‘In my experience it doesn’t always give you that option.’ When my fever came on, my body felt filled with lead, and I was lucky if I could reach a chamber pot. I fetched the medicine box.
‘I’m going to the loo,’ he said to her through the netting. ‘Please don’t slow us down.’
If she responded I couldn’t hear it. Her cheek remained pressed to her knee. Fen disappeared down the pole.
She was not in any state of undress — she wore the same shirt and pants from the night before — yet I felt reluctant to greet her. I wanted to give her the illusion of privacy. I busied myself with turning some yams in the ash fire and doing the washing up at the back of the house, though there were only two plates and two cups and they needed little more than a wipe-down.
‘Did you sleep at all?’
I swung round. She was seated at the table.
‘A bit,’ I said.
‘Liar.’
Her cheeks were flushed in wide circles like a doll’s, but her lips were colorless, her eyes glazed yellow. I tapped out four aspirin into my hand. ‘Too many?’
She leaned in from across the table, peering closely at the pills. ‘Perfect.’
‘You need specs.’
‘I stepped on them a few months ago.’
‘Bankson! A fellow’s here,’ Fen called from below. ‘I can’t make out what he wants.’
‘I’ll be right down.’ I brought Nell water for her pills and went to the smaller trunk in my office. I swept my hand back and forth across its gritty bottom until I felt the small case in a corner. I hadn’t opened it since my mother gave it to me before I sailed.
‘I don’t know how they’ll do,’ I said, handing it to her.
She snapped it open. They had a simple wire frame, thinner than I remembered. Pewter-colored. A near perfect match to her eyes.
‘Don’t you need them?’
‘They were Martin’s.’ A policeman had come to the door with them several months after his death. They’d been freshly polished, and a tag on a string had been knotted to the bridge.
She seemed to understand all that, and lifted them tenderly from their dingy case to put them on.
‘Oh,’ she said, moving toward the window. ‘They’re out on the water with their nets.’ She turned back around to look at me, still holding the frames to her face with two hands as if they would not stay there by themselves. ‘And you could stand a shave, Mr. Bankson.’
‘They work then?’
‘I think I may be more myopic than Martin, but we’re close.’
It was lovely, hearing Martin spoken of in the present tense. ‘Keep them.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘I’ve plenty of his things.’ It wasn’t true. There was a sweater or two in my mother’s closet, but that was all. My father had ordered the servants to give it all to a charity shop as soon as his trunks had arrived from London. ‘Happy Christmas,’ I said.
She smiled, remembering this. ‘I’ll take good care of them.’
They were big for her small marsupial face, but suited her somehow. You get hounded daily in the field for your possessions, and it felt good to give something away that hadn’t been asked for.
‘Bankson, help me out here!’
I went down to Fen, who was face-to-face with one of my informants, Ragwa, who was meant to take me to a naming ceremony in his sister’s hamlet this afternoon. Ragwa had taken up the Kiona intimidation position, arms bowed and chin stretched out over his feet, and Fen had done nothing but encourage it by taking up his own, either in mockery or for real, I couldn’t tell which.
‘Ask him about the sacred object,’ Fen whispered.
But Ragwa cut me off and said his wife had gone into labor and he couldn’t accompany me today. After that he rushed off.
“They all like that?’
‘He’s worried about his wife. The baby’s early.’ A few weeks ago Ragwa had grabbed my hand and pressed it to his wife’s belly. I felt the baby roll beneath her taut skin. I had never felt that before, never known, honestly, that such a thing happened. It echoed against my palm for a long time after. It was like putting my hand to the surface of the ocean and being able to feel a fish beneath. Ragwa had laughed and laughed at the expression on my face.
‘Can I help with the birth?’ Nell was standing in the doorway.
‘I thought we were leaving,’ Fen said, not noticing her spectacles.
‘But if the baby’s premature.’
‘They’ve been having babies for a long time without you, Nell.’
‘I have some experience,’ she said to me.
‘It’s very kind. But there’s a taboo on childless women witnessing a birth.’
She nodded. ‘The Anapa were the same,’ she said, but her voice had lost some strength, and I felt I’d said the wrong thing.
‘And we do need to see if we can find something, Nellie,’ Fen said more gently than I’d ever heard him speak.
I gave them a tour of the village, and an hour later we set off to the Ngoni. I had made a case for this tribe: They were skilled warriors, which would appeal to Fen, and renowned healers, which I thought might interest — and help — Nell. But the real reason I’d chosen the Ngoni was that they were less than an hour’s boat ride from my village.
We were hungry as soon as we got on the water. I had packed enough food for several days if need be. We ate with our hands, scooping our fingers into still warm baked yams and the cool flesh of a jackfruit. I made sure the food made equal rounds up to Nell in the bow, and that she was taking it. After she ate she seemed to revive a bit, looking ahead and turning back toward me, her hair rising behind her, with questions about adzes, kina shells, and creation stories.
The Ngoni were just beyond the sandbar I always had to watch out for in the dark. The hamlet’s houses were arranged in groups of three, set back fifteen feet from the steep riverbank and, like all houses in the region, raised on piles to keep out vermin and the river when it rose.
‘No beach?’ Nell said.
I hadn’t thought about that. It was true. The land dropped into the water abruptly.
‘It’s a bit gloomy, isn’t it?’ Fen said. ‘Not much sunlight.’
At the sound of the approaching engine, a few men had gathered at the edge of their land.
‘Let’s keep going, Bankson,’ Nell said. ‘Let’s not stop here.’
Next were the Yarapat, but Fen thought the houses hung too low to the ground. I tried to point out the rise in the land — the Yarapat were set on a high hill — but he’d been flooded once in the Admiralty Islands, so we passed them by as well.
They didn’t like the looks of the next village, either.
‘Weak art,’ Nell said.
‘What?’
‘That face,’ she said, meaning the enormous mask that hung over the entryway of the ceremonial house we could see from the water. ‘It’s crude. Not like what I’ve seen elsewhere.’
‘We need art, Bankson,’ Fen bellowed poshly from his seat in front of me. ‘We need art and theatre and the ballet, if it’s not too much bother.’
‘Do you want to stop here?’ Nell asked him.
‘No.’
We were now four hours away from Nengai, and the sun was dropping fast, the way it does near the equator. We hadn’t even got out of the boat yet. I knew of one more tribe, the Wokup, before my familiarity with the river in this direction ran out. The Wokup had a beach, tall houses, and good art.
When we reached them, I gunned the boat directly at the center of the beach, determined that I would not stop for any reservation they could cook up. Though I was concentrating on the shore beyond her, I felt Nell imitating the stubborn clench in my face. But I thought she’d been a fusspot about the other tribes and could find no humor in it.