People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  “I’ll catch up with you later.” He wondered what they knew. Damn the travel agent.

  Back at home in the dark, he remembers leaving this place he’d been from since all his ancestors had carried him through their cells, then flying over, seeing water and the reflection of the sky in water, then clouds and waking to green, green land. Brilliant green, colors he had never seen before. He looked down from where he was flying at the clouds piled up high.

  Once in his life there was rice. Now there are black stones in the water, whales. But something was starting to grow again as if it hadn’t heard the story of what the world was aboveground.

  The whale hunt set off his memories. He needs to speak them over and over again and he realizes he is telling Witka. Witka’s spirit in his house, the spirit of the old man who still lives there:

  “Lots of them were like that,” Thomas says. “Sometimes the men just fired, heard a sound, saw anything move, and fired. Like what happened to us.”

  He tells about the way they had no shelter and ate rotten food. “I felt only fear, and I wished I had the courage to shoot myself so I did not have to witness it, and I would have, too, except I knew someone else would do it for me.”

  He’d felt terror, then the need for survival, then nothing, then hatred.

  He omits a part of it at first. But Witka knows. And Thomas knows that Witka knows. To be a hero you always have to betray something or someone. Witka forgives him but Thomas doesn’t feel forgiven yet.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “There were good men, good men.” He read about the attempts to rescue American POWs and MIAs. He’d been one. “Some real good men.” But mostly now he hates everybody, as if the whole world were to blame for the rain and the flooding, the weight of his army clothes with rain and mud and his own thirst and sweat constant, always dripping and it was all in the line of duty, the way the world goes, really goes, leaves, and it was all only money in some people’s pockets. How small men are to try to prove they are warriors, better warriors, better hunters. He says these things out loud.

  “You know what the worst day is?” he says. “The worst day is the one before you go home because you think you have come this close, so near, and then you won’t make it.”

  The A’atsika people hear speaking coming from the house. They avoid the place. Maybe it is haunted, the place where Thomas lives. The house talks at night and there are no lights. It remains empty, they think, so why did he build a fence? But in daylight it is silent. Dead silent. The seals love the shade of the fence. They sleep there. He wants them to leave, but they are there like guardians, his relatives who watch over Thomas. Thomas who is a container of history, pain, convictions, beliefs, memory, sins, and courage.

  So when he was found, so many years later, Thomas was the lone survivor according to the historical record, if there was a living record. Otherwise, Thomas was dead because he threw his dog tags down on the ground. Yeah, he thinks, I am alive and I am dead. He is history the way Dwight is civilization. But in war your life is at its height, watching for danger, wondering if you can make it to the next place, believing you can’t. Sometimes not giving a shit. Sometimes too afraid. The mind wasn’t built for this. Nor was the spirit. And always you know someone is watching you and they are thinking the same as you: Someone is out there. Something is there, and there is a boundary between self and self that is crossed only in a world like this. These are shadow-covered realms. A person watches himself when he is not himself.

  Strangely, the thing he’d done that was dishonorable was the only, the most honorable thing he’d done the whole time.

  He says, “I have a daughter there. I didn’t want to leave her.”

  Now he is thinking about Lin and her mother, Ma. About when Lin was a baby. He sees Ma bending over her, her hair falling down over her face.

  He is thinking about Lin when she is out there somewhere thinking about him.

  LIGHT-YEARS

  Years pass. Lin thinks she is maybe twenty-two now, or older. No one alive knows Lin’s age, but her hands are still the hands of a girl, her face bright and delicate.

  She pushes her black hair behind one ear. Where she sits it is quiet, a park where old people sit in daylight. From only a street away, she hears activity and noise, buying and selling, motorbikes and hawkers. A world is going on, lives being lived. She watches bats cross the body of the distant moon, and thinks she is as far away from her own blood as the moon is from earth. The bench where she sits is rock, old enough to be green in color, as in the cemetery. It was not destroyed by the war. There is a sweet smell. The road that is near her, behind the ginko trees planted by the Chinese, is the one that brought her from far away. It is larger now and traveled by automobiles, bikes, and without a sign of the people who once marched, ran, or died there. It is as if she’d traveled light-years and arrived now at a place where time and space intertwine. And in the dank scent of evening, the rich odors of old earth, they do. Her memory lives with the present as if it is all one, her village, the old ones, and this place, Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon.

  But for now her father, too, is light-years away, and as she thinks of him she remembers more than she has told anyone. She was always one for memory. She remembers her life near the rice paddies and water. She remembers that he did not want to leave her. She knows that. She cannot blame him or be angry and so her feelings belong only to her. She remembers the day the dark machine came down from the sky. They’d been there before, but this time the men in uniforms showed up in the early morning at the funeral of Lin’s mother, amid the smell of incense, the burning joss sticks. Strangely she does not remember everything about her mother’s death, just the smells and the helicopter.

  Always before when the machines arrived, they heard them cutting through the sky. There was time for her father to hide beneath the ground in one of the damp caved-in tunnels. She was afraid of the tunnels. She still smells them, sees the tree roots, the green molds and mosses growing. Underground, secret entrances known only by a few. Most of these had not held up because they were too close to water and the clay was poor. But some of the tunnels were numbered, mapped, and then later forgotten. The Americans never knew how much underworld the tunnels covered. They were known and forgotten by the North Vietnamese who had lived there, even cooked there. Later, the Communist Party with their insistence on a different kind of order did not even recall them.

  Sometimes, too, before ambushers and thieves passed through, her father hid in one of the places where their food had been stored.

  But that particular morning, her mother was dead. Her father had too much grief to think of hiding, maybe to even notice when they dropped down from out of the sky. The Americans were there to make him leave. To take him “home.” When they tried to take him, he protested and fought them off, walking away from them. The village was his home. She still sees one of them reach toward him, her father’s arms rising up out of the man’s grip, his tight back as he walked away and back toward her, his child.

  Lin doesn’t know her mother was killed by a land mine while chasing Lin. There is no one left to tell her.

  She doesn’t know, either, that her father remembers the same day over and over. That he remembers how the old man in the village, the one who always smelled of lime and flowers from his meditations, postponed their departure. Maybe he thought Thomas would disappear if he distracted the captors. The old man put them off as long as possible, the blue cloth in his hand. The Americans were made to wait. Their impatience was obvious, a shaking leg, darting eyes, the way they exchanged glances. Thomas explained to them that this was how it was done on a day when everyone was grieving.

  Lin remembers this now and thinks she is alive, but her mother, the maker of shoes, the onetime cashier, is not, and Lin forgets her at times. No one ever told her about the death of her mother. Whenever she asked why her mother would go into a minefield, they only said it was a mystery. “No,” said Auntie. “Her favorite chicken went there and
she was chasing after it.”

  The village people found ways to make the army wait. One man read a story. To do so was a gift, the soldiers were told. He did it slowly, translating to English. It was the story of the butterflies that had lived in the forests. The soldier-searchers were impatient. “It is a funeral,” Thomas told the intruders again. His voice implied again how rude they were. “You must wait.” He himself listened and cried. Now there were no more butterflies. No forests. Then another story was told. It was the story of a wise man and a wise woman who had survived the French. The wise woman always wore a red scarf around her neck. They called her Red. But then the wise man and woman were taken into captivity by their allies and never seen again and after they were gone, the village people, without the guidance of these two, forgot to treat the world well. They neglected to be kind to the birds, or greet the trees. They thought that was why they were bombed by a fire god from the sky. Otherwise the bombs would have turned into birds and flown away like leaves in a wind. Soon there were no leaves, no birds except one, and it dropped a red scarf over the village where the two had lived, reminding those who remained.

  Maybe, Lin thought at the time, this was why Grandmother, the eldest woman, always wore a scarf around her own neck. Later she learned it was to hide her scar.

  Then some of the accounts of Thomas were recalled. At first that included how well he fished for them. Lin didn’t listen well enough. She was still thinking of the story and the birds. In her eyes she could see them as they once were.

  And one man praised Lin’s mother. Crying, he said, “Oh, how well she made shoes. No one ever made shoes like Ma did.” Ma. Her mother’s name. She, the girl, is named for her mother’s real name. Thuy Doc Lin had made shoes waterproof by using the sap of plants no longer there, long since bombed. Lin had a special pair. They were a bit too large for her so she could grow into them, and she wore them anyway. Each one had an artificial red flower on it.

  But stories were their riches.

  They even told the story of the horse that had come from France and made it by boat to their village. They first worshiped its beauty. Then the old man said, “I rode it everywhere I went. I even rode it to Old Grandmother’s house.” Even though it was a funeral, the people laughed because Old Grandmother’s house had been only a short distance away. Some remembered the horse and how the man rode it in every possible position, not by choice. In spite of themselves and the sad day, they laughed. He rode it sideways, leaning over the neck with his round face in the mane, thrown across the top, and he rode it almost underneath, yelling as he went.

  “What a scene that was!” said a tiny woman.

  But it was a double sadness that day, a funeral and the taking away of Thomas. The people were afraid they would take the girl, too, and then afraid they wouldn’t because they realized the direction the war had taken when the Americans left and maybe she’d live like a queen in America and maybe she’d be killed in their world. So when she cried, “Papa,” to him, they told the Americans it meant “Uncle” in their dialect.

  Oh, and they gave Thomas gifts to take back, a Mickey Mouse watch—who knows where it came from?—a carved box, a square piece of hand-dyed cloth, a bell, and even a prized American baseball hat he didn’t want to accept because it meant so much to the owner. One by one, he was given something small from each person there as the chicken still boiled in the pot, the one chicken that would feed the multitudes. Ma’s chicken that was not killed by a land mine.

  They set out the feast for the men, who looked at the food, the chicken looking a little gray to them. Fortunately it was only a tiny amount. The vegetables were sliced well but unfamiliarly. The rice was wrapped in what looked like leaves.

  One said, “We just need to take him back. We don’t have time to kill. There’s no time to eat.” But they were talked into it anyway and they ate little, mostly the rice which was less likely to be contaminated because the water had boiled.

  As they went to leave, her father turned and looked back and as he did, they handcuffed him. “They act like he’s a god or something,” said one of the Americans.

  Then they left and Thomas watched until all grew small on the ground. He wept. How could he not? Down there was what he loved. His other world seemed dimensions away.

  He cried the whole time even as he was taken up into the wind. Lin remembers that, and the grasses moving in circles so hard, her hair blowing, the wind on her, a woman pulling her away. “Papa!” she yelled, crying. The noise was terrible.

  “It’s okay. He’ll be back.” Lin barely heard the words, but she believed them. All her life she’d been told she was the child of a savior, a beloved man, a man of great beauty and spirit, and that someday he would come back with the spirit they so loved. She believed them and waited with hope. She was certain each morning when she woke and washed her face in the bowl: This day. This.

  For such a long time the small child, Lin, watched the sky for him to return. Her father the fisherman fed many villagers. One day he had come to Lin with a red koi from the river market and it was in a white bowl. She loved the fish. She stood beside roads. Waiting. Holding the fish in its bowl. Watching for him to come down the road. In her blue skirt, she stood outside in the rain and waited. It seemed everyone cried except for Lin who believed he would return and so she waited, smiling, watching. For nearly a year she watched.

  Thomas, her beloved father, the man who had brought a red fish from the river to her, was taken away. This, the handcuffs, and the fish are her memories.

  Right now she hates memory. She sees it often now, in the city, old men crying with their memories, and their memories so terrible, and they have to contain it all within themselves. Nevertheless, they sit together as friends and sometimes gamble, sometimes playing cards the Americans left behind, talking about small things, someone always saying, “You cheat!”

  For her, memory always hurts. She has no memory of her mother. Sitting on the bench she tells herself there have been light-years since then, the days in the country by the river, but even so it is all here now like the light of a star traveling the night, and the bats catching insects in the light of the full moon.

  Then, back then, they heard a new army was on its way and they had to leave the village. The old man, knowing he would die, sewed three things into Lin’s jacket: the address of an uncle in Saigon, what is now Ho Chi Minh City, hoping the uncle was still there, and the address and photograph of her father now in the United States, along with a folded map. “This map. Be sure you keep it. It is important. It tells where we are.”

  When Old Grandmother set out, she took her chicken, a pot of flowers, and a teapot. It was more than she could carry and someone had stolen their cart. Lin carried the teapot and the fish her father had given her. Someone else took the flowers from the old woman. “Keep quiet,” they were warned. At first they went down past the houses on stilts in darkness, thinking the water would be safer to travel, but then they saw the water was dangerous, too. Sampans burned and there was the sound of men shouting. “Hurry!” someone said, and they stepped into a boat and they tried to float away, but not far from there they came to a bend in the river. There even more boats were burning and things were floating where they shouldn’t be, clothing on the water, shoes. It was so light from the fires, it was like daylight. Men and boys swarmed the little boats and rafts like ants that take over the other ants. She recalled hearing an infant cry, then suddenly stop. Its silence chilled her.

  “Does it hurt when you die?” she asked her grandmother on the boat.

  Her grandmother smiled and said, “No, and someday we’ll all see each other again,” because she knew already she would have to be left behind.

  And then Lin was forced to leave. Old Grandmother said, “I will go back home. You go on. Go!” And Lin followed her orders, looking back at the small woman. It was just before her grandmother would be turned to light. The ant boys were swarming. They were like the ants she’d seen leave their hills
to cover over an entire animal someone shot, or come through a village in droves and enter everywhere while the villagers tried to flee.

  There was such confusion. A young man she didn’t know came and said to call him Uncle and she was made to go by land. Already there was a trail, a train of people, animals, their special things, their worn clothes and wagons and cages and bottles, but they were walking again toward another loss. Lin had only her goldfish now. The goldfish her father had brought from the river market. She carried it in a tall glass now, one she’d found.

  On the way, Lin lost the young uncle who had warned them about what was coming toward them. She lost him in a bomb attack by the new boy soldiers. She looked back. Everyone scattered. There were bombs with nails, with pieces of metal, with fins. All around the girl, people screamed and bled in a flurry of movement and sounds. There was confusion and running. She was certain her heart had been hit because it hurt so bad and she cried.

  The path had been changed from mud to dust and it rose up in clouds as they ran. It would become mud again from the blood. A young man picked Lin up to help her. He grabbed her under his arm, but in the commotion and running about he fell and she ran with terror after trying to pull him up and she couldn’t and finally she saw it didn’t matter and left him on the ground, another of her sins. Sins she couldn’t have helped, like leaving Old Grandmother. Another young boy came. She looked him in the face and waited for him to die, too, but he wore a uniform. He looked at her with wide-open eyes for a long time, then let her go.

  She has told this to no one except now, later, to her husband, older than she is by six years, and he becomes very silent.

  Then she was alone. They did run. One of the new enemies, as she then knew them, grabbed her, but she fell and escaped and ran without knowing where.