Bright and Distant Shores (57 page)

He heard a sound and turned to see the brother coming toward him through the open doorway. The boy was stiff-backed and righteous; Jethro knew that the primitive had stirred the crowds with his penitential fury. “You've come,” Jethro said. No use dallying, he thought.

Argus said nothing.

Jethro put an obsidian knife back onto its bed of velvet. “Would you like a drink? No ice, I'm afraid. The weather's sweltering. Though probably not for you.” He made for the liquor cabinet, leaving the display case open. He poured two glasses of single malt and held one out to Argus. When he didn't take it, Jethro set it on the edge of the cherrywood desk. He watched as the native crossed to the display case and began studying the artifacts. It was weapons mostly, the kind of martial handiwork his father liked to collect. The native held up a blunt club studded with mollusks, a bone dagger, a stone hatchet. He did it casually, like a polo player selecting a mallet in a clubhouse, but then he said somberly, “These weapons are from my island.” He turned a wooden haft—two serrations of shark teeth attached—in the lamplight. “They were used by my grandfathers and dead kinsmen in times of war.”

Unsettled, Jethro said, “Please sit and have a drink. We will work everything out between us.” When this failed to sway the native, Jethro drained his glass and dropped into the leather chair, braced for whatever would come next. The wind pounded at the night-backed windows and rattled the sheets of plywood. Jethro gave in to his nervous desire for chatter and said, “I consider myself between religions at present. On a grand tour of belief. Pythagoras had his own commandments, did you know that? Precepts to live by.”

Argus turned slightly from the display case. “Only God's commandments can be lived.”

Jethro was up, pouring himself another drink. “These are rather
amusing, though. Little puzzles to hold in the mind.” Yes, this was the right tactic. The tribal prophet was fond of philosophizing, he remembered, so he could be lulled and placated with conundrums. Like stroking the belly of a fish before you plucked it from its watery domain. “For example . . . feed not the animals that have crooked claws. Abstain from beans. Eat not fish whose tails are black. Never eat the gurnet.” He slumped once more into the chair, his glass poised in front. “And my favorite: speak not in the face of the sun.” He looked up at the smoky portrait of his great-grandfather reposing in an English manor; the face was inscrutable, unyielding. Was the Gray bloodline, Jethro found himself wondering, about to be cut short? The native held a weapon in each hand.

Quietly, Argus said, “My sister expects revenge.”

Jethro nodded, blinked, though he thought the pronouncement sounded a little wooden and rehearsed. He would offer money, of course, as compensation, but also use of his family's connections in obtaining employment for the pair of them. He swallowed a burning quench of whiskey and thought—
Nature herself is not always moral . . . entire species are propagated by ravishment. Take certain species of duck, for example
. He imagined for one terrible moment the bone knife cutting into his skin, the sharpened femur of a centuries-dead warrior slicing him open. With the finger gone, he no longer felt the need for such bloody redemption. And his confession to the suicide, to a man at the threshold of death, had also lightened his mind. Breathily, he said, “Yes, I expect she does.”

Argus saw his own reflection in the glass-fronted cabinet— his dolorous face above the celluloid collar. With each step in the stairwell he had tried to descend into a rage, to loosen the grip of everything measured, watchful, and Christian. Now, standing there with his grandfathers' weapons in hand, he felt more sadness than anger—for his barren sister and her ordeal, for the man watching him who was clearly out of his mind, for the Poumetan clans who had crossed over into oblivion. There was also, running below that mournfulness, a feeling of utter desolation, as if he'd been emptied
out where he stood. His sister, his island, his own boyhood self, they had all been defiled, each in their way. The heir, his sister's rapist, floated in the reflection of the glass, then he saw his own stricken face once more. He was stranded in thought, rowing between islands in his mind. Finally, he said, “I wish to take these back.” He hadn't considered much beyond these words and they hung in the room for a long time. The club and hatchet were in one hand; the dagger and shark-tooth haft were in the other. Argus began for the doorway, having no idea what he would do on the other side.

Jethro sat up in the big leather chair. “I'm afraid I cannot allow that. Those are my father's and were acquired fairly through trade.”

Argus stopped and turned to look directly at Jethro. The windows behind the desk shook with the wind and were bloated with nighttime. “My sister wants your blood spilled and it would be right punishment, but I cannot bring myself to do it. Perhaps I am a coward . . . but if you try to stop me, sir, I will bring bloodshed upon you.” These words had the tone of an invocation and there was something biblical in their quiet menace. Argus heard them as if from another room. He had no idea what he hoped to accomplish— they would come after him, repossess the weapons, toss him and Malini out into the street, perhaps put him in jail. But he wanted the certainty of the objects, the possession of that distant time. The heir stood, buttoned his coat, and walked toward him.

It came to Jethro, as he crossed to the display case, that he'd been outmaneuvered. He'd been preparing to barter for his life, but here the savage was asking for something he didn't have the right to give away. He stopped a few feet away and slowly placed a conciliatory hand on the native's wrist, just inches from the hatchet and club. They both stared down at his pale right hand, all the fingers intact, the knuckles whitening. There was no resistance, then a jolt as the boy tried to pull his arm free. Neither of them said anything. It occurred to Jethro that neither of them wanted sloppy combat, that even though he could poleaxe a man in the boxing ring, under the auspices of Queensberry rules, he had no use for a
common scuffle. He tightened his grip but again the native resisted. For what seemed an eternity their arms yanked back and forth, the tomahawk whirring, the native emitting little grunts—ridiculously, it seemed to Jethro, they were like two men on either end of a crosscut saw, trying to fell a tree. Then a burst of bright pain shot up his right arm and he winced as he looked down at his arm—it was flayed open, the shark-tooth haft augered into the flesh above his cufflinked wrist. They both watched the welling of blood as Argus pulled the haft free. With that terrible extraction, Jethro felt opened to the air itself, as if the brimming world had rushed into the dozen incisions. He dropped to his knees with his mouth open.

Argus watched Jethro kneeling on the floor. There was no trembling in the hand that held the haft and the dagger and there was still no anger. He had simply brought his arm down. The action had seemed entirely separate from him, as if he'd watched a gate swing into place from a high window. His shirtsleeve was spattered with blood. He set the weapons down, reached inside the display case, and yanked free a swath of velvet. Kneeling beside the heir, he wrapped it snug around the wound, applying the same pressure he'd learned during his first-aid classes with the mission schoolteacher, keeping the arm raised, the fingertips pink and warm. Argus stood again and gathered up the weapons. The heir looked up at him wordlessly, blinking and cross-legged on the floor now, as if he were waiting patiently for something else to happen. Argus went out into the elevator lobby, the weapons under one arm. It was only when he was in the darkened stairwell that he understood fully what he'd done, saw himself out in the streets under the cover of night, the savage in the celluloid collar, moving down Michigan Avenue with a tomahawk and a shark-tooth club in his hands. He let out a gasp and it echoed down the cavernous stairwell, into the precipice that ran the length of the building. Then, steadying himself, he took up the thread of prayer, already pleading for forgiveness as he began the long descent.

A
da Rose Graves, named for Owen's mother. Her first winter and the storms came off the lake a few days before Christmas 1899. Owen did everything he could to keep the house warm but with all those windows she vented heat and he was enslaved to the woodpile. But he liked this bracing contact with the elements—swinging the axe through the cold, cleaving a cord of firewood every other day it seemed like. A northerly gust felled one of the knobby orchard trees in the fall and the house had smelt like apple wood ever since. Their first Christmas as a family and Margaret would arrive on Christmas Eve with her digestives and tonics. She'd lend the occasion a sense of personal sacrifice, the way they imprisoned her in a Pullman sleeper since Boston, all of it endured so she could hold her granddaughter in the flesh. Owen had half a mind to leave the web-faced effigy right beside the fireplace to keep Margaret on her best behavior. He raised the axe, let it fall, putting his arms and back into it at the last moment to drive the split. The wood let out a breathy punch, a sneeze of sawdust. He stacked the wood into the waiting barrow after each cut, even though he knew this to be inefficient. Porter Graves did it this way because he was impatient for a neat pile and didn't like splintered logs lying at his feet. We carry dead men in our hands, Owen thought, lining up another log on its end.

He came upon the house with his barrow of wood and a sadness roused through him. In the lighted window he could see Adelaide and the baby in the rocker. Swaddled in her favorite blanket, Ada Rose was eight months old. It was time for her
afternoon nap. The child had to be rocked to sleep every day at three or she would run them ragged all night. Malini stood by his wife with a cup of tea. She was a godsend, like family. More than a nanny, she added to the rhythm of the house. From her green-painted room at the top of the stairs, next to the nursery, she descended each morning cheerful and hungry. She was a terrible cook and they did their best to keep her out of the kitchen. They fed her pancakes until her eyes rolled back in her head and then she would take up the baby for part of the day while Adelaide attended charity board meetings and organized benefits. Malini could be seen carrying Ada around in the plush blanket she took a year to knit, so big that the swaddled creature had the privileged air of a pasha being conveyed between palace rooms. When Ada crawled down the hallway, toward the stairs, Malini was always ready and waiting. She had a sixth sense for the baby's intrepid curiosity and would think nothing of reading aloud the same picture book five times in a row, each recital prompted by the baby's slurred utterance that meant
again
.

What plunged Owen into a few moments of melancholy, standing outside the window to his house under a bruised afternoon sky, was not only the tenderness of the scene—mother rocking child, devoted and adopted aunty standing nearby—but the thought of the vanished brother. He might have been a seminarian by now, deep into his pious studies. Owen had already spent months searching for Argus and vowed to continue until he was found. He'd ventured out into the tenements and docks with a
Tribune
photograph in hand, chased black men down the street on the thinnest premise—a similar build, a certain straightness of posture. None of it had come to anything. In the Back of the Yards he'd gone traipsing through the clamor and squalor, calling out the brother's name. Near the stockyards he'd watched the faces emerging from the slaughterhouses at dusk, the Poles and Slavs almost violent with the day's jokes, anything to rid them of the bloody toil, but the few black faces held nothing like the boy's
high cheekbones and implacable eyes. Owen levied the same persistence toward finding the brother that he'd used in the Pacific— Argus was an elusive object waiting to be found.

He briefly convinced himself that Argus had hopped a series of barges and freighters through the Great Lakes, stowed away down the St. Lawrence, leveled out in New York and was living incognito, with gypsies, in the Bowery. Maybe he'd grown a beard to throw the police off. At least it wasn't murder they had him for; he would hang for that. Or maybe he'd gone west, stolen away in a train's mail compartment and struck out for the islands again from San Francisco. For all Owen knew, he was back in Melanesia giving Mass from a bamboo pulpit at this very moment. It was hollow comfort. Wherever he'd ended up, Argus would not be living in peace. He was on the run or in hiding. A praying fugitive.

Malini wouldn't talk about her brother's attack on Jethro or what had transpired the last time she'd seen him. It was in the past, she said, and she had no use for it. But Owen saw the grief she carried for her brother. He sometimes found her in the attic looking out at the lake, sobbing quietly into a handkerchief. Maybe he was dead. That was another cruel possibility. He'd run out into the city without money or connections, recognizable to lunchroom waiters and rooftop sightseers. It would not have been easy to find his way. Owen stacked the wood by the back door and wheeled the barrow out to the shed. The workshop served as the office for his construction business. He'd kept the scrapyard for storage but now it held more building supplies and restoration hardware than artifacts.