Bright and Distant Shores by Dominic Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

German clipper captain, breakfasting on eggs, sausages, and beer in a saloon eatery. He supported his head with one hand, holding a stump of bratwurst at bay with a fork in the other. A folded newspaper lay beside his plate. His face was sun-ravaged, his lips blistered, his complexion ruddy. Each time he took a swig of beer or bite of wurst his face turned increasingly sour, as if he were eating a lemon by the rind. Owen sat two bar stools down and ordered a shot of whiskey. He wanted to get the German’s attention but Bisky failed to take his eyes off his newspaper or his eggs. Eventually, Owen asked him about the list of names he was tracing with a finger in a column of newsprint—
Argo, Nemesis, Peregrine, Industry, Aramac
. Beneath a heading of
Shipping Intelligence,
the names appeared under the banner
Wrecks and Casualties
. Bisky thereby began a bleary-eyed lament for all the ships he’d ever captained in the Pacific and theAtlantic, and their fates. He detailed each ship’s peculiarities, the way she acted in a squall or the way she took in wind and water in high swells or smelled like baleen in her lower reaches, before giving the exact nature of her demise. Scuttled, hogged-up, reefed, run aground, he gave each word a throaty, Germanic inflection. He discussed the quirks of his current ship, the
Paramount,
which was being repaired and due to set sail in the morning, eventually making for the South Seas. Then Bisky began a diatribe about the wretched state of the Chicago River and its bridge-opening schedule, the humid weather, the many hazards of falling asleep in a brothel. It was during a brief pause that Owen asked him outright for a job.
    Bisky turned on his stool, sized Owen up while tonguing a morsel of food, pushed some air between his lips, and finally said, “You look more idler than able-bodied. Can you cook for two dozen men hungry enough to slit your throat if they miss a meal?”
    The vision of preparing countless fishy meals at sea hovered before him. “What about ship’s carpenter?” he asked. “I have experience and my own tools.” He knew from his years in the library stacks that a ship’s carpenter made general repairs and kept the masts in good condition. That seemed easy enough.
    Bisky said, “Do you have a bevel gauge?”
    Sensing this was a trap, Owen said of course and waited for the captain’s reaction.
    Bisky drained his mug of beer, folded the newspaper, and said, “We leave tomorrow at dawn.”
    This was not exactly what Owen had in mind, but he shook Bisky’s calloused hand, received the details of the dock, and went out into the street. On his way back to the wrecking yard, he stopped in a hardware store and bought a bevel gauge. The salesman said it was the perfect tool for replicating pieces that weren’t square. Owen arrived home and penned a letter to Adelaide in his finest Tabernacle cursive.
    He tried to be brief but something poured out of him in the kerosene lamplight, his collected spoils spread before him, everything ordered and arranged, none of it seen by another person since his father’s death. What was the point of all these objects? A private rummage; his solitary childhood labeled, filed, boxed. He wrote of his mother’s daguerreotype, his father’s death, his desire to find his place in the world. She was the loveliest person he’d ever known and he prayed for her forgiveness. The word
pray
felt like a falsehood—he hadn’t communed with God in years—but within a month he was doing just that. Bunked down in the idlers’ deckhouse of Bisky’s clipper, his hands smelling eternally of tar and brine, he floated prayers out to the white stars, to the ocean mounting against the groaning ballast, even to the Holy Ghost. He prayed for land, for a steak medium rare, for the sight of Adelaide tilting her soup bowl in the wan light of a café.
    Somehow, while he was at sea