Bright and Distant Shores (31 page)

Oh, Owen, I miss you terribly and feel a great sadness that you will never shake my father's hand. Undoubtedly he would have given you a thorough going-over but he knows resourcefulness and depth of character when he sees it. He would have taken you fly-fishing and tested your seamanship on his little ketch; the two of you would have argued at dinner about rope flemishes or whatever it is sailors argue about. That meeting will have to exist in my mind. Before he goes I will tell him all about you. He has already asked me about your voyaging and lamented that he never made it to the end of the St. Lawrence or all the way up the Hudson. Mostly he wants to know that I will be in good hands and I assured him of your vision for our life together.

I received your letter with great glee. I must have read every word a dozen times by now. Whenever your absence is too much I take another look at it. My letter was
supposed to do it justice but if I write past a few pages you will find yourself in possession of a treatise on mortality and I'll spare us both from that gloomy fate. We made a pact at the train station to remain sensible and I swore an oath not to sob or throw roses at the moving locomotive. I was true to that pact and I have been remarkably sensible these months of the voyage. However, love, I do want to say that our life together is about to take a turn. My father has been a prudent and cautious man his whole life, made sound investments, and it appears mother and I will inherit a considerable sum. The majority will be hers, of course, but even allowing for her keeping the family house and other properties I will be receiving a significant consideration. More than I will rightfully know what to do with. It holds the promise of transforming our lives. I know that these last years you have worried about how to make your way in the world and provide for me as your future wife. You are far too proud to want to live off your wife's dead father's estate, I know, but this windfall will allow us the luxury of having you at home while the children are young. There won't be any monetary need for voyages abroad. And as for me, I don't know that I will continue on at the museum forever. I will, however, always keep up my affairs with the women's committee and Hull House . . . I'm getting ahead of myself.

Mostly I want to say that we are fortunate and the future looks bright. I'm already feeling the sadness that will come from my father's passing, but he demands that my mother and I live at the very marrow of life when he is gone—he's read too much Henry David I suppose. I love you and miss you so. Be safe and return as quickly as possible. My father might live a day or a month, we cannot know for sure. If by some chance you could come home early it would mean the world to me. Wire me when you
make American landfall. I hope I haven't botched that maritime usage!

Your loving, future wife—

Adelaide

Owen folded the letter and stood by the open porthole. Outside and above he could hear the first mate bellowing orders and the captain stumping on the windward side of the poop. With the anchor weighed, the bark heeled to leeward and headed down. Owen had told the captain to sail toward New Guinea but that was before he'd read the contents of the letter. A stint in New Guinea—the German or Dutch territories—would mean another six or eight weeks before turning back. It was already December and they'd been gone three months. He couldn't make sense of the complicated emotion battering through him. Tenderness, longing, an eagerness to see Adelaide, to comfort her, that was all there, but so was a flickering scheme in which he would adhere to the New Guinea trading course and simply tell her that he'd never received the letter. He felt a wave of self-loathing at how effortlessly this idea occurred to him.

Slumped on the iron cot with the letter still in his hand, he lit a cigarette and watched the smoke siphon out through the porthole. The thought of marrying a woman of independent wealth terrified him. It felt too easy, like cheating. Before, he supposed now, there had been the threat of a family inheritance, but he'd envisioned years of relative scrimping, the boom and bust of life between voyages, before the golden hammer came down. He was braced to endure the summer-house visits in Maine and the old blood horse's New England condescension—how else would he feel about the son of a housewrecker from the prairie states?—but he was also, or had been, resolved to quietly stand his ground. There would be months at sea, an intermittent hermitage that prepared him for the seasonal role of loving husband and devoted
father. Now the future rushed to meet him and seemed intent on cutting him off from his own vision. What he feared most was being unmoored, of not living up to his father's pragmatic example. Without the combustion of needing a livelihood, of plying a trade, he might turn to laziness or vice; as it was the taverns of Little Cheyenne seemed to hold his interest when he was back on land. How to explain that he lived like a monk at sea, barely fraternized with the men, but found it necessary to be among their rowdy, drunken cousins when at home. Did he belong entirely in either of these worlds? And how would he justify leaving for months at a time if they didn't need the money?

The tone in Adelaide's letter—he reread some of the passages to affirm this—contained something new. Was it wifely insistence? God, was she pregnant? No. She would have written it plainly and issued a summons. Nonetheless she was firmly staking her claim, marking the channel with red and green buoys to bring his ship home, and she had every intention of keeping it there. There was no choice but for the
Cullion
to head north and east, to begin a winding course home. Whatever trade could be salvaged would have to do. Owen got off the cot and studied the island charts that were tacked to his cabin wall. He began circling his index finger east of the Solomon Islands, making small orbits around the equator to find mentionable specks of land. Argus would have ideas about where to go for homebound trade, but heading northeast would also mean saying goodbye to him and his sister.

He drew on his cigarette and ran his gaze along the map's equator.

What were their chances now of recruiting a family of Melanesian tribesmen to return to Chicago, especially if the ship made only perfunctory trading stops? Maybe he should settle for the Christianized boy and his muslin-frocked sister. He entertained the idea that had floated somewhat dimly until now. The contract demanded
a number of natives, preferably related by the bonds of blood,
and
two
was certainly a number. Would it be less morally
repugnant to Adelaide—
and to himself?
—if he brought back two already-tainted natives rather than a family of purebreds? This would fulfill the collecting contract, secure his own independent windfall, a reasonable sum, while diminishing the moral transgression. Adelaide's conscience hovered above his own, like a hand above a tabletop.

Looking into the circle of ocean outside his berth, Owen wondered whether Argus and Malini could be persuaded to come. Perhaps Argus could act more tribal than Presbyterian, wear a loincloth instead of starched trousers, and Malini might wear a grass skirt. Hale's planned exhibit demanded an indigenous spectacle—dreadlocks and tomahawks and all the rest of it. But Owen would present it to the siblings as a business proposition, not as playacting. Six months to a year in Chicago with a monthly retainer and guaranteed steamer passage back to the islands. Surely it was infinitely better than going to the sugarcane plantations in Queensland . . .

Owen ascended to the deck and told the captain to luff up a while. Terrapin gave him an imperious stare followed by a sunward squint. Owen apologized, told him he would have a new course by evening and to bear northeast. The first mate stood by, already filling his lungs to boom directions and insults aloft. The seamen trimmed the sails and the
Cullion
headed up into a close haul. Owen scanned amidships for Argus and climbed down to the quarterdeck. On his way he passed Malini. She was standing by the railing and looking out at the diminishing islands, a Japanese parasol shielding her face from the tin-white sun.

Jethro had been confined to the orlop for two days and he was lightheaded from its drowsy, high chemistry—formalin, methylated spirits, camphor oil. A lock on the companionway served the same purpose as it did in times of quarantine: to keep the malodorous funk from the rest of the crew. This had been the captain's proclamation as he and Owen Graves colluded to keep
Jethro down below. Technically, he was told, he would be allowed on deck when the ship was under sail but so far that hadn't proved true. Couldn't run the risk of the naturalist slipping ashore, no, as if he were some larcenous criminal and most of the crew weren't San Quentin parole jumpers. An awful lot of fuss, he thought, over a field specimen. And it was beyond ironic that he was being kept prisoner on a ship that his own father had underwritten. Perhaps Hale was in on it. Another of the old baron's attempts to teach his son the ways of the world. Jethro chafed at these would-be lessons; they were levied by an aristocrat reared on foxhunting, who'd read at Oxford, but nonetheless—Jethro suspected— thought the word
rectitude
referred to a kind of hemorrhoid. His father might have committed swaths of Keats and Coleridge to memory but only so he could crib a line for an anniversary card or a club member's eulogy. Knowledge was opportunity for Hale, nothing more. Jethro couldn't help the white rage that clamped over his thoughts when he closed his eyes. As a distraction, he returned to the journals of Joseph Banks, spreading them before him in the tallow candlelight. The audacity of the young and wealthy Banks continued to impress him. Here he was at sea, collecting and naming his way across the Pacific in his mid-twenties, already the overseer of a large estate back in England, blending batches of
Sower crout
to protect the seamen against scurvy. But there was also a sense of absolute entitlement in the journals, the hunger of a noble touring his realm for the first time. On one page he spoke of copulating species, recited bird kills like a Latin prayer (“Calm this morn: went out in the boat and shot Tropick bird
Phaeton erubescens,
and
Procellaria atrata, velox
and
sordida”
), and a few days later he spoke of the island girls with that same hint at possession. Anything could be obtained; it was merely a matter of logistics.

Our cheifs own wife (ugly enough in conscience) did me the honour with very little invitation to squat down on the mats
close by me: no sooner had she done so than I espied among the common croud a very pretty girl with a fire in her eyes that I had not before seen in the countrey. Unconscious of the dignity of my companion I beckond to the other who after some intreatys came and sat on the other side of me: I was then desirous of getting rid of my former companion so I ceas'd to attend to her and loaded my pretty girl with beads and every present I could think pleasing to her: the other shewd much disgust but did not quit her place and continued to supply me with fish and cocoa nut milk . . . .

Was this what the captain had in mind with the native sister? Was he plying her with gifts to weaken her guard? No doubt he was making inroads and it was a grievous affront to Jethro. Maybe it was the bottles of embalming fluid all around, or the etherlike cloud seeping through a hundred cork stoppers, that made him envision, in vivid detail, the hundred ways by which their pairing might occur. There was the question of morality, of course, but more than this the thought of the slobbering captain spreading her coppered thighs kept him awake at night. If anything
he
was the savage and held the potential to ruin her native innocence. He'd stared into the man's porcine face the night his personal belongings were ransacked and seen the lechery there like a cancer of the soul. Smelled it like the blackened, mucked bowels of lust so that he couldn't help picturing Malini astride the captain's blotched, paunchy middle or him pounding behind her like a ramrod, her face pressed into the Turkish pillows but her bottom swagging in the air like a tupped ewe. Nature, especially in the spring, brimmed with this kind of bestial ravishment but Jethro liked to think it was the ghastly exception to the rule. He closed Banks's journal and removed his glove. His finger throbbed. It was a poisonous blue around the tip and there was a warbling line of pain that backlit his every thought, like a seam of lightning behind a cloud.

He got up, cinched the glove, and retreated to his specimen shelves. The birds had vigor, that special inflection of flight in the weft of their wings. He was gifted at taxidermy. It was obvious. The bottled subjects were less impressive—coiled snakes without eyes, inverted frogs with separated hind legs, starfish and jellyfish floating in miniature seas of brine that were littered with particles of their own strange flesh. The fern case and the blotting sheet of desiccated beetles, the moths colored like chaffs of dead wheat, were nicely ordered and well labeled. All told, it was a middling collection, but Jethro felt sure that he could end up with something distinguished. First, he would have to sort out this nonsense about being shipbound when the
Cullion
was at anchor.

He returned to the swabbed and splayed bird specimen on the workbench—a Rufous Night Heron. The inversion of the skin had taken place; he had carefully detached the delicate membrane of the ear from its cavity in the skull and cut through the nictitating white membrane of the eye socket. The wings had been skinned down to the wrist joints, the leg tendons cut, the oil gland removed from the base of the tail. He'd been careful not to damage the feather roots as he worked. He prised the skin from the body and placed it wrong side out in a shallow tray of powdered arsenic, working the poison into the denuded wings and the base of the bill. This procedure required the removal of his fencing glove from his left hand but he kept the injured finger above the fray. The arsenic could easily be absorbed into fissures and tiny cuts and this demanded caution—although the powder was mixed with enough alum so as not to be fatal in its present form. Luckily for the captain the poison was in a muted form, or he might find his rum tasting like bitter almonds one evening. Jethro shook his head in the sputtering candlelight; he was no more suited to the role of assassin than he was to the role of insurance company president.