People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  Ruth no longer sleeps, but she does go out with the Forest Service man. At dinner there is too much silence.

  Before he left, the new man in town told Al, “Hold my room. I’m paid. I’ll be back soon.” So Al and his wife keep the room with the leaky ceiling open for him, although Al calls in a few friends to come over and look at the water in the ceiling and the water dripping into the large bucket. “Look, it’s a one-floor building. A flat place with asphalt out in front,” he says. But they also notice the pieces of polished glass and bits of shell on the dresser, the creased jeans on the hanger. One Catholic thinks they should call in the archbishop from over in Arcata. Al says, “No way. I’m having a hard enough time just keeping the floor dry, even with the buckets there. All I need is a bunch of miracle-seekers from Rome. I been putting the water on the plants outside.” The plants, nevertheless, are still wilted in the unusual sunlight. “Besides, he’s paid up.”

  A week later, when it smells of rain, Vince swears it is the toads. “And I was the one that let them out of there.” But at the same time the strange man returns, looking different. When he stops by the office, Al notices the man’s face is calmer. He feels good just to stand near. But the stranger, Al said to people later, didn’t go right to his room. He walked out onto the beach and continued to walk. He walked west like a mirage, looking in the heat wave as if he wore a blanket of wavering clouds, then he was only a shimmering shape of a man and it seemed he went north and then disappeared.

  Ruth, the lightest of sleepers, is asleep when the man climbs quietly into the boat and even more quietly into the top bunk above her. Ruth sleeps through all this, but she is awakened later by the first sound of dropping rain. Slowly at first, the water tapping like at the Western Union when she was a girl, then the sound of all the raindrops seeming to run together. It smells of rain, too, the way it smells inland. She goes outside. It is the best thing she’s ever smelled, the sweetness of it. She stands, wet, and breathes it in, the water pouring straight down on her, making everything look blue. Soaking wet, she breathes it in. Then she returns and puts a towel over her head. Going back to her bunk, she sees the man in the bunk above hers.

  She already has her knife in hand when he props himself up on his elbow and smiles at her, to show he is harmless. “You snore,” he says.

  She knows who he is. And here is the rain. Heart sinking, she says, “So, you! It’s your boat now, isn’t it? You are the one.”

  “Yes.” He feels bad for her, she can tell. “It was you who made part of the sacrifice. It was you who asked.”

  She walks back out and stands in the rain, as if it might not last, her face to the sky, her lonely face that looks like that of her father, the original owner of the Marco Polo, then she looks back at the bringer of rain.

  She sees that he is an inward kind of man. When she talks to him, she gets the feeling he might cry easily. His must be a very hard life. She thinks he would like to be ordinary. He would like to work at a gas station or garage or even a 7-Eleven, or as a greeter at the new Wal-Mart near the city. And he is a kind man. He has a calm face. His countenance is special. A normal life has not been chosen for him. Like the rain, he has his job to do. Just as prayers are sometimes only one-sided, so is he. Just as light enters the sky and falls to the earth, this is his life. As water falls from the heaviness of pregnant clouds. She suddenly feels as much compassion for him as he did for her. He thanks her for it, as if reading her thoughts. “Yes, it is my work.”

  She opens her suitcase and begins packing what she has left, not much, not forgetting anything that reminds her of her son Marco.

  “I’d make coffee,” he says. “But you’d better be going before it is too wet.”

  She smiles, declining his offer. Somehow it seems ludicrous to think of him making coffee and she even laughs, despite the fact that he is, after all, a holy man.

  It doesn’t take her long to be ready. “Goodbye. Thank you.” She is looking at the sky, the fast movement of clouds.

  He doesn’t shake hands when she leaves. He merely says, “It’s restored.”

  It is raining hard when she walks down between the black rocks to her mother’s house, carrying the case, changing hands often because it is so heavy, and the wetter the sand becomes, the more difficult it is to walk, and it is not a short distance. She thinks that now she has nothing except what she carries, and while she is afraid, there is a kind of freedom in it, too, a sense of relief strange to her, of having nothing, of the rain meaning something. Everything of the past is still there. Time is an unstable element, but it doesn’t matter; the birds are returning.

  The rain has started inland, too, without her knowing it. The man’s words come to Ruth: Part of the sacrifice. What else was given, she wonders. What was the other part?

  She walks up the steps and knocks once on the door before opening it. “Hi,” she says.

  “Oh my.” Aurora hands her a paper towel. She wipes the water off her daughter’s face and looks at all her angles and bones. Then Ruth puts down the suitcase, which is ruined, and removes her shoes.

  “Mom, I don’t have the boat.” She will have to explain it all, her visit to the once-white houses, her sacrifice to the drought, the loss of her father’s boat.

  “Shh.” Aurora waves her hand, sitting on her usual place on the couch, and listens to the news. “I’m watching the flood. It’s better than watching the fire or hearing about the drought. Look.” The news is full of talk and pictures, water running down the streets, water back in creeks.

  Dry grasses will magically turn green again. The farm animals will find relief. Drop by drop, the world will live.

  But it rains without stopping. The veterans say it reminds them of the war and monsoons. Some of them go into their houses, now leaking, now wet around the edges, and they don’t want to come out. There is rain upon rain. It even rains on days when there is not a single cloud in the sky. The ponds fill and the people finally conclude it had been him, the man who disappeared the same time as Ruth’s boat, stole the old thing, but who knows, maybe he wasn’t a thief or a womanizer, but instead maybe a rainmaker; surely he’d been a strange one and Ruth hasn’t even reported the theft to the police and that in itself is strange, now, isn’t it? She’d never part with the Marco Polo willingly. It was her life. It was her father’s life.

  As the ponds fill, frogs come up from the ground as if from graves and reappear, their sounds at night comforting the people, making it easier to sleep. Then the turtles climb out with their sharp, determined claws and are seen sitting on logs and beneath leaves.

  Vince maintains loudly that “his” toads are the cause of the rain. “I never did see anything like it. And now look. You see what I mean?”

  Soon the water begins moving down the river again and it looks as if the plants might even turn green, that they will bloom again one day soon.

  The strange man in creased pants brought with him blessings. They realize something extraordinary has happened. Al at his motel wants to keep the room free of customers. His wife convinces him they can’t lose any business.

  When the ocean begins to return, it isn’t the feared and sudden wave that loosens itself from its long waiting on other lands to take away houses and children like some believed. It is a steady movement, approaching the shore. Everyone watches it come toward them.

  From the black rock, Thomas observes its return. Like the sky, he cries. He has given his word. He has made a deal with the rain and he is going to stick to it. He is going to travel to Washington to tell the truth to the army, and then to Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, to see if he can find his daughter. His tickets are in his pocket already. He believes his sacrifice, his looking at the truth of his life and no longer hiding, brought the rain and, in all truth, it did help. It was a part of something given. No one else knows this, not Ruth, not anyone. As always, everything has its part, but the Rain Priest had purposely avoided Thomas and the house where Witka, a man he’d known, once liv
ed. In fact, he remembered Thomas from when he was an infant held up in his mother’s arms at the entrance to the cave and he will see him again one day, he is certain. And then, Thomas doesn’t know about Ruth’s part in the deal and the loss of her fishing boat. Ruth doesn’t yet know about the mysterious money deposited into her savings account for her years of struggle raising a son by herself.

  Now the people who had feared the tsunami return with their loaded-down cars, a mattress on top, a truck filled with plaid chairs and table legs. Before long the porpoises skip across the water like runners, and at the marina the boats begin to lift as if levitating.

  At the restaurant, Vince orders a cinnamon roll. “Do you think those toads were ever tadpoles or do you think they were just always full-grown like that?” He lights a cigarette and watches the water. He puts his hand over his coffee cup when Linda comes by with refills. “I’ve got to cut down. The drought gave me high blood pressure.”

  Nobody knows why the stranger had come there, but the downpour he created made the men stay inside and think, and then the plants began to blossom, so after they had first wished him away, they then saw he brought with him blessings. You couldn’t count on first impressions.

  The rain continues. Not long ago there had been a new hill of earth deposited by dump trucks in a single night. It had been shaped by busy machines and explained away as the place of new buildings being planned by the tribal council. It washed down and exposed the body of a whale they’d lied about some time ago, saying it had washed up and that it hadn’t been killed. It had come to shore dead, they said, maybe hungry, a sign of overpopulation. But the people, once thinking it had drifted back to the sea and been eaten by sharks and swordfish, now go out to look at it with their umbrellas. Even Thomas comes out of his house and goes down to the place. He finds that the whale is riddled with bullets. Revelations. Near it is a crumpled empty pack of Marl boros and an empty bottle of whiskey. Thomas is not even wearing his rain clothes. He stands in the mud examining it and shaking his head, then casts a glance toward the House of Dwight, as they call it, and those additions to the homes of the other men on the council, his cronies who voted to pay themselves, and now it is all clear to him. Thomas goes over to Dwight’s and says, “You have never been honest.”

  “What are you talking about, Bud?” Dwight is tucking in his shirt, as if preparing for a fight, his chest a bit larger.

  “What have you done?”

  “Shit, Thomas, you know what life’s like here.”

  “Yes, and I want to know what you have done and why.”

  Once the truth begins, it continues like the rain, one revelation after the other.

  The women look at their men who have lied and taken from the others. Some of them are their brothers, their husbands, their fathers. Then they understand why the rain and ocean left them, why the fish had gone away, the sun ruined their homes and gardens. And they have questions. How had Dwight suddenly come up with money for a new Jeep and to work on his new home, even though he said he was doing it for a trade? “Yeah. Especially when so many of us are not living well at all,” says one old woman who, like most, was just scraping by.

  Then, too, there was the long-ago past. The rain revealed even this. Not far from here another hill fell, mud sliding down into water in a great heave, and the old place was exposed, a harpoon of older times, rock carvings made with love and the human desire for survival. It is the truth that the rain revealed recent human wrongs, but now a history also opened up again. In this place, the mud fallen away revealed the buildings of shell they’d heard about, the seashell buildings that were written about in the old records, the ones they’d believed washed away—if they had existed at all—into the ocean some time in the distant past. They are buildings of art, homes the people of old once lived in. They shine and gleam, even without the sun. The rain washed away the earth and cleaned the dwellings and they shone with all the colors of the nautilus shells that rose up to the surface of the black sea at night from the bottom. These are a part of the beautiful shining worlds, the homes of their ancestors of long, long ago. The rain, through flooding, has returned the past to the people.

  There is still much talk about the stranger. He must have been a rain-dancer and no one knew. Someone says they thought he had an eye in his heart because he made them feel, and one of the things they feel especially when they see the shell houses uncovered by the fallen hillside is that the past is still with them. They feel beauty again.

  “I just wish we could have sent him to the Sonora,” says Aurora. But after the hillside collapsed and Dwight’s house fell to pieces on wet earth, she feels a secret glee.

  Besides, the Rain Priest reminded her somehow of the octopus that walked out of water that time, she tells her daughter. “I couldn’t identify it at first, the feeling I had, but then I did. He had a feel to him. You should have seen it, but you were an infant yourself,” she says. “There was nothing like it. Could you clean my glasses, dear?”

  AFTER THE RAIN

  A week or two later, when Vince comes in to the café, he is still wearing his fishing clothes. Many faces turn toward his dirty gold-colored overalls and his worn woolen shirt.

  “Gee, Vince, you’re smelling up the place,” Linda says, pouring him coffee, all of them accustomed to the smell of fishing boats. “And now you’re using too much sugar in your coffee.”

  He pays no attention. “Ruth, I’ll be damned, but I found your old Trophy. Way out there. Way out.” Vince chewed a toothpick and squinted, but there was a small wave of happiness across his face, being able to tell Ruth this, for not only had her boat been stolen, it was about damned time something good happened for her.

  “No way, Vince.” Ruth is afraid to even hope. She thought the Marco Polo would be far north by now. “Where is it?”

  “I’ll take you there. It’s about seventy-eight degrees northwest and I’ve got it plotted. Pretty far out, though.”

  He’s already up and so is Ruth.

  “But there’s one thing,” he says as they leave the café. “I saw an octopus climbing down out of it as I approached. I said to myself how strange it was, because it was so large and everyone knows how they hate boats, and yet I swear it looked straight at me like it wanted to be seen.”

  “Kind of like the toads,” Linda says, overhearing as the two leave.

  He talks all the way to the marina. “It was the eeriest thing.” And then there is the noise of the boat starting and they head out, cutting straight through the water. Ruth stands in the spray, looking for sea life. She knows the sea. She thinks of it as time and right now it all seems timeless, as if she can pass through years to the past. As she reaches her father’s old boat, so cared-for, she feels as if no time has ever passed, that she has moved backward.

  It looks clean, tidier than Ruth ever left it. She walks through it, feeling strange to be in it again. Ghostly is the word that comes to her, but only because it is such a strange sight out there, alone on the water, no other ships or boat, no rocks jutting out of water, just the blue and white Marco Polo with everything in its place, except Ruth.

  Vince sits on a chair as she examines it. Then he decides to look for tentacle tracks. “They’ve got to be here.” He tries the engine with her. “She starts, all right, but I better follow you back, just in case. Strange that someone would just take her and then leave her out here. What do you think they wanted with it?”

  Sacrifice, Ruth wants to say, but doesn’t. She does want to stay and touch every last thing, to understand the octopus, all eight legs of it climbing away from the boat left behind by the peculiar, handsome Rain Priest who did, for a time, own the boat. But she must return and go back to her life and get the Marco Polo ready for salmon season. Before long she’ll have it tuned up and full of gas and ready to go out. Still, she looks around lovingly and touches things, the coffeepot, so clean, the bed, so unused. And then, that night, just as she goes to bed once again in her own place, she sees it on her own
pillow. The pearl sitting in the middle of it. The pearl that had belonged to the mother of Thomas, the one that had once been left in the cave, according to everyone who told the story.

  Ruth tries never to think of Thomas. But still she does. She takes him food, coffee. She checks on him. One day, taking coffee and a kettle of chicken soup, she thinks she will soon say, This ocean is the place of life, damn it! Turn around! And she will start to tear down the wall, using a crowbar, the claw end of a hammer, breaking the wood, pulling out nails. On this day there will be smooth water, a light breeze. After she does all this she will sit down, calm, on the ground, and he will come out and take her in his arms and rock her and tell her that he always carried her picture and someone will drive by with the car radio playing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business But My Own.”

  But of course she will never do that.

  One day, visiting, she sees he is different. He is clean and awake. He is packing. He has changed his mind about going to DC to see the Wall with his former buddies. He couldn’t say why.

  “Thank you for the soup,” he tells her, but that’s all he says.

  She wants to ask him, Where are you going? but something about the way he speaks, she understands something. He has made a decision. She is silent.

  HE GOES BENEATH

  Someday we’ll hide in the ocean. We’ll swim out and hold our breaths like old Witka and disappear. This was what he said with his friends when they were boys. We’ll never come back. We’ll become whales like the story says.