Bright and Distant Shores (10 page)

He came up behind the lagoon where the folds of red clay fingered out to the ramparts and houses. The boggy trail was still there, weaving a narrow path between the broken reeds and rushes, and his feet pounded the mud as he ran. He could smell the reeking desolation long before he saw the burnt-out village. The carcasses of gutted dogs and maimed human bodies floated in the brackish water. A few houses remained, ramshackle and stripped bare on their pilings. He climbed up the stepladder to one and found a rummage of wool blankets and straw bedding. The floor slats had been pried up for kindling; clay pots and earthenware jugs lay in shards. Defecation was heaped in the corners. It was the aftermath of biblical tribes, the marauding Amalekites or Hittites, Old Testament infidels.

Argus continued on to the men's longhouse on the other side of the lagoon, his mouth open, eyes stinging, the blackened smell scorching his throat. The tambaran, hewn from teak and sandal-wood, was the place of men's business. It had been decorated with an armory of engraved weapons, famed knives and murderous spears, but also the finger bones of warriors from a previous century, from a thousand moons prior; in the rafters the cauterized hearts of mortal enemies hung like roosting bats. Now it was piled with the bodies of village children. They had come up here in terror, he could see, for only an apocalypse could drive them up into the taboo dwelling, ominous on its leaning stilts, high above the swamps and coral gardens. They lay slender-armed and ball-fisted, faces stricken, huddled behind a useless armada of ornamental shields.

Argus staggered into the bush, fell to his hands and knees.
He cried out once, with his face buried in his hat. Turning on his back, he looked up into the canopy, the moonless dark pinned above a clearing. He tried to gather his thoughts but his mind felt stripped. He was aware of the coarse volcanic dirt against his fingertips and his unblinking eyes and the taste of ash in his mouth. Did the Christian soul wait behind the bludgeoned senses like a camphor flame behind mottled glass? He tried to think of something distant, concrete, and particular—the knife and fork and serviette ring in his portmanteau, the reverend's pigeon rifle, the memory of his mother teaching him to catch fish with poisonous leaves—but these grappling half-thoughts were run through with the dead children's faces. He lay breathing, staring up, formless. He whispered the begats—
Rehoboam begat Abijah, Abijah begat Asa, Asa begat Jehoshaphat
—not as prayer but to still his heaving breath.

There was a sister who'd moved away—Malini. It came to him like an awakening. She had married into a village up on the caldera. The Kuk were shy and untrusting; they had been driven into marginal lands by the warring Poumetan fishermen. They came down off the volcano only to trade several times a year, swapping sago, hardwood, and betel nut for barramundi and snapper, for twists of Louisiana trade tobacco pilfered from missionaries. He had not seen Malini since before he was ten, since the time of the child's republic, when they stayed out until dark and held reed-spear battles in the swamps, since before her head was shaved for the wedding and she'd had to cover her face when the timid Kuk father-in-law came to fetch her. Argus remembered them walking single file up the hill, a cloak over her face to avoid the taboo of seeing her husband's father's face.

Argus would walk through the night to find her. First, he would retrieve his shoes and portmanteau, drag the boat up, and tie the cat in the woods until morning. He stood and fumbled through the dark, listening to the break of surf to make his way.

A
rgus reached the outskirts of the bush settlement in the dawning light, the raucous birds teeming overhead. He stumbled forward with his portmanteau, sleepless, blundering through the vines and fledged leaves, the hardwoods strangled in fig. His feet and hands were blistered, his throat raked with thirst. He shambled out into a clearing with his ivory shirt oranged by clay, the alpaca coat strewn about his shoulders. From above him came the piping sound of roused voices and he remembered that the Kuk lived in treehouses. He craned his neck to see shadows flitting between rope walkways. The houses were carved into the bowls of trees, timbered and thatched, wound taut with sennit and rattan. The tree-dwellers called above him, chittering back and forth, house to house, until four of them emerged from the woods. The Kuk were shorter than the coastal folk and their faces were caught up with their mountainous isolation, their features narrowed and scornful, their eyes myopic from lack of visible horizon. They had matted pompadours and the septa of their noses were pierced through with crescents of pearl shell; they wore rope belts and penis gourds and carried rifles and iron tomahawks. In the days of Argus's childhood they were known for their blowguns and arrows fletched with bowerbird plumes. The guns had no doubt been traded up from Poumeta, come ashore from trading voyages, swapped for canarium nut and virgin brides.

As they approached warily, Argus put his hands in front of him and looked at the ground, signaling submission. The warriors sidled up crabwise, guns poised. One of them slowly
removed Argus's straw hat, exposing the brilliantine worn to dull wax. They stared, spat in the dirt, considered his ravaged church clothes. Was he a black missionary flung out? A deranged Malay halfblood wandering alone on the caldera? A vengeful ancestor, a ghostly bastard from the smoky lagoons? He could see it in their whited eyes. Argus pointed to his left wrist, where a tribal scar ridged against the surface—a shark tooth singed into the flesh, its jagged contours like the head of a delta where the veins met and divided. It was not an initiation scar but a brand of clan affinity. The Poumeta were known for catching reef sharks in rattan nooses then clubbing them in the shallows. Shark teeth were among their most prized objects. One of the warriors recognized the mark and said, “Poumeta fella?”

The Kuk hadn't known a word of pidgin when Argus lived in the village.

“Malini,” Argus said. “Sisa Malini.”

They ignored him and began touching his ragged clothes, prodding his trouser legs with the muzzles of their rifles. The Poumeta and the bushmen were no longer sworn enemies but had become reluctant traders of goods and brides. Nonetheless, they remained suspicious of each other's coy houses and livelihood and weapons. They shared a dim but collective memory of the days of their forefathers, when villages were raided and burned, when kidnapped girls were taken into men's clubhouses to be shackled and whored. Argus looked into their walled eyes, repeating his sister's name. There was something between them he could not name, a need for atonement from generations ago. A few of the women and children began emerging cautiously from the trees, edging forward, clumping sago from coconut bowls, infants nursing and slung on hips. Malini approached slowly, blinking in the early sun, her hair dreadlocked and braided with flowers. It was clear she was embarrassed by having to lay claim to the vagrant who'd wandered up the caldera in stolen clothes. He studied her feet, avoiding the tenacity of her naked breasts. The reverend had
taught him the tenets of Calvinist modesty like a string of phrasal verbs and now he couldn't help but look away, slightly appalled but also annoyed by his own prudishness. She spoke softly to the four warriors and they took a few steps back, their weapons dropping to one side. She was a foot taller than the men, Argus noticed, clearly a Poumetan pureblood among the tree-dwelling pygmies.

She led him to a fire pit and they sat cross-legged. The villagers gathered and circled at a distance of twenty feet. She spoke their childhood language, quietly at first and in the clipped style offered to vexing children. But then she warmed and brightened. He hadn't spoken Poumetan for six years and it came in a halting rush, his mouth now slackened by English. He mispronounced
forest
and
volcano
while recounting his overnight ordeal, his sister's eyes skipping a beat on each botched word. Despite her own years of absence, she spoke their native tongue perfectly. He'd spoken Poumetan in his mind every day for years, a locked room where not even the Reverend Mister could find him, but now it was a hash of half-words and ideas without names. He looked at his hands and tried to puzzle it out. The lack of distinction between
he
and
she
and
it,
the merged pronouns, the occasional and odd formality of
thou art my brother
and
I am thou sister,
something he heard now through the marching rhythms of Shakespeare, plucked from so many nights of
Macbeth
and
Hamlet
read aloud from the captain's chair. But wasn't there also affection in those elevated greetings, a sense of absolute kinship? Everything was stated roundside, drifts of words that died away, weakened into implication and repetition, again
thou art my brother
and
I am thou sister,
like a renewal of vows. He tried to tell her about the village and the dead children in the longhouse but she said: “Do you remember the time our father took us to harvest honey?”

“No.”

“Don't tell lies.”

“The wild bees living on a cliff face?”

“Us girls at the bottom fanning a green fire to send up smoke. The bees were supposed to fall asleep.”

He said, “I still don't like the taste of honey. I like white sugar now.”

“You came down with a dozen stingers in your arms and belly.”

“And you and our mother pulled them out one by one.”

She nodded once, drew a series of lines in the dirt with a twig. He watched her thin, bony fingers and wondered if she had ever held a pencil.

She said, “They came from the ship, crawling across the coral with the swimming rats. We tried to help our cousins but then the sickness came and the fish were gone. People are dying in the trees from fevers and measles. We put them all up in one tree like a bigfella hospital. We give them blankets and water and wait for them to die with the devilment.”

He looked off at a lone treehouse that was set apart and saw some of the fevered propped against branches and limbs, their skin sallow, eyes flatly regarding the siblings between walls of clay and reed. The yam and taro gardens smoldered in the background, swidden mounds and swales of smoking earth. He was brought rainwater and fried bananas and he listened to the story of the shipwreck. The bearded barbarians floated into the village on barrels and deck boards and were taken in. It wasn't until they salvaged the ship that the weapons were brought ashore. They were given the beach to make camp and began organizing a rescue mission; a team of whaleboats rigged up with sails was going to make for New Ireland. But then the rum madness began and the pox and the fever. The bush villagers watched from the edges of the forest, deciding what to do, while the Poumetan elders hid the women and children in the mangrove swamps. The seamen began fighting with each other, voices pounding through the gun-smoke, and then something took up in their midst, a mangled fear
of dying on the black beach or the native bloodthirst of Englishmen far from home. They promptly razed the village, raped the women and girls in the fronds and thickets, severed men's arms, and bottled the shaman's head in a glass jar as a testament. The men of the village fought to the last spear and bone-handled knife, fired what bullets they had, until everything went quiet and still. She was ashamed to say that some of the Kuk had stolen from the beach while the battle was going on, that instead of fighting for the fishermen they retreated into the forest with woolen blankets and tinned beef. And now a third of the Kuk were dying. Men woke in the middle of the night, their lips blue and trembling with plague and the reprimands of dead uncles. There had been so many bodies that they tossed them into the volcanic pit, amid the belching sulfur plumes. Argus listened and watched her scratch the dirt.

“My husband is in that tree,” Malini said, pointing with her chin.

“And your children?”

Without looking up she whispered the Poumetan word
marlok
: barren.

“What will you do?”

She let out a sigh that ended in resigned laughter. “Learn to become a good widow. Carve wooden bowls all day like a leper. Wear breast bands and cut my hair. Hide from my mother-in-law. A terrible woman.”

Argus laughed, too.

She said, “Did you find a Christian wife?”

“Not yet.”

“Because you wear filthy rags. You look like you stole another bird's feathers.”

“I need to wash them.”

“Burn them and put a lime gourd on your penis.”

She said it matter-of-factly but they both blushed and looked off into the undergrowth.

“Little brother . . .”

“Sister.”

“What will happen now?”

“I don't know, but I am going to pray to Jesus Christ and Mother Mary.”

“Are they dead or living?”

“Both.”

The villagers looked on. Someone brought them some pepper leaf and they chewed it, sitting through long silences. Argus couldn't stop thinking about the two girls on the beached divan, about the dead children in the clubhouse. He wanted to do more than pray. He wanted the fortitude of Celtic saints, the fury of crusading moguls, the bloodlust of headhunters in the Papuan highlands, anything except the timid watchfulness burrowed inside him. His desire to think and pray, to float clouds of possibility in his mind, felt like a weakness. Could something be done in God's name? He looked at the warriors and imagined them in battle. There were a dozen guns in plain sight, a stash of tomahawks and spears and slingstones. They were lean, short, broad-shouldered, godless, but he would tell them it was better to die fighting than to die of fever and cholera and shitting blackwater up in a tree. He would tell them that the last two women of Pou-meta were being kept prisoner, raped by barking Englishmen, and that once they died the bloodline would vanish. No more coastal brides. He would stand in front of them and bring the Reverend Mister back from the dead, lean and call as if from the pulpit, evoke the catechism of fire and the blood of the lamb. He would speak of blinding vengeance, wound for wound, burning for burning, the Exodus code that righted all things for the Israelites. Never mind they'd think the Israelites were a fabled tribe on the Papuan mainland, out beyond the Sepik River. For three hundred Sundays Argus had watched the Reverend Mister fill with the demon-breath of his sermons, down a shot of whiskey after breakfast, mumble
shitfire
to himself when he thought the
boy couldn't hear, then march up the hill to the tin roofed church in his Inverness cape. The shoulders carried the message, the voice pitched like a zither in the rafters, and then came the offertory of pigs and breadfruit, an outpouring not just for tobacco but for protection from the wrath above. Six years of sitting in the front pew, lighting votaries and waiting patiently for the singing of hymns, he knew every sermonic rhythm cold. He got to his feet and took a step forward. The village circle moved in, sensing he was about to speak. The sick and dying looked down from their tree-line parapets as he made the sign of the cross, which to the Kuk seemed like an anointment before death.