Bright and Distant Shores Read online

  When Jethro came to dinner in the messroom he moved in a heady cloud of smells—arsenical soap used to prepare bird specimens, mollusk-brine, the residual taint of spending hours in the feculent orlop. The seamen sat as far away as possible and only Owen would endure proximity. The men ate in two shifts because they couldn’t all fit in the cramped messroom.

  Owen spooned through his gravy-colored soup and dandy-funk—a mixture of powdered biscuit and molasses—and watched Jethro make little islands of hardtack in his soup bowl. With Honolulu two days off and the promise of better winds, Owen had watched him give up on food. He turned to Jethro and said, “We’ll be seeing your eye sockets if you don’t start eating.”

  Jethro bit a corner of hardtack, smiled. “Not much of an appetite. So many things to do. My observations are picking up steam. No pun intended.”

  “Flat chat, are we?” said Terrapin, overhearing. He was standing in the galley waiting for a refill of his pewter coffeepot. He was brought a tray each night and ate dinner alone in the stateroom, serenaded by Dame Nellie Melba or Caruso.

  Harvey McCallister, able-bodied crew member and ironworker from Irish Hill, looked at Jethro from the adjacent bench and said to Terrapin, “Must be the private cache he’s got bundled in the apprentice quarters. Young Dickey Fentress tells me he hears feasting when he’s trying to sleep of a night. And his seachest is locked—and we all know that is not the custom forward of the mast.”

  The captain turned his head slowly, like a man with a neck injury. His elbows and chin came out a little as he cleared his throat. “Ship’s ordinance says no private food pantries in the berths, isn’t that right, Mr. Pym?”

  The first mate set his cutlery down to give his own answer full attention. “On account of rats and vermin risk. Correct, sir. Also no personal firearms.”

  Terrapin swiveled in one fluid motion and came out of the galley and into the messroom. He placed a meaty hand on the table where Owen and Jethro sat. “What do you have back there in the berth, Mr. Gray? Niblets? Bikkies? Lollies? Out with it.”

  Jethro fingered some crumbs off the table and placed them on the tip of his tongue. “Just some of my equipment and books. What you saw come aboard.”

  Terrapin took a swill of black coffee and held it in his mouth, nodding, wincing but also agreeing with its bitterness. “Righty-o, then. Davey Unsworth, as bosun and witness, would you please accompany me for a berth inspection.” He pulled a fob watch from his flannel trousers. “Mark the time in the log as eighteen hundred hours.”

  At this the other men set down their spoons and knives and began for the door.

  Terrapin held up a hand. “I’ll bring said bounty into the mess but take your seats. I reckon we might find something besides pinned honeybees.”

  Owen watched the men light up with Jethro’s unfolding humiliation. One man started beating the table with a set of spoons, his teeth flashing. Owen wanted to speak up but he knew this was part of Terrapin’s elaborate hazing ritual. Once the captain was satisfied that Jethro belonged to the brotherhood of ship and sea, knew its occult rituals and names, then he would be welcomed into the fold. He might even sup at the captain’s table once or twice because, after all, he was in the bloodline that was paying for the whole trek. But for now Jethro had to be brought in from the haughty, feckless wings, used as both a diversion in the oceanic desert and a signpost for future wrongdoers and ordinance wreckers. Owen had known men like these since his days with the demolition crews; he knew them to be rough-mannered but ultimately well-intentioned. He waited for the whole thing to play itself out.

  Terrapin and the bosun left the messroom for ten minutes and returned with a muslin sack of contraband. Jethro, resigned to the intrusion, sat back in his chair, nervously touching thumb to fingertip on each hand. The captain brought the sack of goods to the front of the messroom and began emptying the contents onto the hinged galley counter. Hendrik Stuyvesant, the cook, a querulous, wiry counterfeiter who’d skipped his parole, pushed up his shirtsleeves and came forward to enjoy the show, a dripping ladle in one hand. Terrapin put his hand into the sack to produce one item at a time, his face placid and supremely satisfied. Tins of ham, jars of English conserves, Danish shortbreads, ryebread crisps, water crackers, Dutch hard cheese, Belgian chocolate in cylinders of foil, sardines and mussels in flat tins, a box of candied ginger, ropes of licorice, blocks of marzipan, nougat, whiskey-and-cream fudge.

  “Merry-fucking-Christmas,” said one of the seamen from the back.

  Terrapin looked over at Jethro and puckered. “What we have here is fruit from the tree of wealth. I’ve sworn an oath to make all men equal at sea—even officers cannot ferry out beyond their station. Those who sleep in the bow and us in the stern, we are of separate rank but all one under God’s parasol. Yes, that’s it. But this, this is something special and foul. Apparently our slop and hard biscuits aren’t good enough for Mr. Gray. So, I’m in two minds here.” He paused dramatically, thumbs in belt loops, a barrister before the bench. “Either”—he turned to grin at each crew-mate—“we toss this cannery treasure overboard since there is no fair way to distribute the spoils.” The men heckled and booed at this suggestion. “Or—now wait a minute, gents—we don’t attempt to divvy but just say that we eat all of it in the here and now. We pass around the tins of piggy and palaver and let every man take his morsel. Drink it down with a new keg of rum and be done with it. All those in favor say aye.” The deafening, affirmative reply brought the other shift of diners down to the messroom and soon there were two dozen bodies crammed in. The second mate and two of his watch were the only ones left on deck.

  For the remainder of the evening Terrapin presided over the drunken feast. Crew hands ate crispbreads with blackberry conserves laid over with hard cheese or sardines in the buttery wake of Danish shortbread. They were rummed enough to eat any combination. The cook poached a few dozen eggs and served them over wedges of ham that were skewered with toothpicks. Several times Owen and Jethro attempted to leave but each time they were ordered to stay and drink more rum. Jethro ate and drank cautiously, staying close to home with a handful of cashews and some candied ginger. His face was pale and he looked down at the table.

  Owen said, “Didn’t they ever haze you in a fraternity out east?”

  “I was thrown into the pond and had to kiss the wine steward’s hand and call him Your Excellency like something out of Don Quixote.”

  He said it so plainly that Owen couldn’t bring himself to laugh. Jethro might as well have been some migratory bird who’d chosen to alight on the ship. He was so completely alien and ill at ease, making no attempt to join the nautical fold; he was like a ruck-faced stepchild standing at the edge of a family portrait.

  As they entered the embryonic hours of morning, the food mostly gone, a litter of tin cans and foils strewn about, the talk fell from low to base. The seamen competed to make Jethro blush. Gaddy McKlure, a mechanically minded Scotsman, recounted, with painstaking precision, all of the women and barroom brawls he’d survived. He spoke about bedroom tactics, coital names and threats, the fireman’s hold he liked to give his old lady when she stood in the kitchen without knickers to fry bacon, the puncture wound in his leg from a jagged beer bottle. The others listened and made excursions to piss in a slop bucket in the corner. Terrapin, not wanting to be upstaged, delivered a monologue on the opus of his life’s lovemaking, from Samoa to Tonga to Tasmania. He offered theory and conjecture about the evolution of conjugal prowess.

  “Now, my general theory is that the closer you are to the equator the less the women act out in the vaudeville of sexual coupling. Coital stage fright is what I call it. As an extreme, Esquimaux broods copulate like their savage little lives depended on it. Whereas in the tropics they can’t be bothered half the time. You think the Horse Latitudes are bad? Wait until we hit the Doldrums, where the women fornicate like sleepy old mules. Don’t know what it is. In the land of penis gourds it’s like dogs in heat and it’s over before you
can say Fanny’s ya fuckin aunt. But”—he hitched his pants up by the belt buckle—“some of the highland women are much more demanding. They eat all three courses if you receive my meaning. There’s an island off the coast of New Guinea where I swear it’s an island of sexual divas. They can drain your lifeblood. Stories of mutineers swimming ashore only to become sex slaves, drunk and dazed all the time on quiffy lady parts. I’ve double-backed pygmies, lepers, head-hunter’s wives, pearl divers, Maoris, bushmen virgins, hermits, and I have to say nothing compares to a little redhead I once had in the Tenderloin.” The men cheered at this, as if rallying behind a hometown sports team. “A shopgirl who broke me big racehorse heart. There’s nothing this waif wouldn’t do for you. Unspeakable things dredged up from the pit of a man’s bowels. Nothing could tarnish her. Give her a chocolate éclair and she was yours, from the toenails to the tongue, gents. I can see her now—the pinks of her breasts, the strawberry hilltops of her nipples.” He sat back down, caught in the entrails of sexual memory. “But— and here’s the turn—when I found out her Christian name was Delaney . . . well, it played with my mind and I came undone. I had assumed—quite wrongly—that she called herself Delaney as a joke, a simpleton shopgirl lark. Imagined her name to be Rosie or Delilah or Beatrice, for Chrissakes. But once I found out her given name was Delaney, well, gentlemen, I could only ever penetrate her buttocks after that. Stayed in the stern of the brig and things soon died off.”

  Jethro, unable to take the lewd one-upmanship any longer, stood and shouldered through the crowd. He stopped in front of the captain, hands on hips. He blinked before speaking. “I’ve had just about enough of this slander and lewd reminiscence. You’re not fit to sail a dinghy, let alone a ship of men and rest assured I’ll be instructing my father to spread the word with underwriters and investors to blacklist you.”

  Owen sat with his head in his hands. This was, of course, exactly what Terrapin and the seamen wanted, to goad Jethro into a puny, petulant display of anger.

  Terrapin took a deep breath, sucked his lower lip over his jagged bottom teeth, let out a breathy whistle. “Mr. Pym?”

  Mandrake Pym was slumped against the wall, his shirtfront covered in sardine oil and biscuit crumbs. A nearby seaman pulled his head up by a plug of hair. “Yes, captain.”

  “Who’s on watch at oh-four-hundred?”

  “Starboard watch, sir. My crew.”

  “Make a note in the log that apprentice deckhand Jethro Gray has volunteered for extra watch duty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Owen came forward and placed a hand on Jethro’s shoulder. “He’s drunk,” he said to Terrapin. “We’ve all said some things that weren’t well considered.”

  Terrapin said, “A man should stand behind everything he says, drunk or not. Get him out of here and ready for the watch.”

  Jethro buttoned his peacoat. “You think that because I come from money I’m a trinket for your amusement. You can have me clean your rotting ship from head to foot and it won’t change the fact that someday I’ll be running one of the wealthiest insurance companies in the world while you’re buying day-old bread on your sea pension.”

  Terrapin considered this, leaned back, lifted one haunch to give his sphincter the latitude it needed to blow a scorch-hole through his trousers. The men sprayed rum mid-sip with laughter, guffawed, keeled over, groaned with pleasure. Jethro was speechless, his left eyebrow twitching. Owen, appalled but also amused, led Jethro by the elbow out of the messroom.

  Moments before Jethro was due to come off the forenoon watch, a deckhand ran up to tell him they had pulled a strange beast from the water. Owen overheard and followed along to inspect the catch. A dozen men, blearing and moaning through the first waves of sobriety, stood over a monstrous form. It was clearly a hoax but no less disturbing for its mangle of body parts: an octopus head, beak upturned, conjoined with the flattened torso of a stingray. A cleaved shark fin had been attached to the spine of the ray and tropical bird feathers gummed to the dorsal wings. Jethro’s eyes watered with rage. Owen saw that the monster had been cobbled together from various parts of Jethro’s specimen collection, the animals he’d bottled and shellacked in the hold. He’d taken to using the orlop as a repository.

  “Who did this?” Jethro asked, his stare fixed on the creature.

  The men murmured but made no direct reply.

  “I’ll ask again. Who did this?”

  “We all did,” said one of them.

  Owen said, “You had no right to interfere with his specimens. The food was all in good fun but this is different. You men are to keep your hands off his work, or you’ll be making your own way home. Jesus, this is a circus.”

  Jethro said, “But whose idea was it?” His voice uncoiled across the deck.

  Not wanting to be shown a coward in front of his peers, Harvey McCallister stepped forward. He was the same man who’d outed Jethro’s culinary stash.

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Those are my specimens you’ve hacked apart. For what, a joke? To make you look good in front of your dim-witted mates? I’ve never known such idiocy.”

  “Be careful what you say just here,” said McCallister, tonguing a plug of tobacco into his cheek. He spat a tannic stream into a tin cup.

  Jethro looked directly into the Irishman’s face. “Perhaps you and I should settle this between ourselves. This needs to go noticed and the captain certainly isn’t going to do anything.”

  “What do you have in mind?” said Harvey, rolling up his cuffs, relaxing into a big hooligan grin.

  “Not here. Tomorrow morning. Ten three-minute rounds. Queensberry rules?”

  “Whatever you want, mate. Queen-fairy rules or whatever else. I’m a scrapper from the Hill, a hayrope match winner.”

  “Well, this will be a fair fight with a referee and timed rounds.”

  “Terrapin will want to be ref.” McCallister flexed his shoulders, raised a fist in the air in front of him.

  Jethro said, “Fine with me. Shall we put some money on it, just to make it a little more lively?”

  Owen said, “Terrapin won’t allow gambling on his ship.” Jethro was digging his hole deeper by the minute. Varsity welter-weight or not, McCallister was built like a lorry horse.

  “He’ll make an exception for this,” said Harvey. “How much?”

  “Your entire wages for the rest of the trip. How much is that?”

  “Ten dollars a month.”

  “Done. Let’s say sixty dollars, as an estimate. If you lose, the captain will instruct the paymaster to garnish your wages on my behalf.”

  “And when you lose you’ll hand me the same in cash.”

  Jethro held out his hand and McCallister shook it firmly.

  The fight was the final piece of business in the Horse Latitudes and Terrapin, delighted by the announcement of a spectacle, had ordered that the Cullion steam her way into Honolulu Bay by the end of the day. Forty miles off the islands they dropped anchor and roped in a makeshift ring behind the foredeck. The single sheep, the pigs and penned chickens, were moved to one side to make more room. The men lowered the sails and lined up to watch. Terrapin dressed in his cabin and emerged at noon, ascending in a sonic cloud of Caruso. He wore a cravat and jacket, hair raked and brilliantined, face freshly shaved and raw in the hard light. Nipper trotted at his side.

  The pugilists came from separate ends of the ship, Harvey McCallister bare-chested and jogging from the stern and Jethro up from the shade behind the bowsprit. Owen had volunteered to be Jethro’s trainer, largely because he envisioned having to intervene in the event of serious head injury or blood loss. He walked with him now, the rangy boxer in his union suit, his fists wrapped in French flannel. Jethro kept his clad fists under his armpits as if they were something to behold, a pair of dueling pistols still in their velvet-lined case. Harvey came into the light alone, arms and fists clenched. He had refused all offers of trainer or second and had likewise declined a bucket of water and rags for
his corner. To accept either was to elevate Jethro above the status of griping bitch.

  “You don’t have to go through with this,” Owen said, hovering at the hemp rope.

  Jethro said, “I’ve fought bigger.” He ducked and entered the ring, bringing his hands out into the open air for the first time.

  Terrapin gestured for the two men to come into the middle and inspected their hands. In a speechifying, ceremonial manner he welcomed the sailors to the first inaugural bout of the Lady Cullion Pacific Voyage in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-seven. “In the starboard corner we have Harvey Hallelujah McCallister, weighing twenty stone and some ounces, a steel miller, womanizer, loafer, and scrapper from Irish Hill.” The men shouted and cheered. “And in the port corner we have Jethro Jellybones Gray, weighing twelve stone, one for each foot of height, Ivy League graduate, heir to an insurance empire, ship’s naturalist, prig, and dandy.” The men heckled and swore. A few pieces of dried apple were thrown into the ring. Terrapin, satisfied with the reception, turned to the fighters. His accent broadened as he listed the transgressions of the ring. “Now, listen, you blokes, this will be a clean fight. No holdin, trippin, pushin, spittin, bitin, wrest-lin, kickin, head buttin, rabbit punches, kidney blows, or below-the-belt nut and pebble shots.” The men laughed at this last little flourish. They were smoking cigarillos and raising tin mugs of rum, a rare privilege during daylight. “We’ll ’ave ten three-minute rounds and the timekeeper will announce the sunrise and sunset of each round with the ship’s bell.” The bell rang for good measure and the crowd looked toward the catheads to see apprentice Dickey Fentress, barely fifteen, grinning with his fob. “If a man goes down then I will inspect the bludgeoned face and head for gravity of injury and determine the victor. Go back to your corners and come out swingin.”