Free Bright and Distant Shores by Dominic Smith

his first cup of Darjeeling, while Argus fixed eggs and soda-scones to his liking. The fleet Scotsman—a Presbyterian missionary in his twentieth year in Melanesia—reclined now in a wicker chair, head back, pale blue eyes startled and fixed on the thatching overhead. The tea had spilled down his shirt-front, creating a narrow strip of steaming celluloid. He clutched the handwritten sermon in one hand, fingers knuckled white. Argus set down the breakfast tray, called out
Sir
and
Reverend Mister,
shook the preacher by the shoulders. The old man did not respond. He knew his employer was dead but felt compelled to put two fingers on one of the missionary’s copper-haired wrists. He had learned this trick from the doctor who came out from Port Moresby once a year to give the Reverend Mister his wine and spirits permit. The wrist did not throb. But it was still warm and Argus wished he knew how to blow resurrection into a man’s mouth. He put his hand in front of his employer’s nose and felt for breath. Nothing. The schoolteacher who knew first aid had recently eloped with a Sepik River woman, forcing the Reverend Mister to teach the
Catechism of Christian Truth
himself. It made him angry to be pulled away from writing his phrasebooks and tending his garden of celery and artichokes.
    Argus had seen dead men before but not since his father’s funeral off the Bismarck Archipelago six years earlier. At homethe custom was to bury the dead under their stilt houses or, if they lived in a pile house on the lagoon, to bury it near the ancestral gardens. But first they were put on display with their best possessions surrounding them—dogs’ teeth, obsidian-tipped arrows, yams, traded shell armlets—and propped against the house ladder. Then the body was wrapped in coconut leaves and sheaths from the nibung palm. A fire was lit. People mourned. The body was buried. The finger bones and skull were placed into an earthenware pot in the rafters of the house. The spirit of the dead lingered and presided over the household; it punished infidelity, reckless debts, bad housekeeping. Argus had not seen a funeral ceremony on his adopted island of Nimburea but had heard that the ritual was to leave the dead in trees or weigh them down with stones and toss them from canoes. That seemed crude and ill-omened. How was a Presbyterian minister supposed to be buried? Who would give the Sunday sermon? He looked off the verandah and saw some of the night fishermen dragging their canoes onto the beach. It wouldn’t be long before parents and pupils from the school would come looking for Reverend Underwood. Punctuality was a close neighbor to cleanliness.
    Argus would tell them the reverend had taken ill and send a message to the head mission and wait for instructions. Keep the timber house locked. Shutter the windows. The preacher would have wanted that. Some of the locals—the heathen militia, the reverend called them—might show up with spears and clubs and begin looting. Raid the linens and crockery and tinned peaches, throwing him aside or clubbing him in the head and back. Argus could see it all very clearly. He was an outsider here, a houseboy and a Christian convert who knew how to bake bread, speak a butler’s English, sing hymns, recite psalms. They tolerated him but only because he did not talk to their women and worked for the big holy man who handed out tobacco after church on Sundays. He was eighteen years old and uninitiated on any island. To the locals he was something between a man and a boy. Likewords for
bear, snow,
and
ice,
he was something they had no use for.
    Argus placed the teacup on the side table, wrenched the unfinished sermon from the stony hand, and hefted the Scotsman off the wicker chair. He began dragging him inside, hooking his hands under the preacher’s armpits and walking backward, taking small steps. The dead weight of the man’s torso and head was awful; two