Bright and Distant Shores (50 page)

This was her punishment. She blushed before she'd even read the date of
Aug'st 29, 1796
.

Marshall said, “It was written, no doubt, from dictation, when
the Aborigine returned to his native country. Proceed, Miss Cummings, if you will.”

Adelaide read the words aloud, trying not to look at Argus Niu, who was standing very still.

Sir,

I am very well. I hope you are very well. I live at the governor's. I have every day dinner there. I have not my wife; another black man took her away. We have had murry doings; he speared me in the back, but I better now; his name is Carroway. All my friends alive and well. Not me go to England no more. I am at home now.

I hope Mrs Phillips is very well. You nurse me madam when I sick. You very good madam; thank you madam, and hope you remember me madam, not forget. I know you very well madam. Madam I want stockings, thank you madam. Sir, you give my duty to Ld Sydney. Thank you very good my Lord; hope you well all family very well. Sir.

Bannelong.

Dear Archbishop Feehan,

I am writing to you from the top of the world. I have come from the islands of Melanesia to Chicago where I hope to someday become a seminarian. Today I was given a tour of the city and saw your magnificent residence. There was a man brushing a horse in the stable but I did not see Your Excellency. No matter. I have seen Your Eminence in my mind many times. Today I write to you to inquire if you have positions of employment at your bishopric. I have many experiences as a mission attendant. I was the houseboy for the Reverend Mister Underwood of the Presbyterian Church of Melanesia for six years. My employer passed away recently which was sad but I would not be here if it wasn't for his transit. In the mannerisms of cooking, cleaning, ironing clothes, and gardening celery and artichokes I am accomplished beyond my own compare. My soda-scones and chicken egg omelets are famous in all of the Bismarck Archipelago. I am also good at puzzles, analogies, riddles, and reading the scriptures aloud by candlelight. I have a fondness for reading but never shirk my responsibilities for the written word. It would be my honor to serve you in some capability. I know about roses and tulips and penance. Although I have worked for the Presbyterians I have always admired the Catholics. In matters of austerity and temperance your
flock is unparalleled. There is no job beneath me if I could impinge upon your prudence and kindness. Please write back care of the First Equitable Insurance Company, where I am employed presently and until the end of the American summer. My name is Argus Trotwood.

T
he rooftop exhibition opening was two weeks away, scheduled for International Workers' Day, May 1. That day was also, Hale knew, a commemoration of the Haymarket affair. He wanted to divert attention away from any celebrations the bomb-throwing anarchists might have planned, to stem the swelling parades and marches with a statement of his own. It was also annual moving day, when the streets filled with tenement wagons and toppling wheelbarrows, a tawdry procession of mattresses, shovels, tin pots, old shoes. Would the war with Spain over Cuba—less than a week old—dampen any of that? Would people stay at home? Hale doubted it. The city needed distraction. And so, to widen the draw of the event, he'd decided to include a captive balloon ride, tethered to the base of the clock tower, a children's wading pool with imitation coral reef that fronted the thatch-roofed hut, a concession stand selling ice cream and coconut milk served in the half shell. A photographer would be on hand to capture Mr. Haroldson or Tompkins lazing in a hammock, barefoot, toes dusted with sand barged all the way in from Mackinac Island. Junior wading in the lagoon, or maybe paddling a small canoe, play-fishing with a bamboo pole, waving to the big-grinned savages. Hale could see it all very clearly. The missus spotting her neighborhood from the viewing platform, ice cream cone mid-lick, there it is, George, our house, from all the way up here. But George is napping. The commission men move among the crowd, avuncular in sunhats and bow ties, handing out policy brochures, selectively, as if there were a shortfall of paper. Keep
them hungry, curious, that was Elisha's mandate. George wakes replenished, ready to sign on the dotted line, the parsed sequence of dashes and spaces that demarcates his new life. A period of inoculation begins. He sleeps better, drinks less. And over time this has a statistical effect on Chicago, all those policyholders breathing easy. Crime rates diminish. A decrease in divorce. A lengthening of handshake duration. A surge in population as George, indemnified and formidable, descends through the floors in the hydraulic elevator, the policy's goldenrod copy in one hand and his wife's elbow in the other.

The lobby museum was almost complete, the opening imminent, the artifacts dusted, arranged, numbered. The chiefly canoe hung from the ceiling on long metal ties, an effect that brought in a maritime bent, reminded people that the First Equitable had sponsored an actual voyage to procure all this for their pleasure. Jethro's cabinet of curiosities, the
wunder-something-or-other
— perhaps it would be a hit with the children—was shrouded by drop cloths, obscuring any hint of its progress. Hale saw his son passing through the lobby at all hours, carrying one strange object after another into the converted cigar shop. He was afraid to see what was on the other side of the shrouded front window. As curator, Jethro had been largely ignored by the workmen. They placed the items into the display cases based on a list provided by Owen Graves. There was very little harm Jethro could manage at this point. If the cigar shop turned out to be a foppish lair then Hale would simply shutter it.

The preparations, then, were in order. The natives had been spending their time learning English and touring the city, all of it photographed for publicity. Their hut was ready and soon they would make the move from their offices to the rooftop. It was a running joke at the company that the two savages had snagged corner offices without selling a single policy.

What kept Hale awake at night were reports of further deterioration in the plate glass, the engineers insisting that the building
was inching farther afield as the clay bed thawed from a long winter. The foundation, the concrete raft, these were sliding toward the lake by the second, if you believed the structural engineers. Less than six total inches to date was the pronouncement but they recommended drilling, anchoring, boring steel rods and cables into the hardpan. Hale told them he would make a decision after the summer unless they could convince him of immediate peril. Meanwhile, First Manhattan Life & Casualty was adding stories to their building, set to eclipse the rank of highest occupied floor before the year was out. He lay in bed before dawn, listening to birds maraud the seed feeders in Marshall Field's backyard, thinking of ways to build up. On some level he regretted the clock tower because it inhibited the building's further ascent. If the foundation could be squared up, then they could add another five floors, surely, perhaps ten. But what small and narrow floors they would have to be, to leave the clock tower intact. Then he saw a vision of a second tower rising from the rooftop, shadowing the clock face, a stack of private rooms and suites, his own office at the apex. Hale Gray anchored above the grimy world. He was dreaming, he knew. The shrieking birds slipped beyond annoyance and he saw himself in a dirigible, a zeppelin floating above the Loop and the lake. The great hull was gilded with the leonine company seal. He woke to recall Napoleon using hot air balloons during the Battle of Waterloo, advancing above the British with fire and silk.

T
he teeth of a mermaid captured in the Aegean Sea, the horn of a unicorn, the feathers of a phoenix, the claws of a salamander, two iron nails from Noah's Ark—all had been among the King of Bohemia's collectibles. Jethro knew Rudolf II had been taken advantage of, hoodwinked by charlatans and peddlers of fraudulent antiquities, knew the unicorn's tusk was probably, in fact, the tooth of a narwhal. The monarch had been vulnerable in his quest to know the mind of God. Who could blame him? That time—the latter half of the sixteenth century—was seething with mysticism and superstition. People believed ostriches ate iron, moles were eyeless, swans sang before they died, chameleons lived on air, elephants had no knees. What a dark epoch, alchemical in its knowledge, science relegated to ingots, salves, unguents, balsams . . . Rudolf had been mesmerized and blinded by the monstrous and the rare, the aberrations of the divine, filling his cabinet of curiosities with apocrypha. Remember, Jethro cautioned himself, that out of this same period also came Gessner's
History of Animals,
the classificatory basis for modern zoology. Innovation rising up the river of ignorance like a tidal bore.

He sat in the waiting room of Dr. Jallup's office deep in reverie. He hated to leave the
wunderkammer
and had taken to sleeping some nights there, surrounded by his specimens and books. The collection was taking shape and he'd struck upon a theme—
variety and structure in the miniature
. He wanted to show the layman how patterns were sewn into the very fabric of Nature: the crosswise parliament of fibers in a certain kind of leaf, the
weft of quilled feathers in a bird's undercarriage, the spiraled pigment in a seashell that doubled as camouflage. He would exhibit entire specimens but highlight their minutiae (dynasties of filament and marrow), position magnifying glasses in front of teeth, tentacles, talons. The nurse called his name and from her tone he wondered how long she'd been repeating
Jethro Gray
into the crowded waiting room. Jethro got up from his seat a little too fluidly and the waiting infirm—rheumy, agued, consumptive— watched him with suspicion, waiting for another act of celerity that would condemn him as a faker. It was his mind, he told them under his breath, but that was also a part of the body. What ornamentation did the brain hold in its fissures? It was a ghastly thing to look at, the liver-colored purse of human deception. There was a fish—the remora—that swam beneath ships and attached itself to the hull. Sea captains of all stripes believed that if enough of them barnacled to a ship's bottom they had the power to retard steerageway. This was exactly how Jethro's mind felt in the drag of the festering finger and the poisonous act he had committed. A sucker's maw had attached itself to his consciousness.

The doctor's examination room was its own
wunderkammer,
a cabinet of strange objects and smells. The sickly odor of cala-mine, a ferric quickening in the nose, followed by pipe tobacco. How could a room smell brown? But so it did. Surgical tools and dental pliers on metal trays—Jallup was not above pulling a rotten molar—and the
materia medica
propped on its own bookstand, splayed as if for recitation. Was that russet stain actually a blood smear on its celluloid page? Jethro tightened the fencing glove on his left hand and shook hands with his right. The doctor was bald, slumped, unsexed, little more than a ponderous head, colorless eyes that skimmed along the surface of the world from behind long-range spectacles. There was small talk, mainly of Hale, followed by a series of
humph
s and
ah
s and
that so
's.

“Hot was it, out there in the South Sea? I imagine it was, yes.”

“I'm not sleeping.”

“Let's take a look at the finger.”

Jethro had not mentioned his finger. His father had been on to the doctor. He should have found his own physician.

Jallup eased the fencing glove off and whistled involuntarily. He clicked his teeth, filled with clinical contempt.

Jethro said, “I wonder if you can help me—”

“How long has it been like this?”

“Months.”

“Painful?” The doctor looked over the wire rims of his spectacles.

“Depends on the day. When I can't sleep I feel it throb.”

“Yes. I imagine you do.”

“Is there something you can prescribe for my wakefulness?”

“Snakebite you say? In the islands? Nasty. The poison has done damage. That much is clear.”

“Oh, no. The snakes are not poisonous there—on the island where it happened.”

“Tell that to your riddled finger.” Jallup reached for his pipe and filled the bowl. He took a pull of smoke into his mouth and gestured to the finger with the amberoid stem. “Way I see it, you're lucky to still have that finger. Why the rot hasn't spread into the hand entire is quite a thing. Regardless, we need to be prudent. Don't want you to end up looking like an Appalachian coal miner. I'm going to give you some ointments and powders. And keep the glove off from now on. The skin needs to heal in the plain light of day.”

“Is that all that's to be done? Are there no other therapies? My mind, you see—”