Bright and Distant Shores (30 page)

Giles wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “No man would ever sail if he took the time to read a boat's charter. About the only demise those articles don't mention is pinching into the mouth hole of a sea dragon. We are dust mites to the underwriters. Fucking lice on a rat's periwinkle.”

“The captain read them aloud when I signed on,” offered Dickey. “Like he was giving a speech.”

Giles raised a palm to the fire, indicating a change in subject and that he had the floor. “One time I able-bodied on a limejuicer round the Cape and the Brit greenhorns were all up in the high rigging, trial by fire and all that, and fuck me if it didn't rain vomit for a month. Deckwash of bile and ankle-deep!”

Dickey hawed and spat again into the flames.

As the talk continued they watched Jethro ready himself as if for some obscure battlefield commission—placental forceps
hanging from a belt loop, the fencing glove cinched, the collecting rifle with its extended auxiliary barrel, a chest of copper tanks for batrachians and reptiles. He'd camouflaged his coveralls with dead leaves and branches and smeared his face with mud in the manner of the New Georgian headhunters. He checked the muzzle and bore of the rifle, removing his glove so that the aggrieved finger appeared fat and yellowed in the fireglow. Absentmindedly he pointed the rifle into the bowl of firelight by the tents.

“You'll want to point that away from us, Mr. Gray,” said Owen.

“Forgive me,” Jethro said, aiming the rifle into the harkening woods.

Giles said, “Mudface won't hide you tonight if these clouds open up. Looks like it's going to piss down horses and cows. What are you collecting this evening?”

“I'm hoping for some mammals.” Jethro strapped the chest of tanks onto his shoulders.

“Possums and rats more like it,” said Dickey. “You look like you're going to sell ice cream cones at a ball game.”

Owen gave the apprentice a look that told him to ease up. As much as he wanted to, he couldn't let Jethro sally out into the bush dressed like some deranged ancestor back from the brink. The skittish clansmen would shoot him or pinwheel a tomahawk at his head just as soon as look at him. “Which way are we headed?”

“I won't stand a chance with the night wanderers if you all come along.”

“We'll be quiet and stay back,” said Owen. “And since you're on my docket it's not much up for discussion.”

Argus kicked some ashes into the fire and they headed out, Jethro in front and the men fifty yards behind. They watched the hurricane lantern bobble through the darkened thickets up ahead and heard the slosh of the copper tanks. The cordage and drapery of the bush made it slow going, Jethro deciphering a narrow
footpath that led alongside the beach. Robber crabs and rats scurried underfoot, albino possums with pink eyes and hairy white tails. The din of the frogs in the fig trees was deafening, punctuated here and there by the guttural calls of a lone bullfrog. Luminous beetles flurried between branches and there were platforms of fungi, serried and glowing, like banks of phosphorescent cloud in the dark understory. Dickey and Giles took turns throwing areca nuts at Jethro's back when Owen wasn't looking. Argus brought up the rear, hesitant in his dead man's boots, his chest on edge against the memory of the night he trekked up the caldera to find his sister. He'd led the tree-dwellers into battle against the shipwrecked Englishmen, but the whole time he'd tasted his own fear like blood in his mouth.

They came to a clearing and saw the reef houses that were raised on pilings of coral and driftwood, their hearth fires visible through the chinked bamboo walls. Earlier in the day Owen had learned that the householders here were exiles of a sort, disgraced widows and shamans, adulterers and the mad, all of them spending their days fishing for mullet and making stone-shell money. The inhabitants were brought in for feasts and ceremonies, their canoes laden with currency and fish. It might not work in a city like Chicago—to let the inmates of Dunning Asylum run the local branch of the U.S. Treasury—but on an island it was an ingenious solution. The insane and socially blighted were isolated while given an important job to do. Besides, they were also the first to go if a flotilla of enemy canoes paddled into the bay on a night raid.

Just as Giles had predicted, the sky opened up and torrential sheets of rain drenched them to their bootlaces. A river of mud sluiced at their feet. Skeins of lightning backlit the coastline, turned the treetops skeletal. Undeterred, Jethro pressed on, collecting a grounded possum, a cuscus, several frogs, a number of glowing beetles. He wrapped the larger kills in muslin and folded them into his creel. The frogs were embalmed in the tanks, legs
first. The other men slowed and took shelter in a grove of ficus and coconut trees while he forged ahead. The animals of the night stopped moving for a stint and Jethro felt a thousand eyes on him. He wondered how they saw him, this strange figure moving in a cone of lantern light. Or was he shifting and phosphorescent and in that way utterly unremarkable to them?

He heard the flying foxes chirping before he saw them, stepping over a rise to see a mango orchard being devoured by a colony of giant bats. They wheeled above the treetops in slow arcs, flapped between branches, hung inverted to gorge themselves on fruit. He could hear their teeth against the mango skins just below the snare drum of thunder. It was clear this was a seasonal feeding ground—even in the salt fog and rain the stench of guano and rotting mango flesh was overwhelming. He stepped into the orchard, slightly stooped from the vampiric racket overhead, and loaded two 12-gauge shells of wood powder and buckshot into the collecting rifle. A seam of rainwater bled off the chamber onto his finger, forcing him to recoil then relax against the trigger. As he fired the weapon he was glad that the gloved injury was on the other hand.

Six shots in succession—separated by rapid reloads—brought the others running, Owen yelling at Jethro through the monsoon. Like the rest of them, Jethro had been there when it was explained that the clansmen held the flying fox to be sacred, that they sponsored annual festivals in its honor and used its claws for tattooing only after its natural death. There were stories of wayward children being led back to the village by a camp of bats, a woman who gave birth to a flying fox in an ancestral cave. Unlike their sacrilegious neighbors, they didn't use the wing bones for sewing needles or for making barbed spears, but carved bat effigies into the prows of their canoes. This had all been made plain to the naturalist who now kneeled beneath the furious, roused colony, the beat of their wings like broomsticks on leather hides. Jethro was already field-dressing a female in the pall of the lantern, the
rain hissing off its hot tin cap. The men ran into the orchard then slowed, stunned and silent. Half a dozen bats lay dying and flapping in the guanoed dirt, their wings augered with buckshot. Jethro used a scalpel to slice down the bat's gullet and began to swab out the intestines with cornstarch and excelsior. Then came the grim surprise of an infant coiled and wobbling in its mother's viscera so that Dickey Fentress began to weep audibly. Giles swallowed, said,
You've killed us all, you fucking sodomite,
and charged Jethro with his fists swinging. Jethro took a punch in the back of the head and dropped his scalpel onto the carcass. He crouched forward, covered both ears with his hands. Owen pulled Giles back, breathing hard beneath the Babel of shitfire and terror. Argus watched, stupefied, certain now that he had backed the right man.

They heard the clansmen pounding through the bush in the downpour, running through ravines on the narrow, hidden footpaths. Owen tried to wrest the rifle from Jethro but they struggled, dancing with the weapon between them. The gun went off inches from Dickey's ear and he doubled over, clutching his head. Owen freed the weapon and yelled for them to all run for the boat. Dickey looked up, dazed. The naturalist began grappling with his chest of tanks and Owen yanked it to the ground. They took off running for the beach, Dickey stooped, Giles and Owen firing their pistols into the air above the trees to give the villagers pause. The tribesmen flushed out of the woods with spears and tomahawks but also Confederate muskets and Winchesters, a front-runner bearing down on them with a revolver like a frontier sheriff. The seamen sprinted across the beach and dragged the whaleboat down to the water, returning fire across the gunwales. Dickey steadied the prow while the others scrambled to get in, Argus pinioned against the oars to make traction in the surf, Giles and Owen firing at the sand in front of the rampaging kinsmen. Dugouts were already being dragged down to the beach. For a moment Jethro sat motionless, still as a monument, and Giles
used him as a shield before Owen shoved the naturalist onto the boards.

The
Cullion
's middle watch saw the chase unfold across the wavetops, the native outriggers cutting through the high swells while the whaleboat dipped and yawed. Gunsmoke and musket gas flared on the wind. Already the second mate was rousing the captain from his cabin, where Terrapin was teaching Malini card tricks and playing sonatas. The captain bristled onto deck in his dressing gown and gave the order for the bosun to unlock the small armory. Rifles were handed out and the watchmen gave fire over the leeward railing. Terrapin let the seamen do the shooting, as he leaned against the shrouds in silence. He gave the order to weigh anchor and for all hands to stand by to wear ship. The first mate relayed the order up into the crosstrees, but the watch was already unfurling the sails. The whaleboat rowed to port beneath the smoky fusillade. The hemp ladders were lowered and the boat brought up on davits. The traders went below and the bark heeled on a broad reach, fully canvased and armed like a Spanish galleon of another century.

J
ethro Gray, now confined to the hold, would not be getting his first edition of
A Naturalist Among the Head-Hunters
signed by its author. Terrapin granted Owen two hours at the government station in Tulagi and the trader rowed the dinghy onto the beach without passengers. The makeshift station was patrolled by five Fijian policemen and a sergeant from Guadalcanal. Even if Jethro had come ashore in hopes of flattering his fellow scientist into a personalized inscription, it was unlikely that Charles Woodford would have received him. He was preoccupied and not taking visitors just at the moment. The Anglican mission of Siota looked set to be placed under quarantine and there had been a spike in outbound correspondence. Among his other duties, Woodford sold New South Wales stamps to the Europeans in the islands and arranged passage for postal items on government steamers. The missionaries, all those strapping English lads and freckled Australian girls eager for Christian service, were now brought down by every strain of milkpox, cottonpox, and Cuban itch, so that the mailbags were filled with deathbed epistles and codicils, entreaties for forgiveness and reconciliation, strands of hair coiled inside feverishly licked envelopes, night poems filled with remorse. On the mail hut wall, next to a portrait of Queen Victoria, there hung a tintype of missionaries flanked on a beach, sunhats fastened, gilded King Jameses in their hands. Owen stared up at it while a Fijian policeman dug for Adelaide's letter in a canvas mailbag.

The envelope was spattered and torn, looked more like a prison
letter from the Congo than a love letter from Chicago. Owen was puzzled by the Boston postmark and wished he could read the letter at once. He placed it in his pocket and was already thinking about half an hour of solitude on the foredeck. Or maybe he would take it up into the rigging, amid the flying kites and moon-rakers, rolling the words in his mouth to better hear her voice.

Although he had to be back on deck in a little over an hour, he couldn't help wondering whether the Resident Commissioner might be interested in selling some artifacts. Owen knew that he had once collected for the British Museum, technically making him the competition, but he'd also heard from the grumbling constable that the government station had a single whaleboat and five pence in reserves. Maybe the commissioner could be tempted into a quick and haggle-free sale. Owen sent word of his interest with one of the constables. What came back was a politely worded declination and a cup of English tea on a china saucer. Owen drank it down in the hot sun and returned to the ship, watching the envelope square his trouser pocket as he rowed.

On board, Owen avoided the commotion of the crew weighing anchor and unfurling the sails. He retired to his cabin and lit the hanging lantern above his small desk. It sputtered to life, a wavering blue-yellow in the noxious atmosphere. He crossed to the porthole and opened the glass hatch. The letter was thinner than he expected and disappointment registered faintly in his thoughts. There was something about every letter he'd ever received that made him expect surly creditors or bad news. He smelled the folded edges for traces of rosehips and steadied the pages in the disc of daylight.

My Darling Owen,

You will notice from the envelope that I am sending this from Boston, where I have come, it seems, to bury my father. He has been taken ill for some time but it was only when my mother wired me in Chicago that I
realized the extent of his duress. A train brought me east and I'm writing this while a host of visiting aunts and uncles pay their last respects in the room adjacent. I find it difficult to stand by his bedside for fear of having to say goodbye. Although he is a stern sort, he also possesses deep veins of kindness and a philosophical turn. He was forever handing me books during my childhood, much to my mother's dismay. She thought I should be learning to cook and dance and generally finessing the art of snaring a husband. It was he who encouraged me to attend college for no other reason than it might provide me with some interesting reading and conversation. On the topic of charity to one's fellows and rights for women, we never saw eye to eye but we also never argued. He had a kind of decency that seemed to cut through disagreement. There were only three things that made Gerald Cummings angry: wastefulness, greed, and badly behaved dogs.