Bright and Distant Shores (20 page)

As the English minister turned from the dock he said, “And how do you intend to get along in Malekula, Mr. Graves? Nothing but cannibals and Presbyterians is what I hear. They bandage their babies' heads to make the skulls conical, like so many tiny volcanoes. One wonders about such people.”

“I agree with you, Reverend; Presbyterians are a strange lot,” joked Owen.

The missionary smiled but said nothing. Jethro shuffled nervously at Owen's side, arranging his bird pelts to fill the silence.

Turning for the church, Reverend Bulstrode said, “I hear there's a French trader living on the southern end of the island. I would recommend securing his services, such as they are.”

Two days later the ship anchored in a southern Malekula bay. Owen stood by the cathead and watched the anchor line run out,
sluicing the water like a smelter's knife through waved lead. Three men stood aloft and furled the mainsail. Terrapin was on deck to oversee the operation and had barely left the charthouse since Fiji. He was said to be in a blue funk. In these latitudes, Owen was told, the captain had a standing obsession about the
Cullion
getting hogged up on a reef or running aground on a sandbar. One night, Owen had overheard one of his lectures to the first and second mate: “You both sail by the book, but it's more than seamanship that gets a bark through these waters. It's instinct, a feeling in the skin. I look for harbingers and omens, the way the buntlines whisper against the sailcloth. From my cabin I know when the ship is stuttering or off-kilter . . . Lying in bed I can feel the tension in sails, whether she's drawing twenty-six feet or less, whether a seaman on the dogwatch is pissing too long off the starboard railing and is therefore drunk . . .”

When the eastern sky seamed with the day's first light, a small landing party rowed ashore in one of the dinghies. The whale-boats, Terrapin said, were reserved for shipwreck or matters of nautical state. Owen and Jethro were accompanied by Giles Blunt, the introverted carpenter, and Dickey Fentress, the woolly-headed cabin boy and apprentice. Giles leaned whistling against the gunwale with a hunting rifle slung over one shoulder while Dickey rowed them toward the beach. Jethro sat in the stern, a finger trailing in the small wake, his nets and collecting creel at his feet. Owen took inventory of his trading stock—a bag of glass beads, six steel knives, three machetes, a dozen mirrors, a ream of paper, bottles of ink, a carton of matches, three looking-glasses, a fathom of calico. The lush mountains drew up from the pale beach and the trading station stood at one end, a ramshackle cottage made of driftwood, a tendril of smoke rising from its chimney. Dickey feathered the oars into the shallows and they dragged the boat up onto the beach.

They approached the cottage and a tall man dressed in filthy dungarees came out holding a revolver and a demitasse of coffee.
Giles slightly lifted the rifle at his side then lowered it at Owen's insistence.

Owen said, “Reverend Bulstrode sent us. We're out here to do some trading.”

“I'm sure the priest had some complimentary things to say about me.” The Frenchman tucked the revolver into his waistband and blew across his smoking coffee. He gestured with his cup at the anchored bark and the sailors followed his gaze. Captain Terrapin was taking a constitutional morning swim, executing his backstroke rather sloppily while several men rowed a whaleboat beside him and kept the shark watch with pistols.

“I am Bernard Corlette. Would you gentlemen care for some coffee? Camille has just made some.” The formality of the invitation seemed out of place with the Frenchman's dirt-smeared clothes. Although his face was aristocratic—a high-bridged nose, mineral blue eyes—it was also sunken. Something about the jaw-line suggested missing teeth.

Owen introduced the party and accepted the offer. They mounted the makeshift stairs and entered a bare room, the walls chinked with daylight. A figure moved at a woodstove and they saw a native girl, not more than sixteen, tending a coffeepot. She turned, eyes down, and laid out four chipped porcelain cups onto a bamboo table. She wore a flimsy floral blouse and a fringed skirt made of woven grass. For a moment Owen wanted to believe that the girl was the maid and not the wife. But Bernard removed any doubt with: “This is Camille. She is pretty, no?”

“Lovely,” said Dickey, swallowing.

Bernard said, “Twenty-five boars. All with tusks. Can you believe it? A fortune. A bloody king's ransom for this girl.” He blew her a kiss with his fingers and she shrugged then commenced chopping green bananas.

Jethro could not look at the girl directly. He cupped his coffee in his hands and sipped it. It was bitter and hot. With the grounds left in, it tasted more Turkish than French.

They sat on low stools and took in the room. Owen had expected a space filled with tribal artifacts but it was empty save for a stash of French newspapers, a bed, a storm lantern. Everything was covered in a fine layer of silt. It was not squalor so much as exiled ruin, the one-room abode of a man who'd fled civilization. Bernard took a refill from Camille and touched her buttocks in a way that made them all turn their eyes to the wall or the floorboards.

“How long have you been out here?” Owen asked.

Bernard returned and sat on the floor definitively, as if this answered the question. He downed the shot of coffee with one swift throwback of the head. “Years. I am almost one of them. However, I keep a little pinky finger in the world with my trading. I have a brother in Paris, an astronomer, who sends me
La Gazette
. I read of bunting and taffeta and it makes me laugh aloud.”

Owen watched Bernard examine his blackened fingernails and thought of Adelaide and the smell of starched cotton. She was his insurance policy against this sort of existence.

“Who do you trade with?” Owen asked.

“Lately it is the Germans. They are crazy for everything they can get their hands on. Baskets. Penis gourds. I could sell them a toothpick if it had touched tribal lips.”

Jethro let his gaze sidle over to Camille, who was now frying the green bananas in a skillet. Her dark hair was long and matted and clumped at the neck. She stood barefoot, shifting from side to side, raising one heel at a time. The bottoms of her feet were pink and calloused. He watched as the glints of firelight from the stove hatch threw her breasts into flickering relief. To change the course of his libidinous thoughts he said, “Are there snakes on this island?”

Bernard formed a peak with his fingers. “Why do you ask?”

“I am the ship's naturalist.”

A tandem sigh from Giles and Dickey.

“And you will be wanting to collect snakes?”

“All manner of things.”

“Then you will be happy to know that the land snakes are not poisonous. Of course, the sea snakes are another matter. Venomous and difficult to catch.” He turned back to Owen, who was clearly the man in charge. “What is it you wish to collect, Mr. Graves?”

“Tools, masks, weapons, that sort of thing. Baskets. Handiwork.”

Bernard crossed his arms, lightly flushed from the coffee. “And naturally you will desire the rambaramp.”

Owen paused. He'd never heard of such a thing and wondered if it weren't some kind of canoe.

“For the sake of your men's edification: this is an effigy, sometimes life-sized, for a man of rank. They smoke and dry the body and cut off the head. They make a kind of statue with tree ferns, wood, and compost, perhaps some resin and cobwebs, then cap the whole thing off with the skull and occasionally use the dried facial skin of the dead man. It is a marvelous sight. Also terrible.”

The Frenchman delighted in the details as if he were recounting the ingredients of a renowned bouillabaisse.

“Ingenious, no? Quite a ritual. It takes a year for the entire process to be completed.”

“Can such a thing be obtained?” Owen said.

“Anything can be obtained, but naturally it is a question of means. The village down here only has one left and I doubt they would part with it. What are you intending to trade?”

Owen repositioned himself on the stool and emptied his coffee cup. He was conscious of his shipmates watching him. “In the rowboat we have glass beads, knives, matches. We also have some calico. That sort of thing.”

Bernard touched his left earlobe and grinned sarcastically. “Perhaps you think it is 1797.”

Jethro couldn't help feeling smug; Owen had said just such a
thing to him before departure, something about wanting to make new discoveries a hundred years too late.

“I'm not following,” said Owen, bristling.

“Have you been voyaging in the South Seas before?”

“Yes, a few years back.”

“Well, things have changed. The savages do not want matches and mirrors and little glass marbles anymore. They want guns, cash, pigs, tobacco. I have done my best to keep guns off this island because I do not wish to be shot in my sleep. Last year the German New Guinea Company bought some land on Matty Island in the Bismarck region and set up a trading station. The trader was dead within weeks. My suggestion is that you make a list of things you would like and I will quote a total fee and bring the goods out to your ship. Payment terms will be in francs, naturally.”

“We'd prefer to do our own trading,” Owen said.

Jethro added: “And I'd like to collect some specimens.”

Bernard drummed his fingernails on the dirt floor. “Do you imagine you will walk into one of the villages and ask to see the cannibal forks?”

Jethro said, “We will happily pay you as our guide. And we have some chickens and pigs on board the ship which perhaps can be used for trading purposes.”

Owen turned quickly to Jethro but did not look him in the face. “The livestock is not ours to trade.”

Jethro looked at the stove. “Not yours, at any rate, but bought with company finances.”

“Yes, in order to feed the men fresh meat. Or do you intend to incite a mutiny so that you can bag some lizards?”

Dickey bit his bottom lip to stifle his laughter.

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.