People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  Thomas goes to the sea only at night, the same time Ruth walks there. He goes down to the pier or the docks, carrying a wool army blanket. He turns his back and drops himself into the water of the Pacific, of Peace. The Great Being. Awkward at first he holds to the dark pilings and looks around him to be certain no one watches, but Ruth had caught sight of him one night, so now she follows just out of sight and afraid. At first he stays beneath the water briefly, then surfaces, gasping for air. She is more intimate with water. She knows how much goes on beneath its surface. There are currents and undertows, the unseen. There are tides within, beneath, that would take him far out to sea. If he would let them. She knows this.

  In water is the snow of creatures, plankton that glows in the dark. It is blue-dark, green-dark in the swells of waves. Underneath the cold, dark, enchanted world the sea is full with life barely seen. It bears a different weight, a different gravity. Sometimes the beam of his waterproof light is refracted from beneath the water. She knows he is seeing the white suns of fish, the anemones.

  There are creatures that thrive on darkness. He has become one of these. Some create their own light, like the ray and the shrimp and the plants at certain seasons. The light-makers. Thomas has not become one of these. For the most part his light intrudes, he invades. She wants to tell him that the creatures of the night do not want his light, but this is all the life he has right now, his going beneath. She doesn’t want him to know she follows his descents and passages. For now, as he is awakening, he is a creature of night water.

  Ruth knows he is practicing, like Witka and the other old whalers. As if he is trying against time to have the world back the way it used to be. He doesn’t know some changes can never be reversed.

  There are also the nights both of them remember facing the ocean, walking, looking at the tide pools. And with his memory he still sees black snails, kelp and its golden bulbs awaiting its return to the sea. Even on cold days he used to walk the beach out to Old Spirit Rock with Ruth. It was in the days before girls wore pants, so her legs were always cold and wet.

  Old Spirit Rock was formed by a war between wind and land. It was a place the old people wouldn’t go. At the very top, wind has shaped a hole into the rock and sometimes, when wind blows from the right direction, it is heard singing like a flute, sometimes a howl like the cannibal who wanted to swallow their people.

  Some nights he holds himself to the wood, shining his light, looking, as if he would see Marco. Instead, on a ledge, is an orange starfish, the kind he loved as a child when he and Ruth were explorers together in the magic of the world, wandering the lines between land and water at the west end of a continent.

  At first he stays down briefly, then longer every night, holding his breath until his veins might burst. He, Thomas, sees and touches the barnacles in the disintegrating wood pilings and posts, creatures closing and opening, like him. Many lives hanging, holding. He is where small fish take refuge in between the pillars, where the gobies live. Then, again he rises to the surface, gasping for air, cold after these moments gone from this world.

  Ruth knows his alphabet, his syntax, his silent language. She feels him. His very skin cries out. When in the day it seems he does nothing, she knows something is taking place, even if it is invisible. Nothing is ever static. If he were a spiritual man he would one day emerge from his dark house like a prophet or saint, enlightened and shining. But for now, the closest he comes to this emergence is from the water and though his heart carries such a great weight you’d think it would pull him down. For him it is the only time he feels unburdened.

  While at first Thomas wishes he could remain forever, that he could drown, instead he begins to see the beauty of the water, the thickness of life.

  Some nights, he enters this world only for a minute at a time, then longer, and there is happiness for that time, or peace, at least. He descends the way a chambered nautilus does in daylight only not so deep and far.

  Ruth counts the seconds. Not much later, a minute, then even longer. It ran in his family, she thinks, even her Marco.

  If it rains and Ruth is cold out there in the rain, she leans against the rail and pulls her coat tight. On a clear night, she looks not just at him but at the moon path and the shine of natural light, a manta ray in the distance or floating blooms of plankton. Some nights, when she catches sight of something shining, she feels happy and smiles.

  Maybe she loves him still. You’d think so since she watches over him so carefully. They say love is the closest thing to hate. That saying was created by someone who knew little of the many layers of emotions, she thinks.

  He is the reason why there are nights now she is on land instead of asleep in her fishing boat where she is accustomed to waking and beginning her day early in the morning, before dawn, setting out to fish.

  “You need your sleep,” her mother says. “It’s dangerous work you do. You can’t afford to follow him around at night or take him food. You are paying for that food. You are getting dark circles.”

  “He’s still my husband.”

  “Some husband.” Silence.

  Yet they both remember how Ruth’s father, their spiritual leader, had made their marriage whole. Ruth with shell earrings down to her chest. They were at the sea. Ruth had woven her own hat of fine grasses. Her father, with the same finely chiseled bones as Ruth, wore a scarf around his head. A dog peed nearby and Ruth laughed. She couldn’t help herself. Her father said with a smile, “This should never be too solemn an occasion. The coming together of two people is to rejoice.”

  That night Thomas had looked at Ruth with love, her graceful form and happy eyes. Ruth looked at his beautiful—how else to describe it?—blue-black hair and wide face. The feast was salmon cooked in wide leaves that had no name in English. Everyone was there.

  And then he came home one day and he had joined the army.

  “We are warriors,” he said.

  “But you need to be here with your people. You have a wife,” her father said. He was dismayed at the decision of Thomas.

  Maybe it didn’t count anymore, tribal worlds, marriages.

  Now, instead, he has a Medal of Honor, a Silver Star, his Purple Hearts, all on ribbons, something for bravery under fire, bronze, stripes and things she doesn’t understand, and they were sent to his father when his dog tags were found, also a folded flag. They were all kept inside his father’s glass case. She didn’t know what any of them meant, just that they were honors and his father carried them around and never missed a chance to show them off to anyone nearby, no matter how often. His father, with large carver’s hands and a rough face that was a book of his history. An ugly-hearted man who created beauty. He’d carved the faces of Ruth and her father into near eternity and then sold them at a gallery. He didn’t seem to grieve the son he lost. He was proud of his son’s medals. He went drunk to the ceremony for his son’s memorial.

  But she watches Thomas, her hands in her jeans pockets, alert, in case he falls into trouble. She is bound to him for life in ways neither of them understands. She is a strong swimmer, prepared to dive down and save him. He could hold his breath longer than her, but he was a weak swimmer then and now he has aged.

  How strange, that he goes into the water nights—he who was born on the day the octopus walked out of the sea and into a cave on land. And peculiar, too, that at his age he is trying to do what his grandfather had done, like all the tribe’s men had once done as boys, seeing how long he could hold his breath underwater—diving after treasures on the bottom, old spoons found from whaling vessels, coins, once a pair of glasses that belonged to a Brit from a whaling ship. Ruth knows the stories of disasters on ships that entered these unpredictable waters or found themselves butted up against the rocks in a storm. Then there were the Americans who shot at the rocks that looked like sea lions, only to have their bullets return, sinking them.

  But it is not strange at all. This man underwater among urchins and jellyfish, in kelp forests bending, is seeking
to return to before the history of the white man’s whaling ship. It is instinct. He wants to go back, to understand the old ways, if not to live them. If they are ever to be whole again, his people, her people, he will do it right. For whatever reason he has taken this on.

  Ruth recalls when the whales migrated by in the past when she and Thomas were children. Great numbers of them, spouting water, rainbows in the mist of their breath. On the northward journey would be the infants, small, dark, shining. Everyone watched their passage, the tails up from water, the spray, the descent.

  Her mother had seen the last one killed in the traditional way, that day Witka came out of the water dripping seaweed. They found a harpoon made of stone in that gray whale and it had been there for at least a hundred years. Everyone was surprised. Then there was an absence of whales, as they avoided the place for a while after that.

  Thomas has locked himself away, a bent man. Witka’s place is now the right place for him.

  By the time he surfaces the last time, he is blue with cold, thousands of particles around him, in his light, each one something alive, phosphorescent. He pulls himself up, an awkward heave, difficult to lift his own weight. Ruth looks back and she sees him wrap the blanket around himself. He has never seen Ruth watching. Even if there is dew, he never sees her footsteps; he doesn’t look that closely at the world any longer.

  He loves the blue-dark, but he doesn’t see it as his ancestors did. He no longer sees the jellyfish as the ocean pulse or heartbeat. Instead, one night, he sees them as parachutes floating men down from a plane or copter, revealing some poor man’s whereabouts before he even had a chance to land alive. A sky full of them. It was beautiful when he first saw it until he realized anyone could see them. Then there were the quick rescues, surprise attacks, men climbing ladders in the sky the way he’d heard angels did.

  OUT THERE

  Thomas hears the ocean and he remembers the river. During the dry season it was a lazy river on its journey to what he thought was the Delta. Even during the day now at Witka’s, Thomas hears the ocean “out there.” Out there. The words remind him of what the old man said, the man who seemed to be the chief of the village or shantytown where Thomas stayed and remained.

  There was a coastal city upriver somewhere. Some of the goods came from there, others from water by sampans and brown boats. But they lived on flatter land, with rice paddies fed by the water. He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He’d studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too.

  It was so many years ago now, but he envisioned the women he once saw on a rarely traveled yellow dirt road. They were drying rice on the road and at first he saw them with some fear. They gazed at him, also, like small forest deer, watching a man standing with a rifle. The rice covered half of the road. It was the only flat, dry place where the newly born sun would dry their crop. A child on a bicycle traveled by, eating fruit, bumping along the edge of the road to avoid the grain. The women watched him, one bold enough to have her hands on her hips. The boy nodded, smiling. He tossed down the fruit seed. His bicycle wavered into the ditch. Thomas wanted to plant the seed. It was hope. It was a future. He wanted a future to grow in this place made so nearly desolate by bombs, craters and burned woods.

  Thomas had no idea how he’d come across the women drying rice on the road. Or, later, how he’d fallen asleep, too asleep, there in a makeshift village, one of many.

  But there he cried without crying, just salt water running down his face. He was too hardened to cry, or at least he thought that way. Nevertheless the ocean of the body flowed. Then an old woman in a neck scarf sang to him. When he looked at her she smiled and he saw compassion in her eyes, in her wrinkles and dark teeth, and he thought of what she’d seen all her life. Damn, but he could feel it coming from her and that’s what made the rivers flow, and yet she had it in her to smile and gaze, compassion like one of the Buddha shrines they’d seen along the way, and he began to sob.

  There were bodies burning. He could smell them. A woman woke him. He was sweating. “Drink,” she said. It was some kind of rice water. No, it wasn’t burning bodies. It was a fire burning and something was being cooked. He didn’t want to eat. He turned his head away.

  He was not injured, but he seemed to be. He slept as if he couldn’t wake. Or wouldn’t, but finally the woman woke him and she looked familiar. She used a sea sponge on his face. “There,” she said, and went back to weaving a mat. Next time she put a rag on his head and left it. It was wet and cool. Ice. He thought of Ruth at home, weaving. He thought about Ruth’s long black hair, falling over her shoulder, him pushing it back. He remembers pushing it away from her face even when she was a girl and they’d been out running on the beach. He must be an old man now, he thought, because that was a century ago.

  When he woke the second time there were some boys in the room, running about with sticks and yelling.

  “What?” he said, as if they were speaking.

  They were trying to chase a cobra. The boys were sweating. “They come by boat.” They came close to the snake, then backed off.

  “On the boats?”

  “Done move. Done get up.”

  No. They come on the boats. Then they come here. He listened. They spoke in a dialect he didn’t recognize. It was not distinctly northern, not southern, and he was good at languages.

  It was a beautiful creature, the cobra, when he saw it. The high wide neck like a pair of wings.

  This had once been a country of snakes. Who knew now? The poor people were gleaning rice fields that shone like mirrors of the sun with water, and cobras lifted their puffed heads looking for rabbits or rats and shelter. They were hungry, too.

  He wants to remember what happened to the cobra. Rabbit, he remembers.

  Someone shot a rabbit when they were struggling through the jungle. How long ago? It was softly furred, with dark eyes, and running to hide. He cried. He who never cried. And then as they traveled through the next village they tried to destroy the rice before the NVA approached. After trying to burn it, and failing, because it wouldn’t burn, they contaminated it with chemicals. He wondered, now, if anyone had ever grown hungry enough to eat it. He was upset by all of this. In his world, his old world, these things were not done, but now he knew worlds overlapped, many of them, as if they were transparent pages in a book. One world held fog, and whales were swimming across it, as was a tribe, a nation, his own. Then spread across it were boys without wisdom, layered over the once-beautiful world with fire and chemicals.

  His men killed the termite mounds which he thought most beautiful, like the land itself, and the termites would immediately begin to save the young and rebuild. In the same way the people tried to put their lives back together again and again, moving to a new place, going to the water if bombs were near, leaving if bombs were at the water, knowing there were land mines, trying to divine where they were, sometimes succeeding. And he protested the destruction.

  But, then, he was with a people. He was again part of a people. Thomas never asked how these people survived. Or even where they came from. Above where they lived were the remnants of an old building, a once-beautiful house of concrete, painted yellow and blue. The walls were down, rubble all around. There had been an exquisite painting on one inner wall, a painting with hills of green and trees. The place had been fenced in once, but the fence was gone now. And down below it, their little village was a makeshift place, put together with debris from the war-broken world. There were washed-up things from the river and they were sometimes used to build or patch up other things. Below them, the houses were built on stilts, but he didn’t think the river could rise that high. The old man with blue cloth around his head, tied in a knot at the side, said to him, “We are not Vietnamese. We are people from the mountains.” From the highlands, he thought, the “Armpit.” Or
was it the place where everyone killed everyone, even their own soldiers if they moved wrong or scared a man by surprise, or if they hated him. And he wondered if they hated him. He thought they were misplaced and he was lost, or had been, in Muong country. But these were people of the earth and they’d survived. Like him. A tribe, or what remained of one. Now there were silent, empty villages in the mountains. The Tigers had been there. It’s what they called themselves, the airborne men who instead of being in the air swept across the land, destroying everything they came upon because it was a war.

  The old man with the blue cloth said, “You look the same, like us. Ugly.”

  Thomas laughed.

  The old man’s face was red with lines and scars. He kept a cloth for wiping the sweat off his forehead. It was blue in color, lovely against his forehead and then against dark hands and blue veins. Every night the old woman washed it along with one of the two scarves she always wore around her neck, even in the heat, in the wooden tub. “We had to come here,” the man said. “We learned to make friends. Some of us went to Saigon. Now we feed the enemies even when we know who they are, but we have never smiled behind their backs. Up there…” He pointed to a village Thomas couldn’t see, its distance impossible to gage. “Up there, they hate us. They say, take sides or you lose your heart.” He laughed. “They mean in two ways.”

  The old woman gave Thomas a cup of strong sweet coffee. “We used to have more beers.”

  Thomas laughed, but weakly. He realized it was an underground restaurant they’d been trying to run. Noodles and beer. He looked around. There were signs in several languages. Outside were places to sit, a few chairs and two tables, a single, broken umbrella. It was a half-bent store where they also sold Tide, Crest, Marlboros, and other American products bought by those who had once worked in the PX, the army store, including a young woman named Ma. He’d seen her before somewhere. Those who did come by to eat noodles or drink beer saw what a shambles their lives had become, felt sorry for them, and left extra money for their purchases.