Bright and Distant Shores (32 page)

A set of footsteps stopped outside the companionway and Owen Graves came forward with a lantern. “Are you still alive in there?” The unlocked door let in a shaft of slightly cooler air.

“Is this amusing to you?”

“Not really. But neither is the thought of five men being killed in the islands because you failed to observe the local warnings.”

Jethro washed his hands in a clackdish of bloodied water. “Am I free to go above? I haven't seen the sun in two days. I admit I acted a little hastily on the island.”

Owen edged into the orlop proper, the museum of dead and pickled animals. “I've come with a chance for you to redeem yourself.”

Jethro pretended to busy himself with dissecting instruments. “Is that so?” He wiped his hands on a cloth, working his fingertips.

Owen watched him daintily dry the injured finger. “Has the doctor seen that?”

“The barber, you mean? The culinary genius who turns maritime flesh into bonemeal? I'd rather lose my finger than let that blunderbuss come at it.”

Owen pressed his lips together, stifling a laugh. How was this man ever going to get on in the world? If he someday helmed the insurance empire there would be a policyholder revolt, not to mention striking file clerks and secretaries. “We are heading northeast, beginning the trip back.”

Jethro was surprised to hear this and felt briefly overjoyed. The house on Prairie Avenue, the thought of entire Sundays reading in bed, the breathtaking image of Danish pastries arranged on a paper doily, all these things seemed suddenly within reach. Then he remembered his mission and what did or didn't wait for him back in Chicago. It was from this stronger burning sentiment that he spoke. “Why so soon? We've barely begun. What do we have to show for our efforts?”

“Actually, I've already amassed a sizable collection that I think will please your father. And we'll make a final stop before heading up to Hawaii. Argus has told me about an island about two hundred miles east of here. His father and other Poumetans made annual
trading pilgrimages out there when he was a boy. It's an outlier of the Solomons, past the Santa Cruz group, at the cusp of Melanesia and Polynesia. From a collector's standpoint it sounds promising. Remote enough that it's had very little contact with whites.”

Owen watched Jethro cover the skinned Night Heron with the hand towel like some avian coroner.

Jethro noticed his stare and said, “Keeps the mites out until I finish the preparations.” He arranged some implements on the table. “What you're describing is also a naturalist's dream, Mr. Graves. If you think I'm going to sit idle in this suffocating lair while you go ashore then you're sadly mistaken.”

Owen looked around the orlop, took in the spread of specimens. “That is something we can discuss.”

“Ah, I see, I am to be placed on probation.”

“Something like that.”

Owen took out a cigarette—his fifth in the hour since reading the letter—and held it at bay. “I'm afraid to light up for fear of an explosion.”

Jethro didn't give in to the slouching, pally tone.

Owen said, “You mentioned at the beginning of the voyage that you had some reels of Chicago.”

“Nothing really. Some footage taken inside the Loop and elsewhere before we left. I was trying to fathom how the contraption worked.”

Owen blew smoke into a pause. “I'm going to ask Argus and Malini to return to Chicago with us.”

Jethro folded his arms. “I see.”

“This was part of your father's proposal, to bring back some natives. I had hoped for better samples, as it were, but we've had to cut the trip short on my account. A family crisis.” He looked at the backs of his hands.

Jethro had no choice but to appear sympathetic. “I'm sorry to hear that.” Of course there were arrangements with his father to which he had not been privy. It had always been that way.

“I take it you didn't know about the native cargo.”

“My father has a habit of not confiding in me. But I'm surprised you've been taken in by one of his schemes. Are you bringing back the savages like a couple of tomahawks?”

Owen hesitated. “I believe it can be done ethically.”

“I've been studying them in my fashion, their bearing and culture. But sooner or later, as with all live specimens, the choice is simple—put them behind glass or release them into the wild.”

“You make them sound like wild birds.”

A brief silence. They regarded each other.

“I haven't told the captain or the crew either. We're idling at the moment until I ask Argus and Malini outright if they'll come back.”

“And what are you waiting for?”

“Some enticement. It would be a way for you to gain some much-needed goodwill from the crew and the captain if you showed some reels of Chicago. We've been at sea long enough for them to be homesick. And if Argus and Malini saw it for themselves, the glitter and bustle, maybe they could be tempted to come back with us. Of course, I'm expecting they'll need to playact a little to fit with your father's designs.”

“And what designs are those?”

“A rooftop exhibition. He has some notion of displaying a tribal village up there.”

Jethro smiled ruefully. “Two people is hardly a village, Mr. Graves.”

“True. But better than nothing. Will you show the reels?”

Jethro considered; the entire ship had been alive with secret dealings from the get-go. The cook bribed to administer chloroform, the captain to allow the primitives to sail, and now this wager that a few minutes of film could inflame the native mind as if it were a nesting magpie before a shiny spread of coins and tassels. He would happily study the natives further, even back in Chicago, but he resented being caught up, pawnlike, in some
larger design of his father's. Would he ever be trusted in his own right? “I'm the salesman, am I? Show the blackies a few skyscrapers and they'll be champing at the bit to come along? I'm not so sure.” He circled the workbench, rising to a theme as vaporous as the fetid air, elbows jutted. “I'm certainly not going to stand in the way of my father's wishes. That would be irresponsible of me. But, in due course, rather soon, actually, I will expect a return favor.”

He turned on his heels and it was cheap vaudeville to Owen, who blew smoke at the ceiling.

Jethro said, “You'll give me permission to come ashore when we get out to this satellite island. Think of the species that breed in such a far-flung place. It's a scientific duty. Not even Banks went out that way.”

“It's not just my decision. The captain will have to agree to it.”

“The man is a servant of the expedition. You devise the route and my family funds the wake.”

“Nonetheless, under maritime law, he is in charge of our collective well-being. He must serve the ship and the men. And I'll be asking him to use the engines for the last leg, so I need to stay in his good graces.”

Jethro ran his hands along the edge of the workbench. “You will do your best to represent the interests of science, however?”

“I'll do what I can.”

“Fine, then. Tell the captain and the men that I will show a reel in the messroom tonight. Have the cook mangle together some refreshments and let the natives sit up front with their mugs of hot cocoa. And I take it that I am now free to go above and breathe some fresh air?”

“Of course.”

When Owen had left, Jethro practically lurched for the companionway and used the vertical hatchway to ascend to the deck. He shielded his eyes from the blinding light of the sun when he got above. Red orbs and swirls blotted his vision. The wind blew
fresh and from the southeast. He hobbled forward, took the glove off, felt the air graze his finger. Somehow, he felt his awareness swing open, like a door flung wide, and then it came back with a sudden jolt of pain. The snakebite was poisoning his mind, he thought, a tide of tainted blood rising up his arm, lacerating his thoughts.

He watched the men gather around the forecastle where the captain and Owen addressed them. Through cupped hands Jethro caught sight of Argus and Malini by the mizzenmast, chatting in their ragged hand-me-downs, and he thought, God help them if they come back to Chicago, the merciless crowds and the canyons of brickwork and the plumes of soot, a world infinitely stranger than any tribal afterlife could deliver. Then he thought of Malini in a downtown teahouse, dressed in taffeta, and how he would personally teach her to put a napkin on her lap before taking her to a symphony. All was not lost.

At ten o'clock the
Cullion
sauntered into a light breeze, close to fully clothed and fifty miles from the nearest island. Terrapin told the helmsman not to take any sail off her then went to his stateroom to dress for the spectacle. Six men from the port watch stayed on deck to navigate the bark while the rest went below to sit on stools and kegs or cross-legged on the floor of the mess-room. Jethro had set up the cinématographe on an upended crate, the canvas of a retired topsail clewed taut across the galley as a screen. The seamen watched him tinker with the contraption's fidget wheels and gears, peering from behind a candle lantern into a brass-plated recess. He carefully threaded a spool of film, his hands shaking, a blinkard defusing a bomb. “It doubles as projector and camera,” said Dickey Fentress, a little too loudly. His left ear was bothering him, he said, so that he had to swallow to ease the buzzing of the room. A nearby seaman said he'd seen the device exhibited by a Frenchman in a San Francisco dime museum—seen a horse race, a gaggle of factory girls skipping
rope, a Parisian dog pissing on a lamppost. Argus had been told to sit up front in one of three wingback chairs brought in from the captain's cabin. The seamen ribbed him for his elevated position, pretended to be shoeblacks and buff his shoes, joked that he should recite passages of
David Copperfield
if the moving pictures were bunkum. Argus waited for his sister and the captain to join him, nervous about his place of honor. Hendrik Stuyvesant had cooked up a batch of duff and Argus watched the hardboiled pudding being rushed around as quickly as a collection plate among heathen pewfellows. Owen leaned against the aft wall and gave him a reassuring nod.

Terrapin arrived with Malini on his arm and instead of his usual eventide sarong he wore something resembling a coronation cape, silk lined in scarlet, and in the dimness there were either honeybees or embroidered stars on the trim. He carried a pair of opera glasses and since Malini was in the evening gown that had once belonged to Teddy Meyers's mother, it wasn't hard to imagine them stepping through the din to reach their Rossini box seats. Malini sat next to her brother without comment and Terrapin eased himself closest to the wall. He crossed his legs, drew the silk proscenium of his cape across his girthed middle, and gave a hand flourish that indicated the projectionist could begin the show. The hanging slush lamps were snuffed and Jethro began to turn the hand crank, the projector bulb straining to life. He'd spent several hours splicing footage into some semblance of a reel. He let a brown tail of film warm the machine through before he removed the lens cap, by which point the seamen were throwing pudding currants at each other and pretending to kiss and fondle in the nitrate-smelling dark.

When the cap came off, the grainy light startled into blue pales then dissolved into a silent, underwater gouache of the Chicago streets—pyramids of oranges at the South Water Street Market, the shipyards of Goose Island, charcoal baking under clouds of steam, women with parasols on the pier at Cheltenham Beach,
Swedes and Germans reclining under elms in beer gardens, a line of telegraph boys racing their bicycles, fleeting down the canyons of the financial district like a slender-legged cavalry. There was a marching band with trumpets glinting in a municipal park, squatters' shacks drowsing woodsmoke from the shoreline, the civic façades of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago, in which Argus recognized the tintyped images of Oxford and Cambridge, the sandstone cloisters from the Reverend Mister's college days.

Owen was pleased that Jethro had gathered so many amusements of the city as if he had anticipated this particular sales pitch—the wooden toboggan slide and ice-skating rink near Forty-second and Drexel, the sight of couples gliding hand in hand, their reflections muted and amorphous on the frozen pond, the cable cars barreling into soundless turns, the Irishmen playing handball in front of South Side saloons, the carriages priding out of the livery stables as if a monarch ruled the city instead of a mayor, the river with its drawbridges up, steamers lugging for the open lake, and then the skyline itself held in reserve, almost an afterthought, the camera scanning the sooty perches of terracotta and glass, panning up from the curbstone, jittered and harried, to see the shirtsleeved office managers smoking cigarettes by open windows twenty stories aloft, then back down to the brass doors swinging wide to feed the noonday streets with lunching secretaries. The seamen cheered, drummed the floorboards, recalled the monuments and warrens of their own beloved cities. Out here it was inconceivable that a million people had built their houses and paved their streets in the middle of nowhere, driven pilings into Indian marshland and settled a port a thousand miles from the sea. Owen tried to gauge how Argus and Malini were receiving the filmstock but their faces were concealed by shadow. Malini held the opera glasses a few inches from her face. Suddenly nostalgic, Owen watched the city of his boyhood unfold, a patchwork of street corners and stoops that recalled days spent with his
father's wrecking crew. He wished to see it again for the first time, envied what Argus and Malini might feel as they stepped into the tumult from the rail yards. But would they see the promise and perdition that lurked in every doorway? Or would it be merely a chaotic wall of noise? From this distance he felt a strange kind of tenderness, something familial, for the city. It had taken both his parents, in its way, but now, looking up at the screen, it seemed like his only living relative—an irascible old uncle waiting for him to finally come good.