The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Kay pulled the frail paper through her fingers, pressing the folds again, reassembling the little package in its envelope. Above her, Aren and Mr. Brimner were talking about fishing and language, about words that Aren remembered from his childhood. Which were pitifully few, but those few strongly grained, some with funny meanings that caught in the mind. Kay listened, thinking about the letter and wondering whether or when she ought to give it to Aren. She thought it might be better to show him Thea’s earlier letter, Roddy asking when will they come back? She folded Thea’s note small and put it back in her pocket for now.

  “Bub,” Aren was saying, remembering another word. “It means—” He made a rough square with his two hands, fingers spread. “Not square, but parallelogram. Like in geometry at school, and it is two things: both the small fish, bright, straight-lined down one edge—”

  John Giles said over his shoulder, “That’s a triggerfish, I’ll bet you.”

  “And also the stars, constellation, the fish shape in the sky that we, that you, call—that is called the Southern Cross.” He made the shape again. “Small, brightly coloured fish, not very good to eat, I should think, but I don’t remember eating one.”

  Mr. Brimner leaned forward, interested. “It seems you recall things connected with fishing, with the work rather than the eating. When we met long ago, you talked of learning how to fish.”

  Aren looked out over the water, trying to call memory back. “At night in spring, I went with the men for flying fish. We stood in our canoes with palm torches”—he swept his arm widely—“in a circle, so, when it is dark—only stars, no moon, or the fishing will not work. The men with the nets cannot eat or drink or smoke all day, that smell might warn the fish. The signal comes, and we light the torches from a hidden—” He waited, but the word did not come, so he made a shape with his hands, a small brazier, perhaps. “And then! lights all around, and the fish come to see what is happening.”

  Surprised, Kay said, “Like when the whales came to watch the eclipse!”

  “It is the same curiosity, I guess!” He took up an imaginary net. “The men sweep down with their nets, and they are full of fish—flying fish, but sometimes also shark and needlefish.” Some spark of memory had started a fire in his mind. He said, “Also for needlefish, we fished with a kite.”

  From the tiller, John Giles said, “I’ve seen that kite-fishing!”

  “More fish with the big kite, a man out in the canoe,” Aren said. “But I have fished with the boys, using small kites from the land, with the sticky net made from spiderwebs—we cannot eat oil before it or the sticky part goes slick.” As memory came, he wavered in his tenses as he told these things, telling it now as a story, now as a thing that was still happening.

  Mr. Brimner had written down the words that Aren recalled, and he read down the list, ending with bub, the constellation and the fish.

  She and Aren had come here on the Constellation, Kay thought. And the name of the mission ship that ferried the Fruelocks around those islands was the Southern Cross.

  She moved her head to stop that ringing resonance, and said, “Someone told me once—Thea, or perhaps it was Father . . .” She had not thought of that before; she thought she had X’ed out everything he’d told her. “Well, never mind,” she went on. “They told me that in the Cree language the word for seven means ‘enough blankets.’ I’ve lived in the kind of winter that made that word.”

  “That must be how we understand any language, by living in it,” Aren said. “I first understood spring by standing in the little spring at the back of the garden on Elm Street, as the ice was melting. That it is both beginning and rising, that it is the season and the water both, life coming up.”

  Mr. Brimner said, “Prior’s brother, who is studying in Hamburg, sent me a fascinating study by a German philosopher named Buber, who believes that human relation is the original unity, perhaps even is what we understand as God—the self relating to others, recognizing others as human. I find this idea satisfying, and I am far enough from bishops and doctrine to think what I like. Buber says that where we say far away, the Zulu language has a word which means—and remember that I am translating a translation here—‘the place where someone cries out: O mother, I am lost!’”

  Kay looked over the side into the foaming lace that travelled alongside the little boat, loving Mr. Brimner with all her heart. No one in Nova Scotia talked or thought like him. The interior of his mind was watch-crystal, unmuddied by self or selfishness.

  “. . . and I understand that the Tierra del Fuegans have a seven-syllabled word whose literal meaning is, ‘They stare at one another, each waiting for the other to volunteer to do what both wish, but are not able to do.”

  ——

  Kay woke from unaccustomed daytime sleep, and the boat was still. Rising and subsiding gently on the swell, but no forward movement. Water lapped quietly on the boards she lay against, tucked in her narrow forward bunk in the prow’s shape. She sat up, thinking she was mistaken. But no, they were stopped. Now she really did feel better, much better, except for the bad taste in her mouth.

  Dash curled back into her pillows and slept on. She left him there, shook out her hair from its sleep-dampness, found the water cask in the galley and then crept up the little ladder from the galley onto the teak boards. No one was there—had they all been swept overboard as she slept? Of course not! There, they were forward, on the port side, all of them at the railing making the boat heel over slightly, staring out to sea.

  Then the noise reached through her sleep-fuddled ears, and she saw the spires of foam and leaping white pillars. It was whales, breaching. Five, six, seven humpback whales, playing in the dark-green world.

  Aren was not at the rail—he was above, halfway up the mast, wearing only half-breeches, like a true sailor. Spotting her, he came spiralling down and pulled her over to the other side, pointing not back at the breaching show-offs, but downward.

  And there was a whale calf, a so-much-smaller whale, scaled down to a size that was almost seeable for human eyes. His mother nudged him and he turned, turned, and one bright eye stared up at Kay and Aren.

  He stood back on his tail under the water, surprised to be looked back at, and then surged up so that his head breached, gently, long mouth rising up and up until the round eye was out in the air and could see them unfiltered by foam.

  She caught Aren’s hand and squeezed it, and he motioned yes yes yes with his eyebrows, and reached out a hand to the black-and-grey smoothness, the softer white under the chin—leaning out far—so far that he overbalanced and fell in.

  Kay shrieked and clutched uselessly for his waist or legs, but it was a small boat, there was only ten feet to fall, and Aren was already laughing as he went in.

  The whale calf turned in a trice, and its mother turned too, so that for a moment Kay feared she would shoulder up and capsize the boat, but she only pushed her calf out of the way and slid back around again, as if not opposed to Aren but careful of her child.

  Aren bobbed up again from the deeps and waved to Kay, his face splitting into a great crow of glorious joy. “I am in here with them!” he cried, and she wanted to tear off her own clothes and jump in too, but she could not swim, so she did not.

  The commotion drew Mr. Brimner, and then John Giles and Fokisi, away from their lookout to see what was amiss. They all stood along the rail and whooped, Mr. Brimner talking of Leviathan in semi-hysterical language and John shouting down advice to Aren about staying calm and it all being all right, many a man has swum with the whales and boasted of it later . . .

  Through all that, Aren dove and rose, the calf examining his legs and hands and back with his great muzzle. At one point Aren surfaced with a great sputtering and shouted, “He likes to stand upside down!”

  Then he went back down again. They could see the mother whale sinking deeper, and the calf playing peep-bo behind her, now darting up to investigate Aren and now retreating, so that Aren took longer and longer time betw
een breaths, until Kay began to feel concerned that he would stay down there, become a whale himself and never come back.

  At last John gently laid a life preserver down on the surface of the water, and Aren bowed his head to the mother and her child and caught at the white ring and was hauled out of that dangerous beauty and joy, coming up with water and tears streaming down his face until he could leap off the rail and down on the boards, clapping Kay on the shoulders and kissing her cheek.

  “I am sorry it was only me and not us both,” he said, for only her to hear.

  Then he turned to the men and laughed and laughed, telling the feel of the great fin on one’s legs, and confessing that the first drop had given him a fright. “I thought I was eaten for sure,” he said, quite serious.

  “Piss yourself?” John Giles asked him. “I did, the first time I went in with them—but it was worth it.”

  She woke again—she was sleeping her life away!—to stillness, and rolled out of her bunk to run up and check for whales.

  But it was night, late enough that they would not be visible around the boat. As her head rose from the hold, she saw Aren sitting on the little fo’c’sle roof.

  He pointed up to the sky, where the Milky Way was arrayed above, a thousand million dots of light, a thousand billion, a long gossamer scarf flung down the blackness. Low on the scarf, the stars of the Southern Cross, the bub, showed pink and gold. Dawn must be near.

  “We’ve stopped,” she said, very quietly.

  “Yes,” he said. He reached a hand down for her to climb up and join him.

  “I told John Giles that we should turn and make for Ha‘ano,” he said.

  “But that is—”

  He said, “I know.”

  “—long behind us.”

  “I know,” he said again.

  Their legs were snug against each other, the fo’c’sle roof being narrow. The mainsail was down, she now saw. Light wind off the water luffed in the jib, the only sail still up.

  “I told him he should set the sea anchor, and that tomorrow we’d go back.”

  She waited.

  “We don’t need to go there. I don’t need to. It’s too far to go for a walk among graves, graves of people I don’t know, or can’t identify. What is lost is lost, for me. That is not necessarily—it is not the end of my life, my soul.”

  Kay sat still, listening.

  “Ever since we found out that they all died, I have been wondering,” he said. “Today, when I fell into the water, I thought, I am already home!”

  He shifted so he could see her in the starlight, in the pale light spilling from the compass-light. “Do you mind if we don’t go to Pulo Anna?”

  She moved too, turning to dangle a leg off the roof, and leaned on one hand to look up into the black and dazzling sky. “I wanted to fix what we did, you know. What could be fixed, at least. I know it can’t be, but I wanted to take you there, to hear you say, This is where my house was! And to run after you down different paths, for you to show me this, and this, like the spring behind the house on Elm Street or the paths through the orchard at Lake Milo—for you to see it again, to feel that you could walk the whole island in your sleep because you know it so well.”

  “Yes,” Aren said. “I would say, Come, let me show you the beautiful place—the place with two rocks over a water pool, where the boys have been sliding down for so many years that the rock shines. I know it is there.” He took her hand. “It is not my home any longer. It can’t be, it’s gone now, the people are all gone. I have to make my own home.”

  Kay could not bear that there was no fixing this. In the silence, water lapped at the boards. “What will you do?” she asked him.

  “I think I’ll stay here. Don’t you think?”

  “Don’t I think you should?”

  “Don’t you think you should too?”

  She did not know what she should do. She could go home, if Yarmouth was her home, and be with Thea, and Francis, and Roddy. She could go on to Suva and wait for a boat going to San Francisco, and then go home by train, to New York and then to Boston, and catch the Prince Arthur for Yarmouth. That would take a long time.

  Or she could go north—try to go back to her original home, to Blade Lake. Except the school had closed now and she did not belong there either, and never had truly, except that her father had taken her there. But she could at least see the land again, the beautiful hills gently bending one over the other, coyote-coloured, close-cropped, rising into mountains.

  But none of the people there would want her to come back. And no one would know her. She had been a transplant there and was a transplant in Nova Scotia too. It was her home only because it had some people she loved in it.

  “I don’t have any home. Maybe that is not something I need,” she said.

  Mr. Brimner had come up on deck, perhaps drawn by their low conversation. He was thin and brown, she saw now, but not unhealthy. That fear had come from her own illness.

  “I hoped—I thought you both might spend some little time on Ha‘ano,” he said. “There is a cottage empty since the government man from Nuku‘alofa went back to his third wife. It is fixable. The garden plot is already dug.”

  Kay got down from the roof and went to the rail. She knew what she would like best.

  Mr. Brimner made himself comfortable against the mast, folding his thin arms, his fluff of light hair lifting in the night breeze. “So are we going back?” he asked, generally.

  Aren answered, “Yes.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book is fiction, but was sparked by a story my childhood piano teacher told of her mother Grace Ladd’s purchase of a small boy near Pulo Anna for four pounds of tobacco. I read Grace’s letters and her husband Frederick’s logs in manuscript, but also relied on Louise Nichol’s excellent compilation of the letters in Quite a Curiosity, the Sea Letters of Grace F. Ladd, and I recommend it as a fascinating read on its own behalf. Kathryn Ladd, Grace’s daughter, was a brilliant piano teacher and a substantial, complicated person. Although I named Kay after her, they are not much alike; and in fact Miss Ladd was born after that original boy had died. As well as the taking of Aren, I’ve drawn freely on other events and images from Grace Ladd’s letters; I took the liberty of combining two of Captain Frederick Ladd’s ships, the Morning Light and the Belmont, into one barque. Another indispensable source for this book was Words of the Lagoon by R.E. Johannes, an examination of fishing culture and language in the Palau island group. I used incidents and people, real and imagined, from many other first-hand accounts of travel in the south seas. Some passengers and events on the Constellation reflect E.C. Spykman’s account of her pilgrimage by steamer to Robert Louis Stevenson’s grave on Samoa, a lovely portrait of a journeying girl in 1922. Most of the surnames are invented, but Arthur is named in honour of my Elm Street neighbours, the Wetmore sisters. (The eldest Miss Wetmore gave me sound but depressing advice, writing in my childhood autograph book, “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be pretty.”) Among many other sea-faring diaries, Alice Wetmore’s account of their voyages as children in 1903, stopping at Port Elizabeth and Rio de Janeiro, illuminated those places for me. Anyone who has delved into the deeper cut of Gerard Manley Hopkins will recognize lesser-known lines of his attributed to Mr Brimner’s friend Prior, who embodies facts of Hopkins’s life and early death, and of Hopkins’s mother, who after her son’s death used black-bordered paper for her correspondence for the rest of her life.

  The Commonwealth Foundation gave me my first opportunity to visit New Zealand and the South Pacific, and the SSHRC research fund gave me a second, more comprehensive research trip to Tonga, Fiji, Singapore and Hong Kong. I’m indebted to Dr. Roxanne Harde and Dr. Kim Misfeldt at the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta for their support through the SSHRC process. Tia Lalani was a fine research assistant and reader. I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the Canada Council and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. A more comprehensive list
of books and research material is posted on my website, marinaendicott.com

  I heard Miss Ladd’s story of the boy bought for four pounds of tobacco with an instantaneous feeling of revulsion. But what people have done to other people in Canada is no less obviously wrong. The residential school at Blade Lake is fictional, but would have held students from Stoney/Nakoda, Tsuut’ina, Cree, and possibly Blood and Blackfoot peoples. To begin to understand the terrible legacy of residential schools, the best and hardest reading is survivor accounts, and there are so many. I’ve put a list of links at marinaendicott.com

  If not for Dr. Heather Young-Leslie’s introduction to her Tongan family, and to the Pacific world, I’d have been sunk. Heta’s generous practical and scholarly advice have been invaluable—all errors are of course my own. Grateful thanks to Mahina Tu‘akoi and her son Sione for their hospitality and affectionate friendship. I also thank Ebonie Fifita for introducing me to Nukua’lofa and the rest of Tongatapu, twice, and Mary Rokonadravu for our visit in Suva. I hope to visit you all again someday.

  Some of the people I’d like to thank can’t hear me any more: my revered Greek teacher, Mrs. Marion Seretis, sadly missed by all who knew her; and Miss Kay Ladd, my earliest mentor.

  But many can. Thanks to intrepid Thyra Endicott for coming with me on the little ship; to the learnèd Timothy Endicott for patient re-reading and help with Greek. Thank you to Helen Oyeyemi, Madeleine Thien and Caroline Adderson—it is good to talk with wise friends and great writers. Thanks to my beloved editor, Lynn Henry at Knopf Canada, to the incomparable Jin Auh and Tracy Bohan, and to Jill Bialosky at W. W. Norton for this next voyage of the Morning Light. Having listened to endless yarns about the south seas, Rachel and Will are absolved from ever reading this book. Peter did read this one. Like me, it lives because of him.

  Further praise for

  THE VOYAGE OF THE MORNING LIGHT

  “The power of the novel is in its brilliant depiction of life onboard the Morning Light and of the locales it visits. Endicott captures the place and time so emphatically through terrific sensory detail that the reader feels total immersion in the setting.”