by Linda Hogan
“Well, if it isn’t you,” she said, looking at the face she and the rest had never forgotten. “I’ll be damned.” Unlike everyone else, she would never like him, honor him, worship him, because she’d seen Ruth lose weight and grieve when he didn’t return, and when Marco had gone to live with the old people over at the white houses, and she always believed he could have stayed home and that he could have returned home. She felt things in her bones, as she put it, and she’d felt him and it wasn’t good.
“What’ll you have, Thomas Just?”
He didn’t eat. He only drank coffee until he had summoned whatever it was a man of once courage needed to go to his father’s. They had never gotten along. His father’s reputation had even become worse as he’d gotten older.
He found the older man asleep and confused. He stood by the door. He picked up his father’s shaving mirror and looked briefly at himself. Jesus, he didn’t even recognize what he saw. There were new lines, whiskers.
A moment of sun came through a crack in the curtains. Thomas shone a mirror around the room. It reflected on wood, knives, bottles, old yellowed newspapers, maybe even pain in the wooden faces his father had half carved, and a sense of time passing. Until the light came to rest on his father, the woodcarver’s, eyes, the face of the mask-maker.
“Who’s that with the mirror?” He shaded his eyes, trying to see. He looked old to Thomas, his eyes bloodshot, his long hair tangled as he lifted his head.
Thomas didn’t answer.
When the man opened his tired eyes, he saw Thomas. He squinted through the light. “Are you a ghost? Thomas?”
“Both.”
“Well, whatever you are, that goddamned light hurts my eyes.”
Floyd the father of Thomas lifted back his old quilt and got up, fully clothed. Then he went to Thomas. “My son.” He clasped the deathless body. “At last.”
Thomas didn’t clasp him in return.
His father wasn’t the handsome man he had once been, though there was still a hint of the lady-killer.
“Hey, old man, how you doing?”
“Good, good now, my son.”
He made instant coffee. While Thomas drank it, he said, “I need to wash up.”
Thomas saw him hide something in a drawer. It was early autumn and the crickets around the house were loud.
“Where have you been all this time?” The older man sensed his son’s hostility. Well, why not? He had dated other women even when his wife was ill, before she died. He’d remarried right away. A younger woman. It didn’t last, and maybe Thomas knew he’d attacked Ruth that night he was drunk.
Thomas didn’t answer.
“Anyway, I’m glad you are back,” said the carver. “And I’m proud. It’s a good time for us. We are going to come back. Have you heard? As a people, I mean.” Floyd may have been a man who mistreated women, who hated and drank, but he had loved and known his own father, Witka. As he looked Thomas over, he wondered what Witka would think of his son. He wasn’t certain.
He did know that Witka would approve of Marco, his grandson. He said so. “Your son. He is like my father. Wait and see. I can’t wait for you to meet him.”
Thomas didn’t seem interested in Marco, either. He put down his bag. He used the mirror to shave.
“The big meeting’s tonight. Are you going? Floyd was quiet a moment. “Or is that what you are doing here? That’s why you came home, isn’t it?” the old man asked, realizing Thomas hadn’t come home for the love of humans, for a woman, a boy, or for him. He who had not been here for his loved ones was now here for the whale. He looked at his son and, awake now, even though he’d flaunted his son’s medals in a box, he saw all the way through him as if he were glass.
“I see you, son,” he said. “I see right through you. And we are wretched men. Both of us. More than you even know.”
As the sun traveled west, they left for the meeting together. People saw the wretched men and talked. “It’s true. TJ is home.”
Thomas listened to the sound of waves. All the while he thought, I am a hero to them, an island, but my father knows the truth, that I am wretched.
By the time they arrived, everyone was excited that the grandson of Witka had returned.
Ruth was already in the community center talking with some women and laughing with her head back, her legs slightly apart, when he walked in and first saw her and how well she seemed to have survived. They were laughing at her spotted oceangoing dog, still chasing its tail like a puppy, when she saw Thomas. The room was silent except for the dog. “Here, Hoist,” she almost whispered, as if he might be hurt by this man. Then even the dog was still and beside her. Ruth’s expression changed. She softened. Without even willing it, after all the years, she walked toward him, almost floating. He looked away, trying not to see her face, she who was his history, who was moving toward him until she was in front of him, looking at his face, his hair, putting her hand on his arm, him feeling he didn’t want it there, and yet he did. He didn’t want her there, but felt also the love in the touch and he wanted to cry. Again Ruth felt herself sinking, as so many years before, and there was a pain in her heart that almost made her double over and fall to the floor.
She stood back, quietly. “Your son, Marco,” turning her head in the young man’s direction. “He’s over there. That’s him.” Thomas glanced at him, the young man who looked so like him. He turned away. A deep silence fell over the room. They were watched. “Why?” Ruth asked, feeling his disdain. “Thomas. He’s your son, by god. Go talk to him, at least.”
But he was no longer Thomas. She was speaking to someone else, a stranger. A man with secrets, one whose life was unknown or injured, and who’d forgotten his world before. She saw this and she saw that he was as his father had just said, a wretched man.
She walked away, knowing everyone heard and watched, and she stood with a group of women. Linda put her hand on Ruth’s arm.
She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper.
It wasn’t the reunion she had ever dreamed. His love for her had ended.
She still carried his dog tag. She remembered how the two of them had once tried to walk across the river on stones and fallen in, laughing and choking on the running water, grabbing one another.
When Marco heard that the man standing there was his father, he turned to him and saw a wretched man. He kept his silence. He kept his distance, a wise young man already, waiting, observing with his natural dignity.
“Thomas, old buddy!” said Dwight. He cast a look at Marco, who was silent, solemn, a man now himself. Dwight felt things he didn’t usually feel, the wish to take his words back, his lies, to tell Thomas that Marco really was his son, not as he had said years ago, that he’d seen Ruth with his father, but how hard to keep covering up all his many lies, especially as they continued over the years.
Everyone went to Thomas, except Ruth, her friends, and Marco, who stood with a young woman.
When Marco saw his father look past him, he knew the man, Thomas, was not his father except by blood. He, the boy who was clear-eyed and calm, nevertheless felt as if parts of him fell away, like from a statue with one arm, one leg, gone from wars or excavations or thefts. There was no bond, no spider silk of attachment. Thomas wasn’t curious about his son, his wife. Marco watched the man that was his father. He looked at the eyelashes, such a small detail, straight and dark, showing something of character Marco couldn’t quite figure. He looked at the way Thomas tried to buddy up to the other men. How they clapped him on the back, glad to see their old friend. He thought, I know why he came back right now. He came back because of the whale. He came back to help them kill the whale. Marco didn’t think that maybe his father thought he might return to tradition and find himself. He didn’t know that the man had spent years with his shirts over the back of the chair in a room that was not far from a freeway, thinking of how he could face himself, let alone the people at home who b
elieved things about him that were lies.
Marco thought, My father’s heart comes down a pathway like a stone. He stands in the room of men I will have to be with, men who have done dishonest things, and Thomas, my father, doesn’t know it. Perhaps he doesn’t care. He is thinking of himself. He doesn’t even acknowledge my mother, his wife.
All these years he had been told stories about his father, the war hero, the man of his mother’s childhood, the man she waited for. He remembered the day sitting in the airport when he didn’t appear.
When the hunt was first proposed, the old people in the white houses said it was not the right time to hunt; the people were not prepared. Marco dreaded the hunt. It was a lie, Ruth had said. A scheme. Marco agreed with his mother’s protest, but if the hunt was going to happen, his being there was the only thing he could do, no matter how knotted his heart.
One day when he was visiting his mother, as he sat at her little table, Ruth looked at him with her dark eyes, her wet hair wrapped in a towel, and she said, “You’ll understand the right thing to do. Don’t worry. It will be fine.”
He was serious and intelligent. He had grown. His shoulders were wide and strong, tanned under his straight hair, so like hers. His arms like hers, too, only stronger. The old men had taught him to paddle their old cedar canoes. He was powerful from paddling ocean current and waves, and from swimming and diving, a secret he kept from his mother. He moved with a kind of refinement.
She sat across from him. “You’ll know.” Because the old men in the white houses had taught him the proper behavior and the prayers. “You are the one who has been given the songs.”
Oh whale, take pity on us. We are broken. We are weak. We are small. We are hungry mere humans.
He was the one who would hold the old harpoon, although it was only a token position, since the whale, if the hunt took place, would be killed with a missile harpoon and machine guns and Marco would only sing, guide the way, and offer words. He felt torn in half, feeling love for whales. He once swam with two of the whales. They watched him with their ancient eyes and he felt his own small being as a human.
Marco, with his thin mustache, was by rights the chosen, but there were those who thought it unfair, even though he had the strongest of bodies, the quietest of eyes, and clarity of mind.
Thomas listened when the elders said Marco was the one who had been prepared. This began in him a growing respect for the boy.
Others thought it wasn’t right that a young man would be chosen over warriors to hold the honored place. “Hell,” said Dwight. “Some of us have seen war. We know what we’re doing. He’s just a kid.” The older men had life experience.
“Yeah,” said Dimitri, “but remember. He’s just the one carrying the old harpoon. He’s like the queen, a figurehead. He won’t be doing anything else.”
Marco, unfortunately, knew only a part of what led up to the decision to hunt, the politics, the dealings, but he had his conflicts: He had the depths of tradition, but he was also a man, and as far as young men go, they want to be with their peers. They want others to be like themselves. It is why they are the “meat,” as his father, Thomas, had once said, why they are sent to fight the wars of other men. Marco could fish and mend nets, as Ruth had taught him. He could speak the language and he understood and knew the whales that passed by. He could sing, pray, swim, canoe, fish, bring in wood, survive alone if he had to, but he couldn’t stitch together the truths of divided worlds, double people, let alone the factions and jealousies within his own tribe, especially when the jealousy was directed at him. Nor did Thomas know the doubleness that existed here, in his own place. He knew only his own.
Ruth tried to forget that Thomas had returned. She told herself Thomas had become another man. But she looked for him around every corner, through every window and door, her eyes constantly searching. Still, she kept to her stand against whaling. Because of this and because she had inherited some of the old whaling implements, her mother’s house, where she sometimes stayed, was searched and razed, torn apart by angry men. Aurora, distraught, sent for Ruth. When Ruth saw the damage, she fell into despair. Realizing she’d underestimated some of the men, their desperations, and even forgiving them, Ruth said, “They are not angry, Mother. They search for the past. They have lost it. They are needy.” But they did not find the old whaling items they were looking for. The lid of an old ship’s trunk was torn off its hinges, the ceiling at her mother’s was taken apart and left in ruins. They took an old drum that had been given to her father by their cousins up north. It was painted with an octopus by the last few members of the Octopus Clan. Numerous things in Aurora’s house were broken, including her figurines. “They broke them on purpose,” said Aurora, who had been home at the time and afraid of the men even though she’d known nearly all of them since they were first born. She’d watched them grow up. She’d given them cookies. Later, even though she was crying, Ruth’s mother said, as she ate the strawberry-rhubarb pie at Linda’s restaurant, “It’s okay. I’m trying to pare down anyway. I’m going Zen.” Linda sat next to her and took the pins out of her dark hair.
Ruth laughed. “I’ll stay around for a while and fix your ceiling while you meditate.” She stayed at her mother’s for two days until she’d managed repairs and Aurora was no longer afraid.
When Ruth returned to the boat where she lived, just as she feared, they had gone through her things, too. The whalebone mask was gone. The bank of her son was broken. Her nets were torn. Hoist sniffed the deck, smelling the feet of the men.
Ruth and her mother pretended nothing had happened. The two women, seemingly undaunted, kept their chins up and never mentioned the incident in public. Alone, both of them wept, and each day they discovered more missing, a ring, a wooden whale carved by Witka, the old master whaler, even Marco’s fishing rods and reels, and their woven baskets. Ruth’s nets and winches were ruined. She had repairs to make and her hands already hurt.
In addition there was Thomas.
“He hasn’t said a word to me or Marco,” Ruth told her mother, “I don’t understand. His own son.”
One morning she woke and found sweet Hoist bleeding on her boat. Hair matted with blood. She bent over him and ran her fingers through the fur, looking into the eyes as life stepped out of them. She prayed her little spotted dog, so rambunctious, hadn’t suffered. Nothing equaled the killing of her dog and it only made her more adamant against the hurt. There was nothing else to lose.
She didn’t have the heart to tell this to her mother, but Marco knew. He heard it from one of the older people. And he came to be with his mother when they wrapped Hoist in blankets and gave him to the sea.
Ruth knew that someone had come out and boarded the Marco Polo while she slept, so quiet she never heard them, nor had the dog barked. Perhaps it was someone familiar. The boat seemed dirty to her now. She scrubbed it down. She hoped her father was watching over it. For the first time she was lonely. She cried as she wiped oil soap and water across the surface of everything. Worrying about her safety, Marco came to stay for a while, but nothing could fill the emptiness.
At her home Aurora discovered the thieves had taken the old photos. “Those are the most precious,” she told Ruth. They were photographs of the twenties, the old canoes, the people in their woven clothing and harpoons and spears, evergreen hats, shell necklaces. They were the flensers, whale-cutters, at work with their tools. Witka with his hair askew, and Aurora’s father with him.
For Ruth this was a revelation. “I think they want to know. They want to remember. It’s so the men can try to remember, try to do the whale hunt like they did in the old days.” She knew this without doubt. They were lost and needy and inside them all was a drive from the past they carried like DNA, a drive to return. She also knew there was another facet to the story. They’d been offered money for the whales. For the meat and fat. And their attempts were all wrong. They hadn’t even gone to the elders.
“Where’s your dog?” Aurora lo
oked at her daughter. “Oh no. Not that, too. Oh, we should have kept silent and left them to their plans.”
Ruth continued her stand against them. She picketed meetings. She wrote letters. Even Thomas, she realized with her broken heart, only came home to strengthen his identity, to reach for something lost, to join the whaling crew. She stood against this man she had known all his life and always loved.
“What about this?” she said one night at a meeting. “The ones who saved them? What about our ancestors calling them spirit fish when the white men called them devils? What about the whalers who helped the ones that were stranded in the sudden ice farther north? They used everything in their power to save and free the whales.” She looked around. “And who here has the kind of relationship to the whales that our ancestors had? Who among us knows the songs and the correct way to bring in the whale? Who will prepare by fasting? Who will sew its mouth shut so it doesn’t sink to the bottom of the ocean? Which of you knows what our grandparents knew? We can’t jump into this because someone has made an under-the-table offer of money. We know this.” She looked at Dwight. Dimitri. “We’ve all heard about the offers. It’s no secret. You’ve been offered large amounts but we have to do things right, and look at us. Just look at us.”
They looked around at each other. The room was smoke-filled. They saw each other in Budweiser T-shirts, jeans, dirty running shoes on men who didn’t run. There were Styrofoam cups on the tables. They sat on folding chairs. They heard the sound of the Coke machine when another can fell. A few handsome young men asserted their identity by having grown long hair. Thomas looked at the others, wondering about the money, surprised he’d heard no rumors.
The women who came with the men, some in T-shirts and jeans or hot-pink tops, looked at Ruth with hostility. She was against their men. Her own people.
There were a few older men with their lives written on their faces by the sea, thinking of the whales glimmering in sunlight, the young whales in kelp beds bending, blowing, riding with currents. They were thinking, This isn’t how it used to be for us. It’s not good. They thought Ruth was right, but if they stood up with her, they would lose. Health benefits. Housing. And she was an outcast in some circles, a puzzle in others, a hero among the few. She was a rare woman who was not afraid to use words.