Bright and Distant Shores (40 page)

“Tell them we have everything on display now,” Owen told Argus.

Argus did so. “They have decided to welcome us as guests.”

“What a relief,” Owen said, sarcastically.

“They have brought the chief for this side of the island.”

Owen looked at the man leaning forward on his haunches— he was taller and older than the others. Owen had wrongly suspected this was a chiefless society, some egalitarian chaos ringed by coral. Perhaps the chief had balked from coming forward earlier because it meant claiming them, bearing responsibility for the vagabonds.

Argus said, “He would like us to drink kava with them.” A moment later, he added, “There is a mission ban on kava so I cannot drink it.”

Nodding at the delegation, Owen said, “Do whatever it takes to make the trade.”

Argus went quiet and stirred the fire.

The chief took out a bundle of dried kava root, removed a stick, and passed it to Owen.

“What do I do?” Owen said, shrugging in self-mockery.

The chief chewed the tip of the root and, after a minute, swilled a stream of dark saliva into a wooden bowl at his side. He handed the carved bowl to Owen and waited for him to do likewise. Owen took the bitter root in his mouth, chewed it to the count of sixty, and trailed a line of nut-brown spittle into the bowl. The taste was about what he expected—woody, bitter, tannic. The roots were handed around and each man spat into the bowl until it was brimming. It was then that Owen realized that
he would be drinking other men's saliva in his new role as sanctioned guest. The bowl came to him and he drank with his eyes closed. Now he could taste the peppery root and the swill of spittle gave it a fermented reek and bite on the tongue. It was akin, he felt sure, to chewing wood from old doors and then sprinkling the mouth with Chinese pepper. He watched Argus take a tepid sip at the rim of the bowl, his jaw set against all heathenry. After several sips Owen felt the dull narcotic rise through his system like a pale balloon. It started with a gelatinous feeling in his legs. He nodded appreciatively and stirred the fire even though it didn't need it. The traders produced clay pipes and began to smoke tobacco. Owen rolled several cigarettes and handed them out. They passed an amused ten minutes watching a clansman try to light his cigarette by the campfire. He singed his dreadlocks and eyebrows.

The Tikalia chief half pidginized something and Argus clarified. “He asked whether you can hear the ocean from your land?”

Owen said, “We have a lake almost as big as an ocean. But we are very far from the true ocean.”

“How far?” the chief asked.

“From here to New Guinea.”

They all considered this in their pipe bowls and in the red eyes of their cigarettes. “What is in between?” the chief asked.

The man's face was smeared with something like kohl and tattooed beneath the eyes—delicate lines of cross-hatching—and in the smoke-filled gloaming Owen thought it looked like fishnet stockings. He could feel the distortion of his own mind in the afterbite of the kava, some kind of playfulness he knew was not native to his mold of thought. He licked his lips, accepted that he had not changed his clothes or bathed in five days, thought briefly and a little guiltily of Jethro in the
Cullion
's hold and how he had led the heir to believe he was coming ashore, all of it passing in an instant, before saying, “Land. Great gardens of beans and corn as tall as a man.”

The chief puckered with amazement. “We belong to the sea,”
he said. “When a man has something on his face we say the seaward cheek or the landward cheek. This is all we know. The tides and the big winds. We can teach you these things.”

Argus said in a quiet voice, “I can teach you gospel songs to help protect the island from hurricanes.” In his inebriated state his pidgin came out with a slight Scottish brogue.

The kinsmen ignored him. They had heard about and dismissed the clayskin god long ago. “We want to know the names.”

Argus said, “This is Owen Graves and I am Argus Niu.”

One of them said, “No. We want to know names of the big-fella's place. We change names depending on the houses we live in and the gardens we work. A man can have ten names during his lifetime. His name changes when his father dies.”

Thus began a brief lesson on Tikalia nomenclature and the rules for naming children. It was places, not people, that bore permanent title. Men belonged to houses and gardens and reefs. Children were named after streams and trailheads. And every Tikalia word sang with embodied meaning so that the word for wheel was itself a sonic revolution—
takiri-karika
. Argus knew the term for this was
onomatopoeia
but kept this recognition to himself. Next came an introductory course on Tikalia obscenities and curses, and the clansmen all agreed that
may your father eat filth
was the best and most flexible form of profanity. They asked Owen to say the names of places he knew and he began with the names of American states and presidents but soon got down to the curbstone poetry of Chicago streets—Adams, Monroe, Jackson, Polk, Van Buren, Madison, La Salle—so many of them named after men of note, ancestors and patriarchs now that he thought of it.

“Do you name your children after the big chiefs?”

“Yes. I know three Madisons and two Monroes.”

They all appraised the dying fire. A few Tikalia legends were offered to the flames at this point, one about the woman who gave birth to an eel, another about the ocean-dwelling ancestors who roamed the seafloor and kept sharks as doglike pets. Owen, still
emboldened by kava, thought of Chicago's finest myths, of the slang fables George Ade put in his newspaper column—
Once upon a Time there was a slim Girl with a Forehead which was Shiny and Protuberant, like a Barlett Pear,
or
Once there was a Bluff whose Long Suit was Glittering Generalities,
or the baseball fan who arrived home every summer evening to tell his wife that the Giants made the Colts look like a lot of Colonial Dames playing Bean Bag in a Weedy Lot back of an Orphan Asylum, and they ought to put a Trained Nurse on Third, and the Dummy at Right needed an Automobile, and the New Man couldn't jump out of a Boat and hit the Water, and the Short-Stop wouldn't be able to pick up a Ball if it was handed to him on a Platter with Water Cress around it . . . Owen knew there was no way to translate any of this. The stuff of city legends was as inscrutable to an outsider as Oriental philosophy.

A moment of silence passed.

The chief said, “Are those all your goods or do you have more in the big canoe? When is it coming back for you?”

“In two days. This is all we have to trade. From here we are going home.”

“To the land with the lake as big as an ocean?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have things from other islands?”

“Yes. Weapons and handicrafts.”

The chief said, “We need more feathers for making weapons for other islands. The long-tails have killed many of our birds and they have stopped flying here. Rats or birds. This is the choice we have.”

“We can get you more feathers,” Owen said. He was thinking of Jethro's dead-bird aviary in the orlop.

“And the kanaka. Is he going back to the lake? His tribal scar says he is Poumetan. One of the great canoe voyagers and our cousin.”

Owen nodded. The Tikalia looked at Argus's shark-toothed wrist and then at his face with a mix of admiration and pity.

The chief gestured to one of the men to bring forward a woven
saddlebag. It was set beside the chief and he produced a rusting typewriter and laid it on the sand. A sheaf of papers was produced and a list of typed names. From what Owen could tell it was the names of visiting and wrecked ships, their crew itemized, some with an
X
beside their Christian names.

“Who typed these?” Owen asked, pointing to the
X
's.

The chief ignored him as if this were a rhetorical question. “I want you to masin the names in my clan. The chiefs of the island and also the garden and house names.” He moved the typewriter toward Owen and stood, preparing to dictate his lineage. Owen wondered what use a genealogy of typed names was to tribesmen who couldn't read but nonetheless complied. He took the typewriter in his lap and began to hunt and peck his way through an incantation of chiefs and dwellings, the ribbon dull and powdery with old ink, the headman circling the fire with his hands behind his back. The others corrected him if he misspoke or skipped a generation. Argus looked on, slightly appalled that Owen didn't know how to play the typewriter keys the way the Reverend Mister had taught him. Owen's fingers halted across the keys.

After an hour and six typed pages, the chief told the other clansmen to fetch the horse and bring it forward. The mare hobbled over and lay again in the sand, its eyes filmed with cataract. It was breathing heavily, ringed by cats. If they thought he was going to trade for this decrepit animal they were sadly mistaken. Surely the gift of recorded genealogy was worth something. He was just about to have Argus convey this idea when the chief said, “We have been keeping one of your gods for you.”

Owen double-checked the translation. The chief squatted to caress the haggard mare on the flank. “Many years ago the animal swam ashore after a shipwreck. We did not know the word
horse
then and called her the
big hog
. Now we know. We have kept her beautiful and fed her but she is old and of no use to us. She is worse than a dog and it's time you took her away. We will give you everything on the barkcloth in return for your goods and if you will
take the animal from this place. We think the horse god is ready to die and it will be bad luck for her to become a ghost here. We have poured the kava libations to the ancestors and asked for this.”

Owen saw that the typewritten names and the ferrying of the horse were the real asking price. The traders had little interest in what he'd assembled on the tarpaulin. They wanted some feathers for fletching and little else. He told Argus to agree to the terms of trade but insisted on walking them through his inventory. As the traders loaded their woven bags with zinc pails and snuff boxes and rifles, with a hundred trinkets and tools, he told them that the kerosene lanterns would draw many more flying fish from the waters at night. They nodded politely, said they'd already tried this but ran out of fuel, and took their leave. They packed their typewriter in its bag and left the god-horse on the beachhead in the custody of their welcomed guests. For a full fifteen minutes Owen ran his fingers over the bartered goods, taking inventory of his boon through the eyes of Hale Gray, keeping the thought of removing the horse from the island as distant as possible. Terrapin's gall at having to transport a glue horse would be a revelation. Finally he turned and saw the mare strain to its feet, saw the whites of its walled eyes in the moonlit night, then watched it follow in the direction of the vanished kinsmen. Argus followed behind and led it back by the fire. They tethered it in a copse of trees where it could feed on tufted grasses, but the animal brayed all night like a god bereft of worship.

I
t was dusk already and Jethro—still fuming from being left on the ship—came into the apprentice quarters to finish out the workday. He'd spent most of the daylight mounting insects and reading about the fertilization of orchids in the orlop. But the fug below had made him qualmish and he'd come above in search of fresh air. He opened the cabin porthole and spread his books and blotting paper on his iron cot. He lit the slush lamp and it rocked and swayed with a jaundiced flame. He tried to pin a brown beetle but, after three attempts, pricked his snakebitten finger so that a dot of blood broke to the surface. He punched the wall in a burst of anger and momentarily enjoyed the camouflaging pain in his left fist before the finger reasserted itself. His mind was not right. The taste of sulfur and iron was the first indication that he'd placed his bloody finger in his mouth. He thought he could taste the poison. He turned back to his woefully pinned beetles. How could any naturalist be an expert in ornithology, entomology, conchology, and all the rest of it? He was a dabbler at best, he thought. A tourist of the sciences and arts. Where was that resolute self he'd glimpsed in the early days of passage? The poems of ascent. Did every man come to sea in search of some figment?

The Karlsbad pins were too long and flimsy—German skewers where an English short pin was required. And anyway, when pinned through the thorax of a Hymenoptera specimen—an ant, wasp, or bee—the pins were eventually overcome by verdigris, corroding with the secretion of the insect's bodily acids. Or maybe it was Coleoptera and Diptera specimens that turned
the pins gangrenous. If only he'd brought along short, japanned pins for this particular use. His preparations now seemed hasty. At least he'd had the foresight to visit a Chicago tinsmith and commission field containers of various dimensions. This ensured the separation of insects by size and species; otherwise the bigger ones devoured the smaller ones within hours. And he'd taken the time to make a cyanide bottle, which he picked up now, removing the cork. The ingenuity of this killing device could not be overestimated—a two-ounce quinine bottle with cyanide of potassium in the bottom and mixed with plaster of Paris. The word
Paris
made him think of organdy ribbons and bunting and he imagined for a second that cyanide had penetrated his body via the pinpricked finger, saw a flashing vision of his own sea burial, then somehow thought of Keats writing tubercular poetry in Rome, before the briny taste of his own blood brought him back to the cabin. He removed his finger from his mouth and held a vibrating honeybee with a pair of tweezers. He placed it slowly into the cyanide chamber. If you left them in the bottle too long the yellows of the Hymenoptera turned reddish and were ruined for the display case.

Through his open porthole he heard the seamen on watch talking about their exploits with women. The mating habits of hominids, he thought. Harvey McCallister, with his brawny shoulders and clipped Irish accent, was talking up a sexual typhoon. The recounting of bestial acts on foreign shores. Coital plunder north and south of the Line. The ravaged divas of Asia Minor and so on. Jethro remembered the surprise in Harvey's eyes as he'd socked him in the jaw, sending him to the planks; he would have liked to frame that incredulous grimace behind glass. He set the insects and blotting paper aside and turned to Darwin's
The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects
. But instead of being a distraction from the escalating bawdiness outside his porthole it seemed to augment the general slant of talk. Darwin sometimes gave over to botanical descriptions verging on
the sexual; more than pithy aphorisms and the refrain of
Nature's beautiful contrivances,
he spoke of the orchid's surging labellum with its secretions of nectar, of the way the flower courted flying insects and trapped them in its darkly folded lips.