Bright and Distant Shores Read online

  You’ll remember the curious Jethro Gray from our farewell at the train station. Here is another ephemera— or do I mean enigma?—who can only be described as unwonted. In the span of a week he managed to have a banker’s son pull a pistol on him on the train and to have every mariner, the captain included, decry the gilded day he was born. He seems unable to get along with ordinary men. His privilege, the way he disports himself, the stammering face and flinching hands, all of them get the hackles up and make for discord wherever he ventures or speaks. Things came to a head when he challenged a stocky Irish kid to a boxing match and managed to win with a king punch. Since then he has won the men’s silent and begrudging respect. They don’t like him much better but appreciate his combat. They leave him to his manhunt for nature’s curios—tropical birds of scarlet plumage, blue parrotfish, enormous jellyfish, flying insects, lizards. He spent the whole time in the Sandwich Islands with his magnifying glasses and pillboxes and nets and he’s taking up too much of the hold and I’ve barely begun to collect a thing. It smells like a briny zoo of dead animals down there, which is exactly what it has become.

  I have, however, charted a trading route, a jagged horseshoe that cuts through the islands from east to west and north again. We’ll supply at Suva in Fiji before heading for the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands, perhaps north to German and Dutch New Guinea from there. There might be a few sundry islands thrown in for good measure. Fortunately I made notes during the previous voyage and I see now that it was a kind of preparation.

  I know of your reluctance that I should be at sea but I firmly believe this is the trip that will allow me to make the transit into middling society. I can’t shake your father’s hand knowing that my sole property is an inherited junkyard on the South Side. With the contracted payment we can afford to take a mortgage on a modest house in a good neighborhood. I picture grass in the backyard instead of crushed stone and pig iron. What do you think of that? I might even trade the Chinese junk of a bed frame for mahogany or teak. You’ve made every display of tenderness and understanding toward my position and I will always be grateful for that. But I want something for myself as well. My father smoked the cigars of a wealthier man, always assuming his hard work would vault him upward, that if he smoked the right brand then the shoes and hat and house would follow. That didn’t come to pass and I don’t intend to leave this world by the same reckoning. Some of the objects on my cargo list will be difficult to obtain but I feel up to the task. There must be a reason why I hoarded all those things from a time before my voice broke. Whether supernatural will or the material grappling of a wrecker’s son, I can’t speculate, but I do know my life comes to this enterprise with a sort of natural ease. I am gifted at this trade, have an eye for detail, see the way a stone implement can be a storehouse of a man’s soul and hopes, but also his hellgate visions. Forgive the metaphysics; as you know, I am not much for religion, though rest assured I would gladly baptize all of our twelve children (six of each sex would be fine) as long as we could name them all after ships: Enterprise, Republic, Constitution, Beagle, Endurance, Fram—and those are just the girls’ names! All joking aside, I pray you’ll have the patience to endure this disposition for the remainder of our days. Voyages such as these will be enough to float us for years at a time. I promise to be more at home than anywhere else.

  With deepest affection—

  Owen

  Adelaide reread choice selections. She particularly liked the phrases every display of tenderness, forgive the metaphysics and I promise to be more at home than anywhere else. If she were going to catalogue this letter according to Dorsey’s new system it might have read:

  Accession: 25

  Object Number: 13860

  World Area: Pacific

  Country: between Hawaii and Fiji

  Description: letter from fiancé in which he refers to future

  wedding plans and jitters, chides himself humorously, makes

  oblique promises, uses several words incorrectly but nonetheless

  charmingly

  She folded the letter, emptied the palmful of sand back into the envelope. Already composing a response in her mind, she hurried down the stairs, noticing from a wall clock that it was almost eleven. She’d been gone for half an hour and her stomach lurched when she saw Dorsey standing by her desk, a grim look on his face.

  “I’m not feeling well,” she said curtly.

  He held a hand over his stomach in distress. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere, Miss Cummings,” Dorsey said. “A Western Union boy came looking for you.”

  Adelaide walked toward her desk, edging the letter behind her back.

  “I signed for it,” Dorsey said, pointing with the back of his hand.

  Adelaide took up the cable, and in her mother’s frugal entreaty felt her life recede:

  YOUR FATHER STOP PLEASE COME HOME STOP

  16.

  The island of Djimbanko was unclaimed territory, lying in the ferrous-blue straits between the New Hebrides and New Caledonia. It was too barren for yam gardens and the population too motley to be of lasting interest to the Anglicans, Presbyterians, or Lutherans. It was a trading outpost, black market, way station, and island brothel. For decades it had been a sanctuary for escaped convicts from the French and British colonies and for kanakas banished from their own islands. It was populated by lepers, syphilitic Spaniards, exiled shamans, Malay pirates, Indonesian jewel smugglers, beachcombers, highland pygmies. Courtesy of the island’s founding fathers—a band of British mutineers—the language was a strange mix of pidgin and eighteenth-century alehouse slang. The whores were blowsabellas, the pygmies mini-kins, and crinkum was the sort of venereal shanker that drove men into the smoking mouths of volcanoes.

  The island contained several French families who had escaped the failed expedition of the Marquis de Rays in 1880. The nobleman and self-proclaimed King of New France had enticed hundreds of followers from Marseille to Port Breton, where they were expecting a coral-garden utopia but instead found little fresh water and sandy soil. A bishop on board blessed the sea and hung a portrait of the marquis next to the Virgin Mary and the journeyed believers died in droves of hunger, typhoid, malaria, and despair. The land of the new empire was so inhospitable that the New Ireland natives had long ignored it and thought the Frenchmen were gods sent back from world’s end to suffer in eternity.

  There were still tattered copies of La Nouvelle France floating around Djimbanko. It was the utopian newspaper that circulated in French churches and spoke of Melanesian cathedrals and aubergine gardens and which now lined parrot cages and stuffed pillowcases. Its masthead said it was printed in the Pacific colony of the devout but in fact it was printed in a Marseille warehouse and continued to appear long after the last pilgrim had died, escaped, or been rescued, and long after the Marquis de Rays had been arrested in Spain for fraud.

  Several French escapees of this failed religious expedition now held sway over Djimbanko’s attractions. A family of Manouche gypsies ran a small native sideshow and petting zoo. It was an entertainment designed for visiting ships and took place the first Saturday of the month outside hurricane season. There was a makeshift bamboo arena with an acrobatics display by the eldest daughter, a gymnast and high-wire artist. She tumbled and twirled batons while her younger brothers juggled flaming torches, led wallabies on catches of twine so that drunk sailors could put shillings in their joey pouches. One of the brothers played a clarinet with broken keywork before a pit of venomous snakes while another lined up the highland pygmies with their broad noses and girlish voices and made them dance to a Russian waltz.

  Terrapin had promised such whimsy and exotic delights to his men, told them he could vouch for the nubile whoring on the island. The crew was due a luff-day before Owen Graves took the ship southwest and north for a torrent of trade in every malarial port and tumbledown yamhouse. But the sailors would have to earn their reward by scrubbing the Cullion until she smelled like chalk. Ever since
the equatorial crossing, Terrapin had been on a cleaning binge, lighting brimstone fires to clear out the fug and towing the men’s foul laundry astern with the naturalist’s dredge net of bolting silk. Lately the ship had taken a fetid turn—cockroaches, red ants, centipedes, spiders, house crickets, horseflies, and mosquitoes on the fly, scurry, and crawl. There were rats as big as alley toms living in the hold and they were hungry enough to eat hobnails. When seamen put their boots on in the morning there was a fine sod of mold growing on the toe hub. Everyone suspected that the vermin were breeding in the gloomy lair of Jethro’s laboratory—in the darkened theater behind a row of scientifical books, perhaps, or in a tub of albumen extracted from the eggs of native birds. It was a filthy practice, Terrapin told his men, this poaching and pickling and offal-gathering.

  Giles Blunt, as carpenter, was in charge of greasing the masts and blocks and he sent Dickey Fentress aloft with a tub of slush from the cook-surgeon. The boy moved with simian pluck, arms stretched, nimbling over the ratlines. If there was one lesson the apprentice had to learn it was never unclasp a spar or crosstree without first securing a handhold on some other piece of mast or rigging. Terrapin bellowed this cardinal rule up at the boy and went to check on Jethro’s progress in washing down his filthy little orchis-house. Terrapin nodded approval to the sudsy-armed seamen who had trawled in the towline of funked laundry like some grizzly beast yanked from the depths. He went below calling, “Mr. Gray, I am coming to see if you’ve cleaned your room like a darling.”

  Owen was cleaning out the bulkhead and the space beneath the forecastle-head. Now that they had lost a pig to trade there was only one sow, a hatch of chickens, and the rather seasick ewe competing for stowage. They had anchored off one of the islands southwest of Malekula and he’d picked up some low-grade weapons and adornments from the natives who paddled out in single-hulled canoes. When Owen refused to part with any rifles, they’d settled for two knives, a box of wax matches, and a pouch of navy tobacco. He was eager now to press on, perhaps find a people or place untouched by mainstream trade. He wiped the rambaramp down with a chamois cloth but couldn’t look into its gaping, hideous mouth. It amused him to think of Hale Gray having this mummified effigy with its smoked human skull sitting in a glass case on the twenty-eighth floor of the insurance skyscraper. He pictured secretaries not unlike Adelaide taking dictation in the mortuary pall of his office or executives coming to ask for a raise while having to stare down this ancestral ogre. Would it act as a souvenir of a savage and distant tribe or was it a totem, a grim reminder that every man dies alone, powerless to govern what becomes of his person? God help the widows and children without a policy on their dead man’s head. It struck Owen that perhaps every relic in that display case was an advertisement for insurance, a statement about the precariousness of life itself.

  He didn’t want to go ashore on Djimbanko because it sounded, at best, like a native circus and flea market. On the other hand, Jethro had threatened to go birding and he wasn’t to be trusted among the local rabble-rousers. Owen could easily imagine Jethro being shot or bludgeoned for slighting a leper, pearl diver, or jewel smuggler. Ever since his snakebite he’d taken to wearing a white fencing glove on his left hand and claimed it offered protection when gathering tide pool mollusks. Aside from the question of how he happened to have a fencing glove aboard a ship at sea, this addition to his person undid all attempts at camouflaging his upbringing with workpants, broadloom shirt, and serge cap. It announced his pedigree like a heraldry seal and Owen couldn’t help wondering what else he had down in the orlop that might see him murdered—a pétanque or croquet set, a falconer’s gauntlet and polo mallet?

  Three whaleboats went ashore, carrying most of the seamen. The sailmaker was laid low in the hold with the Johnny-trots and the Dutch cook, Hendrik Stuyvesant, stayed behind on the premise of preparing a batch of scouse but was said to be sleeping off a hangover in a hammock between-decks. The captain stayed in the chartroom with Nipper and his gramophone. The sailors’ laundry flapped from the rigging like Irish pennants.

  Owen rode with Jethro, who sat in the prow with his birding kit and sketchpad. What exactly he planned to draw or catch was a mystery; from what Owen could see the island was a treeless clay bed skirted by coral. As they rowed across the honeycombed reef heads, the smell of volcanic sulfur was everywhere. The oarsmen rowed in unison, singing lewdly in anticipation of the coming pleasures. Harvey McCallister sang the loudest and dirtiest and had been restored to respectability despite his crushing defeat in the deckside boxing match. Dickey Fentress was assigned the job of watching the whaleboats to make sure they weren’t stolen but insisted he wanted to go whoring like the rest of them.

  “Captain says hot black nubies is the best way for a man to lose his cherry,” he offered at the end of an oar stroke.

  “When you can slush the skysail mast without dribbling pig grease everywhere we’ll worry about dropping your trousers, little Dick,” said Harvey, eliciting a delighted chuckle from the seamen.

  Owen watched Dickey blush and bite his lower lip. He saw some of himself in the young apprentice: Dickey was orphaned and had been forced to make his way in the world; he was unsure of himself but also impatient to prove his mettle. His main downfall was distraction. Owen found himself dispensing advice to the boy. One watch he’d told the boy that if he learned to box a compass and bend a new topgallant the captain might give him a trick at the wheel. He told him to steer clear of the shirkers and the ship’s deadweight. Dickey seemed to take this to heart for a few days but then his enthusiasm fell off and he became absorbed by some mindless and vulgar prank. A handful of ordinary seamen were always trying to corrupt and sabotage his training and Dickey lacked the will to chart his own course. He would find out the hard way, Owen thought, watching him put his back into the oar stroke.

  They dragged the whaleboats up onto the sand and left Dickey to stand watch with a rifle. He propped himself in the shade of a dory sail and whittled a piece of driftwood with his pocketknife. The men started up the beach, adjusting their clothes and hats as if calling on their own mothers. The forlorn sound of a clarinet came from up ahead and, from the rear, a staticky aria broke from the ship’s charthouse. Jethro trailed behind the group, blinking in the sun, looking for signs of collectible life. Owen slowed and cast a wary backward glance just in time to see him delicately pick up a snarl of kelp as if it were a weed from Lincoln’s grave. He waited for Jethro to catch up, but when it became clear he would be some time on the beach, Owen joined the others.

  They walked along a blackened path and Owen noticed a long-abandoned chapel up on a blighted hillside. Against the caldera it was an odd landmark, a listing shed with a white cross. The volcanic smoke fuming five hundred feet above was an advertisement for the furnaces of hell. They passed through a corridor of shanties and lean-tos and up ahead a band of Tapiro pygmies danced in the bamboo arena. Instead of an island corroboree of spears and foot-stamping, they were taking small, dignified steps in drifts of silt, waltzing in couples, the men in top hats and penis gourds and the women bare-breasted and bibbed in shells. Along the way there were all manner of sorry handicrafts laid out on sawhorse tables—gaudily painted masks, crude weapons hacked from stone, shoddy necklaces, and mud-daubed shields. Owen couldn’t tell whether the artless trinkets had been made by banished natives or English castaways out for a dollar. He shook his head at the men and boys smoking pipes behind the tables and walked toward the din.

  A pole-fence corral had been built around a dead banyan tree and a European woman with black hair was hanging by a roped ankle, spinning slowly. The seamen began applauding and tossing coins as the pygmies took leave and a team of animal keepers came out with exotic beasts. A native clown in vermilion facepaint entered the pit juggling fire sticks. Like the rest of the men, Owen rested on the fence and took in the spectacle. It reminded him of a tramp circus and ox-drawn sideshow his father had taken him to as a boy. Somewhere on the outskirts of Chicago, out
beyond the stockyards, they stood in the rain and entered darkened canvas tents that smelled like snakes to see bearded ladies, serpent charmers, pinheads, men who smashed gravestones over their heads. His father had called it a mudshow and pushed Owen through the Congress of Strange People by the shoulders. At each freakish display his father said nothing but there was the insistent hand at Owen’s back, as if this were a bearing witness to life’s cataclysms, standing before the vaudeville and dime museum Stations of the Cross. His father smoked a cigarette and joked with the sideshow barkers and the venerable old circus barber with a wooden leg and it was all meant to show Owen the razor’s edge that kept them from the brink, the godless maw that waited out in the tenements and stockyards. Owen, at nine, knew he had been spared but didn’t yet know from what. For months after, he dreamed of the freak-show Siamese twins and woke terrified of seeing a brother’s congenital ear next to his own or feeling the double thrum of a shared pulse, the lapping tide in the same hemisphere of blood. This feeling of dread came to mind now as the gypsy woman hung from her teeth and a midshipman pantomimed the humping of a kangaroo for his shipmates. One of the Manouche animal keepers called to the showoff to step back behind the fence or he’d have his whore-pipe culped. The sailor obliged, his shipmates guffawed, and the rest of the vaudeville passed without incident.