Left on Paradise

by Kirk Adams

  “Don’t be too excited,” Linh said. “Things can go wrong and nine months is a long wait. We may be in Paradise, but we don’t exactly have modern medical facilities.”

  “I suppose you’re right about that.”

  Linh tore a piece of bread from a hard loaf even as Kit handed her a slice of coconut meat and a glass of milk.

  “Does she need milk?” Kit asked.

  “All she can keep down is crackers, but a sip of coconut juice wouldn’t hurt. And prenatal vitamins.”

  “We don’t have any in the village. They’re kept at the base infirmary.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe I’ll walk to camp tomorrow to fetch a bottle.”

  “That’d be helpful,” Linh answered. “You’re so nice.”

  Kit dropped her eyes and spoke only after a long pause. “I wanted five children when I was a girl.”

  Linh looked surprised. “Really?”

  “When I grew up,” Kit said, “and became an actress, I realized I’d been dreaming—as if the world was no more than a little house on the prairie.”

  Linh laughed.

  “The trouble is,” Kit continued, “I’m no longer sure which is less real: old books or the glitterati. What I once lived seems like a performance compared to this place. Everything feels so different now. Nature rains on my head and earth oozes between my toes. Motherhood seems so ... so natural. So real.”

  “Someday,” Linh said as she brushed her friend’s arm, “your time will come.”

  “No, it won’t. Ryan and I made our choice and it’s virtually irreversible. We’re not having children.”

  Linh looked toward the shadows of the trees. Though dawn streamed over the canopy of the forest, the jungle remained indistinct in the morning haze. After a moment she smiled.

  “Did you know I was adopted?” the Vietnamese woman asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I was raised in Michigan,” Linh said, “but I’m told that my parents were killed in Saigon after the war ended. My birth father was an army officer and after he was arrested one of his soldiers—my adoptive father—took me into his home. We fled to a refugee camp in Thailand and eventually relocated to Grand Rapids.”

  Kit remained silent.

  “You still can be a mother,” Linh said, “if you really want to.”

  “Where would I find a baby?”

  “Life brings them.”

  “Death,” Kit whispered, “brings them.”

  “That’s not how I see it,” Linh objected with a quiet tone. “Death took my original parents, but life brought me new ones.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kit said, “about your birth parents.”

  “I don’t remember them,” Linh said with a hushed voice, “only my adoptive ones. My real ones.”

  Kit let the conversation die and the two women returned to breakfast without further talk. A moment later, they were joined by Lisa and talk shifted to Alan’s complaints and the day’s work.

  It was midmorning when Lisa approached Alan as he worked alone in a half-cleared field close to the main path leading to the bridge. Alan’s eyes passed over the young woman’s gentle-sloped chest without interest, fixing on her face. When Lisa asked where his work partner was, Alan scowled.

  “We need to talk,” Alan said.

  Lisa asked what he wanted.

  “Ursula’s sick again,” Alan complained.

  “I can’t heal her.”

  “Then get me some help with these trees.”

  “Have you made quota?”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  Lisa turned her eyes from the sun, arched her back, and slipped from her backpack—letting it drop before she reached into a side pocket and felt for a pair of sunglasses. Putting the shades on, she looked at Alan.

  “Why not?” Lisa asked.

  “Because Ursula’s a deadbeat.”

  “That’s slander.”

  “If it’s untrue.”

  “Did she put in all her hours?”

  “If you can call it that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She was here,” Alan said, “but she didn’t finish a single tree. We were told to clear a strip near the trail. We counted out trees and divided sixteen between us. I’ve busted my ass all week and I’m down to my last tree. Mind you, the trees are cut and stacked. Ursula managed to cut one tree down, but it’s not even stripped, let alone cut or stacked. She moves as slow as sap.”

  “I see.”

  “I gave her,” Alan continued, “the choice on which side of the lot to clear but she didn’t do anything.”

  “I’ll find you some help for today.”

  “I’m not staying late.” Alan now sounded angry.

  Lisa stood straight, pulling her shoulders back and sucking in her stomach. “You owe the camp a full forty hours.”

  “And it’s up by noon,” Alan said, “then I’m done. The rest of her quota isn’t my responsibility.”

  “All for one and one for all.”

  “And one isn’t doing anything at all,” Alan said. “Whether or not you find someone to do her work, I don’t care. Just don’t expect to see me after lunch. I have plans.”

  “Then go,” Lisa snapped, “and stop complaining about it.”

  “Tell her work before play or we’re going to starve.”

  “From each according to his ability and to each according to her need,” Lisa replied.

  Alan scowled as he walked away while muttering curses under his breath and Lisa returned to the village to summon help, finding Steve just as he finished lunch. When she brought Steve to the clearing, Alan was stacking wood—his saw lying in tall grass and ax driven into a large stump.

  “What’s that saw,” Lisa pointed at the tools, “doing on the ground?”

  “Taking a break,” Alan said, “like Ursula.”

  “The grass will rust the blades.”

  “It hasn’t rained all day.”

  “We can’t afford to take the chance. Tools can’t be replaced.”

  Lisa asked Alan to pick it up, but it was Steve who retrieved and wiped the blade before setting it atop a stump as he explained that he’d volunteered to help out.

  “This isn’t going to work at all,” Alan objected. “We had plans.”

  “It was Steve’s choice,” Lisa said.

  Alan turned to his husband and asked why he’d changed plans without asking.

  “Let’s chop some trees,” Steve said, “then we can leave. These palms go fast.”

  “Not me. I’m at quota for the week,” Alan growled as he dropped his tools and stomped off toward the village.

  “Don’t mind him,” Steve said. “He’s just tired.”

  “I’m not married to him,” Lisa said, “he doesn’t bother me.”

  Steve helped Lisa until dusk, by which time only one tree remained uncut. Several others had been trimmed—and one palm even stripped of its bark. After the two shared a quick supper, Lisa retired to her tent to read a book while Steve searched for Alan.

  Four women set out for New Plymouth after eating breakfast. Hilary and Deidra walked to the front while Joan and Linh lagged behind, their legs short and steps slow as they ascended Mount Zion. By midmorning, all four western women arrived at base camp and moved bricks to the beach with a wheelbarrow. After loading the bricks into a rowboat, the women carried treated limber to the beach—with Hilary refusing several offers of male help, though she did allow Janine Erikson to take a turn pushing a half-filled wheelbarrow. After a quick lunch drawn from stored rations, the women collected an iron grate, a box of nails, and cement mix. An hour later, these too were secured in the rowboat and the return trip begun.

  During the walk home, Joan and Deidra waded near the beach—pulling fifteen-foot lengths of rope over their shoulders as they trudged through shallow water while Linh and Hilary pulled shorter ropes with which they steered the raft through the surf. It didn’t take the women long to move north when the win
d was to their backs, but their pace slowed after they neared the north village and faced crosswinds and crosscurrents alike. By then, their arms ached and tempers flared and Joan and Deidra were arguing about religion.

  The quarrel started when Joan damned the load in the name of the gods and Deidra responded that no honest work could be “gods-damned” since there were no gods. Though Deidra initially took the attack to be against her native heritage, she was somewhat mollified when she realized that Joan was cursing every faith equally. Still, as Joan argued that religious blessings and curses implied unscientific presuppositions, Deidra pressed her faith in the reality of her gods and customs of her forefathers. In any event, by the time the women rounded the north shore and reached Turtle Beach, they argued so hard that they had ceased complaining of their load and no longer pulled the boat at all.

  “No,” Joan said just after they stopped working to debate religion, “I chose my words carefully. I didn’t say I objected to native religion, only that I didn’t believe its tenets.”

  “Almost,” Deidra scowled, “the same thing.”

  “Tell me why you chant.”

  “To honor the traditions of my people and to enjoy the achievements of my culture.”

  “And I respect that,” Joan replied, “just as I enjoy Irish clog dancers and ghetto rap. Diversity must be encouraged. That’s an absolute.”

  “That’s not what you said. You implied native American religion is superstition. That it’s untrue. If that’s so, then our dancers are like little children pretending to be cowboys and Indians—our whole culture is make-believe.”

  “Those aren’t my words.”

  “Close enough,” Deidra said with a grimace. “Native American culture isn’t singing and dancing and whooping in war paint around an open fire. It’s not selling arrowheads at tourist traps or wearing feathers—just as Scotland is more than haggis and plaid kilts. It takes more than bagpipes to make Glasgow. Either the inner logic of the culture is tenable or it’s no more than a charade.”

  “I disagree,” Joan protested, “I’m more or less a Marxist and I believe that class consciousness and economic modes of production are the deciding forces of civilization, but I’m no monist. We don’t need to pattern our lives by the trappings of Bolshevist Russia. Within the form of economic determinism, we are allowed the freedom of cultural expression.”

  “You’re mixing,” Deidra argued, “both your metaphors and your metaphysics.”

  “And you postmodernists,” Joan said, “allow everyone to tell their cultural stories to the degree no one makes any effort to distinguish true from false, myth from history, or the plausible from the absurd. You think that everyone has a valid story and none of it can be disproved.”

  “I’m no post-modernist,” Deidra said, “which is exactly my point. To reduce Native American culture to a self-actualizing narrative is to accept it only within the terms of post-Enlightened literary interpretation. According to the cynicism of the heirs of Voltaire and Comte.”

  Joan looked confused. “I don’t understand.”

  “You published books on literary theory,” Deidra said. “What don’t you understand?”

  “I understand the theory. It’s you I don’t get.”

  “What I’m trying to say is this,” Deidra explained, “the only genuine Native American culture is that which perceives the world with the same eyes as Geronimo and Sitting Bull and Little Turtle. Apaches and Navajos were neither modernists nor materialists. They believed. And only if we believe are we their true sons or daughters. Anything else is a pretense. Just a show.”

  Deidra paused to catch breath.

  “In fact,” Deidra continued, “it’s cultural treason to accept the white man’s ways. Squanto and Pocahontas were traitors. Can’t you see how they betrayed their own people by accepting the suppositions of European culture? They were even worse than the little whore who led Cortés to Montezuma. You want me to do the same? To commit cultural genocide against my own people? To defile myself in the bed of the white man?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Joan laughed. “I’m not the one who married John Smith.”

  Deidra turned red.

  “But,” Joan continued, “I still want to know exactly what you believe. Are you arguing for a modernist or a post-modernist understanding of Native American religious culture?”

  “Neither,” Deidra objected, “I’m arguing within the framework and terms of the religion itself.”

  “Which is?”

  “Faith.”

  “Faith in what?”

  “In the power of the gods.”

  Joan rolled her eyes.

  “But what exactly,” Joan asked, “is represented by this so-called faith? What’s its ideological meaning? I’m trying to see how your cultural theory relates to social organization.”

  “What I’m trying to say,” Deidra objected, “is that it doesn’t. It relates to the Earth Mother and the Sky God.”

  “Symbolizing?”

  “Symbolizing,” Deidra groaned, “nothing at all.”

  “Then,” Joan pressed her point, “you’re an existentialist? Or maybe a nihilist?”

  “The gods,” Deidra snapped with a loud voice and angry tone, “aren’t symbols. They’re gods.”

  “You mean real gods?”

  “Yes.”

  “That exist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like Jesus?”

  “That,” Joan said as she shook her head, “would make me a Christian, not a Native American. My people are loyal to their own gods, not narrow-minded Jewish carpenters.”

  “What do these gods do?”

  “Whatever they wish.”

  “Where do they live?” Joan asked as she grinned.

  “In the spirit world.”

  “Can they see us now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we see them?”

  “In visions and dreams.”

  “So they’re like Jung’s archetypes.”

  “You’re being stubborn,” Deidra scowled. “You can’t understand the gods through theory and scholarship. They’re not a philosophy. They’re spirits. Deities. Souls of the earth. As alive and real as you and I.”

  “You can’t really believe this.”

  “If I don’t, I’m no true Native American. So for the sake of my people and their sacred ways, I will believe it. I do believe it, the gods helping me.”

  Joan shook her head as Deidra took up the slack in the rope and pulled the boat. Soon they pulled the barge of bricks and timber through the shallows and it wasn’t long before they saw the western beach—where John and Sean were fishing. After the women pulled the rowboat ashore and secured it to a tree, all four of them collapsed into the grass exhausted. Even Hilary didn’t object when the two men dragged the barge to the trees and unloaded it. The women had done their share and were worn out with blistered hands and sore backs.

  All four women arrived home shortly after Charles—who had spent the day with Karla at New Plymouth. After dinner, Charles assembled the village and summarized the council’s actions to a few neighbors while suggesting a Saturday morning session to share further details. The villagers thought it a good idea and agreed to the meeting. Deidra, Hilary, and Linh retired early that night while Joan remained at the campfire talking with her husband: her face sober and voice hushed. Charles and Joan talked long after the fire burned down.

  14

  Private Choices and Public Talk

  As John opened his eyes to the first glimpse of dawn, he reached for his wife—only to touch an empty bedroll. Deidra was awake earlier than usual. Reaching for a shirt and shorts, John quickly dressed and left the tent. Outside, he stretched before walking toward cold fire pits and an empty mess tent—his shirt unbuttoned and boots slung over a shoulder. Though the chill of morning was warming, the camp remained quiet and lifeless, so he arranged several logs into the pit over kindling and struck a match. Soon, a fire blazed and children, accompanied by
bleary-eyed parents, rose from their tents as John started toward the beach.

  At the edge of the village, a spiderweb stretched across the path, indicating no one had passed west, so John doubled back to the Pishon River. Seeing no one at the bridge, he scoured the woods for signs of life. There, he observed the bright light of a new day burning like a disc through the heavens and thought about the life supported by the burning star: plankton, plants, fish, birds, animals, and people. He remembered myths about divine chariots and sun gods and smiled a little. Still, even if the sun was no more than one of billions of stars, it was part of a cosmos supposedly self-created from nothing at all. John wondered whether there indeed might be a ...

  It was at this moment a distant chant echoed from the forest—the singing of a woman. John moved quietly into the old growth forest, his boots still dangling from his shoulders and his bare-footed steps noiseless. The singing grew louder as he drew closer and it wasn’t long before he came to a cluster of ironwood trees where he found a dark-haired woman kneeling in prayer. She bowed before the tallest tree, her hands lifted to the heavens. Then she chanted, worshipping until her forehead pressed mud and her mouth kissed moss.

  John stepped into the open. “Deidra,” he called to his wife. “What are you doing here?”

  Deidra glanced back only for an instant before returning to her ritual. A moment later, she stood—now chanting louder than before and dancing around the chosen tree: knees lifted high and arms over her head. John remembered how he once teased that dancing Native Americans looked to be playing drunken hopscotch, but now he didn’t find it funny.

  “Deidra,” John said, “that’s enough.”

  Deidra danced faster as John moved closer. She circled the old tree, shuffling from one leg to the other, moving her hands down her hips and whirling her black hair in a full circle. She paid the white man no heed as her pace quickened—her chanting almost frenzied.

  “Heh-heh-heh-heh. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

  “For God’s sake,” John said, “get hold of yourself.”