Bright and Distant Shores Read online

Bernard scratched the underside of his chin and stood. “For a fee I will take you into the villages and help you trade. You can take your chances with whatever you have to barter. The Malekula are very business-minded and shrewd. They think we Westerners are all feeble-minded and practically blind.” He set his coffee cup down. “Meet me on the beach at sunrise if this is agreeable to you.”

  They entered the village just after dawn, Bernard leading the way with his pistol in his waistband. Giles, rifle slung over his back, trailed with Dickey in the rear, carrying a tea chest of trade items between them and pulling a sow up from the sandy beach. Jethro had managed to convince Terrapin and the cook to part with one of the hogs in return for a commitment that he would purchase two pigs at the next supply stop with his own funds. Despite the fact that this furthered Owen’s trading agenda, Owen resented the interference. Bernard had implied that a sow, although inferior to a boar, was better than no livestock at all, so Owen had agreed to bring it along. Jethro gathered a few specimens in a muslin bag on the way into the settlement—a dusty moth, a tree frog, a skink, a horned beetle.

  The village was set back from the beach and shrouded by a riot of cycas and tree fern. Beds of yam and taro were hacked into the junglescape, the swidden plots overhung with breadfruit. They moved in single file, the footpath narrowed by a gorge choked with wild cane and umbrella palm. As the native village appeared up ahead, Bernard explained its design. The dwelling houses for the women and children were made from thatch and bamboo, and the men’s clubhouse—the amel—was at the other end of a central clearing and was more elaborately decorated. The men all slept and ate together according to rank. A series of carved wooden gongs stood in the middle of the clearing. The gongs were used during the men’s secret ceremonies and rites, when the women were banished from sight behind the hedge fence. The villagers were milling in front of their houses, smoking and preparing food. They seemed indifferent to the arrival of visitors.

  As they came into the clearing it struck Owen that the men outnumbered the women by two to one. “Are the women out gathering?” he asked.

  “This island is overrun with bachelors. Why do you think Camille was so expensive? And now the missionaries want to stop the village wars in the name of the Virgin Mary. How do they expect to ever trim the male population?”

  They stood and waited, the sow snuffling in the dirt. Bernard told them to wait in the shade. Giles placed the rifle at his side and leaned back cautiously on his hands. Jethro set his muslin specimen bag in front of him and sat cross-legged, pinching the knees of his trousers. He was glad to still see two faint pleats from their last proper laundering.

  An old man with closely cropped hair came forward and squatted on his haunches in front of them, setting his spears on the ground beside him. Another man came from the amel clutching what looked to be a scuffed leather briefcase, its monogram lettering faded to tiny shards of gilt. Like the first man, he wore a boar-tusk armlet and a strip of bark around his waist that was tethered to his penis by a woven sheath.

  “Shoremen bring the sheath straight up and tuck it under the belt while the bushmen come up on the diagonal. A matter of style,” said Bernard to a snickering Dickey.

  Rather than carry the briefcase by the handles the approaching man clutched it in front of his chest and joined them on the ground. He snapped the metal fasteners open, then removed and spread a yellowed edition of La Gazette. Jethro noticed that it was five years old and bore the headline Guerre Afrique Atroce! Giles Blunt took his eyes off the bare-chested women for a moment and said, “Jesus, he’s taught them to read French,” with simple wonderment. But then the two villagers began to tear one of the newspaper pages into strips and proceeded to roll cigarettes from a pouch of tobacco. They handed out perfect newsprint cigarettes and Bernard passed around a silver lighter. They sat in the dirt smoking silently, a hazy nimbus climbing above their heads. The rest of the village went about its unhurried morning ritual. To Jethro the tobacco tasted a little stale and leggy.

  When the Malekula men had finished their cigarettes, Bernard introduced them as Bonum and Nagolo, brothers and headmen. Jethro extended his hand in greeting and it hung there for ten seconds before he cleared his throat and brought it back to his lap.

  “Merry Krismas,” said Bonum solemnly.

  Bernard spoke to the two men in a combination of pidgin and monosyllabic French. They called him man-oui-oui. Owen saw him gesture to the tea chest and the sow, his voice emphatic. The Malekula men clicked their tongues and laughed, shaking their heads. Bernard said something scoffing and the men laughed with renewed vigor.

  It was arranged that they could move about the village but they were banned from entering the amel directly. Anything they wished to barter for could be brought into the clearing and a reckoning would be done at the end. Jethro took Giles to help him gather specimens and received directions to a snake-riddled grove of bastard cotton trees behind the village. Although Owen had prevented him from bringing along his 12-gauge birding shotgun—the trading party didn’t need to look like a militia— Jethro had smuggled a small pistol into his wicker creel and intended to use it if he spied unusual plumage. Dickey tied the sow to the hedge fence and several young boys came forward to inspect its snout and flanks. Bernard said, “The men won’t eat a sow. It is beneath them. A boar has value in relation to its tusks. You have brought them a little tub of bacon grease for their wives.”

  Owen walked toward the dwellings, where householders were already bringing out belts, baskets, boar-tusk armlets, clay masks, bows made from arched roots of mangrove. The goods were laid on leaves of ivory palm. Owen took several armfuls of artifacts down to the clearing. Dickey peeked into the sleeping rooms of the houses but was shooed away by an old woman in a banded headdress. She took him by the arm and led him into the center of a group of women and girls who immediately began touching the kinked blond strands of his hair. Dickey had endured countless taunts on account of his woolly head of hair and he’d neglected to have the cook-surgeon-barber trim what Terrapin called the most unseamanlike pelt he’d ever laid eyes on. While a commotion gathered around Dickey’s unruly hair, the girls twining out strands between their fingers and whistling through their teeth, Owen went to look at the chest-high gongs and drifted over to look partway into the clubhouse.

  At the far end of the murky interior he could see a mummified effigy—three feet tall, the limbs tightly coiled in cobweb and clay, the smoked skin mottled and roughed over the skull. The mouth was harrowed through with jagged teeth, the eye sockets empty. It brought to Owen’s mind the apocalyptic menace of the sharks at the Columbian Exposition aquarium four years prior, of staring into the maw of something otherworldly and desolate. He knew it was the item worth collecting above all others and wondered what would induce the villagers to give it up. It wasn’t on Hale Gray’s list but only because he’d not known such a thing existed. The Field Museum would also go to great lengths to have such an item behind glass. He walked over to Bernard, who was eating a bowl of laplap pudding. “Did you ask them about the effigy?”

  “You would need a whole ship full of boars and virgins.”

  “Is that so?”

  “And even then they might not oblige. That statue is some long-dead headman and they think he still breathes somewhere inside that ghastly head.”

  Owen said, “Would you ask them what it would take?”

  Bernard shrugged and kicked a pig-bladder ball back to a band of playing boys. “They call us ghost skins. We’re the walking dead to them. I’ll ask them politely but I won’t haggle. I’ll still be their neighbor long after your ship sails on.”

  Jethro and Giles came bursting out of the bush at that moment, the insurance heir with his finger raised in anguish and Giles carrying a bag of writhing snakes and lizards. “He’s been bit,” said Giles, repositioning the rifle on his shoulder.

  “As I said, not poisonous,” Bernard responded calmly.

  Jethro came forward with his finger lacer
ated and purpled. A few drops of blood had gathered on the fingertip and he was squeezing it. “Best to bleed it, I think,” he said, wincing. “I didn’t have the stomach to kill the snakes but I suppose that will have to be done before too long.”

  Bernard picked up the muslin sack of shifting forms, swung it nonchalantly above his head, and let it thwack against a coconut tree. He placed the bag back at Jethro’s feet—“Nothing damaged, I hope”—and returned to his impromptu soccer game with the village boys.

  Jethro took the bag and emptied its dazed, reptilian contents onto the dirt. He began arranging the snakes and lizards by size with his one good hand, holding the other limp at his side. He tossed several damaged specimens into nearby bushes, the dogs setting on them immediately, and placed the better ones into the creel for later curing. Bonum came over to tend his finger, rubbing some bark and leaves into the wound.

  Owen returned to look at the effigy in the clubhouse, staring into its inscrutable face. Nagolo noticed him and took him by the hand, leading him behind the amel. They walked toward a lashed bamboo lean-to that stood under starbursts of wild orchids. Nagolo removed some of the leafy camouflage at the entrance to reveal a pyramid of yams, shoulder high and a dozen feet deep. On a planed piece of hardwood at the base of the pyramid was an assemblage of rusted tins of meat, the sun-jaundiced lettering in German and French and Malay, a lineage of HMS Liverpool brass buttons, and a Civil War musket lying in pieces, a cupped leaf of gunpowder at its side. A pinned and torn broadsheet presided above it all and depicted Santa Claus—sparsely bearded and a little too thin—holding hands with Parisian children on the Champs-Elysées in a glitter of dusky snow. Owen wondered what all of this meant. Was there a deity involved? An offering? Had the man in the red suit and patchy beard been mistaken for an exiled ancestor? He’d heard passing stories during his last voyage of cults centering on Western goods, of native militias marching under a threadbare Union Jack, pigeon rifles and broomsticks over their shoulders. Were they saving tins of meat for a future day of reckoning, a day when they would take their rightful share of ghost-skin spoils? Nagolo pointed at the broken musket, then at Owen, then touched his own chest. He squinted one eye as if looking through a gun sight. Owen nodded and they returned to the clearing. It was time to barter and apparently the women had already decided that in addition to the fathom of calico they wanted all of Dickey Fentress’s golden curls. He sat upright under the deliberation of a bone-handled knife, wielded by an old woman who sang as she severed one lock after another. The Frenchman turned to Owen and said, “We have begun to trade without you. As you can see, your shipmate has made the first payment.”

  That night, Owen had the shorn apprentice row him ashore to trade a rifle for the rambaramp. He waited until the lantern at the trading station was extinguished and told Dickey to hush the oars through the water. Nagolo was waiting for him at the beachhead, the effigy upright in the sand beside him. Owen gave him the rifle and a box of ammunition. Nagolo helped him load the rambaramp into the boat while Dickey looked on warily. “Face it the other way,” he said. “I’m not rowing back with that thing lookin square at me.” Owen obliged and turned to make some gesture of thanks to Nagolo but the headman was already walking up the beach with the rifle aimed at the onrush of stars.

  In the morning Captain Terrapin spent an hour tossing coins for the diving Malekula boys. The seamen watched them rise through the tessellated depths with silver in their teeth. Half a dozen villagers launched fishing kites from their outriggers. The crew prepared the sails aloft and waved goodbye, waiting for Terrapin to give the order to heave short. Main and mizzen trimmed, the captain patrolled the boat for native stowaways, Nipper at his side, wind at the starboard beam. With the topsails set and the windlass manned, he boomed to break her out and it wasn’t long before the Cullion was under a nice press of sail.

  Owen watched the shores of Malekula diminish in the distance. He thought of the rifle and the damage it might wreak on the island; trading it had been a moral failure, to be sure. Somehow he’d felt powerless to stop the transaction, even though it was of his own devising. He wondered if there wasn’t something defective in his personality, a calculating instinct and competitiveness. He thought now, with Malekula diminishing, that he’d paid more than necessary for Bernard’s services. As far as he could tell, the Frenchman was more of an impediment to negotiations than anything else. The expedition needed to retain a native guide and translator if they were going to keep costs down. Future expedition funding from Hale Gray would depend on it. By maximizing the gain on every trade, Owen thought, he was securing a livelihood and therefore benefiting his future family.

  He planned to spend part of the day writing a fresh letter to Adelaide, having mailed the first one in Fiji. He would write about the bamboo store of yams and tinned meat, about the image of Santa Claus hanging like the patron saint of tubers. He tried to picture her life and routine—taking dictation in one of the narcoleptic meetings at the museum, or reading in the streetcar—but what came to him, leaning against the Baltic fir of the mainmast, was the image of her making love during their final night together. Against all convention and propriety she had given herself over and there she was on his Chinese junk of a bed frame, naked, a traveler out of her depths, eyes peering through a curtain of her own hair, looking back over her shoulder with a mixture of flushed indignation and total surrender.

  Jethro sat in the orlop with his dead birds and reptiles. His snake-bitten finger had been bandaged by the cook and it pulsed now in the fetid, submarine air. There was work to be done and he’d given the bulkhead over to Owen’s trading items and settled for the would-be sick bay. He’d had Giles rough together some bookshelves, a workbench, a stool. He sat with a lamp burning and his microscope gently swaying a beam of light from its mirrored disc. No one bothered him down here and he’d managed to rid the orlop of some of its briny reek. His glass vials and hand lenses were resting on velvet; his jars of algae and starfish were arranged on a makeshift shelf. There was so much to do—compile a seaweed album, a fern case, a rack of eggs prepared with gum arabic. There were countless ways to arrange and distill nature’s breathing plentitude.

  Open on the workbench beside him was William Muttridge’s Taxidermy and Methods of Preparing Natural Specimens, its spine broken and pages heavily underlined. Lately he’d become enthralled by its wisdom and practicality, though he’d also borrowed some ornithological points from Robert Ridgway, curator of the Department of Birds at the National Museum. The only point of disagreement between the two scientists was what to use for poisoning the skin of a bird—Muttridge recommended arsenical soap while Ridgway insisted on mixing pure arsenic with oil of bitter almonds to repel insects. The soap was safer for handling but less vigilant against ants. Jethro found himself unable to make up his mind and shifted from one poison to the other.

  On the matter of procedure and equipment they presented a unified front and Jethro had wholeheartedly adopted their regimen—set off birding early in the morning and with a field kit containing sharp- and blunt-pointed scissors, heavy cutting forceps for breaking the leg and wing bones of large birds, cartilage knives, raw cotton for stuffing, tow, needles and thread for repairing incisions, a variety of scalpels, a tin box to keep scientific kills cool before fuller preparation. They were very particular in recommending a firearm—a 12-gauge, double-barreled, breech-loading shotgun, one barrel choked and the other barrel cylinder-bored. They insisted on rimfire shells filled with American wood powder, grade D, and buckshot ranging in size from No. 4 to No. 12, depending on the size of the prey. Jethro carried all of the above into the field but also a small pistol for its ease of handling and concealment. Technically, he was forbidden by the ship’s articles from possessing a firearm but—if the captain should ask—he would affirm that the oaths of science and art demanded separate allegiance.

  He sat preparing a Royal Parrot Finch for its second life. He’d spent the morning cleaning it and working the skin f
rom the carcass with cornmeal to prevent adhesion. He made a small incision with a scalpel in the bird’s blue neck and introduced a gouge using the handle of a teaspoon. He used the orifice to tweeze out the bird’s brain, about the size of a cranberry, and then cut away the tiny, pallid tongue. The most delicate procedure was removing the eyes intact. Jethro placed some cotton between the tines of his tweezers and plied each eye from its socket. They were like rolled beads of mercury.

  The scientific technique was in the procuring and preserving but the art was in the resurrection of form, of trying to capture the very mind and wild spirit of the bird. The goggle-eyed stiffs of inferior bird-stuffers had always made Jethro wince. He knew he was an amateur naturalist but nonetheless wanted to achieve something lasting and artful. He could still remember the day when his father and he were in London a dozen years prior, Hale on some business at Lloyd’s, and Jethro had spent an afternoon in front of the hummingbird case in the British Museum. In his memory it was the size of a railcar, glass-fronted, and he’d stood before it, half horrified by the desiccated forms. The hummingbirds were lifeless and wizened, petrified on their little twigs and branches. But he’d also been entranced by such variety—the swordbills, sapphires, ruby-breasteds, starthroats—the promise of nature’s infinite forms.

  A ripple caught his eye as he wadded cotton inside the upper body of the Royal Parrot Finch. Something shifted among the lifeless, coiled snakes. He moved the direction of the lamplight and saw the plumage of a Glossy Swiftlet faintly rising on its darkened chest. Jethro became aware of his own breathing, of a pinched feeling at the bottom of each inhalation, as he watched the bird, its eyelids slightly parted, squinting. There was no gunshot wound in the feathers and it was possible that when he’d fired into the nested cliff face that he’d dazed but not killed the bird. He lowered his face to the bird and could hear a delicate hook in its breath, something vaguely accusatory. He straightened, paced, returned to the workbench. It was still breathing, one eye shut. He looked around for a humane weapon, something to snuff the avian life with efficiency. He might hold a handkerchief over his fingers and clamp its short beak shut or twist its neck, swiftly, like a cook breaking a head of lettuce. But both options required manhandling and he preferred an instrument between him and a specimen. Science was the intermediary. He settled on a drop of pure arsenic and pried open the swiftlet’s beak with a pair of tweezers. The bird twitched its wings, the underfeathers curling, as the liquid coated its throat. Jethro smoothed its breast with his bandaged hand. In his bitten finger he felt a renewed throbbing, a pain that was high and brilliant and radiated along the entire length of his arm.