Bright and Distant Shores Read online

  When the corral floor was covered in coins and the gymnast climbed down from the banyan tree to take a bow, the whores were brought out in single file. “Mine’ll need a leash just like that wallaby,” called Harvey, producing a wad of banknotes he’d borrowed from the sailmaker on account of his garnished wages. There were half a dozen Melanesian girls in filthy cotton dresses and ill-fitting girdles, brassieres visible beneath. Their faces were painted as gaudily as the shoddy tribal masks. The gypsy brothers were not only zookeepers but pimps and began haggling with the men, itemizing each girl’s portfolio of carnal tricks. Deals were brokered while the fusty-luggs and mackerel-backed madonnas toed the dirt, the gypsy boys riffing in French and an English so strange and archaic it hadn’t been uttered in a century.

  Owen drifted back among the flea market stalls and, more from boredom than anything else, bought a boning knife of unknown origin. The boy who sold it to him said they took dollars, francs, English pounds, and rum prog as payment. He said his name was Roger Billy Smith and he sat on a wooden crate, chewing betel nut and dribbling its juice into a rusted oyster tin. Owen found it hard to believe that in the span of a few years the Pacific had become so debauched and overrun with Western influence. During his first voyage there had been plenty of interaction with copra planters and traders, mercenaries living at the strandline of the tribal world, but the native settlements had seemed intact for the most part. Had Captain Bisky steered them a course through untainted territory, knowing just where to anchor, or had something shifted these last few years? New Caledonia—which he’d decided not to visit—was now more European than Melanesian. The French prison colony had just closed down and a nickel mine had opened somewhere in the interior. The white pimps and hagglers of Djimbanko were probably extradited French pickpockets who preferred their lawless island inferno to the prospect of returning to the barbarous streets of Paris.

  One such beggar came bundling down the pathway in a Panama hat and trousers hitched with a length of halyard. He walked in laceless shoes, shambling along with a hardwood cane, singing to himself. As he came closer Owen saw that he was a native boy of about eighteen and that he was carrying both a Bible and a leather-clad edition of David Copperfield.

  “Boy that humboxes from the hill church,” said Roger Billy Smith, gesturing with his chin and spitting into his can. The native stopped a few feet short and could no doubt see the surprise in Owen’s face. Surely the Dickens novel was nothing more than a sheaf of cigarette papers, just as the French newspaper had been on Malekula? But then the boy looked him square in the eye and said, “Excuse me, sir, is there a doctor aboard your ship?”

  Owen took him in. “Where are you from?”

  The boy ignored the question but explained what had befallen his sister, claiming that she needed an operation. She would not let him near her buttocks with a syringe and had taken opium tincture every day to help the pain but the vial was nearly empty. All of it was delivered in a colony servant’s English but with near perfect pronunciation and inflection.

  Distracted by this linguistic display, Owen said, “What’s a hum box?”

  “They call the pulpit that. We are living in the old chapel since we rowed ashore. I am from another mission island and on Sundays a few of the men come up for hymns and a sermon.”

  “Are you a preacher?” Owen stifled the surprise in his voice.

  The boy said, “I can lead you to her. Will the ship’s doctor see her?”

  To call Hendrik Stuyvesant a doctor was a wild stretch of the imagination. Granted, it was common slang to refer to the ship’s cook as the doctor, so technically it wasn’t a lie, but that designation in the wider world seemed to imply formal training and a thorough understanding of the body’s mechanics and living systems. Terrapin claimed that the wiry Dutchman knew how to suture a wound, pull an abscessed tooth, administer laudanum and prescribe a mercurial ointment if a gonorrhea-addled seaman was pissing pins and needles, but the former prisoner and counterfeiter barely knew the names of bones or the vein-ways by which blood returned to the heart. Everything he’d gleaned about medicine had been on a ship and under bloody duress and it wouldn’t have surprised Owen to learn that he had no more studied a medical treatise than read the Iliad . His one saving grace, and the only hope this native preacher boy had in the world, was that Hendrik, outside the kitchen, had a counterfeiter’s precision and tenacity. Then again, Owen wondered, why had he spent a decade in jail?

  Owen looked at the boy clutching the novel to his chest. He tried to imagine him in native garb, without the ragged shirt and trousers. But it was just as easy to imagine him in freshly pressed linens with a cravat around his neck. There was poise, something like dignity in his bearing. “Yes, the ship’s doctor will see her if she comes aboard.”

  “I will have to come with her.”

  “Of course.”

  “Please, follow me to the chapel now. My name is Argus Niu.”

  He held out his hand stiffly for Owen to shake. Outside of some barely civilized traders and some men of the cloth, Owen hadn’t shaken hands since leaving San Francisco. He shook Argus’s hand and followed him down the path. As they came up the igneous hillside where the broken chapel stood rotting, Owen saw that Jethro was still down on the beach trawling for seaweed and plucking up sea anemones with his fencing glove. Dickey was helping him drag tentacles of weed out of the surf, the rifle slung over one shoulder.

  The chapel was a Calvinist clapboard affair, not much more than a shed with a steeple, roughed out with ship’s planking and sawn through with paneless windows. It had weathered at least a generation of neglect and Owen wondered what heathen uprising had seen the mission wane. From his years of wrecking he could tell the entire building was ready to topple. It read in the list, in the cracked soil around the foundation posts, in the wind singing through the joists and rafters. It was what his father and other wreckers used to call a Christmas present—a few hours’ work for a day’s pay.

  Inside, the boy removed his hat and led Owen forward. There were alternating columns of shade and slatted sunlight through the glassless windows. An acrid breath blew down off the caldera and into the battered nave. A couple of pews made from planks and cartouche boxes had been pushed into the shade and the sister lay hallucinating on one of them. One hand was raised as if she were reading an oracle in her knuckles or fingernails, her mouth stricken and full of tremors. She moved her head slowly from side to side and her lips were caked white. She was older than the boy, though by how much was hard to tell due to the fever and opium. Owen stepped closer, peering into the bolt of deep shade where she lay supine. The heat and the smell of the volcano didn’t disguise the necrotic stench. He’d encountered sepsis during his first voyage and the smell was something he could live without. The boy leaned down and spoke to his sister in their tribal tongue.

  “Can she walk?” Owen asked.

  Argus shook his head.

  Owen said, “We’ll bring a stretcher and treat her on the ship.”

  Argus said, “I’ve been praying for a ship but it’s been almost a month.”

  Owen left the chapel and walked down to the beach, where Dickey and Jethro were frolicking like a couple of honeymooners on the shoreline—running through the waves, splashing each other, tossing a waterlogged coconut back and forth. Owen saw that the rifle was unattended by the whaleboats and he hurried to take it up and fired it three times into the air. The two of them couldn’t be trusted to spot their own shadows. Dickey came running up the beach, his face already filling with shame. Owen could remember felling buildings with his own adze, being trusted with a box of dynamite at the age of twelve. Three shots was the signal for all-hands during a landing and soon the men would trudge reluctantly down to the beachhead.

  Dickey stopped short and looked up, waiting for his lambasting. His hair was growing back in quills and spikes and it toughened his demeanor.

  “Row to the ship and tell the cook we’re bringing a patient aboard. If he’
s drunk in his hammock go to the cookroom and hot up some coffee. Understand? And bring back the stretcher in the boat. Be quick about it!”

  Dickey began for the boat, earnest-faced, but turned when he heard Owen speak again.

  “I won’t tell the captain that the rifle was lying in the sand but consider that a loan of confidence. If you want to be an exquisite and splash about in the waves instead of standing watch then you better get rich and go to Harvard like your girlfriend over there.” They looked off and saw Jethro loading his birding bag with seashells. Owen tightened the rifle strap and handed it back to the apprentice. He heard his own father in the admonishment and didn’t mind the sound of it. Give the kid something to nail to the masthead. That’s what Porter Graves would have said.

  When the clay men bore her aloft on stretched white canvas Malini thought she was dead and crossing over. Long-departed uncles and cousins had come back in their white spirit guises to carry her. The old ones were gray and their hair was straight except for a boy who was plumed like a fledgling. She wanted to see her mother, who waited somewhere out on the ocean. She wanted her body to be returned to Poumeta for proper burial and so that someone might weep over her. For five nights she would haunt the lagoons, she thought, rousing the children and the dogs and the shamans before swimming out to meet everyone else. There was an island out there with fruits she had never eaten—grapes, green apples, the blue berries her brother had told her about.

  They placed her in a whaleboat and she felt the ocean plinking against the wooden hull because it was trying to get to her wound. The oarsmen crowded over her with their green eyes and ruddy cheeks. The pain swam up into her stomach and spine when the oars rocked; she could hear their trousers strain against the wooden benches. Argus was sitting beside her singing and praying with her hands in his. The canvas stretcher smelled bitter and she wanted her brother to touch her head. Was the Bible written in heaven? This was a question she wanted to ask him. Their breathing was like a monsoon cloud as they rolled over the waves. The wound had its own heartbeat and she had to protect it. They pulled into the shadow of a ship. Two ropes were lowered and attached to the stretcher. She felt herself rise.

  Owen and Terrapin watched Hendrik Stuyvesant walk unsteadily toward the orlop, a glass of soda water in his hand. He pushed his way through a wall of curious seamen who’d come below to watch him operate on the feverish savage.

  Terrapin said, “A dead native is bad luck on a ship, Doctor. Get her up and able so we can weigh anchor from this little Babylon.”

  “I’ll do my level best, Captain,” said Hendrik. “What’s the presenting complaint?”

  The captain looked to Owen.

  “A boil on her ass,” said Owen. “It’s turning septic or gangrenous or otherwise stinking and rotten.”

  Hendrik winced faintly. “Glad I brought my soda water. I’m feeling all-overish just at present.”

  “You will still prepare mess tonight, I assume,” said Terrapin. “I expect the men are quite hungry from their debauchery.”

  “Of course,” said Hendrik, put out.

  Owen suspected Hendrik was the only man aboard with three jobs. Terrapin summoned him at all hours for food, like it was hotel room service, or if he wanted his sideburns, neckline, and nose hairs trimmed, like some mogul about to be martyred in battle.

  The captain bellowed at the seamen to clear out so that the doctor could do his work. Owen went above while Argus and Jethro remained with the patient. Hendrik came into the orlop proper.

  “The brother refuses to leave and I thought I might lend a hand,” said Jethro. “I’ve cleared some of my specimens so you have room to work.”

  Hendrik took a sip of his soda water and set it down beside the abscessed buttocks. There was a row of glassed jellyfish and a mound of tropical bird pelts on a nearby table. “Suit yourself.”

  “Will you put her to sleep?” Argus asked.

  Hendrik paused, looked at the native’s clothes and shoes. “Not sure I see the need.”

  “She’s in a lot of pain,” said Jethro. “You must have some chloroform.”

  “What I have in my medical kit is my concern.”

  As if on cue, Dickey Fentress appeared with the leather kit and placed it on the workbench. The bag was monogrammed and this made Argus relax a little; they were in good hands. Hendrik began removing items from compartments and sleeves—a tub of jalap, a vial of mercury, cough syrup, laudanum, lousing kerosene, a scalpel, bandages, quinine, needle and thread, a stoppered glass jar of chloroform, a forger’s loupe that doubled for surgical magnification. From out of the cavernous bottom he produced a coil of steel wool and a bone saw with a brocade of rust stippled along one side. Argus felt his heart drop.

  Hendrik ran the scalpel through the candleflame. Malini moaned and turned away. “You gents may need to restrain her.”

  Jethro said, “We can purchase more chloroform if that’s the matter.”

  “I like to keep it in case of emergencies. Hard to come by, it is. One time I had to take off a man’s leg at sea. You want that poor bastard to go without the tide of mercy so this kanaka can take a nap while I lance a boil on her black rump?”

  Jethro looked at his hands and then at the terrified woman on the table. “I don’t think lancing is required.” He paused, folded his arms. “I have a syringe I use to empty bird eggs. If you drain the boil from the inside it might heal without fissuring.”

  Hendrik licked his bottom lip. “Didn’t know I was in the company of a royal physician.”

  “I’ve studied science and I understand the body somewhat.”

  Argus said, “The syringe might be better. I saw a doctor use it on the Reverend Mister one time. We are very grateful.”

  Hendrik removed the scalpel from the tallow flame and in one fluid movement sliced down the patient’s filthy skirt, exposing her coppered nates in the browning light. The plum-sized boil was marbled and the whole offending buttock was taut and blowzed. Dickey Fentress swallowed hard as the black woman brought a hand to cover her rear and the cook inched the candle closer. Jethro grabbed his wrist and said, “Please. I insist on anesthetic and a syringe. I’m prepared to pay for both.”

  Hendrik let the scalpel go limp and looked up. He sighed and said, “Dickey Fentress, get above before I kick your freckled ass.” Dickey fled the orlop and instead of recounting a boil the size of stone fruit he told the midshipmen that he’d seen his first black snatch, a lozenge of brown quim glimpsed in candlelight and from behind.

  Argus began murmuring a prayer with his eyes clenched shut—Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for these men’s Christian spirit and for the vapors of the Holy Ghost which will be breathed into my widowed sister’s lungs so that she might be healthful again . . .

  Hendrik angled his wrist, the scalpel poised. “Twenty greenbacks and you can have a kerchief dipped in chloroform but it’s too late for your birding syringe. This mess will fester and even after I lance it the melon will drain for days on end. You or the brother will have to bathe it in salt water three times a day and she won’t be able to walk for a week. It smells like rancid meat down here for Christ’s sake and I have to go make scouse and bean soup. Can we get this over with? My eyeballs hurt.”

  “We will tend the wound very promptly,” said Argus.

  Malini wept, her nostrils flared in terror. Jethro handed Hendrik a clean linen handkerchief from his pocket and the cook removed the stopper from the chloroform. A moment later Mali-ni’s eyelids fluttered shut and her body went limp. They turned her fully on her side. Hendrik fitted his forger’s loupe into his left eye socket and bent to the task. The brother continued to pray and hum but looked away as Hendrik placed two fingers on either side of the boil, gave it a slight squeeze, and made a V-shaped slice across the top. A liquid tree of blood and pus burst from below and Jethro held a beaker to the wound to let it drain. There were several ounces of expellant in the glass beaker before Hendrik prodded and squeezed the wound to work the core up to
the surface. Something like an apple seed pipped into the beaker and there was a narrow black chute of air extending down into the wound.

  “That’s got it,” said Hendrik, teeth bared. “Wash it with salt water and keep it covered with clean gauze. Call me if she isn’t awake before long. You can give me the money at dinner if you like but don’t let the captain or the men see.” Hendrik packed his kit and left.