by Linda Hogan
“You were drinking with them! That’s why.”
She turned her back to him so he wouldn’t see her cry. After a while she left the small bedroom in their rented place, the green walls and ceiling they’d once laughed about, that only paint they could find, which now seemed pitiful. And she put away dishes, quietly, carefully. He wished she would slam cupboards and silverware. Later he went to her, stood behind her and held her. She didn’t forgive him, not then. Not really until years later when she realized how men were so influenced by their peers and governments. This was something Ruth, a woman who could stand alone in the world, would never understand.
Thomas was sent away before the others.
He argued with the recruiter. “But the army promised us the buddy system. We’d go together. We were supposed to go together. We wanted to fight together for America.”
“The army promises a lot,” said the man at the recruiting station in the little shopping center next to the post office. “Don’t worry. You’ll all catch up with each other.” And maybe Thomas knew he lied, but it was too late. Now he was owned.
On the day Thomas left, Ruth was torn in half. The two of them, who’d always laughed together, floated in the water and talked together, who saw with the same eyes, were now separate. She wept when he left and she couldn’t stop for days. Then she set her lips in tight resignation, more akin to sorrow, and went about her life of fishing.
Soon she moved onto their boat, an old Trophy, a Cadillac of boats, she’d always been told. It had a decent enough living space. Besides, she of the independent spirit and born with gill slits had always wanted to live on the water, and now she and her father would always be ready when the salmon came down from the north.
She was pregnant when Thomas left for war. She didn’t know it until it made her sick to fill the boat with gas, too sick to head toward the salmon run or out deeper to the halibut, as they sometimes did. Her father watched her vomit over the back of the boat and said he’d go alone that day. He sent her home on his worn-out little excuse for a dinghy. She barely made it, and then her mother looked at her and said, “You don’t even need a doctor to tell you that you are having a baby. I give you seven months.”
Evenings, or early mornings, drenched in salt water, loneliness, an infant inside her growing by division she thought, not multiplication, she brought in the nets, counted the fish, sometimes only eleven trying to leap from net into water, both shining.
She already saw the child she was going to have and so she named him Marco Polo, the infant with black hair who was going to do what she’d always wanted and travel the world. Oh, he’d see camels and deserts and silks and people wearing orange and red robes. He’d see temples and monkeys and paintings and hear sounds of the world she’d never heard, jungle sounds, and he’d see the far north.
Guess what? she wrote to Thomas. You would have loved it today. I saw the bald eagle nest. Remember it? It has grown. They added another room. But even better, I saw an octopus in the water. Thomas, best of all, we are going to have a baby. Yes, a baby. He is a boy. I can see him. He looks like you. My mother will be so disappointed. She swears he will look like Dad.
That same day she mailed the letter. After she talked to the gossip Carlene, who worked at the post office, she was followed by a scrawny spotted dog. “Go home,” she hissed at him. But no amount of stomping her foot, of saying “Shoo,” turned the dog back away and when she went to the water, the little thing stood at the shore watching her leave, howling like a baby wolf, until she turned back. “Okay, come on.” He hopped in the dinghy with her and, to her amazement, climbed onto the boat like a human, a few steps up and then a leap. A master at boats already.
That day she had to fix a pending leak in the boat where she lived, fix the hatch, and decide how to make room for a baby and for a dog. She looked at the dog and thought of the words poop deck, and how she would have to train him. She looked about her small room and thought about where the cradle would go, then the crib, then the bed. As it turned out, she didn’t have to wonder where the dog would sleep. The little spotted dog slept with her and she loved the warmth of his body.
Even without Thomas, it became a happy time. Hoist, as she and her father named their little canine assistant, dragged nets in with his teeth as if to help, making them laugh. She would always remember her father’s face as he laughed that first day, red and happy. Hoist also chased his tail. He leaped over waves, biting the top of water. Everyone loved him, even the customers at the NO DOGS, and SORRY WE’RE OPEN café. And the baby was moving, turning like a butterfly growing wings in a cocoon.
It’s salmon season, she wrote Thomas. They are so beautiful. I hate to kill even one. But I only sell what we need to. I almost have to divine what the restaurants will use. Sometimes I throw a few back. I wish you would write me more about what life is like over there. Your letter about how green it is made me curious. I wish I could see it. The baby is growing!
Thomas laughed when he read the letter. But there were two laughs, one about the baby, one about the idea of Ruth seeing the world over there, not worth laughing about, a world taken apart, bodies, fear, and the smell of death. But then, it was the beginning of many lies, how could he tell her the truth of his life there.
Ruth left out some things, as well. She didn’t tell him when her father died and how they’d had a traditional service and his body was taken to the island where once they kept the dead. The mourning songs and the crying would have made a mountain weep. He was left for the vultures, according to tradition which was so rarely kept now. Her mother went into mourning, painting the part in her hair black.
Nor did Ruth write to Thomas about how his own father had attacked her at the corner of the schoolhouse one night. He’d been drinking. She begged him to stop as he pulled her blouse open, then held her arms with one hand. There were some men nearby smoking and laughing. She called to them for help. They didn’t come to help her, even though she knew they heard. They walked away. Worse, they laughed. With her strong arms she had to break his hold herself and leave him bruised, drunk, and angry enough to tell everyone he “got some” from his own daughter-in-law. He was known for his handsome charisma, and some might have believed it if they hadn’t known Ruth. More than one person saw him with a black eye underneath his sunglasses.
When he was born, Marco swam out of the birth canal hands first, like a diver. The doctor at the hospital was worried when he saw the small wet hands, as if a small replica of the woman was reaching, grasping from within herself. One hand even took hold of the doctor when he was feeling for the head and the baby began to pull himself into the world of light and air. Marco managed to swim. Ruth looked at every part of him, his perfect brown fingers. Then his toes. She laughed. “Well, no wonder, Doctor! Mother, look, he has some webbed toes! Of course he came out swimming.” Webbed feet were not unknown around those parts, but no one liked to admit it. Besides, in Marco’s case, there were only a few. And Aurora had never told Ruth about how she had been born with gill slits. They were a family not bound to land, that was for sure, Aurora told her own sister, who lived farther north. Like the whales who were dependent on land, in many ways they lived in two elements.
One morning after a long silence from Thomas, Ruth sat on her mother’s couch eating a Popsicle. It was an old couch, worn velvet or horsehair—she never knew which—and slightly rough. The lovebirds in their white cage in the corner of the room were cooing. Hoist always watched them with strong alertness and snapped up their fallen feathers. Ruth had her eye on the sea. It misted outside. She was looking toward the ocean trying to see through the mists and drifts of fog when a black car pulled up the dirt road to the drive. A man stepped out with clear plastic covering his military hat. Strangely, Hoist did not bark. When the man knocked, Ruth knew why he was there. “Don’t open the door, Mom.” Ruth went to it and spoke through it to the man she would always call Mr. Death. “No one lives here,” she said. As if that was not loud enough, she
said, “Death, you have never heard our name. Go away.”
He, like everyone, was merely doing his duty. “I have a message to deliver. Mr. Just sent me to you.” There were two men. One remained in the car.
“Ruth, don’t be rude. Who is it?” Her mother, with her white hair and dark skin, always gracious, dish towel in hand, opened the door to the stranger. Ruth was already on the floor, fallen as women have done before, so often, some doubled over, some on their sides, some shaking with sobs, some staring at linoleum because at least the floor was not the dread face of human truth.
Aurora, the mother of Ruth, knew why he was there. She pitied her daughter, but she let him in and he removed his hat. “I’m Sergeant Green,” he said. Then, slowly, he bent toward Ruth. “May I?” He looked at the older woman. She nodded. It was clear he was experienced at this and he was strong, as if they only selected men with arms that could hold women, chests that could be hit by them, backs that could lift them. He picked Ruth up carefully, her black hair cascading down, and laid her on the sofa with doilies on its arms. Her beauty was not missed by him. Ruth, as she had done as a girl, cried without crying, water spilling from her eyes, and the man never even had to say, “I regret to inform…”
The baby Marco, who already had watching eyes and showed signs of difference from other children, slept in the next room. He was a calm child, and the voices did not wake him. Or they did and he listened and understood.
“Here.” The messenger spoke to Aurora. “Her father-in-law told me to give this to her. I’m sorry, ma’am. We didn’t even know he had a wife. It wasn’t in our records.”
“No,” said Ruth’s mother. “It was a tribal wedding. It’s in our own records.”
He took something out of his pocket and handed it to the older woman. It was a dog tag, a single one. It fell into Aurora’s hand on its snake chain. “Thank you,” she said. Ruth heard the chain and metal. Dog tag and chain. Dog, that was a man in war. Dog. He had to follow orders. He had to sniff for danger, be willing to die for his owner. He had to hate strangers, be wary, be nothing, be kicked and hungry and still obey. He needed madness. Dog, what Thomas and so many others had been. The president had said about war that it was proof there was still madness in the world, only Ruth always wondered who the mad ones were. Anyway, even if she often thought he was one of them, the president’s words were the truth.
Anger and sorrow grew together in her like a single tree. Sorrow had knocked her down, but anger lifted her to her feet.
Standing tall, Ruth looked at the man. “He’s not dead.”
He’d heard the same thing so many times before. “I hope you’re right.”
The car backed away and left the way it had come.
“He’s alive, Mother. I feel it.”
“You’re probably right.” She took her daughter in her arms and held her. “You usually are.” She, still grieving her own man, smoothed down Ruth’s black hair.
Nevertheless, it was the end of laughter for a time.
The love between Thomas and Ruth was a love that existed in another dimension, just as Witka, the grandfather of Thomas, and his wife had a love that communicated from earth all the way through elements to the depths of water. Ruth had seen through space and time across this world through her own eyes and heart. Through distances across the ocean, with its pulsing jellyfish and swaying kelp forests, flying manta rays, sea turtles coming up to breathe, across all that and heavy clouds, too, she had seen him in her twilight sleep. Once there were firestorms. She had seen him encircled by fire and, like a salamander in the forest, surviving it by staying down in the wet earth, beneath it, breathing through a wet brown rag, not running like others. She saw him leap into a ditch. Once, more recently, he was standing at a brown river in a green world, and he was fishing, his black hair in a ponytail as he threw out fishing nets in their tribal fashion. But then, Ruth’s spirit had never remained in the hiding place of her body. It always traveled. “Last night your father was drunk,” she said to Thomas once when they were children. Tommy, as he was called then, nodded, accustomed to her and how, even shy and quiet, she knew things. He had looked down at the ground where they sat. She said, “And I know why.” She pulled at her braids. “Because he aches inside, because he will never be like your grandpa.”
Now, at night, she pulled her dreams and memories into a net like a school of silver fish. There was the time she dreamed a short-haired Thomas eating with a tribe of people. They wore faded blue and brown clothing, and so did he. They talked rapidly and laughed. They ate fish and rice.
But after the man in the shining car arrived, there were times she doubted herself. “What if he’s sharing food with the ancestors? Or fishing for them and not for earth people?” she asked Linda.
Linda, who owned the only restaurant on the reservation, said, “You always know things, Ruth. Trust your feelings. Your intuition is always right. Yeah. He’s alive.”
Linda was thin from moving all day and her hair was dyed too dark now. She wore it in a bun when she worked, although no customer would complain to Linda about a hair in the food. Some had, and she had merely removed it and said, “There you go.”
“Sit down for a while,” she told Ruth, and poured her some coffee. “For one thing, the ancestors don’t catch fish at rivers. They fish the clouds. They only eat ground acorns and flowers. Like the people of the past.”
But when Linda put her arms around her, and Ruth was an armload of grief, Ruth knew Linda didn’t believe her. She felt it. Linda was thinking, after all, they had the dog tag. And Ruth had it in her pocket, constantly fingering the chain, the cheap metal that should have been gold. Throughout the day, she caressed and felt and read it with her fingertips, that thing which had touched his chest, his sweat.
After Death had come to her mother’s door, Ruth began staying awake on the boat where she lived with Marco. She watched Marco sleep, his lips parted, his skin smooth, eyelashes like his father’s, his eyes already with lines at the side as if he’d spent a lifetime laughing. He was an astute child. Born an old man, was what people said of him. He was also a quiet child. Still, he had a sense of humor from infancy and he was set apart by his inborn wisdom. He was the incarnation of an ancestor, the elders said, those who still believed in such things.
Like his father, like Witka, the boy began to go into the salt water of the plankton-filled ocean and not come to the surface for a long time. Ruth, unable to bear the thought of losing him, waited in tears and then reproached him. “It scares me. I wait for you to be alive. Don’t you understand?” She had already lost her father, her husband.
Marco didn’t. Every day he stayed longer, telling his mother, “I can’t help it. Something else makes me do it.”
Over the next years, Ruth’s visions were a wave that flowed from her bed on the boat and floated her out to the waters of another world. She merely floated, her body lying on the bed moored to her place on the sea as she journeyed. Now and then she had a dream of Thomas with a little girl on his lap like a spirit child.
Out loud one night, she said, “He’s standing in water,” waking her son. Hoist licked her face.
“My father?” Marco asked, half awake.
“Yes,” was all she said. “But it was only a dream.”
“No. He is there. He’s walking across a field of grass.”
Ruth stared at him in the moonlight a long time. “I think it’s rice,” she said.
“Me, too.” As if he’d know what rice looked like.
So, she thought, the boy saw these things, too. So she told Marco the stories about his father as a child, the time he tried to fly, how he also, like Marco, tried to hold his breath until it scared his mother, until she pretended to die of fear and Thomas came up one day gasping and found her lying down, her hands over her chest, posed like a corpse waiting for vultures. They laughed.
When she said the word vulture, she thought of her own father, over on the island, his body on a platform in the trees. But
there was her son, and as time passed, Marco grew into a beautiful child. He helped her when he was not in school even though she worried about him getting hurt. Fishing was dangerous business. For a time, she began shore fishing. It suited them better. Marco, like her, hated to kill fish.
One chilly day Aurora rowed out to Ruth’s bay in her own dead husband’s dirty old rowboat as if rowing was still natural to her skinny old arms.
“Ruth!” she called out as she tried to change boats.
Hoist, with damp fur, licked the old woman’s face, barking happily as the exhausted old woman climbed aboard.
Ruth went to see what the noise was.
“Oh my God, Mom! You rowed all the way out here?” She helped the older woman up the ladder, grabbing her waist with her strong arms, lifting her, really, the skinny old legs finally touching wood. “Hoist, get back!”
In between breaths her mother said, “You were right! He’s alive, Thomas is. You were right all along.”
She’d been called that morning when a few flakes of snow began to drift down. He’d been found living in a village. “He was held by the enemy, brainwashed or injured, they think,” she said. “I’m freezing. I wish you could get a phone out here.”
Ruth wrapped her mother in a quilt that had been stitched of men’s old suits, ones they wore after the Catholics had converted them.
As the snow melted on Aurora’s hair, Ruth heated coffee water, hardly able to lift the kettle.
“You knew it all along. You were right and I’m sorry, but sometimes I didn’t believe you. And now they say he is coming back.”
“I know.” Ruth leaned across the table, smiling at her mother. She put her hands on each side of Aurora’s face and kissed her. “It’s okay. No one did.”
“Except me!” Marco, who had been studying snowflakes, jumped up and down, not his usual style, but he said, “I could see him. My father!”