by Linda Hogan
“That’s healthy,” the doctor said, his brown eyes warm beneath his graying brows. “You’d be surprised at how many men can’t cry.”
Thomas hated the doctor and his all-knowing understanding of men like himself, but he couldn’t show it. The questions were over for then. Only then. With his extra-keen hearing, he heard the doctor in the next room say, “Keep a record on him. We’ll need to keep track of him.” Thomas wondered how long Dr. Christmas, as he called him, had been in war. Dr. Tannenbaum.
Outside in the blue tropics of Hawaii as he thought about what it all meant, the dolphins were leaping all together like one being. He himself was an island of a man surrounded by water, mystery, and being returned to a country he no longer knew or wanted. He was not a part of it, he in his hospital cloth scuff shoes and blue robe, watching the blue ocean.
THE WIFE OF MARCO POLO
No one wrote about the wife of Marco Polo, the first journeyer. As far as anyone knew, no one wrote about the women who were left at home when their husbands were at war or searching for other worlds or traveling out of pure longing. The wife combs her hair. She takes on a job, a mission, a love, or she becomes weak with sadness.
After Thomas did not return, Ruth knew another kind of sorrow, but a calm also set in, as if the solitude would give her over to her own self. Ruth took Marco to the sea and showed him the fish that lived with dolphins. They sat on the wet beach and wrote his name in sand as if it would last. They peered into the morning tide pools. Ruth was a tide pool, full of life that awaited the return of its element. Perhaps explorer Marco Polo’s wife was also a creature in a pool, she thought, awaiting the return of her beloved. She didn’t know that the women gods on all the islands Odysseus visited awaited any traveling sailors around the Mediterranean, to keep them from returning home.
When Thomas went to war, Ruth had never felt so abandoned. On television she watched the casualties, searching every face for his. They promised mail. At first the envelopes arrived with the APO numbers and then they dwindled. Ruth missed her hand touched by his.
Like all the women left behind in wars, she was young but old, both at the same time. Wars amputate the minds and souls of waiting women in different ways than they do the armless, legless bodies in khaki and olive drab or the children stepping on land mines. But it is an amputation all the same. Watching the bullets, the men surviving fire, the dying children, what the women saw on television gave them some truth and from then on American wars were not on the television because people would rise up against their own government if they saw what they had done.
Then the back of this world, all across the land, began to break. Ruth herself heard the sound of its back breaking, almost inaudible, but she could hear it, for her ears could even hear the fish and the whales. It was to that she owed her fishing success. Hearing the country break, she knew nothing would ever be the same.
Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.
What she cried over was nothing. Chipped plates. Another form of oblivion. The Mayans knew the concept of zero. Most other cultures did not. A parrot, they say, also knows it. She lived at Zero and thanked god she did not have to pay rent on it, yet she had to add One to it, and keep a life for her son Marco until she knew they would come for him. She knew because it was in his face at birth. He was a full number, a whole one. He would lead people, so calm, so laughing. And so singled out. At an earlier time he would have worn only white. Always the ones who would be singers wore white, to show their place, but now he wore a T-shirt that said MARINERS or DOLPHINS or one that said POWERED BY JUNK FOOD. Ruth bought him one that said U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA, but he didn’t wear it because he didn’t want to be treated badly by anyone.
Marco, her son with Thomas, had been an unusual child. He smiled when he heard the sounds of birds and he blew feathers into the sky with his breath. He laughed his first laugh at three months, an adult laugh they said sounded exactly like Witka’s. Not only was he watched by all; he watched everyone, everything, but he especially watched the ocean with great care and told Ruth what he had seen beneath it.
Once he said, “I see tiny jellyfish in a forest.”
Ruth looked at him, thinking, Who are you? but she said, “That’s wonderful, my boy.”
“I see a school of silver fish woven into a ball.”
She knew he was right because she heard them. And when he held his breath at night, she said, panicking, “Marco,” and shook him. She realized he dived into the water in his sleep, and then he did it in his waking, too, and she would keep watch to make sure he surfaced. She wished his father could know him. He was chosen.
“You need vitamins,” Aurora told her daughter, placing an amber bottle of pills in front of the young woman.
Ruth took a pill, then said, “We’re going out for a while.”
She and Marco went to the river where she once lived with Thomas and showed him their CALIFORNIA ORANGES house. It had never been repainted. It was faded and in disrepair.
Then she took him to Witka’s up on the black rocks. It would, after all, belong to Marco one day although it might have been hers. She loved it there, her eyes constant on the sea. They sat at the table near the old stove in the corner and listened to the ocean below them.
“He was a great man, your grandfather Witka,” she told him. Just then, as she said it, they felt something there. Someone walked with them, inside. They both heard and felt it. Perhaps it was the old man, Marco’s ancestor. The back of her neck grew cold, the hair starting to rise in the old animal way. Dragonflies came in the window she had opened to the sea and floated in the air around them, blue and shining. A soft knock on the door. She went to the door. “No one is there,” Marco said. “It must be the wind,” but they both knew better because it was a calm day. She knew there were many spirits and felt the air move, spirits one after the other related to the child, come to see him, to infuse him with the world that was his, that he belonged to. Belonging. It has so much significance. So few have it. In his grandfather’s place of many spirits, she brushed Marco’s hair. Both of them knew the spirits had been there, waiting, some human, some the same as in a tide pool, a small octopus with its powerful eye, a starfish.
“Don’t be afraid, Mom. I feel them, too.”
That day when Ruth and Marco returned, Aurora looked up from her knitting of constant afghans that sat on the back or were folded neatly on nearly everyone’s sofa. She guessed where they had been. “You were born prematurely,” she said to Ruth. “Maybe that’s why you need more vitamins.” She handed her the bottle again. “You look pale. Did I ever tell you about the gill slits? When you were born I never even went into labor. You wanted to come into the world and the moment you could walk, you went to the ocean. You walked into it. We yelled and chased you. We were mortally scared. Here, take some more of these vitamins.”
“Gill slits? What gill slits?” Sometimes Ruth wondered if her mother was slipping.
“You were born with them. I was sure you knew that. Didn’t I tell you? At first you had trouble with the air. The midwife put you in water, she told me later, and you lived through it. But then we had to take you to a large hospital in the city where the nurses were very worried, even afraid, I’d say. They never did see such a thing. You choked when the doctor stitched them up. You were a fish even then, my child. They had to open them up again. Then they experimented and put you in water and you didn’t drown. They wanted to call in other doctors to look at you. I wouldn’t hear of it. They even wanted to write about it. I could hear them talking.”
Ruth knew about her mother’s good hearing. She had it, too. It seemed Thomas did, as well. But hers was like sonar. She didn’t believe her mother. “What happened then?”
“You can ask the midwife. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Oh, I thought you knew. I guess I thou
ght it would upset you. Oh, I lost a stitch.” She stopped talking and counted the threads.
“It’s upsetting me now.” Ruth held her voice down, but there was tension.
“I already thought you were a force to be reckoned with, but they got them closed so you looked like everyone else and began to breathe through your lungs. You’ve never had trouble since then. Just those little scars.” She looked up. “Do you want to play Bingo?”
“No. No, I don’t. What did the elders say?”
“The doctors said it was a genetic throwback or something like that. Anyway, the elders said they had known of this. It’s happened before. Destiny is water for her, they said.”
There was an old story about a girl who came from the sea. Not just the sea of a mother’s womb, but really from the sea, to make the People into what they were to be. She had a hard life, for she had to live in water so much of the time. There was no modern medicine then, so she would have drowned in air. Every morning she rose from the sea and went to a bed where she looked like a normal human coming out of the house. But from the sea she brought knowledge. She came in with the sounds of the ocean and she sang them to the people. That’s how they learned the whales’ songs and also the ticking of coral. She protected the sea and the animals. The people kept her wet.
“You remember the story. She was a lot like you, always protecting the sea life. She could hear the fish from land. When she died, which unfortunately was too early, she returned to the sea cut in pieces, and each piece was eaten by the sea animals so the songs and the animals would continue. Not like Sedna up north where her fingers became the animals. It isn’t that old of a story. Could you get my green jacket? Are you sure you don’t want to go play Bingo?”
Her mother was lying, Ruth was certain, but too casually. Ruth took the jacket off the hook, noticing that the wall around the hooks was dirty with years of the touch of hands Aurora didn’t want to wash away. Hands of people who no longer existed.
“That’s about all I know, but I figured it explains your behavior. You always were a peculiar girl. You always were at water. Don’t think I didn’t know you would have been a true whaler’s wife.” Ruth, too tall for her mother’s mirror, examined her neck. What she’d taken for ordinary lines could have been scars. But she thought they were merely wrinkles until now.
“No, not there. They were in front of your ears. Isn’t it funny? You were the one with the gill slits. Thomas was the one who tried to stay underwater. It’s always like that. You never get what you want.”
After her mother left, Ruth woke her son and returned to their boat on the sea. It was true, she was a creature of the ocean. She went out that night and stood on the deck shining in the sea mist, listening to the beneath.
A few weeks later Ruth went into the forest to search for the woman who had been the midwife. It was a difficult trail and more than once she was lost. But she remembered the markers. All women were given the directions. She remembered the driftwood planted along the way, a carved set of lines on an old tree.
When she reached the old cottage, she found the woman still alive. She was neat and clean in an old cotton dress, her hair pulled straight back, plants drying on racks in the little cottage.
“Yes, you were born with gill slits. It isn’t rare, especially in these parts. Just that most of them pass away before the child is born.”
There were many birds in the forest, ravens, songbirds calling from one tree. She found comfort in yellow slugs, the smell of the trees, and sounds of branches in the light wind. Ruth thought, I am happy here, almost as happy as at water. Happiness was not always a fleeting thing, but a state of mind, of being, after having lived, loved, even after being poor, alone, having survived. Even with the pain in her hands she had happiness.
The house was weathered and damp inside like the forest and smelled of the old trees. A large spider lived in the corner and spiders were worshiped. Water walkers. They brought light to the people on their backs from an island struck by lightning.
Ruth saw now that a man was there, sitting quietly, listening.
The woman washed her hands by habit, a constant thing.
“Oh yes, this is my friend Dick Russell. He works for the Forest Service. And this is Ruth, the basket weaver.”
“And fisher,” Ruth added. She reached out her hand and he shook it too hard. He was quiet, but he was taken with her and he had listened to the entire conversation.
The woman ignored them. “I always knew you’d come. Like a salmon. From the ocean to the forest so you could breathe pure forest air.”
Ruth was lost when she left. Home seemed a different way. Finally, she realized she had taken the wrong path. Then, hearing a noise in the leaves, she turned. It was Dick Russell. He smiled and in his good-natured manner, said, “You are lost. This is the way to my world. Yours is over there.”
MARCO: THE SON OF THOMAS
Mother, are you awake?” Marco said one night. He was twelve.
He knew she was. She was silent, though, wanting him to sleep, to not have any conflict. There were shadows even in the darkness.
“Are you happy?
“Why do you ask?”
He was silent. She should have said yes. But it made her think of all the things that had gone awry. All the things she had lost and given up. And that would soon include the boy.
“Yes, son. I am. I find so much joy in hearing the whale songs. I find happiness in the small baskets and the boat going out into the water in the morning when the light is just perfect on the ocean.”
But afterward, she thought about things she might want. A husband. Some help. A little spending money. Days in the town away from their village. Not to worry about her mother, Aurora, who lived on the hillside and was forgetting things.
She was worried about what she’d heard: There was a behind-the-scenes plot to kill a whale. The business leaders of the tribe had met with the Japanese businessmen and made a quiet deal to sell the whale meat to them. She wanted to protect the whales. She was already speaking out against the men.
Marco seemed to read her mind, but he said, “I’m happy, too.”
One morning two old men paddled over to where Ruth lived and worked on the boat and Ruth greeted them. She already knew them. As was customary, she invited them aboard and cooked eggs, potatoes, and coffee. “There was a moon dog last night,” one man said, pushing back his gray hair, his old skin taut across his bones. “A storm is coming.” She thanked him for the information. “I better prepare,” she said. For many things, she thought. “The boat is moored strongly, but I’ll check everything.”
She served the food and they spoke about small things and large. Then she said, “I know why you are here. I knew you would be here one day. But can’t I keep him a little longer?”
“It’s time,” he said, looking at her, then at Marco, the small talk over.
Ruth looked down. She set his food before him and sat across from him.
She knew what was next. It wasn’t like she was giving her son up. He would go live with the old people. She could visit at any time, but she would miss his breath, his conversation, touching his hair, brushing it into a braid, watching the whales with him.
Marco’s school education was now over and his real one would begin. Now Ruth again cried and they smiled kindly at her and at Marco, but said, “Anu, we must take him now because the light passed through the stones just right and he is growing.”
Marco felt his mother’s hand, not wanting to let go.
All through school he knew he would leave, so he learned what he could, more than anyone else. Now it was time to learn other ways of knowing things.
Marco had learned how to think when he was still young. He had learned how to feel, how to understand a human. Listen, his mother would tell him. Listen to the world. Rocking at night on water, he listened to the sound of water against the boat, to the cry of a bird, the slap of a fish as it landed on calm ocean, the waves when it stormed somewhere out
at sea. Listening, he would seem to understand the heart of the world. He was a wise boy. It was in his eyes when he was young. His mother saw it. His grandmother saw it. He laughed at things that adults find humorous when he was only six months old. He examined his mother’s face with his hand and fingers and wondered at the scars beside her ears and later joked that she’d had a face-lift, but she just laughed and said they were a natural wrinkle she’d had all her life and it was just something she must have been born with.
He loved his mother and he treated her with kindness.
He was far from perfect, though. He had two flaws. He was judgmental of the others who didn’t know what or who they were. And he was afraid of his own strength and power, so he seemed to lower himself and always gave in to others, never taking an initiative even when he saw an answer, even when they all saw his leadership abilities and powers. Yet when called on in school, he sometimes could not speak.
He was well acquainted with the ways of the other boys his age and even the young children were drinking beer and using drugs, whatever they could find, even hair spray. He saw them sitting in the doorways and behind the ramps. Or under the pier. They tried to hide their ways, staggering home, sometimes with paint on their faces. And they had knives. Sometimes they threw them in the ground to see how close they could come to someone’s foot. The person with the foot on the ground was not allowed to move.
And he who lived with his mother on the old Trophy was to go another way. The stakes were high, though. He would not have an education. He would have another destiny in the world. He could not change anyone. Neither could his mother. But she tried. And that was what counted.
He remembered the night he got up in the darkness and walked to the chair beside her bed and moved the lamp. “I don’t want to go away to live with the old people, but I know I am the one. I see it.”