Bright and Distant Shores (25 page)

He held out his hand stiffly for Owen to shake. Outside of some barely civilized traders and some men of the cloth, Owen hadn't shaken hands since leaving San Francisco. He shook Argus's hand and followed him down the path. As they came up the igneous hillside where the broken chapel stood rotting, Owen saw that Jethro was still down on the beach trawling for seaweed and plucking up sea anemones with his fencing glove. Dickey was helping him drag tentacles of weed out of the surf, the rifle slung over one shoulder.

The chapel was a Calvinist clapboard affair, not much more than a shed with a steeple, roughed out with ship's planking and sawn through with paneless windows. It had weathered at least a generation of neglect and Owen wondered what heathen uprising had seen the mission wane. From his years of wrecking he could tell the entire building was ready to topple. It read in the list, in the cracked soil around the foundation posts, in the wind singing through the joists and rafters. It was what his father and other wreckers used to call a Christmas present—a few hours' work for a day's pay.

Inside, the boy removed his hat and led Owen forward. There were alternating columns of shade and slatted sunlight through the glassless windows. An acrid breath blew down off the caldera and into the battered nave. A couple of pews made from planks and cartouche boxes had been pushed into the shade and the sister lay hallucinating on one of them. One hand was raised
as if she were reading an oracle in her knuckles or fingernails, her mouth stricken and full of tremors. She moved her head slowly from side to side and her lips were caked white. She was older than the boy, though by how much was hard to tell due to the fever and opium. Owen stepped closer, peering into the bolt of deep shade where she lay supine. The heat and the smell of the volcano didn't disguise the necrotic stench. He'd encountered sepsis during his first voyage and the smell was something he could live without. The boy leaned down and spoke to his sister in their tribal tongue.

“Can she walk?” Owen asked.

Argus shook his head.

Owen said, “We'll bring a stretcher and treat her on the ship.”

Argus said, “I've been praying for a ship but it's been almost a month.”

Owen left the chapel and walked down to the beach, where Dickey and Jethro were frolicking like a couple of honeymooners on the shoreline—running through the waves, splashing each other, tossing a waterlogged coconut back and forth. Owen saw that the rifle was unattended by the whaleboats and he hurried to take it up and fired it three times into the air. The two of them couldn't be trusted to spot their own shadows. Dickey came running up the beach, his face already filling with shame. Owen could remember felling buildings with his own adze, being trusted with a box of dynamite at the age of twelve. Three shots was the signal for all-hands during a landing and soon the men would trudge reluctantly down to the beachhead.

Dickey stopped short and looked up, waiting for his lambasting. His hair was growing back in quills and spikes and it toughened his demeanor.

“Row to the ship and tell the cook we're bringing a patient aboard. If he's drunk in his hammock go to the cookroom and hot up some coffee. Understand? And bring back the stretcher in the boat. Be quick about it!”

Dickey began for the boat, earnest-faced, but turned when he heard Owen speak again.

“I won't tell the captain that the rifle was lying in the sand but consider that a loan of confidence. If you want to be an exquisite and splash about in the waves instead of standing watch then you better get rich and go to Harvard like your girlfriend over there.” They looked off and saw Jethro loading his birding bag with seashells. Owen tightened the rifle strap and handed it back to the apprentice. He heard his own father in the admonishment and didn't mind the sound of it. Give the kid something to nail to the masthead. That's what Porter Graves would have said.

When the clay men bore her aloft on stretched white canvas Malini thought she was dead and crossing over. Long-departed uncles and cousins had come back in their white spirit guises to carry her. The old ones were gray and their hair was straight except for a boy who was plumed like a fledgling. She wanted to see her mother, who waited somewhere out on the ocean. She wanted her body to be returned to Poumeta for proper burial and so that someone might weep over her. For five nights she would haunt the lagoons, she thought, rousing the children and the dogs and the shamans before swimming out to meet everyone else. There was an island out there with fruits she had never eaten—grapes, green apples, the blue berries her brother had told her about.

They placed her in a whaleboat and she felt the ocean plinking against the wooden hull because it was trying to get to her wound. The oarsmen crowded over her with their green eyes and ruddy cheeks. The pain swam up into her stomach and spine when the oars rocked; she could hear their trousers strain against the wooden benches. Argus was sitting beside her singing and praying with her hands in his. The canvas stretcher smelled bitter and she wanted her brother to touch her head.
Was the Bible written in heaven?
This was a question she wanted to ask him. Their
breathing was like a monsoon cloud as they rolled over the waves. The wound had its own heartbeat and she had to protect it. They pulled into the shadow of a ship. Two ropes were lowered and attached to the stretcher. She felt herself rise.

Owen and Terrapin watched Hendrik Stuyvesant walk unsteadily toward the orlop, a glass of soda water in his hand. He pushed his way through a wall of curious seamen who'd come below to watch him operate on the feverish savage.

Terrapin said, “A dead native is bad luck on a ship, Doctor. Get her up and able so we can weigh anchor from this little Babylon.”

“I'll do my level best, Captain,” said Hendrik. “What's the presenting complaint?”

The captain looked to Owen.

“A boil on her ass,” said Owen. “It's turning septic or gangrenous or otherwise stinking and rotten.”

Hendrik winced faintly. “Glad I brought my soda water. I'm feeling all-overish just at present.”

“You will still prepare mess tonight, I assume,” said Terrapin. “I expect the men are quite hungry from their debauchery.”

“Of course,” said Hendrik, put out.

Owen suspected Hendrik was the only man aboard with three jobs. Terrapin summoned him at all hours for food, like it was hotel room service, or if he wanted his sideburns, neckline, and nose hairs trimmed, like some mogul about to be martyred in battle.

The captain bellowed at the seamen to clear out so that the doctor could do his work. Owen went above while Argus and Jethro remained with the patient. Hendrik came into the orlop proper.

“The brother refuses to leave and I thought I might lend a hand,” said Jethro. “I've cleared some of my specimens so you have room to work.”

Hendrik took a sip of his soda water and set it down beside the abscessed buttocks. There was a row of glassed jellyfish and a mound of tropical bird pelts on a nearby table. “Suit yourself.”

“Will you put her to sleep?” Argus asked.

Hendrik paused, looked at the native's clothes and shoes. “Not sure I see the need.”

“She's in a lot of pain,” said Jethro. “You must have some chloroform.”

“What I have in my medical kit is my concern.”

As if on cue, Dickey Fentress appeared with the leather kit and placed it on the workbench. The bag was monogrammed and this made Argus relax a little; they were in good hands. Hendrik began removing items from compartments and sleeves—a tub of jalap, a vial of mercury, cough syrup, laudanum, lousing kerosene, a scalpel, bandages, quinine, needle and thread, a stoppered glass jar of chloroform, a forger's loupe that doubled for surgical magnification. From out of the cavernous bottom he produced a coil of steel wool and a bone saw with a brocade of rust stippled along one side. Argus felt his heart drop.

Hendrik ran the scalpel through the candleflame. Malini moaned and turned away. “You gents may need to restrain her.”

Jethro said, “We can purchase more chloroform if that's the matter.”

“I like to keep it in case of emergencies. Hard to come by, it is. One time I had to take off a man's leg at sea. You want that poor bastard to go without the tide of mercy so this kanaka can take a nap while I lance a boil on her black rump?”

Jethro looked at his hands and then at the terrified woman on the table. “I don't think lancing is required.” He paused, folded his arms. “I have a syringe I use to empty bird eggs. If you drain the boil from the inside it might heal without fissuring.”

Hendrik licked his bottom lip. “Didn't know I was in the company of a royal physician.”

“I've studied science and I understand the body somewhat.”

Argus said, “The syringe might be better. I saw a doctor use it on the Reverend Mister one time. We are very grateful.”

Hendrik removed the scalpel from the tallow flame and in one fluid movement sliced down the patient's filthy skirt, exposing her coppered nates in the browning light. The plum-sized boil was marbled and the whole offending buttock was taut and blowzed. Dickey Fentress swallowed hard as the black woman brought a hand to cover her rear and the cook inched the candle closer. Jethro grabbed his wrist and said, “Please. I insist on anesthetic and a syringe. I'm prepared to pay for both.”

Hendrik let the scalpel go limp and looked up. He sighed and said, “Dickey Fentress, get above before I kick your freckled ass.” Dickey fled the orlop and instead of recounting a boil the size of stone fruit he told the midshipmen that he'd seen his first black snatch, a lozenge of brown quim glimpsed in candlelight and from behind.

Argus began murmuring a prayer with his eyes clenched shut—
Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for these men's Christian spirit and for the vapors of the Holy Ghost which will be breathed into my widowed sister's lungs so that she might be healthful again
. . .

Hendrik angled his wrist, the scalpel poised. “Twenty greenbacks and you can have a kerchief dipped in chloroform but it's too late for your birding syringe. This mess will fester and even after I lance it the melon will drain for days on end. You or the brother will have to bathe it in salt water three times a day and she won't be able to walk for a week. It smells like rancid meat down here for Christ's sake and I have to go make scouse and bean soup. Can we get this over with? My eyeballs hurt.”

“We will tend the wound very promptly,” said Argus.

Malini wept, her nostrils flared in terror. Jethro handed Hendrik a clean linen handkerchief from his pocket and the cook removed the stopper from the chloroform. A moment later Mali-ni's eyelids fluttered shut and her body went limp. They turned
her fully on her side. Hendrik fitted his forger's loupe into his left eye socket and bent to the task. The brother continued to pray and hum but looked away as Hendrik placed two fingers on either side of the boil, gave it a slight squeeze, and made a V-shaped slice across the top. A liquid tree of blood and pus burst from below and Jethro held a beaker to the wound to let it drain. There were several ounces of expellant in the glass beaker before Hendrik prodded and squeezed the wound to work the core up to the surface. Something like an apple seed pipped into the beaker and there was a narrow black chute of air extending down into the wound.

“That's got it,” said Hendrik, teeth bared. “Wash it with salt water and keep it covered with clean gauze. Call me if she isn't awake before long. You can give me the money at dinner if you like but don't let the captain or the men see.” Hendrik packed his kit and left.

Argus brushed some hair from his sister's forehead and tried to wake her in a whisper. Jethro took the beaker over to his workbench. He placed the jar of native blood and suppuration on the shelf right next to the embalmed anemones and the hummingbirds stuffed in mid-flight. From behind he heard the native's voice: “I am very grateful to you, sir.”

Owen intended to query the native lad further as a potential guide and translator. Once the sister was got ashore he might help out the cause in the Solomons and beyond. Owen was behind schedule and needed a trading coup. It was a pity the boy and his sister were wide of the mark as Chicago imports. He was pretty sure Hale Gray had something else in mind entirely—some wood-backed noble savages, tattooed and dreadlocked, wielding tomahawks instead of leathered editions of Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens. But here was also a chance to prove an ethical point—that his collecting mission and kindness toward the natives weren't mutually exclusive. And he had brought the girl
aboard out of common decency, he knew, not just to further his own scheme.

Owen came into the orlop and set down a tray of steaming soup. The sister was still on the table but was now covered in a white sheet. She stared up at the joists above her, oblivious to the men. Jethro and the native—was it Argot or Arganus?—were crouched over a taxidermied fruit dove. The boy said softly, “It looks like it will fly away at any moment.” They turned and faced Owen, Jethro a little flushed.

“I brought you all some soup. How is she feeling?”

The boy picked up the tray and handed Jethro a bowl and spoon before taking it over to his sister. He placed one hand under her head to tilt her chin up but she turned her mouth away. “She is sickly and confused. She has never been in a ship before. We are like the inside of a pickle bucket with all this wood around us.”

Jethro sat down on a stool, threw one leg over the other, and took a few spoonfuls of soup. “It's only natural for her to be nervous, Argus. To be expected, really.”

Argus, that was it. Owen leaned against a workbench and ran one hand against the grain. “Argus, where did you learn your English?”

The boy gently placed his sister's head back down on the cotton pillow and looked over. “The Reverend Mister taught me English. He was a missionary from Scotland but he died on the verandah before breakfast. I was his houseboy. But also he taught me to know Jesus and the Holy Ghost. I am a catechist.”