I kept my distance from Davenport the next day. Tulagi must have been doing the same to Vao, for I saw her several times around the house but did not see the diminutive shadow usually extending from her own. The worst of the rain had left us but the winds remained mighty and dangerous, and occasional lightning, thunder, and showers still fell. Except for some of the outside boys who had to make necessary excursions for the welfare of the livestock or horses, we were all confined to the house.
I did happen to cross paths with Tulagi. It was that evening. He was smoking tobacco wrapped in a banana leaf, looking out at the black sky on one of the verandahs. All of it added up to a sight. For one thing, we were told to stay away from the verandahs for the duration of the storm, and for another the natives were not known for smoking cigarettes. He suddenly appeared to me to be a different sort of man; perhaps it was the lighting produced by the tropical sky, but he was neither native nor white in my eyes—not the garden elf, this time, but a sort of otherworldly and oracular entity. Suddenly, his mission to protect Vao seemed the most worthy in the world to me. It did not occur to me to wonder why he was not overseeing her now. I fell into a spirit of camaraderie.
“Good evening, Tulagi,” I said, struggling against the rainy gusts.
He whispered back, but I could not hear, could not make out whether it was English or Samoan.
I moved closer and asked him to repeat himself, but then I realized he was not paying any mind to me; he was once again reciting the island’s history to himself.
“Then the god of heaven sent down his daughter, Turi, in the form of a bird. She could find nothing but ocean so she returned to her father and told him so. He sent her back and she flew until she found some land in the water. So she returned to her father and told him so. He sent her back with a plant, which she put into the earth. The plant grew and grew, and when she had returned, it was swarming with maggots, and when she returned again, the maggots had become men and women.”
If it had not seemed as though it would be a rude thing, I would have sat next to him and listened. He seemed to disappear into the peculiar myths, most of which had been banned by the missionaries in favor of Christian doctrine. As he spoke, he became as big as the god of heaven and as lofty as the bird flying from land to sea and back again. There was a tranquility coming from this man as he repeated the stories to himself, maybe because there was nothing of all the madness involved in the rest of the world of stories as I knew it: the search for customers, the impatience of readers, the brittle egos of authors, the publishers’ and the bookaneers’ jousts over profits. Here was a man and a story.
When his eyes met mine he repeated: “The plant grew and grew, and when she had returned, it was swarming with maggots, and when she returned again, the maggots had become men and women.”
How unreal the memory seems when I think about what was to unfold only hours later.
Half the house was woken by the shouts of the outside boys; one of them, raising the hurricane shutters, had seen a small child running through the fields with a torch. Even with the downpour having passed, the property was littered with dangers, fallen trees and branches, sliding mud and overfilled streams, not to mention the violent winds. Two of the servants searched, thinking it might be the child of one of the runaway cannibals, and instead found a small broken body at the rocky bottom of a deep ditch.
Davenport and I came out a few hours after the discovery, the bookaneer leaning his body on my arm. Vao had collapsed on the ground nearby, her face hidden in her hands and the rest of her lit dramatically by the torches held nearby as different members of the household took turns to comfort her. Davenport—perhaps to protect her, perhaps because he could not bear it—did not go near her. Stevenson watched over all of it, stricken.
“The poor man must have fallen!” moaned Belle, who tried to comfort her wailing mother, and Stevenson sighed. But there was nothing for Tulagi to trip over near the ditch, and no good reason for him to have been outside in the first place. He was far enough toward the middle that he had to have made as big a leap as his short legs could manage. I leaned out over the ditch as far as I could without risking my life. I needed to see him. The dwarf’s body looked like a girl’s doll, twisted out of its form.
“This will distract Stevenson from his writing,” I whispered to Davenport, then gasped at myself. “I’m sorry. That was an awful thing to say.”
Whispered Davenport, “You always wanted to know what it was like to think like a bookaneer.”
XII
Vailima was abuzz at dawn with news. First, the burial. Though many things in Samoa were done at a leisurely pace, burial of the dead was not among them. The humidity would not allow delay. Tulagi’s body was wrapped in decorative mats and we all sat on the ground, men on one side and women on the other, as Belial delivered yet another eulogy. After his speech, the women filled the open grave with smooth black pebbles gathered from the ocean into baskets. As the company of mourners dispersed, I began to hear whispers. Only once we were all back inside could I understand what else happened overnight.
Stevenson had been up all night after the tragedy, but he had not been grieving mindlessly; I know this because there came the announcement we originally had been waiting for so long to hear, and now dreaded. His masterpiece was finished. Finished. It was whispered and repeated among the household, the staff and servants, in Samoan and in English, by those family members who depended on his books and those natives who never saw a book outside the Vailima library and the writer’s sanctum.
With the storm subsided, visitors to the house were coming and going one after another on various business and personal errands that had been delayed. Mail was distributed, brought in a trunk from a merchant ship that had come in just at the tail end of the storm.