Danny shrugged and then nodded out the window. The sun was now high and the pier that stretched out from the restaurant into the ocean was awash in its rays, the surf beneath it splashing against the A-frame pylon supports. It was a gorgeous scene, and the dunes that separated the diner and the water sprouted golden sea grass from their mounds. Danny loved dunes, always had, even in his life before the sighting. He knew a lot of people thought they were an eyesore, weed-carriers that ruined an otherwise smooth, perfect seascape. But Danny thought the dunes were perfect.
“Look at this place. Who wouldn’t want to live here?”
Sam looked out the window and seemed to give an earnest assessment of the landscape before saying, “Yes, it’s very beautiful. There’s lots of beautiful places. Why did you pick here?”
“Hi, I’m Natalia,” a voice chirped from behind them. “I’ll be taking care of you today.”
Danny turned to see a girl who looked barely seventeen, her eyes wide and smiling, pencil and pad positioned for the order.
“Hi, Natalia,” Danny answered, the relief in his voice palpable.
“Can I start y’all off with—”
“Can we have a minute, please?” Sam interrupted, her eyes never leaving Danny’s.
Natalia shifted her wide eyes over to Sam and then back to Danny.
Danny gave a painful, squinted smile. “Sorry. Just another minute.”
Natalia moved to the next table and recited her welcome line and Danny sat back in the booth, staring at Sam. “Okay, Sam, if you must know, I moved here because I like the ocean. I really like the ocean. It’s that simple. I like to be near the sea. Maybe I was a pirate in a past life.”
“Didn’t you live at the ocean before? In the last place you lived?”
Danny narrowed his look, tilting his head slightly. “I don’t remember telling you that.”
“Yeah, well, you also didn’t remember my name this morning. What did you do, take a peek at my license?”
Danny didn’t address the accusation, still suspicious of the previous question. “I have some bad memories in the place where I lived before. Very bad. So I’m trying to give myself a fresh start.”
“Memories like what?”
Danny snickered and shook his head, hoping to convey the signal that he was willing to put up with this line of questioning for perhaps a little longer, but that Sam was starting to push it. And that if it continued, he would shut the whole rest of the morning down, breakfast or not.
“You know, in some parts of the world, a question like that would be considered intrusive. Rude even.”
“Not here in Wickard, I guess.”
“No, I guess not. But then I guess my reply of ‘None of your business, Sam’ wouldn’t be either.”
Sam didn’t flinch, which made Danny slightly uncomfortable.
“Why are you so interested in what I’m doing here anyway? Who cares? By all the indications I’ve gotten since I’ve been here, this is exactly the kind of place where people come for no reason. Just to retire or drop out or whatever. Why all the curiosity?”
Sam dropped her eyes now and directed them out the window. “Where the hell’s the waitress?”
Danny was intrigued now by the chord he had apparently struck. “Do you know something about me?”
Sam returned her stare to Danny. “Is there something I should?”
Chapter 5
“Tell us again what happened, Samuel.”
Samuel’s head was as low as it would hang, his chin pressed tightly against his chest, shame emanating from him in the form of tears and spit and snot. He shook his head slowly, the mess on his face exaggerated with each turn of his neck.
“Pick your head up, boy, and answer the question,” Samuel’s mother hissed from behind him, shoving a handkerchief in front of her son.
Samuel cleaned himself up and then tried desperately to compose himself, trying not to draw suspicion by recovering too quickly from his hysteria. He looked up slowly at the four brown figures seated in front of him. They were seated tall and proud, with their backs pressed against the northern wall of the village’s largest wigwam. The expressions they wore were as still and muted as the face of a stone mountain.
“It is okay, Samuel,” the only female amongst the group offered. It was Nootau’s mother, unquestionably the most beautiful woman on the island. “We don’t blame you for anything, but we must know the details of what happened to Nootau.”
“Nootau was a very strong swimmer,” a male voice added. This was Nootau’s father, and that he didn’t make eye contact with the boy standing before him, Samuel took as a sign that he did, indeed, blame him for his son’s death.
“Tell them, boy,” Samuel’s mother barked, and Samuel could almost see the clench of her teeth. Fear was dripping from her with every word. She knew they were in danger here every day, even under the best of circumstances, which these times were not. And with Samuel’s father now gone, perhaps forever, there were no other options but to survive here in the colony, to coexist with these natives who had magnanimously decided to allow them to stay.
But with the death of one of their own—a boy—the talented, bright son of a prominent native family, one who possessed a promising future for the tribe, the situation for the Cook family became that much more precarious, especially when his white colonialist friend was a witness to the whole thing.
Samuel steeled his expression and looked at Nootau’s mother, trying to keep his eyes above her ample chest and on her face. “He said that his father encouraged adventure, that he should use his free days as a means to overcome struggles, to prepare for his encroaching manhood years.”
Nootau’s mother averted her eyes to the floor of the wigwam and then turned her head just a fraction in the direction of her husband. Nootau’s father closed his eyes for a moment, the corners of his mouth edging down slightly.
“So, we took the canoe to the barrier island, and then we ventured further, across the dunes and down to the ocean. And there we played a game. A game we made up together.” Samuel looked away again, as if the memory of he and Nootau’s escapades were too painful to recall.
“What game, Samuel?” The kind voice of Nootau’s mother now frightened Samuel, as if she already knew what he was about to tell her was a lie.
“We called it ‘Invaders.’”
“Invaders?”
Samuel smiled weakly and nodded. “We would pretend that Spanish ships were appearing by the dozens on the horizon, and while they were approaching, we would prepare our fortifications and arsenal for the impending battles. We pretended it was just the two of us who had been assigned to protect the village, so there was much to do.” Samuel smiled. “And when the Spaniards finally arrived and the fighting began, of course we were always victorious.”
Nootau’s mother smiled now, and Samuel felt her hand rest on his shoulder. The touch wasn’t one of consolation; it was a signal that her son was doing an adequate job of keeping the natives at bay.
“And then what happened?” Nootau’s mother asked.
Samuel took a deep breath and gave a long blink, opening his eyes just before exhaling. “He said we couldn’t wait on the shores for the final ship of the armada; they were firing cannons from the bow and we were taking too many casualties on land. He said...” Samuel stopped and swallowed, choking on his words for a moment. “He said we had to swim out past where the waves broke. That we had to board the ship and take out the enemy from aboard. I’m not a good swimmer, I wouldn’t have made it, and Nootau knew that, so...”
Samuel began to cry again, but before he went into another bout of full-on bawling, he gathered himself quickly, bravely, standing tall, mimicking the rigid look of the Algonquins.
“So he told me to defend the shoreline while he took to the water.” He paused and looked Nootau’s mother directly in the eye. “And that’s when it took him.”
“The shark?” Nootau’s mother asked.
Samuel nodded.
“It is okay, Samuel. Thank you.”
Samuel nodded and went under the outstretched arm of his mother, pushing in close to her as they walked slowly from the wigwam and out to the awaiting eyes of the colony.
Samuel didn’t open his eyes the entire way home, but as he walked, he envisioned the sight again of the beast that rose from the sound. And with that memory, he couldn’t hold back a smile.
***
“I don’t believe him.”
Kitchi, now the youngest member of the four Algonquins who lived in the wigwam, was back in his bed, carried there by his brother Ahanu, who had returned to his work repairing the family’s longhouse. Kitchi’s back was flush against the wall in the corner of the structure; he was smoking tobacco and sipping mead from a cup made of clay.
“You don’t know him, Kitchi,” Nootau’s mother answered, her voice dreamy, still in disbelief that her son was gone forever. “He and Nootau were friends. They were very good friends.” She continued sweeping the sawdust from the home, her eyes never leaving the floor.
“I don’t need to know him. He is a white man. And thus, he is a killer inside.”
“He is a boy.”
Kitchi waved a hand at his sister.
“What do you believe, Matunaagd?” Nootau’s mother stopped her house work and stared at her husband, as if the idea that he may have thoughts had just come to her.
Nootau’s father had not moved from the chair where he sat only moments earlier, listening patiently, ostensibly, to the tale of his son’s death, a tale that had been spun from the mouth of a white English child. He quietly stared at the door where Samuel had exited, his eyes as distant as the land of the white man, reflecting on his own child and what role he, Matunaagd, had played in his death.
“Matunaagd?”
Matunaagd turned to his wife, a lone tear now in the middle of his cheek. He pinched his lips, trying to hold back the emotion that was bubbling beneath.
Nootau’s mother, Nadie, strode slowly toward her husband and stood beside him, taking his head in her breast, stroking his hair as she took in a deep breath, holding back tears of her own. “What do you think, Matunaagd?”
Matunaagd wiped the tear from his cheek angrily, and then stood and walked to the opening of the wigwam.
Nadie followed him, placing her hand on his bicep as he reached the threshold. “Where are you going?”
At his wife’s touch, Matunaagd stopped and stared out at the scene of the village square. It was a vision of solitude, a depiction of peace and cooperation.
To his left he watched Ahanu assist in repairing the longhouse roof, a critical job as they prepared for the encroaching winter months. There were white men and Algonquins working in harmony, brown hands below passing long strips of bark to white hands above, or white shoulders below hoisting long poles up to another set of Algonquin shoulders that rose high atop the roof.
This scene alone was an unthinkable possibility only one year ago, Matunaagd thought, let alone the dozens of other projects and transactions that occurred daily. He had always assumed by now one of the groups would have been killed off, and, he was ashamed to say, he truly thought it would have been his own.
But a truce had been developed between his people and those from the sea—the place called England—a land at the other side of the Great Western Sea where rulers chased their own people from the land.
The Great Western Sea.
It was a moniker brought to Matunaagd’s land from the white man, the name given to the Yapam—the sea—which had been a part of his entire life. Of course, the Yapam sat to the east of his tribe, east of every tribe in this land, but Matunaagd had grown to enjoy the majestic sound of the ‘Great Western Sea,’ and he had begun to refer to it the same way.
It was just one of the many things he and his people had adopted from the white man, just as they had borrowed from his people, and this mutual exchange of language and ideas—and later goods and services—had cultivated a semblance of respect amongst the two groups. Somehow, despite the unwelcomed nature of the relationship, there began the start of a road that could one day lead to lasting peace. It was a narrow road, one still obscured by a litany of differences, but the first stones had been set.
But then the hunger came.
The harvest had been a difficult one for two consecutive cycles, and though the hauls brought in by the fishermen were still moderate, the animals of the land had all but disappeared from the immediate surroundings. Hunting for deer and moose now often required trips of several days just for a chance at finding meat, instead of the late morning kills that had been so routine before. It was as if the land animals had sensed the danger of the European invaders and had fled for safer pastures.
The wisdom of the animals.
Of course, if Matunaagd was being honest with himself, he knew that scarcity was no new problem in this land, and with the failed crops of the current cycle, hunger would have been a challenge with or without the existence of these settlers. There had been at least one lean cycle every decade for as long as Matunaagd’s memory went back, and with each of those cycles, his people had struggled through with grace and strength. And there was no question they would have seen it through this time around.
But with the arrival of the English—who Matunaagd had counted at a little over a hundred when they first arrived, but whose numbers were now closer to eighty, mostly due to the departure of the men who had traveled with John White back to England—the village was nearing a breaking point. Matunaagd figured in a little over a month, scarcity would turn to famine.
And the tribe had begun to look to him for answers.
“This won’t last, Nadie,” Matunaagd said, as if acknowledging the truth for the first time. “The harmony of this village won’t last for much longer.”
Nadie turned away, feeling the sting of her husband’s words, and then she sighed and turned back, her chin high and sure. “You’re angry, Matunaagd. I am too. And I don’t know...” She caught her breath, putting her hand to her chest, panicking at the thoughts racing through her mind. “I don’t know how to go on without Nootau. Perhaps I won’t.”
Matunaagd whipped his head toward his wife, a look of fear and abandonment glistening in his eyes.
Nadie only shrugged at the look from her husband, in no state to be reassuring. “But we have done much to bring the village to this place of peace.” She nodded out toward the hard-working villagers working alongside the colonists. “And you have been a big part of it. Food is scarce, and that is a problem, but we have grown a resource even more valuable to our survival: trust.”
Matunaagd allowed his wife’s words to settle, considering them deeply as he resumed his surveillance out across the village, watching the setting sun as it illuminated the roofs of the wigwams like unripe kernels of corn. He wanted to tell her that none of it mattered if they all starved to death, but he kept his tongue silent on that matter. “Do you trust them?”
Nadie frowned and lowered her head, now searching for the truth herself.
“Because Kitchi doesn’t,” Matunaagd continued, lowering his voice further, keeping his brother-in-law out of earshot. “And I fear if rebellion comes, it will be he who leads it. He cannot walk, but his voice is as strong as any on the island.”
“Kitchi,” Nadie scoffed. “What merit can you put in his opinion? He doesn’t trust anyone from outside the tribe.”
“Perhaps that is another strength.”
“No, Matunaagd, it isn’t. There is no life for us without the trust of these people. How could there be? Our people have collided now, there is no turning back. More of them will come.”
“So then the answer is ‘yes,’ you do trust them. But only because you must. That is something, I suppose, bu
t it is not trust.”
“I trust the Cooks,” Nadie answered quickly, “and that is the only issue on my mind at the moment.” She lowered her voice again. “They have given me no reason not to. Even if the motives of some of the others are nefarious, and they intend war at some point, I don’t believe that of the Cooks. I believe it has always been their intention to live beside us. To integrate their lives with ours. Morris Cook is a good man.”
“And Elyoner?”
Nadie focused her eyes into her husband’s, swallowing hard before answering. “Yes, I trust her as well.”
“She doesn’t trust you, Nadie. You know that, right?”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Did you hear the way she spoke to Samuel? Did you see her face as he spoke?”
“That was fear, Matunaagd, not distrust. She is frightened to be here. She is a woman—one of only a dozen in the village to have come here from her land—and she is in a place as foreign to her as the night heavens. And with her husband gone, she is also alone. I would be frightened too.”
Matunaagd shook his head. “You would not be frightened like that. There was fear, of course, but there was anger within her too. Rage. It was directed at her son during the questioning, but there is a more concentrated anger that bubbles beneath her. I can feel it in her, as I do in many of these settlers. You can feel it too.”
Nadie nodded solemnly.
“We have structured a peace, that is true, but it is as precarious as the longhouses during the great winds.”
Nadie said nothing further on the matter, instead switching back to the subject of her son’s death. “Why did he go there, Matunaagd? Why did he go to the Yapam? We have told him not to go there alone. Not during this time of the cycle.”
“He wasn’t alone, Nadie.” Matunaagd felt the burn of shame form on his face, and he could only look to the dusty ground that was just outside of the wigwam. It was his suggestion to explore the world, and though Nadie had emphasized that Nootau must always stay on the island, unless given explicit permission to leave, Matunaagd, himself, had never stressed the point during the conversations he and his son had had alone.
The Origin (The Sighting #2) Page 4