The Last Bookaneer (29 page)

My chin thrust downward, my lips retreated into my head in an embarrassed smile, and with that I turned on my heel and began the walk to my chamber. I did not hear her walking and wondered why. Then I saw. Tulagi had come. In a primitive woven robe of green and brown, he looked like a kind of magical elf, and his breathing was labored as though he had come from far away after a long search. His eyes then searched and found mine. His strong, soulful face crumbling, I was certain the dwarf was about to break into sobs. I opened my door and returned to bed, not wanting to see more.

I kept my distance from Davenport the next day. Tulagi must have been doing the same to Vao, for I saw her several times around the house but did not see the diminutive shadow usually extending from her own. The worst of the rain had left us but the winds remained mighty and dangerous, and occasional lightning, thunder, and showers still fell. Except for some of the outside boys who had to make necessary excursions for the welfare of the livestock or horses, we were all confined to the house.

I did happen to cross paths with Tulagi. It was that evening. He was smoking tobacco wrapped in a banana leaf, looking out at the black sky on one of the verandahs. All of it added up to a sight. For one thing, we were told to stay away from the verandahs for the duration of the storm, and for another the natives were not known for smoking cigarettes. He suddenly appeared to me to be a different sort of man; perhaps it was the lighting produced by the tropical sky, but he was neither native nor white in my eyes—not the garden elf, this time, but a sort of otherworldly and oracular entity. Suddenly, his mission to protect Vao seemed the most worthy in the world to me. It did not occur to me to wonder why he was not overseeing her now. I fell into a spirit of camaraderie.

“Good evening, Tulagi,” I said, struggling against the rainy gusts.

He whispered back, but I could not hear, could not make out whether it was English or Samoan.

I moved closer and asked him to repeat himself, but then I realized he was not paying any mind to me; he was once again reciting the island's history to himself.

“Then the god of heaven sent down his daughter, Turi, in the form of a bird. She could find nothing but ocean so she returned to her father and told him so. He sent her back and she flew until she found some land in the water. So she returned to her father and told him so. He sent her back with a plant, which she put into the earth. The plant grew and grew, and when she had returned, it was swarming with maggots, and when she returned again, the maggots had become men and women.”

If it had not seemed as though it would be a rude thing, I would have sat next to him and listened. He seemed to disappear into the peculiar myths, most of which had been banned by the missionaries in favor of Christian doctrine. As he spoke, he became as big as the god of heaven and as lofty as the bird flying from land to sea and back again. There was a tranquility coming from this man as he repeated the stories to himself, maybe because there was nothing of all the madness involved in the rest of the world of stories as I knew it: the search for customers, the impatience of readers, the brittle egos of authors, the publishers' and the bookaneers' jousts over profits. Here was a man and a story.

When his eyes met mine he repeated: “The plant grew and grew, and when she had returned, it was swarming with maggots, and when she returned again, the maggots had become men and women.”

How unreal the memory seems when I think about what was to unfold only hours later.

Half the house was woken by the shouts of the outside boys; one of them, raising the hurricane shutters, had seen a small child running through the fields with a torch. Even with the downpour having passed, the property was littered with dangers, fallen trees and branches, sliding mud and overfilled streams, not to mention the violent winds. Two of the servants searched, thinking it might be the child of one of the runaway cannibals, and instead found a small broken body at the rocky bottom of a deep ditch.

Davenport and I came out a few hours after the discovery, the book- aneer leaning his body on my arm. Vao had collapsed on the ground nearby, her face hidden in her hands and the rest of her lit dramatically by the torches held nearby as different members of the household took turns to comfort her. Davenport—perhaps to protect her, perhaps because he could not bear it—did not go near her. Stevenson watched over all of it, stricken.

“The poor man must have fallen!” moaned Belle, who tried to comfort her wailing mother, and Stevenson sighed. But there was nothing for Tulagi to trip over near the ditch, and no good reason for him to have been outside in the first place. He was far enough toward the middle that he had to have made as big a leap as his short legs could manage. I leaned out over the ditch as far as I could without risking my life. I needed to see him. The dwarf's body looked like a girl's doll, twisted out of its form.

“This will distract Stevenson from his writing,” I whispered to Davenport, then gasped at myself. “I'm sorry. That was an awful thing to say.”

Whispered Davenport, “You always wanted to know what it was like to think like a bookaneer.”

V
ailima was abuzz at dawn with news. First, the burial. Though many things in Samoa were done at a leisurely pace, burial of the dead was not among them. The humidity would not allow delay. Tulagi's body was wrapped in decorative mats and we all sat on the ground, men on one side and women on the other, as Belial delivered yet another eulogy. After his speech, the women filled the open grave with smooth black pebbles gathered from the ocean into baskets. As the company of mourners dispersed, I began to hear whispers. Only once we were all back inside could I understand what else happened overnight.

Stevenson had been up all night after the tragedy, but he had not been grieving mindlessly; I know this because there came the announcement we originally had been waiting for so long to hear, and now dreaded. His masterpiece was finished.
Finished.
It was whispered and repeated among the household, the staff and servants, in Samoan and in English, by those family members who depended on his books and those natives who never saw a book outside the Vailima library and the writer's sanctum.

With the storm subsided, visitors to the house were coming and going one after another on various business and personal errands that had been delayed. Mail was distributed, brought in a trunk from a merchant ship that had come in just at the tail end of the storm.

I was on my way to find Davenport when I was stopped on the stairs by John Chinaman. He greeted me with his usual glare of belligerence and handed me several letters.

At first I could not understand how there could be letters with my name on them, then remembered that Davenport had left word with the post office in London that I could be reached in Samoa, and separately told various associates of his that he could be reached through me. I tucked them under my vest for later and continued on, eyeing Belial, who was conducting a prayer circle in memory of Tulagi. The natives sat in a semicircle around him with heads bowed, and he held his hands high like a tableau of Christ with his disciples. John, meanwhile, gathered up an entire trunkful of letters that I guessed were for Stevenson.

“Davenport!” I called when I found him in the great hall practicing putting weight on his bad leg. “Haven't you heard?”

“What is that?” he asked, looking at the bulge in my vest.

“Oh, letters. Just arrived on a merchant ship of some kind. John Chinaman was carrying a whole trunk of them to Stevenson.”

“Let's see.”

“Here.” I switched to a whisper. “Davenport, forget those, he's finished! Did you hear what I said?”

He ignored me.

“Belial is inside the house. If Tulagi had not died, perhaps he would not be here already, but he is.” My words sounded accusatory, though I had not intended that, but it hardly mattered. He had entered into a haze of distraction that could forfeit the mission.

The bookaneer shot me a brief and meaningful glance. “I'm afraid this concerns you, Fergins.”

He had been going through the letters and handed one back to me. I could not help but wonder if his dalliances with the native girl had put him in this mental fog. “Davenport, are you even listening to what I'm saying? Everything hangs in the balance.”

I looked down at the letter and read: it was from Johnson, the man charged with watching over my bookstall. There had been a rut of bad times in London and worse luck, it said. All the bookstalls in London had been affected. He'd even had to dismiss the boys who helped guard the stalls, which in turn led to a rash of thefts by other boys (including one former guard). That had made everything even worse. There simply was no money left to pay expenses—he had closed the stall temporarily. Worse still, as it was a term of my lease not to leave the space idle for more than four days, a fact unknown to Johnson, it had been repossessed. My bookstall was gone. And I was thousands of miles away.
I'm awful sorry, I am, Brother Bookseller,
Johnson wrote in a postscript, as if he thought of regretting it only at the very end.

“He should have tried expanding the inventory,” Davenport said. “I suppose it had to happen sometime. Doomed calling.”

It was a doomed calling, and my life. I read the letter again and I wanted to deny it, to rip it up, burn it. I wanted to shout down Davenport's unmovable fatalism. But I knew we were at a crossroads that required my attention. I carefully folded the letter up. There was nothing to do about the stall, and something had to be done here and now. I collected myself. We had come for a purpose and if it was to be fulfilled, this was the time.

“Davenport, never mind about that, not right now. But Stevenson is
finished
. Belial is here, the storm has passed on to the next island. Davenport, please, attention!”

The idea struck me right then. I dropped the letter I was still holding. This got his attention.

“Fergins, what's wrong?”

I had to catch my breath before I could find the right words. “The mail, Davenport. It just got here.”

“I suppose it is rather much to take in about your bookstall.”

“Whiskey Bill.”

Now I had his interest.

“I'd rather listen to your piano playing than have to talk about that swindler.”

“Bill imagined setting up a kind of Bookaneer Armageddon, yes? He convinced both you and Belial to come here, knowing you would try to rip each other's hearts open. He wrote you to come to the asylum; he wrote Belial about Samoa. What if he wrote to Stevenson, too?”

“Why would he do that?”

“In my study of the field, Davenport, every bookaneer lives with the inner belief that his talents are unique, and he can hardly suffer the mere existence of his fellow bookaneers because it threatens that belief. I see him in my mind's eye with his wobbly hand over the chessboard I set up for him at the asylum. He had his own game in mind. This was a final ploy by Bill to ensure his rivals destroyed. He set a trap, turning the author against the final two bookaneers, to determine which would be the last.”

“If he was trying to do that,” Davenport said, “the mail that just came in . . .” he did not finish the thought.

I helped: “Could have a letter in it to Stevenson revealing everything.”

“Go up to his library and go through the letters that John carried up.”

I shook my head. “Not me.”

“I cannot,” he replied. “I cannot move fast enough to avoid being caught. You know Bill's handwriting. You could recognize it at a glance, couldn't you?”

“Yes, of course. But if I was discovered digging through the letters—”

“You invent an excuse. What's worse than him reading a letter from Bill, Fergins? Nothing is worse than that. If that were to happen, our entire mission evaporates, and nothing else matters.”

“How could I manage it?”

The plan was hatched. I was to contrive a reason to go to the library. Find the trunk of mail I had seen John Chinaman carry up. Search for any letters with handwriting that could belong to Whiskey Bill. Bring said mail to Davenport to examine and destroy. Somehow, avoid Belial and all servants along the way.

Keeping these instructions in my head, I started for the second floor of the house. A climb up a flight of stairs had never before seemed to take so long, as if each tread tilted up and away from me, the walls shaking and trembling like a runaway train, my mind dark as a tunnel. I headed for the library, eyes down at my feet except to look for anyone who might be watching my path. My heart thumped; my excursion became more momentous and life altering with each step I took. “This, my dear Fergins, this alone, could save my mission from disaster,” Davenport had said to me before we separated, encircling a hand around my wrist like my oldest friend or a policeman making an arrest.

A few seconds later, as measured out by the big clock by the stairwell, I was inside the Stevensons' library. There was the trunk I had seen the Chinese servant carrying. It was resting on the floor in one corner of the room. I had my moment. Here, now, I was to become a . . . the word
bookaneer
retreated from me. It would take much more than this. I thought about the advice Davenport had given me. I walked to the nearest shelves as though to reach for a book, then I dropped to my knees in a quick motion. Opening the lid with one hand, I readied my other hand to dig through the mail.

It was empty. The room swallowed me whole.

“It is so, so lovely.”

The voice came from Fanny Stevenson, sitting in a deep armchair facing away from me. She wore a brown gown with yellow flowers stitched into it, and her toes rested on the windowsill. The mistress of the house was so compact she had been completely concealed by the back of the chair.

“Fanny,” I said, trying to determine how much I needed to explain.

She continued looking out the window. I realized she wasn't watching me at all. I had disturbed her reverie.

“It is all so, so lovely,” she said, then with a birdlike motion she finally glanced at me. “Mr. Fergins, I have made a mistake.”

“Fanny?”

“Oh, a terrible mistake,” she said with a warm smile. “I should never have told you to leave this place. It is the loveliest spot in the world sometimes. The South Pacific can have everything you ever dreamed of, or everything you ever feared coming to pass. We mean to live our lives in Samoa and leave our bones here. Do you know, I was out walking yesterday? The air was soft and warm from the storms, and filled with the most delicious fragrance. These perfumes of the tropical forests are wonderful. When I am pulling weeds, it often happens that a puff of the sweetest scents blows back at me and all is well again. It does not seem possible that we have not been here longer than we actually have. Everything looks so settled, as though we have been here for many, many years.”

She threw open the window. No action imaginable could have been any more absurd. The awful winds howled and rushed in and nearly knocked her over, pushing pencils, papers, and books off the table behind her. Lloyd rushed in and steadied his mother while I forced the window closed.

“It's all so lovely, so, so lovely,” she was repeating through tears but still with a smile.

“Mother, let us take you to bed to rest. Yes, that's it, come with me,” Lloyd said, waiting until she had recovered herself and was walking on her own toward the door. “I'm very sorry,” he said, turning to me with the dutiful face characteristic of a grown man whose mother was becoming a burden. “Sometimes she will rant against this place; other times she will seem ready to throw herself into Mount Vaea to stay forever. When she is caught between the two feelings is when she goes to pieces. It is very hard for her, because when Louis makes up his mind there is nothing to do, and all she wants to do is keep him happy. It has become her . . . calling, so to speak.”

“We all must have one,” I replied.

I could hear Davenport's shouts from downstairs and I tried to ignore them. It meant I was taking too long. He was trying to draw as many of the servants to him—and away from me—as possible by acting as though he had reinjured himself.

When mother and son were both gone, I looked everywhere I could think for any sign of the mail, under the pretense of cleaning the mess blown around by the storm. I rushed to the glass doors that led to Stevenson's sanctum. My legs were moving faster than my brain, but I was imagining a scenario of what must have happened. John had brought the mail to Stevenson's desk, then removed the empty trunk to the library, for it would not fit inside the narrow sanctum without being a hazard for the novelist to trip over.

The doors to the sanctum were closed. I knocked lightly, then made a few bolder taps. Nobody called to come in or go away, so I held my breath and stepped inside. There were stacks of mail on the bed and the floor. My eyes took these in before landing on Stevenson, almost invisible, tucked under multiple blankets, propped against pillows. He looked up from a letter he was reading, but his wide-set eyes, as ever, seemed to absorb everything at once, while mine scrambled for crumbs.

Me: “Tusitala.”

Him: “Mr. Fergins, I have here a most interesting letter from abroad. You might as well join me.”