We discussed Linda Hogan’s pathway to healing the bonds among people and nature. This essay will present your analysis of how Thomas moves from trauma to healing. Your essay should consist of three well-defined sections. Describe your understanding of Linda Hogan’s philosophy regarding people and the natural environment and pathway to healing. Describe, with examples, how Thomas moves from trauma to healing. Describe the events or actions that show his evolution toward his people’s traditions. You might discuss why he does not go home when he has the chance to and what finally drives him to go home. You might also discuss how his views change on the whale hunt or on his responsibility to the daughter he left behind. Reflect on the environmental damage in our own communities. How can Hogan’s pathway to healing be implemented to foster healing in our society? How can we re-connect with nature ourselves and encourage our families and neighbors to do so? 500 to 1000 words. Citations encouraged. 12-point font, double spaced. No title page or list of references is required. The handout is meant as a guide for you to use to shape your essay. It is NOT fill-in-the-blank.
the reading online at
https://www.kcet.org/shows/neighborhood-data-for-social-change/community-health-in-the-i-710-corridor
People of the Whale 2
CHS 340
Trauma
How do we express grief?
What grief is considered valid?
What grief is not considered valid?
Trauma
in the absence of an outlet for suffering, transposition of
trauma occurs among the descendants of exploited populations
Trauma
Trauma is transferred from one generation to the next when
minority communities are forced to suppress their pain in a
culture that does not acknowledge their suffering
Native American Trauma
Native Americans have been required to remain among the
perpetrators of their trauma
without validation of their pain, their trauma has continued.
Native American Trauma
For Hogan, historical and cultural trauma among indigenous
peoples is a result of environmental injustice.
People of the Whale
This novel centers on the role of women in efforts for
environmental justice
People of the Whale
The main characters in People of the Whale experience
different types of trauma
There is also a division of the sexes about the whale hunt
People of the Whale
In the old days, while the men were out hunting, the women
sang the whales toward them
When Witka went hunting, his wife had “visions in her head of
what her husband was seeing inside the water.”
People of the Whale
Now, the men see the whale hunt as a way to make money, and
the women are opposed to it
Ruth knows there are not many whales left
But the men believe the whale hunt “will bring us back to
ourselves.” They think it will heal them.
Path to Healing
However, for author Linda Hogan, the path to healing trauma
involves the entire community
Healing happens when we take care of the natural environment
Path to Healing
The manner in which the men kill the whale does not respect
the animal or follow tradition.
It does not heal the community.
When he falls in the water, Thomas realizes that killing the
whale represents war against the environment.
Path to Healing
Thomas notices that the men “didn’t apologize to the spirit of the
whale, nor did they sing to it or pray as they said they were going
to do“
Thomas begins to learn about the traditions of the elders
“We are going to be good people. The ocean says we are not going
to kill the whales until some year when it may be right. They are
our mothers. They are our grandmothers. It is our job to care for
them”
Path to Healing
Hogan recommends attaining environmental justice to remedy
individual and cultural trauma.
These recommendations can help heal and prevent trauma and
protect the planet
Path to Healing
Hogan’s path to healing is to restore that which was damaged
More difficult today due to further destruction of the
environment by modern technology
Path to Healing
For Hogan, resistance against environmental injustice is central
to healing
Path to Healing
So, how can we heal our communities and ourselves from
cultural and intergenerational trauma?
According to Linda Hogan, we can do that through
ceremonies, remembering, coming together, and resisting
further damage to our environment
Steps to Healing
Ceremonies: your own community’s special occasions
ceremonies keep us connected to our traditions and to the
reasons behind those traditions
Steps to Healing
Remembering, connecting with, and protecting the
environment
According to Linda Hogan, working to get our natural
environment back to what it was before can heal the lack
of connection between people
Steps to Healing
community coming together for environmental and social
justice
Working together to solve community environmental
issues brings people closer and creates a bond to the land
on which we live
Steps to Healing
Resistance against the sources of trauma
We can prevent future trauma to our communities by
recognizing its sources and preventing them in the future
Essay
We discussed Linda Hogan’s pathway to healing the bonds among people and nature. This essay will
present your analysis of how Thomas moves from trauma to healing. Your essay should consist of
three well-defined sections.
Describe your understanding of Linda Hogan’s philosophy regarding people and the natural
environment and pathway to healing.
Describe, with examples, how Thomas moves from trauma to healing. Describe the events or actions
that show his evolution toward his people’ traditions. You might discuss why he does not go home
when he has the chance to and what finally drives him to go home. You might also discuss how his
views change on the whale hunt or on his responsibility to the daughter he left behind.
Reflect on the environmental damage in our own communities. How can Hogan’s pathway to healing
be implemented to foster healing in our society? How can we re-connect with nature ourselves and
encourage our families and neighbors to do so?
500 to 1000 words. Citations encouraged. 12-point font, double spaced. No title page or list of
references required.
In my understanding, Hogan’s pathway to healing is
Examples of Thomas moving from trauma to healing
Example 1 from page
Example 2 from page
Example 3 from page
How can Hogan’s pathway to healing be implemented to foster healing in our society?
More praise for
People of the Whale
“In her remarkable new novel, Hogan…explores themes of love and loss among
the A’atsika people of Washington State…. [Her] style is both dream-like and
realistic, with a nonlinear narrative that loops back on itself as more and more is
revealed.”
—Library Journal
“Deeply ecological, original, and spellbinding, Hogan ascends to an even higher
plane in this hauntingly beautiful novel of the hidden dimensions of life, and all
that is now imperiled.”
—Booklist
“This book brings you deep into the realm of a people who have ancient,
complex ties to the natural world…through a compelling and insistent
narrative.”
—Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education
“This is a fine story that embraces the worthy subjects of modern American
Indians, the Vietnam War and the importance of family.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“In telling a story of the fictional A’atsika, a Native people of the American
West Coast who find their mythical origins in the whale and the octopus, Hogan
employs just the right touch of spiritualism in this engrossing tale…with a
powerful, romantic crescendo.”
—Publishers Weekly
“With her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic, Linda Hogan reinforces my
faith in reading, writing, living.”
—Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible
“Hauntingly wise, beautifully written, and fiercely tender, People of the Whale
goes between realms of animal and human, between Native and non-Native,
between the radiant world as it once was and still might become. This book is a
bridge, a revelation, an open heart.”
—Brenda Peterson, author of Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals
“People of the Whale is pure magic—and pure truth. It’s as perfect as a smooth
stone.”
—Sy Montgomery, author of The Good Good Pig
PEOPLE of the WHALE
ALSO BY LINDA HOGAN
FICTION
Power
Solar Storms
Mean Spirit
NONFICTION
Sightings: The Gray Whale’s Mysterious Journey
The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir
The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World
Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
The Stories We Hold Secret
Intimate Nature
POETRY
Rounding the Human Corners
The Book of Medicines
Seeing Through the Sun
Savings
Red Clay
Eclipse
PEOPLE of the WHALE
A Novel
LINDA HOGAN
W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
Copyright © 2008 by Linda Hogan
All rights reserved
First published as a Norton 2009
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10110
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hogan, Linda.
People of the whale / Linda Hogan.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-07282-2
1. Indians of North America—Fiction. 2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—
Veterans—Fiction. 3. Culture conflict—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.O34726P46 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008025040
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
For the healing of the oceans,
for the healing of our veterans
coming home from all the wars,
and for my brother,
Larry Henderson.
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART ONE
Octopus
Deathless
Body Lies
The Wife of Marco Polo
Marco: The Son of Thomas
Ruth
Dark River: 1988
Hunt
Dark Houses
PART TWO
He Builds the Fence
The Rain Priest
After the Rain
He Goes Beneath
Out There
Light-years
Red Fish: Human
Home
PART THREE
The Wall: The Names
Ruth Watching
DOA: Department of the Army: Rooms
The Day of Tranquillity
The Man Who Killed the Whale
Stirrings Underneath
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
We live on the ocean. The ocean is a great being. The tribe has songs about the
ocean, songs to the ocean. It is a place where people’s eyes move horizontally
because they watch the long, wide sea flow into infinity. Their eyes follow the
width and length of the world. Black rocks rise out of the ocean here and there,
lending themselves to stories of sea monsters that might have consumed mere
mortals. Several islands along the coast are tree-covered green jewels. The
nearby fishing towns are now abandoned, as is the sawmill in disrepair, the
forest missing. Down the beach a ways to the south, white piles, shining piles of
clam and oyster shells were left behind by the earlier people, the Mysterious
Ones, who were said to have built houses of shells, perfectly pieced together.
These places truly existed, the secret places where houses were made of shells.
Royal ships once anchored there; those who kept journals said the houses were
made of pearls. No one sees them now except as a memory made of words. One
man passing by at sunset wrote, in 1910, that they were made of rainbows, but of
course no one believed him. This was also the year the deadly influenza arrived
with the white whalers. The houses of shells were covered in a mudslide that
same year.
Even the land gives in to history.
Out in the water, in the uplift of black stones, caves are left open and
revealed when the tide is out, but there are caves on land also. A pile of
treasures still remains in one cleft in black rock where once, not long ago, the
old revered man, Witka, used to enter the cold sea naked and converse with
whales, holding his breath for long periods of time. “Stay away from there,” the
mothers tell their children, making it all the more enticing, and when no one
looks, the children go through the offerings left there, tobacco, black shining
stones created when lightning struck sand, a glass float from the other side of
the ocean. On some beaches are the broken bones of long-ago boats, skeletons
of carved wood, even with ribs, that are broken dreams of poor men’s labor.
Almost everything from the boats that could be used has been taken years ago.
Old and porous whalebones were also used inland as grave markers for the last
generations, now as fences for flower gardens, and for occasional carving.
To the north, there is an old rubbing beach where the whales used to come
out of water and flop awkwardly about. “Wake up,” a sleepless person would
say back then. “Come.” And others threw on their coats in the early morning to
watch the whales rub their backs into sand and stone, to scratch and remove the
barnacles that lived on their skin. The whales looked joyful and happily clumsy
when they did this, heaving themselves about with great breath and effort. They
were sights to behold, and were watched with awe and laughter. The whales
have always been loved and watched, their spumes of breath blowing above
water, their bodies turning, rising.
Sometimes this is a turbulent place. Two rivers reach the sea here, sometimes in
a muddy rush away from the land. When there are storms, waves reach far
heights and water crashes against the rocks, still smoothing them through time.
Sometimes, too, it is peaceful, the water calm. Then the people go out on the
still water and fish, or sit on the beach drawing pictures or sifting through the
gray sand. They talk with their friends and eat sandwiches. On summer days the
sand is warm against their backs and they rest on its heat.
Across the bay are whitewashed buildings. They look as if they’ve been
painted with milk. The old people, the traditionalists, live there.
It is a secret place, this world. You could say it is in Washington but that is
too far north, by degrees and fathoms. I keep it a secret, the place, the people,
though the world will soon hear about it.
But place or time or season, it doesn’t matter to the man who turns his back to
the sea. No one knows if he will turn toward life again. They wonder if it is hate
he feels, or remorse, or merely human grief. After a while, some forget he is over
there.
PART ONE
OCTOPUS
The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and
many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the
octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave.
Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped
school and smoked cigarettes there.
But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of
the sea and they watched it. Every one of these ocean people stood back, amazed
to see it walk, the eye of it looking at them, each one seen, as if each one were
known in all their past, all their future. Its skin paled at the sight of men smoking
cigarettes and women in their cardigans pulled tight, with their dark windblown
hair. One child stepped toward it as if to speak before his mother grabbed his
arm and pulled him back to her, claiming him as a land dweller and no
communicator or friend of any eight-legged sea creature.
None of them, not even the oldest, had ever seen an octopus do this and their
people had lived there for thousands of years. It scared them into silence, then
they talked about it. They knew it meant something. They didn’t know what.
Four fishermen in dirty clothes wanted to kill it and use it for fishing bait. “It’s
only practical!” they argued. “It’s the best thing that could happen to us.” They
could take it, undigested, out of the stomach of flounder and halibut and use it
again. For days they talked about it. They quarreled. They cried about how
blessed they were. A few wild-haired men, afraid of its potent meaning, wanted
to throw kerosene in the cave and burn it.
But one of the powerful women stepped up. She believed it had a purpose
for going into the cave and that the humans, a small group of lives beside a big
ocean, should leave it alone. Others agreed. Its purpose was a mystery. Or
perhaps it was sick or going to give birth. It turned a shade of red as it reached
the safety of the cave. And so the people thought it was holy and they left gifts
outside the entrance to the black rock cave. Some left sage and red cedar. Some
offered shining things, glass smoothed by the sea, even their watches. As for the
infant Thomas, his mother, whose own infancy was fed on whale and seal fat,
was one of those who thought it was a holy creature and its presence at the time
of his birth granted to Thomas a special life. She came from Thomas’s birth at
of his birth granted to Thomas a special life. She came from Thomas’s birth at
the place of the old people and stood before the entrance of the octopus cave and
held her kicking baby up to it, to be seen by it. “Here is my son. You knew his
grandfather. Watch over him.” They were poor people. She had little to leave but
the pearl she inherited from her father, Witka. She rolled it into the cave. She
was convinced the octopus would be the spirit-keeper of her son, because she
thought like the old people used to think, that such helpers existed and they were
benevolent spirits. An older man named Samuel left his silver ring at the
entrance to the cave; it was his finest possession. Not to have given something
they cared about would have been no gift at all, so, following his example,
others left sparkling glasses, pieces of gold, beads, all the shining things the
octopus people love in their homes beneath water.
For the time it dwelt there, they brought offerings, even the first flowers of
morning. The treasures built up like small middens. Even the children didn’t take
the treasures, although they did go look at them and marvel at what they found,
until their mothers grabbed them away. The younger children tasted them and
found them without flavor except the salt from the air.
Those who were afraid the octopus was created by magic or called into
being by some force on land not benevolent kept an eye on how it stood in the
back of the cave. But it sensed their emotions and formed itself to fit beneath a
ledge. It could shape itself to fit into anything, a bottle, a basket. That was how
they were caught in the old days, by baskets lowered into the water at night and
lifted in the mornings, the creature inside it. Yet, that quality scared people who
knew little about them, but had heard much about shape-shifters and their deceits
and witchery on humans, always with poor outcomes for the mortals.
Nevertheless, the mother of Thomas, in a plain white dress, took the baby
Thomas daily across the sand to the cave when the tide was out.
Then, one night, without any sign, the octopus disappeared from human
sight and went back into the water.
As closely as they watched, no one saw its return to the ocean. It must have
been three in the morning, they decided, because early each morning the old
people were on the beach singing powerful, old, and still-remembered songs.
They sang around four each morning when the atmosphere is most charged with
energy. They could say this now that they lived in measured time. Also, they
could remain and pray and watch the reflected red of dawn on the rocks and sky.
Drinkers might have seen it at two in the morning as they sat on the beach
drumming and singing their newer songs. Of course, they may have missed it
while kissing a lover or, like Dimitri Smith, the man who never tucked in his
shirt and slept often on the beach, while gazing only upward at the sky,
searching out and naming the constellations: Whale. Sea Lion. Octopus. Yes,
that was one of them.
that was one of them.
With the departure of the octopus went their gifts. The octopus, by accepting
the Smiths’ gold ring, Witka’s pearl, gems, the pieces of silver, even a pair of
glasses, knew it was loved by them and it would help them as it went back under
the sea and stayed there, maybe giving them good fishing or good deer hunting,
whaling money, love medicine, all things desperately wanted by humans and
shifting in their value day by day, moment by moment, depending on their
needs.
Thomas’s grandfather was the well-known whaler named Witka. He was the one
who told them what gifts the octopus loved. He was the last of those who could
go under the sea holding his breath for long times and remain, so he had a great
deal of knowledge about the ocean and all sea life. He was the last of a line of
traditional men who loved and visited the whales to ensure a good whale hunt,
along with his friend, the great-grandfather of Dimitri Smith and a man named
Akita-si who could also remain beneath water for briefer times than Witka, but
long enough to sew a whale’s mouth closed when they killed a whale. This
sewing was important so that the lungs wouldn’t fill with water and the whale
sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Witka’s wife lived most of the time in the white town. His other women
lived in the wooden houses that used to be up against the mountain before the
tidal wave washed the places away, but he himself stayed and dreamed much of
the time in the dark gray house he built on top of the thirty-two-foot-high black
rock where his grandson, Thomas Witka Just, now dwells, thinking of his
grandfather, whose watch on the sea had been constant, that man who spoke
with the whales, entreated them, and asked, singing with his arms extended, if
one of them would offer itself to the poor people on land. He beckoned and
pleaded when the people were hungry. The rest of the time Witka watched their
great numbers passing by, spraying or standing in water to look around, or rising
and diving, their shining sides covered with barnacles. The infant whales were
sometimes lifted on the backs of the mothers. They were such a sight for him to
behold, the man who lived between the worlds and between the elements.
Water was not really a place for humans, but Witka the whale hunter had
courage. He had practiced holding his breath from childhood in preparation for
this role. Only for this. He was born to it and his parents were unhappy about it.
When he went beneath water, they stood in their clothing woven of sea grass and
waited for him to surface. But they couldn’t hope away his destiny. He was born
with a job set out for him and his life was already known to them. He wore white
cloth that set him apart so the others would know and remember what and who
cloth that set him apart so the others would know and remember what and who
he was. That way they would treat him well. He learned the songs and prayers.
By the age of five he had dreamed the map of underwater mountains and valleys,
the landscape of rock and kelp forests and the language of currents. He had an
affinity for it. He saw it all. At night he dreamed of the way it changed from day
to day. They were beautiful dreams and he loved the ocean world. “You should
see the circle of shining fish,” he told his mother.
“Oh my,” was all she could say in return, creasing her embroidered
handkerchief, wiping her eyes.
Later, as a man, he visited the world he dreamed. He traveled there. A
person could always think of the old man in any way they wanted, but usually
they saw him in their mind’s eye as the old whaler who went underneath the
water, white hair flying in the currents, old dark face even more wrinkled from
the salt water, the man who was a medical oddity, a human curiosity, a
visionary, a hunter and carver, and a medicine man who could cure rheumatism
and dizzy spells.
His knowledge of the ocean was so great that scientists came to question
him. Scientists and anthropologists then wrote papers about what he told them.
Doctors from as far away as Russia came to find out how he held his breath and
stayed beneath water for as long as he did with no ill effects, how he could
remain in a hibernating state without breathing. “He’s like those men in India
who do yoga,” said one of them, thinking if they could learn it what a weapon it
would make.
Once Witka remained for part of the time with an octopus. It was a larger
one, a fifteen-footer all stretched out, Witka caressing the tentacles. Of course,
he could have exaggerated. Who would ever know? The octopus, who had the
gift of feeling its way into small places, searched out his pockets and took
several coins. It then worked the wedding ring off his hand. That was how they
knew what the octopus loved. Witka told them all about it, laughing, his missing
tooth showing when he laughed. His left hand he held up for display, naked of
the ring. “And not a single tentacle print did it leave!” he said.
All this was in the days when the women would sing the whales toward them.
Witka’s wife, too, was a chosen one. That’s how they came to be matched. She
was one of the whale-singers. As for whaling in those days, nothing except the
women who sang the whales toward them was more serious than Witka’s
knowledge of the sea. When he walked into the cold depths of the ocean, or
slipped so carefully out of the canoe, he began in earnest a hunt for the whale.
When Witka went into the ocean, everyone and everything on land was still. The
When Witka went into the ocean, everyone and everything on land was still. The
town stopped living. No one labored. No one bought or sold. No one laughed or
kissed. It was the unspoken rule. All they did was wait, the women singing,
eerily, at ocean’s edge. They were solemn and spoke softly and they considered
this the great act of a man who sacrificed for them. All they did was think of him
out there in the sea and of the whales that would approach. For them. The people
of the water. People of the whale.
When he entered the water, his wife, by spiritual rule, went underground.
Even when she was very old and stooped, she dug the hole herself. With a small
shovel and with her own thin, wrinkled hands. This was the way it was always
done. She dug a hole, like a bear den, deep inside the giant roots of a tree. She
covered herself with skins and she stayed under the earth, eyes closed, visions in
her head of what her husband was seeing inside the water. She was beneath
ground; he was beneath water. Maybe she breathed for him. People wondered if
they were that connected because it was known that in the cold and dark they
were as one.
With his mind and heart, Grandfather Witka told Mary, her catholic name,
“My hands are swollen and cold,” and about a flotilla of plankton he’d just
passed through. He said, “It’s like a snowstorm,” and as he talked she saw it, too,
as far away as she was. She asked the water to have mercy on the old man she’d
known as a child when he climbed trees, laughed, practiced holding his breath,
and hunted his first seal. “Look,” he’d said, his first gift to her, smiling, a tooth
missing. “It’s for you. I want to marry you someday.”
She smiled. “Only a seal? I’m worth more than that.” She laughed and
walked away, looking back at him once or twice over her shoulder.
Mary sang to the whales, onio way no, loving them enough that one of them
might listen and offer itself to her people. Entombed with the smell of cedar,
curled like an infant newly born, even though her hair was gray now, her face
bony, she was suspended and stiff. And then together, when he saw a whale, the
two of them pleaded and spoke. Look how we are suffering. Take pity on us. Our
people are small. We are hungry.
It was said the whale listened mostly to the woman because who could
ignore her pleading, singing, beautiful voice?
The last time Witka entered the sea he did not return. Worse, a storm arrived.
They all feared that this time, at his age, his heart failed and he would not come
back to the air world where they lived. His daughter, the mother of Thomas, was
little more than a child. She didn’t know where her mother had buried herself in
the trees. Out of grief, she pounded the gray sand beach with her fists. She was
the trees. Out of grief, she pounded the gray sand beach with her fists. She was
such a thin girl, too. She stood by the black rocks in her nightgown looking out
into the dark water, watching in vain. She held hands with one of Witka’s
girlfriends and together they cried and hugged each other and grieved for the lost
old man.
Then, when all had given up and some turned toward home, someone yelled,
“Look,” and he came out of the dark underwater cave where he had anchored
himself and rolled out of the green swells of the waves onto the sand, coughing.
When he surfaced, the water rolling off his head and face, he took a great breath.
He dragged himself up, skinny with age, wrinkled, and walked out from the sea
with kelp still on him, looking anything but dignified. A fish caught in the kelp
escaped his hair and dropped back down to the tide. He walked like a stick, stiff
from the cold, and his face was nearly blue. He walked straight over to his
daughter and said, “Girl, do you want to scare the whales away, hitting the
ground so hard? I heard it all the way out there.” She ran off, ashamed, while he
laughed. Everyone waited for his pronouncement. This time he said, with
smiling eyes, “Yes, tomorrow. It is the right time for us to bring a whale back
home,” as he looked with great joy at the green land and sunlight and his wife
walking—no, floating—toward him, earth and twigs still clinging to her hands
and clothes and hair.
His brother and his best friend called the other men and they went to prepare
the wooden canoes. They brought the harpoon, the floats, drinking water, for
they might be gone four days or more. When they hunted, the women would be
quiet the whole time the men were out. Everyone had to be pure in heart and
mind. By then the whale would be coming gladly toward the village.
“Oh brother, sister whale,” he sang. “Grandmother whale, Grandfather
whale. If you come here to land we have beautiful leaves and trees. We have
warm places. We have babies to feed and we’ll let your eyes gaze upon them.
We will let your soul become a child again. We will pray it back into a body. It
will enter our bodies. You will be part human. We’ll be part whale. Within our
bodies, you will dance in warm rooms, create light, make love. We will be
strong in thought for you. We will welcome you. We will treat you well. Then
one day I will join you.” His wife sang with him.
When Witka truly died, his wife, best girlfriend, and daughter held on to his
body longer than they should. They couldn’t be sure he was dead just because he
wasn’t breathing.
Those were the grandparents of Thomas Witka Just. They were the grandparents
and mother, on one side, of Thomas, the man who had been missing in war, the
and mother, on one side, of Thomas, the man who had been missing in war, the
man who now lived in Witka’s gray hut on the craggy rocks. Thomas, the man
who’d won the Purple Hearts and nearly the last Medal of Honor and other
shining tokens of actions that should have made him feel esteemed.
When Thomas was a boy, he, like his grandfather, always watched the water. As
if keeping with the old traditions they’d all heard about, he and his friends,
Dimitri III, Dwight, jealous of the abilities of Thomas, and the others would see
how long they could hold their breath underwater. “It isn’t funny,” Thomas’s
mother said when she thought, more than once, that he had drowned and she
pulled him up to air by the back of his shirt. The last time, the shirt, an old
Arrow, ripped off and Thomas nearly drowned, laughing.
Custer died in an Arrow shirt. That was their joke.
Later, as his grandfather had gone under the ocean, his grandmother under
the land, Thomas had taken to the sky, a most unnatural thing for a human. On
his way to war, the first plane crashed and he was the sole survivor. Before he
could even protest or tell the story of what he’d seen, they put him on another
plane. After that, he believed he was saved for a reason.
But now he hopes he has an appointment with death and all he wants to do is
wait for it. He has turned his back on the sea.
It’s a secret to the rest of the world where Thomas lives, as he wants it to be.
If it were known, people would come searching. They would find him. He is a
war hero missing for over five years after the war was declared over, until he
was found by the army, then, after a stop in Hawaii, he was lost again in San
Francisco, named for Saint Francis. Now he is missing from himself.
If you knew about him, you would want to go talk to him and tell him it’s
not his fault and you’d tell him to live, or if he is dying, or wanting to die, he
should at least do it without closing the doors of the world. But your words
would tire you out. Even more, they might convince him out of spite or
frustration to go into the water and never come back, or to leap off the high rock
where he sits, and throw himself to earth from one side of the rock like when he
was ten and made wings and jumped off this very rock cliff. For one moment the
air took hold of his sewn wings and he flew for just that moment before he
landed, scratched and bruised on the ocean sand. What a moment, that second in
air.
Now you look at him and think he never had a boyhood or wings.
Now at night he never lights his grandfather Witka’s kerosene lamp. He
doesn’t even have a wick for it any longer. Just as it is for him, what ignites and
maintains the fire is missing. He doesn’t want light and some people hear voices
maintains the fire is missing. He doesn’t want light and some people hear voices
from the place at night so they stay away.
Thomas wishes that, like the octopus that came to land when he was born, he
could place himself inside something small and pull the last stone over the
opening.
During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of
his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came
before him. Witka’s grandson, his dark hair unwashed, his face still one of
handsome angles, sits in the dark of the old house like an octopus in a dark
corner, is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What
lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an
inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must
journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man
can’t escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place
and it begins over again. It courses hard. And Thomas harbors too many secrets.
Death would be beautiful for him, but he’s destined, miserably, to live. He
owes a debt to life. It’s as simple as accounting, as hard math. He owes
something. Maybe he will understand what it is now in the dark at the place
where the old man Witka once watched for whales. The sea is beautiful, but he
looks at it not at all, not even for whales. Soon his clothes grow too large for
him. Inside the sleeves and collars and legs are memories inside the body that
can’t be forgotten.
Like the octopus from 1947, the one that could have gone into a basket to
hide, the one that portended good things for this child, Thomas is contained in
small things, the gray house, cups and cans, packs of cigarettes.
DEATHLESS
Here is what happened, how the man was lost. Here is how he lived through
death, how he came to live on the dark rock and to pass memories through his
heart.
First there was the war and it was in Vietnam and few of our people had ever
heard of that small country before. They knew little of the war except small
things on the news. This is a small reserve, village, or town, as some prefer to
call it, one with old houses staggered here and there on the flats and on hillsides
or near the river. Nothing in Dark River is given to straight lines or planning.
The roads curve up one hill and down another. The roofs are of faded blue
material on some of the small wooden houses, the blue that was once brighter
than sky or water. Other homes are covered with red, also pale so that the colors
look like those of dusk and dawn. The houses, sitting here and there, hold people
who have grown together, all with the same histories like one tree with the same
roots and fallen leaves. They have ancestors in common, most of them. Even the
dogs running after food together or sleeping in the winding roads look like they
descended from the same Adam and Eve of dogs.
Then there was Ruth, the woman Thomas Witka Just had married in a tribal
ceremony on the beach. What a wedding! All their friends were there. It was
even said the fish attended, making the water shine with their silver leaps and
splashes.
Ruth and Thomas had known each other all their lives and it was inevitable,
all thought, that they would marry. As a woman, Ruth inherited a well-boned
face, the kind that is beautiful photographed but looks sharp in person, like she
was carved by the winds that blow there. As an infant, Ruth was born with gill
slits. It had happened before, children being born with gills, but her mother,
Aurora, said, “It’s an omen. I don’t know what, but I don’t like it. She’s bound
for water, this one. Like her father.” She was afraid her daughter might die. In or
out of water, at first it seemed she wouldn’t live either way. The midwife had to
keep the baby girl in a zinc tub filled with water so she wouldn’t drown in air
before they took her to a doctor in town. The gills were right in front of her ears.
before they took her to a doctor in town. The gills were right in front of her ears.
The doctors were baffled and it took many weeks to sew the gills together and
keep Ruth Small breathing through her lungs. Later it seemed she heard things
others didn’t. She heard through water, schools of fish and the whales before
they surfaced.
Ruth Small, granddaughter of Akita-si, Witka’s friend and the other beneaththe-water man, was anything but small. Large in spirit, strong in hand, big in
heart, she was a tall girl, taller than Thomas until he caught up and finally
outgrew the leggy young woman, and then one night kissed her and their love
was sealed, lip to lip.
The night of the wedding there was a full moon and Ruth’s dress, painstakingly
made by her mother, had shells and abalone buttons and other things that shine
sewn on it. It looked like the reflections of moonlight on the ocean itself. Ruth
wrapped herself with a shawl that was also shining. She looked as if she were a
spirit that could walk the ocean pathway made by the moon on water, like the
woman in one of their stories. In this story, the woman and moon together
created the cycles of growing plants, the movement of tides, and the falling rain.
That night, barefoot, Ruth was not only shining with her dress of shell and
bead and white ribbon, but she was glowing from inside. The happiness of the
two, who were always meant to be together, was visible to all, especially to
Ruth’s father, who married them with words in their own language. All noted
how much Ruth and her father resembled one another, their bony good looks,
their golden skin tanned from sun, their long fingers. They even fished together,
and it was hard work. Their muscled arms showed it. All day they fished and
their long fingers and hands had calluses. They would have fished into the night
except for the collision they once had with a fisherman named Vince Only. At
the wedding, Vince, always a fisherman, watched the sea.
“What a smart man you are,” someone said to Thomas after the wedding.
Thomas smiled at his new wife. “I know it.”
Linda, Ruth’s friend, her hair curled for the first time, said, “You two have
always been married anyway.”
It did seem that way. Ruth and Thomas were, even as infants, two people
who had grown together, who were meant for one another, who sat together as
infants in their cradleboards watching the adults fishing, gazing at the world
around them, and at each other, talking in their own language. Ruth’s stitches
had been removed and she could breathe. Yet she did, even then, long for the
had been removed and she could breathe. Yet she did, even then, long for the
water at times. Together they had watched his father carve masks for the dances,
frightening ones, raven masks, ones that made the children laugh. At night the
older people danced, sang, and played old gambling games for stones while the
babies watched, the ocean shining in moonlight. They saw all this from the time
they were children and they saw one another as if they were one person sharing
the same world, the same thoughts.
After the marriage, they moved into a small place by the river and painted it
green from top to bottom because it had been the only paint available. They
called it “Fruit Box imported from California.” It was where they began their life
as a married couple. It was over by the Salmon River. Naked they lay together in
the breeze from the windows. Outside was what had once been a fence made of
willows, but the posts miraculously took on life and now, in spite of being cut
and buried, they bloomed and leafed out, light green, held by wire that Ruth,
with her long black hair, set about clipping, calling out, “The liberation of the
trees!”
She painted on each end of the house, CALIFORNIA ORANGES.
Thomas adored her. They were people of scant resources. Ruth helped her
father fish. She could hear where the fish traveled beneath water so they had a
more or less successful business. Her hands were hardened from the ropes and
wires. Thomas worked beneath cars, adding parts, tightening screws, fixing tires.
His nails were black. And she was tired. Her father had grown old. That, and he
was called on any time of day or night to help people with their ailments. Her
mother went with him but only to tell him if the man on the bed should have his
leg removed because of diabetes or if it was something that Indian medicine
could cure.
Not far from them was the Shaker church many belonged to, but not Thomas
and Ruth who belonged to the age of Aquarius, as they laughingly put it when
making love.
Sometimes at night they swam naked in the sea, plankton on their bodies
lighting them when they surfaced. Thomas was a weak swimmer, but like his
grandfather he could hold his breath for long times.
The young couple had no everyday routine except for work and that varied.
Sometimes no one brought in a car. At times there were no fish. Even old Vince
with his whiskers didn’t go out, unless he went to the deep sea.
Still, the war finally came to the village. It was on a day Ruth was wearing seablue. For some reason, they would both remember that. She looked like a mirage
to Thomas.
to Thomas.
“What?” she was surprised. “You have joined the army? You are going to
boot camp and we’ve barely been married? Don’t you love me?” she’d asked
him when he had enlisted. “Why? We’re just starting together!”
He loved her. He didn’t know why he enlisted. “We just all did it,” was his
only reason. “Together,” he said. They’d been drinking, “the boys,” as she called
them. They believed in America. They did. They were patriotic. “I’m not just an
Indian. I’m an American, too.”
“You were drinking with them! That’s why.”
She turned her back to him so he wouldn’t see her cry. After a while she left
the small bedroom in their rented place, the green walls and ceiling they’d once
laughed about, that only paint they could find, which now seemed pitiful. And
she put away dishes, quietly, carefully. He wished she would slam cupboards
and silverware. Later he went to her, stood behind her and held her. She didn’t
forgive him, not then. Not really until years later when she realized how men
were so influenced by their peers and governments. This was something Ruth, a
woman who could stand alone in the world, would never understand.
Thomas was sent away before the others.
He argued with the recruiter. “But the army promised us the buddy system.
We’d go together. We were supposed to go together. We wanted to fight
together for America.”
“The army promises a lot,” said the man at the recruiting station in the little
shopping center next to the post office. “Don’t worry. You’ll all catch up with
each other.” And maybe Thomas knew he lied, but it was too late. Now he was
owned.
On the day Thomas left, Ruth was torn in half. The two of them, who’d
always laughed together, floated in the water and talked together, who saw with
the same eyes, were now separate. She wept when he left and she couldn’t stop
for days. Then she set her lips in tight resignation, more akin to sorrow, and went
about her life of fishing.
Soon she moved onto their boat, an old Trophy, a Cadillac of boats, she’d
always been told. It had a decent enough living space. Besides, she of the
independent spirit and born with gill slits had always wanted to live on the
water, and now she and her father would always be ready when the salmon came
down from the north.
She was pregnant when Thomas left for war. She didn’t know it until it made her
sick to fill the boat with gas, too sick to head toward the salmon run or out
deeper to the halibut, as they sometimes did. Her father watched her vomit over
deeper to the halibut, as they sometimes did. Her father watched her vomit over
the back of the boat and said he’d go alone that day. He sent her home on his
worn-out little excuse for a dinghy. She barely made it, and then her mother
looked at her and said, “You don’t even need a doctor to tell you that you are
having a baby. I give you seven months.”
Evenings, or early mornings, drenched in salt water, loneliness, an infant
inside her growing by division she thought, not multiplication, she brought in the
nets, counted the fish, sometimes only eleven trying to leap from net into water,
both shining.
She already saw the child she was going to have and so she named him Marco
Polo, the infant with black hair who was going to do what she’d always wanted
and travel the world. Oh, he’d see camels and deserts and silks and people
wearing orange and red robes. He’d see temples and monkeys and paintings and
hear sounds of the world she’d never heard, jungle sounds, and he’d see the far
north.
Guess what? she wrote to Thomas. You would have loved it today. I saw the
bald eagle nest. Remember it? It has grown. They added another room. But even
better, I saw an octopus in the water. Thomas, best of all, we are going to have a
baby. Yes, a baby. He is a boy. I can see him. He looks like you. My mother will
be so disappointed. She swears he will look like Dad.
That same day she mailed the letter. After she talked to the gossip Carlene,
who worked at the post office, she was followed by a scrawny spotted dog. “Go
home,” she hissed at him. But no amount of stomping her foot, of saying
“Shoo,” turned the dog back away and when she went to the water, the little
thing stood at the shore watching her leave, howling like a baby wolf, until she
turned back. “Okay, come on.” He hopped in the dinghy with her and, to her
amazement, climbed onto the boat like a human, a few steps up and then a leap.
A master at boats already.
That day she had to fix a pending leak in the boat where she lived, fix the
hatch, and decide how to make room for a baby and for a dog. She looked at the
dog and thought of the words poop deck, and how she would have to train him.
She looked about her small room and thought about where the cradle would go,
then the crib, then the bed. As it turned out, she didn’t have to wonder where the
dog would sleep. The little spotted dog slept with her and she loved the warmth
of his body.
Even without Thomas, it became a happy time. Hoist, as she and her father
named their little canine assistant, dragged nets in with his teeth as if to help,
making them laugh. She would always remember her father’s face as he laughed
that first day, red and happy. Hoist also chased his tail. He leaped over waves,
biting the top of water. Everyone loved him, even the customers at the NO DOGS,
and SORRY WE’RE OPEN café. And the baby was moving, turning like a butterfly
growing wings in a cocoon.
It’s salmon season, she wrote Thomas. They are so beautiful. I hate to kill
even one. But I only sell what we need to. I almost have to divine what the
restaurants will use. Sometimes I throw a few back. I wish you would write me
more about what life is like over there. Your letter about how green it is made
me curious. I wish I could see it. The baby is growing!
Thomas laughed when he read the letter. But there were two laughs, one
about the baby, one about the idea of Ruth seeing the world over there, not worth
laughing about, a world taken apart, bodies, fear, and the smell of death. But
then, it was the beginning of many lies, how could he tell her the truth of his life
there.
Ruth left out some things, as well. She didn’t tell him when her father died
and how they’d had a traditional service and his body was taken to the island
where once they kept the dead. The mourning songs and the crying would have
made a mountain weep. He was left for the vultures, according to tradition which
was so rarely kept now. Her mother went into mourning, painting the part in her
hair black.
Nor did Ruth write to Thomas about how his own father had attacked her at
the corner of the schoolhouse one night. He’d been drinking. She begged him to
stop as he pulled her blouse open, then held her arms with one hand. There were
some men nearby smoking and laughing. She called to them for help. They
didn’t come to help her, even though she knew they heard. They walked away.
Worse, they laughed. With her strong arms she had to break his hold herself and
leave him bruised, drunk, and angry enough to tell everyone he “got some” from
his own daughter-in-law. He was known for his handsome charisma, and some
might have believed it if they hadn’t known Ruth. More than one person saw
him with a black eye underneath his sunglasses.
When he was born, Marco swam out of the birth canal hands first, like a diver.
The doctor at the hospital was worried when he saw the small wet hands, as if a
small replica of the woman was reaching, grasping from within herself. One
hand even took hold of the doctor when he was feeling for the head and the baby
began to pull himself into the world of light and air. Marco managed to swim.
Ruth looked at every part of him, his perfect brown fingers. Then his toes. She
laughed. “Well, no wonder, Doctor! Mother, look, he has some webbed toes! Of
laughed. “Well, no wonder, Doctor! Mother, look, he has some webbed toes! Of
course he came out swimming.” Webbed feet were not unknown around those
parts, but no one liked to admit it. Besides, in Marco’s case, there were only a
few. And Aurora had never told Ruth about how she had been born with gill
slits. They were a family not bound to land, that was for sure, Aurora told her
own sister, who lived farther north. Like the whales who were dependent on
land, in many ways they lived in two elements.
One morning after a long silence from Thomas, Ruth sat on her mother’s couch
eating a Popsicle. It was an old couch, worn velvet or horsehair—she never
knew which—and slightly rough. The lovebirds in their white cage in the corner
of the room were cooing. Hoist always watched them with strong alertness and
snapped up their fallen feathers. Ruth had her eye on the sea. It misted outside.
She was looking toward the ocean trying to see through the mists and drifts of
fog when a black car pulled up the dirt road to the drive. A man stepped out with
clear plastic covering his military hat. Strangely, Hoist did not bark. When the
man knocked, Ruth knew why he was there. “Don’t open the door, Mom.” Ruth
went to it and spoke through it to the man she would always call Mr. Death. “No
one lives here,” she said. As if that was not loud enough, she said, “Death, you
have never heard our name. Go away.”
He, like everyone, was merely doing his duty. “I have a message to deliver.
Mr. Just sent me to you.” There were two men. One remained in the car.
“Ruth, don’t be rude. Who is it?” Her mother, with her white hair and dark
skin, always gracious, dish towel in hand, opened the door to the stranger. Ruth
was already on the floor, fallen as women have done before, so often, some
doubled over, some on their sides, some shaking with sobs, some staring at
linoleum because at least the floor was not the dread face of human truth.
Aurora, the mother of Ruth, knew why he was there. She pitied her daughter,
but she let him in and he removed his hat. “I’m Sergeant Green,” he said. Then,
slowly, he bent toward Ruth. “May I?” He looked at the older woman. She
nodded. It was clear he was experienced at this and he was strong, as if they only
selected men with arms that could hold women, chests that could be hit by them,
backs that could lift them. He picked Ruth up carefully, her black hair cascading
down, and laid her on the sofa with doilies on its arms. Her beauty was not
missed by him. Ruth, as she had done as a girl, cried without crying, water
spilling from her eyes, and the man never even had to say, “I regret to inform…”
The baby Marco, who already had watching eyes and showed signs of
difference from other children, slept in the next room. He was a calm child, and
the voices did not wake him. Or they did and he listened and understood.
the voices did not wake him. Or they did and he listened and understood.
“Here.” The messenger spoke to Aurora. “Her father-in-law told me to give
this to her. I’m sorry, ma’am. We didn’t even know he had a wife. It wasn’t in
our records.”
“No,” said Ruth’s mother. “It was a tribal wedding. It’s in our own records.”
He took something out of his pocket and handed it to the older woman. It
was a dog tag, a single one. It fell into Aurora’s hand on its snake chain. “Thank
you,” she said. Ruth heard the chain and metal. Dog tag and chain. Dog, that was
a man in war. Dog. He had to follow orders. He had to sniff for danger, be
willing to die for his owner. He had to hate strangers, be wary, be nothing, be
kicked and hungry and still obey. He needed madness. Dog, what Thomas and so
many others had been. The president had said about war that it was proof there
was still madness in the world, only Ruth always wondered who the mad ones
were. Anyway, even if she often thought he was one of them, the president’s
words were the truth.
Anger and sorrow grew together in her like a single tree. Sorrow had
knocked her down, but anger lifted her to her feet.
Standing tall, Ruth looked at the man. “He’s not dead.”
He’d heard the same thing so many times before. “I hope you’re right.”
The car backed away and left the way it had come.
“He’s alive, Mother. I feel it.”
“You’re probably right.” She took her daughter in her arms and held her.
“You usually are.” She, still grieving her own man, smoothed down Ruth’s black
hair.
Nevertheless, it was the end of laughter for a time.
The love between Thomas and Ruth was a love that existed in another
dimension, just as Witka, the grandfather of Thomas, and his wife had a love
that communicated from earth all the way through elements to the depths of
water. Ruth had seen through space and time across this world through her own
eyes and heart. Through distances across the ocean, with its pulsing jellyfish and
swaying kelp forests, flying manta rays, sea turtles coming up to breathe, across
all that and heavy clouds, too, she had seen him in her twilight sleep. Once there
were firestorms. She had seen him encircled by fire and, like a salamander in the
forest, surviving it by staying down in the wet earth, beneath it, breathing
through a wet brown rag, not running like others. She saw him leap into a ditch.
Once, more recently, he was standing at a brown river in a green world, and he
was fishing, his black hair in a ponytail as he threw out fishing nets in their tribal
fashion. But then, Ruth’s spirit had never remained in the hiding place of her
fashion. But then, Ruth’s spirit had never remained in the hiding place of her
body. It always traveled. “Last night your father was drunk,” she said to Thomas
once when they were children. Tommy, as he was called then, nodded,
accustomed to her and how, even shy and quiet, she knew things. He had looked
down at the ground where they sat. She said, “And I know why.” She pulled at
her braids. “Because he aches inside, because he will never be like your
grandpa.”
Now, at night, she pulled her dreams and memories into a net like a school
of silver fish. There was the time she dreamed a short-haired Thomas eating with
a tribe of people. They wore faded blue and brown clothing, and so did he. They
talked rapidly and laughed. They ate fish and rice.
But after the man in the shining car arrived, there were times she doubted
herself. “What if he’s sharing food with the ancestors? Or fishing for them and
not for earth people?” she asked Linda.
Linda, who owned the only restaurant on the reservation, said, “You always
know things, Ruth. Trust your feelings. Your intuition is always right. Yeah.
He’s alive.”
Linda was thin from moving all day and her hair was dyed too dark now.
She wore it in a bun when she worked, although no customer would complain to
Linda about a hair in the food. Some had, and she had merely removed it and
said, “There you go.”
“Sit down for a while,” she told Ruth, and poured her some coffee. “For one
thing, the ancestors don’t catch fish at rivers. They fish the clouds. They only eat
ground acorns and flowers. Like the people of the past.”
But when Linda put her arms around her, and Ruth was an armload of grief,
Ruth knew Linda didn’t believe her. She felt it. Linda was thinking, after all,
they had the dog tag. And Ruth had it in her pocket, constantly fingering the
chain, the cheap metal that should have been gold. Throughout the day, she
caressed and felt and read it with her fingertips, that thing which had touched his
chest, his sweat.
After Death had come to her mother’s door, Ruth began staying awake on the
boat where she lived with Marco. She watched Marco sleep, his lips parted, his
skin smooth, eyelashes like his father’s, his eyes already with lines at the side as
if he’d spent a lifetime laughing. He was an astute child. Born an old man, was
what people said of him. He was also a quiet child. Still, he had a sense of humor
from infancy and he was set apart by his inborn wisdom. He was the incarnation
of an ancestor, the elders said, those who still believed in such things.
Like his father, like Witka, the boy began to go into the salt water of the
plankton-filled ocean and not come to the surface for a long time. Ruth, unable
to bear the thought of losing him, waited in tears and then reproached him. “It
scares me. I wait for you to be alive. Don’t you understand?” She had already
lost her father, her husband.
Marco didn’t. Every day he stayed longer, telling his mother, “I can’t help it.
Something else makes me do it.”
Over the next years, Ruth’s visions were a wave that flowed from her bed on the
boat and floated her out to the waters of another world. She merely floated, her
body lying on the bed moored to her place on the sea as she journeyed. Now and
then she had a dream of Thomas with a little girl on his lap like a spirit child.
Out loud one night, she said, “He’s standing in water,” waking her son.
Hoist licked her face.
“My father?” Marco asked, half awake.
“Yes,” was all she said. “But it was only a dream.”
“No. He is there. He’s walking across a field of grass.”
Ruth stared at him in the moonlight a long time. “I think it’s rice,” she said.
“Me, too.” As if he’d know what rice looked like.
So, she thought, the boy saw these things, too. So she told Marco the stories
about his father as a child, the time he tried to fly, how he also, like Marco, tried
to hold his breath until it scared his mother, until she pretended to die of fear and
Thomas came up one day gasping and found her lying down, her hands over her
chest, posed like a corpse waiting for vultures. They laughed.
When she said the word vulture, she thought of her own father, over on the
island, his body on a platform in the trees. But there was her son, and as time
passed, Marco grew into a beautiful child. He helped her when he was not in
school even though she worried about him getting hurt. Fishing was dangerous
business. For a time, she began shore fishing. It suited them better. Marco, like
her, hated to kill fish.
One chilly day Aurora rowed out to Ruth’s bay in her own dead husband’s dirty
old rowboat as if rowing was still natural to her skinny old arms.
“Ruth!” she called out as she tried to change boats.
Hoist, with damp fur, licked the old woman’s face, barking happily as the
exhausted old woman climbed aboard.
Ruth went to see what the noise was.
Ruth went to see what the noise was.
“Oh my God, Mom! You rowed all the way out here?” She helped the older
woman up the ladder, grabbing her waist with her strong arms, lifting her, really,
the skinny old legs finally touching wood. “Hoist, get back!”
In between breaths her mother said, “You were right! He’s alive, Thomas is.
You were right all along.”
She’d been called that morning when a few flakes of snow began to drift
down. He’d been found living in a village. “He was held by the enemy,
brainwashed or injured, they think,” she said. “I’m freezing. I wish you could get
a phone out here.”
Ruth wrapped her mother in a quilt that had been stitched of men’s old suits,
ones they wore after the Catholics had converted them.
As the snow melted on Aurora’s hair, Ruth heated coffee water, hardly able
to lift the kettle.
“You knew it all along. You were right and I’m sorry, but sometimes I didn’t
believe you. And now they say he is coming back.”
“I know.” Ruth leaned across the table, smiling at her mother. She put her
hands on each side of Aurora’s face and kissed her. “It’s okay. No one did.”
“Except me!” Marco, who had been studying snowflakes, jumped up and
down, not his usual style, but he said, “I could see him. My father!”
They all laughed. “Cocoa, Marco Polo Just?”
The morning Thomas was to return, Ruth braided her hair down her back, undid
it, brushed it again, and braided it until it was perfect. She wore jeans and a dark
green silk shirt and sat up straight. Marco insisted on wearing a traditional
woven men’s skirt over his jeans. He had gifts for his father, a wooden cedar box
which held a bald eagle feather and a carved and painted canoe paddle. And he
had himself, already with an air of authority. They waited. It was eight and
Thomas was not due in until nearly ten, but Ruth was anxious.
He had been found, she was told, quarantined, hospitalized for examination,
questioned by the army, and honorably discharged. But she’d heard nothing
from him and she was puzzled and concerned. She had been waiting for a
century even though Marco was only nine. The war had been over, at least for
America, but she had never given up hope.
She and Marco sat in the small airport and looked out the window. Planes
arrived and left on currents of heat and air. Light crossed their faces. It reflected
off moving things, a woman’s pocketbook clasp, a van outside by the planes,
silver on the luggage.
“Here, young man.” A stewardess gave the boy a pin with a pair of wings.
“Here, young man.” A stewardess gave the boy a pin with a pair of wings.
He sat with it on his lap and waited. Ruth pulled him toward her and touched his
hair. She watched him. He had, for some reason, lost his excitement about his
father coming home.
The sun moved past where they now sat.
Ruth looked at her hand, then at her arm. Muscular and lean. It was hard
work, the fishing boat. She looked in a mirror at her face, wondering how much
she’d changed in these years, if he would recognize her, love her, if she was still
beautiful as he’d once thought.
They had warned her that Thomas would be changed. Maybe in ways
incomprehensible even to himself. The one witness to the massacre said he’d
been hit in the head by something flying, something large. That one witness, the
survivor, young Michael, said he’d seen Thomas fall. The last thing he himself
recalled was that he panicked and ran to the water, turning toward it in the
smoke of burning people and trees and land and then the fog, too, as he reached
the water and jumped in so he wouldn’t burn. He was picked up from the water
by a navy boat. “What luck!” said the man who found him. “And timing.” The
boy was in shock. The words seemed cold after what he’d seen and told them.
“Undress, soldier,” they said, and gave him dry clothes. He believed at the time
that Thomas had died, or if not, desperately needed medical attention. He had
every intention of getting help to him, but he could only cry. He cried when he
told them the story and they had to keep moving away. Then he heard on the
boat that city after city had fallen to the communists. For the first time he
wondered what a communist really was.
The countries fell quickly, easily, to the north. Soon Saigon was invaded.
They said the Americans were leaving the country. The army then had used
nerve gas wherever they thought soldiers either had defected or were caught by
the enemy. To keep them from suffering at the hands of a more cruel enemy,
they said. He thought of Thomas. Sarin. Nerve gas. He wondered for years
where they had dropped it. It occupied his daily thoughts. So did his guilt, his
fractured conscience. He was thinking of it the day they found him and he’d
think of it for a long time after, about the man, Thomas, who must have died that
day, at least his name was on the Wall in DC along with the others.
Ruth’s mother arrived at the airport just before the plane, her hair in a sheer pink
scarf, for it had become windy. She removed the scarf and fluffed up the white
hair which framed her dark face with a circle of light. Ruth looked at her
mother’s dark, ropy hands, her radiant skin. She carried flowers for “the soldier,”
as she called him, and sweet rolls for Marco and Ruth. The flowers were red,
as she called him, and sweet rolls for Marco and Ruth. The flowers were red,
white, and blue. Ruth could not look at them, still thinking of the soldiers as
America’s dogs not cared for as much as she cared for Hoist. Then came the old
friends of Thomas. Ruth did not sit near them or acknowledge them. She knew
them. They were the men who wouldn’t stop a rape. Dwight. Dimitri. Cyrus.
Dark men, not necessarily in skin color, for two of them were mixed, but of heart
and spirit. She could see through them. And they had taken Thomas away. Them
and their beer, or whatever it was. Ruth always thought that if there was justice
in the world, one of them should have been the one who didn’t come back. Then
she disliked herself for thinking it.
There was a smell of sugar and cinnamon, but the sweet rolls went
untouched.
Ruth combed Marco’s hair as the plane arrived. Aurora, still the mother,
patted down Ruth’s hair. “Do you remember before he left for the war? Your
wedding. It was so beautiful.” She smiled, recalling the wedding on the beach,
the firelight that night, almost the entire village there, even old Vince, the
fisherman.
Years had passed since he’d been gone and Ruth’s hair still shone blue-black,
with only a few gray strands. She still looked like her father. She thought of
Thomas’s face. It was wide, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled, even when he
was a child, even when confused. He had a sweetness about him, and an Asian
look. She had teased him about his ancestors coming from China across the
Bering Strait even though the people knew they had come from the caves out in
the ocean, come out on strands of seaweed, some carried, with their stories in
their arms and on their backs or carried on the fins of the water animals, and the
story of the whale, their ancestor, was one of these. All their stories clung like
barnacles to the great whale, the whale they loved enough to watch pass by.
They were people of the whale. They worshiped the whales. Whalebones had
once been the homes of their ancestors who covered the giant ribs with skins and
slept inside the shelters. The whales were their lives, their comfort. The
swordfish, their friends, sometimes wounded a whale and it would come to shore
to die, or arrive already dead. It was an offering to the hungry people by their
mother sea and friend, the swordfish.
Ruth thought of the octopus in the cave when Thomas was born. He was to
be special. Now he was decorated by the army and coming home.
When the plane landed, Ruth stood up, watching, nervous. One by one, the
passengers departed. Then there was no one. She waited. Perhaps his bag was in
the back. Finally, an employee went over to them and said, “I’m sorry. Everyone
the back. Finally, an employee went over to them and said, “I’m sorry. Everyone
is off the plane. Your passenger was not there.” Thomas’s disappointed buddies
said nothing to Ruth. They walked out, their pants too low, their walks too
arrogant for almost-poor men who spent their nights at the bar. Knowing she
disliked them. Knowing why.
A garbled announcement was made for a town whose name no one could
understand.
“There must be a mistake.” But Ruth already had a feeling he would not be
there. Still, trying not to cry, she asked, “When does the next plane come in?”
Ruth went to the window and looked at the plane. She noticed the
fingerprints on the glass, handprints, and thought of them as the ghosts of people
who had been there and gone. In the reflection, she watched families meet,
happily. Lovers kissing. People parting, reaching out to touch one last time.
She waited.
At four he didn’t arrive, either. She looked at their son, who had never met
his father. He was pinning on the wings. He’d seen the pilots.
She looked at her mother in despair. “Why didn’t he call? He could have let
us know. I don’t know why he hasn’t called. I want to hear his voice. I just want
to hear him. He could have even called us earlier.” Her face was pale and tired.
“What’s happened to him that he’d do this? Treat us this way?”
Aurora, thinking he’d broken Ruth’s heart once again, saw her daughter
sway. “Come on. Let’s leave. It’s no good here.”
They drove past water and land, logging trucks.
“You don’t know. Anything could have happened.” But Aurora also knew
he would not be coming home.
“Why didn’t he just call?”
Marco watched his mother cry. He knew his father was there, somewhere.
He’d return.
Hours. Days. Years. Who knew how long?
BODY LIES
Thomas didn’t call. He was a lie. His cells were all lies and his being was made
up of lies. Lies couldn’t call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They
were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. Thomas was
walking, thinking, My body is made of lies. There are lies on my tongue. He no
longer knew the truth.
But lies are the first recognition of truth. He wouldn’t think this, he wouldn’t
know it for many years. He would think, instead, My ancestors had purity and
purpose. They had songs for everything. They were honest, even in their treaties,
which in truth they called entreaties.
Had he gone home, he would have been surrounded by human faces that
believed the lies about him and he would have had to act as if they were true, so,
in his civilian clothes, he walked away from the airport, carrying only one bag.
The other had gone along without him.
Shaking coins in his pocket now and then, he walked toward the city in the
morning, feeling also the bundle of bills from the overdue pay he’d collected in
Hawaii. Some of it should have gone to Ruth, he thought. He bore the realization
that she had worked all those years. He had given little. The army didn’t know
about her.
The distance from the airport was deceptive and by the time he saw
buildings, he was tired.
He was cold even as the fog lifted and his feet had new boots on them, the
ones they gave him in Hawaii when they questioned him on how he’d been
treated. Now he had blisters.
When the officers questioned him, with their gray unyielding authority, he’d
said, “Fine, I’m fine,” but his eyes were swollen with uncried tears, his face red.
He thought they would want him to go to the brig for years.
The strange men said, “‘Fine’! That word is the typical reaction. Did you
know that?”
He didn’t. So, everyone said fine. What else would they have said? The
truth?
The war was like an ocean, an ocean where everyone burned or drowned,
and only a few could swim it.
and only a few could swim it.
He missed the real ocean. He’d never thought of the future in that ocean.
Only of swimming and holding his breath.
As he walked, his feet hurt, but he was glad to hurt, glad his tooth hurt, also.
He changed his bag to the other shoulder. He felt a pang of missing home. He
saw Ruth’s teeth, how small they were when they bit into a piece of fruit, and he
missed her. He wanted to touch her, but this was the decent thing, he told
himself, the right thing, not to go back. He had two lives. Now they both seemed
as if they belonged to another man. He’d been taken away from both of those
lives. He was a stolen person. What remained was not him. It was just his body
walking, the body of dishonesty. He was a taken-away human being. Right now
the only earthly connection he felt to anything was this walking away from
everything in his new boots, hurting and stiff. Miles he walked, miles a long way
for a man who was a rice-grower, accustomed to standing in water, bending
over, a man with a back that showed his labor, too. And a fisherman he had been
until he was found. He saw the brown sea grasses as he walked, then the green of
the plants on the side of the road. He was in a different world. He was from a
different world. It was a long distance between the two. He thought it would
never be crossed.
When at last he reached the city it was in warmth. People passed by, foreign
to him, pale, everything about them strange. The sun watched him from the sky.
He set his bag down on a bench.
Before he began his third life, he lay down on the bench that said THE
HARTFORD with an elk on it, loosened his boots, and fell asleep beneath the
antlers, dreaming his head was in a woman’s lap, not on his bag of earthly
possessions.
After the last plane, after the arrival of buses, after days and sleepless nights,
Ruth realized he was not coming, maybe he was never coming, that he had gone
somewhere she didn’t know. All her hopes dropped to the ground and deeper,
past the soil, deeper than sand and rock. She was afraid to go out on the water
even though she lived on the boat and was a fishing woman. She was afraid
because she was heavy and sinking and the weight would carry her down even
farther than an anchor and she would drown in darkness and loneliness and cold.
She would drop to the bottom of the ocean and maybe the boat, too, with its beds
and pots and pans all falling, floating, dropping. She had thought this day or this
night that she would hold Thomas, touch him, be held in his smooth dark arms.
And his son would be there, and now Thomas would not sit with Marco and look
at his face so like his own. Finally, she fell into a sleep at her mother’s house on
at his face so like his own. Finally, she fell into a sleep at her mother’s house on
the side of the hill. To the dismay of Hoist, Aurora covered the lovebirds’ cage
so they would not wake her.
And so the man whose body was dishonest just by living woke and went into the
city and found a place for himself on a turn to the right, not far from a highway,
a room with an entrance through a crooked alley. It had a bed, a table, and two
chairs. He thought it looked like the painting of Van Gogh’s little room because
the floor was painted wood, red in color and scuffed, the bed was wooden and
made a sound when he sat on it. The chairs and table were in a corner, the walls
were blue. Even though it smelled like an old man, he rented it. Around the
corner was a fruit and vegetable stand. He bought apples the next day. For a few
days he felt free. But at night when he went to bed, if he fell asleep, they
searched him out and found him, the people he’d been forced to leave. Ma. He’d
always laughed at her name. Lin, their daughter, his daughter, with the body thin
as rice grass, his girl. Maybe they came through the worlds and found him
because they were the dead and the dead could travel easily. She could be in the
spirit world with her mother. She could be exactly the same as when he left. If
she was alive, Lin could be anything now. She could be an enlisted child in the
communist army. He saw the old man Song with the goatee weeping at the end
before he, Thomas, had been taken away, Lin crying for him, running toward
him on her precious skinny legs. He looked back down at her as the helicopter
flew him away and he wanted to jump. He should have, he thought.
The faces of the shot men also came to him. Lizards came, and the rubber
trees he saw in the shadows that one time, trees the French had wanted. The heat
descended on him like a blanket. He saw faces that emerged like ghosts from the
canopy of the jungle and then disappeared back into the trees. In his closed eyes
men climbed ladders into the red dream night sky as if they were spiders
climbing their strands of shining silk. American men slept with limbs of trees for
pillows, their guns in their arms like women, or they wrapped themselves around
a tree as if it were safer, the nights cold, days hot, telling stupid jokes, fighting
with each other, then stopping to fight an enemy and trying like hell to help one
another live. Mikey, as he had called the blue-eyed boy whose life he tried to
save; he came toward him.
In Hawaii the hospital had been filled with men who had vacant eyes or worse,
mean ones, or the ones with gentle smiles and silence as if they’d been through
nothing. At that hospital the doctor asked Thomas questions in a room with a
nothing. At that hospital the doctor asked Thomas questions in a room with a
mirror that was a window. Thomas said to the mirror, “Why don’t you just come
in and sit with us?” because there were faces behind everything. He was ignored.
“Do you remember how long you were unconscious?”
“I wasn’t unconscious that I know of,” he said, then paused. “Sir.” He hadn’t
said it in a long time. Sir. It was foreign to him now, years later.
“Did you have anything to do with the communists? Did they hold you or
question you or wound you in any way?”
“No, I only worked. They didn’t think I was an American. The way I look,
you know, being who I am. I mean, what I am. I never talked. I kept quiet like I
was mute or had been shot in the mouth or throat. I grew rice.” There had been
times, too, when he had hidden in dark tunnels forgotten then by those who had
tried to build them too close to the water and so they’d mostly collapsed except
for the reinforced entrances. Or he’d hidden in food containers. “I just grew
rice.”
“Did they try to indoctrinate you in any way?”
“Sometimes I fished, too.”
He couldn’t explain to those who thought everyone an enemy how he’d been
hidden all those years, but even so he wasn’t against the communists. They were
for their own people. They would have killed him, though, and strange as it was,
he would have understood. Of course there had been no Khmer, not yet, and he
had no idea that later it had all come to an end.
“I never even knew where I was.”
This was almost true in the man made of lies because he was a map lover. It
was in the South, he thought. They’d been sent on a special ops mission. There
was the tea-colored river. He thought it must flow into the Delta. They were ricegrowers. They were treated well. There was a shortage in Saigon. People, even
the army, were hungry. Ma, it was a Thai name, it was so unusual, packed rice in
baskets and helped haul it to the road where the Others would pick the baskets
up, always kind to her and leaving her with special treats—ginger, lemongrass,
or cloth.
He could still hear the sound of rice flowing into baskets like strong rain. He
still saw her bending, filling the baskets with grain, the lines of her neck and
shoulders, the concaves of skin and veins, the line of jawbone, small and
delicate.
“How long were you unconscious?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t know.” He thought he was unconscious now, on his bed.
The faces of the alive haunted him, too, Ruth and the ghost child, Marco, the
son. He had loved Ruth all his life. But then, in his second life, he loved Ma and
Lin. He was two men. He told himself love had no limits. For him there was
Lin. He was two men. He told himself love had no limits. For him there was
divinity in both his worlds. It was made stronger by knowing he was a doomed
man and sooner or later he would be killed by one army or another. That’s what
he had told himself until now. He was alive, or something like it. Maybe he’d go
to prison.
He didn’t say to the doctors—because his body was a lie—that he’d lived
with a tribe there and he wanted to stay and his only fear had been of the
Americans. Even now. Instead he cried. For one of very few times.
“That’s healthy,” the doctor said, his brown eyes warm beneath his graying
brows. “You’d be surprised at how many men can’t cry.”
Thomas hated the doctor and his all-knowing understanding of men like
himself, but he couldn’t show it. The questions were over for then. Only then.
With his extra-keen hearing, he heard the doctor in the next room say, “Keep a
record on him. We’ll need to keep track of him.” Thomas wondered how long
Dr. Christmas, as he called him, had been in war. Dr. Tannenbaum.
Outside in the blue tropics of Hawaii as he thought about what it all meant,
the dolphins were leaping all together like one being. He himself was an island
of a man surrounded by water, mystery, and being returned to a country he no
longer knew or wanted. He was not a part of it, he in his hospital cloth scuff
shoes and blue robe, watching the blue ocean.
THE WIFE OF MARCO POLO
No one wrote about the wife of Marco Polo, the first journeyer. As far as
anyone knew, no one wrote about the women who were left at home when their
husbands were at war or searching for other worlds or traveling out of pure
longing. The wife combs her hair. She takes on a job, a mission, a love, or she
becomes weak with sadness.
After Thomas did not return, Ruth knew another kind of sorrow, but a calm
also set in, as if the solitude would give her over to her own self. Ruth took
Marco to the sea and showed him the fish that lived with dolphins. They sat on
the wet beach and wrote his name in sand as if it would last. They peered into
the morning tide pools. Ruth was a tide pool, full of life that awaited the return
of its element. Perhaps explorer Marco Polo’s wife was also a creature in a pool,
she thought, awaiting the return of her beloved. She didn’t know that the women
gods on all the islands Odysseus visited awaited any traveling sailors around the
Mediterranean, to keep them from returning home.
When Thomas went to war, Ruth had never felt so abandoned. On television she
watched the casualties, searching every face for his. They promised mail. At first
the envelopes arrived with the APO numbers and then they dwindled. Ruth
missed her hand touched by his.
Like all the women left behind in wars, she was young but old, both at the
same time. Wars amputate the minds and souls of waiting women in different
ways than they do the armless, legless bodies in khaki and olive drab or the
children stepping on land mines. But it is an amputation all the same. Watching
the bullets, the men surviving fire, the dying children, what the women saw on
television gave them some truth and from then on American wars were not on
the television because people would rise up against their own government if they
saw what they had done.
Then the back of this world, all across the land, began to break. Ruth herself
heard the sound of its back breaking, almost inaudible, but she could hear it, for
her ears could even hear the fish and the whales. It was to that she owed her
fishing success. Hearing the country break, she knew nothing would ever be the
fishing success. Hearing the country break, she knew nothing would ever be the
same.
Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they
should name some countries, towns, and places.
What she cried over was nothing. Chipped plates. Another form of oblivion.
The Mayans knew the concept of zero. Most other cultures did not. A parrot,
they say, also knows it. She lived at Zero and thanked god she did not have to
pay rent on it, yet she had to add One to it, and keep a life for her son Marco
until she knew they would come for him. She knew because it was in his face at
birth. He was a full number, a whole one. He would lead people, so calm, so
laughing. And so singled out. At an earlier time he would have worn only white.
Always the ones who would be singers wore white, to show their place, but now
he wore a T-shirt that said MARINERS or DOLPHINS or one that said POWERED BY
JUNK FOOD. Ruth bought him one that said U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA, but he
didn’t wear it because he didn’t want to be treated badly by anyone.
Marco, her son with Thomas, had been an unusual child. He smiled when he
heard the sounds of birds and he blew feathers into the sky with his breath. He
laughed his first laugh at three months, an adult laugh they said sounded exactly
like Witka’s. Not only was he watched by all; he watched everyone, everything,
but he especially watched the ocean with great care and told Ruth what he had
seen beneath it.
Once he said, “I see tiny jellyfish in a forest.”
Ruth looked at him, thinking, Who are you? but she said, “That’s wonderful,
my boy.”
“I see a school of silver fish woven into a ball.”
She knew he was right because she heard them. And when he held his breath
at night, she said, panicking, “Marco,” and shook him. She realized he dived into
the water in his sleep, and then he did it in his waking, too, and she would keep
watch to make sure he surfaced. She wished his father could know him. He was
chosen.
“You need vitamins,” Aurora told her daughter, placing an amber bottle of pills
in front of the young woman.
Ruth took a pill, then said, “We’re going out for a while.”
She and Marco went to the river where she once lived with Thomas and
showed him their CALIFORNIA ORANGES house. It had never been repainted. It was
faded and in disrepair.
Then she took him to Witka’s up on the black rocks. It would, after all,
belong to Marco one day although it might have been hers. She loved it there,
her eyes constant on the sea. They sat at the table near the old stove in the corner
and listened to the ocean below them.
“He was a great man, your grandfather Witka,” she told him. Just then, as
she said it, they felt something there. Someone walked with them, inside. They
both heard and felt it. Perhaps it was the old man, Marco’s ancestor. The back of
her neck grew cold, the hair starting to rise in the old animal way. Dragonflies
came in the window she had opened to the sea and floated in the air around
them, blue and shining. A soft knock on the door. She went to the door. “No one
is there,” Marco said. “It must be the wind,” but they both knew better because it
was a calm day. She knew there were many spirits and felt the air move, spirits
one after the other related to the child, come to see him, to infuse him with the
world that was his, that he belonged to. Belonging. It has so much significance.
So few have it. In his grandfather’s place of many spirits, she brushed Marco’s
hair. Both of them knew the spirits had been there, waiting, some human, some
the same as in a tide pool, a small octopus with its powerful eye, a starfish.
“Don’t be afraid, Mom. I feel them, too.”
That day when Ruth and Marco returned, Aurora looked up from her
knitting of constant afghans that sat on the back or were folded neatly on nearly
everyone’s sofa. She guessed where they had been. “You were born
prematurely,” she said to Ruth. “Maybe that’s why you need more vitamins.”
She handed her the bottle again. “You look pale. Did I ever tell you about the
gill slits? When you were born I never even went into labor. You wanted to
come into the world and the moment you could walk, you went to the ocean.
You walked into it. We yelled and chased you. We were mortally scared. Here,
take some more of these vitamins.”
“Gill slits? What gill slits?” Sometimes Ruth wondered if her mother was
slipping.
“You were born with them. I was sure you knew that. Didn’t I tell you? At
first you had trouble with the air. The midwife put you in water, she told me
later, and you lived through it. But then we had to take you to a large hospital in
the city where the nurses were very worried, even afraid, I’d say. They never did
see such a thing. You choked when the doctor stitched them up. You were a fish
even then, my child. They had to open them up again. Then they experimented
and put you in water and you didn’t drown. They wanted to call in other doctors
to look at you. I wouldn’t hear of it. They even wanted to write about it. I could
hear them talking.”
Ruth knew about her mother’s good hearing. She had it, too. It seemed
Ruth knew about her mother’s good hearing. She had it, too. It seemed
Thomas did, as well. But hers was like sonar. She didn’t believe her mother.
“What happened then?”
“You can ask the midwife. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Oh, I thought you knew. I guess I thought it would upset you. Oh, I lost a
stitch.” She stopped talking and counted the threads.
“It’s upsetting me now.” Ruth held her voice down, but there was tension.
“I already thought you were a force to be reckoned with, but they got them
closed so you looked like everyone else and began to breathe through your
lungs. You’ve never had trouble since then. Just those little scars.” She looked
up. “Do you want to play Bingo?”
“No. No, I don’t. What did the elders say?”
“The doctors said it was a genetic throwback or something like that.
Anyway, the elders said they had known of this. It’s happened before. Destiny is
water for her, they said.”
There was an old story about a girl who came from the sea. Not just the sea
of a mother’s womb, but really from the sea, to make the People into what they
were to be. She had a hard life, for she had to live in water so much of the time.
There was no modern medicine then, so she would have drowned in air. Every
morning she rose from the sea and went to a bed where she looked like a normal
human coming out of the house. But from the sea she brought knowledge. She
came in with the sounds of the ocean and she sang them to the people. That’s
how they learned the whales’ songs and also the ticking of coral. She protected
the sea and the animals. The people kept her wet.
“You remember the story. She was a lot like you, always protecting the sea
life. She could hear the fish from land. When she died, which unfortunately was
too early, she returned to the sea cut in pieces, and each piece was eaten by the
sea animals so the songs and the animals would continue. Not like Sedna up
north where her fingers became the animals. It isn’t that old of a story. Could
you get my green jacket? Are you sure you don’t want to go play Bingo?”
Her mother was lying, Ruth was certain, but too casually. Ruth took the
jacket off the hook, noticing that the wall around the hooks was dirty with years
of the touch of hands Aurora didn’t want to wash away. Hands of people who no
longer existed.
“That’s about all I know, but I figured it explains your behavior. You always
were a peculiar girl. You always were at water. Don’t think I didn’t know you
would have been a true whaler’s wife.” Ruth, too tall for her mother’s mirror,
examined her neck. What she’d taken for ordinary lines could have been scars.
But she thought they were merely wrinkles until now.
But she thought they were merely wrinkles until now.
“No, not there. They were in front of your ears. Isn’t it funny? You were the
one with the gill slits. Thomas was the one who tried to stay underwater. It’s
always like that. You never get what you want.”
After her mother left, Ruth woke her son and returned to their boat on the
sea. It was true, she was a creature of the ocean. She went out that night and
stood on the deck shining in the sea mist, listening to the beneath.
A few weeks later Ruth went into the forest to search for the woman who had
been the midwife. It was a difficult trail and more than once she was lost. But
she remembered the markers. All women were given the directions. She
remembered the driftwood planted along the way, a carved set of lines on an old
tree.
When she reached the old cottage, she found the woman still alive. She was
neat and clean in an old cotton dress, her hair pulled straight back, plants drying
on racks in the little cottage.
“Yes, you were born with gill slits. It isn’t rare, especially in these parts. Just
that most of them pass away before the child is born.”
There were many birds in the forest, ravens, songbirds calling from one tree.
She found comfort in yellow slugs, the smell of the trees, and sounds of branches
in the light wind. Ruth thought, I am happy here, almost as happy as at water.
Happiness was not always a fleeting thing, but a state of mind, of being, after
having lived, loved, even after being poor, alone, having survived. Even with the
pain in her hands she had happiness.
The house was weathered and damp inside like the forest and smelled of the
old trees. A large spider lived in the corner and spiders were worshiped. Water
walkers. They brought light to the people on their backs from an island struck by
lightning.
Ruth saw now that a man was there, sitting quietly, listening.
The woman washed her hands by habit, a constant thing.
“Oh yes, this is my friend Dick Russell. He works for the Forest Service.
And this is Ruth, the basket weaver.”
“And fisher,” Ruth added. She reached out her hand and he shook it too
hard. He was quiet, but he was taken with her and he had listened to the entire
conversation.
The woman ignored them. “I always knew you’d come. Like a salmon. From
the ocean to the forest so you could breathe pure forest air.”
Ruth was lost when she left. Home seemed a different way. Finally, she realized
she had taken the wrong path. Then, hearing a noise in the leaves, she turned. It
was Dick Russell. He smiled and in his good-natured manner, said, “You are
lost. This is the way to my world. Yours is over there.”
MARCO: THE SON OF THOMAS
Mother, are you awake?” Marco said one night. He was twelve.
He knew she was. She was silent, though, wanting him to sleep, to not have
any conflict. There were shadows even in the darkness.
“Are you happy?
“Why do you ask?”
He was silent. She should have said yes. But it made her think of all the
things that had gone awry. All the things she had lost and given up. And that
would soon include the boy.
“Yes, son. I am. I find so much joy in hearing the whale songs. I find
happiness in the small baskets and the boat going out into the water in the
morning when the light is just perfect on the ocean.”
But afterward, she thought about things she might want. A husband. Some
help. A little spending money. Days in the town away from their village. Not to
worry about her mother, Aurora, who lived on the hillside and was forgetting
things.
She was worried about what she’d heard: There was a behind-the-scenes plot
to kill a whale. The business leaders of the tribe had met with the Japanese
businessmen and made a quiet deal to sell the whale meat to them. She wanted to
protect the whales. She was already speaking out against the men.
Marco seemed to read her mind, but he said, “I’m happy, too.”
One morning two old men paddled over to where Ruth lived and worked on the
boat and Ruth greeted them. She already knew them. As was customary, she
invited them aboard and cooked eggs, potatoes, and coffee. “There was a moon
dog last night,” one man said, pushing back his gray hair, his old skin taut across
his bones. “A storm is coming.” She thanked him for the information. “I better
prepare,” she said. For many things, she thought. “The boat is moored strongly,
but I’ll check everything.”
She served the food and they spoke about small things and large. Then she
said, “I know why you are here. I knew you would be here one day. But can’t I
keep him a little longer?”
keep him a little longer?”
“It’s time,” he said, looking at her, then at Marco, the small talk over.
Ruth looked down. She set his food before him and sat across from him.
She knew what was next. It wasn’t like she was giving her son up. He would
go live with the old people. She could visit at any time, but she would miss his
breath, his conversation, touching his hair, brushing it into a braid, watching the
whales with him.
Marco’s school education was now over and his real one would begin. Now
Ruth again cried and they smiled kindly at her and at Marco, but said, “Anu, we
must take him now because the light passed through the stones just right and he
is growing.”
Marco felt his mother’s hand, not wanting to let go.
All through school he knew he would leave, so he learned what he could,
more than anyone else. Now it was time to learn other ways of knowing things.
Marco had learned how to think when he was still young. He had learned
how to feel, how to understand a human. Listen, his mother would tell him.
Listen to the world. Rocking at night on water, he listened to the sound of water
against the boat, to the cry of a bird, the slap of a fish as it landed on calm ocean,
the waves when it stormed somewhere out at sea. Listening, he would seem to
understand the heart of the world. He was a wise boy. It was in his eyes when he
was young. His mother saw it. His grandmother saw it. He laughed at things that
adults find humorous when he was only six months old. He examined his
mother’s face with his hand and fingers and wondered at the scars beside her
ears and later joked that she’d had a face-lift, but she just laughed and said they
were a natural wrinkle she’d had all her life and it was just something she must
have been born with.
He loved his mother and he treated her with kindness.
He was far from perfect, though. He had two flaws. He was judgmental of
the others who didn’t know what or who they were. And he was afraid of his
own strength and power, so he seemed to lower himself and always gave in to
others, never taking an initiative even when he saw an answer, even when they
all saw his leadership abilities and powers. Yet when called on in school, he
sometimes could not speak.
He was well acquainted with the ways of the other boys his age and even the
young children were drinking beer and using drugs, whatever they could find,
even hair spray. He saw them sitting in the doorways and behind the ramps. Or
under the pier. They tried to hide their ways, staggering home, sometimes with
paint on their faces. And they had knives. Sometimes they threw them in the
ground to see how close they could come to someone’s foot. The person with the
foot on the ground was not allowed to move.
foot on the ground was not allowed to move.
And he who lived with his mother on the old Trophy was to go another way.
The stakes were high, though. He would not have an education. He would have
another destiny in the world. He could not change anyone. Neither could his
mother. But she tried. And that was what counted.
He remembered the night he got up in the darkness and walked to the chair
beside her bed and moved the lamp. “I don’t want to go away to live with the old
people, but I know I am the one. I see it.”
“I know,” she said, taking his hand, already masculine, callused from
helping her with their work.
The day he left, he remembered his grandmother telling about Lot’s wife
looking back, and though he knew his mother watched them leave so silently in
the …