by Linda Hogan
“I know,” she said, taking his hand, already masculine, callused from helping her with their work.
The day he left, he remembered his grandmother telling about Lot’s wife looking back, and though he knew his mother watched them leave so silently in the water, he waved once and then he didn’t look back. He’d be looking back for years so it was a time to look forward. To what, he didn’t know, but looking he saw the great ocean and it was hard work for the men who took him away—well, not really away—but to. And so he took over and helped paddle to a world he was from and was returning to and he was silent.
On the day he went to live with the elders in the white houses on the other side of the large bay, the people were so happy to have him there. They talked to him in A’atsika until he began to understand and speak back. He observed. He had freedom to walk, to swim, to watch the mornings. He could see some of the land from there and think, My mother is setting out for the fish now. She is making coffee. He watched for her boat, named after him.
He also thought, Somewhere there is theory, the big bang, the telescopes, space explorers, the attempted understanding of intelligence. Somewhere else there are people who study the Forbidden City. And here there is knowledge of the water, the land, plants, astronomy, another language. It is time now to learn new words, songs, and plants.
He searched stones, wandered, looked at the insects on the leaves. Moths with large eyes, birds, the cormorant, all lived there. He examined the faces of the people, their voices, practiced the songs. Moon. Rain. They loved his physical presence. He was air and light. Their world was a tight knot that his job was to unravel. There were no rules but he followed them anyway. There was heated water for him in the winter when the old women filled a tub for him with heated containers of water. He was told about the treachery on the other side. His mother visited often and she didn’t have to tell him the news. He had grown sensitive. Each time she saw him, she also told him a make-believe story. One time it was how Marco Polo sailed the seas. The seven seas.
He was happy with the elders and the water was slightly warmer and Marco swam daily. Sometimes too far, Ruth thought when she and Hoist visited. Nevertheless, this was the beginning of Marco’s conflict, the one he would have to face one day. He was recognized. The elders held him in a special place, this quiet boy who held himself straight and looked at the world with a clear, calm eye. He had the prayers and songs. Others, on the other side of water, knew it, too. Because of this, much responsibility would fall on him. At times it worried him.
“Mother,” he said, “what will I become when I’m so different?”
She smiled at him. “I don’t know, son. I guess you’ll have to get a job in a paper mill, such an impossible feat, I’d assume.”
RUTH
Ruth placed the dishes on the shelf, lined the cups on the rubber mat so they would not slide off in powerful waves. She was strong, or so people thought. When she stretched her arms, they were lean, dark, and muscular, the veins standing out. Inside the muscle, inside the flesh, inside the long body and even the skin beginning to age, the older life was beginning in its way toward a new form and inside all of that she still felt grief, even anger, but she would not let her people slide down to the bottom and she could see the people falling, sliding. Her hands hurt from holding on, as if to a rope that would keep the slide from happening.
The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. Some say it is over, the A’atsika way. It isn’t, Ruth wanted to tell the world that she hangs by her strength. Alone. Don’t be fooled. This is just America happening to us again. She would like to keep them from ruining themselves altogether. All together. That is what a tribe is. There was an old person watching her. She felt it. That person had wisdom and pride and the beauty that came with their history, and that person or spirit or ancestor loved Ruth.
Ruth. She was beautiful, with hair graying, with intention, the woman of water, of whales. Ruth watched the whales and never ended her wonder at them. Her love for them was ceaseless. When she saw them rise and return to the sea, when she saw them breathe spray, she was aware that there was at least one god.
“Why don’t you go out more?” her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn’t for herself. It was for what had happened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.
She also thought of her son when she was lonely.
Peeling potatoes, she looked at the beautiful brown peels. Eyes, they call them. They are what she would plant behind her mother’s house. Something grows from eyes, taking root as if a potato sends to earth what it can see, and yet the seeing part is what they say is poisonous about the potato. That first sprout is what can grow, planted, moving upward, seeing in the light.
At the edge of America was her boat, the Marco Polo. The man himself traveled a spice route, a silk route. People were always searching for something. Not just riches.
A pelican sat there, waiting for her to put out food, also at the end of America.
DARK RIVER: 1988
When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable.
No matters remain secret for long at Dark River. At one of the tribal council’s “secret” meetings, an old rose-scented woman named Wilma, her hair as unruly as Witka’s, and Wilma’s heavy granddaughter Delphine, who had a knack for gardening, walked with Ruth Small Just through the door of the room that smelled of coffee and stale tobacco. The room held only five men and a number of disordered empty folding chairs. Five men sat around a wooden table that had been carved over the years with initials, fish, and women’s naked bodies. The women intruded.
“To the women who entered the room of a private meeting,” said Dwight, heavy now and gray. “According to Robert’s Rules of Order, you are out of order.”
Wilma laughed at him. “Who is this Robert?”
Dwight was now the tribal chairman, his hair cut perfectly for the job, short and brushed back. He has fallen through a hole in the world, Ruth thought, looking at him.
“This is not order.” Wilma stood before them and swept her hand around their table. “There are other kinds of order than Robert’s.”
“It’s a private meeting.” Dwight was abrupt.
One of the men must have told about them coming here. Dwight looked around at them, his gaze traveling from face to face, wondering which was the traitor. “We’re a tribe. We don’t have private meetings and you’ve been having too many of them here of late.” Wilma took a seat in the room before the men, her bag in her hand. “You see these chairs. They are not empty. Your ancestors sit there. They are listening to you.” She sat down, bag on lap. “Nothing you do is secret. We have heard about your plan to kill a whale.”
The men looked at each other, uncomfortable.
“The decision has been made.” Dwight said, facing his elder, but feeling as if he still had a boy living inside him, remembering her from old, her hands up as she sang, mumbling prayers in the old tongue. He was a new and different kind of warrior, he told himself, and not easily understood by the old ones. Times change.
“Unmake it,” she said.
Milton, slower than the others, because of what his mother drank when she was pregnant, smiled with pride. “We’re going to hunt a whale.” He said it with awe and wonder. He was slow, they all knew, and not aware of the conflict that was taking place.
It was at this meeting that a reporter walked in. Ruth opened the door to her. The reporter was blond and Germanic and seemed to know Wilma, too.
Ruth, who along with the elders was against the whale hunt, remain
ed standing at the door like a guard, then went inside and stood before the men. She, too, had become a different kind of warrior. “You want to bloody the water and our land when the time isn’t right, when the elders across the bay haven’t even been consulted and none of us have been asked.”
“This is a tribe. It isn’t a democracy.” Dwight regretted his words as soon as he said them and saw the reporter take notes. She would begin to turn the world, or at least the country, against them. She took a picture of him.
“Get that woman out of here.” Dwight pointed to the reporter. “And her.” Meaning Ruth.
“Tribe. Right. That’s what I mean,” said Wilma, crossing her arms like a closed door. “One people. One decision. Take photos, Ursula.” The photos were of men hiding their faces, turning their backs, looking away, Dwight looking angry.
The next day it was all in the news, including the San Francisco Times. The photographs were telling in themselves. When more reporters arrived a day later, notebooks and pens in hand, recorders turned on, the A’atsika men had already talked among themselves and were armed with new words. They argued treaty rights, and their return to tradition. Some of these reporters, especially the white men, thought the tribal hunters were men of mystery and spirit, foreign enough to their own America to be right. Yes, to return to their ways would be the right thing. After all America had done to them, they should be given that. When the animal rights activists arrived, the A’atsika men had to decide if they should have them removed by the police or if that would only look worse for their cause. The news had leaked out that they were planning to sell whale meat to Japan.
Dwight had many strong arguments for the kill. He and Dimitri Smith in his gray shirt and work pants, his brown leather shoes cracked from the salt water, did not have the image of businessmen. They had been through a war together, Dwight told the reporters. Nevertheless, Dwight harbored within himself a great and monetary and maybe even a violent need and so he had helped convince most of the men that they wanted to kill a whale in order to fill their hearts and souls with the wealth of something they wrongly believed had been lost and wanted back. Tradition, they called it.
“Whale-hunting,” Dimitri said, his shirttail out, “will bring us back to ourselves.” A part of him truly believed this. As close as he was to Dwight, he did not yet understand the negotiations to sell the meat to another country, or that it would stop an international moratorium on whale-killing, that it would open a whale market so Norway could sell their vats of stored oil, and that money had been been paid to the council for this. It was an intrigue too large even for Dwight to figure out, too complex. All he saw was the money on the table for meat in another country. “It’s our traditional food. We need it. We are starved for it.”
Ruth stood at full height in front of one of the male reporters. “I want you to know and write that their plans are not even near the original meaning of a whale hunt, that they’ve made a deal to sell the meat and that their meetings took place in seclusion and were secret. This is not the voice of our community. They do not represent us or our elders.” She said, also, “And I want you to write that there aren’t many whales remaining. I fish out there. I watch them.” It was her joy to watch them spray and surface, roll and descend, come eye to eye with her. She recognized some who lived there permanently, in the safety of their bays. She had names for them. Black Mouth. Rock Beak.
“Their numbers are coming back,” Dwight said to a reporter. “When one is killed, its spirit is born again into another whale. This is our belief. It is our way.” He was bringing in the old beliefs, trying to sound like a traditionalist. In truth, Dwight wanted desperately to believe the old ways, to be a part of them, but he had become a soldier and a businessman and he had not retained the old way of being in the world.
“Then how do you account for the lower numbers?” Ruth tilted her long neck. Anyway, beliefs were only beliefs, not necessarily truth or fact or knowledge.
“The counting is off. Our count is higher than that of the scientists.”
“Deathless,” said Ruth. “Is that what you are saying?” To the reporter: “They are saying the world is deathless. But we have seen it differently in our lives. There are fewer whales. I fish out there. I know the whales. And the old people are against this. Only these few men stand to gain.”
A great argument ensued. Nevertheless, the men on the council decided and the whale kill was to commence that fall when the whales passed through the waters by Dark River on their annual migration.
Three days later in San Francisco, Thomas Just saw the newspaper article at the office of the cable company where he worked: “Whale Hunt to Return for the A’atsika People.” That night he took the paper home to his room and read how his people wanted to return to tradition. All night he was sleepless. We are going to return, he thought. We are going to be a people again. He was suddenly full of need and pride. He sat up smoking all night. Occasionally the sight of Ruth on their wedding day passed by his inner sight. Or their orange crate. Or his own grandfather. By morning he had convinced himself that, being the grandson of Witka, it was his duty to go home. By tradition he had to hunt. He had to be one who returned. He tried not to think of Ruth and the child he’d been told by Dwight was not his own. He was busy thinking, I am the grandson of the greatest whaler. Perhaps Thomas thought that he, too, could communicate with the whales.
It was time to go home, as if killing the whale, as if being like Witka, would excuse his lies and actions, as if he could, in one act, save himself from one history and return to another, slide into it with the ease he’d been lacking.
“All along we knew this day would come,” said the old people who lived in the white houses, many of the front panels of their homes still whalebone, in a land with markers of bone, for they truly were still whale people. “They haven’t praised the whales since they were children, if then. They haven’t cleansed themselves. Some of them have been to war and not yet purified themselves. They have not fasted. They have not scrubbed themselves with cedar. They have not put themselves in the right mind. Nothing good will come of this. No one has spoken to the whales since Witka. Not even us. And we remember. Most of us remember those days.”
“Marco will head the boat,” said one old man. “He will be the captain. He is the only one who knows.”
“Yes, I know.” Ruth felt more sorrow, this time not for just the whales, who truly were still smaller in number. She watched them pass. But she and her son would, by tradition alone, be on different sides. He was the one to head the crew, to decide if a whale would be killed. Marco of the old ones had to abide by tradition. She looked at him, how he’d grown, and wished he were a child she could carry away in her arms. He knew it, too. He watched his mother’s face and saw her feelings. He was a man now, tall, with black hair, with a face surprisingly like his father’s. He was calm and sure in his movements. Marco would have to go on the hunt. Ruth knew that. He sat with old Hoist, scratching the aged dog’s belly.
The old people who lived in the white houses sat down on the stones carved by the old ones with spirals.
Someone brought Ruth a cup of the strong coffee the old people preferred, Starbucks. They always asked, “Are you going to the city? Don’t forget the French Roast,” and Ruth laughed as she crossed the water. “Or the Yukon.” Who would have thought the day would come when they would ask for Starbucks? She put her hand over her coffee cup. “No, no more coffee,” she said to the woman who wore her hair in braids above her head.
After this, in her mind, day and night, Ruth tried to speak with the whales and send them away. Nights from her boat, she had been singing songs, pieces of the songs she remembered and songs she made up to fill in for what was missing.
It was thirteen years after his anticipated arrival that Thomas came home. He carried a suitcase someone had left behind where he’d first worked as a doorman in the city, he always the quiet, invisible man at work, the missing, himself the deathless. He returned to
the A’atsika village not thinking, I am a body of lies, but thinking now, I am a part of tradition, grandson of Witka the whaler. He heard the familiar sound of ravens and crows. He carried in his pocket a stone whale, which he touched. It had been through the war with him for a reason, he thought, and the two of them survived. He stepped down from the bus onto damp, giving earth, land he had always known. No one was there to meet him but the familiar wind. Neverthless, it touched him with invisible hands as he thought about his grandfather who could go underneath the water, hold his breath and communicate with whales.
He walked on the half sidewalk, grown over with grass and plants, walked past the man who still made chairs from driftwood all these years later. The sample chairs sat close to the road, visible to tourists driving by. The chair-maker’s hair was now long and gray. He nodded, but didn’t recognize Thomas, who had grown stocky and older, even with thinner hair.
Thomas went past the grocery and fish bait store that overcharged for food. Cans and boxes of macaroni decorated the dirty window. He passed the tiny Catholic shop with its books of saints and cards, paintings and prayers of Saint Anthony, the beloved saint of lost things, and the prayers of safe return bought by the wives of deep sea fishermen and tacked to the walls.
“Why do you keep that Catholic stuff?” he once asked his mother.
“You never know.” She, daughter-in-law of Witka, was going to cover all her bases. She even kept a small Buddha in the corner.
Despite the fact that his hair had grayed and was short, his neck redder and thicker, his eyes fitting for a man who had learned the art of war and then the practice of invisibility, word was out quickly. Thomas Just was back.
He stopped first at the restaurant and said nothing to Linda except, “Coffee, please.”