Bright and Distant Shores (36 page)

Harvey McCallister hollowed his cheeks and made a sucking sound through his teeth. “Tough son of a bitch, that Erasmus.”

The others agreed.

Argus did not encourage the blasphemy with a glance. He continued, “His teeth were plucked out of his head with iron pincers and they carded his skin with metal rods and roasted him upon a gridiron.”

“Sounds a little like sailing round the Horn,” a veteran offered.

“But the angels saved him in the end,” Argus said. “Some scripture books say he went to Mount Lebanon and survived on what the ravens brought him to eat but Reverend Mister used to end the story with the holy man having his intestines stripped out and wrapped around a windlass. Reverend Mister Underwood didn't like happy endings.”

“And he protects all men at sea?” asked one of them, suddenly earnest and rum-flushed.

“Yes,” said Argus. “He also looks out for colicky babies and women in labor and old men with rotgut, which is why the Reverend Mister knew all his woes. Stomach of sulfur and pitch is what he used to say when he had the Johnny-trots. One time I heard him praying to St. Elmo when he was resting a long time in the outhouse.”

This got a big laugh and the men craned up at the flaring masts with more wonder now than fear.

In the days that followed, the cloud dome broke apart and the wind freshened. Terrapin confirmed by sextant what they had all suspected—that they were back in the Doldrums and had drifted badly off course. The island of Tikalia, a cashew-shaped spit of land on the charts, was two hundred miles to the southeast. With Terrapin's bonus hitched to the final leg of trade, the captain agreed to head south for the island. Besides, Owen suspected the captain didn't want to part with Malini anytime soon. They ate dinner together at night in the stateroom and she had begun to laugh at his ribald jokes. The
Cullion
came about and headed south and Terrapin told Owen that he would anchor no more than three days at Tikalia.

“And then we'll engine back directly?” asked Owen. The need to head south again reminded him that he was failing Adelaide in her hour of need.

“Last time I checked, the hatch was full of coal and the engines were greased-up nice. We can trot through the unwinded Doldrums and Horse Latitudes like a bitch in heat if you give the word. Mind you, we're in full hurricane season now so we take our chances. Only madmen and pirates are out here this time of year. Coal by the yard is the contractual arrangement for reimbursement, I believe.”

Owen turned to descend from the poop.

“And Mr. Graves, there will be no more savages coming aboard. Two is plenty with all the menace they might bring upon us. Heaven forbid if one of them gets sick. I know these people and I know my maritime jurisdiction. I should have been informed from the outset what was intended.”

“My apologies.”

“Well, the skyscraper magnate will have to be satisfied with the brother and kanaka princess. Understood?”

“Of course.”

Owen left the captain and went to take inventory of the remaining trade items. He'd already justified that two natives was a lesser crime than a whole family, but wondered if he might have erred without the captain's edict. Would he have been tempted to find others on Tikalia? He stood at the rail for a moment, watching the bark ply through the swells, the men singing overhead. He remembered his father, swallowed by debt, a man so burdened by the past that he could speak only of the present, of meals and weather. The kissed fingers that touched the daguerreotyped wife on the way out the door each day—this was the only gesture toward the wreckage that lay behind them. They lived in a bare room on the South Side, their clothes in packing crates. They lived, it seemed to him now, as if they had just emerged from a burning teardown and were expecting the same calamity to befall them at any moment. He knew where his material hunger came from. And not just for objects or money, but for respect, acknowledgment, a foothold. He was a gambler making a calculated bet—that the potential yield on Tikalia was worth the risks, that the delay would mean nothing to Adelaide in the long run, that two natives could be brought to America and safely returned. He would fill his children's mouths with food from his own endeavors, at the very least. He understood that the bet had been placed some time ago; he was merely waiting for the cards to be turned over. He pushed off the rail and headed toward the foredeck.

He found Argus and took him on a tour of the bark, scouring for trade items, for objects that would strike the tribal fancy. Argus had showed him how to see the second life within an object, how a candle or mirror held more value if it could be traded as sorcery as well as for illumination and reflection. They walked all over the ship, from the underworld of dank compartments to the painted deckhouses. They stood in the orlop, Jethro somewhere above, and stared at the Bausch & Lomb microscope with something that could only be described as object-lust.

“He would never let us have it,” Owen said. “Even if we paid what it was worth.”

“No matter. If the Tikalia thought their seawater was swimming with invisible animals all the time they might give up fishing and live in the jungle forever.”

For now, they left the brass instrument and continued to forage for trade currency throughout the bark, begging and buying trinkets from the seamen and the idlers.

They tacked for three days across a southeasterly headwind, the air swinging north in short, turbulent bursts. Fifty miles from Tikalia, the skies turned crystalline and china blue, a rarity for this zone of sail and time of year. With the winds bearing fifteen knots and the
Cullion
on a close reach, one of the men in the high rigging sighted another ship. Terrapin took up his spyglass and winced. It was an iron-hulled clipper uncanvased down to the lower topgallants, dragging fathoms of seaweed from her stern, the mainsails torn and billowed to rags. She lacked steerageway, idled to leeward. A drowsy strip of white smoke came from the foredeck. Terrapin told Mr. Pym to bring her abeam and the
Cul-lion
headed down. The seamen crowded at the bulwarks, already speculating about the ship's predicament: that she'd been pillaged by murderous Algerines, or quarantined on account of some tropical malaise—never mind the lack of white flags—or the cannibals of Tikalia had stocked their bamboo larders and sent the empty brig out into the voided ocean.

Owen and Argus waited at the rail with the rest of them as the broadside of the
Stately Hope
edged closer. They secured lines and boathooks to steady her prow, turning her into the wind, back-winding what was left of the ragged jibsails. Terrapin came down onto the quarterdeck. He said the sight of the unmanned ship made him nervous and he suspected the mariners lay in the hold with their throats slit or their tongues bloated white with pox. The clipper eased up into the wind, the
Cullion
's hull flush
and groaning beside it. The white smoke continued to draw up from the forehatch.

Terrapin knotted a kerchief around his mouth and nose and prepared to board. He asked the second mate to join him and they began to climb onto the bulwarks. There were captains who sent their seamen on errands such as this, but Terrapin prided himself on having come to the stateroom with calluses on his hands. Owen volunteered to join them. One leg over the side, Terrapin stopped short. They all felt the heat rising from the
Stately Hope
's hull. The captain crouched down and placed a palm close to the ironclad siding. Straightening and casting his eyes amidships, he said, “She's on slow fire from the coal inside her guts. The whale-boats and dinghies are gone.”

The seamen held out their hands to the iron hull as if warming themselves by a hearth.

Terrapin said, “Flares deep down in the cargo bay is my estimation. Probably carrying her cargo from Sydney to South America when it caught. Coal will rumble along for months sometimes. Captain and crew must have abandoned ship too soon and let her drift. They panicked because they left most of her sails up. Poor bastards might have rowed to Antarctica by now. She's so fuckin hot I bet she glows at night. You could cook omelets on that skillet of a hull. They couldn't take it no more.”

“What should we do, sir?” asked Mr. Pym.

“Let her drift. She'll end up beached or reefed somewhere or maybe the coal will burn a hole straight through her crotch. Release at your leisure, Mr. Pym.”

“Shouldn't we make sure that no one is left on board?” asked Jethro, emerging from the group of men with sudden indignation.

“Be my guest,” said Terrapin. “I have all the information I need to know that not a living soul is on that smoldering scow. Mind you don't burn your slippers when you clamber aboard, lovelace.”

The men scoffed at the suggestion of boarding the smoking brig.

Owen said, “He's right. We should make sure no one is left aboard.” It was the right thing to do, the moral thing, but he was also aware of a thought running parallel—that the ship was filled with left-behind trinkets if all the men had abandoned ship. Couldn't an action be both moral and expedient? “I'll go along with him.”

“And me as well,” said Argus.

Owen added, “There might be provisions we could use.”

Terrapin formed a big, sarcastic grin before turning for the charthouse. “Let me know if you find any victims or rheumy wayfellows, gentlemen. I reckon they might have a spot of fever by this point.”

Owen steadied a plank between the two decks and asked one of the men to hold it. He balanced his way forward, followed by Argus and finally Jethro, arms out like a tightrope walker. The smell of charcoal was overpowering and they felt the heat through their boots. It had once been an elegant ship—carved bulwarks and flemishes on the coiled lines, oiled timberheads, the deckhouses painted and trimmed in oyster-white. All of it now in varying degrees of spoil. They walked toward the smoking forehatch and Owen told them not to touch it. “If you let the outside air in there the whole thing will blow. There might be fifty thousand pounds of coal down there.” They entered the forecastle and saw the abandoned iron bunks and the sailors' lockboxes unhinged. Whatever could be grabbed had been taken en route to the whaleboats, but countless personal items remained—nickel shaving dishes, decks of cards, birthday telegrams, coins, framed photographs of wives and children, pocket-knives, compasses, journals, monogrammed handkerchiefs, ditty bags with needle and thread. Owen told Argus to load it all into a pillowcase.

Jethro turned and looked at him. “Stealing from the dead?”

“They might not be dead,” said Owen. “But they won't be coming back for any of this.”

“All the same,” Jethro said, blinking.

“Are you going to lecture me on proper conduct? After all I've seen you do on this trip?”

Jethro stooped through the forecastle doorway in reply.

They continued to the main hatchway and climbed down into the tween decks and the hold. The farther they penetrated the hotter it became. They wended through the companionways, the berths and cabins like smoldering wooden grottoes. They found the armory, its metal doors flung wide and empty down to the last cartridge. In the galley a pot of ancient coffee sat blackened and smoking on the swing table, the air so stifling that the paint was beginning to flake off the walls. They retreated deckside to approach the captain's stateroom from above, glimpsing the room first through its brass-framed skylight as if looking down into a murky, frozen pond. They went below and came through the companionway. Inside, it was the kind of master's cabin Owen had imagined all those years ago, standing mesmerized in the stacks of the public library—a pilastered bed, scrollwork on the maple walls, maps of antiquity hanging above the massive, iron-legged desk. In the extreme aft, a pair of French doors opened onto a balcony that cantilevered above the gudgeon and stern-piece. Through the doorway, Owen could see the clipper's errant wake written across the sea, a veering, undulant line.

Inside, the captain's orderly possessions were relatively unscathed by the heat—being as far from the forehatch as the ship's length would allow—except for an uncorked bottle of blue ink giving off a cloud of vapors. Owen opened a mahogany armoire, a nag's head carved into its crown, and saw two sets of clothing—the captain's jackets and trousers, but also a number of frocks and blouses. Either the captain had a secret or his wife had been aboard. It was a hen frigate. Owen looked around the cabin for feminine adornments and saw empty vases and china
figurines, could feel the marriage battle that had played out in the weave of the rug and the tasseled bedspread. It was clear that no one had won the battle decisively because the décor remained democratic, hedging between masculine browns and lacy, effeminate fringes. The thought of a woman fleeing the burning ship changed the clipper's predicament in his mind. It struck him now as sadder somehow, more poignant. There was a Japanese parasol hanging forlornly from the hat stand, its rice paper edges curling from the heat. To lift his mood, he imagined Adelaide rocking gently in her sleep under a stateroom skylight, saw her waking beside him to watch the stars dot westward. He wondered if she would ever come aboard a ship. He told Argus to load whatever he could manage from the stateroom and they came back out onto the deck, their arms laden with clothes and their pockets full of foreign coins and porcelain dogs. Jethro was made to carry his share and he almost toppled into the swells as he wobbled back across the plank-bridge between the ships. He managed to drop several items, so that when Owen crossed he looked down to see a flotsam of ladies' undergarments and loose-leaf papers floating among the dredge of seaweed.

W
here does night come from? Why do marsupials sleep in caves? Why do women no longer have beards? These were among the riddles of Poumetan mythology, the stories woven into Argus's childhood memory. Every myth began with
long, long ago
and ended with
this is how it came to be
. The stories about their distant cousins, the Tikalia, were no different. Long, long ago, there were two brothers and their two wives. All were banished and went to sea. They paddled a single-hulled canoe for many weeks but no other island would take them in. They paddled a month more and finally reached an island so remote it was uninhabited and bore no name. They called it Tikalia, the Poumetan word for
far away,
and built bamboo huts on the white beach. There were limestone mountains that rimmed a deep lake and freshwater eels with eyes that glowed at night. Food was so abundant, and the needs of the four so basic, that mangos and coconuts rotted where they fell. Bonito fish schooled into the shallows along the coastline and allowed themselves to be caught with bare hands. Wild pigs slept on the beach at night and were easily killed. Because the outcasts didn't need to work for their food, they began making bark paintings and music, necklaces and babies. Soon there was an entire village of people who had rarely hunted but knew how to make tortoiseshell armlets and bamboo panpipes.