Under the Wide and Starry Sky (43 page)

Louis was drifting inside the blurry edge of a dream. He saw himself as a young man, standing on the deck of a boat, staring out at a starless, silent night. He knew there were people on shore, waiting to get on the boat, but he could not see them. Suddenly, a keening wail rose up out of the blackness …

Louis bolted upright, shuddering. The keening continued, piercing the hallway silence as it found its way from Fanny's room to his. With his heart thudding crazily, he realized what he'd done: woven a dream around the terrible wail. As he came fully awake, the pounding in his chest slowed, and a sickening knowledge pressed down upon him.
It is the voice of my wife.

He saw himself from the outside, a small figure in the midst of a tropical forest, ten thousand miles from home, alone and frightened. He wondered how, of all the paths he might have taken in his life, he had come into this nightmare, in this place.

During the two weeks they had been back from Sydney, Fanny had declined further. Mercifully, she was not violent. By day she was inconsolably sad, but her nights were full of terrifying visions. He went out into the hallway, where he found Lloyd standing outside Fanny's room in his pajamas, looking pale but alert.

“Go back to bed,” Louis said. “I'll relieve Belle.”

“No,” Lloyd replied. “I'm up now. And I know you need to work.”

Thank God for Lloyd and Belle.
They'd been exemplary. Louis could not have survived this without them.

In his study, Louis drank his coffee as the dream—and the memory that suggested it—came alive again in his mind. He was a young man of twenty, still an engineering student, traveling through the Inner Hebrides archipelago on his way to view firsthand the Dhu Heartach lighthouse that his father was building at the time. He had boarded a paddleboat steamer at Skye as it headed toward Erraid. One dark night, standing at the bulwark, he noticed that the vessel appeared to be moving through fjords into a loch, where it stopped.

“Have we shifted off course?” he'd asked a boatman who stood nearby, sucking on a pipe.

“Aye,” the man said.

“Why?” Louis asked.

Orders, the man explained. The boat was to collect of group of people who had been moved off their land because a deer park was to be made.

“Where are you taking them?”

“Tae Glasgow.”

“And then where will they go?”

“I cannae say.” The boatman shrugged. “Awa'.”

Louis had looked out into the blue-black night. A lantern here and there flashed upon a figure as the silent moving mass boarded the boat. Then a keening voice rose up and echoed against the cliffs. The chilling cry seemed to speak for every exile who ever was stripped of his home; it was the sound of a soul ripping apart. As the voice was joined by a chorus of others, Louis had turned to a young man next to him and said, “They're being cleared, just as the Highlanders were.” The force of that realization had stayed with him all these years.

Sitting in his dim study, Louis felt a heavy inertia in his limbs. His hand did not go out to the manuscript on his desk. Fanny's cries had set off a jumble of emotions, and his brain kept turning to the Hebrides. Haunted by the keening of the displaced people, he had proceeded on to Erraid, where he was met by his father, who was eager to show his son the miracle that was under way. Thomas Stevenson took him by boat to the large black rock jutting up from the ocean that supported the foundation of the lighthouse. Dhu Heartach had long been considered impossible to build upon, but several dozen losses of vessels and lives in the area convinced marine authorities it should be tried. At the time, Louis was unimpressed by the efforts of the Stevenson engineering firm. He had no interest in building lighthouses and thought himself doomed to proceed in the career his father had chosen for him. Now, when he remembered what he'd seen at Dhu Heartach, his breath flew out of him.

The lighthouse was being built on a reef that was pounded by waves in the fairest of weather; in foul conditions, they reached ninety feet in height. Giant two-ton boulders had to be brought over from Erraid by boat and hoisted in wild seas onto the rock. At least once the boulders were knocked off the lighthouse foundation and pushed into the foaming waves. Workers risked their lives raising that light, and his father always expressed the profoundest admiration for them.

Louis stared at the
Weir of Hermiston
pages stacked at the edge of his desk, where they had rested untouched for weeks. There was little chance he could regain the trancelike state he'd been in while producing that pile of words. He felt numbed by the terrible drama churning under his roof. How to work? How to reenter the nuanced relationship of the hanging judge and his son, Archie? An old promise came to him, one he'd made to his father's memory after he died. A nonfiction history of the lighthouse-building Stevensons might be the one thing he could write at the moment.

Sitting at his desk in the following days, poring over family records and maps, he found himself visiting the landscapes of his youth. He imagined walking the beach at Bell Rock with his grandfather. He meandered through the hills of the Isle of Lewis as his uncle Alan talked about the Arnish Point light; he watched those immense waves crash against the lifeless piece of rock called Dhu Heartach.

The bricks-and-mortar feats of his brilliant relatives awed him as never before and made him wonder:
Why did I ever take up a pen? Why didn't I apprentice myself to a baker? Or build lighthouses
and
write books?
His collection of finished works appeared puny compared to his father's accomplishments.

When he looked back on his own career, he thought the only real genius he possessed as a writer was pure doggedness. He had written propped up in bed, lying down, with scorching fevers and shivering chills, between coughs and hemorrhages, through bouts of scrivener's cramp that rendered his right hand a useless red claw.

If craggy coastlines treacherous with submerged rocks had been the ground where his ancestors proved their valor, the sickbed had been his battlefield. Any honor he'd won had been earned there. Yet what good had it been?

All these years he'd believed that every time he began a story, it was going to be a journey toward some core of truth. That if he passed the world as he saw it through his soul, somebody, at least he, would be better for it. But what did he know now? Only that his soul was cracked wide open, not a fit vessel for filtering anything.

How he longed for Scotland! The other day, in a letter to Colvin, he'd spilled his frustration.
Singular that I should fulfill the Scots destiny throughout, and live a voluntary exile, and have my head filled with the blessed beastly place all the time.
How bitterly ironic to be surrounded by palm trees, flying foxes, sweet-smelling gardenias, red and yellow fruit doves.
And what do I see at every turn? My gray-pigeoned homeland.

Memories filled his head of himself at seventeen, with his ten-shilling allowance jingling in his pocket as he and Bob walked through the Old Town's narrow closes into moldy courtyards behind cramped tenements where ragged redheaded children and friendly drunks throve like lovely mushrooms. He longed to ramble again through Edinburgh as his cousin railed against some “bleating idiot,” or waxed flowery about a Velázquez painting. How he would love to go once more to Rutherford's pub to drink until his money was gone, then happily stagger through the snow back to Heriot Row.

Pacing around his office, he pulled volumes of his early writings from the bookcase and began paging through them, running his finger under lines that sounded foreign now.

By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing … For to miss the joy is to miss all.

What an optimist I was. How utterly self-serious.
Once identity was the most important thing. He'd written with such conviction about “the real knot of our identity” and the “central metropolis of self.”

He hardly knew what he meant by those words anymore. What he felt now about identity was simple:
All that was me is gone. The Great Exhilarator is dead. Puck is dead
. The Atheist had been dead ever since he'd taken to writing prayers for Vailima's Sunday services. He wrote them for the Samoans' sake, and for his mother's sake, and he guessed for his own sake. Now the Worker seemed to be in his last throes. Louis could not seem to write anything besides the little piece about his lighthouse-building family. His imagination felt as if it had dried up.

Unable to work, he rode into Apia, where he collected the mail and called on Moors.

“You look terrible, Stevenson,” the trader remarked, “and I'm not talking about the clothes you put on this morning.”

Louis had been so eager to escape the house that he hadn't bothered to change out of the battered old linen trousers and shirt. “I'm feeling old and fagged, to tell you the truth.”

“Does Lloyd do a lick of work up there?” Moors asked indignantly.

Louis did not respond, feigning absorption in the arrival of a schooner into harbor. More than once the trader had hinted that Lloyd and Belle were ticks on Louis's hide. He called them “the Osbournes,” as if they were a type of affliction or a natural disaster. Truth was, Louis had been feeling guilt about Lloyd, whose apprenticeship had begun well enough. His storytelling was rather rude but entertaining; he could grow into a novelist in a couple of years' time with serious discipline. But Louis suspected that Lloyd wanted the life of the writer more than the art. He would have been better off to have attended classes at Cambridge, as he'd wanted to do before the expenses at Vailima precluded that plan. Lately, Louis had begun to fear that Lloyd might be one of several casualties caused by his selfish desire to gather a clan around him.

“Go to my place on Nassau,” Moors was saying. “You can relax in a hammock for a month.”

“Six months.”

“Then lie in a hammock for six months.”

“Two years,” Louis said. “I think it would actually take two years.”

“I know you are making a joke, but I'm not,” Moors said, studying his face. “I will speak frankly to you, Stevenson. Your family drains you. They ask too much of you.

“I have spoken to any number of the Brits and Americans in this town who admire you immensely and who agree with me that you are ruining your reputation by collaborating with members of your family. You need to get away from them to do serious work, like
Kidnapped
or
Jekyll and Hyde.
”

Before, when Moors was bold enough to criticize his work, Louis wanted to punch him. Now he looked at the man and thought,
He sees clearly what I have been blind to.

“When might you be able to get away?” Louis asked. He knew Moors was traveling soon to the Chicago Exposition to help mount the Samoan exhibit.

“Not for a couple of months. But you don't need me to accompany you. I've told you all along, the place on Nassau Island is yours to use as you wish. I'm having some clearing done over there. You see that steamer?” The trader pointed to a ship being loaded with supplies in the harbor. “It's headed to the Cook Islands, set to depart tomorrow. Just go, for Chrissake.”

“It's not a good time.”

Moors looked at him in a way that suggested he might know about the troubles up at Vailima. “Is there ever a good time? If you're worried about the women up there, you can put Lloyd in charge. He needs some grown-up responsibility. Dr. Funk is always on call if somebody gets sick. As for all the war rumors, they're nonsense. Anyway, Talolo can manage any situation.”

Louis allowed the idea to play in his mind. A few months on Nassau Island would be enough to restore him or blissfully kill him. Either outcome would do.

“I will go,” he told his friend. “Soon.”

Louis left Moors. Sodden with dread at the thought of returning home, he walked the beach, stepping around parties of two or three men camped along the shore. He sat down on the sand, not far from a beachcomber who had built himself a little fire and was cooking something on a stick. The fellow was white, but his face had the sunbaked look of brown clay. He wore a kerchief around his neck and a straw hat on his head.

The man hailed Louis to come over to the fire and offered up his bottle. Louis looked down at his own clothing. He remembered the time he was staying at the Savile Club in London and had dressed up in rags to experience being a beggar. Now he wanted to laugh out loud.
At last I am taken for a proper tramp, without the least bit of effort.
He moved closer to the beachcomber and took a swig from the bottle. Gin.

“Been here long?” the man asked.

“A while,” Louis said.

“Stayin'?”

“I don't know. I may travel.” Louis took out a pouch of tobacco, rolled two cigarettes, and handed one to his new acquaintance. When he looked up from the rolling papers, the steamer headed for the Cook Islands filled his eye. God, how he wanted to leave! He could go right now, get money from Moors, and take passage. He would go unencumbered, the way he'd traveled with Bob long ago, without so much as a comb in his pocket.

Louis smiled to himself at the thought.
Fantasy—what a healthful quirk of the brain.
Just imagining freedom made his mood lighter.

“Where you thinkin' about?” the beachcomber asked.

“Nassau Island. Heard of it?”

“Um-hum.” The man drew on his cigarette with visible pleasure. “Not much there, is it?”

“Enough. And that boat could take me.”

The fellow looked out at the trading ship. “Friendly enough here,” he said, pulling a sausage off the stick. “I'm thinkin' to settle down, set up a trading post, maybe find me a local girl.”