Bright and Distant Shores (19 page)

They took the overgrown path down to the mission house, Malini favoring her left side. On the verandah they were greeted by Pomat, the village headman. He was wearing a shark-tooth necklace, ochre penis gourd, and the reverend's tartan slippers. He recognized Argus and asked him where he had found a wife and was she sick. Sisa, Argus told him. They stood on the front steps, the shadows lengthening, Pomat trying to block any view of the interior. There were betel-nut mortars and spears laid out on the mantel and the fireplace was full of arrowroot. Pomat had been a troubled political figure in the village, having killed his brother-in-law in battle then taking the man's widow as a second wife. But he sponsored enormous feasts and kept the shamans plied with kava and tropical chestnuts, so that Argus wondered if he wasn't holding court in the mission house, sleeping with a murdered man's wife in the Reverend Mister's feather bed. Argus asked what had happened to the preacher's body. Pomat knew a smattering of English and some pidgin.

“Church men come for stink body with big wooden box,” Pomat said. He picked something from his teeth and inspected his fingernail.

“No more big men?”

Pomat shook his head. “They think fire-hair preacher kilim by village. Poison. Maybe tingting you kilim and go away. Now no more tabak or church sing-sings. My ailan now.” The big man smiled at Argus, his head slightly cocked in reckoning. “Sisa from up north way? How old sisa?”

Argus bowed his head slightly. “She sick. The fire-hair preacher had a medicine box.”

Pomat looked at him blankly.

Argus said, “Marasin box. Feel mobetta powders.”

Pomat leaned in the doorway. “What things live in the mobetta box?”

“Ointment creams. White powders for het I pen.”

“Het I pen.” He nodded. “Where does it stap?”

“Cook room next to the stove.”

Pomat went and retrieved the gray metal box with the red cross on the front. He handed it to Argus and watched as he opened the lid. Argus picked through the bottles and jars, reading the labels for any mention of boils. Nitre for asthma, Dover Powder for chill, Opium Tincture for colic and nerves, Aromatic Chalk Powder and Castor Oil for Diarrhoea, Asperine for rheumatism, a thermometer, a set of needles in a hard case. Finally, wrapped in a roll of gauze bandages, he found a small tub of magnesium sulfate
for the relief of boils and carbuncles
. He held it up to Pomat as well as the case of needles, the bandage, and the Opium Tincture because he remembered now the reverend had taken this after having his bottom lanced. “She has feva. We must leave away or olgeta samting get sik.”

Pomat took a step back and put his hand over his mouth. The Reverend Mister had taught them to be afraid of germs and that sneezing and coughing without covering their mouths would lose them a part of their soul. For good measure, Argus grabbed the thermometer, handed the first aid kit back to Pomat, and turned to go.

“Stap,” said the headman.

Argus dropped his sister's wrist and turned.

Pomat came forward and handed the first aid kit to Argus. “Waitman gone now. Nogat tobak and nogat marasin.”

Argus took the kit. No doubt the headman suspected that typhoid had spread like wood dust in the pews of the church on Sunday mornings despite the inoculation of prayer. The waitman with his box of creams and powders and Holy Ghost was surely
to blame. Pomat stood in the reverend's tartan slippers, waving; behind him, trophy skulls lined the fireplace mantel.

Argus said
tenkyu
and backed down the stairs, Malini at his side. Pomat leaned in the doorway and watched them retreat through the thicket toward the beach. After a few hundred feet they came into a clearing fringed with rhododendron and Argus saw a singed wooden frame overgrown with creeper weeds and flowers. The blackened middle rose up like a guillotine. It wasn't until he saw the levered handle and the unhinged block and the metal type still wedged in place that he realized it was the reverend's letterpress. The islanders had carried it from the house, dropped it beside a bog, and tried to burn it. But the press was only lightly charred. The jungle had begun to swallow it whole. Argus stripped back the vines and tried to pry the letters free but they were rusted in place. He removed the entire letterplate and read the reversed font in the dying light.

Natives abhor the general. Speak of the lamb and the dove but not the Ten Commandments without citing itemized punishments and rewards. Further, beware of uttering the future. An Englishman says, “When I get to the village it will be nightfall,” while the Melanesian says, “I am there, it is night.” The Scotsman says, “it will soon be dark and we will need to eat” while the savage says, “I am hungry and it has become already night.” We possess the power of realising the future as present or past; the native does not possess such power. For the Melanesian, everything is unfolding now.

T
he
Cullion
crossed the equator and slouched into the Doldrums. Jethro, after jabbing his way to victory and passing his oral maritime exam (
If present, is the jiggermast the third or fourth shortest of the masts? Explain the customs between privileged and burdened vessels.
), was now free to clew the sails. But the wind was days away. Terrapin fired up the engines to cross the equator slantwise at the 180th meridian, the International Dateline, at the stroke of midnight. An entire day was erased from the calendar. This accorded Jethro and the other sailors the status of Golden Shellbacks and thereby began a series of maritime rituals—a mock revolt, baptism by bilgewater, a beauty pageant. Teddy Meyers, veteran seahand, won the pageant with his mother's retired silk evening gown and a whalebone corset he'd brought along for just such an occasion. Terrapin closed the equatorial proceedings by bungling some Coleridge:
All in a hot and copper sky . . . Day after day, day after day, we drifted idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean
.

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.