Bright and Distant Shores (33 page)

From what Malini could see, the men of this distant island all wore hats and the women wore gloves and there were people with black skin selling fruit and carrying tall drinks in shaded gardens. Her eyes feinted over the canvas where the light broke in waves. It was a kava dream. If Melanesians traveled the nightlands in their dreams then the clayskins had found a way to coil their own sleeping visions into a lamplit machine. Argus whispered
Chicago
aloud, repeating it after one of the men, as if it meant something to her, then said
America, America,
then
they are asking us to come
and she had to tell him to hush. It was hard enough to see what was what without his hymn voice. Cliffsides with many windows, the sky a divided blue field in their reflections. High-perched caves of smoking men and everyone walking so quickly in their clothes, almost running between the giant shadows. There were lurching animals everywhere, horses or mules she'd seen in sugarcane photographs, pulling wooden boxes with people huddled inside. So many hats. Where were the gardens? What did they eat? The women traveled in pairs, headdressed in bird feathers, not an inch of skin visible to the sun. She liked the flounce of their skirts and the tidy hair twists and the way the men stood by to watch them pass.

Argus stopped counting after twenty-two church sightings, all of them steepled and most with stained-glass windows and bell towers. This was a city of the devout, a godly keep by an inland sea, and they were being asked to come. He thought through his
conversation with Owen on the foredeck a few hours prior, the suggestion of a proposal in his manner, and felt the wingback chair now as part of that same conversation. Would there be a letter of employment? Was he to be a butler or a ministry houseboy? How many bishops called this city home? He saw himself walking the bitumen streets in leather shoes, an overcoat slung over one arm, saying good morning to pedestrians and eating a green apple. There was a tailored suit in that shimmering future and pinstripes no wider than a hairbreadth. He would teach Malini how to make her way because he was ahead on this front of acting civilized and she would work as a nanny because that is what they called a governess in America. He watched the frozen pond, couples gliding on steel blades across its surface. The canvas seemed to move toward a girl's bright face and she was waving and smiling at Argus, a scarf wrapped around her throat, her breath like mist off a lake, beckoning to him with one hand and the other poised for balance.

Every seaman saw their own beloved in this waving Chicago girl just as the weather turned and the
Cullion
pitched to leeward. Jethro managed to grab the cinématographe before it fell to the floor. The reel shuddered then stopped. The canvas went black. Without the soft pales of projected light, the messroom was all but dark and the men began scrambling to their feet. The swing tables flapped on their hinges. A seaman from the watch appeared in the companionway and called to the captain that the barometer had been plummeting for an hour. “Squall's come up,” he hollered. “Helmsman says he's done his level best not to take any sail off her, just as you ordered, but now this, sir.” Given the heel of the ship, the men falling sideways over each other, this was a little late in coming. Terrapin waited for the gust to subside, the messroom to level out, and gave the order for all hands to wear ship. The sailors heaved themselves off the floor and dashed for the companion ladder.

On deck Terrapin saw a dome of weather hanging low and
malignant, winds gusting from the west at fifty knots, seas already breaking over the lower rail. A wall of rain advanced, fissured by lightning. The darkened fetches of water were churning and the air smelled like iron. Terrapin braced himself against the windward shrouds as the crew scuttled onto the mid and foredeck, shouldering uphill on a pitch, already clambering up the ratlines in their oilskins. The ship was overcanvased and he told the helmsman to head down to ease the tension in the sails. A wave broke over the prow and sent three men sliding across the deck on their backs. As the bark groaned to change course he roared at Mr. Pym to have the men haul down the outer jib and bring down the main and mizzen topgallant staysails.

The seamen grappled with the clewlines and buntlines, the canvas bellying along the yards. Owen worked the foremast with the other port watchmen, helping to stow and clew and brail, one arm cleaved against the drenched Baltic fir. The squall came all at once and he felt cold needles of rain against his face. He could see the bowsprit plunging in and out of the swells and a surge of seawater top the windward rail. He looked below and saw Jethro watching the mayhem from a hinged hatch cover like an Elizabethan stage prompt. With the river of deckwash the open hatchway was an invitation for flooding but there was nothing to be done. Owen took in the rest of the deck—Terrapin skirling beside the helmsman and Argus helping to unravel the sheets from the belaying pins near the mizzen. Terrapin was pointing at the foremast and Owen turned his attention upward where the royal sail was flogging in the wind. His watchmates had failed to furl and gasket it properly and now Dickey Fentress was climbing up the ratlines to stow it. He was nimble in the upper sticks, partly because of his weight, but Owen followed him aloft. There was no way the apprentice could secure it on his own. The bark pitched into a bowl of turbid water and Owen could feel his finger joints loosen against the ratline. As the bark yawed he felt his stomach drop away. He could only climb a few feet at a stint before another
roll forced him to brace the shrouds. Dickey made better ground, edging closer to the unmuzzled sail with its flailing lines and wrenched canvas.

Terrapin pointed beyond the unruly sail to a quadrant of sky that was turning a poisonous green. The
Cullion,
her record unblemished, was sailing at the leading edge of a hurricane front and from the southwest funneled three storm spouts, glimpsed in sheets of lightning, each one a mile high and attached to a separate cloudcap. They were in the offing but the bark was bending in that direction, caught in the eyewall of the storm. Terrapin sent for Argus and his pigskin Bible because he wanted benedictions right beside the binnacle. The seamen could hear the sucking of seawater in the full dark between verses of lightning. The sound terrified them as the greening cloud continued to spawn overhead. Argus scrambled onto the poop with his Bible and started in with Jonah, preaching,
All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep.
Apparently, this was not the kind of comfort the captain had in mind and he yelled to Argus for a hymn instead, something big on hallelujahs. Argus sang about Christian glee and making the Promised Land and that was better. But then the bark refused to be diverted. They were on a broad reach through a wilderness of vapors and wracked cloud, attempting steerage on a helix tide. Terrapin moved to take the wheel, O-mouthed at the wall of oblivion.

Owen trailed Dickey up the foremast. The apprentice was standing on the footline beneath the royal sail that wailed in a fifty-knot gale. He stepped out onto the yard. He shook his head side to side as if he'd taken a punch. His balance was shot. Since setting sail Owen had been waiting for young Dickey to flash to the surface, to stop slouching with the pranksters of the forecastle and this was finally an article of proof. No one had told him to come aloft and repair the shoddiness of his watchmates but here
he was, keeping his head down to avoid the brunt of the royal sail. Neither of them saw the cyclonic front taking its turn. Each man occupied a universe two-foot cubed, a sphere of hemp and handholds. Dickey hauled in one corner of the sail from the head but the tension made his nail beds bleed on contact. He bellied over the yard, face struck with terror as he stared down the hundred-foot sheer drop to the roiling deck. Owen made eye contact with him and yelled for him to wait. It was crazed to attempt to lash the sail on his own. As it was, they might need another three of their watch. Owen made it to the upper yard and edged out along the footline. The weight of his body brought Dickey down from the head of the sail and he saw immediately that the apprentice had soiled himself through. “Pull together!” Owen yelled. Dickey nodded, eyes wide. They each took a fathom of sail and hauled it in. The footline whipsawed and fell back and all the furled sail was let go. Other seamen were climbing aloft; Owen could see them through the wedge of space between his feet.

Then Dickey righted himself, craned up, mouth open. Owen hollered at him to bear down on the sail because he'd seen the swirling clouds in his periphery a moment before, but Dickey blinked and straightened as if all hearing and sense had stripped away. He stared into the underbelly of the clouds. His head tilted back slowly and by degree, as if it were the blue depths of the middle watch and he was drunk on starlight.

Then a trait that was an error of handling—his habit of unlatching a handhold before securing another—expanded in this state of disbelief. He simply drew both hands off the yard and royal and reached for an imaginary line directly in front of his face. For a moment he was stooped, still leaning to counteract the wind, then he was straightening as if getting up from his knees but with his eyes closed against the needling squall. Owen would remember this, an image flashbulbed into the scene, the apprentice's eyes squinting shut against the terror of the fall before he'd even begun his descent. When Dickey fell his hands continued to
rake for the imaginary line, the invisible halyard beyond his grasp, and Owen had the curse of seeing his face as the apprentice fell all the way down to the deck. His arms winged up then buckled out on impact. The watchmates huddled over his rigid form. Owen took out his knife and slashed along the clewlines and buntlines, letting the royal loose in the wind. He climbed down the ratlines and heard the engines rumble to life. Terrapin was trying to force his way out of the eyewall.

When Owen got to the deck, Giles Blunt was holding Dickey across his lap and a pool of seawater was mired with blood. The captain was struggling toward the foredeck, still in his Napoleonic cape, his legs bent and his face ashen. He joined the semicircle of men and saw that the body was threatening to wash overboard. Above the welter, he told Giles to take the corpse below and for the others to continue wearing ship. “I'll burn all the coal we have to get us on the outer edge of this maw, mark me, but I need you to get the canvas reefed and snugged. Dickey will get his hour, I promise you that.” The wind stalled for a moment, as if in sympathy, and Terrapin said gravely, “What day is it? For the log.” The seamen looked at each other, braced to snatch block and mast, and not a single man could recall that it was December 7 in the year 1897.

T
he word
crizzel
passed among the window-washers of the First Equitable. A nineteen-year-old Norwegian named Anders had spent time in a St. Louis glassworks and said it was the proper name for it—an opaque roughness on the surface of the windowpanes. “Clouds its transparency like a filmy eyeball,” he said to the others. “Cheap windows with too much sand and not enough flint. They brought the plates in from Mexico or Canada on account of the American glass combines. No doubt about it.” He was holding forth at the lunchtime gathering of workmen in the sub-basement room they called the cave. It was a staging area for repair work and for storage, but each noontime it was their clubhouse, the head janitor presiding with a metal rod as his scepter of office. They sat on nail kegs and broken chairs and barrels, eating from their tin pails as each man gave his opinion on the topic at hand—evolution, electricity, magnetism, airships, the merits and burdens of marriage, the tariff on tinplate. Today it was the building's imperfections. Subordinate janitors, window-washers, elevator men, steamfitters, gasfitters, electricians, stokers, carpenters, the sign-painter, thirty men who tended every aspect of Hale Gray's colossus. For many of them, the building was a living thing—the pneumatic arteries that carried paper instead of blood, the electricity that passed blue and silent through the thin walls like nervousness in human skin.

The building was fickle, they all agreed. Now that winter was nearly upon them, the windows frosted and jammed and the elevators ran slow on cold mornings. Design flaws, they said. They
knew her like an intimate. The lairs and crannies, the architectural hollows that were a wink from the draftsmen to the workmen, the cavities for smoke breaks and a hand of cards, the hidden nook inside the rooftop clockworks that was just wide enough for a mattress. A fifteen-minute nap, wedged between churning clock gears and the quarter-hour bells, was better than nothing, they all agreed. And since the bells stopped pealing at dusk, a man on the outs with his wife could spend a restful night directly above Hale Gray's office, 350 feet above the dime flophouses of Van Buren.