaddled creature had the privileged air of a pasha being conveyed between palace rooms. When Ada crawled down the hallway, toward the stairs, Malini was always ready and waiting. She had a sixth sense for the baby’s intrepid curiosity and would think nothing of reading aloud the same picture book five times in a row, each recital prompted by the baby’s slurred utterance that meant again.

  What plunged Owen into a few moments of melancholy, standing outside the window to his house under a bruised afternoon sky, was not only the tenderness of the scene—mother rocking child, devoted and adopted aunty standing nearby—but the thought of the vanished brother. He might have been a seminarian by now, deep into his pious studies. Owen had already spent months searching for Argus and vowed to continue until he was found. He’d ventured out into the tenements and docks with a Tribune photograph in hand, chased black men down the street on the thinnest premise—a similar build, a certain straightness of posture. None of it had come to anything. In the Back of the Yards he’d gone traipsing through the clamor and squalor, calling out the brother’s name. Near the stockyards he’d watched the faces emerging from the slaughterhouses at dusk, the Poles and Slavs almost violent with the day’s jokes, anything to rid them of the bloody toil, but th
e few black faces held nothing like the boy’s high cheekbones and implacable eyes. Owen levied the same persistence toward finding the brother that he’d used in the Pacific— Argus was an elusive object waiting to be found.

  He briefly convinced himself that Argus had hopped a series of barges and freighters through the Great Lakes, stowed away down the St. Lawrence, leveled out in New York and was living incognito, with gypsies, in the Bowery. Maybe he’d grown a beard to throw the police off. At least it wasn’t murder they had him for; he would hang for that. Or maybe he’d gone west, stolen away in a train’s mail compartment and struck out for the islands again from San Francisco. For all Owen knew, he was back in Melanesia giving Mass from a bamboo pulpit at this very moment. It was hollow comfort. Wherever he’d ended up, Argus would not be living in peace. He was on the run or in hiding. A praying fugitive.

  Malini wouldn’t talk about her brother’s attack on Jethro or what had transpired the last time she’d seen him. It was in the past, she said, and she had no use for it. But Owen saw the grief she carried for her brother. He sometimes found her in the attic looking out at the lake, sobbing quietly into a handkerchief. Maybe he was dead. That was another cruel possibility. He’d run out into the city without money or connections, recognizable to lunchroom waiters and rooftop sightseers. It would not have been easy to find his way. Owen stacked the wood by the back door and wheeled the barrow out to the shed. The workshop served as the office for his construction business. He’d kept the scrapyard for storage but now it held more building supplies and restoration hardware than artifacts.

  He could imagine going to sea again but it seemed a very distant prospect. With wife and child and days spent unearthing the promise of old houses, the heat had gone out of the idea. Some Friday nights, the workday completed and all the tools locked up at the scrapyard, he went with his men to one of the saloons in Little Cheyenne. Amid the din and inebriate jostling, he would fall back on his old habit of reticence in the face of wild good cheer. He stayed several beers behind the carpenters and masons, chimed in only when he had a particularly lacerating quip, and was always the first to leave. But these hours spent in rowdy communion with his men gave him a sense of possibility, that other lives run parallel to his own, to one so staid and predictable. But there was never a moment when he wished for anything different. He would trundle home, gently drunk, and find that the whole house had gone to bed. He would sit in the parlor with a drink, grateful and speculative, alternating his gaze between his mother’s daguerreotyped face of smoky pearl and the grimacing effigy. Two different ways of honoring the dead, he would think. One suspended the departed as a million drops of mercury, capturing likeness as a memento of the past, while the other reminded the living that the dead had never really left, that they were too curious and meddlesome to turn away.

  44.

  Just weeks before the wireless system was due to be tested, the upper floors were still stripped bare, the curtain walls removed. Canadian winds keened against the steel frame in the late December bluster. Birds nested in the pockets of dead space between floors and the construction workers had to flush them out with broom handles each day. The new windows on the floors below were rollered to perfection, so translucent that the girls in the typing pool sometimes forgot they were in an office. They sat high above the lake, swimming in ether, typing out a policyholder’s fate, the dividends of sudden decline.

  The renovations of the upper floors were behind schedule. After the final report had been delivered by the city panel, Hale decided to exceed its recommendations and mandates. He wanted to woo Chicago back like a jilted lover. Not only did he replace the windows and square up the foundation, but he embarked on a completely new design for the top two floors. The foundation would not support the addition of more floors—conceding the title of highest commercial perch to First Manhattan Life & Casualty—but he had a new architect re-envisage the offices for senior executives. A public company required a forward-looking image, a sense of strategic mission. The executive offices would wrap around a central area where the entire city was platted out like a giant chessboard. Each neighborhood would be rendered in miniature, by the block, some of it painted and some of it modeled from wood. Landmarks and historic churches would receive to-scale renditions. It would be like the view from the roof, only more manageable. It would be a battlescape, a campaign field. The lake, an expanse of blue paint, would run to the east of the tracts and in this way remind his senior executives of their own limits. It would also remind them that the First Equitable still offered maritime coverage with a good margin. On this giant grid of the city they would track the sale and renewal of policies, using colored squares to denote activity. Hale could come down from his own office and, at a glance, know the state of affairs—the greening upswing in the Near North, the middling blue of the Near West, the red, unprotected barrens in the Far South.

  As for his own suite, he had ordered the removal of the display cases, all of it going into storage, and requested the construction of a private apartment. There were nights when he could not face going home to the house on Prairie Avenue. Jethro’s private nurses did their best to keep him out of harm’s way but the heir moved from one crazed scheme to another. One day last week he’d tried to excavate the backyard, telling Hale at dinner that there was a Potawatomi burial mound beneath the hedgerows. His right arm was near useless after the attack so the thought of Jethro plying a shovel and trowel made it even harder for Hale to bear. Eventually they would have to find a rest home for Jethro, but for now Hale’s wife wouldn’t hear of it. She was rearing a child again, a precocious boy with an eye for bird feathers and honeybees.

  The rooftop, of course, would be a recreation area for employees and, pending the results of the upcoming tests, an outpost for wireless Marconi telegraphy. Hale hoped to have the first Marconi station in the city, sending out bulletins and orders across the voids above La Salle, even farther, perhaps, traversing countless rooftops and the jungle of electrical wires. Hale envisioned the radio signals as a natural complement to the beacon at the pinnacle of the clock tower. That perennial light beckoned to the flock and he hoped the radio signals would find their way into the symbolic mind of the city. In the small hours, wakeful in bed, he imagined the yellow beam of light pulsing with radio waves—signals of distress, weather warnings, orders to sell wheat or buy pork, pithy farewells to lovers, the city’s entire halting anthem.

  That was, if they ever finished the renovations. The unions and combines had their teeth in and he was lucky to get a full day’s work without some complaint about bathroom facilities or meal breaks. And recently he’d asked them to work in shifts around the clock. The construction workers responded by pissing off the side of the building in protest. They tracked mud into his lobby. Used to be that night construction was a natural part of things, that all winter long the derricks and hammers went at it. Now construction workers earned more than insurance clerks and were twice as demanding. Benny Boy, recently promoted to underwriting clerk, earned less than a fledgling carpenter. It seemed wrong, like a misplaced allegiance, but Hale would pay only what the market demanded. He could feel the new century in the offing and it reeked of self-regard.

  On New Year’s Eve, despite the ongoing construction, the small event went ahead. Just before midnight the Marconi wireless system underwent its final tests. There were two messages to be sent from the rooftop of the First Equitable—one to the Tribune Building and another to a steamer bearing two miles north on Lake Michigan. Professor Tabits, from the University of Chicago, had set up his transmission apparatus above the clock tower. A zinc ball topped the flagstaff and an insulated wire connected it to the top floor. Amid the bared steel and renovations, the professor had placed a makeshift telegraphy station. He sat behind the little wooden desk holding the induction coil and battery, exposed on all sides, and prepared to tap out the same Morse signals to both destinations, sending dashes and dots out into frozen space. A zinc ball and receiving ap
paratus waited on the steamer and at the top of the Tribune Building. They would send their own messages as well. The waiting crowd was small—a few patriots with tiny flags, a manager from the Western Union Telegraph Company, a reporter from the Tribune, foremen and telegraphers from a few railroad companies. Hale had outfitted them with logoed mittens and scarves and they waited amid the exposed steel as the professor tended his apparatus. Hale hoped to win their regard if he could send the first wireless message of 1900. He turned to them on his heels, braced against a headwind, told them it should be any moment now.

  They heard the clock tower gearing up and then it opened its baritone chords all at once, announcing midnight and the new century. Some champagne was poured, though it threatened to freeze the flutes. The visitors drank a hurried toast to prosperity but were fast losing their patience. There was a lot of foot-shuffling and wringing of hands going on. The Western Union manager had frost in his beard. Hale tapped the professor on the shoulder for an update but the telegraphy expert raised a hand to fend him off. Hale, stalling, sermonized on the new age.