People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  “I do. I have witnesses.”

  “Yeah, your witnesses are the ones who told us,” the policeman says.

  Dwight hadn’t counted on that, but now he is already figuring out what he might say. He wouldn’t tell the truth if it was his name.

  “What’s going on?” the blond woman asks again, fear in her voice. “Dwight?” She hollers after him as they leave.

  While Dwight is taken away and concocting stories, the woman who has been left behind, and worse, ignored, thinks and says out loud, “Geez, my mother was right. I’ve gone wrong with another freakin’ man.” She closes the door after watching them load Dwight into the car. She steps over the rifle, and, crying, takes out her new underwear and the clothes that no longer fit her pregnant body. She gathers things from the room, the slinky top, and she tries to figure out how to get home. She’ll hitchhike, but she doesn’t trust her own judgment, so she sits and cries until Milton hears her and goes to tell Ruth and send her over to see if the woman is being hurt by Dwight.

  Outside, Ruth can hear her crying, too. When she goes in, the first thing she does is unload the rifle and put it under the bed. All the while the woman packs her suitcase. “It’s okay. It will all be okay. I’ll help you out,” she tells the girl. “Here, let me help you,” Ruth says, being kind to the woman she hadn’t really acknowledged enough. “What can I pack for you?”

  “They arrested him.”

  The woman named Angela wraps her arms around Ruth and sobs. “And I’m going to have a baby.”

  Ruth sits on the unmade bed.

  Then Angela remembers where Dwight keeps his money. He always thought it was secret, but Angela has a keen eye, and while Ruth folds her things, she goes to the freezer to find the key to the safe-deposit box, the freezer out in the back room with the guns, It is in the freezer where he keeps meat he has hunted. She finds the box there and when she opens the box, she says, “Jesus!” Then she remembers Ruth and closes the box. She thinks she better go to the bank with Dwight’s key, too. It is for the baby, she tells herself.

  Ruth has already seen the cash in the box, but Angela doesn’t know it.

  “Could you drive me to the bank?” Angela asks the older woman. “I need to get what’s left out of our account.”

  In the meantime, Ruth decides to talk Angela into staying in town until she has the baby, at least. There are the dogs to think about. “We could help you out. With the baby and all. You can fix up the place any way you like. The birth will be free here.” There are a dozen reasons. And while Angela is in the bank, Ruth goes to the pay phone and makes a call to the police about the money.

  Angela has money in her eyes. At the bank they know already she lives with him and she is showing. They guess she’s his wife. Anyway, they don’t care. She opens the box to find cash. Bills and bills of cash. Rolls. Stacks.

  Charges are pressed against the war veteran Dwight, and he is not released because of his record. They were not minor offenses. One of the cops built a case against him with a tribal police officer and they thought they had him for sure and the feds were involved. Then, after the arrest, they saw him walking along the road just a few days later. It took the officer all he had in him not to swerve and run over the man named Dwight. But this crime, the newer one, isn’t just a parole violation.

  The other men from the canoe the day Thomas was shot hear what has happened. They are satisfied that justice is done, but they worry about whether they are accomplices or witnesses, men who will have to testify against the man who always gets off and can bring them down because they were part of it. But this time they believe something better. Because men can split and lie to themselves, one part to another, a part of them believes they are returning to better ways. Still, Dwight had promised them money from the next whale and the money would come from Japan, the eaters across the sea, and he still owes them from before and now they won’t see that money, either, and hell, they’d made plans for it already, and the two with credit cards ran up large bills, but damn if it wasn’t just like always.

  Over at the white dwellings they could forget America almost, except they like their small conveniences, not electricity, which they do not have, not even running water, for they still want the fresh spring in the rock, but having their laundry done would be nice. They need their propane stoves on cold days, their umbrellas on the warm days, but even though they are great thinkers, they believe in, live in, the world of matter. The Great Something lives in matter, the trees with their mysterious fluid, their force, the green fuse of light, the orange with its inner crystals, the stones and their great and small beginnings. For centuries, maybe a millennium, their own ancestors carved stones, no small labor, with spirals. Then, over by the spring is the carved whale, mother of humans.

  One day in the moss-covered stones Thomas finds other carvings. Not wanting to harm the mosses, he only traces these by feel, the sea creatures. All things with more of a handle on the world than a single, simple man.

  Thomas, who has always loved consulting maps, now maps their land by story and event and the old names. “We want you to record all this on paper.” They bring out a notebook and pencils, but they have stories woven into sea grass, baskets, and cloths. They take him from place to place, over rocks and across streams. He wonders at the agility of the people.

  One day of blue and calm ocean, he takes up the paddles for the painted canoe and he has the muscle to pull himself through the water. He goes to Ruth’s Marco Pollo and up the side and knocks on wood as if there is a door he can enter.

  Dick Russell is there helping Ruth and she is smiling, looking youthful, and even as feminine as she looks, she is still working ropes and twines and has broken nails, no gloves, when her father always told her to wear gloves. She has filled out in a way he hasn’t seen before, but her hands are worn hard and have aged and cracked in places. Still, he has never seen anyone so beautiful. He stands and looks. The boat is badly in need of painting.

  Ruth has seen him but thinks he is a ghost, so at first she looks at him, then looks away and goes back to her labor at coiling the ropes and pulling over nets, heavier than you’d think, no longer smiling. Her arms are sore. Then she stops and turns and looks at him. “Thomas.”

  “They said you were dead.” She is crying now, but looking at him. His arms are strong and his body agile, more now than hers, tired of her labor. He looks like an older version of their son, Marco. She embraces him. Dick Russell at first feels jealousy of this man, their relationship, but Ruth says, “Let’s all have coffee.”

  “Shame on you,” she says to Thomas, as she puts the coffee in the filter, “for letting us think you were dead.”

  But things would have been different if he was alive. There would still be fights among the tribe and now things have calmed down. Dwight is in jail down in Lompoc and the world around them seems to have been growing right again. Thomas has been gone for many months. He looks so good! It’s as if he’s shed a skin.

  “We had a wake and a great service for you. You should have been there. All your friends were there. They turned Dwight in. He’s in jail. For murdering you. We had beautiful flowers at your wake, and even bamboo, for your time in the jungles. There was a giveaway of all your things, so now you have nothing.” She pours the coffee into cups.

  “Be sure to tell your mother I am thinking of her,” Thomas says.

  Ruth is quiet now. “She’s gone, too,” she says. She died shortly after you did.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “She wasn’t buried. She wanted to go out to the ocean with the whales. We wrapped her in the grass cloth. I wove it for her and stitched it together and sang for her. We had a sing for four days.” Ruth goes to straighten things on the cabinet, the saltshaker, the sugar. “We won’t have the memorial until next year. Are you going back over right away?” To the white house people, she means.

  “Yes. But I have tickets to go see Lin. I am going to use them.”

  When he leaves, he
says, “Ruth, you have always been so kind. I will be living with the old people now. I want you to take Witka’s house when you go back. He left it to both of us. I know you love it. You can live there like you have always wanted. I can see that you are almost done with this fishing life.”

  “Yes. I will.” She doesn’t know what else to say. “Thanks, Thomas. I already have sold the boat.”

  “Who to?” he asks.

  “I sold it to two guys from the village. One is Vince’s son and the other is Dimitri’s brother. Remember them?”

  Ruth has always loved the house on top of the black rocks.

  “Thank you, Thomas.” She is older now and wants solitude.

  After Thomas leaves, Dick says. “I can see you love him.”

  “Yes, but not like what you think. I knew him as an infant. All my life.” She leans against him. “He and I had passion once, the young kind, and we had a son but we never really shared him, but that kind of love has gone away. He’s a brother to me now.”

  On the day Ruth moves into Witka’s old gray house, she opens all the shutters and windows to the sea air and looks out. Three dolphins are curving above the ocean. The seals are napping in the shade of the rock.

  At times she walks through the forest and it is a green lamp; sometimes with the fog weaving between trees, at other times with light shining.

  Some say the day he died, the day Dwight shot him in the chest or heart, that they saw him moving above water, dead, as if it was his soul, carried straight out to sea. Others say his body traveled to land. Some are certain a wave took him under and there was a great stillness on his face that made them less afraid of death, therefore of life. They saw a whale carry him, and some saw an octopus tentacle wrap around him like a snake and hold him into the air.

  Some just say the spirit world searches for us. It wants us to listen.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With gratitude to all of my supportive friends and relatives. I thank especially Deborah Miranda, Margo Solod, and Peggy Shumaker for material help with this book during rough times. Thanks to Allison Hedge-Coke, a great human being. Thank you, Dave Curtiss, for being There. For Lisa Wagner and your creative energy. For Cathy Stanton and our long talks. For Kathleen Cain and your trees. For my student and husband, who talked with me about Viet Nam back before my accident. I apologize for forgetting names. For my Brenda Peterson, who also loves the whales, and for the Quillieute Nation and other paddling Nations with beautiful canoes and paddlers who do not kill. And last, for my brother, Larry Henderson, who went with me on part of this journey where we survived the “desperadoes” and their guns! This book has been a long time in the creation and I could go on about all the people and whales who have helped me throughout, but I hope you all know who you are.

  PEOPLE OF THE WHALE

  Linda Hogan

  READING GROUP GUIDE

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  PEOPLE OF THE WHALE

  Linda Hogan

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  When Thomas Witka comes home from Vietnam, he is no longer connected to the people in his tribe. One of the themes in People of the Whale is the significance of tradition, the glue that holds a community together over time. Why might Thomas Witka initially seek reunion, not with Ruth and Marco, but with the whale?

  The A’atsika men who endeavor to end the moratorium on whale hunting suggest to their tribespeople that hunting whales “will bring us back to ourselves.” Why does Ruth reject this argument?

  According to A’atsika tradition, when one whale is killed, its spirit is reborn in another whale. Is this traditional notion of “deathlessness” reinforced by Dwight and Dimitri? Can you sympathize with their point of view? Is their argument valid? Why or why not?

  Discuss the parallels between Thomas Witka’s Vietnam experience and his participation in the whale hunt. How are his psychic wounds affected by the killing of the whale?

  Linda Hogan borrows from Native American knowledge systems, stories, and myth to tell this provocative story of a man’s falling away from and painful reconnection with his family, his tribe, and his history. Why do you suppose she blends myth and history with present-day Western notions of reality in her writing?

  After Marco’s disappearance and the killing of the whale, an old man tells Ruth that a drought will come. “A wrong thing was done,” he says. “Maybe more than one wrong thing…. Get ready for it. N’a sina.” Native American lifeways, like those of other peoples, include sacred narratives and conventional wisdom. Consider the importance of the old man’s words. Do you see his memory of the past as a particularly Native American attitude?

  Ruth was born with gills. Marco was born with webbed feet. Animals figure prominently in the A’atsika people’s environment, daily reality, and collective imagination. Analyze how animal symbolism fits into the past and present in Native cultures.

  When drought comes, as the old man prophesied, Ruth senses that the sea is holding its breath, waiting for something. What does Ruth have in mind? How might the elders of her tribe elaborate upon this notion?

  People of the Whale is concerned with loyalty to and betrayal of the natural world. Discuss how Thomas Witka’s relationship with his two children, Marco and Lin, also illustrates the breaking of a sacred trust and the painful moral choices humans make. Does Lin’s meeting with Thomas and Ruth offer new hope?

  Linda Hogan ultimately offers a striking portrait of what it is to be a modern American Indian. Her narrative plumbs the difficulties of upholding tradition in the face of modern demands. What messages do think Hogan intends to transmit through her storytelling? Discuss the relevance of these ideas in your own community.

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  PRAISE FOR THE WOMAN WHO WATCHES OVER THE WORLD

  “This wise and compassionate offering deserves to be widely reviewed and read.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Transcendent and cathartic, Hogan’s indelible narrative ultimately celebrates love, the ‘mighty force’ that enables even the most harrowed not only to endure but to grow in spirit and wisdom.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “The book is a brilliant, harrowing account of illness and healing, by one of our best writers.”

  —Leslie Marmon Silko

  PRAISE FOR POWER

  “Power is a beautifully written story, that rare book that comes along once in a while, touching the deep parts of our humanness and calling us…to be better than we are.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Hogan’s Power is a bildungsroman. It is a lament for the animals and plants we have so needlessly extinguished and it is also a story hopeful for the restoration of a world in balance.”

  —Bloomsbury Review

  “An enchanting coming-of-age tale.”

  —Washington Post

  “[Hogan] has written a book about a crisis of belief that is dizzying in its depths, a book that is a testament to the ability of people to imagine what they cannot articulate.”

  —Boston Book Review

  “The portrait of nature’s elemental power is distinctive and haunting.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Linda Hogan’s remarkable gift is a language of her own, moving gracefully between ordinary conversation and the embrace of divinity. In Power she has placed her central character precisely where we all stand: on a ruined land, looking backward at the choices that brought us here and forward to those we have yet to make. Power is a haunting, beautiful testament that finally leaves out nothing, including hope.”

  —Barbara Kingsolver

  “Hogan has examined the brutal overlay of white society on Native American culture in her previous books, but none have caught fire as gloriously as this enthralling tale of a young Taiga woman’s struggle to come to terms with her heritage…. Hogan, who is absolutely magnificent in one radiantly dramatic scene after another, compels us to consider all the forms power t
akes and how foolishly we abuse it.”

  —Booklist, starred review

  “Its profundity is great: this is a book about losing and regaining the living world…. Hogan uses her skills as a poet here to cast a potent spell. Her sentences, full of vivid images and often composed of long, rhythmic phrases, have an incantatory, dreamlike sound.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  PRAISE FOR DWELLINGS: A SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF THE LIVING WORLD

  “Hogan exquisitely examines both natural and internal landscapes. She writes beautifully about animals without anthropomorphizing them and, in so doing, explores what it means to be human. Herself a Chickasaw, Hogan is able to bring a diverse cultural perspective to her analysis of how people relate to nature.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Hogan brings her feeling for language and story to these quietly beautiful and provocative musings on the nature of nature…of the ‘circular infinity’ of life and death, of how air, earth, and water commingle and transform each other, how flowers bloom even in a place as blasted as Hiroshima.”

  —Booklist

  “She encourages her readers to see themselves as a small part of the whole that is our ecosystem. The pieces come together to reflect the author’s profound respect for the earth and prompt us to feel the same.”

  —Library Journal

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