Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  I switched on the TV, hopped channels, switched off. The Hitchin books and papers were stacked in a corner, untouched except to check they’d all arrived. I picked up Jon’s school atlas, the one I’d saved from Mole. On the flyleaf:

  Jonathan Wyvern, Fifth Form,

  Harepark School, Waiden St. Lawrence,

  Near Hitchin, Hertfordshire,

  England, Great Britain, Europe,

  The World, Solar System,

  Milky Way, The Universe.

  My father at eleven or twelve, locating himself at the centre of creation, as all kids do; now lost to the world. And there, near the back, was Korea, which I’d looked at so many times in other atlases, and which still seemed unknowable as Madagascar or Mongolia. I had a good cry, then got another drink. I went on leafing through idly, hoping for something—a doodle, a scribble, an inky fingerprint. But Jon must have been a respecter of books, even as a boy. Or maybe he just didn’t like geography. Only Northeast Asia was smudgy, where Mothers finger had often brushed the mountains of Korea.

  The Pacific lay across the centre pages, an ocean hemisphere, the cracked spine like a geological fault. A bookmark, a blue paper or card snagged in the binding, broke loose and fluttered to the floor.

  An airmail envelope. Jon’s handwriting. Addressed to Mother at Tilehouse Street.

  The flap was partly stuck; I tore it open savagely. Inside were two sheets, covered in small script on both sides, as if this was all the paper he had.

  Dear Vivien,

  I’m alive (obviously) and safe. Aboard a copra schooner, the Bremerhaven, Captain Westermann. Typical Jerry, obliging enough but vague about his war. You’ll have had a telegram, I assume. “Missing in action.” I can imagine what you’re going through. So I’m posting this off at first port of call, before anything else. I’ll wire as soon I can.

  Your last letter’s still in my pocket. It’s been in the drink—hard to read now—but I know every word. Should’ve answered in Korea, but couldn’t think what to say. Then I got overtaken by events. Still haven’t the foggiest notion how to respond to what you’ve told me, though I’d guessed something of the sort. The trick is to think clearly about the future, and I can’t seem to manage that yet. A lot will depend on how things go when we make land tomorrow.

  I’ll get on with the easy bit—my ditching. Nothing heroic, just ran out of juice like a young fool. Usually they sent us to the Yalu, but that morning we were scrambled south, behind our own lines. Surprise attack. Bandits on the radar. My wingman found them—cheeky sod went off and jumped a MiG.

  It was early, the sun still rising. We chased them out over the China Sea, above a layer of cirrus like the skin of a goldfish. I don’t miss Korea one bit, but I miss those skies. Then a MiG jumped me. First real fight in weeks. I put some daylight in his tail but nothing more.

  They’d given me a Sabre—quicker kite than my Meteor but shorter range. I remembered this too late. Sheer bloody incompetence. Hadn’t slept soundly for a fortnight, but that’s no excuse in war.

  I carried on south, looking for Okinawa or one of our carriers, holding the best airspeed till she flamed out. She was lightheaded without fuel but steady, gliding down gracefully, the cirrus turning to floss and gone at thirty thousand. Then just open sea, the risen sun, and the Sabre falling, eerily silent, a seven-ton paper dart.

  I must say, Vivien, that it was dreadfully tempting to ride down all the way. There are things you don’t know—I won’t go into them now—and that hissing stillness was hypnotic. I felt paralysed, or perhaps I blacked for a while. Didn’t snap out till I was under five thousand. The sea saved me, the sight of it—like hammered steel coming up to smack me in the face. And I saw a steamer, a rusty old bucket, her plates blazing in the sun.

  Bailed out about two thousand. First time ever—quite a shock—like being slapped with a tennis racket from a passing car. They picked me up in an hour or so. Chinese, though Red or Kuomintang I never found out. We were evens there (I’d dumped my tags). Not a word of English but great mah-jong players. Fishermen, I gathered, outward bound for the Line Islands. I wanted them to put me on a British possession, but they stuck to the high seas. (They were up to something, smuggling most likely.) Didn’t see land for weeks. So I had them hand me over to this little schooner off the Lines. I gave the Chinese half my parachute to make silk thingies for their wives. Westermann says he’ll take the rest for a passage to Tahiti (if I go that far on his tub).

  You’ll get a better letter from me soon. There’s a lot I have to get straight in my mind. And I have to find him, if I can. Please understand this. I mean him no harm. It’s just impossible to come so close and pass on by. Sometimes it seems to me that my fetching up here, of all places, must be providential. Barmy I suppose—there’s so little land out here it’s probably nothing extraordinary.

  No matter what, Vivien, it’ll be some time before I come home. I hadn’t meant to say this yet but I’d better get it off my chest—I’m not sure whether I can come home. I need your patience. A lot of patience. Truth is, I’m none too well. The job’s rather caught up with me. So best not to tell the girls you’ve heard anything. We’ll cross this one next time I write.

  Kiss them for me, Jon

  PS. Westermann says Korea’s over—says a truce has held. By God, I hope he’s right!

  I don’t know how many times I read it, swept along in a flash-flood of emotion, revelation, joy, panic. Mother’s certainty of Jon’s return made sense for the first time. She’d known he hadn’t died in Korea. The odds he might still be alive increased enormously, despite his talk of illness. And what of that? Once I calmed down it struck me as an excuse. The letter sounded wary, distant, even chilly. Something was wrong between them. Who the hell was this “him”? Why didn’t Jon sign off with love, as he did in his earlier letters, all four? Where was the following letter—the one he promised? And why, if he never came home, didn’t Mother go looking for him? (This is something I still don’t know. I can’t answer every question for you.) Or had Jon come back to England after all? Had there been some showdown in Hitchin, too painful for Mother to reveal?

  Another pain took me by surprise, though I should have seen it coming. Suddenly I felt abandoned, not bereaved. I’m sure you know this all too well, no matter how lucky you’ve been with your adoptive parents. Perhaps you think I deserve a taste of it. (I agree.) It occurred to me then that any fact of Jon’s survival must also be a fact of his abandonment of Lottie and me, whatever the circumstances. And of Mother of course; but she seemed implicated in both the cause and the concealment.

  The letter seemed to have been written at two slightly different times, his hand spidery in his words to Mother, steadier in his telling of the crash, as if he’d copied that part from something already written, perhaps a despatch he meant to send. He’d put no date. The stamp—faded and stained, the design some tropical flower, half missing even before I tore it—seemed to be from a French territory. I could just make out … merits Français d l’O … And part of the postmark: … aiohae. I got a magnifying glass. The name was no clearer. But the date stood out: 19-IX-53. He’d reached land somewhere between the Line Islands and Tahiti—perhaps Tahiti itself—two months after his crash.

  I combed every place-name in the index, looking for the sequence … aiohae. Nothing. I slept fitfully that night, a sleeping pill on top of booze, but was up at six and on the doorstep of the Vancouver Library when it opened. The map room soon supplied a perfect match: Taiohae, a town on an island called Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas group, northeast of Tahiti.

  I broke the rules, ringing Bob at the English department, babbling onto his message tape. He met me for lunch at a Greek restaurant, clearly worried about my stability. The shock of my discovery had disoriented me. I couldn’t think. I’d even begun to fear that the letter might turn to ashes, prove to be some sort of fake. Bob heard me out, eating steadily while my moussaka congealed. Then he examined the stamp and postmark carefully.

&n
bsp; “You’re right,” he said. “It’s Nuku Hiva. And the date checks out fine. The Etablissements Français de l’Océanie changed their name to Polynésie Française soon after, in the mid-fifties.”

  He promised to write to an author he knew who lived on Tahiti, a Lars Lindqvist. “Lars owes me. He came to the Vancouver Writers’ Festival a few years back on my recommendation. Why don’t you draw up a list of questions for him? And he’ll be the first person to see if you decide to go there. The guy’s been around.” The name meant nothing to me just then, but this was one of Bob’s great understatements; Lindqvist had sailed with Heyerdahl on the Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947.

  I rang Lottie. A sleepy male voice said she was “on tour.” He’d tell her I’d called. Meanwhile I haunted the library, reading anything that might help me understand. The Marquesas were remote, far off airline routes and shipping lanes: a thousand miles from Tahiti, two thousand from Hawaii, three thousand from Peru. They were rugged and sparsely inhabited. There hadn’t been an airstrip on any of them until well into the sixties. Taiohae, capital of Nuku Hiva and the whole group, had only eight hundred inhabitants at last count, and far fewer in 1953. Mail from there would have taken months. Did Jon just post his letter and sail on to Tahiti with the trading schooner? Or could he still be there, incognito, a sallow old white man with a local wife and family?

  If he was there, he’d be known. Everyone’s business is an open book in a place that size. The size of a school. Even if he left years ago, people would remember him. Then I thought of those Japanese soldiers who wander out of the bush from time to time on Pacific islands, still fighting a war that ended in Nagasaki. Could Jon have hidden in the mountains? But if he’d meant to hide, why write at all?

  And how should I read this letter, anyway? How rational was he? I recalled Mole’s speculation on Jon’s state of mind, that he might have had upsetting news. What on Earth had Mother told him? Had it cost him his sleep—and nearly his life? Was the illness mentioned physical or mental? From what I thought I knew of Jon, he wasn’t the type to be in awe of “providence.” The stuff about looking for someone—someone they both seemed to know—and “meaning no harm” became more and more worrying as I brooded on it.

  Then I remembered that the Henderson papers I’d found had been hidden, or at least put away very thoroughly, presumably by Jon. Given Mothers oddness about the spear, it seemed just possible there might be some Henderson relation out in Nuku Hiva or Tahiti. A black sheep, perhaps. Or even someone connected to Mother’s being “disowned.”

  While in the Pacific shelves I looked at spears in Munro’s Polynesian Woodwork and Clunie’s darkly brilliant Fijian Weapons and Warfare. There was a macabre ingenuity and range of design: multiple prongs, detachable points, poisoned barbs, sting-ray spines, and one type “formed of a wood which bursts when moist, so that it can scarcely be extracted from a wound.” Nothing illustrated was exactly like Henderson’s spear, but there were things similar enough that Bob had to be right: it was from the South Seas, probably the Society Islands—Tahiti and its neighbours. Just possibly it had come from further afield, from the Marquesas.

  Lottie rang back at last (Will you accept charges?) and we ran up a huge transatlantic bill. By then I was lost in a labyrinth of betrayal and intrigue so overwrought I can scarcely retrace it for you now. Jon, I was sure, had had a nervous breakdown shortly before his crash. He’d ditched his plane on purpose, a failed suicide. Then he’d shipped Mother the spear from Nuku Hiva, a bizarre gift to stand in stead of his return. The “assegai” was Marquesan, and she’d insisted it was African to throw us off, to make us believe she knew nothing of her mad, dishonoured husband, who even now might be shuffling round an asylum in Tahiti, or France, or England.

  For the first time in my life it occurred to me that my mother, by hiding all this from me, making me fatherless, was partly to blame for you. Then it came to me that I—my birth—might be to blame for what went wrong. Was I my fathers daughter?

  Lottie listened aghast, unnaturally silent. She didn’t share my urgency and outrage. She had clearer memories of our parents’ life together, had known Jon almost twice as long as I. Lottie couldn’t imagine him a suicide, let alone a deserter, even from a morally repugnant war. And she swore that everything she’d said over the years about my looks was only a joke. She thought I was cracking up.

  “You’ve just finished a film, Liv, haven’t you? In a month’s time you’ll be on to the next one, and all this will be back in proportion. We both need time to digest.” I heard her hand muffle the receiver as she called out to someone; then: “I really wish I’d burnt that sodding spear. But no matter what happened to Jon, it can’t have anything to do with him. I’m positive. You may not be old enough, Liv, but I am. I can remember seeing it on that wall all my life—long before he went missing. That spear was Henderson’s. Or one of the Henderson’s’. Has to be.”

  I sat in the window, gazing at the bay and the long whale-back of Vancouver Island. A paleness was gathering on the sea, the water turning soft and white, the whiteness thickening like light on film. All at the speed of a clock’s hands.

  For weeks on end through the early months of 1989 my view was stolen by fog. I saw little of the bay or islands, knew nothing of the ships except their didgeridoo exhaust and doleful warnings answered by the glasses in my cupboard.

  Bob came over whenever he could get an afternoon or a rare evening. I’d cook for him, or he’d cook in my kitchen. We’d switch on the cosmetic fire below the spear, get gently drunk in one another’s arms. He was a good listener. I wanted to be away at once, but there was no point in going to the Marquesas for a two-week trip. I had to plan for half a year, or more. My search for Jon would begin on Nuku Hiva, but it might take me anywhere. French Polynesia was far-flung and expensive. I needed real money. And I’d have to rent out the flat.

  One day he brought a small gift in a paper bag, presenting it in both hands with a little Asian bow. “Maybe this’ll help you think. Melville’s first book. Few people know it nowadays, but during his lifetime it outsold everything else he did. It’s a true story, more or less. It’s about Nuku Hiva. And running away.”

  Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. A lovely old edition that must have set him back a bit. Several Widows. The endpaper was an early map of the Marquesas Islands, sketchy, almost fanciful. I studied their simple shorelines and archaic names. Santa Christina, or Taouata; Washington Island, or Houa-houna; Marchand Island, or Nukuheva. And on Nuku Hiva was Typee, the “cannibal valley” where Melville was held captive after jumping off a whaleship.

  • • •

  Things fell slowly into place. Lottie warmed to the idea of a South Sea “expedition,” as she called it, as long as I didn’t expect her to come. She still thought I was mad, but knew I’d never rest until I’d done it. We agreed to sell Jon’s old bike, she insisting I take all the proceeds. “You do the search for both of us, Liv. If there’s any cash left over we’ll argue about it when you get back.”

  Bob helped me work up a film proposal on Typee—to get seed money for research while I was there. The centenary of Melville’s death would be in ’91. Two and a half years away; tight but possible. It was a good idea on its own merits, but mainly I think he wanted me to have something on hand besides my quest for Jon, something to help me through the many false leads and dead ends I was likely to find. Not to mention total failure.

  Apart from this proposal, I took on nothing except short-term work that paid well—keeping the decks clear so I could leave when ready. I’d forgotten what “whoring” was like: shooting ski gear at Whistler, ordering “heroes” for frozen food commercials (heroes are those suspiciously perfect grapes, tomatoes, sticks of celery, etc., that appear in loving close-up).

  I lived on pasta, saved every penny, had dreams of Melville and major studio backing. (My proposal has yet to raise riches, but it brought in a few grand from Telefilm Canada and Blue Angel, a Los Angeles soft-core outfit wit
h conscience money to burn.) Mostly, of course, I dreamed of Jon and Mother, of old schooners and green islands, of a warplane sailing down from the sky.

  Eight

  ENGLAND

  Riverhill. October, 1899

  SOON AFTER OUR EQUATORIAL RITES, we met a tall Yankee clipper running north beneath a stack of fancy sail. She signalled that yellow fever had broken out in Brazil, which did nothing to allay the grim foreboding that pervaded our ship like a noxious gas.

  We avoided that country altogether, sailing on south towards the Argentine through still waters that soothed our unease. The sea grew warm and brightly phosphorescent. By night each ship had a glowing bolster at her head, and when a boat was lowered for another man overboard—saved, thank Heaven—the water ran like quicksilver from the oars. From time to time the Inconstant signalled us with her electric searchlight. Even when she was hull down, her powerful dots and dashes could be read from their reflection on low cloud. Most nights were crystalline, Jupiter’s moons clear in the telescope and Sirius very bright, higher in the sky than I had ever seen.

  The ship brushed through shoals of paper nautili, their tiny pink sails spread to the wind, and a battalion of great turtles like the shields of some mediaeval host.

  Shortly before Christmas the sea turned a sickly orange. Dalton lowered a cup and bid us taste: no salt at all, only mud. Though hundreds of miles from land, we were sailing on the mighty outflow of the River Plate.

  “Drink here the soil you will be walking on by spring, boys,” he said to the Princes with his usual flourish. “Or should we call it autumn down here? I’ll wager this red earth has washed all the way from the Andes, where Inca monuments await us!”