Bright and Distant Shores Page 6

  They arrived at the yard after a long walk from the cable car. It was a neighborhood that Adelaide did not know and he watched her feign casualness as she took in the leaning tenements full of raucous arguments and carousing in six languages, gypsy women smoking penny cigarettes on sagging wooden stoops, old Russian men betting on dominoes while dogs growled and barked and were kicked, the smell of charcoal and sawdust and dank laundry, the sidewalk petering out into a goat track of cedar blocks and mud. Although she worked among these people at Hull House, Owen knew she had never been on their native turf; she listened to their quaint singing and folklore and taught them to read Tribune English, utilitarian verbs and nouns, but had never actually seen their kitchens and bedrooms, the beds made from apple crates and tables sawn from railway ties. A few of the rabble-rousers called to Owen and he bade them good night. A chorus of wolf whistles and a heated Someone’s lucky tonight followed them down to the yard.

  He opened the chain-link gate and led Adelaide past the hulking piles of scrap metal, the copper pipes and iron bars waiting to be smelted. Inside the tin shed he lit a few spirit lamps and their shadows loomed as they moved among the workbenches. Here were decades of salvage from the rubble of teardowns, arranged and organized by function, windows of every mullion and design, ornate doorknobs, lintels engraved with the first initials of dead wives or secret lovers, glasshouse and conservatory panels, greened copper turrets, doorjambs with bored-out compartments for pistols, balcony railings and orchestra-pit podiums, box seats from condemned theaters. On a lone table under a window were the artifacts from the Pacific that he’d not sold to the museum. A few shell adzes and stone hammers that were sentimental to him, suggesting that the natives of Melanesia might also be adept at wrecking and dismantling. They stood by a wall of tools, the bradawls and gimlets taking on a sinister, surgical bearing in the lamplight. Adelaide surveyed the chaos of objects, the endless rows of fixtures, the subsections of brick and mortar so numerous that a fortress lay in pieces. “Where do you sleep?” she said lightly, continuing the theme of inveterate explorer of the ghetto.

  Owen, with nothing to lose by now, pointed to the bed he’d made from king posts and metal trusses, a leadlight window standing in for a headboard, the calash of an old carriage acting as canopy. It looked to him now—imagined through her eyes— like a Chinese junk, something forged and welded from scrap, as whimsical as a parade float.

  He said, “It’s ridiculous, I know.”

  “I love it,” she said, walking toward it. “Bring the lamp over.”

  He followed her with the light, thrusting her shadow against the wall. She stood at the banister that doubled as the end of the bed frame. He waited for her to say something but she didn’t. Finally, he said, “I don’t have a ring,” and saw her shoulders go loose. Without turning around, she said, “Be quiet and lie down with me.” He watched her pull the barrette out of her hair and knew, in that moment, the engagement was sealed. He came forward with the lamp.

  II

  ARGUS

  4.

  Argus Niu found the Reverend Mister’s body on the verandah just before breakfast. The preacher had gone outside to plumb the nuances of Sunday’s sermon in the dawning light, smoke his pipe, sip his first cup of Darjeeling, while Argus fixed eggs and soda-scones to his liking. The fleet Scotsman—a Presbyterian missionary in his twentieth year in Melanesia—reclined now in a wicker chair, head back, pale blue eyes startled and fixed on the thatching overhead. The tea had spilled down his shirt-front, creating a narrow strip of steaming celluloid. He clutched the handwritten sermon in one hand, fingers knuckled white. Argus set down the breakfast tray, called out Sir and Reverend Mister, shook the preacher by the shoulders. The old man did not respond. He knew his employer was dead but felt compelled to put two fingers on one of the missionary’s copper-haired wrists. He had learned this trick from the doctor who came out from Port Moresby once a year to give the Reverend Mister his wine and spirits permit. The wrist did not throb. But it was still warm and Argus wished he knew how to blow resurrection into a man’s mouth. He put his hand in front of his employer’s nose and felt for breath. Nothing. The schoolteacher who knew first aid had recently eloped with a Sepik River woman, forcing the Reverend Mister to teach the Catechism of Christian Truth himself. It made him angry to be pulled away from writing his phrasebooks and tending his garden of celery and artichokes.

  Argus had seen dead men before but not since his father’s funeral off the Bismarck Archipelago six years earlier. At home the custom was to bury the dead under their stilt houses or, if they lived in a pile house on the lagoon, to bury it near the ancestral gardens. But first they were put on display with their best possessions surrounding them—dogs’ teeth, obsidian-tipped arrows, yams, traded shell armlets—and propped against the house ladder. Then the body was wrapped in coconut leaves and sheaths from the nibung palm. A fire was lit. People mourned. The body was buried. The finger bones and skull were placed into an earthenware pot in the rafters of the house. The spirit of the dead lingered and presided over the household; it punished infidelity, reckless debts, bad housekeeping. Argus had not seen a funeral ceremony on his adopted island of Nimburea but had heard that the ritual was to leave the dead in trees or weigh them down with stones and toss them from canoes. That seemed crude and ill-omened. How was a Presbyterian minister supposed to be buried? Who would give the Sunday sermon? He looked off the verandah and saw some of the night fishermen dragging their canoes onto the beach. It wouldn’t be long before parents and pupils from the school would come looking for Reverend Underwood. Punctuality was a close neighbor to cleanliness.

  Argus would tell them the reverend had taken ill and send a message to the head mission and wait for instructions. Keep the timber house locked. Shutter the windows. The preacher would have wanted that. Some of the locals—the heathen militia, the reverend called them—might show up with spears and clubs and begin looting. Raid the linens and crockery and tinned peaches, throwing him aside or clubbing him in the head and back. Argus could see it all very clearly. He was an outsider here, a houseboy and a Christian convert who knew how to bake bread, speak a butler’s English, sing hymns, recite psalms. They tolerated him but only because he did not talk to their women and worked for the big holy man who handed out tobacco after church on Sundays. He was eighteen years old and uninitiated on any island. To the locals he was something between a man and a boy. Like words for bear, snow, and ice, he was something they had no use for.

  Argus placed the teacup on the side table, wrenched the unfinished sermon from the stony hand, and hefted the Scotsman off the wicker chair. He began dragging him inside, hooking his hands under the preacher’s armpits and walking backward, taking small steps. The dead weight of the man’s torso and head was awful; two hundred pounds of hoop iron in a gunnysack of clothes. The long, hairy arms, which had once flailed during a sermon—Who among ye hath felt the fury and sublime in ye very human core?—scraped across the floor. His ears, viewed from above, were cave-like, tufted and pink from too much sun; they resembled things that shouldn’t be seen in the naked light, like a mother-in-law bathing in the ocean or a cassowary’s jaundiced hide. The clergyman’s mouth was open, the whitening lips slightly parted. He wouldn’t speak anymore, no longer say, Modesty and temperance, Argus, these will vouchsafe virtue.

  Argus made it into the sitting room and hoisted the monster into the captain’s chair. He propped the head up with a pillow and placed the steamer blanket over his lap. This was where the Reverend Mister spent his evenings with a glass of claret and the ornamental Bible, mulling over the pestilence and plague of the Old Testament, worrying the gilt pages with his thumb. A digestive biscuit before bed then his arsenal of evening remedies—boric acid for his carbuncled feet, sulfonal for insomnia, ginger essence for his overwrought stomach, each of them brought by Argus on a lacquered tray. Then prayers on calloused knees, the dimming away of earthly pretensions in the stammer of private worship. Each night,
Argus retreated to his small room and quietly pulled out his woven leaf mat from under the iron cot. The Reverend Mister would have suffered apoplexy if he ever caught his house-boy sleeping on the floor.

  Now the master was something lifted from the miry pages of Genesis, a husk-skinned ancient, ascended from ribs or clay, surely a hundred and twenty years old. Argus combed the preacher’s gray-red hair, applied some brilliantine, perched his spectacles onto the bridge of the nose. He began to assemble favored objects—the leather-bound Bible, the quill and ink he used for calligraphy, his Oxford cricket bat, the amber-tipped pipe, the nickel shaving dish, the hand mirror, the daguerreotype of his sisters rambling on a heath in Sunday whites. But just as he placed these items on the side table, beneath the brass spirit lamp, Argus realized this was not the right resting place for the preacher. It was the workroom at the back of the house where he had been happiest.

  This time he kept the dead man in the captain’s chair, worked a rug under each of the legs, tilted the chair slightly back, then slid the entire rig toward the rear of the house. He bore the Reverend Mister down the sparse hallway—be wary of adornment, the seedbed for idolatry—steamer blanket over legs, spectacled eyes vacant and heavenward, a rheumy passenger being taken deckside for a spot of fresh air and sun. He settled the chair in a sheet of early sunlight, right beside the inked letterpress. By noontime he would need to shutter the louvered windows, be vigilant against the musk and rot of death, but for now he would let whatever remained of Underwood’s spirit tarry a while in the brightening room. There were two separate book projects spread out—a Melanesian Phrasebook of Pidgin English and A Presbyterian Missionary’s Compendium of Practical Advice. When Argus wasn’t cooking and cleaning he assisted with these projects, sometimes acting as translator or letterpress operator. He had learned to ink the metal letters, to know the measure of each of the printer’s marks, the tiny horizons hemmed in by em and en. He carried reams of paper up from the dock when they arrived from the Brothers of Biblical Charity. Now he stood over the pages, tracing a finger across lines of text in the phrasebook:

  My wife is always vomiting: All-time all-time mary belong me he-throw-out

  All the white men are having a big celebration: Alltogether master he-make-im big-fellow Chris’mas

  Then he moved to the compendium:

  For candlesticks that fare well in the tropics I recommend Haddock’s Belmont Sperm, a first-rate diminisher of darkness. In the way of lamps go with a “Hitchcock” or an “Empress” lamp and a “Hurricane Lantern.”

  Pack along a shotgun, No. 12 bore, for the pigeons and to deter heathens after too much kava. No. 2 shot is the ticket for pigeon-shooting and may be purchased in Sydney or Auckland. Be sure to oil and clean your weapon often. Bring a rag as cloth is a rarity.

  This reminded Argus to fetch the shotgun and set it beside his master. The preacher, who told stories of grouse hunting in the Scottish Highlands, had been fond of setting out at dusk on a pigeon shoot, gun cocked over one shoulder, cooing into the woods, a few naked village boys trailing behind him with reed spears and bark shields. Argus went along and received instruction in handling a weapon; how to let the tang and bore extend from the shoulder, from the eye itself. He set out all the objects on the worktable and this is how the presbyters would find their fellow—rigidly reclined, objects of work, grooming, and study about his person. Argus would tell the church elders that he died as he lived, simply and without fuss, passing silently before breakfast. He remembered some coughing now, heard over the flames of the stove, but he would omit that from the account. They would not bury him under the house, but take his body away in a pine box. Maybe his bones would go back to a churchyard in Scotland where everyone had red hair. If only the Presbyterians had a bishop and a big mission like the Anglicans, who trained the new recruits on Norfolk Island, taught them Mota and how to conduct themselves among the natives before sending them out to the islands and atolls. Meanwhile, the Presbyterians were losing their hold on the islands. If the Reverend Mister had been an Anglican, the bishop might have come on a steamer to fetch the body himself.

  Five days later the house was turning rank. He couldn’t wait any longer. Wild pigs had begun grunting and snuffling under the stilts and piers. They smelled it. Several times he had to ward off visitors and well-wishers, telling them that the minister was bedridden with influenza. They asked which spirit he had angered and left manioc and bowls of coconut milk. Tomorrow was Sunday. If the reverend didn’t show up for his sermon there would be a gathering on the verandah. They wanted their tobacco as much as their Gospel According to Mark. They would demand to see him. Argus had dispatched a typewritten letter to the main mission—On the occasion of the death of Reverend Mister Underwood. Canoe teams had relayed the sealed envelope across the islands. A blackbirding schooner was recruiting in the islands and expected in the bay that afternoon. If the black-clad presbyters weren’t on it, if a new missionary didn’t get rowed ashore, then Argus planned to go aboard. He had no desire to go sugarcaning in Queensland, but he could catch a ride to the outer islands as the men recruited kanakas. He had enough of his monthly wages to buy himself a passage. The schooners didn’t go out as far as Pou-meta but he could come within a day’s canoe ride. It had been six years since he’d seen his family.

  Then there was the matter of the minister’s cat; surely that was a favored object. No one on the island had seen a cat prior to the Reverend Mister returning from a trip to Brisbane with the ginger tabby. He had carried it in a small crate and the dogs and children came running to take a look. The village elders warned that the unsightly beast would curse the yam harvest or doom the annual canoe race. They recommended that the minister and Argus never sneeze in its presence for fear of the cat’s sorcery. Fresh off the pitching steamer, the cat was skinny, dazed, terrified. The minister had found it skulking around a dilapidated wharf and couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Within a few months the animal—now named Mr. Nibbles—had become a fat housecat, living on tinned milk and morsels of fish, preening itself in every room. The minister loved nothing more than to sit in his captain’s chair at night, the ginger tabby in his lap, the cat nuzzling the edge of the King James or chewing on his pinky finger. Argus had to witness the cat’s transformation from savvy derelict to kept sloth. The cat was guilty of avarice, a serious sin, and was frequently out of sorts. Argus had to feed it and change its sandbox, for the animal remained housebound. The minister feared any number of ugly fates outside the timber walls of the mission house—attack by dogs, drowning at the hands of unruly children, being plundered by a wild pig. The locals found it amusing that an animal lived in a house and dubbed him the Reverend Mister Nibbles. They suggested that just as a sow could be blinded to prevent it from wandering too far, the cat could be rendered sightless to keep it close to the mission verandah. Argus did not translate this piece of advice for the preacher and kept the cat out of plain sight for fear of an assassination attempt.

  Now the ginger tabby slunk into the workroom, hindquarters in the air, tail quivering, rubbing its dander against the cold, dead feet of its benefactor. Argus remembered stories of Egypt from his daily lessons and wondered if the cat shouldn’t be buried along with his employer. Was it slaves or cats that were buried with the pharaohs? He couldn’t quite remember. Maybe it was both. The body smelled now like pestilence itself—head belong em he-stink finish—a fact the cat didn’t seem to mind; Mr. Nibbles chewed on a yellow-gray finger, perched in his owner’s lap as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. Argus shooed the cat away and finished washing the reverend’s face with soap. Maybe he would let the cat into the wild after all. The beast would either recover its natural instincts or perish within hours.

  But when it came time to release the cat, Argus was unable to follow through with his plan. The recruiting schooner had anchored in the bay and there was no sight of a delegation from the synod. Teenage boys had gathered on the black beach to be bartered over. Fathers negotiate
d over their sons, allowing them to go to the cane fields in exchange for guns and knives, sticks of tobacco, beads, fathoms of cloth. Argus opened the back door of the mission house but the cat offered an indifferent gaze to the acacia fronds that swayed in the foreground, then it retreated to the sitting room. In the room where Argus slept, he packed his belongings, borrowing the minister’s portmanteau and some of his clothing. He wanted to arrive home looking distinguished— starched cotton shirt, silk cravat, Panama straw hat, khaki trousers, alpaca coat, perhaps the Reverend Mister’s ironwood cane at his side. He would return home a Christian gentleman. The dead no longer needed their possessions, especially if they had reached the bounty of heaven.

  After dark, with all the cane boys boarded, Argus locked the rank-smelling mission house and placed the key—the minister had been a big believer in the sanctity of English-made padlocks— under the doormat, just as he had postscripted in his letter to the synod. He made his way down to the mission rowboat, his portmanteau in hand and the howling cat, encased in a leather satchel, under one arm. Although the reverend had done much to wean Argus from his supernatural belief in sorcery and witchcraft, he continued to believe that the cat was capable of great harm. He suspected that the dreams of cats were filled with carnivorous sport and vengeful taunts against the humans who cared for them. They remembered empty milk bowls and intemperate nudges of the foot. If dreamers left their bodies, as Melanesians suspected, then the cat would surely chase him across the archipelago to repay its abandonment. He rowed out through the coral reef, the waves drenching the gunwale and further angering the cat. He approached the schooner and sidled up to its hull. One of the seamen on watch called out, a lamp hoisted: “Tell the recruiter we av another un.” Some ropes and a ladder were lowered. Argus passed up his portmanteau but retained Mr. Nibbles at his side. By the time Argus stood on deck there was a small party of squinting seamen gathered in the lantern light.