Bright and Distant Shores (14 page)

They steered alongside New Ireland but kept their distance because it was a traditional enemy of Poumeta. Seacoast elders and even their own father had spoken of New Irishmen with two thumbs on each hand, albinos with pink eyes, weekly earthquakes, tumbledown villages set beside boiling sulfur springs. The Lemakot in the north strangled widows and threw them into the cremation pyres of their dead husbands. If they defeated potential invaders the New Irish hanged the vanquished from banyan trees, flensed their windpipes, removed their heads, left their intestines to jerk in the sun. The reverend had confirmed these heathen atrocities. The preacher remembered navigating the New Irish coast in a steamer and the natives lining up to fire their Birmingham trade muskets at the ship, discouraging the good news of Jesus Kris from coming ashore. The New Hanover men weren't much better, the reverend said. They would sell their own children for hoop iron and Winchesters and ate smoked red clay and carried daggers in their big mops of hair. But Argus also remembered hearing stories from a seafaring uncle who spoke of the New Irish with hushed reverence for their artistry and stature, the women lithe and kilted in ocher-dyed leaves and grasses, the men ferocious, athletic, hardworking, stocking their joss houses with cowrie shell money and tortoiseshell ornaments alive with fretwork. Whether they were ungodly brutes or savagely
gifted artists with beautiful wives, Argus had no desire to learn for himself.

The southeast trades came up most afternoons, smelling of salt. Argus luffed up into the wind and took shelter in leeward firths and sheltered bays. But if they were between calms and pulling in open waters there was nothing to do but ride it out, tossing over swell and spume, his shoulders and hands burning, his sister sullen and horribly seasick in the stern. The reverend had envied the Anglicans their mission whaleboats, each fitted with a lugsail and jib for windy conditions. The old man joked that it was Calvinist thrift that had given him a sentence of infernal rowing and that he lapped the oar blades through his evening prayers. When Argus lay beside his sister at night, he felt his arms pulse with the day's dip-draw passage and his dreams were all set in motion—sliding, falling, tumbling through water and air.

In the stilled waters between islets, Malini held the map over her head to keep the sun off her face. She waved gnats and flies away with one hand. He had made her wear one of his clean cotton shirts because he couldn't row with her nipples flouncing at him all day long. She kept the grass skirt and sat with her legs apart, her knees calloused and swaying. “We are dying out here,” she said with no particular emotion. “The seabirds are waiting to eat our faces.”

“Tomorrow, you iron clothes and learn hymns.” To use the future tense in Poumetan he had to prefix everything with
tomorrow
.

“I don't want to sing hymns. I want to eat something bigger than a rat.”

Argus looked into the sun-bleached distance and a line from the “Song of the Sea” came to him:
The horse and the rider have drowned in the sea
.

It rained all afternoon, a deluge that forced them to look for shelter. Drenched and exhausted, they made for an island of yew and
scrub, a copse of coconut palms fringing a beach. Malini hadn't spoken to her brother for several hours and she leapt from the boat the instant it banked on the sand. She was eager to take matters into her own hands. The hunger was embarrassing, her brother a child in filthy rags. She took his leather suitcase box from the prow, took it up into a small clearing, emptied its contents into the wet sand, and proceeded to fill it with green coconuts. She remembered from her coastal days that there was more coconut water when they were unripe and the flesh was easier to pry from the husk. She would bring the coconuts along in the rowboat for the bloodiest stretches of daylight. Standing beneath each tree, she lobbed a heavy rock into the branches and took a step back as a nut landed at her feet. She knew perfectly well how to scale a tree, a custom the forest-dwelling Kuk had bestowed on their women, but out of respect for her brother she settled for the rock. Only Poumetan men were allowed to climb trees. Was he still Poumetan or was he Christian and half white?

Argus dragged the boat up and went to rescue his possessions. He made a display of collecting driftwood into a pile for a fire but knew it was too wet to catch. They would have to find dry leaves somewhere in the bush. He watched Malini lug the portmanteau up and down the beach and, once it was full of coconuts, she began gathering shellfish in the tide pools with the hat he'd made her. When she wasn't glaring back at him, he arranged his books and clothes and spread his alpaca coat in the sand for her to sleep on. The bruised clouds had cleared and the sky was high and blue again. He wrapped the Bible inside a cotton shirt and set it down as her pillow. He opened his roll of damp sketches, blew sand from the broken watch, buffed the cutlery with a hank of gun rag, and arranged his books—
The Jungle Book, David Copperfield, Kidnapped
. According to the Reverend Mister, outside of the Holy Scriptures, these made up the divine trinity and contained all the escapades, morality, and lessons in self-determination that a boy could want.

Argus recited the full and epic subtitle of
Kidnapped—
“
Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: How he was Kidnapped and Cast away, his Sufferings in a Desert Isle; his Journey in the Wild Highlands; his acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites; with all that he Suffered at the hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, falsely so-called: Written by Himself and now set forth by Robert Louis Stevenson.
” It had been a Christmas gift from the Reverend Mister in 1895 and he'd insisted on the full title whenever Argus read a chapter aloud after dinner. The long title not only honored Underwood's fellow Scotsman but acted as an incantation before the offering itself.

Argus flipped through the book to
Chapter XIV
, wherein David has come ashore a small islet after the shipwreck. Were there survival tips buried in those pages, instructions for setting snares or traps, something that might save Argus from his sister's nagging wrath? What he found was this:

I knew indeed that shell-fish were counted good to eat; and among the rocks of the isle I found a great plenty of limpets, which at first I could scarcely strike from their places, not knowing quickness to be needful. There were, besides, some of the little shells that we call buckies; I think periwinkle is the English name. Of these two I made my whole diet, devouring them cold and raw as I found them; and so hungry was I, that at first they seemed to me delicious. Perhaps they were out of season, or perhaps there was something wrong in the sea about my island. But at least I had no sooner eaten my first meal than I was seized with giddiness and retching, and lay for a long time no better than dead.

Argus had no idea what a
limpet
was. On Poumeta it was women's work to fish the shoreline while the men fished the open sea. It stood to reason, then, that Malini knew more of what to
gather in the tide pools. He was in charge of building fires with the reverend's flint stone because it was taboo for a seacoast woman to handle flame. Argus was overcome with a desire to read more Stevenson, or to sketch, to loose himself from the present, but Malini was already striding toward him with the suitcase full of coconuts and shellfish.

“Where is the fire?” she asked.

“I need to gather dry leaves.”

Malini produced a handful of twigs and pine needles. Argus dug a small bowl of sand beneath a stick of driftwood and placed them inside. He knapped the flint against a piece of granite, aiming the sparks into the bowl. Nothing caught. It was too damp. After several minutes of exasperation, Malini took up
David Copperfield,
ripped four pages from it, and placed them flat into the bowl of sand. “Now try.”

Argus could not speak or look at her. He read a few lines of text upside down and saw that David was walking the road from London to Dover, sleeping at night in fields of hops. “Wait, not those,” he said. He removed the frontispiece from each book but the Bible and swapped them with the excerpted Dickens. He flinted against the granite again and the pages blued with flame. Malini threw the shellfish into the kindling fire and walked off without a word.

She returned a while later with tern eggs, wild figs, and a strangled lizard, dragging several dozen pandanus fronds behind her. Argus put the big lizard into the hot coals and they ate in silence when it was cooked. He used his cutlery to cut the lizard into pieces then ate them with his hands because of the look in his sister's eyes. Malini put some driftwood ash into a husk of rainwater and let it settle. She skimmed the top layer off with a shell, poured it onto her food, and handed it to her brother: “Salt.” It tasted good with the sweet smoky flavor of the hot figs.

In the fading light, they heard the gulls and terns roosting noisily in the cliff rookeries, the surf breaking on the narrow
reef. With their bellies full, their moods brightened. Malini began weaving the pandanus leaves and Argus guessed it was to make a new skirt or a sleeping mat. They drank warm coconut milk and Argus removed his boots, picked up
Kidnapped
and began reading to himself. He didn't want to read any more about the island and the shipwreck but turned to the chapter called “I Come into My Kingdom” wherein Ebenezer admits to wanting to sell David into slavery in the Carolinas. A book, once read from front to back and with no skimming, could be taken piecemeal. Unless it was the Bible, in which case it could be read according to the lesson at hand. It sometimes occurred to Argus that all the parts of a story existed at once and that people in other places were reading ahead and behind him, the words alive and unraveled across islands and oceans and continents.

After some time, and without looking up, Malini said, “Are you praying again? I see your lips move.”

“I am reading.” In Poumetan he translated
reading
as
thinking aloud
.

“What happens?”

“I make the words that are on the paper in my mind and mouth.”

“How do they stay on the paper, the words?”

“Ink. Like blood or the stain from a squid or octopus.”

“Does it smell?”

He handed her the book and she smelled the leather cover. She said, “Like pigs sleeping in the sun,” and handed it back to him.

“Do you want me to think aloud from one of these stories?”

“Will I understand it?”

“I will make the words into our language.”

“Yes, all right,” she said, plaiting the fronds.

Argus read from the opening chapters of
Kidnapped,
translating into Poumetan as he went along. There were immediate difficulties, concepts and words that had no native equivalent.
Key
and
mansion,
the words
muckle
and
laird
. But why not
big
house
for
mansion
and
headman with many gardens
for
laird
? He looked up at his sister, who started to blink very slowly in the firelight. He took out
The Jungle Book
. She was briefly enthralled by the idea of a boy being raised by animals but Argus had to stop to explain at length what a wolf was. “A wild dog with a bat's face,” was all he could come up with. Malini considered this a moment, clucked her tongue. “This story is impossible. Everybody knows that dogs don't like children.” Argus moved another piece of driftwood into the coals and lay back on the sand. His sister didn't make any move to lie down and he was lulled to sleep by the husking sound of the leaves being woven and pulled taut.

In the morning, the sky was streaked with high clouds and sand blew up the beach. Argus stood, stretched, and saw Malini, still sleeping beside her woven mat of leaves. It was now a giant sheet and she had surely stayed up the whole night working the pandanus. He raked the coals and placed some wood in them to kindle the fire. She stirred and sat up.

Argus gestured to the mat. “What is that for?”

“The boat. If we find a bamboo pole we can use it to catch the wind.”

Argus looked at the sand. She had woven a sail after living in the forest for ten years. Had she studied the seacoast fishermen from afar during her girlhood? Did she also know how to thatch a roof? He was disgusted with himself.

Softly, she said, “Will you find the bamboo pole?”

He nodded, put on his boots, and walked off, feeling her eyes on his back. He wanted to eat a piece of toast with blackberry jam, an omelet with capsicum and bacon. He missed the brown-sugared porridge and the tins of peaches. Tramping into a bamboo thicket he searched about for a fallen pole. He wanted a piece of roasted pumpkin and slices of salted tomato on a plate. A bamboo pole, dried and twenty feet long, lay on a hummock of weeds and he pried the smaller branches from it. Back on the
beach he carried it like a flagpole, marching proudly. This was for Malini's benefit and she smiled enough to show her teeth when he approached. She rewarded the find with a tern-egg omelet— not exactly bacon and capsicum—boiled in a coconut husk. It was yellow-gray and smelled as bad as it looked. They choked it down and went to rig up the sail. Since the portmanteau was now full of coconuts, Argus had to carry his books and clothes under his arm. He placed them in the lockbox along with the flintstone. They fastened the woven sail to the bamboo pole and bound the mast to the middle bench with a catch of rope. Malini stood holding it square across the wind while Argus tillered in the stern with an oar. The wind came slowly, then all at once.

I
n San Francisco they had to locate Captain Baz Terrapin, an associate of Captain Bisky, the commander of Owen's first voyage. A wire had been sent from Chicago, and the steam clipper in which Terrapin owned a majority share was now contracted. A crew of twenty-four had signed articles, supplies had been ordered, and the
Lady Cullion
was due to weigh anchor in three days. Owen and Jethro dropped off their luggage at a downtown hotel and set off on foot. Owen had been unable to convince Jethro to trim his luggage and send half of it back to Chicago by rail. He explained that a clipper was light on storage space and that extra baggage meant fewer artifacts for the return trip, but Jethro insisted that his equipment was essential. They passed an outfitters' storefront and Owen persuaded Jethro to purchase some clothes fit for seagoing, something sturdy and utilitarian. The truth was that he feared showing up to Terrapin's rooms with Jethro dressed for Sunday brunch at the clubhouse. The straw kady had been mercifully lost en route but now the raglan sleeves and the blazer were traded for blucher boots, several broadloom cotton shirts, worsted trousers, dungarees, and a serge cap. With his dandy get-up in a brown paper parcel, favoring the heels of his new boots, Jethro walked through Chinatown, tipping his cap at strangers.