Bright and Distant Shores Page 11

  Argus dragged the boat up and went to rescue his possessions. He made a display of collecting driftwood into a pile for a fire but knew it was too wet to catch. They would have to find dry leaves somewhere in the bush. He watched Malini lug the portmanteau up and down the beach and, once it was full of coconuts, she began gathering shellfish in the tide pools with the hat he’d made her. When she wasn’t glaring back at him, he arranged his books and clothes and spread his alpaca coat in the sand for her to sleep on. The bruised clouds had cleared and the sky was high and blue again. He wrapped the Bible inside a cotton shirt and set it down as her pillow. He opened his roll of damp sketches, blew sand from the broken watch, buffed the cutlery with a hank of gun rag, and arranged his books—The Jungle Book, David Copperfield, Kidnapped. According to the Reverend Mister, outside of the Holy Scriptures, these made up the divine trinity and contained all the escapades, morality, and lessons in self-determination that a boy could want.

  Argus recited the full and epic subtitle of Kidnapped—“Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: How he was Kidnapped and Cast away, his Sufferings in a Desert Isle; his Journey in the Wild Highlands; his acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites; with all that he Suffered at the hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, falsely so-called: Written by Himself and now set forth by Robert Louis Stevenson.” It had been a Christmas gift from the Reverend Mister in 1895 and he’d insisted on the full title whenever Argus read a chapter aloud after dinner. The long title not only honored Underwood’s fellow Scotsman but acted as an incantation before the offering itself.

  Argus flipped through the book to Chapter XIV, wherein David has come ashore a small islet after the shipwreck. Were there survival tips buried in those pages, instructions for setting snares or traps, something that might save Argus from his sister’s nagging wrath? What he found was this:

  I knew indeed that shell-fish were counted good to eat; and among the rocks of the isle I found a great plenty of limpets, which at first I could scarcely strike from their places, not knowing quickness to be needful. There were, besides, some of the little shells that we call buckies; I think periwinkle is the English name. Of these two I made my whole diet, devouring them cold and raw as I found them; and so hungry was I, that at first they seemed to me delicious. Perhaps they were out of season, or perhaps there was something wrong in the sea about my island. But at least I had no sooner eaten my first meal than I was seized with giddiness and retching, and lay for a long time no better than dead.

  Argus had no idea what a limpet was. On Poumeta it was women’s work to fish the shoreline while the men fished the open sea. It stood to reason, then, that Malini knew more of what to gather in the tide pools. He was in charge of building fires with the reverend’s flint stone because it was taboo for a seacoast woman to handle flame. Argus was overcome with a desire to read more Stevenson, or to sketch, to loose himself from the present, but Malini was already striding toward him with the suitcase full of coconuts and shellfish.

  “Where is the fire?” she asked.

  “I need to gather dry leaves.”

  Malini produced a handful of twigs and pine needles. Argus dug a small bowl of sand beneath a stick of driftwood and placed them inside. He knapped the flint against a piece of granite, aiming the sparks into the bowl. Nothing caught. It was too damp. After several minutes of exasperation, Malini took up David Copperfield, ripped four pages from it, and placed them flat into the bowl of sand. “Now try.”

  Argus could not speak or look at her. He read a few lines of text upside down and saw that David was walking the road from London to Dover, sleeping at night in fields of hops. “Wait, not those,” he said. He removed the frontispiece from each book but the Bible and swapped them with the excerpted Dickens. He flinted against the granite again and the pages blued with flame. Malini threw the shellfish into the kindling fire and walked off without a word.

  She returned a while later with tern eggs, wild figs, and a strangled lizard, dragging several dozen pandanus fronds behind her. Argus put the big lizard into the hot coals and they ate in silence when it was cooked. He used his cutlery to cut the lizard into pieces then ate them with his hands because of the look in his sister’s eyes. Malini put some driftwood ash into a husk of rainwater and let it settle. She skimmed the top layer off with a shell, poured it onto her food, and handed it to her brother: “Salt.” It tasted good with the sweet smoky flavor of the hot figs.

  In the fading light, they heard the gulls and terns roosting noisily in the cliff rookeries, the surf breaking on the narrow reef. With their bellies full, their moods brightened. Malini began weaving the pandanus leaves and Argus guessed it was to make a new skirt or a sleeping mat. They drank warm coconut milk and Argus removed his boots, picked up Kidnapped and began reading to himself. He didn’t want to read any more about the island and the shipwreck but turned to the chapter called “I Come into My Kingdom” wherein Ebenezer admits to wanting to sell David into slavery in the Carolinas. A book, once read from front to back and with no skimming, could be taken piecemeal. Unless it was the Bible, in which case it could be read according to the lesson at hand. It sometimes occurred to Argus that all the parts of a story existed at once and that people in other places were reading ahead and behind him, the words alive and unraveled across islands and oceans and continents.

  After some time, and without looking up, Malini said, “Are you praying again? I see your lips move.”

  “I am reading.” In Poumetan he translated reading as thinking aloud.

  “What happens?”

  “I make the words that are on the paper in my mind and mouth.”

  “How do they stay on the paper, the words?”

  “Ink. Like blood or the stain from a squid or octopus.”

  “Does it smell?”

  He handed her the book and she smelled the leather cover. She said, “Like pigs sleeping in the sun,” and handed it back to him.

  “Do you want me to think aloud from one of these stories?”

  “Will I understand it?”

  “I will make the words into our language.”

  “Yes, all right,” she said, plaiting the fronds.

  Argus read from the opening chapters of Kidnapped, translating into Poumetan as he went along. There were immediate difficulties, concepts and words that had no native equivalent. Key and mansion, the words muckle and laird . But why not big house for mansion and headman with many gardens for laird? He looked up at his sister, who started to blink very slowly in the firelight. He took out The Jungle Book. She was briefly enthralled by the idea of a boy being raised by animals but Argus had to stop to explain at length what a wolf was. “A wild dog with a bat’s face,” was all he could come up with. Malini considered this a moment, clucked her tongue. “This story is impossible. Everybody knows that dogs don’t like children.” Argus moved another piece of driftwood into the coals and lay back on the sand. His sister didn’t make any move to lie down and he was lulled to sleep by the husking sound of the leaves being woven and pulled taut.

  In the morning, the sky was streaked with high clouds and sand blew up the beach. Argus stood, stretched, and saw Malini, still sleeping beside her woven mat of leaves. It was now a giant sheet and she had surely stayed up the whole night working the pandanus. He raked the coals and placed some wood in them to kindle the fire. She stirred and sat up.

  Argus gestured to the mat. “What is that for?”

  “The boat. If we find a bamboo pole we can use it to catch the wind.”

  Argus looked at the sand. She had woven a sail after living in the forest for ten years. Had she studied the seacoast fishermen from afar during her girlhood? Did she also know how to thatch a roof? He was disgusted with himself.

  Softly, she said, “Will you find the bamboo pole?”

  He nodded, put on his boots, and walked off, feeling her eyes on his back. He wanted to eat a piece of toast with blackberry jam
, an omelet with capsicum and bacon. He missed the brown-sugared porridge and the tins of peaches. Tramping into a bamboo thicket he searched about for a fallen pole. He wanted a piece of roasted pumpkin and slices of salted tomato on a plate. A bamboo pole, dried and twenty feet long, lay on a hummock of weeds and he pried the smaller branches from it. Back on the beach he carried it like a flagpole, marching proudly. This was for Malini’s benefit and she smiled enough to show her teeth when he approached. She rewarded the find with a tern-egg omelet— not exactly bacon and capsicum—boiled in a coconut husk. It was yellow-gray and smelled as bad as it looked. They choked it down and went to rig up the sail. Since the portmanteau was now full of coconuts, Argus had to carry his books and clothes under his arm. He placed them in the lockbox along with the flintstone. They fastened the woven sail to the bamboo pole and bound the mast to the middle bench with a catch of rope. Malini stood holding it square across the wind while Argus tillered in the stern with an oar. The wind came slowly, then all at once.

  11.

  In San Francisco they had to locate Captain Baz Terrapin, an associate of Captain Bisky, the commander of Owen’s first voyage. A wire had been sent from Chicago, and the steam clipper in which Terrapin owned a majority share was now contracted. A crew of twenty-four had signed articles, supplies had been ordered, and the Lady Cullion was due to weigh anchor in three days. Owen and Jethro dropped off their luggage at a downtown hotel and set off on foot. Owen had been unable to convince Jethro to trim his luggage and send half of it back to Chicago by rail. He explained that a clipper was light on storage space and that extra baggage meant fewer artifacts for the return trip, but Jethro insisted that his equipment was essential. They passed an outfitters’ storefront and Owen persuaded Jethro to purchase some clothes fit for seagoing, something sturdy and utilitarian. The truth was that he feared showing up to Terrapin’s rooms with Jethro dressed for Sunday brunch at the clubhouse. The straw kady had been mercifully lost en route but now the raglan sleeves and the blazer were traded for blucher boots, several broadloom cotton shirts, worsted trousers, dungarees, and a serge cap. With his dandy get-up in a brown paper parcel, favoring the heels of his new boots, Jethro walked through Chinatown, tipping his cap at strangers.

  They took a cable car into the Potrero District and alighted a dozen blocks from Irish Hill, the neighborhood where Terrapin was said to board. South of the shipyard and Steamboat Point, it was an enclave of workers’ cottages and shacks built along serpentine hills in the lee of the Union Iron Works and the Gas & Electric Company. The bay hazed at the foot of the hillside, a muted blue-gray. The mud streets were planked and sawdusted, run through with fissures. Coalsmoke plumed out of the ironworks and the frowzy smells of gas and damp laundry were everywhere. In the murky windows of several bleak storefronts handbills advertised vaudeville and a Saturday hayrope boxing match. Owen asked for directions and made for the Big Brown House, a rooming establishment that took in San Quentin parolees and whose proprietor got them jobs in the rolling mill down the hill. Terrapin leased rooms on the top floor year-round and this was where he moored himself between voyages.

  Son of a freed Tasmanian convict, Terrapin had a soft spot for former San Quentin inmates with seafaring ambitions. They worked cheap and hard and were generally loyal. He’d been commanding vessels and hauling Pacific cargo—tea, copra, teak, sulfur, Australian wool more recently—for thirty years and knew the South Sea Islands intimately, having spawned illegitimate children from New Zealand to the New Hebrides. The rumor was that he dodged creditors and ex-wives in San Francisco, running a brisk circuit between the steam beer dumps of Irish Hill and the brothels of the Tenderloin. He now owned two-thirds of the Lady Cullion outright and took no more than two passages a year. Trade clippers were practically a thing of the past—even if they had auxiliary boilers—but Terrapin refused to change with the times. He called the Suez Canal the Devil’s Ditch and vowed to never command a steamer.

  Owen and Jethro stood on the balcony where Baz Terrapin slouched against the railing, big-knuckled and half naked, a white towel around his flaccid middle. He was drinking beer before noon and staring into the mire of his glass. “I prefer bottom-fermented beers, like to taste the yeast and hops . . .” He took a swig from his jug of fizzing ale, still dripping from his daily plunge in the frigid bay. “Constitutional swim is what it is. Testicles like a pair of clams winking shut from the cold. Ah, but the heart expands and pumps . . . gets as big as a Christmas ham. Ticker of a racehorse in here.” He tapped at his rib cage, grinned. His enormous girth, coupled with the constellation of scars and moles spread across his torso, reminded Owen of the barnacled hull of an ancient, waterlogged ketch. He hunkered across the balcony, a hand spread against his paunch, thumb tucked into the edge of the wrapped towel. Tattooed on each forearm was a succession of dates—Nov 21 ’82, Mar 2 ’84, Jan 14 ’89, and so on—arranged in perfect columns of blue ink. He took up a small telescope from a bench seat and glassed the bay, his mouth forming a Roman arch. “I’d swim out to it just to see the look on the Alcatraz guards’ faces. They got Hopi Indians out there just at the moment. Those docile mother-worshippers can’t swim neither.” He moved the spyglass down toward the mill and the works. “I audition crew members from up here. Spy on the Dutchmen coming out of the sugarhouse or the Scotch toppling out of the countinghouse or mechanical-repair yard. I watch the way a man walks with his mates. Way he holds himself. The Irishmen come knockin ’cause all they wants is to leave their twenty-six skirling kiddies and the pasty fat wife and sail away for a set of Tongan kanookas. If you ever worked in a steel mill you’d understand this sentiment.” He swiveled his mass and lowered the spyglass.

  Jethro stood in his new dungarees, holding his brown paper parcel, biting and licking his lips.

  “This is Jethro Gray, the son of the underwriter, and he’ll be coming aboard,” Owen said. “He’s a man of science, among other things.”

  Terrapin’s face fell a little, a squint working into the sun-cracked ravines around his mouth and eyes. “Ship’s surgeon? Not usual on a windjammer like this. These ain’t the slavin days and the cook knows some of his medicals and surgery.”

  “He’s no doctor,” said Owen.

  “What then?”

  Jethro turned his serge cap in his hands. “This is my first time at sea. You can put me to use anywhere you like. I plan to take some samples. Plants and animals. I’ll be the ship’s naturalist.”

  Terrapin adjusted himself through the towel and considered Jethro Gray from head to foot. “I’ve taken plenty of virgins offshore, working men and prisoners who paid their dues for theft and manslaughter—won’t touch rapists and arsonists, mind you, consider it bad luck on a bark to have that kind—but fuck me blue, this one’s a buttercup, ain’t he? Look at them fingers and hands and the milky-veined arms. He’s like a custard tart.”

  Jethro said, “I’ve been studying my maps and have a good sense of direction. Maybe I could be a deckhand when I’m not studying specimens. Sleep in a hammock on the deck. Under the stars.”

  Owen stared down at his feet, heard the crinkle of Jethro’s nervous hands on brown paper.

  Terrapin leaned his massive head back and coughed up a phlegmatic laugh. When he’d regained his composure he lifted the jug of steam beer to his lips and let the situation settle on his tongue. “Makes no difference to me whether you’re the King of Siam or the son of the money behind this jaunt, any new crewmate starts out before the mast, as a deckhand proper. No special treatment. You’ll be scrubbing and tarring on deck, lovelace. You’ll sign articles of waivering just like the San Quentin forgers and muggers. Captain Basil Terrapin and unnamed minority silent partner indemnified against all loss of life and limb et-bloody-cetera.”

  “My father’s lawyers—” Jethro began.

  “He’ll sign and note that he’s on my docket. Nothing happens to him without my consent,” Owen said.

  The captain drained his jug and tightened the cinch in his
towel. “Amenable. And what about you, Mr. Graves? What will your assignment be? Heard from Bisky that you was carpenter. I already have a handy carpenter and I got a cook who can also barber and suture a wound shut, as I mentioned prior.”

  “Like I said in the wire, I’ll be the trade master. I’ll direct the coxswain where to make landfall and do all the purchasing. Until we get to the islands I’ll help as needed.”

  “You can have the steward’s cabin, right next to the first mate’s. I’ve never believed in stewards and the men respect me for it. Lord Buttermilk can bunk down with the apprentices because I’m afraid what might happen to him in the fo’c’s’le. This afternoon, I’ll be up at the shipyards. The Cullion is moored up there, having some sail and hull work taken care of. Any return cargo I should know of?”

  Owen hesitated, wondered whether Jethro knew that he was assigned the task of bringing back Pacific Islanders for his father’s advertising campaign. “Artifacts mostly. I’ll fill you in when we get to the Southern Hemisphere. I’m finalizing the island route. We’ll start by heading to the Sandwich Islands. No real trading until after that.”

  They shook hands and Terrapin showed them to the door, still in his towel.

  The Lady Cullion was a twenty-five-year-old steam clipper originally built for the tea trade. She was square-rigged, sharply raked in the stem, spanned two hundred feet from gudgeon to bowsprit. At the shipyard she’d had her hull freshly coppered—one of Terrapin’s flourishes along with the nymphal figurehead—her masts tarred, and the topgallant sail replaced. Extra ballast of rock and sand had been loaded to keep her at proper trim because she had a tendency to sail high. Despite the repairs the ship looked off-kilter and weary, a sloop-of-war fallen on hard times. Hatch covers were out of plumb, the brass capstans had been lacklustered by salt, the forecastle had the buff of driftwood. Owen and Jethro watched the commotion of the crew loading supplies—crates of tinned meat, dry biscuits, sauerkraut and limes, munitions, sacks of rice and flour, duff, dried apples, kegs of tallow and lamp oil, a dozen wire cages of chickens, a fretful sheep, two sack-bellied sows. Davey Unsworth, boatswain and rehabilitated kidnapper, stood by the gangway in his oilskins and slouch hat, checking off inventory from a clipboard.