Easter Island

by Jennifer Vanderbes

  By February, Greer had completed a first draft she was happy with. It focused more on theory than data, but the data had been gathered in Thomas’s lab, under Thomas’s direction, and she felt it was important to step back from his project. Her paper was thick with evolution and dispersal theory, graphs relating populations of flowers to pollinators, the time lapse between plant dispersal and pollinator dispersal. It was nontraditional, something at which she knew her committee would raise their eyebrows, but it was a risk she was willing and eager to take.

  She gave a copy to Jo and a copy to Thomas, who had already removed himself from her committee. Both said the paper was wonderful, each recommending a set of revisions and adjustments, Jo, in the end, taking more time than Thomas, because Thomas was busy finishing his own paper, and was gone for weeks at a time with Bruce Hodges.

  She went back to her carrel and spent another month reworking her material. In March, Thomas concluded the final revisions on his own paper, and offered—a late concession—to let Greer read it before publication. But if he hadn’t wanted her help in the beginning, she wasn’t going to offer it now. She said she was busy. Marriage, she had decided, was more important than professional collaboration.

  It was May when she finally submitted her dissertation to the committee, and after a few weeks of waiting around the house, Greer decided to distract herself with a short trip back to Mercer. She wasn’t sure why then, of all times, after six years, she wanted to see her hometown. She and Thomas had spoken of visiting; perhaps she was tired of putting it off, waiting for a break in his schedule. Thomas was once again traveling, this time presenting the paper about to be published, with Bruce Hodges coauthoring. It was a warm day, and she drove slowly through the town, looking at the familiar names on the mailboxes—Feyenbacher, Simpson, Gertz. When she finally made her way down the road to her parents’ old house, it was smaller than she remembered, but the same shade of yellow, with the same wraparound porch. She parked the car and knocked on the door. A woman appeared, her hair in a loose bun, wiping her hands on the fraying hem of a pale blue apron.

  “You must be Maria Compton. I’m Lillian Greer. I grew up here.”

  “Ah, yes, Miss Greer. Please, come on in now. I’ve some lemonade if you’d like. And there’s a cake in the oven. Double fudge.”

  “No, thanks. I was just wondering if it would be all right if I wandered up the hill to where my parents are buried. It’s been a while.”

  “Sure thing, you go right on ahead. We ain’t touched a thing. The stones are still there, and Harold trims the grass ’round them quite regular. Our girl Becky asks who’s there, ’cause she likes to sit on that hill, and we just tell her it’s nice folk.”

  Greer smiled. “I won’t be long.”

  “Long? Nonsense. Take your time. I got tissue if you want.”

  “No, thank you.”

  Greer walked up the hill and lay down between the two simple headstones, staring at the slightly overcast sky. The ground was cold and moist beneath her and soaked the back of her blouse. She let her hands wander the grass, remembering how years before she’d come up here to pluck wildflowers, carrying them back to the house in the bib of her shirt, hoping that under the microscope she would find something that would explain where her mother had gone. Greer wondered if it was really any different from what she was doing now, lying by their graves, because she believed, or wanted to believe, that life was somehow bound to matter, that spirit lodged itself in land.

  She felt a spider inch across her ankle, and she sat up and let it walk onto her hand, examining it closely. Whitman’s verse came back to her:I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars / And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren / And the tree-toad is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest . . . The spider, too, should have been equally perfect. It roamed her skin, wandering the peninsula of each finger, until she set it gently back in the grass.

  But Greer worried she was losing her belief in the journey-work, that nature was becoming a speck on a glass slide in a sanitized room. Investigating to produce publishable answers—this was what had filled her days for the past six years. Was she now less moved by science? Or was she simply feeling the exhaustion of finishing her dissertation, years of work officially surrendered. She got up, brushed the dirt off her back, and walked down the hill.

  “Thanks,” she called out to Maria Compton, who was just then stepping onto the porch with a cake in hand.

  “Double fudge!” she sang. “That’s fudge plus fudge.”

  “I want to make it back before dark.”

  Greer had plenty of time, but the sight of the house depressed her. Its memories seemed out of reach.

  “I have a big meeting tomorrow,” Greer said.

  “Well, you stop by anytime. Hear me? Anytime. We’ll keep them stones clean.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and drove down the dirt road that once seemed the longest road in the world.

  The next day, Greer awoke early and dressed for her committee meeting. She had bought a black suit for the occasion and looked, as she glanced in the mirror, surprisingly professional. She fastened her hair with two tortoiseshell combs; she applied some lipstick. She fixed herself coffee, a bowl of cereal, and opened the sealed envelope Thomas had left her:

  Remember. No fear, my love. You’ll be great. I miss you.

  Home soon.

  Your husband

  She was disappointed he wasn’t there; this day was the culmination of all her work in the lab. But she knew he couldn’t get out of this conference, or at least felt he couldn’t.

  As Greer walked slowly over to Birge Hall, she reviewed in her mind the details of her paper. They could ask about anything, try to trip her up on the smallest of details, though she had a feeling they would be less aggressive than normal. After all, she’d been to cocktail parties at all their houses, had helped their wives clear plates from the dinner table, had sat with them into the night, sipping port and brandy to the sounds of Bach. It would be difficult for them to attack her, and in a strange way, this was disappointing. Greer felt good about her work, and didn’t mind a scuffle.

  It was a beautiful spring day—a loose net of cirrus clouds caught the bright sun at brief intervals—and she promised herself she would take a long walk after the meeting and try to bask in the end of this rite of passage. She was meeting Jo later, to celebrate, and thought they should have dinner outside on State Street.

  She arrived at the lecture hall—the same hall where she had taken Thomas’s class years before—and sat in the front row. There was a bustle among the five members of the panel as they opened their folders and files, and then Professor Jenks, whom she’d last seen at Thomas’s birthday party, called her name. She stepped up to the podium, her folder in hand.

  “Mrs. Farraday,” began Professor Jenks. He looked surprisingly tired, disheveled, almost annoyed. The green plaid bow tie he was famous for wearing daily appeared hastily tied. For a moment she was tempted to ask him if he was all right, but thought this would compromise the meeting’s decorum. His wife had been recently diagnosed with cancer; it seemed to be taking a large toll on him. She’d heard complaints that he’d been neglecting his chair responsibilities. In fact, he hadn’t met with Greer about her paper in months.

  “Good morning, Professor Jenks.” She tried to lend kindness, of the professional sort, to her voice.

  “Yes, yes. Please, Mrs. Farraday.” Professor Jenks stood. “You have of course placed the committee in a most uncomfortable position. And before we go any further we would like to tell you that you will, of course, have the opportunity to submit a new paper. We do not intend for this incident to ever go beyond these halls.” He returned hastily to his chair. “That is the end of it. Take whatever time you need.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Please, Mrs. Farraday. This is awkward for all of us.”

  “Me, especially. What, pardon my language,
in hell is going on here?”

  Professor Jenks let his forehead fall into his palms. “We’ve read Thomas’s paper. Did you really think we wouldn’t?” He looked up and ran his hand through his hair. “Well, anyway, that isn’t the point here. It’s done. Done. And we don’t need to deal with that. Again, Mrs. Farraday, let me assure you, you have our word that this will never leave this hall. It’s of no advantage to any of us, as individuals, or, for that matter, as a department with a reputation to uphold. You have been working very hard in the lab, we know. It’s a tiring job. A thankless job. It can easily exhaust a person. Blur a person’s normal judgment. There is no accusation, you understand, in any of this.”

  Greer’s mind was trying to sift the data: Thomas’s paper, her dissertation, no accusation.

  “Of course,” Greer finally managed to say, then closed her folder. “I need to review some materials.” She gathered her purse, pens and paper clips spilling as she slung the strap over her shoulder, and hurried from the room. In the hallway, with the door sealed behind her, she took a deep breath and let the eerie silence of the corridor surround her. She walked quickly to the library, fumbling in her heels, soon breaking into a run in front of the periodical shelves. She peeled off her blazer and let it fall to the ground. The man at the circulation desk called out, “Ma’am, are you all right over there?”

  She felt along the shelves until she found it:Nature. Spring 1967, Vol. III. In the index she saw the title:A Preliminary Study in the Evolution of the Magnolia Flower by Thomas Farraday, Ph.D., and Bruce Hodges.

  She skimmed the first few pages: descriptions of sample collection techniques, location, data—what she would have expected—and then, at the end, a sidebar:Magnolia Dispersal: A Mathematical Theory . She read every word. In it was the same data she had used, the same analysis, and the same equation she had presented to the committee.Her equation. Greer closed the journal, set it back on the shelf. She began to walk away, her jacket abandoned.

  The man at the circulation desk called out, “Ma’am, would you like some water? Or a chair?”

  But Greer said nothing as she pushed open the heavy glass library door, and felt the warm air shock her lungs.

  16

  Von Spee must have felt the strain of his predicament. Ammunition and coal supplies were low; the journey across the Pacific had been long and lonely. Would those dusty orders issued by the Kaiser have started to haunt him?He must never show one moment of weakness. How, in the knowing approach to doom, would that have been possible? Even for a man known for unwavering confidence, for unflinching calm?

  Now that the squadron was off the coast of South America, cables and telegrams once again reached him on the ship’s radio. Despite the clear impossibility of the fleet reaching Germany, Berlin advised: “Break through for home.” At the same time, von Spee learned that Japan, France, and Britain were concentrating their entire naval efforts on his squadron. (“Thus,” Churchill would later write of the hunt for von Spee, “to compass the destruction of five warships, only two of which were armoured, it was necessary to employ nearly thirty, including twenty-one armoured ships, for the most part of superior metal, and this took no account of the powerful Japanese squadrons, and of French ships or of armed merchant cruisers.”) But information as to the enemy’s position reached von Spee only weeks after dispatch, when it was no longer useful. As he was rounding the coast of South America, the enemy, larger, more powerful, and invisible to von Spee, was closing in.

  Von Spee knew he could not lead the squadron’s two thousand men safely home. Is it not likely this plunged him into despair? Despair so great it caused him to miscalculate at the Falkland Islands, an error, in the end, that would cost him the fleet?

  Shortly before leaving for the Falklands, at Valparaíso, von Spee sent this message to his Kaiser: “I am quite homeless. I cannot reach Germany. We possess no other secure harbor. I must plough the seas of the world doing as much mischief as I can, until my ammunition is exhausted or a foe far superior succeeds in catching me.”

  When a visitor aboard the ship handed him a bouquet of purple irises, von Spee is reported to have said: “Thank you, thank you, indeed. They will do very nicely for my grave.”

  —Fleet of Misfortune: Graf von Spee and the Impossible Journey Home

  17

  The small beans, shaped like hearts, arrive in the middle of the night.

  At dawn, when Elsa walks down to the ocean to splash her face, there they lie: small black hearts, wet and glistening, scattered like pebbles along the beach’s rim. They have come, she knows, from somewhere far. She tries to calculate how long they’ve been at sea. If it was three weeks by boat from the mainland, then drifting on the current alone would take at least two months. Two months—assuming they left the nearest landfall. But they could come from anywhere—Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia. And this reminds her, as nothing for the past year has, of lands beyond this one, each bean like a bottle with a distant greeting. Plucking them from the sand, Elsa wipes each one on her skirt, and then cups them in her hand. She is collecting them to make a necklace for Alice’s birthday.

  It is October and the weather is getting warmer. A party will be held on the beach—Elsa making the traditional taro cake as she has learned from the islanders, Te Haha singing. Too many birthdays have passed without event. Christmas and New Year’s marked only by sips from the small remaining store of brandy. But now, Elsa has decided, they will return to tradition, will pretend, if they can, that their lives are proceeding normally. And so seaweed is strung like tinsel from the tents. A white lace cloth sewn from Elsa’s old petticoats is laid across the small table. When they are all seated on their linen-covered crates, the coconut that miraculously washed up the week before is cracked open, its white flesh sparkling like ice, and is admired from all angles before Alice lifts the first crescent to her mouth.

  She gnaws at the meat of the nut, sucks the inside of the shell. “Try it, Beazley,” she says.“Co-co-nut.”

  Edward takes his share, then Elsa, then Biscuit Tin and Te Haha. They all nibble slowly at their slivers of the white nut. It could be months before another washes ashore.

  Elsa lifts the necklace of hearts from her lap and hands it to Alice.

  “Twenty-two hearts, Allie. For the twenty-two years my heart has belonged to you.”

  Alice fingers the necklace. “Beans!”

  “It’s for your neck. To wear.”

  But Alice simply sets it beside the ruins of her coconut.

  “And, Alice,” begins Edward, lifting from his lap a bundle swathed like a mummy in silk handkerchiefs. “For the birthday of my most excellent assistant.”

  She unfurls each cloth until she is holding the small figure of amoai.

  “You see.” Edward reaches forward to touch the statue. “It is made from the same volcanic tuff the realmoai are carved from. From the quarry. The proportions are identical to those of the one we are excavating.”

  “My ownmoai ! Alice’smoai !”

  “Yes, Alice. Your ownmoai. ”

  “Edward, that’s wonderful,” says Elsa. Alice has been helping Edward at the quarry. As the pit around themoai ’s base grows deeper, Alice can climb to the subterranean level to make sure the workers don’t damage the statue. She describes to Edward any marking she notices, makes drawings of any petroglyphs. Alice has loved working there, her happiness awakened from a long sleep. The gift is perfect, thinks Elsa.

  “Moai iti,” says Te Haha.Little moai . He examines it, clearly unimpressed by its artistry. “Humph.” He is, after all, a wood-carver. He is the artist among them.

  Alice snatches themoai and clutches it to her chest. “Moai iti,” she whispers.

  Soon the taro cake is presented. Te Haha rises from the table, sits cross-legged in the sand, and begins one of his warbling songs. Elsa feels herself relax. She is grateful to Te Haha, her teacher, their friend. She is grateful for this small family they have forged. Biscuit Tin, who has grown two inches in
the past months, sits beside the birdcage. As Alice sways with Te Haha’s chant, losing herself in the music, he watches with fright as she seems to disappear.

  Elsa lifts the necklace from the table and strokes the hearts. These beans washing ashore, the coconut on the sand, they make her wonder—could the tablets be made from driftwood? Where else would the pieces have come from?

  “Elsa.” Alice’s eyes are on her. “That’s my necklace.”

  “It is, Allie. Do you want to wear it?”

  “Yes.” Alice leans across the table and Elsa places it around her neck.

  “My necklace,” Alice says, squinting. “Mine.”

  Several nights later they are having dinner on the beach. To the west, the sky is primrose, the clouds like melting pearls of sunset. The scent of smoke and sweet potatoes and roast mutton fills the air.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Elsa says as she pries a pile of steaming banana leaves from the earth oven, “of paying a visit to the leper colony.”

  “Elders?” Edward is seated on his crate, leafing through his notebook. He has been excavating eight hours a day; drained, he now speaks only in the most efficient shorthand.

  “If rumor is correct, there are at least three people there old enough to remember the Peruvian slavers.” She forks a sweet potato and shakes it onto a metal plate. “And Te Haha says there is a man there who can writerongorongo. ”

  “The lepers? Write?”

  “Well, I have to see, don’t I? I can’t pass up what might be a conversation with the only islander left who can read the script.” After all her interviews, her extensive records of the island’s folklore, Elsa feels she is close, on the verge of at least a partial decipherment. “Given the age of some of these people, it would not be wise to put it off.”

  “Yes. Quite right, dear. Do go.”

  Alice is perched on the sand beside Edward’s crate. “Quite right, dear,” she says. “Do go.”