“There she is, sitting with the irooj. What is she doing?” Jitwa asked her girls.
“She is sitting behind him, picking lice from his unbound hair!”
“Mānnijepḷā flutters down,” she continued, “and lands on the lagoon shore close by. The bird cries ‘Kook!’ The newcomer hides himself under the bird’s feathers. The irooj has never seen such a large bird. He impulsively announces he will take it as his pet and sends his workers to gather fish for the bird to eat.”
This is where Ḷainjin interjected. “Just like he impetuously snatched the good-smelling Liṃanṃan from his loyal, seafaring workers!”
Jitwa continued. “The bird eats all the fish they are able to catch.
“The next morning, the irooj is awakened by the bird, screaming to be fed.
“‘Kok! Kok! Kok,’ goes the bird.
“So the irooj grabbed his twine for ekkoonak, gathered his workers again, and sailed out to a spot on the reef where they were able to encircle a large group of ikaidik.”
At this point, one of her daughters interrupted Jitwa and turned to Tokjān. “Father, tell us again why the fish don’t just escape under the floating twine.”
“Because the twine makes a shadow through the water and, at first, the fish are afraid of this shadow. As the circle gets smaller and smaller, the fishermen encircle the group tightly and hold their position. By then it’s too late to escape, and they all fall prey to the fishermen’s three-pronged spears of stingray-tipped barbs.”
Jitwa was determined to finish her story. “No sooner had they filled their proa with the ikaidik than Mānnijepḷā flew up and fluttered among them, screaming ‘Kok, kok, kok!’ Frightened, the fishermen tossed up their catch, and the bird ate it all.
“‘What kind of bird is this?’ said the men. However, not deterred, the irooj announced that they should get prepared for bọbo.
“So the men went home to their villages and made torches from dried coconut fronds.”
This was the part of the story that led to the famous bọbo song that the jekaro boys had sprung into on the night Paratak tore his kilt away. It was not a war dance like the jebwa but a dance to celebrate getting back to everyday life after the battle.
“Father, show us again how to bọbo,” asked one of his daughters. This, apparently, was the part the girls liked the most, and Jitwa, the least.
Tokjān rose quickly, grabbed onto his pole net of two ñeñe, reached over the sitting group with the pole, and cupped the net at the end beneath his woman’s two coconut shells of cooking water, which were hanging in their own nets from one of the cookhouse rafters. He twisted the net to break them away, backed the butt of the pole out the open doorway, and exited, dripping water over the lot of them. When he returned, Jitwa beat on his foot with the stick she used to stir the coals of her hearth, leaving black marks of charcoal across the top of it.
“Sit down and stop showing off!” The group roared in laughter at these antics. Jitwa seemed intent on finishing the story, but her girls were not ready.
“But Father, you said the fish would fly from all directions!”
“That’s right, and that’s why the men in the dance dip their poles low and then high so they can catch the fish as they fly.”
“But why do the fish fly?”
“They are escaping the sharks that are rushing to eat them!”
“Why are there so many sharks?” asked one.
“At first they are attracted by the light of the torches, but as they get close, they see the flying fish there, stunned by the light. So they go for their meal, and the fish take flight to escape the sharks’ bite.”
After a brief silence, Jitwa returned to her story.
“That night, the men launch their proa and head out to sea, past the western reef of Ujae. The newcomer unites with Liṃanṃan, and they cling to Mānnijepḷā’s feathers as it takes flight and approaches the fleet as the men fish. It flutters over them, and their torches flare as they toss up fish to feed the greedy bird. That is when the irooj sees his stolen woman. She is sitting there on the bird’s back with her bare legs wrapped around the newcomer, and she is picking lice from his unbound hair. He gets a last whiff of her scent before they fly off. He will never smell her again, and she is glad she chose a man of certain powers.”
When the story was finished, the younger girl said, “Mother, I’m going to take a man of certain powers.”
Her older sister said, “You like Ḷōbwebwe! What powers does he have?”
“I do not! But he knows how to bwilbwil,” said the younger girl, defending him.
“And bwilbwil is the first step in learning how to become a great navigator,” added Ḷainjin, defending the girl’s choice.
“What’s a navigator?” she asked.
“That’s a man who goes out into the ocean, sails in circles until he finds an island, and then claims he knew where it was all along!” answered Liṃanṃan jokingly. “That’s where I caught this one, paddling around in circles until he stumbled upon my father’s proa and followed me home.”
Ḷainjin’s eyes squinted at her and she squinched her nose back at him.
Tokjān interjected. “The women have clearly won this evening’s battle. Better to retreat than end up sleeping in your hull!” he said, departing for the big house.
“Girls, time to grate coconut and draw water for our guests,” Jitwa said.
The little ones scampered. Jitwa passed the sleeping baby from her lap to one of her older daughters to take to the house and turned to Ḷainjin. “Ḷōtokjān hasn’t heard about all the fun you two had in that hull of yours!”
Liṃanṃan, with a look of embarrassment, turned her face to Ḷainjin but avoided his surprised and questioning eyes by stating it was time to draw his bathwater and then quickly exiting, leaving the two of them by themselves in the cookhouse.
Jitwa poured him a shell of steeped nen. He was wondering what details Liṃanṃan had given her about their first or subsequent encounters and was not sure how embarrassed he should be — but he was not about to ask.
“Just like a man,” she continued. “You’re so concerned about your story that you forget we women have our own stories to tell! Tomorrow, when you walk the path, ask any little girl you meet about the story of Liṃanṃan and her man shark, and they will tell you how she cast herself into the sea to die with a man she just met! She is so young, yet she is already a legend among us women! She is not cross when you tell your story of all your adventures on faraway islands. So don’t be cross when she brightens our lives by feeding us landbird tidbits about her life with the glorious seafarer.
“I’ll tell you a story about my sister Likeju. When Ḷōtokjān took me, he had been with many other girls around the atoll. After all, he had irooj blood, and look at him now. Even at his age, he would be a catch for any young woman! My good fortune was on everyone’s lips. I was the most desirable to him, and he lay with me night and day, like a fisherman drilling the eye of his lure. It took him but a week to plant his seed, and everyone marveled at how quickly I got pregnant. Everyone was happy for me except my sister!
“She was an unusual girl who had her pride and had been with no man, and she claimed she did not want to have to please Ḷōtokjān while I was incapacitated. She told our grandmother so, and without saying another word, she took our father’s proa and sailed off into a storm…” She slapped her right hand against her left palm, extending it forward to mime her sister’s sail heeled over and dramatizing the depiction of her careening off into the wind.
“The next day, word came that she had made it to that northernmost islet, there” — she pointed with her face — “across the passageway. She was lucky she wasn’t swept out to sea in the squall!”
“Very brave,” responded Ḷainjin.
“Very foolish was my opinion at the time. I was livid!
“A few days later, grandmother mentioned why she disappeared to Ḷōtokjān and so” —she slapped her ha
nd again as before — “off he goes!
“When he gets to the island, he sees Father’s canoe in our cousin’s boathouse and is told Likeju is gathering pandanus leaves. He finds her in the pandanus patch with our cousin’s daughters and sits before them. He promises her that, if she returns, she has nothing to fear — that he will respect her wishes and expect nothing from her — and then he pledges before all these girls to remain celibate during my pregnancy out of respect for me!”
Continuing, she said, “What a luwap!”
“Just like a man, he assumed she left because of him! In truth, it had nothing to do with him. It was all about her and me because everyone was voicing my name and she was not content to stand in my shadow. She craved her own story and that’s why she left, not because she was afraid of that soft banana of his!
“The amusing thing is that, once she understood what a doting and respectful old puffer fish he was, she returned our father’s proa, attacked Tokjān like a landed barracuda, and successfully planted his seed under the first moon that passed. Guess who everyone was talking about then?! Then guess what? The puffer fish got his wish because my other sisters were too young to take our place on his mat. Likeju and I became sister stars in the sky. We are inseparable. We shared every minute of our pregnancies together and have not shared a cross word since.
“Here is my point. We women have our own stories and our men need to realize this. Let Liṃanṃan tell her story any way she wants.”
“Did I hear my name?” inquired Liṃanṃan from the doorway, as she grabbed hold of Ḷainjin’s arm and started playfully yanking him away. “Don’t listen to a word she says! She is trying to get you to confess to all the private details about us that she has already tried to pry out of me with no success! It’s time for your bath, little boy!”
“Well, keep the bathhouse dark,” Jitwa said. “I don’t want my daughters peeking at your little boy’s private details! When you’re done washing him, lay him on a mat in the house.”
“I’m going to put him to sleep in your cookhouse,” Liṃanṃan said.
“Just as I thought — the poor thing has a careless mother,” retorted her aunt.
Later, in the dark of the bathhouse, under the faint starlight seeping through the forest canopy of breadfruit leaves and coconut palms, they took turns squeezing the oily milk from white mounds of grated coconut upon each other and then scrubbing each other with the remaining pulp and the inpel used to squeeze it. The water wilted the curls of her hair, and she reminded him of the way she looked earlier that day, when she had dunked to cool herself in the lagoon — except this time, she was shivering as the well water ran cold over her sunburned skin. He embraced her with the warmth of his body, squeezed her with his arms, and lifted her high to his chest. Then he twirled her once to remind her of her first night with him. She landed on his hip with her legs wrapped about him. She pressed her breast up to his mouth, whispering the name of the little one she had fruitlessly suckled earlier. “Ḷajuōn, here’s your supper. Yes, here it is, here it is. What? There is nothing left? Well, you must have drunk it all. Yes, you drank it all! You are a greedy little boy! You drank every drop of my milk and there’s none left,” she whispered, kissing him repeatedly on the face as she had the child.
When he put her down, she wrapped her skirts about her, handed him his kilt, and led him across the stone yard back to her aunt’s cookhouse, where Jitwa had left them a rolled-up sleeping mat. Liṃanṃan unfurled it, laying it on the thicker, more broadly woven mats they had sat upon earlier. Then she snuffed out the shell lamp of coconut oil that her aunt had lit, and they lay in each other’s arms in the darkness, save for the dim glow of dying coals in the hearth and the starlight reflecting off the sun-bleached stones of the surrounding courtyard and shining through the slatted cookhouse walls. In the nearby house, her aunt, who commandeered her family as though they were the crew of her proa, broke the quiet periodically. There was singing and the scampering of little feet, scolding, cautioning, crying, and then orders to draw more water, to grate more coconut, to bathe, to come and to go, to lie still, and to sleep.
“Ḷajuōn looked so cute dancing the jebwa.”
“What made you decide to plead for my life?”
“It was a good lesson for the girls.”
“I felt awkward and embarrassed.”
“I wanted to embarrass you,” she said, touching him, gently drawing his attention away from their discussion.
“Why?”
“Because you needed a little humbling after dancing like that.” She removed her skirts and lifted her thigh invitingly.
“Dancing like what?” He rolled over, sitting on his knees and straddling her other leg.
“Your dance was too compelling,” she said, fondling his bulging manhood beneath his kilt. “I saw all the women were watching you and not the others. Now when the men return home, they will be talking about the both of us and not just about you. No man wants to listen to talk about another man’s dancing.” She untied his kilt, flung it aside, slowly and seductively extracted her leg from between his, and wrapped it about him until he could feel her heel high upon his back.
“How do you know?” he asked, as he positioned himself.
“Litaknaṃ taught me such things.” She giggled.
“Oh, Litaknaṃ again. What else did she teach you?” he asked, accepting her invitation and gently entering her.
“She told me to invert myself to plant your seed deep.” Placing her weight onto her elbows, she maneuvered the flat of her feet up onto his shoulders and rolled back to accept the entirety of his swollen manhood as he hunched on all fours. He looked down into her determined face, her wet hair sprawled beguilingly on the mat beneath them. “Release it, and I will keep it warm and moist and dark within me. It will grow into a boy or a girl. Either way, we’ll call it Kāmeto and it will be a great seafarer like its father” — she was laughing now — “and a great fisher like its mother!”
They laughed together at her joke as he rolled her high upon her shoulders. Then he began once again his gallant struggle to master the oncoming urge to release himself into her, knowing she wanted him to rock her to satisfaction, knowing she expected him to chafe the skin of his knees red — knowing this would be the very first thing she would look for in the morning and knowing that her sister would tease him if he scabbed. He therefore concentrated his thoughts on the details of the things she had done or said to him. He raised his face and peered into the blackness above, searching for images of her to un-urge himself for one instant, and then another. He rejected the perennial images of the broken, ashen bodies of the friends who had lost their lives for him; the cold, dark, and putrid cave of Nan Samohl, with its single unreachable circle of light above him; the fiery sun of the doldrums beating down upon his cracked lips as though it intended to shrivel his face to the bone.
In their stead flashed her auburn face as it surfaced from the blue sea beneath him and feigned a pout as she snatched his prized pandanus and teased him by floating it away from his grasp. Here, he found her determinedly, ecstatically hauling her catch, seawater mixed with blood from her palms running pink down her forearms. There she was at the mast in the rain, releasing the halyard in the teeth of the approaching storm. One intriguing image of her led to another and then another as the moments of their short life together streamed about him timelessly, crowding away those of his harrowing, unhappy past until his desire for the noble, seductive soul striving beneath him forced him back to the faint glare reflecting off the starlit eyes peering up at him.
He, realizing she had been watching him as he had turned away to watch her out there in their past together. She, nevertheless, revealing to him, through the faintest murmur, her undaunted passion. He, realizing their heavy breathing had become one, felt the coconut-scented sweat dripping from his face down upon her, as it became his turn to watch her writhing to fulfill herself. Her face, wet with oil and perspiration, began to twist from side t
o side away from him, now in a seemingly solo struggle. Then, as though swimming through the waves, he watched her reach the precipice that now required her to draw herself onto it. He felt her fingers clutch onto each of his wrists as his hands were clutching the undersides of her thighs, as though she needed leverage for a final thrust. A moment later, he felt her tremble. She turned back to him, raised her eyebrows, and simultaneously inhaled sharply — and none too soon, as watching her desperate pursuit had drawn him irreversibly back to the edge of uncontrollability. His seed was now too much to bear despite his will to continue to contain it and bask in the sweltering desire that had welled up inside him. Silently, satisfyingly, he felt the storm she had so seductively brewed peak and seemingly flood her insides with its torrent.
Exhausted, they curled their naked, oily, and sweaty bodies together. They lolled in the faint breeze that had drifted across an untold expanse of waves to cross the calm waters of the reef-sheltered lagoon and then seep through the slatted walls sheltering them. They lay content that they had managed, despite all odds to the contrary, to clutch onto each other amid the boundless, unknowable universe of endless sky and sea sweeping about them, and this mutual, meditative thought lay wordless between them. After a prolonged period of silence, she covered their nakedness by folding the mat over them, and each fell separately into a deep peaceful sleep.
When he awoke the next morning and ran his hands over the smooth skin of the naked body still intertwined with his beneath the mat, he soon realized that not all was well. He could hear lagoon waves breaking on the shore. The breeze had picked up and was carrying familiar voices from the boathouse where his proa rested. Liṃanṃan protested, clung to him from the warmth of the sleeping mat, pleaded he stay, and then pouted as he nonetheless arose, donned his kilt, and emerged into the slight first light of daybreak. The air was heavy, damp, and salty. Two of his jekaro boys were talking with Tokjān. They had been sent by Etre, who had apparently hurt himself and could not make jekaro. Not till later, once he had crossed the lagoon, would Ḷainjin compile the true story. Word had spread that Likōkkālọk was pregnant, and Paratak, who had seen Etre conspiring with her, now accused him of being the father. Paratak had attacked Etre, who was embarrassed that he had not put up much of a fight.
Man Shark Page 27
