Read Among the Wonderful Online
Authors: Stacy Carlson
Among the Wonderful (35 page)
The tribesman could navigate by landforms, winds, and by the night sky. That’s why he left the home place with the keeper. He always went with the keeper to visit the oldest places, walking a full twenty paces behind him so he would not hear the song, but he had heard it despite this precaution, and he had learned it by the time he was thirty, though he dared not sing it aloud. He went with the keeper many times a year, to Nanguluwur, Ubirr, and Burrunggui. Sometimes they did not go to the old places; they went walking across the savanna, or by raft during the wet seasons, so the keeper could listen for information that came from the water, from the dry ground, and from the cliffs. They returned to the people after days, sometimes weeks, with guidance and news. Incorporating the new knowledge, the people would move to the next camp, or they would stay until the eucalypts flowered or the magpie geese took flight
.
But the last time had been different; the tribesman knew it right away, even if the rest of the people did not. The keeper beckoned to him in his usual way, and pointed east. The tribesman prepared for a journey but he could not feel the reason for it. The old women talked among themselves: He was going now? With the thunderheads building? They did not understand it but they trusted the keeper, as they should
.
The keeper led him to the east. The tribesman thought they would go to Nourlangie, but after a day’s walk away from the camp the keeper turned north. The tribesman’s unease grew. This was not the way toward any ancestor, unless the song had given the keeper knowledge much deeper than anyone knew
.
On the evening of the second day of walking the keeper had come to him. Brother. The keeper’s white hair glowed in the nighttime. Brother, we are going to the sea. The tribesman knew he was smiling. It is the sea we need to ask. The keeper’s voice was strange, different. He squatted next to the tribesman, rocking gently back and forth on his heels, twisting a length of his hair between his fingers.
The tribesman noticed his eyes were red-rimmed and watery. The keeper was very old. He held centuries of knowledge, but could he walk that far? The people knew the sea only by what they heard in stories. Those stories had nothing to do with life at the home place. Why? whispered the tribesman. We have never gone there. What is the need? We have never gone there for anything. Something is changing, the keeper told him. That is what I know. We must find out what it is and bring the news back. Now is the time to go and get this information
.
For four days they walked across dry floodplain, through forests where the rustling of leaves blocked every other sound. They watched thunderheads pass above their heads and drop their rain far to the west. The keeper walked steadily in his uneven gait, limping from his old wound. As they went farther and farther the tribesman’s fear grew, and he mourned. He hated to leave the home country more than anything else in his life. The aunts and grandmothers had always teased him, ever since he was a boy, saying the only reason he learned how to read landscapes, how to mark paths and navigate by the night sky, was so that wherever he was, he could return very quickly to his bed
.
As they walked, he tried to keep the home place with him. He saw the men poised ankle-deep in the shallow wetlands, spears raised. Faster than you could see, they speared turtles through the neck. The hunters walked back to the stone cliffs before dusk, watching the wood swallows roosting in the high crevices. The women plucked the last geese of the season, storing the down and stringing flight feathers and hanging them among the rocks. The tribesman wanted more than anything to return, to feel the first drops of the rain on his back. He wanted to walk into the shelter and breathe the scent of roasting bird, of coming storm. But without the tribesman the keeper would be lost. And the people needed a keeper, so the tribesman could not turn back
.
The song on his lips tastes metallic, brings a vision of rain and the smell of wet eucalypts. He moans when he feels the wooden floor of the museum under his feet and hears the sound of horse’s hooves and clanging metal harnesses on Broadway. He covers his ears, but nothing helps. He is nowhere, dying, waiting
.
“But where did they come from?”
“Chicago, probably. Most of the Indian shows originate there.”
“I mean before that. Where are they from?”
Guillaudeu was incredulous. Lilian Kipp’s interest had swerved almost immediately from the enigmatic white whale, the secret he’d used to bring her to the museum, to the Indians who lived beside it. The presence of the beluga had startled her, of course. She had scaled the ladder, even extended a hand to the creature, which had given it a hesitant nibble. But she was entirely more intrigued by the Indian camp, even though no one was there.
“These baskets,” she had exclaimed. “I saw some like them at the British Museum before I left home. The motifs remind me of Greek mosaic, do you see the similarity? I haven’t had a chance to see any of your Indians yet. I would love to travel west, but I don’t have the time right now. I’d better go soon, though. Tribes like this won’t last long.”
“They’ve been living here for several months.” Guillaudeu struggled to recall another detail about the Indians. “They perform two shows a day. Dancing, I believe.”
“We should see them! Could we? Ever since I was a girl I was always envious of you Americans with your Indians. I imagined if I’d been born here I would have run away from home and been adopted by some.”
“Oh?”
“Isn’t that silly?”
“Not at all, Miss Kipp.”
“Oh yes, it is. If we’re to be friends you must tell the truth, Mr. Guillaudeu!”
Guillaudeu blushed. Once again, Miss Kipp had slipped into a directness that he found exciting, terrifying, and somehow a relief. Linked to her, he felt himself anchored to the ground instead of stumbling over uneven, undulating terrain.
“To be quite frank, then, I am at a loss. I showed you the museum’s greatest treasure and greatest secret. It is the only beluga whale in the country, and yet you are entirely more interested in the Indians.”
“A-ha! That’s better, Mr. Guillaudeu. The answer is simple: I have seen the whale before.”
“That’s not possible! The public isn’t allowed into the fifth floor at all.”
“No. Not
this
whale. I’ve seen belugas in the seas of Greenland. I accompanied my father on one of his last voyages, and we watched the whales, hundreds of them, as they foraged in Baffin Bay. This is a fine whale, though. I will pay it more attention if that makes you feel any better.”
“But that would not be truthful, Miss Kipp! No need for you to cater to an old man’s delusion. I simply assumed that, like me, no one had ever glimpsed one before.”
“Most people haven’t.”
“But I managed to find the one woman who had.”
“I was glad to be found.”
Guillaudeu offered Lilian Kipp his arm. “As I understand it, there is an Indian show at eight o’clock this evening. If we want to see it, we should ascend now to the Aerial Garden and Perpetual Fair for supper.”
The evening was windy and warm. Clouds in the shape of all manner of pastries scudded low against a purplish backdrop. He seated her at a table near the railing. It was the first time Guillaudeu had eaten supper on the roof. The prospect of navigating the crowds had always been distasteful enough
to send him into the streets instead, or home. Now that he was here, the people did not bother him. The view to the harbor was spectacular, and off to his right he could see the Happy Family in its cage. The coyote seemed to be watching him specifically. Hoping for food, he suspected.
Lilian Kipp regarded patrons, restaurant waiters, even the tableware aligned in front of her with the same exacting scrutiny she had given to the Indian baskets. Now she gazed over the railing at the city below. Guillaudeu felt he would lose her completely to the many-layered vista if he didn’t engage her in conversation right away.
“You inherited the naturalist’s capacity for information.”
“Something of it. Compared with the others I am a dilettante. In some it borders on mania. Useful mania. An accepted one, but mania nonetheless.”
“Was your father afflicted with it?”
“Mania? Perhaps. He
was
considered something of an oddity. He was always abroad, and when he was home in Bradworthy he walked through the fields and woods, taking down notes and observations of things the farmers could not even see. He wandered and wandered, in circles and loops, backtracking and cutting his way through thickets. Yes, some people considered him a bit off. And then after a few months out would come an article, published in London or Edinburgh, making some new sense of the grub or the blackbird. I adored him, of course. I would stumble along behind, making notes of my own, which he insisted I read to him. He would pretend to augment his findings with mine.”
“You moved to London when he died?”
“Yes. The contours of my life have been wholly determined by his.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” said Guillaudeu. Lilian Kipp had issued her comment casually, without blinking. If it was intended for humor he could not say, and he experienced an unpleasant memory of his wife’s cholera-stricken face.
“Oh, it certainly is! The farm was Mother’s. But we stayed there for him. He could not bear to live in the city. But as
soon as he died we were off. Once again, he prompted our move. And the Royal Society offered me work only because I am his daughter.”
“It seems a sad way to look at things, doesn’t it? An oversimplification.”
“But it’s true,” she said and laughed.
“But no one is forcing you to publish his writings, are they? It is obvious to anyone who hears you speak that there is passion behind your efforts.”
She examined the black tulip in the vase on the table. The wind lifted the corner of her shawl and delivered a pleasant whiff of fennel to Guillaudeu’s nostrils.
“What is
your
work, then?” he asked gently.
Lilian Kipp replied quickly. “I classify botanical and entomological specimens for the Royal Society. I sit at a table with Miss Bedard, who sketches each beetle while I look it up in Albin’s natural history. Miss Martin fills in the sketches with watercolor.”
“That sounds like the work of the Royal Society, not your own.”
“You’re making fun of me!”
“Not in the least,” said Guillaudeu. “I truly want to know.”
“I have no work of my own.”
“I don’t believe it,” snapped Guillaudeu.
“Whyever not?” Lilian Kipp snapped back.
“Because I am convinced that everyone spins a web of their own design inside their own head. Everyone creates some personal taxonomy with its own meandering logic, some small prism of ideas and passion, no matter how delicate or unusual or unspoken. No one can implant such a thing in another. It springs from one’s own vision.”
“What a pretty thing to say,” said Lilian Kipp.
He saw she had not expected it. Neither had he.
“What is yours, then, Mr. Guillaudeu?”
“I won’t let you turn the conversation that way, Miss Kipp,” he said. “The question was first put to you.”
“Well,” she began, “I
have
been investigating something over the years. It started with frogs at the pond in Bradworthy. The development from polliwog to frog is remarkable; I have countless sketches and observations of it. But several years ago my mother and I were walking in Kew Garden. We looked at the leaves of a flowering cherry tree, and I found a chrysalis. Have you ever seen a chrysalis, Mr. Guillaudeu?” Lilian Kipp appeared a bit breathless.
“I have not.”
“Not many people have, which is surprising, considering there are over fifty thousand species of caterpillar in the world, and those are just the ones we’ve classified! There are untold thousands more, I have no doubt. A chrysalis is a thing of real beauty. Extraordinary beauty. Rare beauty. For example, if you look at one through a magnifying glass, you will see imprinted textures and patterns on its surface. These patterns, I’ve discovered, reflect the markings of
both
the caterpillar
and
the inchoate butterfly. But inside the shell, the actual creature has dissolved into a pulpy liquid. Liquid!” Lilian Kipp paused for a drink of water. She shook her head. “In fact, I met a man in London who kept a colony of
Smerinthus geminatus
. He was the only other person I found who was conducting his own inquiry into the process of metamorphosis. I realized his aim was much different from mine when I entered his laboratory and found that he was draining the liquid contents of the cocoons into cocoon-shaped glass vials and selling the substance to ladies of rank as an elixir.
Skin like the wing of a butterfly
.
“A frog’s metamorphosis is not quite so otherworldly as that of the moth or the butterfly. The frog sprouts its limbs in plain sight. True, it changes from breathing water to air. That is no small feat.” She laughed. “But consider the caterpillar! It emerges into the world and the first thing it does is consume its own leathery egg. From that moment on, all it does is eat. Its body is a simple vessel blessed with the flame of life! It doubles and triples its size within three hours of its birth. It splits out of its first skin into a bigger
one, with different coloring and contours. It repeats this process two more times, evolving into several different caterpillars on its way. Then, according to some indicator still unknown to man, it hangs itself under a leaf. It is perfectly still for almost exactly twenty-four hours. Then, its skin splits apart one more time to reveal the chrysalis. From the wormy, earthbound crawler emerges this liminal phase, a hanging cocoon, more of a place than a being. Inside, slime somehow organizes itself into a powder-winged creature, an iridescent aeronaut, one of our universal symbols of beauty. Does the butterfly remember eating the leaves upon which it now alights? All of its mechanisms for survival are different. Its whole architecture has transformed. Are they two creatures, five, or one? Only when I examine the chrysalis itself, as I told you, with the magnifying glass, do I see how the caterpillar is linked to the butterfly.”
