Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 73

Louis has gone o? to the Sydney to meet his mother and accompany her back to Samoa. It is an obligatory trip that he didn’t want to make, as he was concerned about leaving me here alone in hurricane season, but I’m glad he is gone. It will get him away from the local politics, which he has taken up with too much fervor. He may have abandoned writing travel letters for McClure’s syndicate,  but  now  he  writes  furious  letters  to  the  editor of the Times  of London  about  the interference of the imperial powers in the lives of native Samoans. What care the readers of the Times? It is the preacher in Louis that makes him write those letters, and then, there is the matter of his sense  of right. He  is disgusted that the  Germans have  set up Malietoa Laupepa as the puppet king. Louis says he’s a good man who’s not ?t to run things. We both believe the rival, Mata’afa, is the far stronger leader: He understands the importance of his people claiming and using  their  land  so  outsiders  can’t.  Germany,  in  particular,  has  much  to  lose  if  Mata’afa’s in?uence takes hold. Britain and the U.S. have inserted themselves into the picture, and now all three countries have consuls in Apia.

And so Louis writes his letters. He has fashioned himself a diplomat and is trying to bring about some compromise between the two chiefs. He has never forgiven himself for not intervening in the Irish boycott that left those women in Kerry defenseless. The other day he said to me,  “I was silent about Ireland. I won’t make that mistake here.”

Among the workers, rumors ?y that there will be a war. I cannot think of war; I must be ready for Louis’s mother. The workers seem as weary as I am, for I have driven all of us pretty hard. But we will have a sparkling room ready for her in the new house, come hell or high water.
I  have  hired  a  new  cook,  a  native  woman  named  Emma  who  cooks  all  right  but  seems frightened to be working here. She says the kitchen is full of devils. She says that a woman and a man were murdered some time ago on the site of our cottage, and their ghosts are the very spirits who follow her home and climb into bed with her at night. That makes three dens of devils on our property: in the barn, on the land near the garden, and now in the kitchen.

“Henry, I want you to make some sandwiches for supper. It will be just the two of us. Emma is o? today, and Lafaele has arranged to court his lady.” The Archangel had already left, garlanded and smelling heavenly.

Fanny went out to the garden  to ?nish planting a  couple of precious rhubarb plants given her by a missionary. She listened for the rumbling sounds she’d heard earlier, but

only  the  wind and birdcalls  disturbed the  air.  Possibly  what  she’d heard before  was  a volcanic rumbling, far more serious. A chemical odor like burning sulfur hung about the farm, yet she saw no ?res or smoke out in the bush. The air had the green tint that the Indiana sky carried when a tornado was approaching. In the eerie light, the plants took on a spectrum of glowing hues, from chartreuse to near black.

Leaden clouds moved in quickly from the sea, and before she ?nished her row, drops of rain sharp as sleet stung her skin. She hurried inside.

As blasts of  wind rattled the little cottage,  her head began  to pound,  just above the hairline. She told Henry to go ahead and eat without her and she went upstairs to bed. No position she tried would ease the pain, which was so severe, that her skull felt close to bursting. She took out the medicine box and ri?ed through it. The laudanum Louis had given her for rheumatism had not worked last time. She found the bottle of chlorodyne. Her eyes went down the list of ingredients. Morphine, Indian cannabis, nitroglycerin  … She drank a capful. Not intolerable. She waited to see if the pounding quieted.
Why, oh why, was her head going wrong now? Only Henry downstairs to help. She’d not had one of these spells for a long while, and she became afraid when she contemplated what might happen.

Sleep it off, Fanny. She threw on her nightgown and fell into bed.

When she awoke in the middle of the night, her heart and neck were pounding like horse hooves.  Above,  a  white  streak  lit  the  ceiling.  She  sat  up,  groped  frantically  for  the matchbox on the side table. She heard the box fall and the wooden sticks splatter across the ?oor. She slid out of bed to her knees, took up a match, struck it against a ?oorboard, and lit the candle. Shadows licked the walls. Climbing under the covers, she leaned against the headboard and closed her eyes, lest she begin to see strange things. In her mind, the face of a woman appeared. Her eyes were wild, her mouth gaping in a long O. She was clasping two small children to her chest. Fanny shook her head and opened her eyes. In front of her, the woman was standing at the end of the bed, holding each baby by a foot, so that the small bodies hung from her ?sts like dead white birds.  “Stop that!” Fanny screamed. She leaped out of bed with a pillow and threw it at the woman, then screamed again. A loud pounding at the wall sounded outside her curtained room.

“Louis?” she called out. “Is that you, Louis?”

Henry stepped through the curtain, alarmed, as Fanny’s limbs went weak. He caught her

as she fell, and carried her back to bed.

The window curtains were open, and the sun was high when she awakened. A tray with tea and ship biscuits sat atop the table. In a while, Henry tapped on the frame opening to her room.

“Come in,” she told him. He stood at the foot of the bed, where the hideous apparition had been the night before. “Thank you for coming to help last night.”
Henry affected a philosophical shrug.

“It was just a bad dream,” she said. “Yes, Tamaitai.”

“Do not tell Mr. Stevenson when he returns, “ she said. “Do you understand?” “Yes, Tamaitai.”