People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  They motor out. They pass an old cemetery, which appears to be under a soft layer of moss. “It’s where I hope I will be buried one day,” Ruth tells her. It is the one the archaeologists dug up for bones and artifacts so many years ago against the will of the people. The bones came back not long after. “They came back because they heard them singing and grew afraid.” The employees wouldn’t work in the rooms where the bones were. She tells this to Lin and Lin sits down and listens.

  “Ghosts have great abilities,” Ruth says.

  “Yes. I am with them every day. They wander every where.”

  Then Lin tells Ruth about the American soldiers digging up the ancestors and urinating on them. But not about the old man who opened the bag of bones.

  Like Ruth, Lin loves the sea and stares into it. She doesn’t know ocean, but she loves the small white jellyfish, the occurrences of tides that speak of the moon. Then, when Ruth starts up for business, Lin learns how to fish. She screams when a line begins to unravel. Ruth laughs and Lin hangs on and pulls. But soon Lin works with her length and graceful, smooth motions. Later she writes her husband about the different ways the people here fish. Trolling. Longlining. Netting. The tall poles and lines of the boats, the lights at the top when they move out or in at night. How once, out at sea, they caught a fish so big they used a winch. She sends him some Kodak pictures Ruth took of her with a fish. She has red eyes in them. He laughs when he sees them later and calls her his demon. He writes back and asks when is his demon coming home.

  “Watch out for the hooks,” Ruth tells her. “They are ruthless and painful to get out if you get caught. The only way is to push them all the way through.”

  When they use the net for some of the salmon coming down from the river, they sit back and wait at the river’s opening. Lin drinks a root beer. They take out the many red salmon from the net. They don’t keep them all. There are other fishers around. It is an easy catch, too easy. They keep enough to eat and sell and for Aurora to smoke.

  “I don’t want to kill them,” Lin says. Ruth is handling a fish that hasn’t given up. “I can’t.”

  “I don’t, either. But one of us has to, so turn around.” Ruth, as soft-hearted as she is, hits each one at the back of the head in just the right place, praying, apologizing, then goes to work as fast as she can. There is much to be done. Fish to be put on ice. To be delivered. Ropes to coil. Lin helps wash the deck afterward. Fore and aft, she writes her husband.

  They go farther out to catch the fish coming down from the north. It is not so easy when they go far out for king salmon that come down. The boat is not easy. It rolls and seems to tumble. Ruth always has to watch the weather, the moon, the tides.

  The two women are easy together, able to be quiet and alone. Ruth keeps a journal and Lin makes sketches. “Those are good,” Ruth tells her, looking at the drawings of the sea, the dark rocks, the precise sketches of salmon.

  At night, far out, there are the lights of phosphorescence, animals of the sea. One night nautilus shells come magically to the surface with their own gleaming. “Look,” Ruth says. They are shining and nearly round in the dark water under the moonlight.

  Lin leans over. “Oh, they are beautiful.”

  It has also grown colder, so that night Ruth says, “Here, use this comforter.” It is soft, filled with down. Lin has never slept so well or felt so safe except that night she remembers when the woman finally put her arms around her in the flower shop. Then, waking, she recalls the night with her grandmother on the boat when she was a girl and the boats were burning, even the little sampans where families and their dogs lived, and she had to leave the old woman in the bright lights and take to land. “Go.” Her grandmother was weary. “Go. You are the new. I am the old. It’s only natural,” said the old woman in the light of many fires and their reflection on water, and it seemed also that the old woman turned to light as Lin ran through the water. The whole world was burning. Lin left, sobbing, wet, but somehow still carrying her fish.

  Sometimes at night she and Ruth talk. Lin, full of memories, begins talking about her father. “All my life they spoke of him, my father. He was a king. Now I find him and he’s a common man.” She thinks for a while. “He’s not even good at that.”

  Ruth laughs. “It’s true.”

  “They always called him a man of beauty, a loved man. Even Thuy Su Linh gave him the prized jewel in all the town. Why? I ask now.”

  The water is seamless tonight and still. It is listening to what she has to say.

  “They say once he even tamed a mean dog. He saved us. I used to think it was because he stayed and he caught fish for food and he worked all hours in the rice fields. But that wasn’t how he saved us.” She sounds so matter-of-fact.

  Ruth doesn’t see the vast expanse of rice, the water in it like a mirror, the people bending, but Lin does. “He said he’d come back. He never did. I remember him. But I expected a different man. The way he used to be.

  “I always waited for him to return. I looked across the burned old forest watching for him. I looked out at the water where the market was. I thought he would step out of every boat or come down any path whistling just before he arrived. Even in the city, I looked for him around every corner.”

  How often Ruth had done the same thing before she was told Thomas was dead. Even after, because she didn’t believe it in her bones. Something in her knew what the army didn’t. She had looked around every turn in the road, watched every door that opened, knowing he was alive somewhere.

  Lin tells how she had traveled by water partway to the city, then had to walk, finally running. “I rode in the back of a truck, behind and under other people, maybe even dead bodies. I don’t know because it was hard to get out from under them. There was always yelling. Somehow, in the confusion, I slipped away.

  “When I left my grandmother, I touched her arm, her hand. She was narrow as a grain after all has been taken from it. ‘Hurry,’ she told me, but I didn’t want to leave her.”

  On the water, Lin’s cheeks are rosy from the sea air, the fog. Her eyes, Ruth realizes now, listening, are still those of a village girl born closed into a small world, a sad girl showing through all the education, the appearance of a young woman with a profession. She was a lost girl, motherless, fatherless, placeless, alone in the midst of turmoil and war. And she was also an old, old woman who had seen and lived too much.

  The next night, as they stand on the boat watching the sea, Lin says to Ruth, weeping, “My mother, she is the dream in my cells, and him, Papa…” She can’t finish her sentence. The word sounds strange to Ruth. “I have felt all my life the blood I come from. Even this place I have always felt. It is like I know it here.

  “On that terrible day he was taken away we all cried. And my father, the old men and women told him stories and sang to him.”

  She can’t help remembering. It has been a long time, but it is only yesterday. “Then when he was gone, they said he was air. He was wind. He went into the sky and blew away. He was in every wind. Maybe my hope was only in my head like a light, incense burning with a prayer to make sure it gets to the sky.

  “Even if Papa went back, he never would have found us. I returned once. The place was nothing but moss-covered ruins.” She recalls that day. There were a few men and women with one leg on the bus, people walking on the road. “Not a sign of us was there, except a once-blue door. Later, I remembered it. It must have been indestructible. He was the wind, even if he now seems like a rock.

  “They took him away. Then there was no one but Old Uncle, nearly blind, and Grandmother and the old people we had to leave behind. There were other children, women, but I don’t remember where they went.” The words fell out of her.

  “We all left because the old man said the government has changed again and this time you have to leave. He said, ‘you.’ Not himself. He stayed behind. Without a word we packed up a few things, tea, rice, a pot. We had to try to live, but the whole world said to me, I am the dying f
ields of poor planters. I am the fallen people, the ruined land, the blackened trees with no leaves.

  “I was afraid to die at first, but here was so much that after a while it didn’t matter. I was also afraid of life. If I felt life too much I would miss it even more when I didn’t have it. I would break like a glass.”

  She remembered her father standing in the fields or paddies working, bent over. He smiled when she brought him a jar of water.

  He caught fish from the river for them to eat. He worked hard and made the field safe from land mines. He was everything. She still remembers the sweaty feel of his clothing, warm, his long black hair and the thrill of being pulled through the air by his arms.

  “I chased the helicopter. I saw him crying as he left.”

  At Witka’s place on the rock, Thomas opens his window, the side where the seals groom and talk and wrap about each other. He has been watching the north where he can still see the fishing boats despite the wall, watching for Ruth and Lin, thinking, She is here. Lin is here. And I am locked in, a key turned somewhere in my heart.

  He sees the Marco Polo when it comes to shore. He knows they will tie up the boat and deliver the fish and return to clean the decks with scrub brushes and mops. They will pull together the floats. Do you do this all the time? Lin will probably ask Ruth or at least wonder. He even knows that. He knows it suddenly, as if he can see them and hear them, as if he is again close to them. He knows they will shower and dress before they come to him.

  This time he is reading. So when they come back, he opens the door. He has opened a few windows. They can smell the sea and feel the air from inside Witka’s place on the dark rock.

  “Where do you live now?” he asks Lin. He has put on a clean shirt.

  She is surprised he has addressed her so directly and suddenly, and her face grows red. “Ho Chi Minh City,” she tells him. “Saigon, they used to say. I work there. I am married now.”

  “Married?” He has shaved. His eyes look surprised at the new name of Saigon, always it surprises him. He didn’t see, as Lin did, how it became a sell-and-buy city so quickly. Saigon. His eyes see far away.

  “Yes. I am a florist, I think you call them here, part of the time, and also an interpreter there for people searching for their loved ones.” And the interpreter in her knows that in their absence something has changed in him. Every night they slept on the boat she thinks he must have dreamed or remembered their past.

  He fixes coffee, letting it drain through a paper towel. His hand shakes when he hands some to Lin. She is beautiful, he thinks. She looks like Ma and she is tall. How did she survive? Someday he will ask.

  She looks at the fish, remembering how she had loved the fish her father gave her. She didn’t tell Ruth that one of the boys with guns threw it out of her hands. The fish lay on the ground, twisting, flopping. She would always remember the eyes of the boy. They were filled with a hatred of life as he stepped on it. And now she thought more, that maybe the boys and men had a fear of life, for to hold it dear and to lose it was a burden to carry, vulnerable as a fish in bottle and water, carried by a little girl in the middle of a war. Maybe it has been that way for her father, too.

  “I almost forgot,” Lin says. She opens the large bag she bought at the airport with a Frida Kahlo face on it, a real prize. “Look! You’re in this painting.” She has postcards of a painting one woman in the village had made, a picture of people working in the rice fields. “It is in a museum now.” She hands several to him, a few to Ruth. Thomas studies it for a long time.

  Lin laughs. “No one knows it is an American there! It’s you, and every time I see it I remember.” It had been their village, their put-together dwellings and the blue door to the shanty where Lin was born.

  Ruth looks at it, too. She is silent. She recognizes him in the painting, though he is different there, his body, his looseness. It is part of the mystery of his disappearance. They sit without talking. But Ruth feels it is like the old days when the traditional people came together. They would sit for days in silence and decisions would be made in that way, knowledge passed, relationships renewed. Now it is like that. In silence, much is said.

  He thinks of Ma. He loved her when he first saw her, even if he never told her or spoke with her. He never knew that she spoke several languages, including Hmong, French, and English. He never heard her speak. She took orders in the make-shift bar and always spoke to the others in her own language.

  Then one day he said, thinking she didn’t understand English, “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve seen. You are like a candle burning. You are a woman I would like to carry over the mud when it rains. You are a woman I would sing to.”

  She said nothing. But the next time she saw him, she said, “There’s a mud puddle outside.” She smiled and put down his glass and ashtray and he carried her across the mud.

  It was the beginning of Lin.

  She also made shoes, the finest ever seen, the most comfortable, and people came to her from other villages to have their shoes repaired. On the day of her funeral, that was all they could say except that she had made the shoes waterproof by using the sap of plants no longer there after the war, long since bombed.

  He doesn’t know that Lin learned the same languages, that she had gone secretly to school at night when it was against the law. And the new people would come to the flower shop where Lin stayed to lecture and be certain they were all reformed. “Yes, yes,” the old man would say. “Our daughter is shy. She doesn’t talk.” But at night she learned to read. And as an adult she has just translated her first book, but she doesn’t tell them.

  So, Thomas thinks, she has gone to Ho Chi Minh City. Ha, the world has changed. Life is always changing. He puts his hand on her arm, his fingertips, really, lightly. She puts her hand over his. She looks down, though, suddenly shy. Something has come to fullness.

  At Aurora’s, Lin falls asleep that night thinking of home, of her husband. Gesturing, the husband had said to Lin one day after she was learning to read in English, “You win the prize. We give you a certificate, a pen, a flashlight so you can read in the dark when the generator stops!”

  Lin laughed at how well he knew her, except that she never kept it dark, always a candle.

  “And paper, too?” Lin asked.

  “Anything.” He pulled her head forward. She let him. “You should write our stories,” he whispered, and she put her hand over the missing ear. “Does it hurt?”

  “Always.”

  Now she looks forward to seeing him again. She sees him standing at the door in the late day, greeting her in the brilliant color of their world. She sees him at their little altar, bowing to the ancestors and the gods of compassion that they also pray are real and true. She knows he once denounced them, but a man has to believe in something.

  Then the day comes when Lin must leave. Ruth stands beside the door of the rented car. “Come back.”

  “I will.” Thomas comes walking. Lin sees the village behind him as if in a photograph. She will remember. She gets out to meet her father.

  The next week Thomas is gone. Ruth looks around his place and notices his clothing missing. The fish is there alone and unfed. Damn it! Ruth thinks. She takes it to the small lake at the edge of the forest to turn it loose. It is not a long drive. And she marvels that after the drought the plants have returned and some are blooming. The sweet smell finds its way to her. The water has other fish in it, even other goldfish and koi, as if they had gone under the mud and waited the return of water. The grasses are there, the marshy beauty where birds nest.

  She carries the fishbowl in her hands, walking carefully and talking to this fish Lin sang over. “You will grow and become large. You should see the others in the lake. There are many.” The lake, really a large pond, is calm and surrounded by large trees. Green plants at the bottom. Ruth empties the bowl, knowing she will see the fish some days coming, red, to the surface. Ruth says, “Look, you are so beautiful.”

  From behind h
er a man’s voice says, “Do you always talk to fish?”

  She stands up quickly, embarrassed. Dick Russell is smiling at her.

  “Yes, always. It’s how I catch them on the boat.”

  “I figured that.” He smiles at her.

  “Did you catch the fire-starters?”

  “It turned out to be easy. One was burned and hospitalized up in Layton. His friend complained about his ruined jacket. Say, do you eat?”

  She thinks he means she’s lost weight. Then says, “I think I’ve fallen for that one before. Yes.” She laughs, suddenly shy. “I eat a lot.”

  “Good, then let’s go get some dinner.”

  HOME

  When Lin returns home, her husband greets her. She holds him and won’t let go of his thin shoulders, feeling with her hands the rib cage in the back. It’s night and he takes her home from the airport.

  When they reach home she leans into him. A light rain begins. “It’s too soon to tell. But I think he’s coming here.” Inside, she opens her suitcase. “Here, a present for you.” It is a mask carved of wood with raffia hair, a perfect face, painted with color. “It was made by my grandfather.”

  She also has a carved wolf, yellow cedar. It is becoming the moon and the moon is becoming a whale. He studies the wolf, not the mask. “Transformation,” he says. “That is your father.”

  He pulls her to the bed. “You must be tired. I won’t bother you tonight.” He kisses her stomach. “But watch out!”

  That night she doesn’t keep a light on. She has new ghosts, but they are far away.

  She laughs just before falling asleep. During the night she holds on to him as if he will disappear. She dreams a helicopter, black as an insect, will come and take him away. She dreams he leaps out before it gets high enough to keep him in.