Bright and Distant Shores (43 page)

Owen prepared to broker and summon common sense, but the seamen were already hauling the rowboat up on the davits, the mission boy rising with it like a stage actor on a rigged-up scow. Malini came running from somewhere and the siblings embraced. What is happening? Argus wanted to know, but Malini already carried the weight of the silence and knew that things would run their course. She understood now about America. The engines rumbled to life, coalsmoke billowing in the sails, the air rattling and choking with soot as the
Lady Cullion
surged north, its wake ten fathoms wider under a head of steam. And beyond that trailing wrack of foam, beyond the towed canoe plowing the glazed waters, the dead horse resurfaced and rode the incoming tide, across the skirting coral, floating back to its little Elba of twenty years, where it had lived like a ruminant. The Tikalia found it beached and half hacked by reef sharks and they cursed the clay-skins for all eternity—
may your fathers eat filth
repeated with the devoutness of prayer.

I
f Hale Gray had believed in omens instead of destiny he might have been unsettled by the steamship foundering on the lake. It was full of uncrated Steinway pianos, concert grands hewn from rock maple and spruce, and they were being hoisted, one by one, onto a narrow shelf of ice for fear the steamer might sink at any moment. The ship had struck the ice in the foggy dawn, her horn bleating for hours like some animal dying out in a field. One of his vice presidents had called it to his attention and they stood watching on the rooftop in the early light, a viewing party of six or seven bundled men, opera glasses poised and someone narrating the rescue's progress:
That makes three floating on the island of ice . . . now the winch hooks are going back to the deck for another Steinway
. They watched as if it were a kind of calculated violence, a lynching or firing squad execution. They smoked cigars in muffled fur caps, tycoons of the upper drafts.

As it turned out, Hale carried the insurance policy for the Lyon & Healy Music Store, the concern attempting to import this particular shipment of pianos from out east. The store was a favorite sanctuary from the din of State and Clark, a showroom of gold-crowned harps and ebony-glossed pianos, where the salesmen all had the handshakes of diplomats and the smell of sheet music and French walnut was hypnotic. As far as Hale was concerned—and he didn't mind telling his underlings this— the pianos, though paid for in advance, were in the official care of the factory until signed delivery at the storefront had occurred.
Expect no losses on this account, gentlemen
.

Just then the ship listed and yawed.
Now she's rolling like a sperm whale,
the narrator announced. The harbormaster and the fireboats had rescued most of the crew but two men remained in charge of the derrick. Five pianos had been lowered to the ice but the steamer appeared to be going under with several instruments in the hold and one suspended in midair, now lowering, its black legs dipping into the lake. The two derrick operators jumped as the ship went under. Bubbles rose and broke on the surface; the men were plucked from the icy waters. After the steamer had disappeared from sight, the insurance executives watched and smoked in the cold. An aura of filmy residue formed in the steamer's watery footprint. Hale watched the black Steinways drift on the little ice shelf and then a grain barge looked set to haul them aboard. It was an occasion for hope, he thought, not because several grand pianos had corkscrewed and trilled their way to the frigid lake floor, but because the size of the shipment showed the economy was on the mend. He couldn't help wondering who was buying all those pianos.

The viewing party dispersed and Hale took note of the preparations for building the native set. He imagined this was how a stage director might feel in his contemplations—there was a growing sense of theatrical possibility mounting beside pragmatic concern. For example, the trade-off between how much space to devote to the staging area and how much to the audience. Should he include a photographer's concession so that visitors could have their likeness taken beside the South Sea Islanders? Where would refreshments be served and should they have a native theme? Coconut milk in frosted glasses? There was a platform erected in the foreground of the clock tower and the frame for a single hut. Where were they going to get bamboo at the end of February? Or sand and palms, for that matter. On the other hand, an opening day of May 1 gave him plenty of time. He'd received a telegram from the trader in Hawaii indicating that artifacts were plentiful but that only two islanders had been contracted. That
was better than nothing, but now his plans had to be scaled back. A brother and sister hardly comprised a village but he would have the designer capitalize on that diminished number, set a tone of savage siblings marooned at the top of the world.
From the ends of the earth to the top of the world.
That was a phrase the marketing department might use. If a potential policyholder didn't think his life was worth insuring after such a sight then he was beyond redemption.

He took the stairs and decided to complete one of his impromptu tours of the building, wending his way from management and sales to clerking before bottoming-out in typing and filing. He enjoyed the look of submerged terror among his employees as he walked the floors in his rubber soles. They never heard him coming until they were ambushed and had to thrust out
good morning, sir
s like bayonets. As he walked, he listened to the tenor of the desktop conversations, tried to gauge the view from the ground, like a general eavesdropping outside a barracks. In this way he heard about infidelities and secret lunch dates, about babies and christenings, about baseball defeats and horse-racing wins, but also about the speculation that the blighted windows of the First Equitable were ready to pop their frames. The rumors were becoming mythic: the colossus was sinking and leaning into a field of clay, a foot a week if you believed the stories, the Pisa of La Salle Street, and pretty soon the windows would explode from their casings and the elevators would tilt and spark against the darkened shafts. Hale had sent memos, invited an eminent engineer to deliver confident remarks during a luncheon, made official announcements to quell the rumors, but all of it to no avail. People feared in droves—a boon for the insurance game—and no amount of reason could dissuade them.

He soft-shoed across the floor and caught a whole tribe of clerks studying one of the ill-glazed windows. They traced their fingers across its opaque mottlings as if they could divine the future. “Gentlemen,” Hale called from behind, “the murkier
windows are merely designed to prevent distraction at every turn, so that you don't spend the day watching clouds or your own reflections.” The clerks straightened, coughed, retrieved pencils from behind ears in a burst of industry. Hale enjoyed the look on their faces. Walking away, he said, “Someone bring me the Lyon & Healy policy.”

M
alini watched the world freeze over from her window. The flatlands banked in white, the blueless sky. Ever since leaving the ship, the sun had moved like a dull rumor behind an ocean of cloud. Incredulous, she saw signs of human life in the cold barrens—smoky-breathed animals shambling in icy fields, men cutting fallen trees with enormous hatchets, yellow light coming from neat wooden houses. There were bridges across swollen rivers and level, wide roads. Most of the trees were as bare as driftwood and it made her lonely to look at them. She recognized pigs and dogs, knew about horses and wagons. People and animals trudged through the dull landscape, fell away, came back someplace else. Some things moved faster than others; fences and trees rushed by close and whirring while frozen fields floated along the horizon. If she looked at the whirring her eyes hurt and she felt like throwing up. It reminded her of looking at the moving pictures in the belly of the ship. She cinched her heavy coat about her shoulders and felt the cold against the rattling windowpane. This was civilization, the big fella's place, so cold you could barely breathe. An oven was going in the back of the clattering room on wheels,
carriage,
and the air brimmed with farting and burning coal and wet clothes, just the way the ship had smelled in the final weeks of the voyage. She was glad to be off the ship. Once ashore, she had accepted the captain's apology and he'd told her he would no longer go to sea. One of his halfblood children was coming to visit him, a Tahitian boy, and he had a letter waiting in dock to prove it. She told no one about what had happened in the orlop, had banished it from her thoughts.

The heavy smells of cooking filled the carriage. Half of what was being eaten around her she did not recognize or acknowledge as food. Old whitefellas with beards spooned up something brown and smoking while others, families of tired women and bleak-faced children, ate gristled cuts of meat. The captain's food had been unfamiliar but came in tins or on plates; what she saw before her now was wrapped in pieces of greasy paper or skewered on flimsy wooden sticks. Something the color of taro rolled in a husk and drizzled with bloodred sauce. She recognized pig's feet but could not overcome the Poumetan bias against any part of an animal that trod the earth. The snow continued to fall like white leaves outside her window.

She was hungry but refused to eat. The people who shared the wooden benches with her offered some of their unsightly food. No thank you, she told them, proud of her English. She knew more than fifty words by now but Argus had told her to act like a highlander in Chicago, a Kuk tree dweller come down for the first time. This would be their job of work. But she had no intention of parting with the wool coat—it was like a blanket sewn up with buttons. While the parents across from her ate, she took their baby for a stint, patting its little rump and letting it look at the white whirring outside the window. They were black people like herself, even darker, and she liked seeing so many different-colored faces in the crowded carriage. She had never before seen Chinamen or Africans or Mexicans and found herself studying their mouths and eyes and hands when they weren't looking. Their languages and accents filled the carriage with clipped words and singing phrases, with hushed arguments and nighttime whispers, with murmurings so soft and liquid they sounded like a river flowing by. She'd heard the uniformed ticket man call the bustling carriage a Zulu Car and she wanted to ask Argus what that meant. She touched the baby's head with the tip of her nose as it stared and blinked out the window; it smelled like sun-warmed clay. After some minutes, lulled by the rocking motion, the baby
snuggled in her lap and she felt a ball of heat spread across her middle. Sometimes, when she held babies, her breasts throbbed and ached and it made her cry. She patted the baby's back and a belch shot out from its mouth. The parents shrugged, smiled, ate. Malini began singing it to sleep. She sang about a mother turtle coming ashore to lay her eggs and die and soon the baby's body went limp. She saw Argus watching from across the aisle, where he sat with Owen Graves. The tall, skinny one, the ghostskin, rode in the back of the train with a bed made of feathers and boys serving him brandy. Malini had not seen him since the ship but knew he was back there. She closed her eyes, feeling the baby's milky breath against her neck. She thought about all of these people moving together, about sitting on her bum at such a speed—as fast as any man could run, mile after white mile. Somewhere in the back of the train, boxed and tied up in string with all the suitcases, were the dead birds and lizards from the islands, the bottled jellyfish and starfish, the honeybees pinned to sheets of paper. Some had been lost and ruined in the canoe, where the captain had banished the tall one, but many had been saved. She thought of them coming back to life, of the carriage door opening in Chicago to reveal a shrieking flock of gold-breasted birds, a flurry of angry wasps, a swarm of stinging jellyfish living in air.

It was just after dawn when they got to the outskirts of Chicago. Argus and Owen stood smoking in the vestibule between rail-cars, watching the sun strain up through a cloth of weather. In the windy gaps above the coupling head they could see the rattling undercarriage, sparks flinting against the gunmetal rails in the early light. The train slowed in the vicinity of the stockyards, a mile or two shy, and Owen watched the boy's face sour as they got their first premonition of the city—the ammoniac anthem of the feedlots and slaughterhouses, a stench of animal dung and charred fur and beef tallow. Then there was some hint of lime or cinders as they passed a tanning yard and saw butchery wagons
unloading, their beds piled heavy with steaming bones. A man in coveralls was spreading ash over the fetid ground.

“Smells a bit like the
Lady Cullion,
” Owen said, grinning.

Argus pulled the lapel of his greatcoat over his nose.