Bright and Distant Shores (27 page)

The helmsman released his grip on the wheel, ran a hand over his whiskered face, plumbed the horizon for new information. “We are hove to, sir. The wind is flukey.”

“Answer my question.”

“The islands are springing up where they shouldn't,” he said. “I'm seeing double.”

Terrapin said, “Don't trust what you see unless we're about to hit one of them, and rest assured I'm not about to resort to the steam engines on this account. Stick to the charts, because they have been vetted with my own hands and eyes. Now stop luffing into the wind and keep her trimmed. Are we agreed on this front?”

The helmsman nodded and the first mate yelled at the men to take their places. Terrapin walked on the foredeck, Nipper at his side. Odd-looking shadows then amorphous shapes emerged from the ropy groves of rigging. Owen watched the captain as he discovered that the ship was run amok with Djimbanko stowaways—the sailmaker with a mongoose on a leash, the apprentice with a green parrot on his arm, a large tortoise eating chunks of pineapple below the bulwark, a blue-eyed Siamese cat drinking from a bowl of condensed milk, a wallaby eating oats from the carpenter's hand. Terrapin put Nipper down and let the terrier run a yapping circuit around the ship until he backed the tortoise into its shell.

Terrapin called for the first mate. “Pym, what are the ship's rules about pets on board outside a captain's personal hound?”

Pym straightened and brought his hands to his sides. “I believe, sir, that pets, like livestock, are at the discretion of the master himself. As far as I know, the only animal expressly forbidden on a ship is a monkey . . . and that might only be on a surveying ship, come to think of it. Somewheres I heard a story about a monkey destroying a map that was being drafted and now the admiralty has written a ban into the laws of the sea.”

Terrapin called off Nipper from the terrified tortoise and the dog scampered up, wheeling and nuzzling at the captain's pant leg.

Owen couldn't resist a little dig. “Strange cargo we have, Captain.”

Terrapin winced. “You worry about the collecting, Mr. Graves, and I will worry about the fucking petting zoo we seem to have acquired.” A dozen men were listening from the rigging. He continued loudly, “Pym, inform the men on your watch that if these beasts so much as shit or piss on my deck they will end up eating parrot soup and wallaby meat loaf before the day is out. Or I'll set these mammal and amphibian demons in a dinghy and watch them drift away in a squall. There's no end to the invention I have for these kinds of turns. Furthermore, make sure the men know that the orlop is strictly off-limits and that the natives are to be treated fairly or I'm not above lashings. I don't care if it is nearly the twentieth fucking century, I'll flog a man sixty times and would be within my nautical rights for doing so.” He picked up Nipper and walked toward the chartroom muttering every expletive he had ever learned or invented—
fuckhorse mother, bitching louse, barnacled slut, shit-faced canks
—while the men relished the scene from behind the cover of sailcloth.

What Argus thought about in the hold was Noah's Ark, about animals paired and saved. But were the stuffed and cottoned birds or lizards going to come back to life at sea? The man named Jethro—a good biblical name belonging to the father-in-law of Moses who lived near the Dead Sea—was kind and patient. Argus didn't understand who had the higher rank, Owen or Jethro, but the skinny, tall one wore a fencing glove on one hand and tended his sister's wound and wrote things down in a leather notebook. He gave her medicine called laudanum, which was another name for opium tincture, and it eased Malini's pain but also made her drowsy. Argus slept on a cot in the corner of the orlop and on a few occasions woke to see Jethro trimming his sister's fingernails, or cutting a piece of her hair, or measuring Malini's arms
with a tape measure while she slept. The nails and locks of hair were bottled and shelved and more notes were penciled into the book. If Jethro were an islander, he would be accused of sorcery because only shamans took such an active interest in the sprouting and residue of the human body. It was never-ending and the Reverend Mister hadn't liked it at all, the constant battle against unkemptness, the calcareous civil war that raged in nails and hair and teeth. Argus carefully watched Jethro empty Malini's bedpan into a slop bucket to be taken above and made sure nothing was retained. Storing excrement was a sure sign of devilment.

For Jethro's part, he was applying what little he knew of anthropometric and craniometric methods to the study of the native girl. There was a correlation to be made between head and nose form, stature, and skin color, though he didn't have the books he needed to bolster that view. Something about Camper's facial angle came to him, that if you drew a line from nostril to ear and another line perpendicular from upper jawbone to the prominence in the forehead you could ascertain the angle. Europeans had something like an 80-degree angle and Africans 70 degrees and orangutans less than 60. The body, after all, was a map of consciousness. But he was a Darwinist at heart and stayed skeptical of any method that lent itself to a polygenic theory, to the idea that humanity came from separate lines instead of a single ancestor. Why, then, was it so satisfying to measure the architecture of her bones?

They shared an interest in sketching and, while Malini rowed on the tide of laudanum, Jethro taught Argus new techniques— how to cross-hatch his shading, how to leaden the clouds in his landscapes. He gave him a knife-sharpened pencil and showed him how to capture the essence of a specimen. Jethro brought out his japanned tin box of watercolors—viridian, burnt sienna, pale cadmium, carmine, bistre, Chinese white, and a dozen other tints that could capture any hue found in nature. They outlined then painted a series of marine creatures that had been built on a radial plan: sponges, sea anemones, jellyfish, starfish, sea urchins.

“The great wheel of life seems to be sewn into their very structure,” Jethro said, holding his page at an angle to the lamplight.

Argus considered the sketchbook and the idea. Was life a wheel?

Jethro looked at Argus's pencil-and-watercolor of the starfish and said, “You can draw the structure of what you see inside as well. Imagine if you took the roof from a church and looked down from above.” Jethro took a scalpel and sliced down one of the legs of the starfish.

“Why do you want to know the insides?” Argus asked.

“So we can determine how it works. The structure reveals its nature!”

This didn't make any sense at all; wouldn't you watch a starfish or jellyfish swim if you wanted to know how it worked? Nonetheless, Argus took up a new piece of paper and began to sketch the struts and filaments of the dissected limb.

Jethro stood and went over to the brass microscope he had lashed to a workbench. He clipped a glass slide onto the mounting stage.

“Come over here,” he said. “I will show you what I mean.”

Argus went to the workbench. “Who are Bausch and Lomb?”

“Look into the eyepiece.”

Argus bent to the vulcanite eye-rim and Jethro lit a candle near the base. At first he saw nothing but when Jethro told him to close his other eye a ring of light shimmered into view. Translucent specks floated across a pale moon.

“You are looking at a single drop of sea water.”

Argus repositioned his eye and said, “Are they germs or tiny fishes?”

There was no end to what this boy knew; next he would be talking Pasteur and Thomas Huxley. Jethro said, “Think of them as sea mites. Tiny creatures dancing and swimming for our amusement.”

“And what do they do when we are not watching with amusement?” Argus asked.

Jethro wiped a fingerprint smear from the brass pinion but did not answer. The boy sometimes spoke in Confucian riddles.

The sister began to moan and Jethro felt in his trouser pocket for the vial of laudanum.

Argus straightened from the workbench. “No. Let her wake.”

Jethro kept his hand in his pocket.

“I think the pain has fled her,” Argus added softly.

They crossed to the table where Malini was wrapped in a flannel sheet and cushioned on a bed of wadded cotton. Two wooden boards had been nailed to the table sides to ensure that she didn't topple while the boat was under sail. She held a hand in front of her face and seemed startled to be in the boat.

“Sister,” Argus whispered in Poumetan. “Are you hungry? We are in a boat and sailing to some islands where I work as a guide. We are safe.”

A weight was pushing down on her chest. Her eyes felt swollen and she was glad for the dark wooden cave. Like kava, the medicine had numbed her tongue and lips, ribboned its way into her stomach before banishing the pain. It felt like a soft silver voice speaking inside of her. She had drifted in and out of dreamless sleep, half glimpsing thoughts like a swimmer coming to the surface before plunging anew. Where were her children? This is what she thought now, looking at the back of her hand as if for the first time. Then the old gnawing sadness swelled again, all her childless days, and she remembered the rowing and the husband who must surely be dead. She had been cursed after all.

“I will wash her wound again,” Jethro said. He cut some gauze and went to unwrap the flannel sheet but Malini pushed his hand away. “Tell her I need to make sure it is still draining.”

Argus spoke again to her in Poumetan.

She heard his voice from very far away. Were they all dead? She said, “Why are we beneath the ocean?”

Argus said, “She says she will clean it herself if you tell her what to do.”

Jethro tightened his lips and set the roll of gauze on the table. He explained that the wound needed to keep draining, that it should be covered with gauze but also exposed to air for a few hours each day. “Tell her those things,” he said. “She will need to press it until nothing more comes to the surface.”

Argus said, “You will need to let it weep and clean it with a piece of cloth. He says it also needs air.”

Malini closed her eyes. “I don't want to stay under the waves.”

“Did you hear what I said, sister?” He gently shook her shoulder.

Her eyes stuttered then settled on his face. “I will do it. I am in charge of it. Leave me so that I can clean it.”

“She wants us to leave so she can have some privacy.”

Jethro paused, swallowed. “Yes, of course. I'll take you up on deck for some fresh air. Perhaps your sister can join us if she feels up to it. Ah, that reminds me, we'll need to find her some clothes and I know just the place to look.” He hesitated, smiled reassuringly, then took up Sir John Herschel's
Manual of Scientific Enquiry
and led Argus toward the companionway.

Owen was about to come off the first dogwatch when the siblings emerged from the hold, Jethro at their side, a pair of placental forceps hanging from his belt loop like a cutlass. The brother appeared with Dickens under one arm and had been decked out from the slop chest in a broadloom shirt and sturdy trousers. Then the sister, incredibly, came forth in the silk evening gown that Teddy Meyers had used to win the equatorial beauty pageant. There was a slight hobble in her gait as she favored her left leg, but she was undeniably radiant, her dark hair hoisted above the mizzen of a bare neckline, the sorrel ridge of her shoulders against the scarlet gown. A few men of the dogwatch came down out of the rigging to gather around the trio, Dickey Fentress in front, awed by the sight of so many dark and womanly parts packaged in silk and frocking.

Malini breathed in the southeasterly, moved unsteadily to the rail without giving the men a second glance. She could hear the
waves slapping against the wooden hull of the ship. Her bare toes gripped the deck planks and she could feel the throb of the wound dimming away. It was almost dark; she saw a sliver of mackerel sky along the horizon like a glimpsed river. They were heading north, she could tell, and the hurricanes would be coming before the next full moon. She turned and looked up into the rigging, where a few faces stared back at her. The sailors were perched like tree-dwellers, some ghostly barefoot clan with knives between their teeth. One of them flagged his hand through the air as if it were on fire. She had seen this violent greeting before and she wasn't about to respond. She turned for the rail and watched the sun wink then disappear into the sea.

Owen didn't know the particulars of how Jethro had persuaded the captain to bring the natives along but he suspected that, as with everything else, it involved bribery, begging, or both. Jethro followed the sister to the bulwarks and Owen came up beside the boy.

“We're heading to the Solomons. Do you know anyone on those islands?”

“No, sir. But I have passed through the Solomons before and know they are headhunters.”

“Excellent.”

Argus adjusted the book under his arm. He said nothing but the confusion read in his face.

Owen said, “If they headhunt then they probably also make artifacts to celebrate the rituals. That's what we're after. Objects.”

“There is an Anglican mission there and smallpox fever.” Argus also knew that the Bishop John Coleridge Patteson had been killed on Santa Cruz but thought it best not to mention it.

“Then prices should be coming down,” said Owen. He didn't mean to sound callous but he couldn't help the feeling that some kind of conspiracy was being plotted in the hold. What in God's name was Jethro showing them down there? And he didn't like one bit the way the heir looked at the sister. If his interest was scientific it was a low-grade brand, the kind of zoological bent a
man shows at a horse auction. Here he was, circling her chestnut flanks at the rail, warding off the seamen with a proprietary hand. “Do you speak the language?” Owen asked Argus.

“They will speak pidgin because of the mission and traders.”

“We're all set then. You can help me negotiate a fair price. We have a lot of beads and calico. Think we can steer them away from the tobacco and guns?”