Bright and Distant Shores Page 15

  When the winds did pick up, Jethro and Owen worked their way from jib to mainsail, blistered their hands slackening and tightening hempen lines through the groaning mouths of blocks, cinching halyards around belaying pins. Owen hadn’t worked like this in several years and he liked the way the labor strained his lungs, burned his shoulders, benumbed his thoughts. The uptake of air in the topsail as they sped away from the flaccid Doldrums was like the sound of a thoroughbred snorting mid-race. The keening of the wind against the shrouds and the billowed sailcloth on a tack were part of his dreams at night. At dinner he ate his weight in beans and rice before collapsing into his hammock and letting the day’s thoughts tick over and empty out into sleep. His dreams were crystalline and sun-drenched: a country house with Adelaide baking bread, a glimpsed orchard, white bedsheets flapping in the yard. He wondered how he could make himself worthy of that future vision, what had he done to deserve such tenderness in his life.

  He went to breakfast each morning with a growling pit bull in his stomach and ate whatever gruelish thing the cook-cum-surgeon had prepared. And it was surgery and sawbones more than comestibles that came to mind whenever Hendrik Stuyve sant laid out a platter of bleeding mutton and formless eggs. Owen climbed to the deck and took his assigned position from Terrapin. The captain had become affable now that all the dockside bluster among the men had been settled. All were equalized, he said, by the demands of confined living and the whims of the sea herself.

  The men had also been mellowed by their carnal Hawaiian days, the pageant of crossing the line, and close to a week of riding the trades with all sails out. This was when Owen liked it best—hauling up on a starboard tack, the seamen bent at their work, fierce as Maori warriors. The piston-and-crank of their arms flurried in his peripheral vision as the ship cleaved the lip of a colossal swell. For hours at a time between tacks and jibes, Owen and Jethro perched silently up in the rigging, roped to the mizzenmast, trimming the topsails.

  To Jethro the work was a revelation. He felt sinew in his back and arms for the first time. He noted the way his bones hummed in a high wind and the salt caked his mouth with a satisfying thirst, the way a dozen men sat in the rigging wordless and sullen like boys sulking up in trees. An occasional whistle or quip emerged from the high rigging. There were rules for whistling. It beckoned the winds and should never be done when under gale. Jethro did his best to observe their customs. The equatorial sunsets were brief and chromatic, the final seam of light gone in a burst.

  His shipmates were congenial enough toward him but he floundered for common ground with them. His brief encounters with women had been lackluster and didn’t warrant mention. After hearing the grisly details of other men’s exploits he couldn’t help feeling a lack—he’d never buttered a naked woman’s toast or kissed a pretty girl without knowing her name. At Harvard he’d dated country girls from Radcliffe who were well bred but horsey. They were prim in their opinions about his dinner attire and the books on his shelf. The most reckless thing any of them had done was steal sherry from their father’s liquor cabinets and ride bareback at the beach. They saw Jethro as a gentle dabbler, an uncertain bet. Despite the fact that he was heir to a mammoth insurance empire, he was pulled in too many directions—science, fine art, poetry, card games, boxing—not so much a Renaissance man as a dilettante, a competent traveler. The Radcliffe girls inevitably left him for firmer ground—future accountants and lawyers, even politicians. But for now this was no matter; tied to the mizzenmast, the clipper trued in a sheet of sunlight, he felt loosed from all worldly expectations. He had reserves and stamina. The South Seas were upon them. The collection of specimens was growing below deck now that the men had stopped interfering. Looking down at his split knuckles he thought, I may make a contribution to science. His senses felt sharp, his mind elastic. For several days now, he’d sensed the edges of a poem taking shape somewhere inside him. The sea brims and I brim was a definite candidate for first line. The truth was, this acuity and sensory elation had started the very moment he knocked Harvey McCallister to the deck, his temple bruised and bleeding. Terrapin had come out to raise Jethro’s arms above his head and he’d felt faintly reborn. Somewhere in all this watery splendor there was a resolute self waiting to be formed.

  Introspection was unavoidable at sea. The immense sight lines had a way of turning a man inward. Up in the rigging, Owen watched a progression of coral atolls and saw his life in outline, a lineage of bare rocks that stood for future events—marriage, children, even his own death could be reckoned in the crags that dotted then diminished above the ocean. He saw the other men in the cross-trees, each of them sunk in his own reverie between tacks. Somehow, the sea offered a reprieve from the turning wheel. He could see the workings of his life more clearly, felt a fondness for it that he seldom felt ashore. Time slowed and the days were graspable things, bright objects waiting to be taken up.

  He saw Jethro musing in his notebook and wondered what those pages might contain. Was the heir really concerned with science and the common good? It seemed far-fetched that he wanted to benefit mankind through his bird-poaching and mammal-stuffing. Yet Owen couldn’t help envying what Jethro knew of the world, at least its scientific fabric and underpinnings. But Jethro also plainly knew about art and literature, tossed off casual references to this philosopher or that poet. Owen felt somehow accused by this body of knowledge. What had he done to improve himself, to prepare for a life with Adelaide? What had he ever accomplished for nonmaterial gain? Perhaps he could learn something from the heir that would raise him in Adelaide’s estimation, make him a fuller citizen of the world.

  Then again, was philanthropy and worldly concern only for the rich? He thought of Adelaide’s efforts with the Bohemian poor; yes, she had an elevated perch from which to dispense charity, but he suspected she’d have volunteered at Hull House even if she were living solely off her secretary’s wage. Again it came to him that he was unworthy of her, despite her efforts to bear him up. Every time he thought of bringing savages back so that he could receive his contractual bonus he felt a glimmer of shame. But he wasn’t sure if it was his own shame or Adelaide’s. Her disapproving regard and folded arms played out in his thoughts. Her wifely recriminations would be something to behold. Surely the whole enterprise could be done ethically . . . One of the tethered seamen started singing and he joined in, their voices seeming to fill the topsails.

  Owen shared his trading route with the captain and it was in the New Hebrides, on the island of Malekula, that the collecting voyage would begin in earnest. The Lady Cullion resupplied and watered in Fiji. The seamen loaded the bark with a fresh supply of chickens—most of the laying hens had been eaten—in addition to dry goods and wood. For two hours after dawn, Jethro went birding with his wicker creel and 12-gauge shotgun, a pair of Bond’s placental forceps looped through the buttonhole of his suspenders in case he shot something he didn’t want to touch with his bare hands. Owen sent a wire to Hale Gray to report on their progress and obtained some additional trading goods. He converted some U.S. dollars to English and Australian pounds and French francs. He managed to buy a few tribal clubs from a missionary with a church by the port in Suva. The pink-cheeked Anglican—Reverend Bulstrode—had a collecting kit for tropical butterflies, much to Jethro’s delight, and promised he would keep an eye out for artifacts the next time he went upriver. Owen gave him ten pounds and wrote down a shipping address.

  As the English minister turned from the dock he said, “And how do you intend to get along in Malekula, Mr. Graves? Nothing but cannibals and Presbyterians is what I hear. They bandage their babies’ heads to make the skulls conical, like so many tiny volcanoes. One wonders about such people.”

  “I agree with you, Reverend; Presbyterians are a strange lot,” joked Owen.

  The missionary smiled but said nothing. Jethro shuffled nervously at Owen’s side, arranging his bird pelts to fill the silence.

  Turning for the church, Reverend Bulstrode said, “I hear ther
e’s a French trader living on the southern end of the island. I would recommend securing his services, such as they are.”

  Two days later the ship anchored in a southern Malekula bay. Owen stood by the cathead and watched the anchor line run out, sluicing the water like a smelter’s knife through waved lead. Three men stood aloft and furled the mainsail. Terrapin was on deck to oversee the operation and had barely left the charthouse since Fiji. He was said to be in a blue funk. In these latitudes, Owen was told, the captain had a standing obsession about the Cullion getting hogged up on a reef or running aground on a sandbar. One night, Owen had overheard one of his lectures to the first and second mate: “You both sail by the book, but it’s more than seamanship that gets a bark through these waters. It’s instinct, a feeling in the skin. I look for harbingers and omens, the way the buntlines whisper against the sailcloth. From my cabin I know when the ship is stuttering or off-kilter . . . Lying in bed I can feel the tension in sails, whether she’s drawing twenty-six feet or less, whether a seaman on the dogwatch is pissing too long off the starboard railing and is therefore drunk . . .”

  When the eastern sky seamed with the day’s first light, a small landing party rowed ashore in one of the dinghies. The whale-boats, Terrapin said, were reserved for shipwreck or matters of nautical state. Owen and Jethro were accompanied by Giles Blunt, the introverted carpenter, and Dickey Fentress, the woolly-headed cabin boy and apprentice. Giles leaned whistling against the gunwale with a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder while Dickey rowed them toward the beach. Jethro sat in the stern, a finger trailing in the small wake, his nets and collecting creel at his feet. Owen took inventory of his trading stock—a bag of glass beads, six steel knives, three machetes, a dozen mirrors, a ream of paper, bottles of ink, a carton of matches, three looking-glasses, a fathom of calico. The lush mountains drew up from the pale beach and the trading station stood at one end, a ramshackle cottage made of driftwood, a tendril of smoke rising from its chimney. Dickey feathered the oars into the shallows and they dragged the boat up onto the beach.

  They approached the cottage and a tall man dressed in filthy dungarees came out holding a revolver and a demitasse of coffee. Giles slightly lifted the rifle at his side then lowered it at Owen’s insistence.

  Owen said, “Reverend Bulstrode sent us. We’re out here to do some trading.”

  “I’m sure the priest had some complimentary things to say about me.” The Frenchman tucked the revolver into his waistband and blew across his smoking coffee. He gestured with his cup at the anchored bark and the sailors followed his gaze. Captain Terrapin was taking a constitutional morning swim, executing his backstroke rather sloppily while several men rowed a whaleboat beside him and kept the shark watch with pistols.

  “I am Bernard Corlette. Would you gentlemen care for some coffee? Camille has just made some.” The formality of the invitation seemed out of place with the Frenchman’s dirt-smeared clothes. Although his face was aristocratic—a high-bridged nose, mineral blue eyes—it was also sunken. Something about the jaw-line suggested missing teeth.

  Owen introduced the party and accepted the offer. They mounted the makeshift stairs and entered a bare room, the walls chinked with daylight. A figure moved at a woodstove and they saw a native girl, not more than sixteen, tending a coffeepot. She turned, eyes down, and laid out four chipped porcelain cups onto a bamboo table. She wore a flimsy floral blouse and a fringed skirt made of woven grass. For a moment Owen wanted to believe that the girl was the maid and not the wife. But Bernard removed any doubt with: “This is Camille. She is pretty, no?”

  “Lovely,” said Dickey, swallowing.

  Bernard said, “Twenty-five boars. All with tusks. Can you believe it? A fortune. A bloody king’s ransom for this girl.” He blew her a kiss with his fingers and she shrugged then commenced chopping green bananas.

  Jethro could not look at the girl directly. He cupped his coffee in his hands and sipped it. It was bitter and hot. With the grounds left in, it tasted more Turkish than French.

  They sat on low stools and took in the room. Owen had expected a space filled with tribal artifacts but it was empty save for a stash of French newspapers, a bed, a storm lantern. Everything was covered in a fine layer of silt. It was not squalor so much as exiled ruin, the one-room abode of a man who’d fled civilization. Bernard took a refill from Camille and touched her buttocks in a way that made them all turn their eyes to the wall or the floorboards.

  “How long have you been out here?” Owen asked.

  Bernard returned and sat on the floor definitively, as if this answered the question. He downed the shot of coffee with one swift throwback of the head. “Years. I am almost one of them. However, I keep a little pinky finger in the world with my trading. I have a brother in Paris, an astronomer, who sends me La Gazette. I read of bunting and taffeta and it makes me laugh aloud.”

  Owen watched Bernard examine his blackened fingernails and thought of Adelaide and the smell of starched cotton. She was his insurance policy against this sort of existence.

  “Who do you trade with?” Owen asked.

  “Lately it is the Germans. They are crazy for everything they can get their hands on. Baskets. Penis gourds. I could sell them a toothpick if it had touched tribal lips.”

  Jethro let his gaze sidle over to Camille, who was now frying the green bananas in a skillet. Her dark hair was long and matted and clumped at the neck. She stood barefoot, shifting from side to side, raising one heel at a time. The bottoms of her feet were pink and calloused. He watched as the glints of firelight from the stove hatch threw her breasts into flickering relief. To change the course of his libidinous thoughts he said, “Are there snakes on this island?”

  Bernard formed a peak with his fingers. “Why do you ask?”

  “I am the ship’s naturalist.”

  A tandem sigh from Giles and Dickey.

  “And you will be wanting to collect snakes?”

  “All manner of things.”

  “Then you will be happy to know that the land snakes are not poisonous. Of course, the sea snakes are another matter. Venomous and difficult to catch.” He turned back to Owen, who was clearly the man in charge. “What is it you wish to collect, Mr. Graves?”

  “Tools, masks, weapons, that sort of thing. Baskets. Handiwork.”

  Bernard crossed his arms, lightly flushed from the coffee. “And naturally you will desire the rambaramp.”

  Owen paused. He’d never heard of such a thing and wondered if it weren’t some kind of canoe.

  “For the sake of your men’s edification: this is an effigy, sometimes life-sized, for a man of rank. They smoke and dry the body and cut off the head. They make a kind of statue with tree ferns, wood, and compost, perhaps some resin and cobwebs, then cap the whole thing off with the skull and occasionally use the dried facial skin of the dead man. It is a marvelous sight. Also terrible.”

  The Frenchman delighted in the details as if he were recounting the ingredients of a renowned bouillabaisse.

  “Ingenious, no? Quite a ritual. It takes a year for the entire process to be completed.”

  “Can such a thing be obtained?” Owen said.

  “Anything can be obtained, but naturally it is a question of means. The village down here only has one left and I doubt they would part with it. What are you intending to trade?”

  Owen repositioned himself on the stool and emptied his coffee cup. He was conscious of his shipmates watching him. “In the rowboat we have glass beads, knives, matches. We also have some calico. That sort of thing.”

  Bernard touched his left earlobe and grinned sarcastically. “Perhaps you think it is 1797.”

  Jethro couldn’t help feeling smug; Owen had said just such a thing to him before departure, something about wanting to make new discoveries a hundred years too late.

  “I’m not following,” said Owen, bristling.

  “Have you been voyaging in the South Seas before?”

  “Yes, a few year
s back.”

  “Well, things have changed. The savages do not want matches and mirrors and little glass marbles anymore. They want guns, cash, pigs, tobacco. I have done my best to keep guns off this island because I do not wish to be shot in my sleep. Last year the German New Guinea Company bought some land on Matty Island in the Bismarck region and set up a trading station. The trader was dead within weeks. My suggestion is that you make a list of things you would like and I will quote a total fee and bring the goods out to your ship. Payment terms will be in francs, naturally.”

  “We’d prefer to do our own trading,” Owen said.

  Jethro added: “And I’d like to collect some specimens.”

  Bernard drummed his fingernails on the dirt floor. “Do you imagine you will walk into one of the villages and ask to see the cannibal forks?”

  Jethro said, “We will happily pay you as our guide. And we have some chickens and pigs on board the ship which perhaps can be used for trading purposes.”

  Owen turned quickly to Jethro but did not look him in the face. “The livestock is not ours to trade.”

  Jethro looked at the stove. “Not yours, at any rate, but bought with company finances.”

  “Yes, in order to feed the men fresh meat. Or do you intend to incite a mutiny so that you can bag some lizards?”

  Dickey bit his bottom lip to stifle his laughter.