by Linda Hogan
Someone from the Coast Guard boat yelled, “We got them all. Everyone accounted for.”
Still, Thomas searched the scene. His warrior intuition told him something wasn’t quite right. His jungle law, something that told him when there was danger, when an enemy was near, or death in his proximity.
The storm came in and many of the young men left as soon as the whale was dragged to land. Thomas thought Marco was among them, and he was angry they had gone indoors to watch a football game. A ball game, no less, leaving the whale on the beach, a large mass of blood and fat and skin needing to be cut away from the enormous bones, the spilling innards shining and the flies coming from nowhere, even in the night and autumn wind. This was what Ruth had protested.
“Hey!” someone called out. “We need some help over here.”
And then Ruth came again to ask about Marco. She asked, standing there in the whipping wind.
Thomas didn’t know. He was thinking the blood was too familiar. The sound of helicopters, as well. It all made him nervous.
“Where’s Marco?” she repeated, a frenzy in her, her eyes, yet she sounded quiet in spite of the certain knowledge that something was not right.
“He went in already,” Thomas said, almost brutal. “Like the rest of them.” He was angry, but he thought his son was probably angrier. Worse, his son had seen him. Really seen him. And he had been brutal to the whale and he wondered what it was in him, in other humans, and he was wishing he could change time, go back hours, even years, and change events. He wished he would have stood by Marco and said, No, it is a friendly whale.
Never kill a timid whale. He had been told this by the old people.
Ruth’s eyes scanned every face in all the fast motion. Searching. “Thomas, you don’t know him. You don’t, but he wouldn’t have gone in. He wouldn’t do that.” She started to tell him, He’s lived over with the white house people, but instead she entered the house of her own fears, the son she searched for, feeling, knowing she would not find him, she would never see him again, his dark soft eyes, and her face already began to line with another grief.
As for Thomas, he himself wanted to leave as soon as the whale was dragged from the water and the men cut it, laughing, talking about its sex organs, calling it names, all the love for the animal missing, and he thought, Jesus. They are like the men at war. What his grandfather would have thought if he had seen it! Thomas was ashamed of them. Now he hated his own men. His love for them had led him to crimes, including this one. He never wanted to talk to any of them after this, some of them drinking in the boat that day, smoking marijuana, one had put beer in the blowhole of the whale with irreverence and stupidity and Thomas had made him stop. “You fucking idiot!” he yelled through the noise.
“You’re the fucking idiot. Where you been all these years, man? Huh? You want to explain that one, hero?”
They didn’t apologize to the spirit of the whale, nor did they sing to it or pray as they said they were going to do. He alone prayed and he did it silently because he thought, really believed, the men would laugh if they heard him. He realized they didn’t even believe in the lives of their ancestors, that it was as if those old ones, the ones whose presence he often felt, were only stories to them. Maybe they’d lost all feeling because they’d had to in order to survive in a place where kids shot guns, killed dogs, and died of alcohol poisoning, but he’d hoped this would be something different than just a killing, that it would mean something, that it would do something for them.
Now Thomas knew only that he’d stay there all night if that’s what was required to do this job right.
In silence, he apologized to the whale. He was sorry they had caused it so much suffering and pain. He wanted to make amends for those who hadn’t prayed or sacrificed, not knowing his son had done both. Not only that, but Thomas thought they’d need a dozer to help them with such a mass of innards and bone.
As Ruth searched for Marco, Thomas continued to cut into the whale. The helpers, the flensers from the north, patiently, even in the wind, taught him to cut, taught him to lay out the meat in eight-pound slabs on a kind of paper, and when they had enough, some drove it away to be frozen in lockers in town. The fat and oil had an odor to it that made him sick.
Ruth went from house to house asking, “Have you seen Marco?” But she already knew. As a mother, she felt it. His absence was everywhere. Wet from the rain, she began to run, her hair in her face. She went to Dwight’s. The Breaker, she called him. She took hold of his shirt as if she could shake him, and she did, with her great fisherwoman’s strength. She hit him in the chest over and over, crying now. “This was all your doing,” she said, her knees starting to buckle until his wife, casting a look of pure disgust at her own man, said to him, “You could at least go out and help the other men.” His wife, Candy, took Ruth into the kitchen and cried with her at the table about the s.o.b., the wife all the time hating Dwight, too, as she would forever after. She had believed in him. They all had. They didn’t know him. Now she saw him and it made him all the more hostile. But still the younger men had all looked up to the man who sat on the brown plaid couch in his Rod and Gun Club jacket and said to Ruth, “Hey, it’s cool. Just chill out. He’ll turn up.”
Ruth blamed him for this. And she blamed Thomas for returning. Thomas had come for the whale. Only for the whale. It was his way of returning to himself. He was not returning for her and their son. She didn’t know that now he was sorry. That now, without showing it, he knew he, too, had lost.
Ruth returned to where the whale was a mass of red and fat and bone. “Marco’s nowhere.” The rain was now falling on the whale, the men working. Water was rising up the beach from the storm.
Ruth said with finality, “Marco is gone. He is not missing. He is dead.”
Later that night, Aurora, with hope, called everyone she knew. It was useless, but she asked if they’d seen her grandson.
Marco had the coveted role. He was the traditionalist they all wanted to be, and they all could have been if they’d just done it. Tradition had been awaiting their return.
Word spread that Marco was gone. Later, the women came to Aurora’s house to be with Ruth and her mother. They assumed he had drowned in the bloody thrashing of the whale.
Once again, Ruth fell to the same linoleum floor as when the man named Death came to the house with regrets to inform. This time she was not even crying, just silent, a stone that passed down and down through forever. Aurora, after some time, asked for help. She went outside to get the men. Thomas came to help. He and Milton, the slow-wit, lifted and carried Ruth to her girlhood bed, her hand over her mouth, her eyes staring through the ceiling now as if looking for the spirit of Marco, who was following the path of souls along the Milky Way.
Thomas, gentle with her, pulled back the covers, removed her shoes, and placed the blankets over her familiar body in the room he remembered from years before, even childhood. He would have been a liar if he’d said he had no feelings left for Ruth, but then, who was he to want her, to want anything beautiful and right? And yet, he was not without compassion.
Ruth’s mother tried to comfort her. “Marco could be somewhere and we just don’t know yet.”
“You know it’s not that way.” Ruth said the words with tightness. Bitterness was her voice.
Milton, still there, said, “I saw it. I saw them fight.”
“What fight?” She tried to keep her voice calm. Milton could be scared into silence.
“Someone hit him. They wore a big ring. I saw it. He went under. They held him down.”
Ruth would question Milton later. So would the police when they got wind of it. She would ask, “Was there a tattoo? What kind of ring? Could you tell whose fist? Did they hit his head? Did they hold him under water until he died?”
“Yeah, he hit his head.”
But some said Marco had been hit by the tail of the whale or was in the broken canoe, and that in the chaos, no one noticed and each group had thought t
his promising young man, a new traditional, was in the other boat.
Thomas was silent, thinking of Marco.
“I saw Ruth with your father,” Dwight had told him when Thomas didn’t want to go out with them to visit the other women. In the other country. Over there. When the mail plane arrived near the jungle, the men he saw from home had teased him cruelly. “Your brother or your son?”
“Ruth wouldn’t do that.”
“What do you know? How many men do you know are still married, man? Look around. Dear John…
But after he returned he went to the tribal records and looked at Marco’s birth certificate and he knew without a doubt that he was the father. He could have gone to them then, Ruth and Marco, but he didn’t. He had guilt now, another reason to hate himself. And he had already ignored them—now what would he say or do? It wasn’t pride so much as passivity. And what difference would it make now?
For a moment in the canoe, it did make a difference. For a moment, they talked. Marco, his son. My son, he said to himself. He thought in another wave of guilt that it was his fault Marco was gone and that even the men he’d killed in the war had to kill, were in that other world, the one Marco now entered, and they were all carried in that same wave of his fault. It was a tsunami of memories that could not be held back, faces, ghosts, loves. Night after night he lay sleepless in his father’s house and they all came to him as if they were truly there, in flesh.
On the boat that day of his death Marco had asked him, “Are you afraid?”
“No,” Thomas lied, because he was always afraid and he didn’t even know of what. Fear was his constant, his daily habit formed years ago. By noise, bombs, the smell of chemicals in the air.
Then, in the boat, Marco said to his father, “Do you hear it? Do you feel it?” He meant the whale. Thomas realized that the boy was a true whaler. Marco felt its presence first, heard the deep rumbling sound of the whale. Thomas said, “No, son. I wish I did,” because he’d lost all his capacity to feel. Did he even feel the soul of water?
But Marco said, “I do,” and breathed and was silent as he looked around at the light on the waters, the firmament, which was the very word for it, the presence around them. “It’s young. It’s not the right one to hunt. It is friendly. It just wants to see us. We are its relatives.” He said it out loud. The others heard. He’d said it to turn the men away from this whale. And then Marco had to watch without judging the men and what they were doing. Marco, who had been a true man, a strong Indian, alive. Yes, he’d also thought he could impress his father and that his father might begin to care about him. They’d all thought they could prove themselves as they set out in the two canoes.
After the thrashing and yelling and blood, after they’d hauled the whale in, Thomas thought Marco had gone in with the other young men to watch the ball game. He had been angry with him. His judgment was too severe; the fierce judgment of those who also judge themselves. Not knowing where Marco had gone, now this came back to him.
Thomas tucked in his shirt as he left. It was going to be the fourth time he would cry. How many things can a man hate himself for?
He, Thomas Just, was the man who killed the whale.
That night the breakers rose up and took the whale away. In the morning, to the dismay of the people, it was gone. In the water only the dozer and the winch remained.
DARK HOUSES
It was the custom, when a person died, to keep the houses dark and when the sun went down, to live in darkness and silence, and so it looked like a ghost town. In the old days, darkness meant not to burn the lamps that used whale fat. Later, kerosene. Now the electricity was kept off to show regard for those who lost their loved ones, and the people fasted for three days. On the fourth they came together to sing songs that were so slow and deep and mournful a passerby would cry just to hear them.
Often there was no body because many died at sea. It was the custom once, if it was a land death, to take the body on a slab of wood to one of the islands out in the ocean, the island of ancestors, and to place it in the trees. Next to the body were the person’s favorite items, a special necklace or drinking cup, sometimes a picture or carving. There was a special clan of people and these were the only ones who could go to that island which looked so green from the mainland. They were called the Moon Woman Clan. The moon was related to the wolf and to the women, so most often it was the old women who took the loved human out there, rowing through whatever the ocean offered that day, setting out with the tide in the early morning, returning with it late.
But this custom ceased during the influenza epidemic when so many died that there was no room on the island for the bodies. Then there was the massacre by the Americans seeking gold in the hills and even the babies and elders were bayoneted and shot. There were too few old women left to row and the Americans had burned the canoes so no one could escape. Still, some had lived, had gone into the forest and pretended to be trees and thus became invisible, so there are people remaining today.
Even if the custom of burial in the trees still existed, Marco would not have gone to the island where the eagles and sacred condors once visited to make their meals. He would have been buried near the cemetery marked by whalebones. As it is today. But with no body, now there was just the rule of darkness and silence, the people wrapped in blankets, together, later singing the slow, deep songs.
To the griever there is darkness anyway. Nights are lengthened, time is endless. Even in daylight darkness is a room of corners and shadows, things are not there. After the fourth-day sing, awkward, kind neighbors bring food to be eaten. Those who loved Ruth—so many—touched her hand, her shoulder, held her lightly, but no one could read the world inside other human bones. They could touch the skin and not feel the grief and pain it held only a skin’s-width away.
“You haven’t been sleeping. I can tell.”
Ruth was pale. Her mother wanted her to eat. Ruth’s hands wanted only to touch Marco’s hair, his cheek. She wanted to go backward in time and watch him sleep, count every eyelash, and then to tell him, No, you can’t go. It is all wrong.
No one but Vince, the old weathered fisherman, saw her walking the pier at night. He thought she was a sleepwalker. It would not have been strange. But Ruth was looking for the remains of her son, Marco Polo Just, the one now traveling worlds she would never know, just as she’d always hoped, although she wanted it to be land he traveled, not the spirit world, not water.
She looked for the white shoes he had worn that day instead of his moccasins because the rubber was more secure against the sides of the canoe. She never dreamed how tender the vision of a Nike might become.
Vince, the old, weathered man whose body was created of coffee and cigarettes, wondered if he should tell Aurora, at least, that Ruth was walking in her sleep near water and it might be a dangerous thing.
Because she was so lost, it was a good thing when Ruth looked up one day and saw that the white houses on the other shore had disappeared. “My God,” she said, coming back to her life for a while. “Look!”
Aurora could not see the houses, either. But she had a new worry now, knowing Ruth would go there. “This isn’t a good time to be on the water,” she told Ruth. “It’s so rough.” It was the season of quick changes in the ocean. “I don’t think you should go just yet.” Aurora fiddled with her spoon at the table, warning her strong-willed daughter.
“But they might need help. I have to check it out, at least.” It took her worries off Marco and herself.
“Call someone else. Old Vince could go there.”
Ruth feared that a sudden wave, like the swell that surged high enough to carry the whale back into its world, had taken away the old people and their homes. It had been an unusual wave, too high, too close. Who was to say there wouldn’t be more? Ruth took off her robe, dressed, and went to prepare the dinghy to travel to the shore of the elders, the old houses where the People Who Remember lived.
It was a poor decision in the continuing
stormy weather, but she was overcome by the thought that the elders were in need. As it turned out, there was a high wind. Soon the water itself seemed to cry out. She “felt bottom,” as they say about water in ocean storms before the big wave comes.
Then she was carried. By waves so large that Ruth had to make a choice. She could try to return to land, with no guarantee of reaching it, she could fight the water to continue on, maybe running out of gas, or she could wait for the tide to change. She decided that last was the wisest choice, to move with the water and not against it. And so she sat in the waves, covered with her wet cape and warm enough with the life jacket, letting herself go out farther into the ocean until water changed its will. Otherwise, just as in her life, it would take everything she had just to remain in one place.
It was good she had the time to think. She went over Milton’s statement. She believed him. He was not cunning enough to lie. Marco, the child once held in her arms beside her in bed, had been murdered, and she tried to think of why. And who she could go to. The tribal police would not investigate Dwight or the others. Those outside the tribe would not believe her or, if they did, would not give it much thought. Besides, after killing the whale, no one wanted anything to do with them. They were ostracized, disliked right now by most of America.
Thomas knew Milton told the truth, but he’d said nothing. Ruth knew Thomas well enough to know he still had some feelings, even if dwindling, toward the men he had known all his life, those like Dwight, a few years older, who had always fished with him, had gone with him to hunt in the great forests, to drum and sing at the ocean, yet Dwight had always fallen short of Thomas and his resentment wasn’t always held at bay.