Bright and Distant Shores (28 page)

“We can try.”

They turned to see Terrapin descend from the poop deck with a sartorial swagger, Nipper cradled in his arms. The bright plumage of a cravat drew attention to his ponderous chin and jowls. The sleeves of his undersized peacoat were too short and his stomach surged against the line of gilt buttons. “Mr. Gray, are you and your guests ready for dinner in the stateroom?”

Jethro performed something that approached a Regency bow. In that moment Owen could envision dragging him behind the ship in one of his dredge nets. The captain's eyes drank down the sister in several slow gulps. She took a step forward, much to the amazement of the men. Maybe the captain's self-proclaimed prowess at the stern of a four-poster bed or his command of the unsounded waters of coital union were, in fact, true. But then the real motive of her advance was revealed. The first time any of them saw Malini smile was as she put a gentle hand to the dog's ears and Nipper raised his black nose to lick her fingertips.

Owen watched the diners go below. If Terrapin claimed the girl, marked her in some way as his own, then the ship was doomed. The
Cullion
would become a hen frigate, only the hen was a tribal widow. Between the lusty seamen and captain, the protective brother, the pike-hearted naturalist wanting to pin her like a beetle, nothing good could come of her presence.

Owen took a lamp up to the foredeck and worked on his next letter to Adelaide. Before leaving, he had instructed her to send her first dispatch to the government station in the Solomon Islands and he prayed the mail steamers had favored their correspondence.

T
he
Cullion
spent two weeks trading in the southern Solomons, anchoring off San Cristobal, Ulawa, and Malaita. They weren't the untainted islands Owen had hoped for—they were part of a newly formed British protectorate, and Roman Catholic priests had been in Makira Harbour since 1846—but the villages were resilient and steeped in their own culture. Away from the coastline, where smallpox had wiped out a sizable swath of the population, the clansmen were eager to trade with the landing party—Owen, Argus, Jethro, Giles Blunt, and Dickey Fentress. Argus agreed to let Malini remain on the ship after much deliberation; he reasoned she was better off under the captain's questionable watch rather than run the risk of her being snatched for the local bride market.

The well-armed trading party headed out each day at dawn, to avoid the heat but also to afford Jethro ample collecting opportunities. They trekked along ridgebacks of chert and limestone, along clifftops that overlooked the coast. The sea was striated in bands of green and the sun rose a smoky gold. They came upon villages fortified by stockades, riven by trenchlike fosses designed to keep enemies at bay. They stared into bamboo pitfalls staked with human remains. The highland settlements consisted of four or five taro-thatched houses on rocky knolls. At each cluster of dwellings they heard elaborate tales about the infidels over the hill, translated from the bastardized pidgin a few elders had acquired long ago in Queensland cane fields. Stories of infanticide abounded, women who suckled pigs, men who ate the flesh of
serpents, a tribe of hermits who lived above three thousand feet and used only dew for drinking and bathing. Their acrimony was so dramatic that Owen wondered whether they weren't protecting their brethren in the hinterland. Was there a village up there that had never smelled a body gone to the ruin of smallpox?

Owen led the way through stands of canarium and milkwood, sometimes wielding a machete to hack a path. In the clearings he used a spyglass to survey the escarpments and stony valleys that reminded him of the Colorado canyons seen from the westbound train. Jethro trailed in the rear with his creel and 12-gauge, eyes worrying the tree crowns. He brought his cinématographe along and captured the sight of a hawk whisking a village chicken from the ground. On Argus's advice he refrained from shooting the bird—plumaged in black and white, at least fourteen inches head to tail—for fear of offending the locals.

The villagers disliked giving their names directly to the whites and they regarded Argus with suspicion, calling him their word for the twice-fruiting Malay apple. Despite their general wariness, they traded, albeit at spear point—relic-house figurines, elaborately carved gongs, ceremonial bowls of l'ao shell, in return for tobacco, wax matches, calico, sharpened tomahawks, and bush knives. Owen gave Argus credit for not trading a single rifle in the Solomons. The villagers asked for Martini-Henry rifles and breechloaders—the preferred murder weapons of the New Georgian headhunters—but Argus said they only had the rifles they carried and that firearms did not fare well in the bush. He sermonized on the maintenance and care of steel or iron adzes and tomahawks and within fifteen minutes the topic of guns had been all but forgotten. He was also responsible for their biggest trading coup—swapping a spyglass and some incidentals for a festoon of decorative skulls and a prized single-hulled canoe. Owen had no idea how he was going to get the canoe back to Chicago, let alone into Hale Gray's private collection, but he was hoping its workmanship and audacity would win him a handsome bonus from the insurance magnate.

The canoe and skulls were obtained on San Cristobal. They arrived there on the morning of a burial ceremony for a chief, and trading looked like a remote possibility at best. They contented themselves with watching the proceedings, Jethro working the handcrank of the cinématographe. A boy sounded a conch shell and the villagers prepared themselves as if for war, gathering adornments and favored weapons, streaking their faces with lime and arranging feathers in their hair. Young warriors rushed shouting into the village square, sham-fighting and throwing spears. The chief's body was washed by his relatives, painted in turmeric, wrapped in the heated leaves of the pandana. The corpse's big toes and thumbs were tied with rattan. Argus learned that this practice was designed to puzzle the ghost so that he would leave the villagers alone. They wanted the chief's ghost to swim out to the island of Maraba, the Hades of the Arosi clansmen, without lingering.

The dead man's property was destroyed—his trees were cut, his nuts and yams thrown into the bush, his feasting bowl broken, a favored pig or dog slaughtered and buried alongside him. The women began the lamentation and Argus extracted the meaning from an elder—
Ancestor, my mother has come, I come back to thee, through the deep sea
. The dead man was taken away. His relatives would shave their heads and fast for twenty days.
Water, my mother.
Argus heard the elder say that a youth would have to be bought as a
ramoa
sacrifice for the chief's death and that his body would be cooked and eaten . . .
taboo of the dead, I rest from weeping
. He did not offer this information to Owen and his men; although these heathens were alien to Poumetans and God, he liked their graceful bearing, the way they sang lamentation and observed custom. He thought of Jeremiah 9:20 and the instruction to teach your daughters wailing. He was sure if they were offered the
Catechism of Christian Truth
correctly they would come to embrace it, learn to trade their winged serpent
Hatuibwari
for the Holy Ghost.

After the burial ceremony was completed there was a feast and
the landing party prepared to depart. Jethro returned the cinématographe to its case and began looking for reptile and avian trophies. Owen sat with Dickey and Giles, passing a cigarette back and forth, admiring the dead chief's canoe. It was slender-hipped and inlaid with pearl. The smell of tobacco brought a few onlookers but Owen failed to interest them in trade. Argus watched Owen mime, point, gesture with his hands to a circle of implacable faces. He remembered the exact moment he had won the Reverend Mister's affections. Not five days into his post as houseboy, after studying the ritual of a palmful of Darjeeling into the china teapot, of counting the minutes for the steeping of boiled water, then the sequence of stirring, kneading, and baking flour that resulted in soda-scones, he had come out onto the verandah one morning with the preacher's breakfast on a lacquered tray. The fleet Scotsman was pulled by gratitude to his feet, the closest thing he knew to Calvinist joy registering in his features.
Ye cannae know how you've pleased this ol' Glaswegian, boy
. It was a brief but definitive anointment and Argus never looked back. Now he wanted that same recognition from Owen. He didn't understand all the stations and offices aboard the ship, but he knew now that the trader was higher in rank than the tall, single-gloved one, that his own future was somehow bound up with service to this man.

An idea came to him as he listened to the villagers argue about whether the chief would return in malice. There were itemized grievances, occasions listed when the chief might have felt slighted. Argus picked up Owen's spyglass, told several of the dead man's relatives to follow him, and walked down to the beachhead. The villagers flanked him as he pointed from the shoreline, raised the telescope, and glassed the horizon. He was unsure whether the island of Maraba was a physical atoll or a mythic transit for dead souls, so he scanned a series of distant coralline islands with the spyglass. The pidgin phrase for telescope was
glas blong look-look big
and he repeated it as an incantation each time he glassed the blued distances. The old widow stood by with her shaven
head, squinting into the east. Slowly he positioned the telescope for her and covered her left eye so that she could make out the shimmering atolls in the circle of light. Several times she plumbed the distance with her naked gaze, then raised the spyglass to the horizon, her mouth opening in skepticism or awe, it was hard to tell which. The chief's brother, of some political clout, took the telescope and repeated the process.

Soon there was a delegation of elders on the beach. A shaman was brought in for consultation. Argus knew they had seen spyglasses before but perhaps they had never found a metaphysical application for the instruments. Other villagers wandered down to see the pilgrimage route of the dead magnified and brought under scrutiny. The telescope was handed down a line of bereaved relatives. Argus suggested that the spyglass and other goods could be swapped for the chief's canoe and the skulls on his clubhouse. It sounded ridiculous, even to him, but there was no denying the revelation on the shoreline, the sense that they might steel themselves against supernatural whim. Owen, Dickey, and Giles listened from the periphery as the new headman and shaman held forth. Argus could tell from the undercurrent of Melanesian cognates and pidginized slang that there was some advantage in his proposal. The canoe, like the rest of the chief's property, was slated for destruction, the prow was to be removed and placed as a headstone, and the skulls were kill trophies from a previous generation. The headman was happy to be rid of them, to gather a festoon of new skulls that might seal his own reputation. Argus chimed in with enticements of additional goods. To the white men, he gave the impression of deft salesmanship when, in fact, he mostly repeated key phrases and arguments of the lobbying shaman. He felt Owen's approving regard at his back.

By nightfall a deal had been brokered—the canoe and skulls in return for the spyglass, three fathoms of calico, six tins of wax matches, and half a dozen tomahawks. Dickey and Giles paddled the dead chief's boat out to the
Cullion
like Polynesian warriors,
shirtsleeves hitched, hamming it up in the slender prow and stern with full-armed strokes and bloody war cries. She was tippy and lean over the swells. Dickey put his back into it, his hair diamonded with spindrift in the falling dark. Giles picked up one of the skulls and raised it to eye level in the stern. He botched a rendition of Hamlet's “Alas, poor Yorick” speech—a mash of
gorge rims
and
infinite jests
. Jethro winced from the other boat. Why was it that the common man always yammered,
Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well
instead of
I knew him, Horatio
? Jethro watched the native boy rowing with considerable gusto, facing Owen with a smile. Some shift had occurred. He had hoped to make a naturalist of Argus, to bring him onto the confluent streams of art and science. Perhaps there was still time. Unlike the traders, Jethro's day had been a bust, a few desiccated insects and skinks in his creel.

They arrived back at the ship and the crew took turns paddling the canoe through the light swells. Owen consulted with the captain and Terrapin pronounced that due to lack of space on the quarterdeck, the canoe would have to be towed astern. Jethro went below to drop off his equipment before going to check on Malini. On his way to the poop deck he passed Argus, who was carefully loading the skulls into the bosun's store. They exchanged a careful glance. Jethro could see Terrapin standing at the wheel, a slouch hat pulled low and Malini at his side, reclining in a wicker deck chair with Nipper asleep in her arms. She was dressed in a frock made of muslin and gingham, eating a stick of saltwater taffy.

Just as Jethro put his hands on the railing and started to climb the stepladder, Terrapin said, “Officers only, cupcake.”

Jethro stopped, dropped his hands by his sides. “I was just coming to check on the girl.”

“Sure you was.” Terrapin cast a glance back at Malini. “She's in fine spirits. I had the sailmaker hem her up something from the slop chest offcuts and he's quite the seamstress, don't you think? I'm calling it Bush-and-Bodice . . .”

“Very nice. Perhaps you can have him make some extra blankets. It's awfully dank in the hold at night for the native girl.”

Terrapin turned the wheel to port with his extended thumbs. “No need. I've asked first and second mate to share a cabin so the kanaka princess can have her own quarters. That seems like the proper and Christian thing to do, wouldn't you say, Mr. Gray?”

Jethro turned to the weather side of the boat just so the captain wouldn't see his face blanch. “Indeed.”