Then the two of them—bird and woman—waited together silently on the docks, waiting for whatever would happen next.
* * *
It was seven miles between Papeete and Matavai Bay. Alma took such pity on the poor pony who had to haul her luggage that she stepped out of the carriage and walked along beside it. It was exquisite to use her legs after so many stagnant months at sea. The road was lovely and shaded overhead by a latticework of palms and breadfruit trees. The landscape felt both familiar and confounding to Alma. Many of the palm varieties she recognized from her father’s greenhouses, but others were mysterious concoctions of pleated leaves and slippery, leathery bark. Having known palms only in greenhouses, Alma had never before heard palm trees. The sound of the wind through their fronds was like rustling silk. Sometimes, in the stronger gusts, their trunks creaked like old doors. They were all so loud and alive. As for the breadfruit trees, they were grander and more elegant than she would ever have imagined. They looked like the elms of home: glossy and magnanimous.
The carriage driver—an old Tahitian man with a disturbingly tattooed back and a well-oiled chest—was perplexed by Alma’s insistence on walking. He seemed to fear this meant he wouldn’t be paid. To reassure him, she tried to pay him halfway to their destination. This brought only more confusion. Captain Terrence had negotiated a price beforehand, but that arrangement now looked to be void. Alma offered payment in American coins, but the man attempted to make change for her from a handful of dirty Spanish piastres and Bolivian pesos. Alma could not figure out how he was possibly calculating this currency exchange, until she realized he was trading in his dull old coins for her shiny new ones.
She was deposited in a fringe of shade under a banana grove in the middle of the mission settlement at Matavai Bay. The carriage driver stacked her luggage into a tidy pyramid; it looked just as it had looked seven months earlier, outside the carriage house at White Acre. Left alone, Alma took in her surroundings. It was a pleasant enough situation here, she thought, though more modest than she had imagined. The mission church was a humble little structure, whitewashed and thatched, surrounded by a small cluster of similarly whitewashed and thatched cottages. There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen people altogether living there.
The community, such as it was, was built along the banks of a small river that let out straight into the sea. The river bisected the beach, which was long and curved, and formed of dense, black, volcanic sand. Because of the color of the sand, the bay here was not the shining turquoise one normally associates with the South Seas; instead it was a stately, heavy, slow-rolling inlet of ink. A reef about three hundred yards out kept the surf fairly calm. Even from this distance, Alma could hear the waves smashing against that distant reef. She took up a handful of the sand—the color of soot—and let it pour through her fingers. It felt like warm velvet, and it left her fingers clean.
“Matavai Bay,” she said aloud.
She could scarcely believe she was here. All the great explorers of the last century had been here. Wallis had been here, and Vancouver, and Bougainville. Captain Bligh had spent six months camped on this very beach. Most impressive of all, to Alma’s mind, was that this was the same beach where Captain Cook had first landed in Tahiti, in 1769. To Alma’s left, in the near distance, was the high promontory where Cook had observed the transit of Venus—that vital movement of a tiny black planetary disc across the face of the sun, which he had traveled across the world to witness. The gentle little river to Alma’s right had once marked the last boundary in history between the Tahitians and the British. Directly after Cook’s landfall, the two peoples had stood on the opposite sides of this stream, regarding each other with wary curiosity for several hours. The Tahitians thought the British had sailed out of the sky, and that their huge, impressive ships were islands—motu—that had broken loose from the stars. The English tried to determine if these Indians would be aggressive or dangerous. The Tahitian women came right to the edge of the river and teased the English sailors on the other side with playful, provocative dances. There seemed to be no danger here, decided Captain Cook, and he let his men loose upon the girls. The sailors exchanged iron nails with the women for sexual favors. The women took the nails and planted them in the ground, hoping to grow more of this precious iron, as one would grow a tree from a sprig.
Alma’s father had not been on that voyage. Henry Whittaker had come to Tahiti eight years later, on Cook’s third expedition, in August of 1777. By that point, the English and the Tahitians were well accustomed to each other—and fond of each other, too. Some of the British sailors even had island wives waiting among the women, and island children, as well. The Tahitians had called Captain Cook “Toote” because they could not pronounce his name. Alma knew all this from her father’s stories—stories she had not thought of in decades. She remembered them all now. Her father had bathed in this very river as a young man. Since that time, the missionaries had started using it, Alma knew, for baptisms.
Now that she was here at last, Alma was not certain what to do next. There was not a soul in sight, with the exception of a child playing alone in the river. He could not have been more than three years old, was absolutely nude, and acted quite unperturbed about having been left unattended in the water. She did not wish to leave her luggage unguarded, so she simply sat down on the pile and waited for someone to come along. She was terribly thirsty. She had been too excited that morning to eat her ship’s breakfast, so she was hungry, too.
After a long spell, a stout Tahitian woman in a long, modest dress and a white bonnet emerged from one of the more distant cottages, carrying a hoe. She stopped when she saw Alma. Alma stood up and straightened her dress. “Bonjour,” she cried out. Tahiti officially belonged to France now; Alma imagined French was her best option.
The woman smiled beautifully. “We speak English here!” she cried back.
Alma wanted to approach, so they would not have to shout at each other, but—foolishly—she still felt bound to her luggage. “I am looking for the Reverend Francis Welles!” she called.
“He is in the corral today!” the woman called back cheerfully, and went on her way down the road toward Papeete, leaving Alma once more alone with her trunks.
The corral? Did they have cattle here? If so, Alma could neither see nor smell any sign of them. What could the woman have meant?
Over the next hours, a few more Tahitians wandered past Alma and her pile of crates and trunks. All of them were friendly, yet none seemed especially intrigued by her presence, and none talked with her for long. All reiterated the same piece of information: that the Reverend Francis Welles was in the corral for the day. And what time would he be back from the corral? Nobody knew. Before dark, they all dearly hoped.
A few young boys gathered round Alma and played a daring game of tossing pebbles at her luggage, and sometimes at her feet, until a large older woman with a glowering face chased them away, and they dashed off to play in the river. As the day wore on, some men with tiny fishing poles walked past Alma down to the beach and waded into the sea. They stood up to their necks in the gently rolling surf, casting about for fish. Her thirst and hunger had become urgent. Still, she did not dare go wandering and leave her belongings behind.
Dusk comes on fast in the tropics. Alma had already learned this in her months at sea. The shadows grew longer. The children ran out of the river and dashed back inside their cottages. Alma watched the sun lowering swiftly over the steep peaks of the island of Moorea, far across the bay. She began to panic. Where would she sleep tonight? Mosquitoes flitted around her head. She was now invisible to the Tahitians. They went about their business around her, as if she and her luggage were a stone cairn that had stood there on the beach since the dawn of history itself. The evening swallows emerged from the trees to hunt. Light glared off the water in dazzling blazes from the setting sun.
Then Alma saw something in the water, something heading toward the beach. It was a small outrigger c
anoe, quick and narrow. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted against the reflected sunlight, trying to make out the figures inside. No, it was just one figure, she saw, and that figure was paddling most energetically. The canoe shot up onto the beach with remarkable force—a little arrow of perfect momentum—and out sprang an elf. Or such was Alma’s first thought: Here is an elf! Further scrutiny, however, revealed the elf to be a man, a white man, with a wild corona of snowy hair and a fluttering beard to match. He was tiny and bowlegged and spry, and he hauled the canoe up the beach with surprising strength for one so small.
“Reverend Welles?” she shouted with hope, waving her arms in a gesture that utterly lacked dignity.
The man approached. It was difficult to say what was more remarkable about him—his diminutive stature or his gaunt frame. He was half the size of Alma, with a child’s body, and a quite skeletal body, at that. His cheeks were hollow and his shoulders were sharp and pointed beneath his shirt. His trousers were held around his pinched waist by a doubled-up length of rope. His beard reached far down his chest. He was wearing some sort of strange sandals, also made of rope. He did not wear a hat, and his face was deeply sunburned. His clothes were not entirely in rags, but quite nearly. He looked like a broken parasol. He looked like an elderly, miniature castaway.
“Reverend Welles?” she asked again, hesitant as he drew nearer.
He looked up at her—far up at her—with frank and bright blue eyes. “I am the Reverend Welles,” he said. “At least, I believe that I still am, you see!”
He spoke with a light, clipped, indeterminate British accent.
“Reverend Welles, my name is Alma Whittaker. I hope you received my letter?”
He tilted his head: birdlike, interested, unperturbed. “Your letter?”
It was just as she had feared. She was not expected here. She took a deep breath and tried to think how best to explain herself. “I have come to visit, Reverend Welles, and to perhaps stay for a while—as you can probably see.” She made an apologetic gesture toward her pyramid of luggage. “I have an interest in natural botany and I would like to study your native plants. I know that you are something of a naturalist yourself. I come from Philadelphia, in the United States. I have also come to survey the vanilla plantation my family owns. My father was Henry Whittaker.”
He raised his wispy white eyebrows. “Your father was Henry Whittaker, do you say?” he asked. “Has that good man passed away?”
“I’m afraid he has, Reverend Welles. Just this last year.”
“I regret to hear it. May the Lord take him to His breast. I worked for your father over the years, you see, in my own small way. I sold him many specimens, for which he was kind enough to pay me fairly. I never met your father, you see, but I worked through his emissary, Mr. Yancey. He was always a most generous and upright man, your good father. Many times over the years, the earnings from Mr. Whittaker helped to save this little settlement. We cannot always count on the London Missionary Society to come through for us, can we? But we have always been able to count on Mr. Yancey and Mr. Whittaker, you see. Tell me, do you know Mr. Yancey?”
“I know him well, Reverend Welles. I have known him all my life. He arranged for my travel here.”
“Certainly! Certainly you do. Then you know him to be a good man.”
Alma could not say that she would ever have accused Dick Yancey of being “a good man,” but she nodded nonetheless. Likewise, she had never before heard her father described as generous, upright, or kind. These words would take some getting accustomed to. She remembered a man in Philadelphia who’d once referred to her father as “a biped of prey.” Think how surprised that man would be now, to see how well regarded was the biped’s name here, in the middle of the South Seas! The thought of it made Alma smile.
“I would be most happy to show you the vanilla plantation,” the Reverend Welles continued. “A native man from our mission has taken over management of it, ever since we lost Mr. Pike. Did you know Ambrose Pike?”
Alma’s heart pirouetted inside her chest, but she kept her face neutral. “Yes, I knew him a bit. I worked rather closely with my father, Reverend Welles, and it was the two of us, in fact, who made the decision to dispatch Mr. Pike to Tahiti.”
Alma had decided months ago, even before leaving Philadelphia, that she would tell nobody in Tahiti of her relationship to Ambrose. During the entirety of her journey, she had traveled as “Miss Whittaker,” and had allowed the world to regard her a spinster. In a very real sense, of course, she was a spinster. No sane person would have regarded her marriage to Ambrose as any sort of marriage at all. What’s more, she certainly looked like a spinster—and felt like one. Generally speaking, she did not like to tell lies, but she had come here to fit together the story of Ambrose Pike, and she much doubted that anyone would be candid with her if they knew that Ambrose had been her husband. Assuming that Ambrose had honored her request and told nobody of their marriage, she did not imagine anyone would suspect a link between them, aside from the fact that Mr. Pike had been her father’s employee. As for Alma, she was merely a traveling naturalist, and the daughter of a quite famous botanical importer and pharmaceuticals magnate; it should make every bit of sense to anyone that she might come to Tahiti for her own purposes—to study its mosses, and to look in on the family’s vanilla plantation.
“Well, we sorely miss Mr. Pike,” the Reverend Welles said, with a sweet smile. “Perhaps I miss him most of all. His death was a loss to our small settlement, you see. We wish that all strangers who came here would set such a good example to the natives as did Mr. Pike, who was a friend to the fatherless and fallen, an enemy of rancor and viciousness, and all that sort of thing, you see. He was a kind man, your Mr. Pike. I admired him, you see, because I felt he was able to show the natives—as so many Christians cannot seem to show the natives—what a Christian temperament should truly be. The conduct of so many other visiting Christians, you see, does not always seem calculated to raise the esteem of our religion in the eyes of these simple people. But Mr. Pike was a model of goodness. What’s more, he had a gift for befriending the natives such as I have rarely seen in others. He spoke to everyone in such a plain and generous manner, you see. It is not always done that way, I am afraid, with the men who come to this island from far away. Tahiti can be a dangerous paradise, you see. For those who are accustomed to, let us say, the more rigorous moral landscape of European society, this island and its people can present temptations that are difficult to resist. Visitors take advantage, you see. Even some missionaries, I am sorry to say, sometimes exploit these people, who are a childlike and innocent people, you see, though with the help of the Lord we try to teach them to be more self-preserving. Mr. Pike was not such a type—to take advantage, you see.”
Alma felt bowled over. She found this to be quite the most remarkable speech of introduction she had ever heard (barring, she supposed, the first time she had met Retta Snow). The Reverend Welles had not probed whatsoever into why Alma Whittaker had come all the way from Philadelphia to sit upon a pile of crates and trunks in the middle of his mission, and yet here he was, already discussing Ambrose Pike! She had not expected this. Nor had she expected that her husband, with his valise filled with secret and lewd drawings, would be praised quite so passionately as a moral example.
“Yes, Reverend Welles,” she managed to say.
Astonishingly, the Reverend Welles continued even further on the subject: “What’s more, you see, I came to love Mr. Pike as a most cherished friend. You cannot imagine the comfort of an intelligent companion in a place so lonely as this. Verily I would walk many miles to see his face again or to grasp his hand once more in friendship, if only that were possible—but such a miracle will never exist for as long as I breathe, you see, for Mr. Pike has been called home to paradise, Miss Whittaker, and we are left here alone.”
“Yes, Reverend Welles,” Alma said again. What else could she say?
“You may call me Brother Well
es,” he said, “if I may call you Sister Whittaker?”
“Certainly, Brother Welles,” she said.
“You may now join us for evening prayer, Sister Whittaker. We are in a bit of a rush, you see. We will start later than usual this evening, for I have spent the day out in the coral, you see, and I have lost track of time.”
Ah, Alma thought—the coral. Of course! He had been out at sea all day in the coral reefs, not looking after cattle.
“Thank you,” Alma said. She looked again to her luggage, and hesitated. “I wonder where I might place my belongings in the meanwhile, to keep them safe? In my letter, Brother Welles, I had inquired if I might stay at the settlement for some time. I study mosses, you see, and I had hoped to explore the island . . .” She trailed off, unnerved by the man’s candid blue eyes upon her.
“Certainly!” he said. She waited for him to say more, but he did not. How unquestioning he was! He could not have been less discommoded by her presence if they had planned this rendezvous for ten years.
“I have a comfortable amount of money,” Alma said uncomfortably, “which I could offer to the mission in exchange for lodging . . .”
“Certainly!” he chirped again.
“I am not yet decided as to how long I might stay . . . I shall make every effort not to be a bother . . . I do not expect comforts . . .” She trailed off again. She was answering questions that he was not asking. Over time, Alma would learn that the Reverend Welles never asked questions of anyone, but for now she found it extraordinary.
The Signature of All Things Page 40