May we be the chosen generation, friends. Let us send wireless messages around the globe and bring down the horizon. I’m a firm believer in science and wish to offer this experiment as a promise to be its ally. When these floors are finished there will be a dedicated telegraphy station, right where we stand, next to my office. We will send and receive the lifeblood of commerce. Information. The beating heart of the enterprise. Just as the pneumatic tubes in my building carry the flow of paper, this wireless device will carry waves of—
The wooden speech was cut off by Professor Tabits bundling forward in his fur hat. He whispered in Hale’s ear and the spectators leaned in. The company president smiled benevolently and told them the ship and the Tribune Building had both received their messages. A timid round of applause. Hale said, “Another message is coming back from the steamer right at this moment.” They circled the professor’s little wooden desk as he jotted down the Morse code. The dashes and dots inevitably reminded Hale Gray of the signature line at the bottom of a life insurance contract:
The Western Union manager, his frozen beard like an arctic explorer’s, asked, “What does it say?” on behalf of the timid crowd. He couldn’t see the code because of the professor’s fur hat.
Tabits said something but between the driving wind and booming clock his words were lost. He said it again, louder, but it may as well have been a foreign language. Finally, he wrote out the message on a piece of paper and held it up.
Can you hear me? Is anybody there?
They all stared at it for a moment, nodding, feigning gravity but wanting to get out of the cold. The clock continued tolling, resounding like a rebuke from the old dead century.
45.
Both Davids had been in exile and Argus was no different. The icefields of Wolf Lake hemmed in life’s possibilities. After ten days of cold the ice had hardened enough for the horses to pull the snow-scrapers across the frozen lake. Argus worked with the others to marshal the snow into long windrows, revealing the ice below, a glaucous eye, he thought, looking straight up at heaven. They began to lay off the field, gouging furrows three inches deep, a grid of lines twenty-two inches apart. Then the deeper blade was plowed along behind the horses and the gangs came out with handsaws and hooks. Argus piloted a raft along one of the canals because after two seasons cutting and a summer care taking he was considered an old hand. He used a pike pole to deftly maneuver the raft into position for loading. A muffled gang began stacking it with the cubed, frozen lake, their breath smoking with cold. They called Argus Romeo Mowgli and told him he ought to move to Venice and become a gondolier. You’d make a killing, one of them called across the ice. As far as they were concerned, he was from Borneo or some unlikely place and knew about twenty words of English total. They loved to watch him pole a raft, wend along the slushy streamway, toward the elevator incline and the icehouse. He was nimble and uncanny on the ice. Years back, the bunkhouse legend went, there had been an Esquimau escaped from the fair who wintered here and cut for a season. That native couldn’t pike-pole to save his life. They called out bawdy encouragements as Argus piked his way along the canal, his gondola laden with ice. He raised a mitten in response.
Argus watched the icecakes trundle and glint onto the incline; the endless chain with its crossbars was a slipstream that he carried into his dreams each night. Before each block of ice was loaded it was passed over a vent of steam, scalding the under-side clean so that slush didn’t form and slow the conveyance. The cakes mounted their way toward the towering icehouse and another gang waited inside with icehooks, sluicing and angling the harvest into tiers. By the end of the season the house would be stacked full, half a foot of sawdust on top, the doors clapped into place. Argus and a few others would remain throughout the year, fixing fences and cutting weeds, hauling dead beavers from the lake. They would load the delivery wagons in the early light of summer. Argus would think, as he did last summer, of the ice making its journey into Chicago, to the breweries and lunch-rooms, of the way it would be chipped for drinks, dropped into soda and whiskey, touching the lips of people he once knew and loved. The bricks of ice ascended, the chain clacking in its groove. The conveyance needed greasing and he went to tell the foreman in his practiced broken English.
In the evenings, when steam breathed out of the newly cut lake, Argus sat in the messroom with the others. He listened to them complain about supper and the beds they slept in, about unfaithful wives and girls abandoned in pregnancy, and he remembered the ribald seamen on board the ship. Men living in groups, separate from women and polite society, brought out the godless swagger, he knew, but he liked them just the same. They were fair-minded and treated him well. His position among them allowed him to live slightly apart. They thought nothing of his nightly habit of retreating to the bunkroom before anyone else. In secret, he read the Bible by a kerosene lantern and put the great book under his pillow before they came to bed. His penance, in addition to the burning cold, was silence. He didn’t sing or preach and his conversations were limited to transactions about food, weather, and ice. This future was furrowed for him long ago, he thought, but by his own hand. God was merely watching and waiting for his next move.
He could feel something going out of him in these endless white days. Prospects and plans used to quiver at the edge of every thought; now he thought about fences to be repaired when spring came, of the way an entire year’s harvest could be ruined with one night of unseasonable warmth. Like the icemen themselves, he had feverish hopes for dismal weather, even though it crushed him. The freezing jaws of winter were his closest ally, his livelihood, his camouflage. He felt the cold and his somber mood as defeat, a deflation in his chest and stomach. He thought about the kanaka boys in the sugar plantations of Queensland and the stories of them dying from homesickness. Actual death from longing. They would stop eating, work listlessly in the fields all day, speak to no one, then quietly slip away one night. Death of the soul, he thought. What good are we without a candle burning behind the glass? He wondered if it would come to this. He missed the islands and thought of them every time he looked at the tribal weapons locked in the trunk under his bed. But the Pacific came to him as a series of abstractions rather than volcanic atolls and reefs—the smell of salt in the aura of rain, the sound of surf reefing on coral, the languorous hum of the forest at night, the unbroken, warbling line of the horizon. These were bound up with his own sense of discovering God. When he looked out at the muted woods that rimmed the lake he knew that there was endless land and townships beyond, farther afield, that there were churches full of parishioners on their knees, repenting, an entire continent peopled and taken up. More than the two Davids, he thought about Peter in exile. Fleeing Jerusalem after imprisonment, Peter, the Reverend Mister had insisted, ministered in Babylon to Jews and colonists alike. It was here that he wrote his first epistles. He spoke of a holy nation and a peculiar people, praised the chosen generation. Argus leafed through the Bible to Peter’s first epistle and bathed it in lamplight . . . though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations . . .The ice gangs, sinners like himself, were caroling outside in the frozen dark, coming toward the bunkhouse in a dirge of drunken accents. He thought about his sister and wondered if she had forgiven him, whether she had gone back to the islands. He knew from the newspaper that Jethro Gray was alive and for this he was thankful. He thought about the trial of faith and read— be sober, and hope for the grace that is to be brought unto you . . .Holding the pigskinned scriptures up to the lamplight, he wondered, finally, what God thought of him and when his self-imposed penance and exile would be over. He had ruined his chances for a life in America and now he craved the islands. He wanted to redis-cover his place there, to forge an alliance with a mission and use his citizenship in two worlds to God’s advantage. If Alice Binns still loved him he would ask for her hand in marriage and they would begin a life of service in Melanesia. These thoughts buoyed him through the dark days and cold nights. He glance
d at the simple note he had written months ago and tucked inside the Bible— Tikalia is no place for horses— a cryptic message that would be carried by one of the icemen some hot day on a company wagon, trundling into the Near North Side, toward the resurrected house with the big church windows. Owen Graves would come for him, Argus knew, just as the lake would thaw in the spring. Argus tucked the note back inside the Book of Genesis and placed the Bible under his pillow. Outside, the men clambered up the wooden porch and someone missed a step in the dark.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Of the many books, archives, and resources consulted for this novel, I would like to acknowledge several in particular. My desire to devise a seagoing story was inspired by Charles John-son’s wonderful novel Middle Passage and Barry Unsworth’s beautiful and harrowing Sacred Hunger. In terms of research, the project was aided enormously by the collection of the Chicago History Museum and the digital archive of the Chicago Tribune. I consulted many texts about Melanesia, nineteenth- century sailing, natural science, and the history of architecture and demolition, but there were a number of crucial works—Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition by Jeff Byles, The Rise of the Skyscraper by Carl W. Condit, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City by Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, The Melanesians: People of the South Pacific by Albert B. Lewis, Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education by Margaret Mead, The Way of a Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail by Derek Lundy, We, the Tikopia by Raymond Firth, the pamphlets published by the Smithsonian Institution under the heading Instructions to Collectors of Historical and Anthropological Specimens, and A Handbook of the Melanesian Mission, made available by the Anglican Church under Project Canterbury. I’m thankful to Jonas Collins for answering my emailed nautical questions whenever he came upon the Internet while sailing a thirty-five-foot Pearson Alberg sloop solo around the world.
Thanks to Wendy Weil, Gaby Naher, Sarah Branham, and Jane Palfreyman for their encouragement and discernment.
Special thanks to my wife, Emily, for her patience and love, and to my daughters, Mikaila and Gemma, for their book hunger and loving support.
Also by Dominic Smith
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Dominic Smith
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Dominic.
Bright and distant shores / Dominic Smith.—1st Washington Square Press
trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
Washington Square Press fiction original trade—T.p. verso.
1. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. 2. South Pacific Ocean—Fiction. 3. Oceania—Fiction. I.
Title. II. Title: Bright and distant shores.
PS3619.M5815B75 2011
813’.6—dc22
2011002995
ISBN 978-1-4391-9886-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-9888-9 (ebook)
Bright and Distant Shores Page 45