“Breadfruit — good, but taro, much better. Sinks in stomach like ballast. Breadfruit — taste all right, but float in stomach. Never done eating!”
“You mean pọljej doesn’t fill you up?”
“That ripe one baked in coconut milk? Yes, that one is good, but you need to eat that with crab and not enough crab here to fill stomach!”
“He has a way of turning every conversation back to his own unhappy predicament,” thought Ḷainjin. He decided to press the argument he’d had many times with high-island people. Paratak was sitting on the bow deck facing them with his feet dangling down into the proa, silhouetted against the rapidly fading light on the western horizon beneath the sail behind him. The lagoon water lee of the windward fringing reef was relatively calm, and the hull jettisoned hardly a drop as it rose and fell and rhythmically cut into the gentle ripples generated by the light wind.
“Don’t the crabs eat shit when your people defecate in the swamps?” questioned Ḷainjin, half laughing as he leaned back across the outrigger platform on his right elbow and mischievously glanced toward Liṃanṃan at the helm.
She squinted back at him like a mother cautioning her child to behave.
“Forbidden to defecate in swamps!”
“It is also forbidden for the children to pee in the streams as they bathe,” said Ḷainjin, “but who knows if they do?”
Paratak appeared frustrated. His persona was to appear above everyone else because he came from a bigger, more advanced place with a more sophisticated culture. Everyone had always been in awe of his tales of freshwater and endless taro pits and villages made of stone with the help of countless workers. No one had ever suggested such a place had flaws, let alone someone who had been there. The suggestion took him a bit aback. A sense of fear crept over his face as though he feared Ḷainjin had lured him away to revive their grievances and kill him out there. He began glancing about as though he was perhaps looking for a weapon that Ḷainjin might be ready to use on him.
“True, we have too many people to count. Lots of shit? Yes.” He smiled reticently. “I agree, better to defecate on reef. Ocean surround everything and make clean.” He looked at Liṃanṃan, who had her ear turned to him but was busy watching the wind in the sail. “You people of low island are lucky you are few. Much space — many fish to eat — strong women like no man has ever seen before!”
Liṃanṃan gave him a smile and a cute scrunch of her nose, and they all laughed very hard at this — Paratak especially, as he had proudly demonstrated that he was not without charm. As the tension eased, Ḷainjin asked Paratak if his father was a fisherman.
“Oh yes! My father taught me how to fish beyond reef with long line for big-eye tuna.”
“What did he use for a hook?”
“He had many he earned from his chief. My father never lost a hook. He was very good fisherman. Once he went into the water when big tuna pulled outrigger into air but managed to keep hook and fish.”
“But what was the hook made of?” asked Ḷainjin.
“The best! Same as your hook.”
“Kapwōr?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Where did the kapwōr come from? Who fashioned the lure?”
“Okay, you are right! Come from people of low island. True, low island make much wealth, but no one wants to live there!”
“What did he accomplish for his chief to earn the hooks?” asked Liṃanṃan.
Ḷainjin knew well the answer to this question, but he was curious to see how Paratak would respond.
“He delivered stone at appointed time.”
“Just a stone?”
“Big one.”
“How big?” she persisted.
Ḷainjin interjected. “You have no idea,” he said.
“Stone long as this boat.”
“How did he carry a stone that large?” she questioned. She sounded skeptical.
Paratak looked toward Ḷainjin and raised his eyebrows, deferring the question to him.
“You can’t carry a stone that large. You cannot imagine how large they are. The stones have flat sides. Most have six. They are too heavy for twenty men to carry. They sort of paddle them around placing skids beneath them. It takes many days of intensive work.”
Paratak followed along and demonstrated Ḷainjin’s words by holding up six fingers and then digging the back side of his hand into the air, smiling and nodding his head repeatedly in agreement.
“Six sides. How did they grind stones that large?”
“Nobody ground them. They are just that way!”
“Nan Sapwe make that way,” added Paratak.
“Who is Nan Sapwe?” she asked.
“He make jourur,” he replied.
“The stones differ in length and size,” said Ḷainjin. “Strangely, they break off from the mountains that way — with six sides. Pohnpeians say the thunder does it. You have never seen anything like them. Pohnpei is clearly a special place, but my point is that they look down on us even though we provide the tools for them to accomplish all this. We give them the adzes to cut the logs and to fashion their fishing canoes. We give them the blades for their knives, the barbs for their fishing spears, and the hooks for their lines, and we deliver all these things to them. Truth be told, they do not even know how to navigate, and their chief treats us like heroes because we cross the ocean to trade our wealth. Only the chiefs seem to realize that if it were not for us — we of the low islands — they would lose control of their people and their way of life. Yes, taro is more nutritious than breadfruit, but you will sleep all day if you do not eat fish. You can’t eat crabs every day either. You need hooks and lures to fish.”
“But what do they use these stones for?” Liṃanṃan asked.
“They build their great village on the reef with them.”
“On the reef?”
“Yes, it is called Nan Madol. That is where we trade what we bring. At high tide, we enter the village in our boats. The village has paths of water at high tide. The stones fit tightly to enclose the mostly coral landfill, and they prevent the islet from washing away. It’s a village like no other. Their houses are much larger and pitched higher than you could ever imagine. They are so large they take days to thatch, and the walls surrounding them are of stones the size of which you could never imagine. It is a trading settlement built on the reef of an island that is so high its mountains reach to the clouds. Every day, men arrive in their foreign crafts speaking different languages from all over the west and the south, and they trade and watch them lay the stones. The village keeps half of what we trade as tribute to the chief. It is the most exciting place anyone has ever seen. There is nothing like it anywhere else, you can be sure of that… Except maybe Kosrae. Paratak, have you been to Kosrae?”
“No, but Kosrae small island, no compare. Their builders came from Nan Madol. All agree no equal.”
“Where is Kosrae?” asked Liṃanṃan.
“West of Namorik. If you drift off from Namorik in the windy season, that is where you end up. During these days of Jebrọ the opposite is true.”
“Ḷainjin, I want to see the stone villages. Take me there!”
Paratak and Ḷainjin both laughed together at her request. Paratak responded first. “That trip not for women. Too dangerous!”
Ḷainjin, though he knew Paratak’s statement to be untrue, nodded his head in agreement all the same to tease her.
“I’ll trade Ḷainjin to a Pohnpeian chieftess! I will get a good price for him, don’t you think? Then I’ll sail home with my fortune.”
They both laughed at her joke.
***
Night crept upon them and its breeze dried the sweat of the day. The first stars began to appear in the clear sky. They turned silent as Ḷainjin’s thoughts drifted back to his days paddling about the canals between the stone islets at Nan Madol. Liṃanṃan concentrated on making headway toward their still-distant destination, and Paratak lay back flat on the risi
ng and falling deck, his back cushioned by the two flat coconut-leaf baskets Kōkkālọk had woven for his catch. His legs bent at the knees, and his feet dangled through the forward hatch into the hull. He contentedly dozed off, periodically breaking the silence with a single snore that caused him to wake once or twice and peer about to remind himself of his surroundings.
Finally, their craft began to slow as Liṃanṃan steered them into the lee of the islet of their destination. The sleepy boat sounds of wind in the sail, and surging and slapping water, and the gentle creaking of their boat gave way to the chaotic squawking of the seabirds commanding the squat kōņņat forest of this stark, uninhabited place. It was surrounded by patches of lagoon back reef, wave-abraded coral stones, sand, and periodically outcropped shorehead. The malodorous, dank smell of fresh guano filled the air and reminded them they were but intruders upon the desolate pile of poop amassed by this horde of noisy inhabitants.
As the tide was in process of receding, they had only to beach their canoe where the shimmering lagoon water, gently rising and falling, sloshed upon the stony sand. Ḷainjin loosened the halyard, lowered the yard, and carefully flaked the boat’s sail. He left the sail with its spars to hang and waft gently in the faint breeze and then inserted his fingers beneath the gill of a dead fish and lifted it off the outrigger. Paratak grabbed his baskets and slung one over each shoulder. Liṃanṃan removed her alele of fire-making implements from the dry place in the hull where she stored them, and the three of them left their craft and headed around the islet toward the fresh breeze of its somewhat less squawky, windward side. Ḷainjin had already asked and been told there were no ak to be found on these islets. If the Chief was there, he would expect to find him in plain sight, roosting amid the shore-most kōņņat branches. That is where he searched, to no avail, as they continued around the islet. Soon they began to hear the distant sound of the living reef crest absorbing the force of the ocean swells rolling upon it. This was followed by the rushing sound of the white starlit water swishing shoreward upon the reef flat, which assured Ḷainjin that the tide was receding. The black sky was so ablaze with countless points of light that, for a brief instant, each no doubt realized that they had indeed momentarily forgotten that all was about to change.
Then they reached a stony spot on the ocean side of the strand that was midway above the high-tide mark and well oceanward of the chalky, bird-infested forest of the interior. Ḷainjin laid the fish upon the still-wet shorehead of dead, fused coral overlooking the beach, and both men crouched beneath the kōņņat branches and entered the dark thicket to gather dry wood for their fire.
Liṃanṃan, on her part, sat upon the stones above the shorehead. She opened her alele and dug out her gift from Ḷaluj, a small ball of bwijinbwije that she planned to use as tinder. Next, she withdrew a loosely tied fire bow of two hand lengths; a hardwood fire spindle to be inserted into a loop in the bow string; and a rounded, palm-shaped cap of hardwood with which to hold it and drill into the softer, sun-dried kōņņat wood that Ḷainjin had tossed upon the rocks next to her. He had split the dry branch in two with his ring, and she peeled out the soft, white center with her thumbnail and positioned it under the heels of her feet. She adjusted the bowstring — which was just long enough to create a single loop for the spindle — squatted, and began frantically drilling the dry wood beneath her feet, chanting:
Sear stick, blow coal,
fire flame, so fear me!
Eat fire, eat stick,
eat Lairi, fart!
‘Where do you come from, Lairi?’
‘But from your fart, my dear!’
When she could smell the scent of smoking wood, she drilled all the harder in hope of begetting a tiny coal on her first try. Soon she dropped her drilling implements, covered the smoking kōņņat branch with the ball of bwijinbwije, bent low to the shore, and gently blew into the fibers until white smoke began to rise from the hair-like ball. Then she placed the smoldering ball between two pieces of dry coconut husk that she snatched from the alele and began wafting the tinder through the air with both hands. The smoke became thicker, and the husks’ cores turned red as she blew between them. When they flared, she placed them on the sun-bleached stones above the tide line of the rocky shore and covered them with the sticks the men had piled next to her. Eventually, she inserted her fire-making implements back into the alele and removed a dry, trimmed breadfruit leaf that she used to fan the smoldering pile of tinder until it inevitably, suddenly burst into flame.
Soon the fire was roaring. Liṃanṃan began choosing rounded stones the size of her curled index finger and gathered the hardest ones into a pile. Paratak lay down again on his baskets away from the heat of the fire, and Ḷainjin took the fish out on the reef to clean it. As he crossed the reef flat and looked back at Paratak resting in the light of the fire, he chuckled to himself over the frightened look on his face when he had asked him about shitting in the swamps — as though he were a boy again and his mother had caught him squatting in the wrong place. “Should he ever start bragging about the crabs again, a little smile on my part should suffice to stop him in midspeech,” he thought. He had the feared Pohnpeian eating out of his basket, which was exactly where he wanted him.
He stooped over a puddle of water, laid the fish in it, slit its belly, removed the guts, and rinsed the fish in the clean salty water. He looked across the flat to the reef crest where the live corals bathed by the breaking swells rose as shadows against the starlit foam splashing over them, and he imagined the lobsters slowly retreating into the crevices of the caverns between them. They had just started eating the green reef moss, too small for most men to notice, but had had their meal cut short by the moon that ruled their behavior. It was about to surprise all and suck away the remaining water in which they waded, and he imagined them retreating knowingly into their crevices beneath the waves and impatiently waiting for the tide to turn before crawling shoreward upon the reef as red ants would probe the strand at the scent of a dead fish cast up by the high tide.
“Kok, kok, kok, kok!” he chanted, to tease them. “Paratak has a big basket for you,” he whispered in good humor, as he turned, chuckled, and walked back toward the firelight reflected by the reef puddles scattered across the flat. He inhaled the scent of the stark landscape about him. He had been at sea so long that he had forgotten the smell of a reef laid bare by the receding tide. “It is good to have the chance to smell that once again,” he thought. Mulling the chances he had taken to fulfill his destiny, he watched Liṃanṃan covering the fire with stones as he returned with warm feelings for her and especially for his mother, whom he felt had somehow guided him to her. Now if only he could adjust to island life and all the pretense and drama that came with it, a life he was sure his mother, too, had wished she had settled for but been unable to return to.
Liṃanṃan had killed the flame of her fire with the stones, and much smoke was swirling about. Each noticed for the first time the faint glimmer on the eastern horizon that announced the moon’s ineluctable rise into view. Then Ḷainjin rushed up to the fire as though to warn them of some danger.
“Paratak, do you hear that?” asked Ḷainjin.
“What?”
“Listen carefully! Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?” said Paratak seriously, turning his head to and fro. He faced Ḷainjin as though he was the wind and he had to immediately set his tack to escape the danger — listening intently, no doubt, with one ear turned to the roar from the reef’s edge, the other to the downwind chatter of the sea birds.
“There it is again!”
“Where?” Paratak responded with a splash of fear drenching his face.
“Out there! The lobsters are calling!”
At that point, the heavy smoke of Liṃanṃan’s fire broke wondrously into blaze and illuminated Paratak’s face the instant his fear faded into embarrassing relief as he accepted the brunt of Ḷainjin’s joke. The sympathetic upward look on Liṃanṃan�
�s smiling face erupted into laughter as their eyes met and he realized how thoroughly Ḷainjin had fooled him. Jagged white stones stuck to the black of their backs as both men dropped to the beach and rolled with uncontrollable laughter.
“They are calling the name of the great Pohnpeian seafarer!” continued Ḷainjin, interrupting himself in hysterical laughter as he struggled to continue. “They all want a ride in his baskets, but most are sad that only the biggest will be chosen!”
The joke was as slow to pass as the night. They continued to chuckle as the light grew in the eastern sky and gradually replaced the multitude of stars that had thus far illuminated their adventure. Their fire burned down into coals beneath the stones that cooked their savory catch as it simmered and smoked and spit its juices. Had what started in misunderstanding, rage, and fear settled into bonds of friendship? This is what they most likely pondered as the three sat silently, sharing their meal and, now and again, returning to friendly laughter. They watched the moonlight grow from the enormous oblong ball that patiently rose through a narrow line of clouds to create, as though summoned, a path of light directly toward them across a vast expanse of ocean.
“What meaning your fire chant? Eat fire, eat stick?” Paratak asked Liṃanṃan.
“We women of kapin meto always sing that chant when we make fire. The chant comes from the story of Lairi, who lived on the atoll over there.” Liṃanṃan pointed northward toward Wōtto with her nose. Now he lives in a story our grandfathers tell us when they want to put us to sleep.”
“Tell me story. I want hear.”
Liṃanṃan was still picking over the head of the fish she was eating and had just loudly slurped an eye from its socket when she raised her left hand high to the sky, almost as though imploring him to stop pleading.
Man Shark Page 19