It was time to move on. The swells from the east were rolling over the flooded open fringing reef as they sailed through the mismatch of waves and swirling currents to the next islet north. This was where he was to continue his search around its ocean side as she paddled with lowered sail along its lagoon shore toward the islet’s northernmost end, where they were again to meet. Except this time, as he casually searched and casually continued to fill his basket with the precious porous stones that had by chance floated across the sea, washing up here and there at the end of their separate journeys, something unbeknown to him had happened.
Had she again attempted to land their canoe and gone inland for more fronds upon which to beach it? Had she managed to beach and then begun to search for pumice herself, only to return and find it floating away? Had she been careless, or just foiled by the currents swirling about the flooded shores? More than likely, he would later contemplate, she had been preoccupied by her thoughts of him and perhaps Likōkkālọk. That thought would bring back a pang of guilt to his throat. Yet the only thing that mattered now was that she had plunged into the lagoon in a desperate attempt to retrieve his canoe after it had somehow slipped away, and by the time he had sauntered around the islet’s shore back to the lagoon, the boat had drifted so far that he initially assumed what he spotted in the distance was someone else’s. Except the shore was abandoned. So, though he could not see anyone on the canoe, he realized it must be his and began waving at it, expecting her to appear from below and wave or immediately hoist the sail and come back. Curiously, there was no response from the drifting craft. His throat tightened abruptly as he spied what must be her there in the distance, swimming after it! The pang in his throat quickly traveled to his head as he began to realize the dangerous situation into which she had cast herself.
Immediately, he shifted to battle. He cleared his head of all thoughts other than the situation facing him. He cupped his hands behind his neck, faced her image swimming toward the drifting boat, and adjusted his stance so she was equidistant between his elbows. He then tattooed that image onto his mind’s eye, stood steadfast, tightly closed his eyes, and slowly counted. When he reached fifty, he opened his eyes and, still at a standstill, tattooed the image again. Then he closed his eyes and again counted slowly to fifty. When he opened his eyes, he realized she was making good progress, swept by the current, no doubt. More importantly, she was not swimming toward the boat but rather anticipating where the boat was moving. It was not drifting dead in the water. Though they had previously struck sail and left it hanging properly furled, it was still catching some wind. The craft had turned to windward and was slowly making its way to the north as it drifted westward. He knew that the farther she swam into the lagoon away from the lee of the islet, the larger the waves would grow, making her return — should she be unable to catch her target — more difficult. Once again, he was tempted to leap into the water to rescue her, but how successful was he likely to be? She would be swimming away from him toward the drifting boat. She had the current and the wave behind her. He, with such a late start, could never catch up to her no matter how hard he swam. Though he could see her clearly now from his vantage high upon the shore, he was sure to lose sight of her in the troughs of the waves the moment he lowered himself into the water, especially if she tired and broke the line between him and his drifting target. Three times, he entered the water to swim after her and three times, he stepped back to shore. He realized, no matter what, it would be dark long before he could hope to catch her. She would never be downwind from him and would probably not hear his call. If she did reach the boat, she would have to tack back and might miss him, and then he would have to turn and swim back, in which case she would reach shore only to find him gone. What mistakes might she make then?
Suddenly, he saw her skirts hanging from the kōņņat tree where she had neatly folded and hung them, and was comforted that she had not impulsively dropped them in haste or cast them carelessly away. It was a sign she had at least deliberated. Her instincts must have told her she could make it! In that moment, who better to decide? Or had her “I can” attitude got the best of her? He decided he had no other choice but to remain diligently disengaged and wait for her return. He could do nothing to help her! He walked down the shore to a sandy spot, still sheltered and still warm, and lay back frustrated upon the sand. Had he lost her? Was she destined to become but another tragic and painful episode to crowd the memory of his already battered and bleeding soul? It was so comforting to have found someone to share his memories. Though he kept the darkest parts buried in his throat, at least she knew he was hiding them and periodically forced some out, as with a drowned man coughing up sea he has swallowed.
As he sat there at the water’s edge, absorbing the incessantly rising and falling tidal flow, a ḷañe chased a circle of baitfish that jumped at the flooded shoreline next to him. Three of the fish landed upon the shore, one of which flipped and flopped back into the water and was gone. He watched the other two lie there on the beach, expanding and contracting their silver gills to breathe. Alas, out of water, they would surely die and soon be eaten by hermit crabs — or more probably by one or another of these noisy, flocking terns. On a different day, he might have rinsed one and popped it into his mouth, crunching down on its head to stop its wriggle and chewing through its bones as he savored its raw, bloody flavor. If he had a line, he might have tossed pieces of the chewed fish back into the lagoon as chum, to keep the jack circling as he hooked and threw the second after the predator itself.
Just as a clear or cloudy sky would determine the color of the lagoon, so a man could see a vision of himself reflected off its surface, and so this ever-flowing sea of ever-moving participants would be the final arbiter of his destiny. He imagined Liṃanṃan settling into her own rhythm and carving her own path upon the face of the lagoon. Her ancestors, to preserve their story for posterity, had cleverly carved the image of their story into the coconut trees. Surely, the surrounding sea was swallowing her wake as immediately as she created it, so just as surely, the aorak images carved by her ancestors would disappear over time, though less swiftly. It was only their story that might survive.
Then his grandfathers again came to his aid and, in his moment of anguish, whispered their rule for the item lost. “You have not lost the thing; you have lost yourself. It is where you set it down before you distracted yourself and forgot where you left it. Learning is remembering. To cast the future, you must understand the past. Retrace your steps back to that moment you found her. Go back. Go back further into the distance of your past than comfort allows. Why were you attracted to her? Why did you pursue her? When did you last hold her in your hand? Which way, at that point, did you turn?”
As she no doubt continued her desperate chase, the horizon turned slowly orange and blue, then gray, and finally, dark red. Then, as the brightest stars projected their points of light through the deepening blue hue above, while the moon continued to traverse its arch across the night sky, shining all the brighter as the sky dimmed, it became the sole reference point for the small white clouds that drifted, one after another, beneath her majesty. The birds, gullets filled, cried out as they returned from the hunt and carelessly dropped their goo. The salty wind rustled and coated the leaves of the trees in which they returned to nest. The swells tumbled upon the ocean reef crest and thundered on into the distance. Exhausted mentally, ever so gradually, he followed their timeless advice. Cautiously, like an angler with a hopelessly tangled line, he gave up his quest, stopped all forward intention, and began retracing its circuitous path back into his past. That, of course, no matter how imperfect, was the one thing that truly stayed what it was. No matter how tortuous, it could never change, even as he waited for the uncertain outcome of this current contest between his chosen woman and the sea to determine what his future would be, even as he would ponder the question of the night before him. Would she succeed? There was no course of action left before him but to retreat i
nto his past, meander there, and search for a clue.
Clearly, he had somehow led her to believe his boat and his fortune were more important to him than she and the seed she nurtured inside her. Had she known his trials and what he bore, she would never have cast herself after a mere craft and collection of shells that were in no way critical to the desperate passion he carried for her. By so carefully guarding his promise to keep his mother’s story untold, he now feared he had stayed his final cast at happiness. Surely, he could have trusted her, above all others, with the secret of who he was. His past now spread before him. All the terrible experiences he had endured and struggled through cried out that her likely death would be the result of this mistake. He had already let the two women he most respected slip from his grasp into the depths of the sea. Surely, he could not withstand a third. No longer able to bear the torture of the present, he lay back upon the beach and sought relief from his past. He thought. He slept. He dreamt. Each time, he awakened sick in the gut and throat gasping as he fruitlessly sought signs of her on the horizon below the gradually setting moon. He repeated the cycle, growing more and more despondent and nauseated as each horrible moment penetrated like the first projectiles of rain driven by an oncoming, ominous storm. Each time, as instructed, he turned back yet again to seek refuge in better memories as he searched his past, desperate for direction.
Finally, in the cold dampness before dawn, the forbidding words of his mother flashed back to him. “Tell my story not! There are moments in a woman’s life when her future will reach back to guide her destiny. A woman knows she must bear her child. In that moment and thereafter, she feels her future drawing her. Better to stay my story’s end leading my fleet out to sea in the face of certain storm than tell its true ending — wishing for a life that could have been. Let some woman, somewhere, someday, hear of my courage and struggle forward unafraid to achieve her destiny.”
He awoke and looked out with reborn confidence as the first light spread across the lagoon before him, and he believed he saw the faintest glimmer of a sail in the fading moonlight. Cautiously, he turned his eyes elsewhere upon the horizon then turned back till the same flicker caught his eye. He raced like a man possessed to the highest point above the shore. He scanned his eyes again along the horizon, and there she was with her sail blinking back at him, clear as the new day. And that is when the storm of tears he had avoided his entire life sprang forth, as he turned around and around to show his contorted, jubilant face to those in the crowd now gathered about him. Each to whom he owed love. Each of whom he had left selfishly behind, becoming but a spot on their horizon. Each of them had nourished his soul. They were all there, his grandfathers, Taknoḷ, and Kalbōk — even Jiañ and all the others who knew his story. A contrite aura of thankfulness overcame him. He happily surrendered himself to it, and as this long-awaited, happiest day of his life progressed from one event to the next, he realized it was not just a passing emotion. This thankfulness would be a new state of life for him.
She too seemed changed. He noticed it from the first moment he smothered her blushing face with kisses and she laughingly turned one exhausted cheek to expose the other. She had lost the girlish giggle he loved so much, but in its place, he found a more mature and knowing composure that he would learn to respect and similarly cherish. She was tired and, curiously, wanted him to take her to rest on that same islet ahead that Likōkkālọk had offered to give him. As they approached, it seemed large but sparsely settled and appeared to lack the manicured look of the islands of her father and uncle.
“We don’t have to accept this gift if you would rather not,” he said.
“Of course, we will. You are such a puffer fish! You can stop worrying she will tell everyone you are the father of her child! If she ever does, Lijoḷọk is eager as a conch shell to announce her tale of how she watched Likōkkālọk swipe your seed from her sleeping mat and impregnate herself with it! I’m glad she carries your child. It will better your chances of having a son. Mine is a girl.”
“How do you know?”
Her theretofore blithe expression clouded, becoming somber. “Because the spirit out there told me so,” she recalled, as though struggling to remember a dream almost forgotten. “She was the same one who calmed me. She gave me the direction to swim and the confidence to keep going. She told me that I would beget a beautiful daughter who, like her father, would attain a quiet yet heroic destiny.”
At hearing this, Ḷainjin wept until she shut him up.
“Stop that and look like an aḷap or your workers will think you are weak and will cheat on their tribute! Look up! You haven’t even noticed your bird circling! It perched on your boat like it was its own this morning. It was probably waiting for you to emerge from below and catch some fish for it. Imagine its surprise when I recuperated and drew myself up from the hull and chased it away! Lazy fisher, it keeps pooping its goo where it doesn’t belong. You must have spoiled it!”
Ḷainjin looked up and saw his friend gliding high above. He resolved not to flop their heroic story like a regurgitated fish before Liṃanṃan but to relate who they were in short, pungent sips, like those from a half shell of nen too hot to drink. She, of course, would marvel at his adventures as they emerged one after the prior.
Finally, after seasons in the telling, she would seem to appreciate his companionship with the Chief. She would likewise profess to respect his mother’s wishes and, as far as he knew, would never speak of her, even to her closest friends.
As for the future of their daughter, his unbeknownst son, and the fall of the Saudeleurs, that story will arise in time of its own accord and prove yet again that each generation can learn only so much from history and must struggle with the past anew. As for his gift to posterity, Ḷōpako would tell his future ri-katak that once he shadowed the wake of the man called Ḷainjin, who taught him his famous navigation chant but never spoke of his mother’s end. Now, after generations of silence, the story of the Forbidden Man — the prequel to Ḷainjin’s shelter at Lae — can finally unfold like the shifting sands from a storm are known to uncover the occasional skeleton of a long ago buried, and long ago forgotten, creature of the sea.
[119] Medicine.
[120] Mangrove: Bruguiera conjugata.
[121] Literally, “woman chief.”
[122] The day the moon rises at dusk amid tree trunks.
[123] Pumice stone: a porous form of volcanic glass that drifts up on island shores.
[124] Literally, “big time”; spring or extreme tides during full and new moons.
[125] Night the moon rises so late it can be forgotten.
[126] Rainbow runner: Elagatis bipinnulata.
[127] Char-roasted, unripe breadfruit subsequently scraped clean before eating.
[128] Language of the Rālik Islands, now the western chain of the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
[129] Ripened breadfruit filled with coconut milk and baked in a breadfruit leaf.
[130] Thunder.
[131] A by-product of the rope-making process; densely packed strands of coconut husk fibers too thin for rope making; used for kindling as well as washing.
[132] Convict surgeonfish: Acanthurus triostegus.
[133] Banded sergeant fish: Abudefduf septemfasciatus.
[134] Soldierbush: Tournefortia argentea.
[135] Answer floats eastward.
[136] Archaic shoals left by the old women in the story of Ḷōppeipāāt.
[137] Fire sticks; the small piece of wood is used to scrub the larger piece to make fire.
[138] A spindly weed: Wedelia biflora.
[139] A plant with small, thin leaves; the stems of this plant, Triumfetta procumbens, were processed to make skirts and kilts.
[140] The heaviest, densest, palm-sized coral stones.
[141] A flowering plant with large leaves: Polyscias guilfoylei.
[142] Literally, “bones of pandanus”; Pandanus people.
[143] Pohnpeian title: master
fisherman.
[144] One of many man-made islets on the reef off the coast of eastern Pohnpei.
[145] Literally, “bones that cast fortune”; fortune teller.
[146] A paramount landholder who manages land on behalf of an irooj.
[147] Kava; a drink with anesthetic properties made from the mashed roots of the propagated Piper methysticum, or pepper plant.
[148] A species similar to the brown-marbled grouper, Epinephelus fuscoguttatus, which spawns seasonally in atoll passageways and in lagoons close to the passageways.
[149] Flocks of seabirds diving for baitfish driven to the surface by tuna.
[150] “Pull this gray hair!”
[151] “From this old lady!”
[152] One.
[153] Two and three.
[154] Literally, “grab the reef tightly”; extremely large spiny lobster: Panulirus penicillatus.
[155] A sharkskin drum used when paddling or sailing.
[156] Legendary trickster.
[157] A game in which a foot-sized cube of woven pandanus leaves is kicked back and forth within a circle by clapping participants.
[158] Fart fish; species of emperor fish: Lethrinus variegatus.
Man Shark Page 33
