People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  They are traveling to the old village and the songs come to his voice. He sings. The water is like mother-of-pearl. The men smelling like men, the sea smelling like sea. He sings.

  “That’s good,” says Dimitri.” That song, I sort of remember it.”

  As for Thomas, he is whole. His mind, his heart, his being, all of him is in the paddles, the canoe, the water, and his song, too. He wants to live in the right way with the people, so he hasn’t said anything about Dwight coming back for this journey. He saw him come, but they were going to be better people and so he had decided to say nothing. Dwight was looking for this path, too, and he was part of them. Maybe forgiveness exists for all their deeds and the actions of humans, but he can’t stop thinking that Dwight probably killed his son. He couldn’t prove it. There was so much happening, the canoe overturning, the confusion. Someone saw it, he is sure—someone besides Milton. But it is so hard with the conquered, having no one but each other. How much they want to thrive and watch the life grow back, and also how much they want what the conquerors have, long journeys to beaches and hotels, good cars, better boots, and then they want the other, longer journeys where they imagine the ocean and recall the constellations that guided their ancestors. Thomas has now become something else, not one of the conquered any longer but whatever was deep in him all along and precious as if it, too, crossed the water, the old world new in him, yet old.

  They are trying to be The People, he thinks as they lose sight of the shore and head north. But Thomas is there with the games god can play on men. He feels the force of it hit before he even hears the shot. He sees Dwight with the pistol. He hasn’t even finished the song when he falls backward as if through a door without a room, an anchor tossed down. He is still taken by the beauty of the world as he ages suddenly. His hair already is whitening with the salt. The spirit bones are all moving inside him. Dwight thinks, I killed him instantly. Thomas is thinking, Ha, there is no death.

  His eyes see the crimson dresses of red all around him now and what hasn’t existed for a long time is there again, the constellations, the human portions of water, the rapid waves soothing the cells, oh, a new world, one of changes, full and potent, and when he looks back everything, everyone but the spirits has disappeared.

  And he knows the others will come to them, that they know his decision, that they know what he said about the kind of people they were becoming. Cedar will be brought, feathers, even flowers in the canoes. The crimson dresses come closer until they stand around him in the water, flowing the way blood does.

  Out in the water the men are silent.

  In water he, Thomas, sees above his head the points of the sea shining, the frothing water. At death, he feels, but doesn’t see, all those moments of the past, beautiful and terrible. His senses are awake. He remembers even the unseen, the sweat of labor and love, the taste of the salmon from the river, hears the songs of the ocean, the loved ones singing, smells the garden in the first of spring, the green sprouts, he feels the cool taste of something he can’t name, the sweetness and the physicality of the bending and working in the rice fields.

  STIRRINGS UNDERNEATH

  Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest.

  The red dresses he saw may have been his own blood growing, blooming about him in the water. But if he was too far from shore to see the women with his human eyes, there are other ways of seeing. And when they hear there was an accident, the women dressed in red dresses with grass belts and woven earrings and hats sit down in the sand, dismayed that things had once again gone so wrong. So do the women in jeans and T-shirts. Ruth falls, sinks down, with her face against the sand, sand in her hair, weeping. “Oh, what will ever help us now?” says Wilma. “We are beyond it. How could this have happened? It’s like evil has been living with us.” Even the way they walk. Even the darkness around them. There is evil in the world. It takes the shape of humans. Who want something small. Who want to distinguish themselves. Who want power to make decisions. Who think they want to change things. Who want their own ends. It took the shape of the invaders. It took the shape of the whalers. The men who killed things here. The women who didn’t turn away from them. The women who fed them and didn’t say, We are your hearts. We are your conscience.

  Nevertheless, like Jonah in the book written by many men who heard the voices of their own gods, he washed up out of the belly of the Great Mysterious that held him, washed up to the old white houses, the houses that sat back from the shore made of lava and rock worn by centuries into sand, the place where the whale gave birth to the human and it was writ into stone, like a commandment, back up behind the houses of the old people.

  There was surge and foam of ocean, the waves that rise over a mere human in all their greatness, and he washed up the way most alive men would gasp for a breath or double over in pain. But did he come ashore without breath and did they find the old person who revived him, the one, it was said, who brought back the dead? It may have been the same one who lobbied for the Rain Priest to come to them during the drought. If so, it would have been kept a secret. Also, others would have feared a man or woman with such great power and connections.

  Perhaps Thomas had been enfolded by the large old octopus that appeared at his birth, and he was taken down for a time to its own magical world of shining things beneath the sea, its walled world with the hoard of eyeglasses, necklaces of rhinestone, the emeralds dropped by a Russian whaler’s wife.

  When Thomas woke was he truly laughing at the stupidities and frailties of mere humans, as it was later told by the people to others?

  When he arrives, he is carried by all that mystery to the old land where they hold to what is valuable, perhaps by the whale who heard his song and recalled it and knew his intentions.

  Intentions are everything to the whale, older than the humans by millions of years. The whale, with its barnacles and wise old eye sees straight into the human soul. Through skin. Through bone. But perhaps, like some later would say, they saw an octopus lift him. Maybe the octopus took him to those who could help.

  Now he is nearly naked, his clothes washed away, and he is newly born and so beautiful, this drowned handsome man who was loved and cherished by the people. They see him in the first blush of morning, newly arrived. He is a sleek branch of a man, muscular because they have been teaching him to paddle and swim and he has been working hard ever since he took down the fence and again faced the sea. They bend over him on the sand, the stronger ones kneel while the others marvel. Feather says, “Oh, no. It’s Thomas,” and he with two others get down on their knees over the body and lay their hands on him. Thomas is pushed and pressed and turned by their hands until the seawater runs from his throat.

  When Thomas wakes he thinks he is dead. Then he laughs. A woman with her hair held by bone sticks helps him get up and stand and walk like old Witka, with almost no clothes, just rags now, with grime and weed, salt and blood falling from him and he walks into the white house place. He is as gray-haired as the rest. He is bent, hair hanging down. And old as she is, that one woman notices the man is pale as a fish and just as cold. She thinks, I am walking with a dead man. No one is more astute than she is. It was said at her birth that her soul was an ancient tree and so she leaves him to the one who revives the dead. Something secret is being done by the man who says he bought the gift of revival from an old man in a marketplace in Turkey, haggling about it over coffee that was the best in the world.

  That man said he kept a human spirit which was a wind in a bottle for just such cases as death or near death. This scared the people. But that was that. The bottle was now emptied.

  While this is being done, Argentine walks away
and out into the forest and gathers greens. When she returns she boils them and then she leans over the sleeping man and she puts a plaster on his terrible wound with forest greens and mosses, and with a candlestick and lantern she sits beside him and sings and spoons boiled herbs into his mouth at night. Sometimes he feels a hand on his chest, but no pain. He dreams that she can see his heart. He believes she can. It is a good heart.

  When Thomas has his spirit back and can sit up and his heart has been covered with something like bark, they all sit in silent council for days. He understands what is being said. This is the way it used to be. The speaking is done through the eyes and through the soul and heart. A person can feel what is considered. Intelligence is passed all around, knowledge is shared. Decisions are made this way, primal, primary. Stories are told. For Thomas, he is emptied of all his stories and secrets, even his deeds, and one time he thinks, We keep nothing. What we are shows on our faces, our every move, our grasping, the way we consume others or ourselves.

  The ceremony begins and it is never what those who are not Indian think, wish, hope. They want something more. They want so much, as if they have nothing. But now it is asked, What has he nourished himself with? What has he given the world and what has he taken? It is like judgment day for those who are questioned by a god in the sky or an angel who does the accounts.

  For some time afterward all that can be done is to sleep. The room is full of his even breathing and snoring. No nightmares. Then the man named Feather wakes him and beckons to him. He gets up and washes and they go out, pull the ancient canoe into the ocean, and paddle, invisible in the light, as if they are ghosts transparent as dragonfly wings in the misty light and maybe they pass to the other side of something. All the clouds soon lift from the sky and the sun comes to their faces, glints off the ocean. No one can ever tell what it is, but travelers to other worlds return with special light.

  In one world it all matters, the truth, all the many truths. In real worlds for those travelers, it is all the same.

  The tribesmen and tribeswomen take him in, Thomas Witka Just, grandson of Witka. Even so, they are still questions, the people. Some are even shaped like questions, those who have bent backs. And there are the questions to be asked.

  Thomas tells the old people he has learned to hold his breath for long periods of time. “Oh, just like your grandfather. Maybe that is why you lived.”

  “No, that wasn’t all of it.” But he can’t remember. He is still salty. When he licks his lips even those days later there is still salt. And he doesn’t know he is still cold.

  Argentine tends to Thomas. Later she says, “How come Marco didn’t wash up?”

  “He had other places to go. But I always look out there, watching for him anyway.”

  After the silence and the healing and the tending, the people want to know everything about his life at Witka’s for the last year or so. “How did you sleep during that time?” Feather asks him.

  Though Thomas is healing, the water has swollen his hands and they will remain swollen. He opens and closes them. “Mostly by day.” The dreams at night he didn’t want to tell about.

  “I see. And you practiced holding your breath at night.”

  “Yes.” He sees it now, the world beneath, the particles in the beam of his light, the starfish holding to the rocks and pilings. He doesn’t know that Ruth was ever there, watching him.

  “And where did you stay?”

  “Usually close to the pier.”

  “No. In Witka’s house, I mean.”

  “Mostly in the corner of the house.”

  “Like a spider in its web, I think. With its silk. Out of your own self you made a new man.”

  They speak until all the words leave English and they exist then in their own language.

  He is tired. Yes, he has shed a skin. He has worn it for years and he’s had a weeping inside that only Ruth could hear when she was around it. It walked about with him like another person. Now there is silence, even peace, no more haunting. He is red in the eyes. They watch him sleep, coughing now and then. They think, Yes, he is equal to it.

  Then one woman says, “He doesn’t look like much more than a boy now. He’s good-looking.”

  When he wakes he says, “Spring is coming. I smell it in the air. Dawn, too.”

  On the other side are answers. A few men have grown tired of their leader, Dwight, and walked straight as they could from near the fisheries, the marina, and went to the police. They walked up the single rotting wood step into a modular building. It was as if no one saw them at first. Because the police receptionist and the two busy men and one woman don’t want to hear about the Indian problem. “We have another tribal ‘thing,’” as the receptionist says, almost to herself, as she blows her red nose, cursing the weather that has spread a recent virus. She throws the tissue into a trash can near her desk.

  But then the men show them the bullet casings and, standing there, tell their story. “A man was killed. A good man. And it was Dwight who did it. Dwight…he killed Thomas Just.” The officers’ ears opened to the mention of the hermit war hero. Thomas Just was missing for so many years and is now lost at sea.

  “Okay,” says an officer with a crew cut. “Sit down.”

  It has been told before, but none of them know it now, when the whales were there years ago, at the turn of the century, when the Americans first came and made some of the Indian men believe they could take up another way and profit and win when win was a word that never existed in A’atsika. Neither did profit or lie.

  And the other policeman looks up. One with his hair sprayed and combed like Johnny Cash gets up and brings the men back to sit on hard wooden chairs near him. They have a record on Dwight. For a while they are all bodies of silence. Then Dimitri talks. They listen for a while. The one with a crew cut runs his fingers through his hair. It feels good, his new haircut, like touching an animal, and the officer rubs his sore shoulder as he listens. The other writes it all down, then he pushes back his chair on wheels and says, “At last. Let’s go,” and they leave the men on the hard chairs and walk out the door to go pick up Dwight. “This time the witnesses want to talk.” All of them, no longer afraid. There is something the men want deeper than what they know, beyond human law and justice. It is to go back to being who they used to be, to love, to the touch of a foot on earth as a sacred touch, to the whale mother, to home.

  At Dwight’s the dogs bark fiercely at the door. Outside, the policemen look at each other. They hope they don’t have to shoot the dogs. They both hate shooting animals. Dwight gets up from the couch and the ball game and goes to the door where the dogs are barking. He opens it to see if there is a raccoon or skunk. He has his rifle in his hand to shoot the damned animal and hang it somewhere for others to see, hoping it is not a skunk because it will stink to high heaven. He is surprised to see the police there. “It’s okay,” he tells the dogs. “It’s okay, Jake.”

  When they see him with the rifle, they think he is dangerous. “Drop the fucking gun,” says the officer. “Call off the dogs.”

  The other tries to be more soothing. “Just put it down nice and easy and don’t try anything. We don’t want any trouble, especially with your wife here.”

  Dwight knows the routine. He’s been through it. He lays it down gently on the floor. He has been to war. He has told many men the same thing.

  “Here, boys,” he says to the dogs. “It’s okay.” They go out and pretend to chew on each other’s necks, growling, playing.

  “What’s up, Lyndon?” Dwight asks, feigning innocence. “Hey, man, you know me. Haven’t we known each other forever?” He looks at JC, as he has silently called him behind his back. “I been buying you drinks for years.”

  It’s true, but the officer hasn’t been bought off like Dwight thinks, and he’s not his friend. They went to high school together. JC remembers him. And he’s been waiting for information on the whales killed, thinking a drunken tongue will sooner or later tell the truth and h
e’ll find Dwight behind the wall of lies.

  Dwight had brought the white woman back with him. She was so proud to be with the man who sings old songs and tells her traditional stories, even those not intended to be told and some he even made up, and he is a warrior and a paddler and such a good, proud Indian man. Her friends think she is fortunate and privy to tribal secrets. She watches Dwight at the door. “What’s going on?” she says. They all ignore her.

  Suddenly self-conscious, she goes into the other room and puts on the new robe she bought to cover her gown, a silky pink thing Dwight secretly told his friends about, laughing about her wiles. She stands at the door, watching his hair fall across his face as he looks down and they handcuff him, in front, not like on TV with his hands behind him, and they tell him not only his rights but also his wrongs and he says, “There are witnesses. I have my witnesses,” meaning from the boat the day Thomas was shot, but he doesn’t say a word, nor will he ever, about how he thought he saw the great octopus lift a tentacle and rise up and look right at him with a black, intelligent eye and become red with fury at the humans who were said to be similar to itself except for the bones that limit them so much they can’t slide away and into safe, small places, and only two arms, oh, poor pitiful creatures. Dwight will never tell how the whale lifted their canoe from beneath or that he was jealous that Thomas had been the one that could hear the low rumbling of the whale that day and he’d said, “Wait. Listen.” Or that Thomas had been the one who could paddle and sing and truly had been a hero and a man. Always, really, when they thought of it, as if he’d been born to it, even as a child.