Bright and Distant Shores (41 page)

One of the seamen said, “Tonight's the night. Odds are six to one in favor. Which way are you going to bet, Harvey?”

“I already bet.”

“Which way?”

“That the kanaka gets her sails reefed tonight. Five dollars on landfall credit. Captain's been circling for weeks but I see it in his eyes. What with the brother gone and the trader, too. Full moon tonight, lads. With a bit of luck we'll hear them howling like alley cats sparkin it hot.”

They moved amidships and Jethro couldn't bring himself to turn another page; suddenly he was holding in his shaking hands a pornographic treatise on orchids. Something had been happening all this time. The corruption infecting the ship, radiating from the stateroom just as poison issued from his own rotting finger. A kind of savage lust had taken hold, blooming like verdigris on a straight pin. Who would take a stand to protect the native girl's station? Here was a chance, he thought now, for resoluteness, to become the figment evoked in those early poems he'd written in the crosstrees. Wasn't character ultimately a question of action? History was full of fledgling men who reached across the way with a single act of defiance. He waited until he heard the seamen go about the business of the anchored watch and went below to the orlop. Unsteadily, he lit the lamps and unwrapped his collecting pistol from its muslin. He loaded two .32-caliber shells, each filled with the mixture of grade D American wood powder and buckshot that was ideal for larger birds, for hawks and eagles and herons.

Terrapin played a sonata with all his big racehorse heart, his ham-knuckled fingers lighter and quicker than they had any business
being. Malini danced in slow circles, eyes closed, moving through a cloud of ambergris. The perfume was a present from the captain—from the dark of a whale's stomach he'd told her—and she was wearing somebody's dead mother's frock, something red and too big, but she didn't care. For dinner she'd had bacon and pudding and tinned cherries. Terrapin watched her dance, nodding in appreciation, swelling beneath his cotton sarong. He stopped playing and handed her the jug of rum. She drank up, like she really meant it.

Somehow they ended up on the piano bench and he was teaching her “Chopsticks” or something else for children. He watched her fill with girlish delight as she tapped it out. Looking at the relief of her breasts against the neckline of the frock, her slender, sun-bronzed arms, he said, “Here's church if you want it.” Malini shrugged, moving her fingers into an atonal scale. He stood up, nodding again, providing encouragement for the two-fingered playing. Standing behind her he looked down into the dimming abandon of her brown cleavage, his calloused hands resting on her shoulders. He began rubbing her shoulders while she chopped away at the black sharps and she angled her neck to one side, the piano slurring a little. He inched a hand down her neck, running over the lamplit gloss of her collarbone, the tinkling still in motion. It wasn't until he had a breast cupped in one hand that the piano stopped. It went dead silent in the stateroom—the hush of all those Bedouin draperies and carpets. Malini swallowed against the crook of his arm, against the tattooed list of begats and halfbloods. The pause that followed was complicated. His hand went limp and he said in a whisper, “You're a lovely thing . . .” She sighed and played a handful of bass notes to indicate that her allegiance was to the music, and the piano wires were still humming dark when Jethro Gray burst into the cabin with his long-barreled pistol. Terrapin straightened and let his arms go loose. The naturalist was red-eyed and rabid with something. The captain saw that he was clearly out of his head.

Terrapin took a step back from the piano bench and Malini adjusted her dress, face down. “Steady on, lovelace, let's ease into this together.”

Jethro advanced, the pistol aimed at Terrapin's chest. The bulbous finger was biblical in its fury and proportions. He said, “Everyone has turned a blind eye, until now. The girl is coming with me.”

Terrapin set his jaw. “This is mutinous, understand that. You have entered the master's stateroom without permission, wielding a firearm. This won't look good in the log, peanut.”

“I'm tired of the way this ship is being captained.”

“And do you intend to relieve me of my office, Mr. Gray? Because if you intend a mutiny you better find a man who won't come with me in the whaleboats. Those men would have shoved a golden rivet up your arse if it wasn't for me. Ungrateful fucking dandy! I will wring blood from your spleen for this little trick. Mark my words.” Terrapin's voice wavered in anger.

Jethro kept his voice low. “This is not mutiny. I intend to protect the native girl in the orlop for the duration of the passage home.”

Malini could feel humiliation burning in her cheeks. She took a step back, furious that her brother had left her behind in this mess. Her choice was between a lecherous old man, who could probably be persuaded to keep his hands to himself, or a ghost of a man who now stood with a gun, blinking wildly.

“Go on then, love,” Terrapin said to her.

Malini picked up her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. She petted the sleeping dog and went to stand beside the skinny bird-killer, her eyes down. Terrapin smiled at her and said, “Don't worry we'll work this all out in a jiffy.” Jethro backed out of the stateroom, gun muzzle raised and pointed, Malini at his side. Terrapin didn't bother following. He took his time putting on his favorite peacoat and belting a pair of trousers before going to consult the first mate in his cabin. He told the bleary-eyed Mr.Pym
that he wanted to discuss the strange and supernatural pleasure he would take in Jethro Gray's downfall. It was like a prayer on his lips, he said, brimming with a vengeance so pure it was holy.

All the way down the long run of companionways Jethro kept telling Malini to hush. But she wasn't making any noise. A few sailors noticed the pistol and backed away. He flashed the weapon through the underworld of the ship, spinning crabwise. He grabbed Malini by the arm and led her into the orlop, barricading the door with workbenches and sawhorses and the wooden faldstools the carpenter had made him. Malini hadn't been in here since her recovery from the lancing of the boil and it reeked of dead birds and lizards. There were stuffed and hanging corpses, white cotton bulging from their mouths, frogs limp in briny jars, ferns pressed and mounted, jellyfish bobbing with the ship's rocking sway. A horned beetle, pinned in place but still alive, was trying to scratch its way up a sheet of white blotting paper.

He made her a bed of wadded cotton on the floor and smoothed it out with his hands. The gun was still at his side when he handed her a drink of brandy. She knew she was still drunk from the captain's rum, could feel it buzzing away in her arms and legs, but she took the drink because all she wanted now was sleep. It tasted funny, more bitter than the captain's bottle. She drank it down and went to lie on the cotton bed. She wanted the dog in her arms and wished her brother would return at once. The wooden cave of dead things started to move all around and she couldn't feel her body. She closed her eyes and thought of treehouses draped in wild flowers.

Jethro watched her on the floor, her legs crossed at the knees, the dress slightly splayed in the rear. She'd been at the point of nervous prostration, he told himself, and the laudanum in the brandy would ensure a restful sleep. It would be a long night and he would stand guard by the door. He sat by the bed on a stool and alternated his gaze between the blocked companionway and
the bed. He listened for the sound of footsteps, for Terrapin's cavalry, the gun square across his legs. After some time he dozed off and woke with a start, a single lamp burning. Still nothing. He got up and placed a glass beaker on top of the furniture blockade so that it would announce a forced entry. He took up the lamp, quietly removed his shoes, and lay down on the bed next to her. The dress was unbecoming and he draped her legs with a square of blanket. Her breathing was easy and light. He thought of all the anthropological measurements he'd penned in his leather note-book—the circumference of her head, the incline of her forehead, the breadth of her mouth. He thought of the way Nature kept receding. This game of advance and retreat kept him off balance. What was it to know a thing with absolute certainty? A poem allowed doubt but natural history required something declarative. He ran his hands across the plane of her back, scientifically, across the dark skin that overlaid an armature of bone no different to his own. He blew out the lamp and felt something mount within him in the tallow fumes. It was so quiet beneath the waveline. The ocean pressed against the ship's gently groaning ribs. He thought of Darwin and his orchids full of nectar, of the proposition that a flower's extravagant beauty served nothing but insect courtship. In the dark he felt invisible, unmoored. Slow-wheeling thoughts moved through the submarine dark, loosed, somehow, from his own mind. His hands edged beneath the blanket and he searched out everything that was obscure and unknown, everything that Nature was keeping at bay.

T
he
Cullion
did not return at noon on the third day. They waited all afternoon on the beachhead, the boat loaded with trading spoils, ready to walk the ancient piebald out onto the tidal mudflats. From there it would be a matter of coaxing the mare into the swells and towing her behind the rowboat. Owen knew that horses could swim—he'd once seen a palomino ford the mire of the Chicago River during a stable fire—but he also knew this hack could barely walk, never mind dog-paddle. He didn't let his thoughts eddy beyond the image of the horse flanked to her ribs in seawater, did not plumb the proposition of getting her aboard the bark. The skeptical villagers looked on from a distance, watching the sun transit the quadrants of clear blue sky, waiting for a ship to speck the horizon.

By late afternoon, Owen began to speculate about the reasons for the delay—faltering winds, flukey tides, a mishap in navigation. If the
Cullion
had forayed half a day north, to the anchorage of the nearest island, then it was hard to imagine a botched return. The sky was a high blue and the wind was blowing fresh from the west so that the clipper could easily zag its way south. The hours passed without sight of the bark and a band of clans-women appeared on the beach as a distraction from the waiting. They collected fish from the mudflat weirs and urchins from the silvered tide pools, gathered up an array of cowries and cat's eyes and cockles from the wet sand. Owen and Argus watched them in silence. Carnation and hibiscus garlands around their necks, bandeaus of leaves and myrtle blooms in their hair, girdled in
paperbark, they picked across the sand without haste, singing and calling to one another. The word among traders and colonialists was that whenever you saw the women you were safe. Tribal attacks never occurred with women present; this was the inherited wisdom. The Tikalia trusted the two clayskins now that a deal had been struck, it seemed to Owen, but he could feel his tongue coat with thirst as he stared out at the younger clanswomen's bent, lithe, and near-naked forms. There were sylphlike girls and old crones with breasts as pendulant as eggplants, daughters and sisters and cousins of the same bloodline, judging from the familiarity between them.

More than anything, it seemed to Owen, the extremes of life felt a part of the natural order in the islands—the vigor of youth and the plainness of death was everywhere. It reminded him of a plot of ground out by the Livestock Emporium where a full-bloomed pear tree and a burned-out byre flanked each other on the same hillside. He thought of polite women in Chicago, about their fruit-laden hats.
Wasplike waists and with tempers to match
was the saloon refrain. Adelaide was wholly different; well-bred but also earthy and decent. He imagined her teaching a daughter to sew, pictured a sunny kitchen with a dog curled at their feet. He needed, suddenly, a diversion from the twilit haunches and jostling breasts before him. Those visions of the future anchored him, promised a kind of safety. From what? he wondered. From his own flawed character? From a trader's hut on a lonely far-flung beach? He heard himself swallow and it felt like his mind blinking over. He was ready to surrender wholly to his future, however it unspooled.

Argus watched the native women a little distantly, as if from a height. In the falling light he thought their flower coronals made them resemble English wives of title and dominion, like aristocrats walking in a dusky rose garden instead of godless women gathering shellfish at low tide. A lone woman walked apart from the others, some distance behind, and Argus wondered whether
she was childless. A native woman without children was adrift, invisible. He thought suddenly of Malini and hoped she was safe aboard the ship. He had been a negligent brother, gone six years and now letting her fend for herself. He felt a pang of guilt and quietly said a prayer for her.

The women departed and Argus made a pathetic fire with coconut fiber and scantling washed up from a wreck. The flames flickered and sputtered. It was barely enough light to read by, and anyway Argus felt much too hungry for orphans flung out. They had traded their tinned food and rice and fishing supplies, and the Tikalia had led them to believe that catching bonito or barramundi would be an intrusion. As a small gesture of goodwill and hospitality a few villagers brought down a clay pot of fermented breadfruit and left it in the sand by the campfire. They said it had been buried in the earth for a year and was eaten in the caves during the big wet. The sticky, glutinous compound— yellow and formidable as bookbinders' paste—required a swift finger to spool it mouthward before it was retracted by the rest of the brimming compote. They ended up still hungry, with their shirtfronts and trousers strung in fermented breadfruit.

Owen retrieved a flask of whiskey and a scrimshaw knife from his rucksack. He sliced crescents of coconut from a shell that was woody and slightly green. He placed them on a hank of cloth. “Dessert,” he said to Argus.