Mr Darwin's Shooter (28 page)

Covington retreated inside himself somewhat as the voyage went on. From his close living together with Darwin he added patience and long-waiting to his virtues. He learned being one thing to one person, another to the next. It was a change enlarging his usefulness in service, though narrowing to his spirit. Or more truthful to say, packing his spirit down in the nether-hold until it cried to be taken out. He did not press so much for what he wanted any more. Silence bulged around him. Deafness boxed him in.

They sailed down the coast and he missed Mrs FitzGerald with a mighty sorrow that made him shed tears into her handkerchief. He did not know why, it was a painful souvenir, but he kept it till its scent faded, which was not long, then shoved it deep in his seabag, and took it out and stroked his thumb on it many times after. It was embroidered BF and had a four-leaf clover in green, and was a fine, soft piece of work. It was all his heart as he recollected his time with her.

 

The
Beagle
stood off-shore in a gentle swell. They were on the low coast of Patagonia, at Punta Alta near Bahia Blanca. Covington found himself standing on a beach where bits of worn skeleton rolled around in the waves.
They were old bones: all bigger than horses' and cows' bones by far, and strangely configured. To get them back to the ship's boat, at a riverbank landing, a packhorse was hired. Water and land intermingled dizzying a vision of one in the other, and the floating bark seemed to break from itself in globules of glass. Men broke in two walking only a short distance off, and the brain buzzed with excitement over what was found, the very brain itself breaking in half trying to understand what was in these problematical shapes that the living and the dead brought forward. The place was like a great slaughtering yard where hides only had been taken, and the rest left to rot, as was typical in that country (and how the Quentin House of Bedford got its profit). But who by, or by what agency had the bones been laid down? And what hides had they had, that must have been thick as turf on cottage roofs? All were agreed that a sweeping power of water must have brought the bones to the plains, and it was never cattle skeletons that came in such size, but debris of a race of animals gone from the earth before Noah.

Covington followed his gent's bootsteps scrambling a loose cliff and spent a day dislodging more bones still, making use of pinch bar and spade, thus proving his energy for ten masters and more. Darwin made notes and Covington asked him what he was about today. He answered, ‘
Quien Sabe
?' with a short laugh, but Covington insisted.

Gent rested his chin on the handle of his spade and said he was about getting good South American fossils to display in England, because there was only one, a fossilised sloth, in the whole Kingdom, which was held at the Royal College of Surgeons. It seemed what they'd stumbled on was unique, except in Madrid there was a
Megatherium
specimen described by Cuvier as having a curious osseous coat. Could these bones be it? For they put Gent in mind of living species of the armadillo, only bigger by far.

‘I have trouble enough with your standard issue armadillo,' said Covington. ‘The lead-bellied bastard even gets in my dreams, and I
still
can't pull him from the ground, owing to his strength.'

‘See what you can do with this one,' said the gent.

‘I shall, if it takes all day and night,' said Covington.

‘You are changed since we sailed,' said Darwin, making a hesitant probe in return for Covington's probing him.

‘Well, I have my reasons, I am glad to be back with 'um,' Covington jerked a thumb at his shipmates, who were preparing an upturned boat on the shingle and making a passable shelter for the night. But Darwin knew better— there being few secrets aboard when it came to men and their carnal temperature—and it was said his coarse Cobby had had him a whore and fallen the full-bottle. Darwin, being pricked with interest over the matter, was unable to make any straight reference, of course, otherwise he might crimson and splutter. What he
could
say was that he'd rather missed Covington in the way of a busy, bustling wife.

On their days of sleeping ashore Covington woke first, yawned, stretched and broke wind. He gave his blanket a whiplash to free it of burrs and dust before folding it and getting down on his knees to spark the tinderbox for an early fire. There was something irredeemably melancholy about a fire before sunrise, making a puny orange sputter against the fading stars. Then it became the best thing there could be. Darwin always said so and covered his head for his minute more, only to find, after that
momento
of fading dreams, his Bedford-born
vacciano
crouching over him, gripping a pannikin of tea and asking if he wanted shaving water.

‘I can have it hot in a jiffy,' was the promise that Covington always made.

This was if they were near a river. (Otherwise they went dry, grew beards.) If they were near a town or coming to an
estancia Covington searched around for a shining buckle where he could glimpse himself and apply his pomade, reeking of bay rum in the dewy morning like a Pall Mall rake. He always seemed to have recently broken his mirror and Darwin unwrapped his from its protective chamois and passed it over. Then Covington trimmed, with a pair of surgical scissors, his nascent moustachios, which were scrappy as a Chinaman's and yet enviable in the youth because worn with such expectant bravado. Darwin tried not to think about the woman Covington was believed to have tupped on his bird-shooting forays. He could do without the unsettling and unreliable effect of any passion that might break out in himself. But in the margin of a letter to his dear friend Fox he was caught sketching a seal of Cupid trimming the sails of a vessel. Covington found it when he readied the post, and grinned as if he'd found the product of a girl.

Gentry had to be pitied. They had so few advantages in respect of love. They could say they longed for a kiss from a bouncy wife in a vicarage garden. They couldn't say she roared under me and clutched my back, and I shot my specimen to blazes.

 

‘
What are we about, you ask?
' The gent looked at Covington thoughtfully, not impatiently for once, and said they were about creeping back in time. He said that good spadework carried them there, and Covington, liking ‘they', the way the gent used it so inclusively, boasted: ‘Us Covingtons are bone-men going back a bit, you may swear on my pick.'

It was the day Gent wrote in his notebook with the writing slanting across his knee (Covington always looked, when the day's work was done, in case there was an estimation of him good or bad):

Nothing much there for a loyal retainer. Nor, as time went on, did Covington ever find his name written in the notes, though a
quien sabe
was something, having an echo of him, surely, and his perky Spanish. A speculation by the gent was sometimes followed with the phrase
vide specimens
, and as Covington was the source of the specimens it was acknowledgement of a kind. It was like a rock scratched with charcoal or engraved with a spike, the way sailors did wherever they went in the world. ‘Cobby was here.' That kind of thing. He knew his time would come, as surely as he trusted in the completion of heaven.

 

Covington used his pickaxe to loosen a jawbone in the cliff line. It was like a broken door. The creature had teeth knobblier than handles, suggesting a throat like a hallway and a stomach like a ballroom arch. It was turned to stone and embedded in soft rock. He took hold with all his strength and tugged remnants from the earth. Up came jawbone, thighbone, and at last the great skull of the monstrosity that so excited the gent he swore by his living bowels (which was most unlike him), declaring it to be a specimen of creation well off course. Indians they questioned reported no such animals ever roamed the spot, neither in memory nor legend. It was no African rhinoceros, either, as he'd thought at first.

Covington spaded towards nightfall, and then worked
the clunkering great nut free by lamplight and twirled the cranium above his head for all to admire until Gent raged at him be careful. It was to go to the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields and be put on display, a rarity and a freak, and Covington was fearsomely proud of that.

The crew and even Capt smiled and made jokes of the cargoes of apparent rubbish brought aboard. But all of them knew that the taking of objects from earth, water and sky made a storehouse of treasure. The Spaniards had scoured the Americas for gold, whereas glory for England was in the naming. There were a few Frog Eaters gone ahead of them, one d'Orbigny was a particular foe, having had a three-year start. Gent was afraid d'Orbigny might get the cream of all good things. So they cracked on a pace. From birds to stones and bones and back to birds again, the mood was always the looking under of surfaces. Covington wasn't one to think with his head so much, that was established between them, but he could think with his hands and amaze with his production. Self-willed he might be as John Phipps had once hurtfully accused, but look what transpired, he came to this work and excelled. An easygoing servant without much pride was not for this master, and Covington meant to be prodigious and more. He would be made and shaped all over if that was the need.

The work ashore showed how far mighty golls, a solid trunk, and strong curiosity could take a young university man away from anyone's conception of him. Was Darwin truly to be a curate in a country parish, as was said? Those days with the monster-bones were a kind of bullock-hauling, man-driving display, with great organisation and demand on show. Darwin matched Covington in labour and there was no second-guessing: it was the most perfect of times and pray they came again.

‘You are like my brothers,' Covington told him, adjusting the bandanna handkerchief tied above his eyes to keep
the sweat from stinging. ‘You moan and groan but you never tire.'

‘I congratulate you,' rejoined Darwin, ‘on being like your brothers too, I daresay. But I
am
tired enough, and will sit making my notes while you feed me my matter.'

‘Covington!'

‘Sir?'

‘As you gather the bones up care must be taken not to confuse the tallies. They are mingled with marine shells.'

‘What say?'

‘
I said … bones … mingled …
'

‘I had my eye on that,' said Covington, beginning to throw fresh shells away. ‘You took them from the water. It is how you wanted them.'

‘I do want them, can you hear me? But now they are mingled in the sacks.'

Covington stood over a sack. ‘It will be an hour's work to separate them all.'

‘I just want my friend to know, when they reach London, they are not the same …'

‘He would have to be blind …'

‘Very well. He would have to be blind. I shall make the point to him.'

Covington whistled and knew he was on the side of good sense. Darwin might say that presumption was the foe of intelligence, but a donkey was not allowed sixty pounds per annum including expenses only to
bray
.

They camped near the boneyard under their upturned boats listening to a ghostly wind and all wondering if any of the great animals that died there were still on the earth. Darwin brought out his books, Covington held the lamp for him, and he mumbled his suppositions of what the bones were.

Next day John Phipps came with the cutter and Covington took him to see the finds. They caught a snake on the way, by standing on its back. Its tail was terminated by a hard oval point that vibrated like a box of Lucifers. While Covington pinned it down Phipps clutched it behind the neck with his thumb and forefinger. Darwin thanked him and cut the snake open, and said it was equal in poison to the rattlesnake, and might have bitten him. Phipps laughed and said he put his trust in God. Phipps got excited about the bones, when all was explained, and said it was like doing business in great waters, or going down into the deep, was it not?—Covington winked at knowledge of this great text between them. ‘Like being in the heart of the sea and going down to the bottoms of the mountains,' he replied. Covington was proud of Phipps as their bark's best countryman bar none—fowler of strong repute, immaculate poacher and something odd to have aboard, his fierce dissenting minister at large who would never own to his truest calling except under the stars, but treasured it inwardly while he worked at being coxswain and maintop-captain.