Bright and Distant Shores Read online

  The two men touched fists and returned to their corners, Jethro with his looped shoulders and bantling legs, Harvey with his brawny arms held high for the men to admire. The ship’s bell rang as if in a squall and Terrapin shot Fentress a stare before the clanging died away.

  McCallister came out light on his feet, jabbing and breathing. Jethro stepped toward the center of the ring, tender-footed, a doe picking its way into a clearing. He raised his arms, blinking madly. The Irishman tested the waters by fibbing with his left before striking through with a right cross. Jethro parried and slipped back, the ham-fist whizzing by his right ear. The men were chuffed at this, cheering obscenities and thumping their feet on the planks.

  McCallister circled and probed, letting his footwork and jab push Jethro against the ropes. Jethro swayed his torso, fading in and out of striking distance. Owen watched Jethro’s spooked eyes stare out between his cocked arms, the fists slightly curled over the top of spindled wrists. Was he going to blink and telegraph before he punched? Harvey let off little grunting noises as he came in again, his body turned, elbows tucked. He aspirated with each headward blow but Jethro pivoted and took nothing more than a grazing on the side of his neck. Jethro startled off the hemp rope and cantered to his left, bringing his guard up, swinging to face his opponent. This kind of dance continued for the rest of the round—McCallister bum-rushing Jethro into a corner, jabbing furiously, while the Harvard welterweight parried and weaved in stumbling circles, still averting anything fatal.

  “What the hell are you doing out there?” Owen said between rounds. “Throw a punch at least so they don’t think you’re a coward.”

  “Let him chug a little,” said Jethro, taking a sip of water.

  By the middle of the second round Jethro came up onto the balls of his feet and began punching when the Irishman one-twoed his way forward. His arms shot straight out from the elbow, the loose fists clenching hard mid-flight and the arms stem-stocked at right angles. He came up onto his toes and connected a right on McCallister’s chin, sending the Irishman backward. Harvey shook his head and shoulders loose, spat, came in with uppercut-and-hook. Jethro sidled, took a step back, then landed a short jab in Harvey’s side, ducking low and coming in at an oblique angle. It was clear that what Jethro lacked in poise during everyday life he had in the ring. The nervous face, the twitches and stammers, were all still there but they were somehow channeled and rarefied in the uncoiling hands and shuffling footwork.

  McCallister was yet to connect a punch and it showed in his face. He came into the third round without water, mouth hinged in thirst and rage. Meanwhile Owen had doused the back of Jethro’s neck with wet rags and the fighter had brought a few handfuls of water to his mouth. He looked oddly invigorated. A reluctant seaman told him fancy footwork and nice snappy left. He came back out looking more relaxed and upright than Owen had ever seen him. Some of the Gray blood—the vinegar of the mercantile risk takers, the profiteering bravado of the men who did not go to sea but floated their countinghouses on the backs of a nameless Atlantic crew—was coursing through his veins now. During one of Harvey’s onslaughts Jethro leaned into a full crouch, arms up, then bobbed out of the pen with six punches in as many seconds. Two of them landed on the Irishman’s nose and beside his left eye socket. A line of blood appeared at Harvey’s temple, a cut right at the edge of the hairline. His face dropped with unspeakable humiliation and fury. He looked at Jethro, hangdog, almost blind with ire. His technique fell away in the pitched yells and stamping of his crewmates. They were calling him every colorful noun and adjective they could think of, interspersing it with practical instruction. He let out an oxen bellow and came forward again, this time his arms swinging wide with barroom haymakers and bolo punches that never had a chance. He collapsed into a clinch and held Jethro’s arms down with his biceps, his hands gripping in the back. Owen could see the seaman’s face and made out the words: I’ll kill and rape your mother and sisters.

  Terrapin intervened, took a quick look at McCallister’s bleeding wound, and sent the two fighters apart again. Rather than being drawn in by this sloppy display of technique and malice, Jethro drifted forward, leading the way with his left held high like a lantern, holding it there as if beckoning a cow in from a darkened field. The raised hand left his rib cage wide open and McCal-lister took the bait, cutting his way forward with sledging body blows. The Irishman steam-shoveled his way in, fists pounding, head down and chin cocked behind one shoulder for protection. Jethro slipped back, feigned with a hook, and followed through with a downward right cross. The pickaxe punch was textbook perfect, the weight transfer and pinioned back foot, as if voltage had sprung up through his raised heel and flowed to the knuckles and burrowed fingertips. It walled into McCallister’s jawline and sent him to the planks. The din of booing was cut through with raised cheers, for it was clear that the Irishman wasn’t getting up anytime soon. Terrapin stood over him and counted aloud to ten. Incredulous, he raised Jethro’s thin arm in the air and declared him the winner.

  12.

  The afternoons blanched white with heat, the rowboat skirting in the wind. The sky-country had as many moods as Malini—leaden, bright, brooding, placid, cheery. Their clothes were veined with salt and worn thin. She had boils on her bum from all the salt water and sitting and had to haunch to one side. When she was thirsty she punctured a green coconut on the oarlock and brought it to her mouth. Argus was sometimes able to catch bonito fish with a bamboo pole and hooked nail. She made him recite the names of long-dead fishermen in their clan because this brought good luck and was the proper thing to do. He braced the sail to windward and, during calms, rowed the boat in his Panama hat. There were days without landfall and they slept huddled under the alpaca coat, drifting off course, pressed into the prow of the rowboat.

  Argus sang and preached to pass the seared afternoons. All the hymn songs sounded the same to Malini and she wanted him to quit his bellowing. His voice was good but the rhythm was plodding. When she heard the pent-up and breathy Aaaameeeeen she knew things were finishing up. But then he would hum into another hymn without pause. Eventually, out of sheer boredom, she joined in the singing but caroled in her own language. She made up lyrics about wedding feasts and babies being born in the middle of the night while he bullroared God and gladsome light. She imagined what the Kuk were saying about her. Women who ran away were usually adulterers. She missed the straight-stemmed trees and wanted to smoke.

  Argus blessed the flock and gave communion from his gunwale pulpit. He imagined himself a prophet who could say the right things to the godless. He had the power to turn the wretched devout. The Reverend Mister had trained him as a houseboy but also as a catechist, someone who might walk among the unbelieving and reveal the truth of Jesus, riven and bleeding on the cross. He understood the native mind. Maybe the new missionary would let him lead the hymns and light the candles and carry the Book into the pagan villages. Maybe someday he would be made a deacon and go to Oxford or Sydney and study the scriptures and play cricket in front of Christian ladies in lavender and lace.

  He saw Malini watching him preach into the gale. Would she ever know that the world was a watery ball spinning in God’s endless black space, that day and night flowed from such spinning, that the hurricanes came from yearly orbits around the sun, that the ends of the earth were made of ice and guarded by savage white bears and flightless birds? Argus knew all these things and knew there to be continents drifting on the briny ocean like potsherds. By lantern he had seen the world’s parts laid out on a map where the scale held three fingers to be a thousand miles and Melanesia was like a trail of breadcrumbs. If they stayed at sea long enough they might come ashore on a distant coast where there were cities of stone and glass and churches as big as mountains.

  After several weeks of drifting, rowing, and pinch-sailing, the New Hebrides seemed as far away and implausible as America or Africa. Malini’s bum boils were living sores and they festered her into putrid silences and full-blo
wn scorn. For three days she refused to get into the boat and lay on the volcanic sand, looking skyward and weeping like a new widow. Argus gathered firewood and fished the reef and, once they were fed, read silently from the two Davids—Copperfield and Balfour. He watched the clouds dismantle and re-form over the endless waters. According to his map they were several hundred miles north and west of the mission.

  Days later, a brigantine of Malay pearl divers anchored in the bay and Argus rowed out to meet the boat. In return for some money they were willing to tow the rowboat behind but the kanakas couldn’t come aboard. For the next few days they were tossed and pulled south, scraping the dried flesh from coconuts and sitting in the shade of the dropped sail. When one of them had to defecate they squatted over the stern while the other held the portmanteau as a screen from the leering shipmen. Occasionally one of the Malay divers pulled in the towline and tossed them some fish scraps. The meat was enough to bring Malini briefly from her prostrate position. Her boils throbbed all day long. Argus fed her, wiped her forehead with a cloth, promised there was a doctor who came to the mission. To cheer her up he told her that one time the Reverend Mister had to have his bottom drained with a syringe—sharp and thin as a pine needle— by the freckle-faced Anglican doctor. He had watched the holy man drop his trousers and seen the doctor work the pomegranate moon of his arse where a Tanna-like eruption cratered and glowed. The preacher squealed like a runtling pig. Every night for a month, he told her, he had to sleep with a yam poultice in his feather bed. She smiled at this but did not laugh. When she was done eating she lay back and closed her eyes and was soon twitching into feverish dreams.

  The Malays untied them five miles from the mission and Argus hauled toward the shimmering sliver of land, his sister whimpering at his feet. He rowed against the tide and arrived before evening, his shoulders on fire. They pulled onto the beach, the mission church and house in plain view.

  “You can stay here and I will find the new reverend who will know about boils and how to use the first aid kit. I saw the Reverend Mister use sticky ointment.”

  “No,” she said. “I am not staying here.”

  “All right. But I’d like to say a prayer in the church before we go up to the house. I need to give thanks for making it back here.”

  Malini got to her feet and leaned against his shoulder, limping up the beach. She could feel the poisonous blood draining into her feet as she hobbled along. She saw the building with the white walls and the cross just like the one around her brother’s neck. It was raised up like a men’s clubhouse, only there were sheets of glass in the walls, clearer than bead glass so that you could look inside and see the long wooden planks for sitting down. But some of the sheets of glass were broken and she was surprised that they let pigs and dogs sleep inside. Argus went ahead and she limped after him. Through the open doorway there was a straw pigsty in one corner and three mottled dogs eating scraps from the floor. A pigeon flapped in the rafters and flew into a rent of sky torn into the thatching. The floor was spattered with guano. Her brother walked slowly up to a platform at the front of the clubhouse and looked around with torment on his face.

  The pigs had beveled and grated the corners of the pew ends with their teeth and the dogs had scratched the Norfolk pine floorboards with their claws. Argus did his best to shoo the animals out of the church, waving his arms in the air. They scattered and converged indignantly amid the pews. The building was perched on a hillside and the animals had come in through a hole in the back wall, a place level with the ground. The timber siding had been prized from the church frame for firewood so that the vestry where the Reverend Mister paced before a sermon now gave onto a bamboo thicket. No one from the Presbyterian synod had come; they had abandoned the mission and here was the godless result. He mounted the stairs to the pulpit and rested his hands on the lectern, looking down into the pit of consecrated ruin. The saints and virgins and apostles were all gone from this place. No more offerings of breadfruit to God the Father. It was a pigpen and barnyard, a place where fruit bats roosted instead of the dove of the Holy Ghost. Argus told his sister what had happened, that there was no one here to give them work or write a letter of introduction so that she could look after mission babies or wash cotton clothes. Malini thought of her husband, feverish and dying up in a tree. She had abandoned him to die alone and wondered if she had been cursed for it.

  They took the overgrown path down to the mission house, Malini favoring her left side. On the verandah they were greeted by Pomat, the village headman. He was wearing a shark-tooth necklace, ochre penis gourd, and the reverend’s tartan slippers. He recognized Argus and asked him where he had found a wife and was she sick. Sisa, Argus told him. They stood on the front steps, the shadows lengthening, Pomat trying to block any view of the interior. There were betel-nut mortars and spears laid out on the mantel and the fireplace was full of arrowroot. Pomat had been a troubled political figure in the village, having killed his brother-in-law in battle then taking the man’s widow as a second wife. But he sponsored enormous feasts and kept the shamans plied with kava and tropical chestnuts, so that Argus wondered if he wasn’t holding court in the mission house, sleeping with a murdered man’s wife in the Reverend Mister’s feather bed. Argus asked what had happened to the preacher’s body. Pomat knew a smattering of English and some pidgin.

  “Church men come for stink body with big wooden box,” Pomat said. He picked something from his teeth and inspected his fingernail.

  “No more big men?”

  Pomat shook his head. “They think fire-hair preacher kilim by village. Poison. Maybe tingting you kilim and go away. Now no more tabak or church sing-sings. My ailan now.” The big man smiled at Argus, his head slightly cocked in reckoning. “Sisa from up north way? How old sisa?”

  Argus bowed his head slightly. “She sick. The fire-hair preacher had a medicine box.”

  Pomat looked at him blankly.

  Argus said, “Marasin box. Feel mobetta powders.”

  Pomat leaned in the doorway. “What things live in the mobetta box?”

  “Ointment creams. White powders for het I pen.”

  “Het I pen.” He nodded. “Where does it stap?”

  “Cook room next to the stove.”

  Pomat went and retrieved the gray metal box with the red cross on the front. He handed it to Argus and watched as he opened the lid. Argus picked through the bottles and jars, reading the labels for any mention of boils. Nitre for asthma, Dover Powder for chill, Opium Tincture for colic and nerves, Aromatic Chalk Powder and Castor Oil for Diarrhoea, Asperine for rheumatism, a thermometer, a set of needles in a hard case. Finally, wrapped in a roll of gauze bandages, he found a small tub of magnesium sulfate for the relief of boils and carbuncles. He held it up to Pomat as well as the case of needles, the bandage, and the Opium Tincture because he remembered now the reverend had taken this after having his bottom lanced. “She has feva. We must leave away or olgeta samting get sik.”

  Pomat took a step back and put his hand over his mouth. The Reverend Mister had taught them to be afraid of germs and that sneezing and coughing without covering their mouths would lose them a part of their soul. For good measure, Argus grabbed the thermometer, handed the first aid kit back to Pomat, and turned to go.

  “Stap,” said the headman.

  Argus dropped his sister’s wrist and turned.

  Pomat came forward and handed the first aid kit to Argus. “Waitman gone now. Nogat tobak and nogat marasin.”

  Argus took the kit. No doubt the headman suspected that typhoid had spread like wood dust in the pews of the church on Sunday mornings despite the inoculation of prayer. The waitman with his box of creams and powders and Holy Ghost was surely to blame. Pomat stood in the reverend’s tartan slippers, waving; behind him, trophy skulls lined the fireplace mantel.

  Argus said tenkyu and backed down the stairs, Malini at his side. Pomat leaned in the doorway and watched them retreat through the thicket toward the beach. After a fe
w hundred feet they came into a clearing fringed with rhododendron and Argus saw a singed wooden frame overgrown with creeper weeds and flowers. The blackened middle rose up like a guillotine. It wasn’t until he saw the levered handle and the unhinged block and the metal type still wedged in place that he realized it was the reverend’s letterpress. The islanders had carried it from the house, dropped it beside a bog, and tried to burn it. But the press was only lightly charred. The jungle had begun to swallow it whole. Argus stripped back the vines and tried to pry the letters free but they were rusted in place. He removed the entire letterplate and read the reversed font in the dying light.

  Natives abhor the general. Speak of the lamb and the dove but not the Ten Commandments without citing itemized punishments and rewards. Further, beware of uttering the future. An Englishman says, “When I get to the village it will be nightfall,” while the Melanesian says, “I am there, it is night.” The Scotsman says, “it will soon be dark and we will need to eat” while the savage says, “I am hungry and it has become already night.” We possess the power of realising the future as present or past; the native does not possess such power. For the Melanesian, everything is unfolding now.

  13.

  The Cullion crossed the equator and slouched into the Doldrums. Jethro, after jabbing his way to victory and passing his oral maritime exam (If present, is the jiggermast the third or fourth shortest of the masts? Explain the customs between privileged and burdened vessels.), was now free to clew the sails. But the wind was days away. Terrapin fired up the engines to cross the equator slantwise at the 180th meridian, the International Dateline, at the stroke of midnight. An entire day was erased from the calendar. This accorded Jethro and the other sailors the status of Golden Shellbacks and thereby began a series of maritime rituals—a mock revolt, baptism by bilgewater, a beauty pageant. Teddy Meyers, veteran seahand, won the pageant with his mother’s retired silk evening gown and a whalebone corset he’d brought along for just such an occasion. Terrapin closed the equatorial proceedings by bungling some Coleridge: All in a hot and copper sky . . . Day after day, day after day, we drifted idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.