Bright and Distant Shores (35 page)

Adelaide trudged behind her, trying to spot the store detectives in the press of shoppers. There had been a rash of shoplifting, and if she believed the papers, the mink-stoled woman trying on the diamond ring at the jewelry counter was about to turn and make a dash for the exits. Adelaide had been at the museum all morning, typing letters and cataloguing while the curators uncrated a new collection. Apparently, in the three weeks she'd been gone, no one had typed or filed a letter. It was a miracle the museum men knew how to make a cup of coffee without her. She was prepared to let her mother battle against the dressmakers of the world so long as it all passed without incident. When Margaret was bent on a task there was no use getting in her way. And she was clearly avoiding her own grief with her infantry tactics. As the housewives marauded around them, as the world blurred with ruffles and corsets, all Adelaide could think about was Owen's return in the coming months. She gave her mother a thin smile at the proffered bolt of white satin, white—the color of surrender—but she was thinking about their last night together in the junkhouse emporium, about the oily dark smell of grease and metal as Owen kissed her neck and shoulders before snuffing the light.

They moved down State Street with tied packages. It was snowing, a light glitter off the lake. On La Salle Street they hit a wall of wheat brokers and secretaries coming off their lunch hour, bundled and cinched with wool scarves, bounding along in the
brittle air.
Like an army of madmen,
Margaret was saying,
and all I want is to find the stationer the head porter recommended, did you know, Adelaide, that head porter is quite a lucrative position in the better hotels and the man at the Palmer told me something curious, George or Bernie if I recall, that all the hotels have housecats and the bigger ones have a cat on every floor. Brings them luck, he told me
. They walked under an awning and Adelaide realized they'd come upon the First Equitable. She'd taken to crossing the street to get away from its self-involved splendor, but here it was, reared up before her. Through the big frosted windows she could see a cigar stand with a carved Indian standing sentry and salesmen having their shoes blacked in the aura of blown lights and brass. The clerks and typists were filing in through the double doors, in from the cold, their faces falling a little. She'd half believed that they weren't allowed to leave the building during daylight, that management patrolled the cafeteria for jailbreaks. At the far end of the building's endless frontage hung a large sign that killed her stride. Two native men stood on a beach with spears and very little clothing, facing each other as if in battle. Below the image:

Margaret yammered something about the wind at such a height and perhaps they should abandon the quest for the stationer because there was always tomorrow. Adelaide felt her shoulders harden in the cold. She'd suspected this might be afoot and had offered Owen a chance to confess on their last night together. Now here was the proof. That Owen hadn't told her
about bringing back natives was a betrayal, a deceit. He'd lied to her face, knowing that she would be dead against such a thing. She'd even mentioned something about Boas, her former boss, persuading Robert Peary to bring back Inuits from Greenland. The six Esquimaux were studied in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but all had fallen sick and ended up at Bellevue Hospital. In a letter from Boas's new secretary—a woman with whom Adelaide had struck up a correspondence—she'd learned that the wife of the museum president planned to adopt the recovered seven-year-old Inuit boy as an experiment in educating the uncivilized. The rest were expected to die before the year was out. Hadn't she told Owen all of this?

She saw her face next to her mother's in the window's reflection. In the hard set of her jaw, in the imperious regard she now weighed at the sign, it was Margaret's long-suffering countenance settling over her. It was not the first time she had been angry with Owen but it was the first time she'd felt hollowed out by his deceit, furious over his absence and the way she would have to nurse this hurt until he returned. He was implicated in this, regardless of who was funding the voyage. She turned from the giant window, shopping bags swinging wildly, and hailed a hansom in the slushy street. “I'll pay if I have to, Mother, but I am not walking another block!” she yelled above the bustle.

F
or days the
Cullion
malingered without a glimpse of sun or moon or stars. The wind had died off but the sky remained a blighted gray. Without view of the celestial bodies, Terrapin couldn't take his sightings and angles and was therefore ignorant of the bark's exact latitude. They were adrift. At dusk and at dawn he paced the poop with the sextant still in its case, waiting for a break in the ulcerous sky that would allow a shot at the sun burning above the horizon. The twin chronometers were running perfectly in the hold—one with Greenwich and one with local time—but without angles their location was a hundred-mile wedge of ocean on the map. Terrapin fell back on dead reckoning, studied the current, leeway, wave action, and the helmsman's yawing to get some sense of their position. He consulted almanacs and admiralty charts, cross-referenced his own deck logs from previous voyages. None of it gave more than a pale illumination of where they were.

On the second day adrift Terrapin ordered a sea burial for Dickey Fentress. Regardless of the ship's ghostly latitude, proper custom had to be observed, the apprentice committed to the deep for fear he might haunt the ship and worsen her luck. Sailmaker Fennimore Jauss and carpenter Giles Blunt had taken the body below for due preparation. Jethro offered up the orlop for the funerary preparations and they found themselves scrubbing the jeweled blood from the boy's crown with muslin rags used for wrapping dead birds. Dickey's face was waxen and pale, his lips parted as if in speech. Jethro stood by with embalming fluids
and tins of excelsior cotton, but the sailmaker insisted that he was following, under captain's orders, the procedures outlined in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer circa 1662. They lifted the body onto a shroud of retired sail and Jauss placed two lead weights by the feet. He sewed the shroud, starting at the feet, then up the middle above the sternum. As per custom, he hooked the final stitch through Dickey's nose because this assured the seaman was really dead. Giles Blunt wept openly at the sight of this maneuver. When he regained himself he went above to signal the body was ready.

Eight seamen carried the canvased body on a mess table. It was draped with the red ensign but also decked in flowers from Terrapin's stateroom: hibiscus and frangipani and something resembling a native rose. In matters of funerary rites, as in all observances of religion, philosophy, and inebriates, Terrapin took a blended approach—leaned on the Anglicans for wherewithal and procedurals, stole from the Hindus for their flowers and oil lamps, borrowed a few ceremonials from the U.S. Navy. This was only the tenth man he'd buried at sea in three decades—a low trade average he was proud of—and he liked to think each seaman had been dispatched with tenderness and form. The bark was hove to, the topgallant yards were a-cockbill, topped up in mourning. The bosun and the mates stood at the head of the lined-out men, dressed in their church clothes, the entry port open on the starboard gangway. As the body came out of the hold, the officers held burning cressets at the incline of parade swords. The seamen clutched rifles brought up from the armory.

Argus and Malini watched from the quarterdeck, apart from the official assembly. The body came forward.
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live,
Terrapin said. Argus recognized the prayer as St. John's and mouthed the words
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die
. Malini held the captain's dog
in her arms but was stone-faced, wondered why guns were part of a ceremony to bury the dead. Poumetans and the Kuk would never bring a spear to a funeral. Terrapin said,
He brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out
. The bosun ordered
ship's company, off hats
and the seamen doffed their serge caps and broadbrims.

The captain read psalms in his best oratory but Argus couldn't help cringing at Terrapin's dry inflection, the way he chewed over
quickening spirit
and
sown in weakness
and
raised in glory
like so many stale crackers. At the conclusion of the psalms, as the pallbearers prepared to upend the mess table and slide the canvased body overboard, Argus began to sing a Presbyterian hymn. They all turned to hear his voice climbing the notes of “Take My Life and Let It Be.” Far from being affronted, the captain raised a palm to cease the pitching of the corpse.

Take my life and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee
Take my moments and my days;
Let them flow in ceaseless praise,
Let them flow in ceaseless praise.

Take my hands, and let them move
At the impulse of Thy love . . .

Standing beside the tearful carpenter, Owen reflected on the boy's life cut short. He remembered Dickey's face as he plunged to the deck, a look of apology in the startled eyes. In falling, Dickey had wanted to say he was sorry for not being more adept in the upper rigging. He was more afraid of the men's faltering opinion of him, of being called a lubber, than of the afterlife rushing from below. An orphan on a ship full of men and none of them had been the least bit fathering. Owen had extended a timid hand to the boy, offered him a smattering of advice, but had
waited for a sign of true worthiness. He withheld his affections out of some wager with his own past, revisiting his thirteen-year-old self on the grimy stoops of Chicago tenements and feeling, anew, that he'd been abandoned by God and life. Did he expect Dickey to climb out of that same pit without help? He imagined Dickey's self-pity and kept him at arm's length. To make amends, Owen came forward to offer a eulogy. The seamen nodded, glad that he would say some words on their behalf.

“We all failed him in a way,” Owen said, surprised by the tone in his voice. “We all assumed that he was already fully raised, capable of shouldering against the driving day on his own. What was he? Fifteen? None of us extended an example. Least of all me. He was ripe for guiding. Wanted it, in fact. Anyway, he should never have been up there with his hearing shot. We should have looked out for him.”

The seamen looked down at the deck timbers.

Owen continued: “I'm sure in his own time, Dickey Fentress would have become a first-rate sailor. Someday a captain, perhaps, if he applied himself. But he's gone now and we commit him to these waters with our gratitude and blessings. Rest easy, Dickey. And forgive us.”

The seamen looked over at Owen, uncomfortable with the sudden air of culpability. One of them stepped forward and added, “Goodbye, Dick. We'll miss you, little mate!”

Argus finished the hymn's last verse with a flourish, arms held to the heavens and rigging above, his voice at the edge of wavering. The men waited a beat and the captain gave the signal for the body to be committed to the sea.
We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body
. They retained the ensign but the canvas sack slid into the waves. The body turned, sank, and was gone. The sky was still cancerous and brooding. From the foredeck the ship's bronze bell sounded and the seamen fired their rifles three times into the air. Teddy Meyers played his rusty old bugle and the men were
dismissed, half of them reporting for the afternoon watch and the other half going to the forecastle to get soused.

All that night the weather stayed ominous. Owen leaned against the mainmast halyard during the middle watch and saw the sky fissure with lightning. The seas stayed calm but the monsoon was clearly in the offing, the hemisphere's turn for the wet. He could see Jethro holding on to the rail of the foredeck and wanted to stay clear of him. Dickey's fall, he knew, had been partly caused by his dulled hearing, which in turn had been caused by the close discharge of Jethro's collecting rifle on the island. A sailor's sense of hearing was everything, part of his instrument for fathoming windshift, for deciphering the barked orders from the first or second mate. It gave him balance in the rigged treetops. Owen pictured Dickey aloft during the storm. The kid had heeled to one side, faltered on the ratlines, ignored Owen's calls from below. Perhaps that look of dismay just before Dickey fell to his death wasn't an apology after all but him feeling the ship's auditory pulse slip away. Perhaps for Dickey Fentress the world went silent before it went black.

Sometime in the small hours of the night the main and mizzen-masts gave off an electrical discharge and the captain was called above. He insisted on being roused for any display of unusual weather or nature and St. Elmo's fire was no exception. The atmosphere was thick with electricity. The trucks and spar-ends of Baltic fir were alive with corposant flares and this was further proof, Terrapin told the men, that they were under the auspices of a metaphysical Dog Star. Whether it was the apprentice's stymied soul or the humors of a poisoned latitude didn't much matter. The result was the same. He took a tin cup of rum on the poop and did not sleep the rest of the night. “I feel another blue funk coming on,” he told the helmsman. “Taste it like an iron hobnail on my tongue . . .”

Meanwhile, in the doorway of the forecastle, Argus recounted
the trials of St. Erasmus, now called St. Elmo, to the men of the watch. They regarded the flickering spars with unease. It was fortunate there were no winds to be caught, because none of them would go into the rigging with the masts seemingly ablaze. Argus spoke of Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors, who was persecuted by Roman emperors, spat upon and besprinkled with foulness, thrown into a pit of snakes, boiled with oil and sulfur. “Erasmus went on thanking and loving God, this man of big forbearance, and then the angels sent lightning and his torturers were electrocuted. Then came another emperor who put him into a pan seething with rosin, pitch, and brimstone lead but he did not shrink from his punishment and continued to say the Gospel in a high preaching voice.”