Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  A tank was fashioned from a sail in one of the gangways, and filled with seawater to the depth of a fathom. Above this a ladder led up to an extempore stage with the “shavers” upon it. These cut-throats ran from side to side, brandishing their “razors,” a rusty assortment of old cutlasses and gutting knives. One by one we novices were brought up, still blindfold, and presented to Poseidon. You then felt rough hands upon you, a nauseating gust of smelling salts, a lather of soapsuds in the face and over the body—not neglecting ears and groin—and a tumbling backwards off the platform into the tank for many duckings by Neptune’s fearsome retinue. A final squirt from the fire hose, and all were pronounced shorn, washed, and enrolled in the brotherhood of the Seven Seas.

  The Princes were not spared at all by the rough sovereigns of the deep. Indeed, I heard afterwards from Dalton that their handling had been tougher than mine, which he thought all to the good, especially in Eddy’s case.

  These light-hearted rites were destined to be soon forgotten. On the very next day a man fell to his death from the fore-topsail yard.

  As is customary, the Captain and whole ships company assembled, bareheaded, the white ensign at half mast. At sunset the body of the fallen man was carried by his messmates for a last turn of the deck beneath a Union Jack, then sent to the bottom in his hammock freighted with a cannon ball.

  On the following day another man fell overboard, from the flagship. She hove to and lowered a boat, but he could not be found.

  Thus began the ill fortune that seemed to shadow Bacchante, and to which Prince George alluded on my visit to London two years ago when he called her an unlucky ship. I remember how these mens deaths affected him at the time; I saw his slight figure bent over the gunroom table, inking a black border on his diary page. How Eddy responded, or if he did, I do not recall.

  It was as if the bright pageant of the Line, believed by sailors to bring luck, was but a bitter parody, heralding storm-clouds of misfortune. Murmurings were soon heard among the men: Neptune had taken two of us; perhaps it was not he but Death who was ushering us into southern seas.

  Seven

  TAHITI

  Arue Women’s Prison

  AS I LOOK OVER THIS NOW, on the point of sending it off to you, I remember how I felt while writing. It was two months ago—February—a month of constant rain. I was very low. Eighty days in here. Jail was ceasing to be cruel and unusual, starting to seem cruel and normal, a torment curving over the horizon.

  Bob and the Canadian consul came to see me in the “bank,” the visiting room, which has a counter down the middle with a wall of bars and mesh to the ceiling. Things were going well, they claimed. Their faces said otherwise. When the consul left, Bob took my hands through a small wicket where prisoners and visitors can touch, pass cigarettes. Amazing what a charge can crackle through one’s fingers. Like being thirteen again.

  Our time was nearly up but Toho, the warder—a mountainous Tahitian overflowing her blue uniform and orange plastic chair—smiled as if to say, go ahead, all the world loves lovers, and left us alone in the room. She’d never done this before, and I should have been grateful. But on that day, in that mood, unsure of things, especially myself, all I thought was: They know me now. L’écrivaine. Not a runner or a doer. They’ve stopped worrying Bob’s going to slip me a baguette with a file inside. And I knew I didn’t deserve Bob.

  “Aren’t you tired of coming here?”

  “I’ll never get tired of being with you, Liv. Wherever you are.” He kissed the palm of my hand. “You’re salty.” He nodded at the jailer’s empty chair. “Look at that!”

  “They think I’m resigned. A zoo creature. They can leave the cage open and it won’t leave. Spirit broken.” I burst into tears. “Sorry. This is one of those days when I’d feel better if I’d actually done something. Something really nasty.”

  “I prefer you innocent.”

  “I’m not innocent.” I withdrew my hand. “And it’s high time you knew.”

  “Christ, Liv!”

  “No, not that! But I’m not the nice girl you think I am.”

  This was the first time I told him about you. The essentials. My test of Bob’s faith, of his idea of me.

  “At least now you know for sure I’ll never want another kid. I couldn’t risk it all going wrong again—blighting others’ lives.”

  “You shouldn’t be so altruistic, Liv. Don’t get hung up on what you imagine might happen to others.” He was thinking the best of me, as he always does.

  “It’s not altruism. It’s for me. I can’t risk another load of guilt. I’ve carried this around for more than twenty years. If I add another ounce I’ll sink.” I took his hand and squeezed it. “I’m a shit. I should’ve told you all this ages ago. Long before you threw away your life and came out here.”

  “Nothings been thrown away.” He stroked my fingers one by one, perhaps regretfully. “I’m working on Loti’s Mariage, remember? Not wrecking mine. You mustn’t take things on yourself so much.”

  I didn’t seem to have diminished in his eyes, or shocked him, put him off. For he answered my secret with a secret of his own: why he’d left America in 1970.

  “You’ve heard of the Kent State shooting, right?”

  “The song was everywhere when I came to Canada. ‘Four Dead in Ohio.’ But you already told me you left because of Vietnam.”

  “It was more personal than that.”

  Bob said he’d been a “bit of a radical,” roaming from campus to campus in an old Chevrolet with a young girlfriend who wove tapestries from seashells and doghair.

  “I was having the time of my life. And all for a good cause. Then the National Guard shot those kids.”

  “You were there?”

  “Thousands of miles away. In Berkeley. I was desperate to get there for the protest. I guess I thought—” (a dry laugh, more a squeak) “—my presence would stop Nixon flattening Cambodia. But Barbara was sick. Food poisoning, she said. I dithered. Then she seemed over the worst, so I left. Driving day and night, an hour’s sleep here and there on the back seat.” His voice fell. “The car had no radio. I was in Denver before I knew what had happened in Ohio. I rang Barb. No answer. Eventually I raised a friend. She was in hospital. It was blood poisoning, not food. Sepsis. She must have cut herself. She was always doing that. Poor Barb had hands like a fisherman.”

  They hadn’t any money or medical insurance. He found her in a San Francisco charity ward. He sold his car and got her moved. But Barbara died within days. Bob left the States forever, appalled at his nation and himself.

  “It was hardly your fault,” I said. His hands were shivering in mine.

  “Oh, sure. It was the war. It was Nixon. It was America. You probably think America’s a modern country. America likes to think it’s the only modern country. It isn’t. It’s primitive. A land of social Darwinists who don’t believe Darwin. A decent hospital won’t touch you if you can’t flash a credit card!

  “Circumstances pile up,” he went on, “and you can unpile them any way you like after. But the difference between bad luck and tragedy lies in knowing what truly matters. When it matters. The thing—the thing I’d give anything to change—is I didn’t know that. I didn’t think.”

  I followed his gaze to a gecko high on the wall, wagging its head slowly from side to side as if it had heard and sympathized. Or disapproved. There was nothing else to say. He’d gone over and over his loss, as I had mine, for twenty years.

  Toho returned, sinking cautiously onto her flimsy chair, ending the confessional. Bob got up to go. We tried kissing through the wire—not something we usually did. Too many others had done it, the mesh greasy with lipstick and lushly scented monoi.

  • • •

  It wasn’t long after this that my outlook began to improve. Alain Tremblay, the Canadian consul, began coming more often, genuine cheer in his voice. He’d managed, at last, to get his superiors in Canada to make some diplomatic noise—no easy matter, given the tender st
ate of relations between Ottawa and Paris ever since de Gaulle’s “Québec libre” outburst.

  Alain has become a real friend, but I remember my disappointment the first time we met. I’d expected someone older, more worldly, a heavyweight—not this slight, boyish man in white suit and black polo shirt that made him look like a tropical priest. He wore a rather floral cologne and a tiny pair of wire-rimmed glasses, perched on a nose even bigger than mine. He was younger than me, and Tahiti was his first foreign posting. I couldn’t take him seriously.

  His English was slangy and fluent, a Montreal accent I remembered from the years at Studio D. In my despair I thought he might be a Francophile with separatist sympathies, merely going through the motions, someone who’d never rock the boat. He didn’t say much that first time. Just listened (that took patience!), explained he’d have to make his own enquiries.

  I needn’t have worried; Alain is no Gaullist. Now he’s embroiled in this sticky political mess, the resolution of which may soon get us both out of Tahiti: me home to Vancouver, and him to a more senior but less agreeable posting such as Lima or Kiev.

  My problem is the people I was with. Not that they’re killers. Quite the contrary. They were interested in exposing death of a different order: the slow and possibly abundant death from the nuclear mess at Moruroa Atoll, where the French government tests its bombs. I’ll come to this later; but in short the authorities know perfectly well we have nothing to do with that dead girl. This isn’t just my view—Consul Tremblay said so too.

  “We know you’re not guilty. The French know you’re not guilty. This isn’t about the law. Soon as I can raise enough pressure, or we get near court, they’ll let you go. Though you’ll have to go quietly. Nothing to the press. It’s a matter of face. We bring in the press only as a last resort. In my job we catch more flies with honey than vinegar—you can say this in English?”

  We were smoking our way through the Gauloises he’d brought. I’d begun to trust Alain by then, but wasn’t sure I trusted his optimism. I didn’t like the sound of “last resort.”

  “This is just theatre,” he was coughing into his sleeve. “To make people like your friends think twice about poking around. And put the Rainbow Warrior sinking in the shade. That was a big cock-up. … They killed a guy. Even if they didn’t mean to. And they got caught. Very embarrassing.”

  “I know. I’ve heard all about it.”

  “They play hardball down here. Before this they played hardball with Pouvanaa.”

  “With what?”

  “Tahiti’s Nelson Mandela. Pouvanaa a Oopa. He died about ten years ago.”

  “They killed him?”

  “Just locked him up and threw away the key. The guy was past eighty when he died. … Sorry! Don’t worry—you’re no Pouvanaa! But they play rough here. Always have. Though they may have to lighten up if the Cold War goes away, like people are saying. Not so easy to justify this crap.” He chuckled scornfully and lowered his voice. “It’s a joke. All this nuclear shit going down for twenty-five years and they’ve got about as much firepower as one U.S. submarine.”

  Alain opened a fresh pack, tapped one out for himself and passed the rest under the wire. He cocked an eyebrow. “This is all off the record, Liv. Anything I say that’s worth hearing, I haven’t said. Diplomats are dead men. We don’t tell tales. The nearest we get to the truth is to give it a massage.”

  I flew back to Canada from Hitchin in September—the September before last—back to my desirably situated apartment with its panoramas of water vapour and crippling mortgage. Things I’d shipped from Tilehouse Street began to arrive: Jon’s photos, his books, Henderson’s papers, Mother’s china. The spear took months by sea in a container.

  My flat was built to save money and make the world safe for vacuum cleaners—no skirting, no picture rail, no trim around doors and windows. Economies justified by the International Style. A previous owner in bourgeois despair had added a cosmetic fireplace with fake coals and a red bulb. Above this hideous fixture I hung Frank Henderson’s spear.

  It is fourteen feet three inches long (4.3 metres, if that’s how you think) and carved from a dense dark wood that Mother used to call ebony. She was right about the weight. How could even the burliest warrior have wielded such a thing? I had to haul it up the outside of the building with a rope and bring it in over the balcony—unlawful, no doubt, but the delivery man helped me and we got the job done without breaking glass or impaling pedestrians.

  Far from lending mystique, the spear lay reproachfully on my wall, accentuating the starkness, underlining Mother’s death, the dispersal of a family past; and how much I missed Tilehouse Street, its cracks and ghosts, the smell of soot, the sprung floors that foretold who was coming down a passage, into a room.

  It was mid-January. The whale film had aired the night before. Bob came up with flowers and a bottle of the Widow. By then we were seeing each other discreetly about once a week.

  A great success, he insisted. So did friends and colleagues who rang. But hearing their voices only depressed me. I felt guilty for neglecting them. Friendship shrinks to a string of airy promises when I’m busy. Above all, I missed my “real” friends, women I’d got to know in my twenties and left behind in Montreal. The older one gets the harder it becomes to make those friends.

  My West Coast friends I’ve met through work: a composer who does soundtracks, a sculptor who pays her way building stage sets. And Jane, a script editor who lives nearby. It was Jane who helped me find the flat. We have lunch, jog around Stanley Park sometimes, but I haven’t told anyone in Vancouver about you, or Bob.

  All I could think was: What now? What next? And the answer seemed to be that I was finished, that there was no way forward except to give up my pretensions, get a waitressing job.

  “Fantastic, Liv. Well done! I didn’t think about whales much. Except Moby Dick. Now I care.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Robert. Tell the truth. Was it awful? What were the ads?”

  “You mean you missed it?”

  “I never watch them air. The last stage I sees the rehearsal print. Cant bear it otherwise. The rehearsal print’s as good as a film ever gets. It’s the last cut. All the other cutting—months and months of it—you’ve done on a grotty old work print covered in finger-smears and scratches. Looks like shit, but that’s what you work with. Till the rehearsal. For the first time it’s cut from your original negative by nice ladies in silk gloves. It’s shown in a beautiful auditorium with perfect sound. It’s breathtaking. And everyone comes, and they are breathtaken. It’s the moment of truth and beauty. So why watch it again?”

  He started to speak. I put an olive in his mouth and a whisky in his hand. “Drink this and listen. When it comes out of that box in the corner there, with its muddy little screen and tinny speakers, my film’s ruined. And every ten minutes someone butts in and tries to sell me Tampax.”

  “Give yourself a break, Liv. It looked wonderful. They weren’t selling Tampax. It was four-wheel-drives and winter cruises.”

  “You see! You remember the fucking commercials. Cruises in a film on whales! Have you any idea how many marine mammals are carved up every year by ships’ propellers? How many turtles choke to death on all the plastic bags they dump over the side? Anyway, it doesn’t matter what they’re selling. Everyone I know in this business feels the same. You find the best locations, the best cameraman, great music—and when it’s squeezed into that horrid little frame and interrupted by inane propaganda it looks just like everything else.”

  “Oh,” he said, taken aback. “I thought tuning in to your latest would be like walking into Duthie’s and seeing your own book in the window. I never get tired of that.”

  His eyes were roaming, searching for a change of subject. “That’s extraordinary. Am I so unobservant? Or wasn’t it here last time?”

  “Just arrived. An ancestor—well, a cousin really—brought it back from Africa in the 1890s. We’ve always called it the assegai.”

/>   He walked the length of the spear, taking his time.

  “Awful big for an assegai. Assegais are short stabbing things with steel blades. Like the Zulus have. Take a look next time Chief Buthelezi’s pals are on the news.”

  “Well, that’s what my mother used to call it. The assegai. As if it mattered somehow. She was funny about it. Always said it would be mine one day. Don’t know why—she’d never let me touch it.”

  “I’ve seen things like this at the museum in Honolulu. I’d say it came from the Pacific. But I don’t know this stuff. We should get someone over here from anthropology. They must have an Africanist. Or there’s always Dermot Hough in astronomy.…”

  “Astronomy?”

  “He collects African and Melanesian carvings. His sidelines ethno-astronomy. Ancient star maps, constellations. We have lunch at the faculty club once in a while. Trouble with Dermot is he’ll talk your ear off. His students call him the Gas Giant.”

  Bob took his drink and went to the window, ice chiming in his glass. The setting sun had oozed through a bank of mist, a ragged fir against the redness like stitching on a wound.

  “How long have you been living up here, Liv? Looking at this ocean. Isn’t it time to go there? You should take a trip. You need one. Really.”

  “Last time I took the boat to Nanaimo a kid threw up on my shoes.”

  “I mean a real trip. Hawaii, Fiji. Melville’s mysterious divine Pacific. The tide-beating heart of Earth! We’ll go together. You come up with a film project. I’ll find some writers to visit.”

  I was thinking: If he’s alive, he’s sixty-eight. If I go out there I must go and go until I reach Korea. Until I find him. Or find nothing. Or bones in a jungle. A skull and some brass buttons in a killing field.

  Bob left. Night came down on the sea, the ships lighting up one by one in the roadstead, pricking the dusk on the bay. It felt good to be alone. The whale film was dead to me, and Melville with it.