Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 69

Four A.M. and I am wide awake, thanks to a noisy honeyeater singing out in the forest. Reverend Clarke  tells me  the  natives believe  that when that bird sings in the  middle  of the  night, it is warning that a ghost is near.

As the hurricane season approaches, we work against the clock to get the house ?nished and seeds in. With Lloyd in Britain, where he is arranging the sale of Skerryvore and collecting Louis’s mother, it is just Louis and me, and of course Henry and Lafaele, and a few day workers.
Of these  300 acres, we will clear only about ?fteen at most. It is all we can ever manage, I think, for the  jungle  reclaims cleared land quickly. Louis says we  should grow cacao. I think co?ee and have begun a large number of cuttings in small pots to be planted out soon. I have made  a plan to divert water from a mountain stream to pipe  into our house  as well. We  are building the reservoir just now. There is plenty to worry about, but there are gifts, too. Last night when we sat outside, Louis said, “These are the real stars and moon, not the tin imitations that preside over London.”

Now, when I get up in the morning, my legs do not feel like jelly, as they did on the boats. I am so grateful not to be sick to my stomach and terri?ed, the way I was nearly every day at sea. It’s not the staying but the coming that I object to.

I could not have conceived two years ago that the solution to our search for a home where Louis could regain his health would be Samoa, of all places. But indeed, I believe we are at last on solid ground.

Fanny set aside her diary, closed her eyes, and listened to the sounds of insects and birds awakening. It was always a single triller who started the morning music, but in a minute thousands of creatures would join in, sending up  swooping ribbons of coos, chirps, and clicks into the black morning air. How they must love the sound of their own chorus! They wove their ribbons together intentionally, she was certain of it, because every once in a while they would all stop at once—insects and birds alike—as if on cue, as if to catch their breath and listen to the silence.

When  the  sun  tore  an  orange  line  through  the  clouds  and lit  the  hillside,  the  music slowed. There would be individual songs called out here and there, but she wouldn’t notice a chorus again until dinnertime, when the frogs took over. They sang so loudly that Louis complained he might be losing his hearing. A booming glee club, they were. Fanny was so

enchanted by the frog song that she didn’t care if she missed the end of someone’s sentence.
At dawn, too alert to remain in bed, she went by lantern light to her toolshed. Fog was rolling up the hill, pu?ng across the clearing like pale smoke as she pulled out the things she would need for the day. Her ambitions for Vailima grew by the hour. She had three pigs —a white boar and two sows—and she wanted many more. She saw a big farm: a real, producing farm from which she could feed her family and work crew. There would be more horses and eventually a cow for milk. And more gardens, profuse with every vegetable she might crave. She saw a plantation operation with cash crops that would eventually support Vailima.  Maybe  she  would grow  both  co?ee  and cacao  and make  a  run  at  a  perfume business as well, since Henry had found ylang-ylang trees on the property.
She  could tell  other  people  had lived on  this  land.  Henry  came  upon  evidence  of  a banana plantation in a soggy area of the bush. Excited, Fanny made a muddy foray into the swamp to have a look. To think she had so much of her own property to explore—three hundred  mysterious  acres!  Never  in  her  wildest  dreaming  had  she  considered  the possibilities of such a canvas.

There had been  the most basic beginnings to make: a  fowl house for her Cochins, a paddock to clear, a barn and pigpens to build, and seeds to plant, starting with the bu?alo grass she’d ordered from the States.The tough bu?alo grass would keep out weeds once it was established. Today she would follow behind the tiller, planting grass in the morning and vegetables in the afternoon. Thinking of the seeds she’d ordered from Australia made her heart thump. Long green beans, peas, radishes, melons, corn, artichokes, eggplants, tomatoes. When a neighbor gave her six lovely pineapples, she planted their tops in hopes of having her own grove.

All the books she had ever read on botany and gardening and landscape design seemed to have been driving toward this moment in her life. She thought of the Englishwoman, Gertrude Jekyll, whose brother, Walter, used to visit them at Bournemouth. Fanny once visited her house in Surrey and nearly fainted when she saw corn stalks growing in the woman’s extraordinary ?ower border. And I thought I was the only gardener in England with corn between my roses. When Walter saw Fanny’s garden at Skerryvore, he said to her, “You plant in strokes, as Gertrude does. She is a painter, too.”

The woman was an artist with plants, and Fanny had in mind a ?ower garden at Vailima that would equal Gertrude’s. It would not be easy to imitate such an e?ect in the space

around the house. A beautiful garden  was a  three-dimensional composition  made up  of ephemeral materials. It was far harder to make than a painting; she knew that ?rsthand. But what she had in mind was even harder: a vast architected landscape of ?ower and vegetable gardens, ponds, and plantation crops moving out into the hillside.
As Fanny began hoeing a new section, the fog thinned and the damp world around her turned  silver-bright.  In  the  ?eld  beyond,  she  saw  the  brown  earth  was  marked  with shimmering green lines where her beans had begun to quicken with life. After an hour, covered in sweat and already sore, she went back to the cottage, where Louis stood on the little porch, drinking his morning coffee.

“Good mornin’, Weird Woman,” he called out. It was his latest pet name for her, no doubt  in  reference  to  her  recent  fascination  with  Samoan  superstitions,  as  well  as  her appearance this morning. She was wearing the wide brim of a hat—only the brim. She had separated the crown and tossed it away so that her scalp could catch the occasional cool breeze.

“Louis,  do  you think  we  are  still on  friendly  terms with  Walter  Jekyll and his sister Gertrude?”

“I suppose. Why do you ask?”

“I’m thinking about writing to Gertrude to ask for some seeds, but I don’t know if I dare. I’ve never had a sense of how they felt about us after you borrowed their family name for
the story.”

Louis shrugged. “At least it wasn’t Dr. Hyde and Mr. Jekyll.”

They stood together, contemplating the clearing near the house, where dozens of burned tree stumps poked up from the dirt. Fanny envisioned a great sward where the family could play lawn tennis, but the ugly black things reminded her how far they had to go. “What would Gertrude do with those stumps, do you suppose?” Fanny wondered aloud.
“Why, set flower pots on ‘em, girlie!” Louis said.

Fanny savored this part of the day, when they talked of what they intended to get done on  the  land.  In  the  past,  such  planning  would  have  been  unthinkable,  but  Louis  was joyfully well. For hours on end, he waged death contests with the wretched sensitive plant —green murders, he called his battles—and emerged invigorated, whooping like a warrior and shouting, “I love weeding!” He cut swaths through the bush to make paths, returning ?lthy and triumphant. He rode his horse back and forth to Apia at a terrifying speed, given

the condition of the road. He rejoiced in the muscles growing strong in his thighs. When she massaged the back of his neck at the end of a long workday, she glimpsed lines of white skin hidden within furrows of brown. “You are turning the color of the earth,” she told him.

It  gave  her  peace  to  see  Louis  so  vigorous  and  happy.  She  occasionally  found  him standing still in a spot, listening to birds in the forest. “Do you hear that? They’re chuckling like children out there.”

Fanny worked so hard some days that her arthritic knees would not come up o? the ground. When Henry found her stuck between her garden rows, he would lift her by her middle and move her to the next section that had to be planted. Louis worked just as hard.
Before dinner, they went to the pool near the house that was surrounded by orange trees; there they bathed among water lilies. Standing in the waterfall that poured over a rock ledge, Louis called out, “This is a fairy story!”

A few days earlier, while Louis was in town, he was approached by Mr. Sewell, the U.S. consul, who asked if  he might bring  a  pair of  famous Americans up  to Vailima.  “John LaFarge, the painter, and a historian named Henry Adams,” Louis told her. “LaFarge is a friend of Will Low. But I never heard of the other one.”

“Their timing couldn’t be worse,” Fanny protested. “What will we feed them?” “I told the consul they should bring their own food.”

“You are the best attraction Sewell has to o?er on this island, I suppose. The equivalent of Queen Vaekehu’s tattooed legs. ‘Not to be missed!’” she teased.

Next day, Adams and LaFarge appeared in the clearing with Sewell as their guide. While Louis greeted them, Fanny ran into the cottage to wash her arms and feet and put on shoes. It was afternoon. They had spent the morning installing a stove in the outdoor cookhouse, and they were both covered with black grease. There was no time to bathe or change. Both travelers were balding fellows, slightly older than Fanny, and pinched in aspect. LaFarge was polite, but Adams could not conceal how appalled he was by the spectacle in front of him.  He  appeared thunderstruck  as  he  gaped at  poor  Louis,  who  was  wearing  greasestreaked white linen trousers with a brown sock on one foot, and a purple sock on the other. In the space of a minute, Fanny was fairly certain she loathed Henry Adams.
Louis, on the other hand, was beside himself with joy. It was almost embarrassing to see

how excitedly he approached the men. He was like a puppy, eager to play, jumping around a more reserved dog who is not done sni?ng, as indeed Adams was not, for his nostrils were ?ared from the moment he arrived, and they seemed incapable of de?ating. Louis toured the men around the cleared property, talking of their plans. Later, over a simple meal on a table outside, he pitched one topic after another at Adams and LaFarge, seeking to spark the kind of brainy repartee he’d so missed since leaving his old friends in London. The painter was clearly  cultivated but politely  reserved.  Adams was more forthcoming, promptly  revealing  that  there  were two  American  presidents  in  his  family  tree.  In  his Boston  Brahmin  accent,  he expanded on  his own  interests,  in  particular how  American education  was  producing  a  crop  of  young  people  ill  prepared  for  the  coming  century. “Second-rate” was a phrase he used to dismiss any number of people, places, and ideas. Sewell turned the talk back to Vailima, and the herculean task of building a house when the materials had to be imported. The historian’s snobbery seeped through his every remark. “One must lower one’s standards in the tropics, of course.” Adams sighed.  “Lord knows, Henry Adams certainly has.”

Fanny engaged the man’s eyes. “We don’t stand on too much ceremony here,” she said. “A  simple  way  of  life  thankfully  preserves  us  from  that  burden.  Someone  without imagination might look at this place and see squalor, but we see possibility,” She smiled sweetly.  “And we are grateful to be living in Samoa, among people with truly humane manners.”

If her remark had landed as she hoped, Adams gave no sign of it, as he’d turned his attention to swatting mosquitoes. But Louis’s eyes had widened at her retort.
“Good riddance,” Fanny muttered when the men left.

“Is the hostess feeling a bit churlish?” Louis said.

“What a ridiculous prig! Does Adams always refer to himself in the third person?” “Louis Stevenson was wondering the same thing,” Louis said.

Standing  there,  she looked at her husband as Henry  Adams must have seen  him,  an emaciated ?gure with legs so long and thin, he resembled a stork. Her eyes followed Louis’s legs to his mismatched socks, and then she began to laugh uncontrollably. He looked down at his feet, sank onto the porch step, and laughed, too.

She realized their happiest times had been just like this, when the two of them were alone with the rest of the world at bay, as they’d been at Hyeres. They did best when they

were making a new beginning, planning and creating together. She savored having Louis to herself, without friends or family. His jokes and thoughts were only for her. Pulled away from his writing by the physical work at hand, and miraculously healthy, Louis seemed reborn.

They had been through wretched times, and Louis had relapsed often enough that she’d learned not to trust the moments of  reprieve.  But she couldn’t help  thinking, This  feels different. This time we are on solid ground.

During those ?rst months at Vailima, an impetuous joy overtook her. She would walk out to ?nd Louis in a ?eld valiantly weeding, fall on her knees beside him, and declare, “Fanny Stevenson loves you madly.”