Under the Wide and Starry Sky (36 page)

Fish striped in vivid hues of orange and white and black swam around his ankles. A crab dotted with brown spots scuttled past his toes. Green fingers of sea life with flesh-pink tips waved all around him.

“Why don't you come with us?” Fanny called to her husband. She held on to her straw hat with one hand and a bundle of skirt with the other as she climbed out of a canoe.

“I want to collect a piece of this coral,” he answered. Louis stood calf-deep in the ocean, his pants rolled above his knees, his shirt abandoned on the sand. In the water surrounding him lay an astonishment of coral.

It was a perfect day, somewhere just south of the equator, on a slender thread of land called Arorai in the Gilbert Islands. They had been at sea in the
Janet Nicoll
some two months; he knew it was June in the year 1890, but he had lost count of the date and day of the week. He hadn't any idea of the hour; it would have been a sacrilege to consult a watch. He had hitched a ride to shore in a native's canoe and was stricken nearly blind by the violent glare of the sun on the water. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the reef was made up of a mass of spherical shapes, each a labyrinthine miracle of squiggling grooves.

Louis went back to the ship and fetched a hatchet. With the sound of the surf pounding in his ears, he chopped at the coral. He knew no proper names for the exotic objects in this fantasy, but he wanted a piece of it. Through the clear water, he saw the rippled patterns the waves had made on the ocean floor. Was there a single straight line in all of the Pacific? Even the sand bore the mark of nature's art. Surely Darwin must have dropped his notebook to gasp at the beauty of the Pacific.

As the morning heat rose, the air singed Louis's nostrils. He splashed his face to cool off, tasted the briny seawater in his mouth, longed for drinking water. But he couldn't bring himself to leave this spot.

The Big Book of the South Seas soaked his brain. Colvin had written to him in Sydney, objecting to his concept for the volume. He was singing the same tune as Fanny, that the book should be in the vein of
Travels with a Donkey
. The letter left Louis feeling uncomfortably out of tune with the two people he trusted most. Neither seemed to understand that he wasn't the same man who had written that early book.

Something had happened over the two years since he and Fanny had left Bournemouth. He wasn't entirely sure what it was, but he felt himself changed. Physically, to be sure. To function in the world as other men functioned, to no longer view himself as an invalid, was still miraculous to him. He felt more alive than he'd been in a very long time. He was hungry to learn about the world, to
be
in the world.

Louis continued hacking at the coral. He felt the muscles in his arms growing sore, yet he kept chopping, curious to see how far the new sap in his limbs would take him. After a time—how long, he wasn't certain—he saw Fanny and Lloyd returning from the village.

“What are you doing?” Fanny asked when she got close. She stood in the water next to Louis, her arms laden with necklaces of red seeds and shark's teeth. “You fool!” she exploded. “You haven't moved from where we left you this morning.”

Louis held up the pieces of coral he had managed to dislodge. “Have you ever seen such extraordinary patterns?” he said.

“How ignorant you are, Louis. That's common brain coral in your hand. Any schoolboy in San Francisco knows that and will give you specimens.” Fanny was fuming. “You should see yourself—burned to the color of a brick! You're going to be blistered head to foot.”

“I saw the letter from Colvin,” she said later when they were alone in their cabin. “I'm glad he agrees with me that it is a bad idea to approach this material in such an impersonal way.”

“Colvin is doing what Colvin does,” Louis said. “He hates an idea when I present it to him, and then, when the book is a success, he claims he knew it would be all along.”

“Louis, listen to me. We have seen things that no one else has seen. And to write in an academic way about the South Seas people with only a few personal aneċes is a terrible mistake. You should have seen what Lloyd and I saw on the island today. The people were so colorful. There were women walking around in these little doll hats they'd gotten in trade, and they'd made them into hair ornaments.”

“I have no desire to cast myself as the witty narrator who tells amusing stories about the quaint characters I encounter in my rambles,” Louis said. “It belittles them, and it cheapens the significance of the tragedy happening to the people here. This material is bigger than I am, and there's too much at stake. What we are witnessing is the imminent disappearance of ancient traditions. It's been passed on orally, and if their way of life continues to degenerate, their history will be lost. Not just their history but their wisdom. Somebody needs to document their languages, their rituals and beliefs, to alert the world to what is happening here.”

“How can you suggest that I would want you to cheapen the material?” She bristled at the idea. The cabin was full of things she'd been collecting, and she threw a pile of rolled
tapas
aside in order to sit down. “You are the brilliant writer on this journey, and I am a poor second by comparison. But if you choose to ignore the stories of what we've experienced,
I
will tell them. This is
our
journey, Louis, not just yours.”

“We are not one person!” he shouted.

“Have I no voice?”

“You are free to do as you please.”

“We wouldn't even be on this ship if I had not talked our way onto it!” She raised her chin defiantly. “Henry James says I should publish my letters. Well, I assure you I will. Along with my diary from this trip, if need be.”

He left the stifling compartment in a fury, desperate for fresh air. Up top, he lit a cigarette and watched the fellows working on deck. They were all black sailors, some from the New Hebrides islands, some from the Solomons, and they all spoke surprisingly fluent English. Perhaps they didn't understand one another's native tongues; he wasn't sure. One of them was named Sally Day. Fanny had come into the cabin a week ago to report that she'd overheard another sailor respectfully call him Sarah. They'd had a chuckle over it.

That was precisely the sort of tidbit she wanted him to include in the Big Book, and he didn't blame her, it was funny and sweet, but where was the room? The bigger story to tell was about what was happening to men like them from their home. For years, ships piloted by slavers had been “recruiting” native men and carrying them off to distant islands to work as laborers. “Blackbirding,” people called it, as if it were a hunting sport. At best, the workers ended up as indentured servants; at worst, they died in captivity as slaves. “They take my uncle away,” one sailor had told Louis. “Ten years, fifteen … no one see him again.” In their three voyages, Louis and Fanny had come across laborers who had been dumped on far-flung islands after their service, with no hope of making their way home.

The bigger story was about what
commerce
was doing to the South Sea islanders. It was enough to hear Fanny mention that she noticed native women on Arorai wearing doll hats; Louis had seen the same phenomenon a hundred times. Yes, it expressed the clever way the native people took the brummagem of the trading ships and found some use for it. But it was an image that sickened him, for it showed how profoundly the influence of foreign
things
was having on the culture. He was struck by how the ships were creating an appetite among the people for more things. And while the traders collected copra to sell to manufacturers who would turn it into coconut oil and sell it to merchants in Europe and America at considerable profits, the islanders got dolls' hats.

I need to tell that story.

Sometimes he wondered what it all said about human beings. These ships hurrying port to port, this busy moving around of goods in the name of progress and industry. And religion, that must not be forgotten, for it was aboard the ships as well. The South Seas were a wilderness like any other. First came explorers and then a wave of missionaries and traders who brought their brand of enlightenment to the poor savages.
Is this what we've been evolving toward? Is this the best that the crown of creation can do with his mighty gifts? Is commerce what makes us superior to apes?

He was too much of a realist to romanticize the South Sea islanders or demonize the whites who traded with them and lived among them. But as far as he could see, not much good had come of Europeans bringing their notions of civilization. Of the islands they'd visited, it seemed that the ones with the least contact with the outside world had fared best. And in many places, the
kanakas
, as the natives were called, had been hideously misused by the colonizers.

Fanny had no claim to be the arbiter of what he wrote and published. He had been pleased enough to see her taking notes so diligently with her journal propped on barrels, on her pillow, on the floor, whenever she had a moment to write. Her notes were useful to him, and her perceptions about the women she'd encountered on this voyage were especially interesting. But her perceptions were not identical to his. Proud as she was of her instincts, they were often flawed.

Maybe it was the money that worried her. After all, McClure was committed to ten thousand dollars for the fifty-two letters; a piece of their future was riding on that horse. Or maybe she was disappointed because he didn't want to write about their adventures in a romantic vein. The way he had written
Travels with a Donkey
. He'd been positively possessed when he wrote that book. It had been an open love letter to her. Was she worried that at fifty, she didn't look like the woman he'd fallen in love with?

Her wrinkles didn't disturb him; they were a map of her amazing life. He loved his wife, though love seemed an inadequate word to contain all the emotion that passed between married people. After fifteen years, shouldn't disagreeing with Fanny be easier? When they quarreled, he felt as if he were walking barefoot across jagged coral. Shouldn't their marriage be smooth by now, like a polished stone?

Louis ambled through Apia on his horse, Jack. The town was alive with the afternoon noise of children, dogs, and chickens in the fenced yards adjoining the low wood houses. He had spent the past few hours sitting on Moors's verandah drinking stiff coffee and chewing on local politics. They had a view of the harbor, where an overturned German man-o'-war appeared like a political cartoon titled “Samoan Troubles.” Louis knew enough about recent history to see the wrecked ship as a sad symbol for the mess created in Samoa by Germany, Britain, and the U.S.

“Samoa is no different from any other little outpost,” Moors had said. “Once the big powers put money in a foreign place. So they insert themselves into local politics.” The trader pointed toward the ship. “Mind you, it wasn't more than a year ago there were
six
men-o'-war out there, all of ‘em spoiling for a fight.” He snorted. “A hurricane settled that tiff. Tossed those ships over like toys in a tub. Killed two hundred sailors. That's when the Powers figured out they were three big dogs fightin' over a mighty small bone. They had their Berlin conference; the Germans put their puppet, Malietoa Laupepa in the king's seat; and they agreed to send over a ‘chief justice' to settle disputes among all the parties.” He put a plug of tobacco in his cheek. “It can't be done.”

Moors's knowledge of tribal rivalries and the financial interests of the Powers had been useful in Louis's letters for McClure's newspapers. Better yet was the trader's knowledge of the island's hidden wonders. He had already led Louis on afternoon rides through the bush to blue lagoons where locals bathed, and to lava caves where swiftlets swooped past them in the darkness, calling out to each other in clicks.

As Jack turned toward Vailima, Louis saw bare-breasted girls along the road, beautiful brown girls wearing flowers in their hair, bead necklaces, and scanty kilt-like
lavalavas
tied round their waists. He smiled at the notion that his eyes had grown accustomed to such naked beauty. What would Baxter or Colvin do upon encountering such females? Fall from their mounts, no doubt.

The air grew silent and the path rougher as he rode beside a high lime hedge, then ascended the hill into the bush. On either side, ropy vines wound around thick trunks, knitted themselves through branches, and hung down like fat snakes from the great canopy to the thick scrub below. Louis passed through a tiny village just below his own land where a family was drinking
kava
in their open-sided house. The lanterns were already glowing. “
Talofa!
” someone greeted to him from beneath the thatched roof.

At a bend in the road was a clearing where he often stopped to look up at Vailima and down at the coastline. To the west of Apia lay a string of German settlements that continued along the coast until they reached Mulinuu, the official seat of the Samoan king. Louis could see distinctly the coconut and cacao plantations owned by the Hamburg company with a very long name that everybody called “The German Firm.” “It might as well be an arm of the German government,” Moors had groused.

In Apia and to the east, English and Americans populated the coast. It was a cruel irony that while the natives preferred to live along the water, whites had claimed the harbor section of Upolu's northern shoreline. Forced to live away from the town in areas where decent roads and basic amenities ended, the native people moved through Apia as foreigners. That center of commerce was run by white administrators for the white settlers and was immune to the rule of the native king. But the white kingdom was not a happy one. The town, jointly held by whites of different nationalities, was divided into bickering camps.

Louis shaded his eyes and studied the coastline. All around the island, the surf crashed up and over the coral reefs. He turned toward Vailima, where he saw a windowpane in the new house glint copper gold as it caught the sun.

They had been living on the island for three months, sheltering in the cottage. The house was a simple structure, a two-story clapboard with three main rooms on the first floor and five bedrooms upstairs. The house's size made the locals gasp. He and Fanny didn't think it was too big; they would use every square inch of it for their extended family. What made it extravagant was the fact that all the building materials had to be imported, either from the States or from Australia and New Zealand. Everything: nails, window glass, doorknobs, redwood boards. The German Firm had taken the contract and gotten the materials from the harbor to Vailima by dray horse and cart, up the treacherous, furrowed road from Apia.

Dinner will be waiting,
he thought,
such as it is.
There was a provisions shortage that Moors insisted would be temporary, caused by the fact that the men-o'-war hadn't come into Apia harbor for extended stays of late. With the reduction in population, suppliers were not shipping food into the town as they once did. Fanny's garden would soon be producing, but in the interim, they ate a lot of breadfruit. The night before, he and Fanny had shared one avocado for supper.

When the conch shell was blown to call in anyone out in the fields, it would be he and Fanny who gathered at the table, along with Henry and Lafaele, two Samoan members of the household. Henry Simele was a bright, strong, plain-faced fellow who oversaw the day workers and did whatever job was required. When he began working with them, he'd asked Louis to teach him how to speak more complex English, or “long expressions,” as he called it, in exchange for Samoan-language instruction. The two met every evening for a mutual lesson. Henry always arrived freshly bathed, his chest decorated in fern garlands or a flower wreath. It turned out he was a chief on his own island of Savaii, but he had to work at Vailima to earn money for all the feasts he was expected to host.

Fanny was especially fond of Lafaele, a loyal fellow whom she was trying to turn into a gardener. He was a fine-looking man: muscular, with curled hair gone red from using slaked lime on it. Louis suspected the name to be a version of Raphael, so he called him “the Archangel.” He
was
that—good-hearted, and a great believer in the supernatural.

Both men seemed to regard Vailima as home. Louis was touched when Henry said, “
Our
house is a gentle house.” At one of the early social gatherings he and Fanny attended in Apia, the wife of a diplomat advised Louis to treat his servants like family: “You'll get more work out of them.” Louis had been offended by the crassness of her remark, though he'd already witnessed the nugget of truth in the statement. His familiarity with the Scottish clan system helped him make sense of Samoan life. The extended family was at the heart of both cultures. Everyone knew his role in the scheme of things, showed the proper respect for superiors and elders, and drew identity from the clan.

In a couple of months, once they were in the big house, Lloyd would return with the contents of the Bournemouth house, Louis's mother would join them, and if they could persuade Belle, she and Joe and Austin would take over the Pineapple Cottage, as they called the little place they were living in now. When it was finished, the new place would look like a barracks. It was not a Highland country house—the sort of building his countrymen might picture as the ideal home. But it would be enough for him. And the prospect of his own extended clan settling around him in Samoa was enormously comforting. He wouldn't be lonely.

“
Talofa,
” Louis called out when he saw Henry standing at the gate of the paddock.

“Hello Tusitala,” Henry said.

Tusitala.
Louis smiled to himself as he rode his horse to the barn. His new native name pleased him.
Teller of Tales.