Bright and Distant Shores Read Online Free

elevator shaft. He took the envelope out of his pocket and broke the seal with his penknife. The typewritten document was thirty pages of minuscule font, separated by headings that indemnified against acts of God, payments to subsequent heirs, delays and failures, et cetera, et cetera. It was hard to tell exactly what the contract proposed. The elevator arrived and the attendant sat slumped on his stool. He gave a cursory nod to Owen and the doors closed. Gone was the ceremony of earlier hours; the pomp had been reduced by the hordes to something shuffling and miffed. Owen was glad for the silence and the light coming from the elevator ceiling. He positioned the contract and traceda finger over the elliptical text. The car swayed downward, stuttering here and there in the windy shaft. The gist of the proposal was buried in the addendum. Jethro Hale Gray to enlist in the voyage as “ship’s naturalist,” under the direct protection of Owen Graves. An itemized list of desired cargo: shields, canoes, painted masks, tribal weapons, adornments, textiles, et cetera, and there, listed like a handmade artifact or a woven skirt, was the phrase
a number of natives, preferably related by the bonds of blood, for the purposes of exhibition and advertising
. A single dotted line awaited his signature at the bottom of the page.

I

OWEN

1.
    O wen’s love of objects first began with afternoons spent prospecting in the rubble of his father’s trade. Ada, mother and wife, had died in the Great Fire and Owen had only a dim recollection of her—raspberry leaves pressed into a hymnal and braided chestnut hair. Porter Graves kissed his fingertips every morning and touched her daguerreotyped face on the way out the door.
Graves & Son Wrecking & Salvage,
the two of them on the box seat, riding to another falling tenement or warehouse. Porter bellowed through a bullhorn at his crew while Owen, aged about twelve, helped pry wainscoting or de-nail floorboards. Brawny men labored with crowbars and sledges, loosing bricks from the lime mortar, hurling debris down a shaft that had been hewn clear through the center of the building. They plied pickaxes, wrecking adzes, pneumatic guns. When all else failed, a stick of dynamite bored into a wall of solid masonry. The heady cocktail of nitric and sulfuric acids, glycerin mixed with porous clay, all of it blended and wrapped in brown paper like an orphan’s Christmas present. Dynamite was Nobel’s gift to the wreckers of the world and there was no better moment in Owen’s short childhood than standing with his father and the men after the fuse was lit. Dusty silence followed by a sonic clap; runnels of smoke and billowing clouds of falling plaster. The bite of gunpowdered air. And for fifteen minutes the men relaxed, waited for the all-clear from Porter, for it was the boss himself who inspected the aftermath. They rested on crates and haunches, smoked cigarettes, spoke of wives and girlfriends, recalled pints of ale in neighborhood wateringholes and mythic accidents in teardowns. A grand piano falling six stories down the shaft and landing on a mason doubled at his work, the crazed arpeggio of splintered wood and warped notes ringing out for twenty city blocks. Or the mechanic who fell into a side chute, tumbling into a skip of broken glass. They spoke to Owen as an equal, a fellow destructionist and rubble-maker, and he could feel their respect for his father as Porter came back from his inspections with the steely demeanor of an artillery specialist, two thumbs in the air.
    They salvaged as much as they could: pipes, fixtures, beams, marble and granite, trim, even plate glass wrapped in muslin. The scrap wood was bundled and sold to immigrants for kindling. The granite was recut for tombstones. Secondhand-brick dealers carried off an endless bounty. Owen wasn’t allowed within twenty feet of the shaft and he worked the trim and fixtures with a hammer and chisel. And