The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “Certainly!” he said, for the third time. “Now join us in evening prayer, Sister Whittaker.”

  “Certainly,” she said, and gave up.

  He led her away from her luggage—away from all that she owned and all that was precious to her—and strode toward the church. All she could do was follow.

  * * *

  The chapel was not more than twenty feet long. Inside, it was lined with simple benches, and its walls were whitewashed and clean. Four whale-oil lanterns kept the place dimly lit. Alma counted eighteen worshippers, all of them native Tahitians. Eleven women and seven men. To the degree possible (she did not wish to be rude), Alma examined the faces of all the men. None of them was The Boy from Ambrose’s drawings. The men were dressed in simple European-style trousers and shirts and the women wore those long, loose frocks that Alma had been seeing everywhere since she’d ar-rived. Most of the women wore bonnets, but one—Alma recognized her as the hard-faced lady who had shooed away the young boys—wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, decorated with an elaborate array of fresh flowers.

  What followed was the most unusual religious service Alma had ever witnessed, and by far the shortest. First, they sang a hymn in the Tahitian language, though no one had a hymnal. The music was odd to Alma’s ears—dissonant and sharp, with voices layered upon voices in patterns she could not follow, accompanied by naught but a single drum, played by a boy of about fourteen. The drum’s rhythm did not seem to match the song—not in any way that Alma could identify. The women’s voices rose up in piercing cries above the chants of the men. She could find no melody hidden within this strange music. She kept listening for a familiar word (Jesus, Christ, God, Lord, Jehovah) but nothing was recognizable. She felt self-conscious sitting in silence while the women around her sang so loudly. She could add nothing to this event.

  After the singing ended, Alma expected the Reverend Welles to deliver a sermon, but he remained sitting with his head bowed in prayer. He did not even look up as the large Tahitian woman with the flowers on her hat stood and approached the simple pulpit. The woman read briefly, in English, from the book of Matthew. Alma marveled that this woman could read, and in English, as well. Though Alma had never been the prayerful sort, there was comfort in the familiar words. Blessed are the poor, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the reviled and persecuted. Blessed, blessed, blessed. So many blessings, so generously expressed.

  Then the woman closed the Bible and—still speaking in English—gave a quick, loud, and strange sermon.

  “We are born!” she shouted. “We crawl! We walk! We swim! We work! We give children! We grow old! We walk with a stick! But only in God there is peace!”

  “Peace!” said the congregation.

  “If we fly to heaven, God is there! If we sail the sea, God is there! If we walk the land, God is there!”

  “There!” said the congregation.

  The woman stretched out her arms and opened and closed her hands in quick succession, many times in a row. Then she opened and closed her mouth rapidly. She made antics like a puppet on strings. Some of the congregation giggled. The woman did not seem to mind the laughter. Then she stopped moving about and shouted, “Look at us! We are cleverly made! We are full of hinges!”

  “Hinges!” said the congregation.

  “But the hinges will rust! We will die! Only God remains!”

  “Remains!” said the congregation.

  “The king of bodies has no body! But he brings us peace!”

  “Peace!” said the congregation.

  “Amen!” said the woman in the flower-covered hat, and returned to her seat.

  “Amen!” said the congregation.

  Then the Reverend Welles moved to the altar and offered communion. Alma stood in line with the rest of them. The Reverend was so tiny, she had to bend nearly double at the waist to receive his offering. There was no wine, but the juice of a coconut served the purpose of Christ’s blood. As for the body of Christ, it was a small rolled ball of something sticky and sweet that Alma could not identify. She welcomed it; she was famished.

  The Reverend Welles offered an impressively short prayer: “Give us the will, oh Christ, to endure every affliction that is our portion. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said the congregation.

  This concluded the service. It could not have lasted fifteen minutes. Yet it was just enough time that—when Alma walked back outside—she found that the sky had grown completely dark, and every last one of her belongings was gone.

  * * *

  “Taken where?” Alma demanded. “And by whom?”

  “Hmm,” said the Reverend Welles, scratching his head and looking at the spot where Alma’s luggage had rested only so very recently. “Now, that is not easily answered. Probably the young boys took it all, you see. It is usually the young boys, for this sort of thing. But most certainly it has been taken.”

  This confirmation was not helpful.

  “Brother Welles!” she said, frantic with alarm. “I asked you if we should safeguard it! I need those items most urgently! We could have put it all in a house somewhere, safe behind a locked door, perhaps! Why did you not suggest it?”

  He nodded in earnest agreement, but without any trace of consternation. “We could have put your luggage in a house, yes. But, you see, everything would have been taken regardless. They would take it now, you see, or they would take it later.”

  Alma thought of her microscope, of her reams of paper, her ink, her pencils and medicines and collection vials. What of her clothing? Dear God, what of Ambrose’s valise, filled with all those dangerous, unspeakable drawings? She thought she would weep.

  “But I brought gifts for the natives, Brother Welles. They did not have to steal from me. I would have given them things. I brought them scissors and ribbons!”

  He gave a bright smile. “Well, it appears your gifts have been received, you see!”

  “But there are items that I will need to have returned to me—items of unspeakable value and tenderness.”

  He was not entirely unsympathetic. She had to grant him that. He nodded kindly, and took notice, at least somewhat, of her distress. “That must make you sorrowful, Sister Whittaker. But please be assured—none of it has been eternally stolen. It has simply been taken, perhaps only temporarily. Some of it may be returned, if you are patient. If there is anything of particular value to you, I can ask for it specifically. Sometimes if I ask in the proper manner, items reappear.”

  She thought over all that she had packed. What did she most desperately need? She could not ask for the valise filled with Ambrose’s sodomite drawings, though it was torture to have lost it, for it was her most important belonging.

  “My microscope,” she said, faintly.

  He nodded again. “That may be difficult, you see. A microscope would be an item of considerable novelty around here. Nobody will have ever seen one. I don’t believe I have ever seen one myself! Still, I shall start asking immediately. We can only hope, you see! As for tonight, we must find you lodging. Down the beach about a quarter of a mile is the small cottage we helped build for Mr. Pike, when he came to stay. It has been left much as it was when he passed away, may God rest him. I had thought that one of the natives might claim the place as his own home, but it seems nobody will go inside. It is tainted by death, you see—to their minds, I mean. These are a superstitious people, you see. But it is a pleasing cottage with comfortable furniture, and if you are not a superstitious person, you should be at ease there. You are not a superstitious person, are you, Sister Whittaker? You do not strike me as such. Shall we go look at it?”

  Alma felt like crumpling to the ground. “Brother Welles,” she said, struggling to keep her voice from breaking. “Please forgive me. I have come a long way. I am far from all that is familiar to me. I am much shocked to have lost my belongings, which I managed to safeguard for fifteen thousand miles of travel, only to have it vanish just a moment ago! I have not had a bite to eat, with the exception of your ki
nd communion, since my dinner on the whaling ship yesterday afternoon. All is new, and all is strange. I am much burdened and much distracted. I ask you to forgive me . . .” Alma stopped talking. She had lost track of the purpose of this speech. She did not know what she was asking forgiveness for.

  He clapped his hands. “To eat! Certainly, you must eat! My apologies, Sister Whittaker! You see, I do not eat myself—or quite rarely. I forget that others must do so! My wife would lace me up and give me the evils, if she knew of my poor manners!”

  Without another word, and without any supplemental explanation as to the subject of his wife, the Reverend Welles ran off and knocked on the door of the cottage closest to the church. The large Tahitian woman—the same one who had delivered the sermon earlier that evening—answered the door. They exchanged a few words. The woman glanced at Alma, and nodded. The Reverend Welles rushed back to Alma with his springy, bow-legged step.

  Alma wondered, could that be the Reverend’s wife?

  “Then it is done!” he said. “Sister Manu will provide for you. We eat simply here, but yes, at minimum you should eat! She will bring something to your cottage. I also asked her to bring you an ahu taoto—a sleeping shawl, which is all we use around here at night. I shall bring you a lamp, too. Now let us find our way. I cannot think of another thing you will possibly need.”

  Alma could think of many things she needed, but the promise of food and sleep was enough to sustain her for the time being. She walked behind the Reverend Welles down the black sand beach. He walked at an impressive speed for one with such short, crooked legs. Even with her long strides, Alma had to rush to keep up with him. He swung a lantern beside him, but did not light it, for the moon had risen and was bright in the sky. Alma was startled by large, dark shapes scurrying across the sand in their path. She thought they were rats, but on closer look discovered they were crabs. They unsettled her. They were quite sizable, with one large pincer claw each, which they dragged beside them as they scuttled along, clicking awfully. They came too close to her feet. She might have preferred rats, she thought. She was grateful to be wearing shoes. The Reverend Welles had somehow lost his sandals between the church service and now, but he was unconcerned with the crabs. He prattled along as he walked.

  “I am intrigued to see how you will find Tahiti, Sister Whittaker, from a botanical point of view, you see,” he said. “Many are disappointed by it. It is a lush climate, you see, but we are a small island, so you will find that there is more abundance here than variety. Sir Joseph Banks most certainly found Tahiti lacking—botanically, I mean. He felt the people were far more interesting than the plants. Perhaps he had a point! We have only two varieties of orchids—Mr. Pike was so sorry to hear of that, though he avidly searched for more of them—and once you learn the palms, which you will do in a snap, there is not much more to discover. There is a tree called apage, you see, which will remind you of a gum tree, and it rises to forty feet—but not very magnificent for a woman raised in the deep forests of Pennsylvania, I wager! Ha-ha-ha!”

  Alma did not have the energy to tell the Reverend Welles that she had not been raised in a deep forest.

  He went on: “There is a lovely sort of laurel called tamanu—useful, good. Your furniture is made of it. Impervious to insects, you see. Then a sort of a magnolia, called the hutu, which I sent to your good father in 1838. Hibiscus and mimosa are to be found everywhere by the seashore. You will like the mape chestnut—perhaps you saw it by the river? I find it the most beautiful tree on the island. The women make their clothing from the bark of a sort of paper-mulberry tree—they call it tapa—but now many of them prefer the cotton and calico that the sailors bring.”

  “I brought calico,” Alma murmured sadly. “For the women.”

  “Oh, they will appreciate that!” the Reverend Welles said breezily, as though he had already forgotten that Alma’s belongings had been stolen. “Did you bring paper? Books?”

  “I did,” Alma said, feeling more mournful by the moment.

  “Well, it is difficult here with paper, you will see. The wind, the sand, the salt, the rain, the insects—never was there a climate less conducive to books! I have watched all my papers vanish before my eyes, you see!”

  As have I, just now, Alma nearly said. She did not think she had ever been this hungry in her life, or this tired.

  “I wish I had a Tahitian’s memory,” the Reverend Welles went on. “Then one would have no need for papers! What we keep in libraries, they keep in their minds. I feel such a half-wit, in comparison. The youngest fisherman here knows the names of two hundred stars! What the old ones here know, you could not imagine. I used to keep documents, but it was too discouraging to watch them be eaten away, even as I laid down the words. The ripening climate here produces fruit and flower in abundance, you see, but also mold and rot. It is not a land for scholars! But what is history to us, I ask? So brief is our stay in the world! Why make such a bother to record our flickering lives? If the mosquitoes trouble you too severely in the evenings, you may ask Sister Manu to show you how to burn dried pig dung by your door; it keeps them down a bit. You will find Sister Manu most useful. I used to preach the sermons here, but she enjoys it more than I do, and the natives prefer her sermons to mine, so now she is the preacher. She has no family, and so she tends to the pigs. She feeds them by hand, you see, to encourage them to stay near the settlement. She is wealthy, in her way. She can trade a single piglet for a month of fish and other treasures. The Tahitians value roasted piglet. They used to believe that the smell of flesh draws near the gods and spirits. Of course, some of them still believe that, despite being Christians, ha-ha-ha! In any case, Sister Manu is good to know. She has a fine singing voice. To a European ear, the music of Tahiti wants in every quality that would render it pleasurable, but you may learn to tolerate it with time.”

  So Sister Manu was not the Reverend Welles’s wife, Alma thought. Who was his wife, then? Where was his wife?

  He kept talking, tirelessly: “If you see lights out on the bay at night, do not be alarmed. It is only the men, gone fishing with lanterns. It is most picturesque. The flying fish are drawn to the light, and they land in the canoes. Some of the boys are able to catch them by hand. I tell you—whatever natural variety is lacking on the land in Tahiti, it is more than made up for by the abundance of wonders at sea! If you like, I will show you the coral gardens tomorrow, out by the reefs. There, you shall witness the Lord’s inventiveness most impressively evidenced. Here we are, then—Mr. Pike’s house! Now it shall be your house! Or, I should say, your fare! In Tahitian, we call a house a fare. It is not too soon to begin learning a few words, you see.”

  Alma repeated the word in her head: fah-ray. She committed it to memory. She was exhausted, but even so, Alma Whittaker would have to be far more exhausted than this not to prick up her ears at a new and unfamiliar language. In the dim glow of moonlight, just up a slight slope from the beach, she could see the tiny fare hidden under a fretwork of palms. It was not much bigger than the smallest garden shed at White Acre, but it was pleasant enough to look at. If anything, it resembled an English seaside cottage, but much shrunken in scale. A crazy zigzagged path of crushed seashells led from the beach to the door.

  “It is a queer path, I know, but the Tahitians made it,” said the Reverend Welles with a laugh. “They see nothing advantageous in making a straight path, for even the shortest distances! You will grow accustomed to such marvels as this! But it is good to be a bit off the beach. You are four yards above highest tide, you see.”

  Four yards. It did not seem like much.

  Alma and the Reverend Welles approached the cottage up the crooked path. Alma could see that the purpose of a door was answered by a simple screen of plaited palm fronds, which he pushed open easily. Clearly, there was no lock here—nor had there ever been one. Once inside, he lit the lamp. They stood together in the one small open room, beneath a simple thatched roof. Alma could just barely stand up without hitting her hea
d on the lowest rafter. A lizard skittered across the wall. The floor was dried grass that rustled under Alma’s feet. There was a small rough wooden bench with no cushion, but at least it had a back and arms. There was a table with three chairs—one of which was broken and tipped over. It looked like a child’s table, in a poor nursery. Curtainless, glassless windows opened on all sides. The final bit of furniture was a small bed—barely bigger than the bench—with a thin pallet slung on top. The pallet appeared to be made from an old canvas sail, stuffed with something or other. The whole room, such as it was, seemed much more suitable to somebody of the Reverend Welles’s size than her own.

  “Mr. Pike lived as the natives live,” he said, “which is to say—he lived in one room only. But if you want partitions, I suppose we could make partitions for you.”

  Alma could not imagine where one would put a partition in this tiny place. How do you divide nothing into parts?

  “You may wish at some point to move back to Papeete, Sister Whittaker. Most do. There is more civilization to be found there in the capital, I suppose. More vice, as well, and more evil. But there you could find a Chinaman to do your laundry, and that sort of thing. There are all manner of Portuguese and Russians there—all those sorts who fall off whaling boats and never leave. Not that Portuguese and Russians constitute a civilization, but it is more variety of mankind than you will find in our small settlement out here, you see!”

  Alma nodded, but she knew she would not be leaving Matavai Bay. This had been Ambrose’s banishment; now it would be hers.

  “You will find a spot to cook in the back, by the garden,” the Reverend Welles went on. “Do not expect much of your garden, although Mr. Pike tried nobly to cultivate it. Everyone tries, but once the pigs and goats have finished their forays, there are not many pumpkins left for us! We can get you a goat, if you would like fresh milk. You can ask Sister Manu.”