The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  No more speculation. No more of it. She would now need to know everything. She would insist on knowing.

  * * *

  Alma could hear the church before she reached it. The singing coming from within that humble building was like nothing she had ever heard. It was a roar of jubilation. There was no room inside the church for her; she stood outside with the jostling, chanting crowd, and listened. The hymns that Alma had heard in this church in the past—the voices of the eighteen congregants of the Reverend Welles’s mission—had been thin and reedy tunes compared to what she was hearing now. For the first time, she could understand what Tahitian music was truly meant to be, and why it needed hundreds of voices roaring and bellowing together in order to perform its function: to outsing the ocean. That’s what these people were doing now, in a crashing expression of veneration, both beautiful and dangerous.

  At last it quieted, and Alma could hear a man speaking—clearly and powerfully—to the congregation. He spoke in Tahitian, in a disquisition that, at times, was almost a chant. She pushed closer to the door and peered in: it was Tomorrow Morning, tall and splendid, standing at the pulpit, arms raised, calling out to the congregation. Alma’s command of Tahitian was still too basic for her to follow the entire sermon, but she could comprehend that this man was offering up a passionate testament to the living Christ. But that was not all he was doing; he was also cavorting with this gathering of people, the same way Alma had many times watched the boys of the Hiro contingent cavort with the waves. His mettle and nerve were unwavering. He pulled laughter and tears from the congregation, as well as solemnity and riotous joy. She could feel her own emotions being tugged along by the timbre and intensity of his voice, even as his words themselves remained largely incomprehensible.

  Tomorrow Morning’s performance went on for well over an hour. He had them singing; he had them praying; he had them prepared, it seemed, to attack at dawn. Alma thought, My mother would have despised this. Beatrix Whittaker had never gone in for evangelical passions; she’d believed that frenzied people were in danger of forgetting their manners and their reason, and then where would we be as a civilization? In any case, Tomorrow Morning’s riproarious soliloquy was unlike anything Alma had ever before heard at the Reverend Welles’s church—or anywhere, for that matter. This was not a Philadelphia minister, dutifully dispensing Lutheran teachings, or Sister Manu and her simple, monosyllabic homilies; this was oration. This was the drums of war. This was Demosthenes defending Ctesiphon. This was Pericles honoring the dead of Athens. This was Cicero rebuking Catiline.

  What Tomorrow Morning’s speech most certainly did not bring to Alma’s mind was the humility and gentleness she had come to associate with this modest little mission by the sea. There was nothing humble or gentle about Tomorrow Morning. Indeed, she had never seen such an audacious, self-possessed figure. An adage of Cicero’s came to her in its original, mighty Latin (the only language, she felt, that could stand up to the thundering groundswell of native eloquence she was right now witnessing): “Nemo umquam neque poeta neque orator fuit, qui quemquam meliorem quam se arbitraretur.”

  Never did there exist a poet or an orator who thought there was another better than himself.

  * * *

  The day became only more fervid from there.

  Through the terrifically effective native telegraph system of Tahiti (fleet-footed boys with loud voices), word spread quickly that Tomorrow Morning had arrived, and the beach at Matavai Bay grew more crowded and exuberant by the hour. Alma wanted to find the Reverend Welles, to ask him many questions, but his tiny form kept disappearing into the mob, and she could only catch fleeting glimpses of him, his white hair flying in the breeze, beaming with happiness. She could not draw near Sister Manu, either, who was so electrified that she lost her giant flowered hat, and who was weeping like a schoolgirl in a crowd of chattering, euphoric women. The Hiro contingent was nowhere to be seen—or, rather, they were everywhere to be seen, but they moved far too quickly for Alma to catch and question them.

  The crowd on the beach—as though by unanimous decision—turned into a revel. Space was cleared for wrestling and boxing matches. Young men flung off their shirts, applied coconut oil, and began to tussle. Children galloped across the shoreline in spontaneous footraces. A ring appeared in the sand, and suddenly a cockfight was under way. As the day went on, musicians arrived, carrying everything from native drums and flutes to European horns and fiddles. On another part of the beach, men were industriously digging a fire pit and lining it with stones. They were planning a tremendous roast. Then Alma saw Sister Manu, quite out of nowhere, catch a pig, pin it down, and kill it—much to the consternation of the pig. Alma could not but feel a bit resentful at the sight of this. (How long had she been waiting for a taste of pork? All it took, apparently, was Tomorrow Morning’s arrival, and the deed was done.) With a long knife and a confident hand, Manu cheerfully took the pig apart. She pulled out the viscera, like a woman pulling taffy. She and a few of the stronger women held the pig’s carcass over the open flames of the fire pit to burn off the bristles. Then they wrapped it in leaves and lowered it onto the hot stones. More than a few chickens, helpless in this tidal surge of celebration, followed the pig to its death.

  Alma saw pretty Sister Etini rushing by, her arms filled with breadfruit. Alma lunged forward, touched Etini on the shoulder, and said, “Sister Etini—please tell me: who is Tomorrow Morning?”

  Etini turned with a wide smile. “He is the Reverend Welles’s son,” she said.

  “The Reverend Welles’s son?” Alma repeated. The Reverend Welles had only daughters—and only one living daughter, at that. If Sister Etini’s English were not so nimble and fluent, Alma might have assumed the woman had misspoken.

  “His son by taio,” Etini explained. “Tomorrow Morning is his son by adoption. He is my son, too, and Sister Manu’s. He is the son of all in this mission! We are all family by taio.”

  “But where does he come from?” Alma asked.

  “He comes from here,” Etini said, and she could not disguise her tremendous pride in that fact. “Tomorrow Morning is ours, you see.”

  “But where did he arrive from just today?”

  “He arrived from Raiatea, where he now lives. He has a mission of his own there. He has found great success in Raiatea, on an island that was once most hostile to the true God. The people he has brought along with him today, they are his converts—some of his converts, that is. To be sure, he has many more.”

  To be sure, Alma had many more questions, but Sister Etini was eager to attend to the feast, so Alma thanked her and sent her off. She went over to a guava bush by the river and sat down in its shade, to think. There was a great deal to think about and piece together. Desperate to make sense out of all this astonishing new information, she harkened back to a conversation she’d had months ago with the Reverend Welles. She dimly remembered the Reverend Welles having told her of his three adopted sons—the three most exemplary products of the mission school at Matavai Bay—who now led respected missions on various outer islands. She pushed herself to recall the details of that single, long-ago conversation, but her recollection was frustratingly indistinct. Raiatea may indeed have been one of the islands he had mentioned, Alma felt, but she was certain he had never brought up the name “Tomorrow Morning.” Alma would have taken note of that name, had she ever heard it. Those words would have immediately alerted her attention, brimming as they did with personal associations. No, she had never heard the name spoken before. The Reverend Welles had called him by something else.

  Sister Etini rushed past again, arms empty this time, and once more Alma darted forth and detained her. She knew she was being a pest, but could not stop herself.

  “Sister Etini,” she asked. “What is Tomorrow Morning’s name?”

  Sister Etini looked puzzled. “His name is Tomorrow Morning,” she said simply.

  “What does Brother Welles call him, though?”

  “Ah!”
Sister Etini’s eyes lit up. “Brother Welles calls him by his Tahitian name, which is Tamatoa Mare. But Tomorrow Morning is a nickname he invented for himself, when he was just a little boy! He prefers to be called that. He was always so facile with language, Sister Whittaker—quite the best student Mrs. Welles and I ever had, and you will find that he speaks far better English than do I—and he could hear, even from earliest childhood, that his Tahitian name sounded like those English words. He was always so clever. Now the name suits him, we all agree, for he brings such hope, you understand, to everyone he meets. Like a new day.”

  “Like a new day,” Alma repeated.

  “Exactly, yes.”

  “Sister Etini,” Alma said. “I am sorry, but I have one last question. When was the last time Tamatoa Mare was here at Matavai Bay?”

  Sister Etini answered without hesitation. “November of 1850.”

  Sister Etini rushed off. Alma sat down in the shade again and watched the mirthful mayhem unfold. She watched it with no joy. She felt an indentation in her heart, as though somebody were pressing a thumbprint through her chest, deep and firm.

  Ambrose Pike had died here in November of 1850.

  * * *

  It took Alma some time to come near Tomorrow Morning. That night was a mighty celebration—a feast worthy of a monarch, which was certainly how the man was regarded. Hundreds of Tahitians crowded the beach, eating roasted pigs, fish, and breadfruit, and enjoying arrowroot pudding, yams, and countless coconuts. Bonfires were lit, and the people danced—not the most obscene dances, of course, for which Tahiti was once so infamous, but the least offensive traditional dance, the one they called the hura. Even this would not have been permitted in any other mission settlement on the island, but Alma knew that the Reverend Welles sometimes allowed it. (“I simply cannot see the harm in it,” he had once told Alma, who had begun to think of this oft-repeated phrase as a perfect motto for the Reverend Welles.)

  Alma had never seen the dance performed before, and she was as captivated as anyone else. The young female dancers wore their hair ornamented with triple strands of jasmine and gardenia blossoms, and flowers draped over their necks. The music was slow and undulating. Some of the girls had faces marked by the pox, but in the firelight all were equally beautiful. One could get a sense of the women’s limbs and hips in motion, even underneath their long-sleeved, shapeless, missionary-prescribed dresses. It was very much the most provocative dance Alma had ever seen (their hands alone were provocative, she marveled), and she could not begin to imagine what this dance must have looked like to her father back in 1777, when the women performing it wore grass skirts and nothing else. Quite a show it must have been, for a young boy from Richmond attempting to uphold his virtue.

  From time to time athletic men jumped into the dance ring to perform comic, buffoonish interruptions to the hura. The point of this, Alma thought at first, was to break the sensual mood with mirth, but they, too, soon began testing the limitations of lewdness in their movements. There was a recurrent joke of the men grasping toward the female dancers, while the girls gracefully darted away without missing a step. Even the youngest children appeared to understand the underlying allusion to desire and rebuke playing itself out in the performance, and they howled with a degree of laughter that made them seem far more sophisticated than their years. Even Sister Manu—that shining example of Christian propriety—leapt into the fray at one point and joined the hura dancers, swaying her bulk with surprising agility. When one of the young male dancers came after her, she allowed herself to be caught, to the roaring delight of the crowd. The dancer then pressed himself against her hip, in a series of motions whose frank ribaldry could be misconstrued by nobody; Sister Manu merely fixed him with a comically inflated flirtatious gaze, and kept dancing.

  Alma kept an eye on the Reverend Welles, who appeared simply charmed by all that he saw. Beside him sat Tomorrow Morning, poised with perfect posture, immaculately dressed like a London gentleman. Throughout the evening, people came to sit by his side, to press their noses against his nose, and to bring him salutations. He received everyone with a spirit of both finesse and largesse. Truly, Alma had to admit, she had never seen a more beautiful human being in all her life. Of course, beauty in the physical form was everywhere to be found in Tahiti, and one grew accustomed to it after a while. Men were beautiful here, women yet more beautiful, and children even more beautiful still. What a pale and spindle-armed group of hunchbacks most Europeans seemed by comparison to the extraordinary Tahitians! It had been said a thousand times, by a thousand awestruck foreigners. So, yes, beauty was in no short supply here, and Alma had seen much of it—but Tomorrow Morning was the most beautiful of all.

  His skin was dark and burnished, his smile a slow moonrise. When he gazed upon anyone, it was an act of generosity, of luminescence. It was impossible not to stare at him. Notwithstanding his handsome countenance, his size alone commanded attention. He was truly prodigious in stature, an Achilles in the flesh. Most certainly, one would follow such a man into battle. The Reverend Welles had once told Alma that in the old days in the South Seas, when the islanders went to war against each other, the victors would pick through their opponents’ corpses, looking for the tallest and darkest bodies among the dead. Once they had found those slain behemoths, they would carve open their corpses and remove their bones, from which they made fishhooks, chisels, and weapons. The bones of the largest men, it was believed, were charged with tremendous power, and hence the tools and weapons carved from them would endow their holder with invincibility. As for Tomorrow Morning, Alma thought ghoulishly, they could have made an armory’s worth of weaponry out of him—if they could’ve managed to kill him in the first place.

  Alma hovered around the outskirts of the firelight, to remain somewhat inconspicuous while she took in the situation. Nobody took notice of her, so consumed were they by their joy. The revelry went on long into the night. The fires burned high and bright, casting shadows so dark and so twisting that one almost feared to trip over them, or to be clutched by them and pulled down into the pô. The dancing grew wilder and the children behaved like spirits possessed. Alma might have assumed that a visit from a prominent Christian missionary would not have produced quite so much roistering and carousing—but then again, she was still new to Tahiti. None of it disturbed the Reverend Welles, who had never looked happier, never more buoyant.

  Long after midnight, the Reverend Welles noticed Alma at last.

  “Sister Whittaker!” he called out. “Where are my manners? You must meet my son!”

  Alma approached the two men, who were sitting so near the fire that they appeared ablaze themselves. It was an awkward meeting, for Alma was standing and the men—as per local custom—remained seated. She was not about to sit. She was not about to press her nose to anyone else’s nose. But Tomorrow Morning reached up with his long arm and offered a polite handshake.

  “Sister Whittaker,” said the Reverend Welles, “this is my son, of whom you have heard me speak. And my dear son, this is Sister Whittaker, you see, who visits us from the United States of America. She is a naturalist of some renown.”

  “A naturalist!” said Tomorrow Morning in a fine British accent, nodding with interest. “As a child, I had quite a fondness for natural history. My friends thought me mad, to value that which no one else valued—leaves, insects, coral, and the like. But it was a pleasure and education. What a worthy life, to make so deep a study of the world. How fortunate you are in your vocation.”

  Alma gazed down at him. To see his face so close at long last—this indelible face, this face that had so troubled and fascinated her for so long, this face that had brought her here from the other side of the globe, this face that had probed so stubbornly at her imagination, this face that had beleaguered her to the point of obsession—was simply staggering. His face had such a powerful effect upon her that it struck her as incredible that he, in turn, was not equally staggered by seeing her: How could she know him so i
ntimately, and he know her not at all?

  But why in heaven would he?

  Placidly, he returned her gaze. His eyelashes were so long, it was an absurdity. They seemed not only excessive, but almost confrontational—this spectacle of eyelashes, this needlessly luxuriant fringe. She felt irritation rising within her—nobody required eyelashes such as these.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you,” she said.

  With statesmanlike grace, Tomorrow Morning insisted that, no, the pleasure was entirely his own. Then he released her hand, Alma excused herself, and Tomorrow Morning returned his attention to the Reverend Welles—to his happy, elfin, little white father.

  * * *

  He stayed at Matavai Bay a fortnight.

  She rarely took her eyes off him, keen to learn—by observation and proximity—whatever she could. What she learned, and quite quickly, was that Tomorrow Morning was beloved. It was close to exasperating, in fact, how beloved he was. She wondered if it was ever exasperating for him. He was never given a moment to himself, although Alma kept watching for one, hoping for a private word with him. It seemed there would never be a chance for it; there were meals and meetings and gatherings and ceremonies all around him, at all hours. He slept in Sister Manu’s house, which buzzed with constant visitors. Queen ’Aimata Pōmare IV Vahine of Tahiti invited Tomorrow Morning for tea at her palace in Papeete. All wanted to hear—in English or Tahitian, or both—the story of Tomorrow Morning’s extraordinary success as a missionary on Raiatea.

  Nobody wanted to hear about it more than Alma, and over the duration of Tomorrow Morning’s sojourn, she managed to piece together the entire story from various onlookers and admirers of the Great Man. Raiatea, she learned, was the cradle of Polynesian mythology, and thus a most unlikely place ever to have embraced Christianity. The island—large and rugged—was the birthplace and residence of Oro, the god of war, whose temples were honored by human sacrifice and littered with human skulls. Raiatea was a serious place (Sister Etini used the word weighty). Mount Temehani, in the center of the island, was considered to be the eternal residence of all the dead of Polynesia. A permanent shroud of fog hung over the tallest pinnacle of this mountain, it was said, for the dead did not like the sunlight. The Raiateans were not a laughing people; they were a firm people—a people of blood and grandeur. They were not the Tahitians. They had resisted the English. They had resisted the French. They had not resisted Tomorrow Morning. He had first arrived there six years earlier in a most spectacular manner: he came alone in a canoe, which he abandoned as he neared the island. He stripped naked and swam to shore, paddling easily over the thunderous breakers, holding his Bible over his head and chanting, “I sing the word of Jehovah, the one true God! I sing the word of Jehovah, the one true God!”