Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  The baby was trying to pull herself across the mat toward Vo. He leaned over and patted her head, bouncing the ringlets of hair against his palm, then said something to her in his language. Oriela did not know what he called the baby. There was no word he always used, at least not one Oriela recognized. It was strange that they had never talked about a name. She knew Vo’s people loved names. He sometimes amused her by saying the names of people he had known, and then she would make him laugh by trying to repeat them. The only one she could really say was Jah-lafo, a man who had sickened and died during their journey. Vo was still sad about him even though the man had just been his slave. He had explained to her that people of higher rank had longer names. Vo himself had a long and unsayable name, or so he claimed. “Vo” was the only part of it any of them could manage.

  Maybe his people did not name children until they survived infancy or did something nameable. Or maybe the mothers named the children. Oriela liked that idea—her own choice for a name would have been Iri. But that was not the way here, and without Vo’s announcement of a name for the baby, the villagers had settled on one for themselves. Someone called her “Half-Child” after she was born, and to Oriela’s dismay, the name had stuck. Every time she heard it she remembered a baby born on the island a long time ago, a sad creature with no arms and legs. That was the half-child, she thought. But that baby had never been called anything. It had simply disappeared—thrown to sharks, perhaps, or abandoned on the mountain, or smothered by its father and buried under the house. No one spoke of it.

  She stepped outside to toss the scraps from their meal, then lingered in the doorway to admire the sunset. It looked as if a giant parrot had spread its many-colored feathers across the sky, filling her with both joy and sadness. Behind her she could still hear Vo talking. When she had first heard his language spoken among the survivors of the wreck, she had thought it the worst collection of sounds, all snorting and swallowed, as if they had something to hide. But now she could not imagine the sound gone from her life. She ran one heel across the rough surface of the round stone where Vo liked to sit when he was outside. He had told her the stone was used to grind food on their vaso. Reaching up, she gently tapped a hollow bowl-like thing, an object from the vaso that Vo had hung upside down from the roof beams of their hut. It made a lovely teen-teen sound against her fingernail, and was the perfect accompaniment to the shifting colors of the sky and the lilting murmur of Vo’s voice as he told his secrets to their daughter.

  By the time Oriela stepped back inside, the hut was silent and growing dark. She lay down between the baby and Vo, eager to claim sleep at the end of such a strange day. But Vo turned to her, his narrow face filled with longing, though not, she saw, longing for her.

  “Perhaps it’s good,” she said. “Perhaps your people are now at war with their people.”

  “I would gladly have gone as their captive,” Vo said.

  Oriela shut her eyes tight. It was not dark enough to hear this. She did not need to ask, What about me? What about our child? He would have left them behind, and she would not have asked to go with him. She was curious about his part of the world, a place where everyone was pale like him and where they were forever making new and larger and more complicated things. But curiosity was different from desire. She did not wish to leave the island. Little good had ever come of people leaving the island. Still, she wished to be wanted. And finding herself unwanted, she wished to injure him.

  “The vaso was not looking for you,” she said.

  “You don’t know that,” he said.

  “My poor Vo.” The pity in her voice was not false. If someone were looking for him, it would mean the other survivors had made it home. But that was impossible. “Your friends—”

  “Yes?”

  “You saw the canoe.”

  “I helped make it.”

  When she said nothing, his brow creased in anger and he turned away. Vo and the other survivors had built the canoe out of wood and parts culled from their broken vaso. They had worked for days and days, but when they dismantled their enclosure and dragged their creation to the water, the islanders had stared in horror. One of the village men had said, “We might as well have killed them all if they’re going to kill themselves.” The others shushed him, but they had all been thinking something like it, for a sadder canoe it was difficult to imagine—unstable, cramped, open to the sky.

  Two men had had to be left behind because there was no room for them—Vo and another, younger man. The head elder had taken a liking to Vo and offered him protection, the house, and then Oriela. The younger man had foolishly attached himself to an unlucky rival elder who was later driven to the other side of the island. Oriela assumed the young man had gone with him, but for all she knew he was dead. Perhaps his blood had been exacted to spare the life of the rival elder.

  Vo said nothing more, and Oriela began to ease toward sleep. There was no happiness in learning that one’s husband would leave if given the chance, but how likely was that chance to come again? The other survivors must have perished of thirst or, if they were lucky, drowned, taking with them the news of Vo’s whereabouts. The On-lay who skimmed their horizon that morning were far away by now, no doubt satisfying their curiosity about the world, as Vo and his friends once had. She and Vo should not have spoken of it. From now on, she told herself, she must let Vo believe that his friends had found their way home. It was not such a hard thing to do.

  Then Vo, his voice loud in the darkness, asked, “Oriela, who do you belong to here?”

  She came fully awake, her stomach flipping like a trapped fish. The baby stirred, and Oriela turned toward her. But Vo held her by the shoulder, his thumb pressing into her upper arm. It hurt, and she knew the baby’s snuffling would soon turn into real crying if ignored.

  “I’ll tell you if you let go,” she said.

  He released her and she rolled over, taking the baby to her just as the child opened her mouth to wail. Oriela tried to lose herself in the baby’s fierce suckling and its strange mix of pain and pleasure, but Vo pressed a finger against her back to prod her.

  “I don’t belong to anyone…” she said. The words felt like swallowed fish bones in her throat. “I don’t know. There are just stories.”

  “Stories?”

  She drew in a long breath, the way the island boys did before diving off a high cliff. “My mother may have been the head elder’s wife.”

  “Head elder?” Vo said. “The same head elder you have now?”

  “I don’t know,” Oriela said, although she was pretty sure she did know. She knew from the way the elder so carefully ignored her. The only time he had spoken to her was when he brought her to live with Vo, and then he had been too cheerful, too loud, giddy with the relief of solving an old problem.

  “What happened to her?”

  “My mother? Well…” Now that she had begun, it was easier to continue. She told Vo what she had learned from all the whispered conversations around her—whispers she was not supposed to listen to but was nevertheless meant to hear. That her mother had been taken away by raiders from another island. That later she was rescued or returned, or maybe had managed to escape. That she came back pregnant, and that her husband, the elder, had rejected her and the baby. In despair, she had taken the infant in her arms and walked into the ocean. Oriela had washed ashore alive, but her mother was never seen again.

  “But other people tell it differently,” Oriela said. She had simply washed ashore one day, her origins unknown, or no, she had been stolen from the enemy in retaliation for the taking of the elder’s wife. And yet others whispered that she was the head elder’s child—but by his sister, not his wife.

  Vo listened in silence, then said nothing for a long time, so long that Oriela wondered if he had understood. Perhaps she had spoken too quickly or used words he did not know. His fingers traced lines in her back—along her shoulder blades, and then each notch in her backbone. “Who raised you?” he said.

&
nbsp; “She was called Talimba. She lost her own baby, so she took me.” That answer would have sufficed with her own people, but Vo would want to know more, so she added: “She used to dream all the time about her dead baby telling her things. People came from all over the island to tell her their dreams, and she would help them. I got the fishing spirit from her.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “Yes. It was before you came.”

  He sighed, then said, “When they first brought you to me, I thought you were the daughter of a chief.” He sounded angry, as if he had discovered her in a lie.

  Oriela opened her mouth, then closed it, not sure whether to laugh or weep at his pride and disappointment. She remembered his delight with her in those early days, a delight she had attributed to his being so long without female company, and to his need for comfort after being left behind. He had been hungry for her then—for her body, for the food she prepared, for the words she taught him. It had never occurred to her that he had also thought himself honored by the union. A helpless man with no skin color, washed ashore in a storm, then left behind by his longer-named friends, given to the daughter of a chief? Did all the men from his land think so much of themselves? What trouble there must be among them!

  “But later,” Vo continued, “I saw how people were around you, and I knew something was wrong—you were sick, or crazy. Or something about your family.” His finger stopped at a point in her midback, as if he had discovered the source of her malady. “That’s why they gave you to me. Because you belong to no one. Like me. And no one else would have you.” He lifted his hand away, and she felt a chill spread from the spot.

  The baby had fallen asleep again, so Oriela pried her off. Her chest was damp from its contact with the baby’s face, and she rolled onto her back to cool off. Staring up, she felt like she was falling, the barely visible roof above her receding. She knew she could right herself by turning toward Vo and offering herself to him. They would then pass from sadness to pleasure to sleep. Instead, she said, “There’s a house full of skulls behind the village. Some of your people are there.” So many unsayable things had been said already. Why not that?

  Vo sat up. “What?”

  “A skull house.” Oriela could feel the ceiling swim back into place. The scrabbling of a rat on the roof sounded just the right distance away.

  “We buried all the bodies,” Vo said.

  “The bodies you found.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She sat up too and faced him, although it was utterly dark now and they could not make out each other’s expressions. “The big storm was terrible for us too,” she said. “It took trees down all over the island, every village lost houses, people were swept out to sea. When your people started coming ashore, wet and raving and so white, everyone was terrified. We thought you had brought the storm.”

  Silence. Then Vo said, “You killed them.”

  “Our men did, yes.”

  “How many did you kill?”

  “I don’t know. Ten. Sixteen. Maybe more.”

  “Why didn’t you kill all of us?”

  Why did he keep saying you? It made her want to scream. “The men who drowned began washing ashore,” she said, “and then the things from your vaso, and we saw that you were just men suffering from the storm, like us. The head elder made them stop.”

  “But I’ve been all over the island. I’ve never seen this—what did you call it?—bone house?”

  “Skull house. We’ve kept you from it.”

  He went still; she could not even hear him breathe. But she could sense him remembering all the times he had walked through the steep wooded interior of the island, and how someone, often Alu, always happened by to distract him with some marvelous thing—a flycatcher’s nest, a new spear, a waterfall great for diving. He lay back down.

  “I wonder who you killed.”

  She pulled at her hair, hard, to keep from shouting, I didn’t kill anyone! “Who were your best swimmers?” she said.

  From the sharp intake of breath next to her, she could tell that Vo had thought of someone, or maybe several people—men he had not buried, men whose bodies he had assumed till then had been lost in the ocean.

  She felt suddenly heavy, with a deep-down tiredness that pressed behind her eyes and drained through her body, demanding and refusing sleep at the same time. She had been awake this far into the night only twice before. Once as a girl she had been sick all night after eating a spoiled fish. The other time was the long night of birth pangs with the baby. Terrible nights, both of them, but they had ended, and light and life had returned in the morning. And so they would again. It was not sleep that made morning come. Morning arrived each day, guided by its own kind spirits.

  When she opened her eyes, however, she knew right away she was wrong—wrong about not falling asleep and wrong that morning would restore the ordinary. She knew it from the relative coolness of one less body in the hut and from the extra layer of quiet beside her. She sat up and looked around. The gray light before dawn was just seeping into the house, but she could see that the heavy ax that hung from the opposite wall was gone. Fear spilled over her. Had he taken it and killed the men in the village? But no—there would have been shouts, an uproar that would have wakened her. The skull house—perhaps he had gone in search of it. What would he do if he found it? She strained to hear the angry sound of splintering wood, even though she knew the dense, green distance between the skull house and the village would swallow up any noise.

  She got to her feet. One of her baskets was missing, along with two water gourds, and a few of the coconuts she had lined up along one wall. Then she knew. He must have taken one of the canoes. She stood before the altar, regarding it with both relief and dismay. He had taken neither his own stick spirit nor her hooked fishing spirit, which meant he was out in the ocean with no protection at all. Not that either spirit had impressed her lately. Maybe they were trapped in combat with each other and had no power to spare for her or for Vo. She plucked Vo’s feeble sticks from the wall, snapped them in one hand, and dropped the pieces to the floor. She should have done it long ago.

  She moved to the ledge where Vo stored his old tools, and suddenly she understood: here were the spirits Vo truly revered. He had taken everything except for a small, round object he said was broken. It housed a shiny little needle which spun over a bottom painted with strange markings. The needle was supposed to point in the same direction all the time, “so you can tell where you’re going,” Vo had said. Oriela had twirled around with it once, watching the needle spin in her hand. But no matter how she held it or where she stood, it always pointed back at her.

  “See, it’s no good,” Vo had said, laughing.

  “It likes me,” Oriela had said.

  Had he left it behind to please her? Or was it to make sure he did not rely on a spirit that would steer him back to her?

  Oriela returned to the mat and leaned over her sleeping child. The baby’s lips were moist and slightly parted, like a hibiscus about to open. Oriela hated to think of her waking up fatherless and abandoned, and now she sensed the truth of her own mother’s story. She knew how easy it would be to walk into the ocean with the baby. Gently she scooped up the child, noticing as she did so that a fistful of ringlets had been clumsily cut from one side of her head. Oriela rubbed her hand over the cut hair, feeling the blunt ends between her fingers. What did it mean? Was it a mark of shame, of rejection? Or had Vo loved the child and wanted something to remember her by? Oh, she had not known him at all, she thought with bitterness. Not even after all the secrets traded during the night. Weeping, she tied the still sleeping baby to her back, then left the hut and padded silently toward the beach.

  And there he was, just offshore, struggling against the wind and tide, unable to get past the reef. Oriela stared in amazement, forgetting for a moment her own misery. If he had taken one of the smaller fishing canoes, he would have made it, might already have been beyond her sight. But he had
taken the head elder’s ceremonial canoe, the least seaworthy in the village and nearly impossible to manage without other rowers. Why? Had he not wanted to trouble anyone by taking a working canoe? Or was he making a claim? I know now you may be my father-in-law, so you won’t mind if I take this. Or, I know you married me to the village outcast, so now I’ll have your canoe. Or maybe it was to make sure everyone knew: I would rather die than stay with people who killed my friends. But now, fighting uselessly against the water and the wind, he only looked foolish. Oriela did not know whether she felt more relieved or embarrassed as she stood on the beach and waited for him to notice her. When he finally did, his shoulders fell in surrender. Bringing up the oars, he allowed the current and the morning breeze to carry him ashore.

  As the first rays of sunlight washed over them, Vo and Oriela dragged the ceremonial canoe to its accustomed place on the beach, then carried everything back to the house—the ax, the gourds and coconuts, the navigational instruments. They worked in silence, shyly, not looking at each other, as if they had just met. Luckily, no one from the village had seen them, or so it appeared, as they saw and heard no one. The baby did not wake till they had put everything away. Sitting in the doorway of their house, Oriela nursed the child and said, “I want to call her Iri.”

  “What?” Vo raised his head from where he lay facedown on the mat.

  “Our child. I want to call her Iri.”

  “Iri,” Vo repeated. “That’s pretty.”

  “You have to tell everyone.”

  Vo’s eyes widened in alarm. “Tell everyone what?”

  “That her name is Iri.”

  His tired, lined face relaxed, and he lay his head back down, then suddenly laughed. “Yes, of course. I’ll tell everyone.” Then, not looking at her: “Will you take me to the skull house?”

  Oriela said nothing and Vo did not repeat the question. Before long, she could hear that he had fallen asleep. When the child finished nursing, Oriela retied her to her back, then shook Vo by the shoulder. “Come,” she said when he opened his eyes. He looked confused, but stretched himself noisily and followed her out. She led him inland, behind their house, behind the village, uphill along a familiar path, to a dense wall of vines he had walked past hundreds of times. She pointed to it. “Only a priest or elder can go,” she said, then walked away, her footfalls swallowed up by the forest.