by Linda Hogan
“At the end, they dropped us outside the war zone. I had a map. It was all one fiery lie. I kept telling the pilot, Look, look where we are. We aren’t even supposed to be here. I kept telling him we were off course.”
She knew his love of maps, how he could follow them.
Then he is silent again. She thinks of how he used to show her the lines of demarcation, the legend, the way he used to show her sea monsters and how they thought California was an island.
“That was why you stayed all those years.”
He only nods, swallows.
Suddenly Thomas seems to grow small. Bent.
“You didn’t really have to tell me.” She sounds tired. “I already figured it out. I know what happened. I had years to think about it and then when she came, Lin told me more. You saved a village there.” She even sees them, the dirty American men, desperate, sweating, the way they moved, even their thinking. She knows how they approached the people. She sees the people about to be in a trench, some waiting to die while the men take a smoke break. The unborn Lin is an egg inside a woman about to be stabbed in the vagina. She loves Lin. She loves that Lin did not become a casualty.
She thinks of her own lone pregnancy. She doesn’t hate what he did. If she hates, she hates the men who sign the papers. On their own land, too. She thinks, I am capable of hatred. Suffering is our history. Oh yes, there is singing down by the water, dancing, and joy some nights. As if it is a little gift wrapped in stars to make up for all the rest.
“I have practiced now, like Witka. I have gone beneath the water. I have learned to stop breathing.”
“I know.”
He looks at her. “What do you mean, you know?”
“I followed you to be certain you wouldn’t drown. But you did, didn’t you?”
She gets up and turns on the lights. Now it seems darker out. He says, “I loved you. I loved them. I loved. I tell myself that is what matters.”
“It is.”
“And at the end I loved Marco. No, I loved him before then. When I first saw him. I was a coward. I should have gone over and hugged him. But I talked to him on the boat. He was beautiful. He was one of us. An A’atsika.”
“Yes. He was.”
She’d been so proud of him, to see him paddle, to see his strength and hear his voice singing the songs. “If you’d only known. And the way he moved.”
She stands at the table, as if waiting for Marco to arrive.
She hears the splash of oars in water. The voices leave with him.
Thomas paddles on from there out to the white house people. He paddles, staying close to shore at first, passing away from Ruth’s boat. Along the way he stops. He feels it in his muscles, sinew, where things meet in the body. It hurts at first. Not just tendons, but whole histories. He doesn’t hear them speaking, but he follows what they tell him to do, as if now he, too, hears the voices inside him.
It is nearly morning. The houses are white again, now from rains and mist, but that doesn’t mean that grief has disappeared. It has more staying power than weather. The people are busy. A man sings in a crack of light from atop a black rock, as if he were inside a clamshell. He stands with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed and he doesn’t lose his balance. Thomas is invisible in the night, but it is as if the man is singing Thomas toward him, as if the voice leaves the man’s body, travels outward, and is a path to their world. Thomas follows. His back and arms hurt, but he paddles and he closes his eyes and follows the voice. When he opens his eyes, two women are standing in the water, ready to pull his canoe in.
“Look,” one says. “It’s one of the old canoes.”
He thinks it must be very late. He is surprised they are awake because he doesn’t realize how long it has taken him to arrive, but they knew the man with many voices was coming. They summoned him. One has her hair down, gray and disheveled. The other is dressed and tidy. “Well, father of Marco, grandson of Witka, Thomas Just,” she says formally. “So.”
On land one woman with twine for hair steps toward him. She says to his body, “Be quiet, you are driving me crazy,” and the voices subside. He feels calm and even laughs.
Ferns grow there in that place as if it is the first moment of their universe. His bones are an eye through which the spirit is looking.
The people are waiting, their faces like open questions. No, Thomas thinks, they are answers to questions not yet even asked.
They bring him inside into the old warmth and he sees the stones carved with spirals. A fire burns. He sees animals in the flames, as if he has walked into another world. He watches the fire. Sea animals. A red otter, an orange seal. Land animals, the forest deer coming from the woods where they hide. A candle burns.
Old as some of them are, the people are still alive in the body, laughing, talking, sweating. They are people who lived through the starving times, the treaty-making times. And then they watched the last humiliating kill of the whale.
And then they were completely silent, even the man with the hurt foot.
They live near the wall. A stone wall. It has a whale carved into it and the whale is giving birth to a human. It is their ancestor. There are no names of humans on the wall. Few people know it is there. Even fewer are allowed to go there. When Thomas was a boy the old ones took Ruth and him to that stone wall and told them about the mother of life and all that followed. After the whale, the octopus in all its intelligence was next in the line of creation, then the salmon, Ruth’s clan; a spiral, and then the other constellations.
They have already made a place for him as if they knew he’d arrive. But first they set down a cup of coffee. He sits on a stone which is warm from the fire. “Starbucks,” the old woman says.
He smiles at her. “Thank you.” He thinks it’s funny and he sips the coffee, trying not to laugh.
“They tell me you put up a wall,” she says.
“I have taken it down and burned the wood.”
“Good. You have gained some weight since your return. That’s good. I knew your grandfather. I was younger than he was, of course. You are like him. He was always so quiet.”
Thomas only nods. Inside himself the voices have stopped. He feels clear. It is right that he is there.
As if responding to his thoughts, she says, “We called you here. This is your home. You were born here. Did you know that? It was the time of the octopus. Then your mother went back across to be with her mother and she showed you to that octopus. It’s your clan, you know. There are not many left. But we delivered you. And boy, what a head of hair you had, and we all said, ‘He’s so big!’ We love you, son. This is your home. You came back like the salmon come back. We wanted you. We sang for you. We called for you. That is why you came.”
The old singing man has white hair pulled back. “You will be here for a while.” Outside the seagulls were waking and beginning to comb the shores. “You are going to learn. The songs. You are going to gain strength. Here, eat this.” They place a meal of acorn mush before him.
The next morning, the man says, “Come.”
Thomas follows.
They go over the dark rocks behind their houses to the freshwater pools in the rocks and bathe, the wrinkled old dry darkness of the older man and the almost newness of Thomas.
Then, afterward, they sit in silent council, meeting together for a long time, and much is said through the silence, more than all the voices inside him could have said.
As it has turned out, there is another plan to go whaling. Thomas doesn’t know it.
Although Dwight had gone away for a while, to live up in Washington with a cousin, he had his friends and family still at Dark River and they made plans, connived and bargained with people from other places, other countries, other monies.
Dwight had covered his tracks. They were mere footprints at the edge of the ocean, filling in with water and disappearing, but they were there nonetheless. Though his house had fallen and his wife had left him and he had become something of an enemy to
everyone, he only had to give it time. He only had to stay distant for a while. Everything blows over there. Everything is forgotten, at least on the surface, as if the people learned amnesia in order to survive. And so, he lets it pass over, like a fast hard wind across their bay. Then he will go back and start again, and they will whale.
In the meantime, there is a girl to consider. She lives in the apartment downstairs. He met her when she came to the door to complain about the noise. “Ho,” he said. “We are Indians. We drum and sing and dance. Come in.” She looked around, seeing they were all men, and said, “No, I have company, but maybe another time.” He thought maybe she would have come in if they were white men, but then thought, No, she wouldn’t. This is the city. She wouldn’t feel safe. At home the women sit and talk to the drunks that live in the driftwood at the beach. The men tell them the same stories over and over. “I keep hearing the women and children crying,” that’s what the old drunk vet, Smith, who lived on the beach, told Ruth every time she saw him, Ruth good enough to take him food and coats, sometimes even beer. Smith Tiny was the son of a good man, the grandson of a great one. A mountain had been named for him. Once.
Smith’s words are the reason Ruth doesn’t blame Thomas for anything he might have done, even though she knows he blames himself.
Thomas remains at the white house place. His bed is near the fire and during the night he watches the flames, the animals swimming in them, the way they billow and flow. Sometimes they are like the waves of morning water he crosses over with the elders, singing as he paddles.
Over time, Thomas makes himself at home. He is helpful to the old people. He gathers wood. He splits wood. He lifts stones and moves them to where the elders can better see the water. He fishes for them. He takes their dinghy out and catches the daily supply. “You better not spoil us,” says the man with his missing teeth, laughing. “Then we will forget how to take care of ourselves.” And so the man goes with him, and the women clean the fish. But Thomas doesn’t know that he will ever leave.
He says little. They don’t care. He has come to them and now he is there paddling the ancient cedar canoe, he is singing at night around the fire on the beach. He is sometimes dizzy and falling from the movement of the earth. This is all good.
The day of tranquillity is a day he will never forget because this day he hears the ocean. He hears the seabirds. He is free because of truth. He wakes alive, as if something is happening in his life, something unknown. He wakes up and he is not a halfhearted man and he can’t remember why he wakes this way, except that he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place. The ocean is peaceful, too, on this day, and he stands at Old Point and looks out at the light of morning, then with the excitement of a young man he puts on his boots and he walks from the rocks to the beach and he looks in the black stone for the creatures again. It is a still day, everything silent. Even the wind isn’t blowing. There is just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe.
THE MAN WHO KILLED THE WHALE
After that Thomas fasts. He scrubs himself with cedar boughs, scratching his skin. Thomas prays. He thinks of the story from the north about the whale that lived in the lake. It was a tiny whale. It gave the first hunter instructions on hunting and other details of living a good life. He places on the bow of the canoe an eagle feather and it does give him the power of wings to move through water, arms strong as wings, as if flying.
He goes into the water like his grandfather when women wore woven grass earrings and hats and shells and they all wrapped themselves in blankets. The man who killed the whale now holds his breath again.
Thomas is in the place where there is the only reef, in this place just before it drops down into the depths. And there is sand blowing like a storm in the water, which isn’t clear. Even so he keeps his eyes open and sees the fish that remain and the starfish hanging on like purple and orange hands to the rocks and the feelers of other creatures, maybe crabs taking a measure as if they can tell things by inches or feet, fin or tail. Then he sees a young octopus float by, silken, one-eyed, beautiful, and he moves toward it, but it changes color to white and vanishes so quickly into the smallest place in the reef between rocks.
In all the green beauty Thomas recalls his purpose before he needs to rise and take a breath and he listens to the water because he doesn’t know how Witka determined what needed to be done in the thickets of seaweed or the forest of swaying kelp and the school of silver fish all in a circle beside him, a marvel of fish, he hears the sounds of all the life in water, the clicks and ticking, and for a while time changes. It seems he was there listening, hearing what almost amounted to words and now he no longer needs to breathe. He hears a low rumble, the kind Ruth describes, the low rumble of a whale and it comes to him and it looks at him with its wise old eye and he knows everything in that gaze. He knows how small a human is, not in size, but in other ways. As he rises to the surface, it helps him, pushes him slowly and it exhales a breath as he surfaces, too, gasping for air. For a while he catches his breath, choking, the upper world reeling around him. The whale leaves. He is suddenly cold and aware of it and then he swims in a ways, floating with the current until he is butted up against the sand of the near shore and he stands, seaweed in his hair, suddenly colder, and he walks, no, he limps with the cold and his old injury no one had seen—one of his injuries—and with everything reeling around him still. He comes out of the water and sits down on the beach where things meet in the world between sea and land. Finally, with as much dignity as a bedeviled wet man with sticks in his hair and sand on his flesh can summon, he goes indoors and drinks hot water and later he meets with the people who are still waiting patiently even though it has started to mist outside and is growing chilly, and he says, “We are going to be better people. That is our job now. We are going to be good people. The ocean says we are not going to kill the whales until some year when it may be right. They are our mothers. They are our grandmothers. It is our job to care for them.” Then he sings an old whale song he has never learned. He looks toward the ocean, and the song, it comes to him from out of a hole opened in time. He sings it, a little embarrassed at first, then growing stronger in voice.
“We are going to become better people.”
“I’ve heard that song before,” one old woman says later. It was so long ago she can’t remember where exactly except she thinks it was her own grandmother’s song, but then again it could have been Witka who sang it or maybe the whole village back when it was just a little place with old buildings that were dark from the sea spray and rain and time.
Thomas knows there is a volcano out in the ocean. All the world is changing and the ground is always moving. He feels it, the ocean change, the sea change, shifting life. He is part of it. They all are and he sees Ruth smile at him like she is still the girl he once knew, a beautiful smile full of words.
The morning light is brightening and Thomas wonders when the first sand was created from the wash of water on the mountains, or the first seabird grew feathers and wings, or the first whale with inner legs walked on earth then turned back to the water. He wishes he knew the real name of the world. The beach birds walk away and the water fills their prints and even the poor men who live on the beach feel rich today as if the sea breathes and it is the exhalation of a conquered world and it is being breathed away and the spirit of the place is breathed back in and they are part of it all now, it is part of them.
So now the other men have said they will go to join the other paddling nations. There is the announcement. “Ho, we go to strengthen ourselves, not to kill a whale.”
Thomas walks into the water like his grandfather, pushing a canoe.
The women watch. They are thinking it is a lie. They are waiting to see if the men are really going to kill a whale. There are no weapons to speak of, none that they can see, but they are suspicious now anyway. They wait to see what is the truth. Now, if they want to hunt, the women, even
those who had been afraid to speak against their men, will fight them. All the wives and mothers watch and are wary. After all, they are people of the whale and this is history.
Even the man who sells his sometimes crooked homemade chairs to the tourists is on the beach, in the glint of light, watching the men disappear.
The endless vistas of water are shimmering and for a moment Thomas sees the women of Vietnam floating above the streets of the city in their cheongsams. He sees his daughter of flowers, Lin. He sees her surrounded by orchids and lotus blossoms, the sweet perfume of her life, but he doesn’t know how he sees this far.
He doesn’t see the old women in dresses of red with woven grass earrings and hats and shells, but they are there.
They live in a land where even at noon there are shadows. Thomas had been strengthened. Now his arms are firm, his legs are able to push against the side of the canoe, strong and capable. He is teaching the men to paddle. To paddle and to sing their names. He takes them out in the canoe. Men he has known. This time the men are quiet. He thinks they are all humble. But even at noon, they go out without telling anyone their plans. Thomas has a feeling of uncertainty about the endeavor, but he wants to practice paddling, to make a group of men who will go with the other tribes who have avoided them since their hunt, to journey the ocean north and soon to even travel at night by the old astronomy, by stars the old people know. They can stop at all the villages and feast and rest and make friends.
The others join him and drag the canoe into water. It is an older one, not as old as the ones over at the white houses, but old cedar and he is thinking how hard it was for his ancestors to bring in the large fish of any kind with these canoes, let alone a whale. They walk into the water with it and when they sit in it, he pushes it out. Then they begin, awkwardly, to paddle. He paddles the hardest as he looks at the beauty of the water, looking into it, thinking he would see the face so like his, Marco’s, looking back at him, looking up. We are not the fallen, he thinks. We are suspended and we can take this turn and rise.