Bright and Distant Shores (24 page)

Giles Blunt, as carpenter, was in charge of greasing the masts and blocks and he sent Dickey Fentress aloft with a tub of slush from the cook-surgeon. The boy moved with simian pluck, arms stretched, nimbling over the ratlines. If there was one lesson the apprentice had to learn it was never unclasp a spar or crosstree without first securing a handhold on some other piece of mast or rigging. Terrapin bellowed this cardinal rule up at the boy and went to check on Jethro's progress in washing down his filthy little orchis-house. Terrapin nodded approval to the sudsy-armed seamen who had trawled in the towline of funked laundry like some grizzly beast yanked from the depths. He went below calling, “Mr. Gray, I am coming to see if you've cleaned your room like a darling.”

Owen was cleaning out the bulkhead and the space beneath the forecastle-head. Now that they had lost a pig to trade there was only one sow, a hatch of chickens, and the rather seasick ewe competing for stowage. They had anchored off one of the islands southwest of Malekula and he'd picked up some low-grade weapons and adornments from the natives who paddled out in single-hulled canoes. When Owen refused to part with any rifles, they'd settled for two knives, a box of wax matches, and a pouch of navy tobacco. He was eager now to press on, perhaps find a people or place untouched by mainstream trade. He wiped the rambaramp down with a chamois cloth but couldn't look into its gaping, hideous mouth. It amused him to think of Hale Gray having this mummified effigy with its smoked human skull sitting
in a glass case on the twenty-eighth floor of the insurance skyscraper. He pictured secretaries not unlike Adelaide taking dictation in the mortuary pall of his office or executives coming to ask for a raise while having to stare down this ancestral ogre. Would it act as a souvenir of a savage and distant tribe or was it a totem, a grim reminder that every man dies alone, powerless to govern what becomes of his person? God help the widows and children without a policy on their dead man's head. It struck Owen that perhaps every relic in that display case was an advertisement for insurance, a statement about the precariousness of life itself.

He didn't want to go ashore on Djimbanko because it sounded, at best, like a native circus and flea market. On the other hand, Jethro had threatened to go birding and he wasn't to be trusted among the local rabble-rousers. Owen could easily imagine Jethro being shot or bludgeoned for slighting a leper, pearl diver, or jewel smuggler. Ever since his snakebite he'd taken to wearing a white fencing glove on his left hand and claimed it offered protection when gathering tide pool mollusks. Aside from the question of how he happened to have a fencing glove aboard a ship at sea, this addition to his person undid all attempts at camouflaging his upbringing with workpants, broadloom shirt, and serge cap. It announced his pedigree like a heraldry seal and Owen couldn't help wondering what else he had down in the orlop that might see him murdered—a pétanque or croquet set, a falconer's gauntlet and polo mallet?

Three whaleboats went ashore, carrying most of the seamen. The sailmaker was laid low in the hold with the Johnny-trots and the Dutch cook, Hendrik Stuyvesant, stayed behind on the premise of preparing a batch of scouse but was said to be sleeping off a hangover in a hammock between-decks. The captain stayed in the chartroom with Nipper and his gramophone. The sailors' laundry flapped from the rigging like Irish pennants.

Owen rode with Jethro, who sat in the prow with his birding
kit and sketchpad. What exactly he planned to draw or catch was a mystery; from what Owen could see the island was a treeless clay bed skirted by coral. As they rowed across the honeycombed reef heads, the smell of volcanic sulfur was everywhere. The oarsmen rowed in unison, singing lewdly in anticipation of the coming pleasures. Harvey McCallister sang the loudest and dirtiest and had been restored to respectability despite his crushing defeat in the deckside boxing match. Dickey Fentress was assigned the job of watching the whaleboats to make sure they weren't stolen but insisted he wanted to go whoring like the rest of them.

“Captain says hot black nubies is the best way for a man to lose his cherry,” he offered at the end of an oar stroke.

“When you can slush the skysail mast without dribbling pig grease everywhere we'll worry about dropping your trousers, little Dick,” said Harvey, eliciting a delighted chuckle from the seamen.

Owen watched Dickey blush and bite his lower lip. He saw some of himself in the young apprentice: Dickey was orphaned and had been forced to make his way in the world; he was unsure of himself but also impatient to prove his mettle. His main downfall was distraction. Owen found himself dispensing advice to the boy. One watch he'd told the boy that if he learned to box a compass and bend a new topgallant the captain might give him a trick at the wheel. He told him to steer clear of the shirkers and the ship's deadweight. Dickey seemed to take this to heart for a few days but then his enthusiasm fell off and he became absorbed by some mindless and vulgar prank. A handful of ordinary seamen were always trying to corrupt and sabotage his training and Dickey lacked the will to chart his own course. He would find out the hard way, Owen thought, watching him put his back into the oar stroke.

They dragged the whaleboats up onto the sand and left Dickey to stand watch with a rifle. He propped himself in the shade of a dory sail and whittled a piece of driftwood with his pocketknife.
The men started up the beach, adjusting their clothes and hats as if calling on their own mothers. The forlorn sound of a clarinet came from up ahead and, from the rear, a staticky aria broke from the ship's charthouse. Jethro trailed behind the group, blinking in the sun, looking for signs of collectible life. Owen slowed and cast a wary backward glance just in time to see him delicately pick up a snarl of kelp as if it were a weed from Lincoln's grave. He waited for Jethro to catch up, but when it became clear he would be some time on the beach, Owen joined the others.

They walked along a blackened path and Owen noticed a long-abandoned chapel up on a blighted hillside. Against the caldera it was an odd landmark, a listing shed with a white cross. The volcanic smoke fuming five hundred feet above was an advertisement for the furnaces of hell. They passed through a corridor of shanties and lean-tos and up ahead a band of Tapiro pygmies danced in the bamboo arena. Instead of an island corroboree of spears and foot-stamping, they were taking small, dignified steps in drifts of silt, waltzing in couples, the men in top hats and penis gourds and the women bare-breasted and bibbed in shells. Along the way there were all manner of sorry handicrafts laid out on sawhorse tables—gaudily painted masks, crude weapons hacked from stone, shoddy necklaces, and mud-daubed shields. Owen couldn't tell whether the artless trinkets had been made by banished natives or English castaways out for a dollar. He shook his head at the men and boys smoking pipes behind the tables and walked toward the din.

A pole-fence corral had been built around a dead banyan tree and a European woman with black hair was hanging by a roped ankle, spinning slowly. The seamen began applauding and tossing coins as the pygmies took leave and a team of animal keepers came out with exotic beasts. A native clown in vermilion facepaint entered the pit juggling fire sticks. Like the rest of the men, Owen rested on the fence and took in the spectacle. It reminded him of a tramp circus and ox-drawn sideshow his father had taken him to
as a boy. Somewhere on the outskirts of Chicago, out beyond the stockyards, they stood in the rain and entered darkened canvas tents that smelled like snakes to see bearded ladies, serpent charmers, pinheads, men who smashed gravestones over their heads. His father had called it a mudshow and pushed Owen through the Congress of Strange People by the shoulders. At each freakish display his father said nothing but there was the insistent hand at Owen's back, as if this were a bearing witness to life's cataclysms, standing before the vaudeville and dime museum Stations of the Cross. His father smoked a cigarette and joked with the sideshow barkers and the venerable old circus barber with a wooden leg and it was all meant to show Owen the razor's edge that kept them from the brink, the godless maw that waited out in the tenements and stockyards. Owen, at nine, knew he had been spared but didn't yet know from what. For months after, he dreamed of the freak-show Siamese twins and woke terrified of seeing a brother's congenital ear next to his own or feeling the double thrum of a shared pulse, the lapping tide in the same hemisphere of blood. This feeling of dread came to mind now as the gypsy woman hung from her teeth and a midshipman pantomimed the humping of a kangaroo for his shipmates. One of the Manouche animal keepers called to the showoff to step back behind the fence or he'd have his whore-pipe culped. The sailor obliged, his shipmates guffawed, and the rest of the vaudeville passed without incident.

When the corral floor was covered in coins and the gymnast climbed down from the banyan tree to take a bow, the whores were brought out in single file. “Mine'll need a leash just like that wallaby,” called Harvey, producing a wad of banknotes he'd borrowed from the sailmaker on account of his garnished wages. There were half a dozen Melanesian girls in filthy cotton dresses and ill-fitting girdles, brassieres visible beneath. Their faces were painted as gaudily as the shoddy tribal masks. The gypsy brothers were not only zookeepers but pimps and began haggling with the men, itemizing each girl's portfolio of carnal tricks. Deals were
brokered while the
fusty-luggs
and
mackerel-backed madonnas
toed the dirt, the gypsy boys riffing in French and an English so strange and archaic it hadn't been uttered in a century.

Owen drifted back among the flea market stalls and, more from boredom than anything else, bought a boning knife of unknown origin. The boy who sold it to him said they took dollars, francs, English pounds, and rum prog as payment. He said his name was Roger Billy Smith and he sat on a wooden crate, chewing betel nut and dribbling its juice into a rusted oyster tin. Owen found it hard to believe that in the span of a few years the Pacific had become so debauched and overrun with Western influence. During his first voyage there had been plenty of interaction with copra planters and traders, mercenaries living at the strandline of the tribal world, but the native settlements had seemed intact for the most part. Had Captain Bisky steered them a course through untainted territory, knowing just where to anchor, or had something shifted these last few years? New Caledonia—which he'd decided not to visit—was now more European than Melanesian. The French prison colony had just closed down and a nickel mine had opened somewhere in the interior. The white pimps and hagglers of Djimbanko were probably extradited French pickpockets who preferred their lawless island inferno to the prospect of returning to the barbarous streets of Paris.

One such beggar came bundling down the pathway in a Panama hat and trousers hitched with a length of halyard. He walked in laceless shoes, shambling along with a hardwood cane, singing to himself. As he came closer Owen saw that he was a native boy of about eighteen and that he was carrying both a Bible and a leather-clad edition of
David Copperfield
.

“Boy that humboxes from the hill church,” said Roger Billy Smith, gesturing with his chin and spitting into his can. The native stopped a few feet short and could no doubt see the surprise in Owen's face. Surely the Dickens novel was nothing more than a sheaf of cigarette papers, just as the French newspaper had been
on Malekula? But then the boy looked him square in the eye and said, “Excuse me, sir, is there a doctor aboard your ship?”

Owen took him in. “Where are you from?”

The boy ignored the question but explained what had befallen his sister, claiming that she needed an operation. She would not let him near her buttocks with a syringe and had taken opium tincture every day to help the pain but the vial was nearly empty. All of it was delivered in a colony servant's English but with near perfect pronunciation and inflection.

Distracted by this linguistic display, Owen said, “What's a hum box?”

“They call the pulpit that. We are living in the old chapel since we rowed ashore. I am from another mission island and on Sundays a few of the men come up for hymns and a sermon.”

“Are you a preacher?” Owen stifled the surprise in his voice.

The boy said, “I can lead you to her. Will the ship's doctor see her?”

To call Hendrik Stuyvesant a doctor was a wild stretch of the imagination. Granted, it was common slang to refer to the ship's cook as
the doctor,
so technically it wasn't a lie, but that designation in the wider world seemed to imply formal training and a thorough understanding of the body's mechanics and living systems. Terrapin claimed that the wiry Dutchman knew how to suture a wound, pull an abscessed tooth, administer laudanum and prescribe a mercurial ointment if a gonorrhea-addled seaman was pissing pins and needles, but the former prisoner and counterfeiter barely knew the names of bones or the vein-ways by which blood returned to the heart. Everything he'd gleaned about medicine had been on a ship and under bloody duress and it wouldn't have surprised Owen to learn that he had no more studied a medical treatise than read the
Iliad
. His one saving grace, and the only hope this native preacher boy had in the world, was that Hendrik, outside the kitchen, had a counterfeiter's precision and tenacity. Then again, Owen wondered, why had he spent a decade in jail?

Owen looked at the boy clutching the novel to his chest. He tried to imagine him in native garb, without the ragged shirt and trousers. But it was just as easy to imagine him in freshly pressed linens with a cravat around his neck. There was poise, something like dignity in his bearing. “Yes, the ship's doctor will see her if she comes aboard.”

“I will have to come with her.”

“Of course.”

“Please, follow me to the chapel now. My name is Argus Niu.”