As though summoned by the sound of her name, Sister Manu appeared at the doorway. She must have been right on their heels. There was almost not enough room for her to enter, with Alma and the Reverend Welles already in the cottage. Alma wasn’t sure Sister Manu would even fit through the door, with that wide, flower-covered hat on her head. Somehow, though, they all squeezed in. Sister Manu opened a bundle of cloth and began to lay food out on the tiny table, using banana leaves as plates. It took all of Alma’s reserve not to dive into the meal immediately. Sister Manu handed Alma a length of bamboo with a stopper of cork.
“Water for you to drink!” Sister Manu said.
“Thank you,” said Alma. “You are kind.”
They all stared at each other for quite a while after this: Alma exhaustedly, Sister Manu guardedly, the Reverend Welles cheerfully.
Finally, the Reverend Welles bowed his head and said, “We thank you, Lord Jesus and God our Father, for the safe delivery of your servant Sister Whittaker. We ask that you hold her in your special favor. Amen.”
Then he and Sister Manu left at last, and Alma plunged into the food with both hands, swallowing it in such quick gulps that she did not pause even for a moment to determine what, exactly, it was.
* * *
She awoke in the middle of the night to the taste of warm iron in her mouth. She smelled blood and fur. There was an animal in her room. A mammal. She identified this fact before she even remembered where she was. Her heart beat rapidly as she sought more information. She was not on the ship. She was not in Philadelphia. She was in Tahiti—there, she had oriented herself! She was in Tahiti in the cottage where Ambrose had stayed and where he had died. What was the word for her cottage? Fare. She was in her fare, and there was an animal in it with her.
She heard a whining noise, high and eerie. She sat up in the tiny, uncomfortable bed and looked around. Enough moonlight shone through the window that she could see it now—the dog who stood in the middle of her room. It was a small dog, maybe twenty pounds. Its ears were back and it was baring its teeth at her. Their eyes fastened on each other. The dog’s whine turned to a growl. Alma did not want to fight a dog. Not even a small dog. This thought came to her simply, even calmly. Next to the bed was the short length of bamboo that Sister Manu had given her, filled with fresh water. It was the only thing in reach that might serve as a weapon. She tried to determine whether she could reach for the bamboo without alarming the dog further. No, she most certainly did not want to have a fight with a dog, but if she must fight, she wanted it to be a fair match. She stretched her arm slowly down toward the floor, not taking her eyes off the creature. The dog barked and came nearer. She pulled back her arm. She tried again. The dog barked again, this time with increased anger. There would be no chance for her to find a weapon.
So be it. She was too tired to be afraid.
“What is your complaint with me?” she asked the dog, in a weary tone.
At the sound of her voice, the dog unleashed a great torrent of complaints, barking with such force that his whole body seemed to lift from the floor with every syllable. She stared at him dispassionately. It was the dead of night. She had no lock on her door. She had no pillow for her head. She had lost all her belongings and was sleeping in her filthy traveling dress, with its hems full of hidden coins—all the money she had left to her, now that her belongings had been stolen. She had nothing but a short length of bamboo with which to defend herself, and she could not even reach that. Her house was surrounded by crabs and infested with lizards. And now this: an angry Tahitian dog in her room. She was so exhausted, she nearly felt bored.
“Go away,” she told him.
The dog barked louder. She gave up. She turned her back to him, rolled over, and attempted, once more, to find a comfortable arrangement on the thin pallet. He barked and barked. His indignation had no limits. Attack me, then, she thought. She fell asleep to the sound of his outrage.
A few hours later Alma woke again. The light had changed. It was near dawn. Now there was a boy sitting cross-legged in the center of her floor, staring at her. She blinked, and suspected magic: What sorcerer had come and turned a little dog into a little child? The boy had long hair and a solemn face. He looked to be approximately eight years old. He wore no shirt, but Alma was relieved to see that he possessed trousers—although one leg was ripped to a short length, as though he had pulled himself out of a trap and left the remainder of his clothing behind.
The boy jumped to his feet, as if he had been waiting for her to awaken. He approached the bed. She drew back in alarm, but then saw that he was holding something, and, what’s more, offering it to her. The object gleamed in the dim morning light, balanced on his palm. It was something slender and brass. He placed it on the edge of her bed. It was the eyepiece to her microscope.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. At the sound of her voice, the boy ran away. The flimsy object that called itself a door swung closed behind him without a sound.
Alma could not fall asleep again after that, but she did not immediately rise, either. She was every bit as weary now as she had been the night before. Who would come to her room next? What sort of a place was this? She must find a means to block the door somehow—but with what? She could move the little table in front of the door at night, but that could easily be shuffled aside. And with windows that were nothing but holes cut in the walls, what good would it do to block the door at all? She fingered the brass eyepiece in her hand with confusion and longing. Where was the rest of her beloved microscope? Who was that child? She should have chased him, to see where he was hiding everything else she owned.
She closed her eyes and listened to the unfamiliar sounds around her. She felt almost as though she could hear the dawn breaking. Most certainly, she could hear the waves just outside her door breaking. The surf sounded disquietingly close. She would prefer to be a bit farther away from the sea. Everything felt too close, too dangerous. A bird, perched on the roof directly over her head, uttered a strange cry. Its call sounded something like: “Think! Think! Think!”
As though she ever did anything else!
Alma rose at last, resigned to wakefulness. She wondered where to find a privy, or a spot that might serve as a privy. Last night she had squatted behind the fare, but she hoped for a better arrangement nearby. She stepped out the front door and nearly tripped over something. She looked down and saw—sitting right on her doorstep, if one could call it a doorstep—Ambrose’s valise, waiting politely for her, unopened and tightly buckled as ever. She knelt down, undid the buckles, and threw it open, then quickly dug through the contents: all the pictures were still there.
Up and down the beach, as far as she could see in the dim morning light, there was not a sign of anyone—neither woman nor man, neither boy nor dog.
“Think!” shrieked the bird over her head. “Think!”
Chapter Twenty-three
Because time does not object to passing—not even in the strangest and most unfamiliar situations—time passed for Alma in Matavai Bay. Slowly, haltingly, she began to comprehend her new world.
Just as she had in childhood, when first awaking to cognizance, Alma began by studying her house. This did not take long, for her minuscule Tahitian fare was not exactly White Acre. There was nothing but the one room, the halfhearted door, the three empty windows, the sticks of crude furniture, and the thatched roof full of lizards. That first morning, Alma searched the house quite thoroughly for some vestige of Ambrose, but nothing existed. She looked for signs of Ambrose even before she began the (completely fruitless) search for her own lost luggage. What had she hoped to find? A message to her, written on a wall? A cache of drawings? Maybe a packet of letters, or a diary that actually revealed something other than inscrutable mystical longings? But there was nothing of him here.
Resigned, she borrowed a broom from Sister Manu and swept clean the cobwebs from the walls. She replaced the old dried grass on the floor with new dried grass. She plumped her mattress and acc
epted the fare as her own. She also accepted, as instructed by the Reverend Welles, the frustrating reality that her belongings would either show up eventually or they would not, and that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—that could be done about it. Though this news was distressing, something about it felt strangely apt, and even just. To be stripped of all that was precious made for a kind of immediate penance. It made her feel somehow closer to Ambrose; Tahiti was where they had both come to lose everything.
Wearing her one remaining dress, then, she continued to explore her environs.
Behind the house was something called a himaa, an open oven, where she learned to boil water and cook a limited assortment of foods. Sister Manu taught her how to manage the local fruits and vegetables. Alma did not think the final product of her cooking was meant to taste quite as much like soot or sand as it did, but she persevered, and felt proud that she could feed herself, which—in her entire long life—she had never before had to do. (She was autotrophic, she thought with a rueful smile; how proud Retta Snow would have been!) There was a sorry patch of garden, but not much to be done about it; Ambrose had built his house upon the burning sand, so it was futile even to try. There was nothing to be done about the lizards, either, who scampered across the rafters all night. If anything, they helped to abate mosquitoes, so Alma tried not to mind them. She knew they meant her no harm, though she did wish they would not crawl over her while she slept. She was happy they were not snakes. Tahiti, mercifully, was not snake country.
It was, however, crab country, but Alma soon taught herself not to be bothered by the crabs of all sizes that scuttled around her feet on the beach. They, too, meant her no harm. As soon as they glimpsed her with their waving, stalked eyes, they skimmed off in the other direction in a quick, clicking panic. She took to walking barefoot as soon as she recognized how much safer it was. Tahiti was too hot, too wet, too sandy, and too slippery for shoes. Fortunately, the environs welcomed bare feet; the island did not have even a single thorned plant, and most of the paths were smooth rock or sand.
Alma learned the shape and character of the beach, and the general habits of the tide. She was not a swimmer, but she encouraged herself to wade into the slow, dark water of Matavai Bay a bit deeper every week. She was grateful for the reef, which kept the bay fairly calm.
She learned to bathe in the river in the mornings with the other settlement women, all of whom were as thickset and strong as Alma herself. They were fiends for personal cleanliness, the Tahitians, washing their hair and bodies every day with the foaming sap of the ginger plants along the banks. Alma, who was not accustomed to bathing every day, soon wondered why she had not been doing this her entire life. She learned to ignore the groups of little boys who stood around the river, laughing at the women in their nakedness. There was no point in trying to hide from them; there was no hour of the day or night when the children would not find you.
The Tahitian women did not object to the children’s laughter. They seemed far more worried about Alma’s wiry, coarse, faded hair, which they fussed over with both sadness and concern. They all had such beautiful hair, which fell in black, billowing sweeps down their backs, and they felt simply terrible for Alma that she did not share this spectacular feature. She felt simply terrible about it herself. One of the first things Alma learned how to convey in Tahitian was an apology for her hair. She wondered if there was any place she could go in the world, ever, where her hair would not be considered a tragedy. She suspected not.
Alma picked up as much Tahitian as she was able, from anybody who would speak to her. She found the people to be warm and helpful, and they encouraged her efforts as a kind of play. She started with the words for the commonest items around Matavai Bay: the trees, the lizards, the fish, the sky, and the sweet little doves called uuairo (a word that sounded exactly like their soft, bubbling cry). She moved on to grammar as quickly as she was able. The inhabitants of the mission settlement spoke English at varying levels of proficiency—some were quite fluent, some simply inventive—but Alma, always the linguist, was determined to keep her interactions in Tahitian whenever possible.
But Tahitian, she found, was not a simple language. It sounded to her ears more like birdsong than speech, and she was not musical enough to master it. Alma determined that Tahitian was not even a reliable language. It did not have the sturdy injunctions of Latin or Greek. The people of Matavai Bay were especially kittenish and rascally with words, changing them by the day. Sometimes they mixed in bits of English or French, inventing imaginative new words. The Tahitians loved abstruse puns that Alma could never have comprehended unless her grandparents’ grandparents had been born here. Moreover, the people at Matavai Bay spoke differently from the people in Papeete, a mere seven miles away, and those people spoke differently from the people in Taravao or Teahupo. You could not trust a sentence to mean the same thing on one side of the island as across it, or to mean the same thing today as it meant yesterday.
Alma studied the people around her carefully, trying to learn the disposition of this curious place. Sister Manu was the most important, for she not only tended the pigs, but policed the entire settlement. She was a strict mistress of protocol, that one, keenly alert to manners and missteps. While everyone at the settlement loved the Reverend Welles, they feared Sister Manu. Sister Manu—whose name meant “bird”—was as tall as Alma, and as heavily muscled as a man. She could have carried Alma on her back. There were not many women about whom one could say that.
Sister Manu always wore her broad straw hat, dressed with different fresh flowers every day, but Alma had seen during bath time in the river that Manu’s forehead was covered with a hash of blunt white scars. Two or three of the older women had similar mysterious marks on their foreheads, but Manu was scarred in another way besides: she was missing the last phalanx of each of her pinky fingers. It seemed such a strange injury to Alma, so neat and symmetrical. She could not imagine what a person could have been doing, to have lost both pinky tips so tidily. She dared not ask.
Sister Manu was the one who rang the bell for worship every morning and evening, and the people—all eighteen of the settlement’s adults—dutifully came. Even Alma tried never to miss religious services at Matavai Bay, for it would have offended Sister Manu, and Alma could not have survived long without her favor. In any case, Alma found that the services were not difficult to sit through; they seldom lasted more than a quarter of an hour, and Sister Manu’s sermons in her stubborn English were always entertaining. (If the Lutheran gatherings in Philadelphia had been as simple and diverting as this, Alma thought, she might have become a better Lutheran.) Alma paid close attention and in due course pulled out words and phrases from the dense Tahitian-language chants.
Te rima atua: the hand of God.
Te mau pure atua: the people of God.
As for the boy who had brought Alma her microscope eyepiece the first night, she learned that he was one of a pack of five small boys who roamed the mission settlement with no apparent occupation other than to play ceaselessly until they collapsed with exhaustion onto the sand, and—like dogs—slept where they fell. It took Alma weeks to tell the boys apart. The one who had shown up in her room and handed her the microscope eyepiece was, she learned, named Hiro. His hair was the longest and he seemed to hold the highest status within the gang. (She later learned that in Tahitian mythology, Hiro was the king of thieves. It amused her that her first encounter with Matavai Bay’s little king of thieves was when he returned something that had been stolen from her.) Hiro was the brother of the boy called Makea, although perhaps they were not actual brothers. They also claimed to be brothers with Papeiha and Tinomana and another Makea, but Alma thought this could not possibly be true, because all five boys appeared to be the same age and two of them had the same name. She could not for the life of her determine who their parents might be. There was not the slightest sign that anyone took care of these children but themselves.
There were other children aroun
d Matavai Bay, but they approached life far more seriously than the five boys whom Alma came to think of as “the Hiro contingent.” These other children came to the mission school for classes in English and reading every afternoon, even if their parents were not residents of the Reverend Welles’s settlement. These were little boys with neat, short hair, and little girls with beautiful braids, long dresses, and bright smiles. They took their classes in the church, where they were taught by the bright-faced young woman who had called out to Alma on her first day, “We speak English here!” That woman’s name was Etini—“white flowers strewn along the road”—and she spoke English perfectly, with a crisp British accent. It was said she had been personally taught as a child by the Reverend Welles’s wife, and now Etini was considered the best English teacher on the entire island.
Alma was impressed by the tidy and disciplined schoolchildren, but she was far more intrigued by the five wild and uneducated boys of the Hiro contingent. She had never before seen children as free as Hiro, Makea, Papeiha, Tinomana, and the other Makea. Tiny lords of liberty, they were, and mirthful ones at that. Like some mythical blend of fish, bird, and monkey, they seemed equally at home in the water, in the trees, and on land. They hung from vines and swung into the river with fearless cheers. They paddled out to the reef on little wooden boards and then, incredibly, they stood up on those boards, and sailed across the foaming, billowing, breaking waves. They called this activity faheei, and Alma could not imagine the nimbleness and confidence they must have felt to ride the breaking surf with such ease. Back on the beach, they boxed and wrestled each other tirelessly. Another favorite game was when they would build stilts for themselves, cover their bodies with some kind of white powder, prop open their eyelids with twigs, and chase each other across the sand like tall, queer monsters. They also flew the uo—a kite made of dried palm fronds. At quieter moments, they played a game like jacks, using small stones instead of jacks. They kept as pets a rotating menagerie of cats, dogs, parrots, and even eels (the eels were bricked up into watery pens in the river; at the sound of the boys’ whistles, they would raise their heads up eerily above the surface of the water, ready to be fed bits of fruit by hand). Sometimes the Hiro contingent ate their pets, skinning them and roasting them on a makeshift spit. Eating dog was common practice here. The Reverend Welles told Alma that Tahitian dog was just as tasty as English lamb—but then again, the man had not tasted English lamb in decades, so she was not sure he could be trusted. Alma hoped nobody would eat Roger.
The Signature of All Things Page 42