‘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.