by Linda Hogan
Ruth understood the ocean like the other fishermen. She knew the unpredictable waters, the large waves, the near-collisions, how an earthquake far away could change the currents without warning. But she also knew people. Because she’d been shy as a girl, she learned to see to the core of them, the kindness of a gruff person, the hardness of a friendly one. She saw the vulnerabilities and the cruelties. It gave her a voice.
She said to the crowd, because by now there were people coming in from other towns, “Tell the sea what you are going to do. It is already listening to your words, deciding things in a new language. The whole world out there is waiting to escape your human grasping. The mind of water is listening, the mind of the water is thinking, is willing it another way. The thoughts of the world know. Truth is outside this room of bad choices.”
At the end of all this they would still have wants and needs never fulfilled. Ruth understood that humans could be such empty vessels.
Marco, perhaps, was too young to know what was in the cravings of the other men, too innocent. He’d lived always with those who loved him, protected him, even at the painted white town with the elders. The truth was, he also wanted to know something of his father. He told himself his father had shrapnel in his brain like Ruth told him and had forgotten them or that he’d been through something and lost the thing that made a man, his memory, his soul. Maybe, Marco thought, he could get past that place.
Marco and his father both also believed the rituals were still with them. They did not know the whole story. The selling of whale meat, the opening of the whale fat market of other nations and whaling in other countries.
Marco had a picture of his father, a man in the war, in the clothes of a soldier, the greens that didn’t really match any jungle. He’d seen these men on television at his grandmother’s. He had pictures of his father in his mind, pictures that didn’t fit this man.
How Marco wished he could snap his father open and see what might fall out.
But if he did he would be surprised to find that the room would fill with visions of fire, and a woman blown to pieces, not just one woman, but many. A little girl would fall out of him, his daughter, Lin, in the other country. His remembered and cherished childhood with Ruth. The days they loved in the green house by the river.
The meeting began. It was exactly as Marco thought. The few women arguing. The men implacable, like walls, their faces growing red, unchanging in their opinions, wanting the women to just say, Yes, sir.
But Marco had been the child listening to the stories during long nights, the one who went to the stone petroglyphs hidden in the rock world, the one of the whale who gave birth to the humans, the beginning of the octopus and other creatures of the sea.
At the meeting, Marco sat at the table in the center. His arms were powerful and strong. He listened to the other men and had his own thoughts.
There was so much darkness in the room. Light was swallowed by the lies and thoughts and hopes of what used to be that would never return.
The men were unmoved. It was decided still that they would hunt.
Come near me. Hear me. I am asking for you, whale.
Hold tight, old Wilma thought. You are only mortals, not at all as constant as the sea, as day and night.
More than one of the elders dreamed that night. Their territory seemed small by day, but when they were quiet or slept it was large and vast. Someone go tell the sea to keep its creatures away. They said this to Ruth in their dreams. Somehow she heard, and she stood outside singing, her hair blown across her face.
That night on his mother’s boat, Marco was awake listening to night birds, and remembering how when, as a boy, the people had come for him, and his mother had known they would.
By now the wind was howling outside, moving the dunes. A body of sand turned over.
HUNT
On the day of the whale hunt, the gray day, only three women had the courage to stand at the shore facing the ocean fog as it lifted. Far out was the roar of water, the sound of a storm beginning in the lead-colored sky. Their eyes closed, the women sent their hearts across the water, willing the whales not to come near land. Ruth was one of those women. Old Wilma was another. Delphine, the heavy, sweet-faced granddaughter of Wilma, was the third. Wilma, whose face could sag with sorrow or crinkle with happiness, was the daughter of treaty-signers, the daughter of one of the last true whalers, one of Witka’s crew. She had also been the keeper of the women’s songs and washing houses. She alone knew how to play one of their musical instruments, a metal hand instrument always painted red and sounding like the songs of seabirds. In fact, it spoke their language. Her granddaughter aspired to be like her grandmother and watched her closely, always, and practiced the sounds of the birds without even using the instrument.
There were other women who didn’t have the courage to join them at the beach, but their hearts were with them. “Join us,” Wilma had begged. However, to appear at their shore would have meant going against their husbands, brothers, or sons. Time and history had reduced their world, maybe even the soul, as easily as a sand castle is washed into the sea. Maybe their absence was why the whale did not hear the few singing women who gazed out past black rocks at the horizon. The three on the beach did not judge the others, even Linda, who was too sensitive to stay in town that day. Linda closed the restaurant and went inland to stay with friends in order to avoid nightmares with blood and her own all-pervading sadness.
Ruth knew there would be consequences against her. Already the anger, the hatred, the fallout from her protest was as alive as if another creature had grown and pervaded the tribe, a monster as in the stories of the past, the cannibal that wanted to eat the people, and she felt that she alone stood in its path. Some saw her as their ruin. They blamed her for the news coverage, the loud protests of the activists, and even the storm that later arrived, as if she had more power than she herself had ever known.
The three women told the whales not to come. But the whales no longer heard their voices or thoughts. Perhaps because this hunt had become a spectacle and not a holy thing. Their voices were drowned out by the sound of speedboats and a helicopter, the pilot spotting the whales so the men wouldn’t have to wait for them or search. This was not the way it had ever been done in the past. This was the first whale hunt since the 1920s. Everyone was there. Reporters, like the one Ruth had called. Newspeople and watchers from outside, from other tribes who swore later that they themselves would never whale, and the many protesters from San Francisco and thereabouts. It was a spectacle. Ruth thought no whale would be near all the commotion. Watching, she also thought how few knew or remembered how to paddle the canoes except Marco. Marco had explained and taught some of the others how to paddle, but still they were a sorry sight.
The women watched as the men moved the two canoes away from land in all the chaos. Long ago, the women used to hold up their skirts and go out into the cold water and ask the whales to offer themselves to the hungry people and to those women with breast milk, to feed their families, all of whom loved the whales with their great breaths rising out of water, their barnacled bodies, their ancient eyes.
Those men strong enough, including Thomas and Marco, pushed the canoes into the water and jumped in with the ones already inside, some of them not strong enough to row. There was chatter as they left, directions. There was food and drink and noise. Marco was surprised. He was given to prayer, as he had been taught.
From out on the water, from in a dark canoe, Marco, so vividly alive and aware, looked back and saw the women on shore, knowing his mother was there. He understood his mother’s position every bit as much as she understood that he had a role to fulfill. The women looked beautiful standing together, he thought, like the figures of spirits the old ones carved. He smiled slightly at them as the waves moved him, but they, of course, could not see him.
The old people watched, also, from the white houses on the other side of the water. They could barely see the awkward men try to paddle amid
the spectacle of speedboats alongside the two canoes.
“This is terrible. I hope I am not really seeing this,” said a man named Feather who recalled the days when people called out lovingly, bringing the whale in, promising to care for it and treat it with respect, to inflict the least pain, and to use it all to save themselves from hunger.
The new hunters didn’t remember that they should cover a whale with eagle feathers on land, how to make light with its oil, or how to make baskets with its baleen. Ruth’s mother, as a girl, had done this. In the old days, Aurora had gone to the whaling captain, Witka, and asked for permission to cut off the baleen from the gums of the killed whale. He would pronounce, “I give you, the weaver, permission to use the baleen,” Then she soaked that amazing part of the whale mouth which had strained plankton, algae blooms, and other green sea-rich life from the full waters, the small of the ocean drop by drop making the whale large. She remembered its purpose. Oh, baleen, its wonders, its thin strands of beauty and strength. They took it inland and at the edge of the lake she and the other women cleaned it with rags, scraped it. They soaked it until it was like fiber, soft and ready to weave the threadlike strands into baskets.
In those days, too, anything unused would be reverently sent back into the ocean, the men singing.
Now the men seemed to have lost their hearts and the women who still had them were against the hunters and the division was a desolate thing for a tribe, whose purpose was to be One.
Thomas’s mother had been named Martini, for the beauty of the name. No one then had heard of the drink. The word had just been said once. If Martini were alive, she would have been foremost against the actions of her own son, and especially against Dwight, a boy she’d never liked or trusted since he was a child, always sneaky, always trouble, a thief and a bully, and Dwight who had gone against Ruth, always, even as a child, as if jealous.
No one now even remembers the taste of whale meat. That’s what Martini would have said if she were alive and standing strong in her little frame with the three others on the shore.
The women waited all day, watching the sea, the helicopter, catching glints of light. Then came a light wind and Wilma, the oldest woman, her dress blowing, her skin lined deeply, sat down on the wet sand. In her dark, bony, veined hand was a white bald eagle feather given her as a girl by Thomas’s grandfather, Witka, who had been her lover for a time. He’d had that gift, attracting women. Back then, lovers were acceptable. She cried about what they used to be as a people and what they had become in such a brief passage of history. She’d watched all this history unwind like a thread, leaving an empty spool.
A whale sprayed and breached in the distance. “Oh my. It’s a whale. Do you see it? This is terrible. It’s going toward the men.”
“I know,” said Ruth, closing her eyes as if to ward off the sight.
“I hope the old white house people can’t see this.”
“A storm is going to come,” Wilma said, opening and closing her hands, holding her back. Her arthritis was acting up. Ruth sat down beside her and pushed back a strand of Wilma’s hair. It was the dusk of her life and Ruth could see that. The wind, with its own mind, blew the gray hair back again into Wilma’s face. Maybe the storm would disrupt the hunt.
It was so difficult to have to go against your own people who had already been wounded and persecuted and to want to see them thrive, to really be, like they once were, and to see how compassion had been taken away from their lives by their experience in the new and other world as if they’d been transported away from themselves. Now they were merely trying to fill themselves up but not with the heart, not the soul. They’d lost both those along the way, some of them. Yet Ruth and Wilma’s hearts ached. Ruth was most keenly aware of suffering and thought of the whale, hoping the men would not be there, that the spray was far from them, heading farther west, faster.
Wilma’s predictions based on her hands were always true. As the wind picked up, Ruth worried about the storm coming in, about Marco, even Thomas—yes, she admitted it—out there in wind and crashing waves. She was a fisherwoman. She knew what the ocean could do with a boat as large as her old Trophy, let alone a canoe. She’d heard the sound of a storm early that morning. And then, far out, even as the clouds moved in, she and the others saw the struggle begin. “Worse,” Wilma said, “I feel it from the body of the ocean,” which was now almost her body.
It was a sorrowful thing, to watch an old woman weep, giving up and letting her sweater, unbuttoned, be blown by the chilly incoming wind. Wilma placed her hands over her face, her body wracked with sobs. You’d think even the heart of the world, already broken, would ache just to see her. “They don’t know what this means,” she cried.
And so it began, and then it lasted too long, which was not a good sign. Even when it was over, they still sat there. Two young men behind them built a fire and downed cans of beer. Blue Ice. The women barely noticed them, except one wanted to talk. He told Ruth, “I was in Vietnam. Everywhere the women and children cried. That’s all they did, all the time. They cried.” He had said the same words to her so many times, every time she walked the beach.
It was early evening when the men came in with only one canoe, and with help from the Coast Guard, the other canoe in tow. Both vessels had many ropes uncoiled and were trying together to bring the whale up toward the dragging beach. It was not full-grown. By then some of the men in the canoe were not sober and they were laughing. Delphine turned away. “This is even worse than I thought it would be.” Others came down to watch, a few cheering, and the three women viewed this scene with sorrow and even horror, the excited men in T-shirts and wet jeans breathing hard as they tried to drag the sand-covered, bloody, weed-covered whale up the ancient dragging beach, once smoothed solid with fat and blood. Whales had been brought into this place for over a thousand years. More, perhaps. But never like this. Now they had the help of white men. They had the help even of reporters who had arrived to reveal this action to the world. No matter their views on the event, the watchers saw the situation, and that the whale could not be brought in without them. There was nothing else to do. There had not been enough planning, and so together they all hefted ropes. Dwight wore his Rod and Gun Club jacket for the photographers. The whale was sideways, then righted, and then, as an afterthought, Thomas and someone else ran for a truck with a winch for towing.
Ruth felt that she could hate Thomas forever for not trying to stop them, for being part of it, until she saw him when he returned with the brown truck. He looked pale and serious. He alone looked as if he had done this with purpose, as if he were sorry now to be involved, and had truly believed that they were trying to do this in the right way. And so she had compassion for him, the father of her son, the man whose missing years were a secret to her. She saw in his face, in the way he held his body, like a bow without a string, that something terrible had happened to him in those years, that this was terrible, too, with unforeseen consequences, more than he even knew until he became a part of it. And she realized he hadn’t known about the money the others had accepted until it was too late. She, who had fought them, did not tell him, and when she announced it at the meeting, he simply didn’t, or couldn’t, understand. In all the years he’d been gone, he had no idea what the other men had become. And she was their enemy.
The wind grew stronger.
Watching him and the others, seeing the blood of the whale, the sun a red line going over the horizon, Ruth searched for Marco. He wasn’t present.
Ruth went down to the whale and the men. The whale, though large, was even younger than she’d thought. It was a mess of wounds. It had suffered, she could see that. “Where’s Marco?” she asked Thomas. Her words were urgent, hair blowing about her face.
Thomas looked at her. He shook his head. He didn’t know. Even though he and Marco had spoken in the canoe, he had no idea. He thought of Marco and the whale. In the canoe, Marco had said, “I hear it beneath us.” It was a low rumbling sound. It wa
s the same sound Witka had spoken of. Then it came to greet them; it breathed out in a strong spray. It looked at them. It moved the water. It was friendly and it was too young to be killed. Marco said, “This is the wrong whale to kill.” But there was yelling in the background. Thomas heard his son and he was of two minds. He looked at the whale. The waves were changing, the wind blowing the spray of the whale toward him, a mist. He heard the other men, their excitement, their preparations to shoot it, even if it was friendly. The canoe was precarious. And then he, Thomas, shot it with them. Maybe he was even the first to fire. Hell, he couldn’t remember now, except at the same time wondering, Why? Why am I doing this? He would later wonder, At which second could I have stopped myself? But then it was the familiar feel of the weapon, the sounds. It was because he had the rifle, a gun. It was the feel of it, of war. It was habit. Somewhere, in the old or new of his memory, he heard other shots. In spite of its size, it fought back, as befits the whale’s reputation as Devil Fish and sea demon. He shot again, almost falling into the water, as Marco looked at him with surprise, Marco wondering why his father had shot the whale, and Thomas, too, wondering why he had fired, why the weapon in his hands had the life it had, or the death, but this all happened as if it had its own will. And he saw Marco’s face when he shot. This time to put it out of pain as much as to stop the fight. “I’m sorry,” he said to the young man, and just at that moment the whale whipped about and broke the canoe. Thomas and Marco and the others were cast into the bloody water. The Coast Guard helped them out of water. Those in the other canoe pulled in two men, almost upsetting their own balance. There was confusion and spraying blood coming from the blowhole, all of the men covered in it, the sea red.