People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  Time passed even if it didn’t seem to. He was sitting now. By then the doctor was there. “They say that a lot, you survivors. Did you know that? But your records say you already told the doctors. They told you that what you did was right by military law. The simple rules of engagement. But it was common then, you know. It also says you had a head injury.”

  “But I did it. I knew what I was doing. They were going to kill innocent people. I left my own tags there so everyone would think I was dead, too. I ran away. I didn’t go home. I couldn’t. It was a choice, don’t you see?”

  The two looked at each other. One of them said, “Well, maybe you weren’t wrong. The war is over, son. We have to let the past rest. Also, in my book you did the right thing. Get up. Walk out that door. Walk down those steps. Cross the street. Go home. The war is over. You don’t have to go on trial. You don’t have to give back your medals.”

  “I don’t want them. The past doesn’t rest. They were smoking dope, they were killing the people’s pigs, they were planting land mines all around the place, killing innocent people. They shot at anything. The…cries, they were going to kill children. Rape and kill them. I looked at their faces. I looked at the children. I turned and shot them. There wasn’t even a look of surprise on their faces. They weren’t even that clear. I hated them. I hate myself.”

  “You only won this war if you stayed alive. You should have left well enough alone. You’re more a hero in my book. Sir, is there anyone we can call to come get you?”

  “No. But I’m trying to tell you I don’t want the medals. They hurt my hands to touch them. They are hot. Like fire.”

  “You are free to go, Sergeant Just.” He salutes.

  He didn’t know what he expected, but this encounter was as meaningless as the men who left their medals at The Wall to make a statement. Still, he left the medals, all of them, and walked away, merely walked away. Outside, looking at the Potomoc, he wondered what Indian word the river name came from, where the tribe lived.

  THE DAY OF TRANQUILLITY

  He is a numb man. Flying back, almost home in the evening, he looks for whales in the ocean before the plane reaches San Francisco. He remembers when the whales used to pass by in great numbers. He would watch one, its great shining side, the eye with its old intelligence, the gentleness of it in the body covered with barnacle life and sea creatures. It was loved by his people. It was a planet. When they killed it, he thinks perhaps they killed a planet in its universe of water.

  The next day he walks from the bus, wrapped in fog. He has left a part of himself behind. There are spiritual requirements to make up for all he has done. There are those that require offerings to the ancestors. You offer food, your body, your service, your heart to open and fill. Sometimes you go up to the rocks that are carved with humans being born of the whales.

  His ache is so great he would like to harm it by harming himself. They don’t want that, the old ones, the ancient ones. This requirement is not that of Thomas Witka Just. It may be dark at times but the ancients live in a lightness, lighter than dust in air. They want him to open the pathway into the future, not to fast or starve or harm any part of himself but to be whole and nourished. They are there to take his human hand, its lines, its dark skin with pale scars from a never-won war, not that winning would ever have made a difference. In their world, there is only the hand to take, the human hand, to slide through time along its mysterious pathway sometimes called memory, sometimes called feeling. They travel through ancient knowledge and the movement of mountains, winds familiar and singing, and through the sweet water. He knows they can take him to the shoals on the other side of his life even if he feels lost. Or they can take him seaward, farther than a man can see or know, that’s where the grasp of their hands lead. They can take you to the green mosses, or to places where creatures cling to granite walls above the ocean. Oh listen, the seagulls call, and the sound of washing water comes to earth. In his raw condition, he could break open and a new man filled with beauty would be there as if from a cocoon, soft and new, shining. The dead heart falls away and there is a new one, alive and beating.

  He knows the horrors in his body will be there the rest of his life if he doesn’t heal them. Maybe even then they might remain, but he would see them differently. For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosion of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses.

  The fog has fallen the night before and now its hand covers their world. Ruth watches it lift a finger and a man walks out of the fog, a ghost becoming real, taking on a body. Thomas comes to Aurora’s door. Ruth stands behind the door, feeling him, not answering. She can feel his condition and it is full of voices. She hears them talking. Maybe they mumble, or maybe they are all talking at the same time, but she thinks it is A’atsika they speak and it makes a chill rise up her spine to hear a man’s body speak so. She doesn’t let him in. It is not the right time for them to meet and face one another.

  Aurora watches from the roadway and stops and waits for Thomas to leave her front door.

  Inside, she asks Ruth, “Why didn’t you let him in?”

  “It didn’t feel right.”

  “There’s water on the front step. Where did it come from?’

  “Maybe it rained.”

  “I don’t know. I was out here and it didn’t rain.” And then she tells again about the octopus. Ruth has heard it before but she doesn’t tell her mother about the Rain Priest and the octopus old Gus saw leaving her boat when it was stranded far away out there in the water. She just listens and knows the water has fallen from Thomas’s body. It is all of his uncried tears.

  That night Ruth loads up the Zodiac with things she needs for the boat and makes her dark way out through the water, home to her Marco Polo, and as she travels the water and sees her boat it is a strange presence rocking there in the fog but the wind is rising and so the trees on the nearby shore are moving and if she could hear them, they would be creaking.

  She knows it is only a matter of time before Thomas will want to speak with her some more. She could hear that, not just in his own words but in the many voices that emanated from him where he stood. He was waiting for something to open, but it wasn’t the door. Nor was it her.

  A few days later he comes to her on the boat. She’s tired. She sold all her fish early and the price was too low. She is cleaning the decks. But she stands and she watches him.

  This time his face is relaxed, his eyes not haunted. Our brave people, she thinks when she sees his face in the light and shadows. We have continued.

  She rinses herself off with the hose and she invites him in and looks him over as she wraps her brown shawl about her and combs her wet hair. She dries her face and waits, watching him from where she stands beside the stove. He sits down, but then he changes his mind and he looks at Ruth and gets up and holds her, standing behind her. She is wrapped up in warmth, her hair down over the brown wrap, a black river of hair that could flow on out to the ocean. For Thomas, it all passes through his heart again. Remembering. Then he begins to sob. He thinks, And I’m a grown man, and she is thinking, Thank God, stepping out of his hold and turning to him. The boat is moving sideways and back. At last, at long last, the tears are there for him. She wept for many years. Now it is his time. She looks at him. She brushes hair back from his face even though none is there, as if he is her son, or as if they are children again and his mother has just died on the road, in the car, the father drinking, the other car, all the people in it. It was in the terrible times and his father, the man of artistic gifts, so highly treasured, the mask-maker, was never the same, yet he was alive. Still sometimes
he made spirit faces, transformations.

  Together they sit and look back at the green hills. They both remember how one generation took down a forest. They don’t even need to say it. Thomas, who left his uniform behind in DC, says, “I have to think. How am I going to be remembered in the end?”

  “What are you going to be remembered as?”

  “What am I going to do? I’m changing history now. I am going to be remembered as the man who could kill but doesn’t. As the man who one day said I’m going to be like the old people, I’m going to be like the ancestors. If I ever have to kill a whale I will prepare for a year. I will have good thoughts. I will love the whale.

  “I was wrong about so many things,” Thomas says.

  She feels for him. “I know. Shh. Oh, look out at the water, Tom.” It is beautiful shades of color, worked by the sun and water.

  “I thought Marco wasn’t my son. For a long time I thought that. I can’t forgive myself for that. I couldn’t even come home. I went to San Francisco. I found a place. Remember Van Gogh’s room, the one we used to look at in the picture I had? It was like that. That’s why I moved there. And it was cheap.”

  He has traveled away from the subject. “Anyway, I came home and I went to look up the date of Marco’s birth.”

  “Yeah. I know. The girl at records told me. Here.” She pours him coffee, thinking maybe he’d been drinking with “the boys,” as she’s always called them. She doesn’t smell alcohol, but then suddenly she’s angry. She remembers the evening he came to the meeting, her excitement, seeing him finally, after all the lost and gone years, the years she had waited for him, then grieved him, that night telling him where Marco was, pointing out their son to him so he could at least love the young man, if he did not love her all those years.

  “You’re right. You’ve been wrong and you are a bastard.” But she’s not yelling, just stating what sounds true. “One hell of a bastard.”

  “It was Dwight. That’s what he told me. We met at a landing strip in Da Nang and he said you were with my father.”

  “Yes. It’s always him, isn’t it? It was Dwight who killed my son. Ours. I feel it. I know it every time I have to look at him.” She becomes fierce. “Everything was always Dwight. He was jealous of you. Always. First he wanted what you had. He wanted to be you. Later he wanted what Marco had because you know what your son had? Marco had the old ways. The thing is, Dwight could have had them if he’d tried, if he could have given up some few, meaningless things. You could have them even now. The old people want us to learn and know.

  “And it was your father. He tried to rape me. Dwight and some of the guys walked by and they could have stopped it. I cried out for help. They were drunk. They didn’t do anything. I was already pregnant. I said, Help me, and they didn’t do a thing. I fought your father off. I attacked him with all I could muster.”

  “Jesus.” Thomas is quiet, thinking of his father, but he is also a man possessed by his own offenses. He thinks of Dwight lying again. Then he remembers. He takes Dwight’s ring out of his pocket. “Here. It’s his ring. Just as Milton described it.” It makes a hollow sound when he drops it on the table. “We can go to the police.”

  She looks at him long and hard. She wishes he would leave. He didn’t even care about what his father had done. But then she turns to the ring. “Which police? The tribal police? The town? The FBI? Our word supported only by a retarded boy and everyone out there hating us for killing the whale? This whole part of America hates us. Even our children are attacked in school. Who is going to care about a dead A’atsika who was whaling? Me with only a mother’s feeling and you with something you didn’t even see?”

  “Yes, but Dwight knows I know.”

  Thomas still fails to see that sometimes there isn’t justice, that the world still is not one made up of black and white, right and wrong. How could he have survived a war, she wonders, without knowing that zone of gray, of being in between, of sitting on the border between lies and half-truths, between the goodness of some and the evil of others?

  “Nothing is ever finished,” he says.

  “What does that mean?” She’s almost sarcastic. “Some things are finished. Gone. Done.”

  “I don’t know what it means. It is some kind of riddle of being human, being a man.”

  She sits down. “Okay. Do it. Get Milton to testify. Between the two of us we have a history of Dwight’s betrayals, including the death of whales, the stealing of tribal funds, his lies.” She knows it is futile, but at least Dwight would have to sweat it out.

  “It’s even in the fact that Marco said no that day.”

  She is silent, taking it in, taking him in. Sometimes she wakes up thinking Marco is alive. She talks to him out loud in the floating darkness. She tells him, “Good morning,” or “Oh, look at the whales pass by.” But now she looks at Thomas in wonder. “He said no? You mean about killing the whale?”

  In the long silence that follows, Thomas thinks about how, with surprise, he could have been the first to fire a shot and he blamed it on history, his history, and he hated himself for it, but that day it was like war all over again, the copter above, the men in the boat yelling, the Coast Guard boat, the excitement akin to fear. He remembers the men, them firing, too, the barrage, the sound, the whale coming to them in its pain from somewhere it didn’t know, to them instead of away in its last fight, larger than they could have thought even though it was just a small one, moving the boat, and then it turned in its bleeding agony and the canoe was tossed like a stick and the Coast Guard rushed in with all the noise and yelling. The confusion, everyone with a different focus. Some trying to get the whale up from its descent down to the bottom of the ocean with lungs full of water, some trying to find the men who were lost in the water. Yet for most, the focus was on the whale, even with water all around them, the men trying to get out of water, afraid of the whale, of the great waves created by it and the Coast Guard boat, the spray of blood on them all.

  “The thing was, he didn’t want to kill the whale. It was friendly, he said. It was timid. It was young. the People taught him well. And then, Goddamn me, Ruth, I fired and we all fired. I had my own brother in my hand, that’s what we called it, an M16. Hell, I’m surprised anything was left of the poor creature. It was like war all over again, and we were warriors, only then he tried to stop the men even if it was too late and the canoe overturned. I did stop them. In the war, at least. Then on the water.” He is silent, mulling it over while she doesn’t know what to think of this man she once knew so well, after just forgiving him everything. “Maybe I wanted to be Witka. I came back to prove something. That I could be one of us. But in truth, he was us. He was Witka. But how I wanted. How I yearned. I longed for something.”

  She stands, waiting for this man to shut up and leave. He had gone against her own son. Then Dwight had killed the boy.

  She has no idea what is on his mind. She just sees his expression. She puts her hand on his. The boat slowly rocks. “Thomas.” Again she speaks, “Thomas?”

  He doesn’t realize how his own face looks. They are quiet awhile. Then she says, “You should leave now.”

  “What?”

  “You went against Marco. My son. Ours. How can you come here to me? How could you have touched me!”

  He looks at her wide-open eyes, the flecks of red in them. “Ruth, you are my only family.”

  “I’m not. And Thomas, I am not coming back to you if that is what is on your mind.” Her eyes are clear, disarming, as if she sees what he sees, knows what he knows. It’s not about the whale. Not even about Marco.

  He looks down. “I know it. I didn’t expect you to. That’s not why I came.”

  In spite of it all, she closes her hand around his, caressing it, the familiar hand she has known all her life, then stops herself. “There are all the years, the lies. The times I’ve had no money. I went to the army and they said our marriage didn’t exist. It wasn’t even on the record. There were times when there we
re no fish, no jobs, and you were gone. And now I want you to go.”

  He sees her dark eyes fill with tears. They come from nowhere that can be explained by anything but feeling. They come from everywhere, like the rain. “Ruth, I ran away from you. I never even asked for an explanation for anything. I never gave one. I just ran. From everything.”

  “You ran out of our lives.”

  “No, really, I fell over the edge.” Suddenly he wants to explain everything to her.

  He looks at her. “You must hate me.”

  The darkness is lowering itself outside. Rain. Ocean. Storm. Evening. He sees the swaying of things underwater, how the fish hold their own in it and how he can’t hold his own in still air.

  “I do.”

  “I had to stay. I couldn’t come home in the condition I was in. War is another world. Hell, Ruth, it’s another universe. It’s like one of those Brueghel paintings we’d look at.” He puts his head in his hands. “I couldn’t come home to you like that. Even now, after all these years, I can’t explain it, the feeling. Then…” He pauses, looking out the window as if he’d find answers in the darkness where they sometimes live. “It was all lies. You know? The boys didn’t even know what a communist was or why we fought them. And they were scared at first, thinking everyone was a communist. Then something else took over. They’d shoot at anyone or anything. The first night I was there I dropped down so scared I peed myself. I saw a beautiful forest. Suddenly the forest was gone. What about a little human?”

  There are limits to what he can say.

  But she hears the voices begin in him again.

  “I am sorry to be a man,” he says. “I am sorry to be a human being. I used to think it was other people. But I am one of them. I became one. I even killed Americans. I had to.”

  She has thought often about being a soldier. She thinks she would have killed herself on her first day in war just to have it over with.