Beautiful Wild

by Anna Godbersen

  “Fitzhugh thought it best to go now. There may still be Farrar boats out looking for us.”

  “Oh . . .” A darkness welled inside her. Of course she knew that it was perfectly logical—if she was going to spend the winter by a fireplace in Manhattan with Fitzhugh, then someone was going to have to go for help soon. It was so frightening, the idea of Fitz or anybody going back out to sea. But really Fitz, who she had only just begun to know. She glanced up at the sky helplessly. It was then that she lost her footing. One foot skidded, the other twisted miserably. She fell, rolled, found herself half hanging from the cliff. “Oh!” she exclaimed, as she clung to the rocky edge with stinging hands.

  “I have you,” Sal said, grabbing her by the arms. “I have you.”

  He said so, and only then did she believe him. The rest of her was dangling over the rocks, the water below, but he had her arms firmly. Weirdly, he was smiling.

  “Why are you smiling?” she demanded.

  “Your face—it’s different when you’re afraid.”

  “I almost fell to my death!” she exclaimed. Her heart skipped. “I still could,” she whispered, sensing the open air beneath her feet.

  “No. We’re almost to the beach now. It’s only a ten-foot drop. At worst you’d break your ankle.”

  “I’d rather not,” she said, and with a strong pull he brought her up. She kicked at the edge, pushed with her feet, and felt the solid earth beneath her. Beside Sal again, she thought to tell him he should not be so cavalier about her ankles. She had almost found the words. Then she noticed how her fall had knocked the earth way—it was loose, precarious, dirt and rocks scattering beneath them, beginning to give way. She scrambled back without thinking. Meanwhile Sal went on crouching above that unreliable earth. Before she could say anything, it began to crumble and give way. His face was perfectly calm, not even really surprised, as he fell.

  One moment he was right next to her, the next he was going down.

  It was true what he had said—it was only a ten-foot drop. But when he hit the rock below he cried out in shock and pain.

  “Are you all right?” she called to him.

  “Yes.” But he didn’t sound all right.

  “I’m coming down to help you,” she called.

  “No.” He shook his head and met her eye. “Fitzhugh wouldn’t like it. Go back, before they know we’re out here together.”

  She was afraid that the cliff would give under her as well. Sal’s dark eyes met hers, and she saw he was serious. He hadn’t seemed to care about propriety before, and she was struck by the oddness of him caring now. He was in pain—she’d heard it in his voice—but his face suggested he was afraid of something else.

  In any case, he was right. With a strange reluctance in her heart she made her way back to the camp, where the others were just now waking up.

  Eighteen

  Without learning of the kiss in any explicit way, the people of Farrar Island (as the men were calling it), knew something had occurred between Vida and Fitz. They knew that despite their tragic circumstances they were witness to what was sure to become one of the great love stories of their time. And because they, like all people, are fed love stories from their earliest consciousness, they understood that matters could not proceed smoothly from this moment. They, like Vida, wondered what the setback would be, how the lovers might be separated so that all could work out happily in the end.

  The morning after Fitzhugh romanced Vida in front of everybody, all the survivors wondered how those setbacks, that happy ending, would be accomplished. But by afternoon they had an answer.

  The rigged-up boat had been moved from the forest to the beach. It rested on the shore, gleaming, magical. The green mystery of the island as backdrop, and the shifting, glittering blue chop waiting to welcome it back to sea. The boat was like all of them, now: half-built in the manner of the world of civilized men (factory smooth, painted, adorned with the names of ports and shipping concerns); and half-built from scraps (tied together with who knows what, and rather beautiful in its wildness). Vida was like that, too, with her corset and her bun, her tangled wisps of hair, the freckled skin of her face so unpainted it was hard for her to imagine it.

  In this curious fashion she was not alone. Those thirty or so bodies wore the clothing that had defined them in their old lives, but it was torn, held together with rope. They were barefoot, their appearance roughed, hardened, embellished by the elements. Fitzhugh summoned them and they gathered, in their ripped, sun-bleached, mud-stained finery. They listened as he spoke of his mission. And she understood, by his grave tone and their intent listening, that the happy hours when she knew he had chosen her, just last night, were almost over.

  The signs his love was real were numerous:

  He had appeared at her hut that morning to inquire about her rest and to present her with a bouquet of pink flowers.

  His eyes had sought hers throughout those first hours, a silent language of yearning and communion that she had spoken fluently in her old life.

  He had told her about their boat, their mission, before anyone else.

  And when he gathered them around the boat, he held her gaze as though waiting for her approval, and it was not until she gave him a dip of the chin that he began to speak.

  “My friends,” he began. “You have all been very brave. I and my family are responsible for your safety and we have failed you. But I hope that we may be redeemed in your eyes. I have traveled the Amazon and trekked the Himalayas. I have never begun such journeys without trepidation, and today is no different. But I have never undertaken a more important mission than the one I shall set out on today. I can think of no more solemn duty than my duty to bring you home, back to your lives, to your loved ones. Luckily,” and here, Vida noticed, he left off his serious voice, and employed the dimple and the eye twinkle that she couldn’t help but find charming, “I have some experience navigating what others have proclaimed impossible.”

  Vida’s eyes shone. Her heart smiled to see him like this, to see his ability to rouse and reassure a crowd. For the first time she thought it was a little lucky after all that their story should have brought them here. For otherwise how could she have known how right she had been, what a worthy specimen he was?

  “The wind is good today,” he proclaimed. “It will carry us quickly away from the reefs that surround this island, and will, we hope, bring us swiftly into the path of a ship, if not all the way to the islands that were our original destination.”

  “What will you eat?” asked Peter, the eldest of the children.

  “We have packed coconut meat, dried seaweed, dried fruits. We have stored water in coconut husks, and we hope to be able to fish in the open ocean. But we will be hungry, we will be thirsty—this we know. It won’t be an easy passage.”

  “Can I come with you?” asked Peter.

  Fitzhugh knelt, so the boy stood above him, and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You’re very brave, aren’t you?”

  “I want to see my father.”

  “Yes, I want you to see your father, too. But you must look after your mother and your sister, do you understand? And then, when we return in a bigger, sturdier ship, I will personally deliver your father the message of how brave you were here.”

  The boy straightened and saluted Fitzhugh.

  “That’s a good sailor,” Fitzhugh said, rising to his feet. “In my absence, my man Sal will be first in command, and young Peter shall be his lieutenant.”

  The laugh of derision surprised them all, and they glanced at Sal, sitting on the sand, elbows on knees, a bit apart from the rest. “I should be with you,” Sal declared, not breaking his gaze from the ocean. He threw a pebble in the direction of the water. She had avoided him since their trek to see the sunrise. She had not noticed he was not preparing the boat with the others, that he was gloomy.

  “You’re injured,” Fitzhugh said. “It could jeopardize us all if we meet weather.”

  “I told you
,” Sal said, “there is sure to be weather. Anyway, you don’t know how to read the stars.”

  “Sal, I have been navigating the world by maps all my life; if anyone can find his way in the unknown, it is me.”

  Sal glanced up, shielded his eyes from the blazing sun. “There is no map for the ocean.”

  “I can read the stars a little,” Fitzhugh added, almost as an afterthought.

  Vida’s eyes darted from Fitz to his man. She was mystified by this quarrel, and more so by the contradictory feelings it aroused in her. For all that morning her heart had sung a plaintive song of wanting this new association between her and the Farrar scion to continue for all to see, with the romantic gestures and escalating intimacies that were the familiar signposts on the road to an engagement.

  But at the same time there was that (strangely satisfying) sting of irritation. The way she’d felt watching the sun come up, and when Sal had pulled her to safety when she fell.

  “The wind is good today,” Fitz called to Sal.

  The tone of his voice said that it had all been decided. The two most senior members of the Princess crew, George and Seamus, lifted the boat up and carried it down to the water. Poor Jack had not been chosen for the crew (though he wore a brave face). It was Henry Dries Stahl who went in Sal’s place, trailing rather uselessly as they labored to bring the hull beyond risk of rocks. The whole band of survivors went with them into the waves, up to their waists in it. The tide was strong, pulling the bark out into the unknown. The wind pressed their shirts to their backs, pulled their hair to the west.

  “Wish us luck!” Fitzhugh cried.

  The waves crashed in, but the human sounds were louder.

  “Good luck!”

  “Bon voyage!”

  “Viva Farrar!”

  Fitzhugh was the last of the men to jump aboard. He stood before Vida, the water dense and swaying between them. She felt what he wanted to do. He wanted to take her by the waist and kiss her once before he went. He couldn’t, though. Not in front of anyone. It would be a scandal, and possibly a bad omen.

  “I’ll be back for you,” he said. His gaze had that strange opaqueness that was sincerity mixed with desire. Then his serious façade cracked, she saw his most charming smile, and he said: “You and I have unfinished business.”

  He shoved the boat once more, and swung his legs over its rail. For a moment he had the appearance of a sailor in a heroic painting, the light hitting him just so as he cut a dashing figure against a magnificent seascape. Then the wind filled the sail and the boat flew into the open ocean and he became a miniature. In a few minutes she could make out no detail of him at all, just the silhouette of the little bark against the endless horizon.

  The tide gripped her skirt, which was still heavy despite the layer she had given up last night in the grove. When she turned and tried to make her way back she felt how the ocean tugged at her body. As she dragged herself and the once-fine skirt from the water and onto the beach she heard a growl that seemed to come from above. Over the high green hills of the interior the sky was a dense gray. She saw a brief, pale yellow iridescence. The breeze cooled the tip of her nose, her earlobes. Then all was tranquil, warm, lapping waves again. Sal was staring at her, and she stared back to show him. She knew she looked afraid, but she tried to square her shoulders, prove it was not him she was afraid of.

  He and Fitz had had their little skirmish and Fitz had triumphed. She had triumphed. She had sent her man out to bring back the glorious finale of their love story. But Sal did not look away, and Vida realized this pettiness was a poor match for a day of such consequence in the great scheme of her life.

  She revolved to have a final look at Fitzhugh. But she could make out nothing but the endless Pacific.

  He was gone.

  Nineteen

  The afternoon brought a spectacular sky streaked with peach and robin’s-egg blue. It was a perfect match to Vida’s inner landscape. She was full of pleasant fantasies. As she gathered firewood, as she ripped the leaves from the spines of palm fronds and weaved them into new mats, her mind turned again and again to the man she was sure to be betrothed to by New Year’s. She imagined Fitzhugh and his two sailors masterfully steering their boat over big, gentle waves.

  Perhaps right now, at just this moment, he was swimming in the open ocean, catching a fish with his strong, bare hands. Perhaps he had just sighted a big boat, and his men were ferociously rowing toward it. Perhaps they were being lifted up to the high deck of a sugar company’s cargo ship. Perhaps he had already wired Mother and Father to tell them that Vida was alive and well with the others, and that she would be coming home soon. (For everything was going so well—surely her worst fears were false, surely her parents had survived the wreck.)

  Perhaps he couldn’t wait. Perhaps he went right ahead and asked Vida’s father for her hand in marriage.

  But that was stupid, wasn’t it? Father and Mother would be in Honolulu, waiting for her safe return. In which case, how would he ever guess where to wire them? Or would they have returned home? And if they had returned home, why would they have done that?

  Vida knew the answer to that one.

  If they had returned home, it would be to bury Vida. To have a funeral without a body for the girl they had raised to be a lady, but who couldn’t control herself, who wanted too much and made a spectacle of herself trying to get it, and had thus put them all in danger.

  Vida laid down the mat she was weaving and frowned at her theoretical death.

  That it was the imaginary conclusion to an imaginary saga comforted her none at all.

  The fantasy of her demise sobered her as though it were real. She glanced up at her surroundings, wanting some reassurance that she was still here, that she was still alive. That was when she noticed how the waves moved in a crazy pattern—now to the left, now to the right. They were all white on top like snowy peaks. She became aware, too, of her physical self, which she had quite forgotten in her daydreaming.

  How hot her face was, how the sweat sprang from the delicate skin above her lip, under her chin, at the back of her neck. How her hair frizzed where it had gotten loose from the knot at the nape of her neck.

  The air seemed as overheated and significant as in a ballroom when everyone has been dancing, and glancing over their shoulders to see who else is dancing; when everyone is looking their very best, and it is difficult to choose one person it would be most pleasurable to sit next to. The atmosphere was heavy, and she was restless. She stood and went to the place on the beach where Sal still sat gazing out.

  “Fine weather, isn’t it?” she asked.

  He nodded in a way that did not signify agreement. “‘Fine’ is a funny word, don’t you think?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “People like you use it carelessly to describe anything that you admire. What you mean is that it is refined, or that it is like finery. But how can you say weather is fine? Weather is so much larger than whatever you perceive of it from a picture window in your overbuilt cities. Weather is a beast. Perhaps it is magnificent. Perhaps it has an awesome sort of beauty. It is almost never fine.”

  “Thank you for the lecture. I didn’t know you were such a scholar.”

  “I am not a scholar, but I have listened to nonsense from people like you all my life.”

  Vida had to smile at that. “It gladdens me to hear you talk this way. When you talk this way I know you are telling the truth. I know where I stand. But when I say fine weather, I am talking about a clear blue sky and a sweet breeze. I am talking about the kind of weather that is perfect for a stroll. Or a sail.”

  Now he raised his dark gaze to her. “Then this is definitely not fine weather,” he replied. Her back straightened when she heard his tone. “It’s no day for a sail.”

  An odd thought occurred to her, which was that Sal—who had in the span of a few weeks caused her such a wild range of irritations—had once been a child. This tall, lean young man, with his skewed feature
s and his long lashes, with his absolute inability to adhere to the rules of decorum and polite behavior, had a history all his own. With Fitzhugh, this was rather obvious. One could not meet him without knowing he’d once worn little suits of velvet, and posed for photographers against elaborately painted backdrops. The story of his life, from his charmed birth to his brave exploits and his rakish adventures of the heart, was whispered about and written of and depicted in newspaper illustrations. But Sal she knew nothing about.

  “What could you possibly be thinking with an expression like that?” he asked.

  She had the strange impulse to tell him. But before she could, a fat raindrop splatted against her forehead.

  Sal saw it, too, and was on his feet. A bolt of pain flashed across his face.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “That’s rain,” he replied. “It’s about to pour.”

  “I meant your ankle.” She hadn’t noticed how bad his injury was, the terribly bluish stain under the skin, how different in size one ankle was from the other.

  “I know, it’s gotten worse since this morning,” he answered. “I was worried about you, and I fell wrong, and it keeps swelling in the heat.”

  This morning seemed so long ago. “Oh,” she said witlessly.

  “Come on,” he urged her, but when he put his weight on the bulbous foot again, his face crumpled with pain and he made a sound she’d never heard him make before.

  “You can’t walk on that,” she gasped. “How have you been getting around?”

  “Hopping.” He laughed, but laughing seemed to hurt him, too.

  “Here.” Before she could think how it would look, she’d wrapped his arm around her shoulder, put her arm around his waist.

  Thus entangled they made their way up the beach.

  At first the raindrops were like the first one—large and heavy, but occasional. By the time they had reached the shelters, it was impossible to identify one drop from another. The light had changed. In a few minutes the world had gone dark. She could hear the shouting of the others over the wind, saw them flocking toward the huts at the top of the beach, the rain blown sideways by the wind. The drops accumulated, became a torrent that soaked through their clothes and blinded Vida as she and Sal hobbled under the first thatched roof they reached.