The Plover

by Brian Doyle

  I know who you are, says Taromauri, so quietly that if you were standing next to her you could not be sure if she had spoken aloud or if she had thought those words, and somehow you had heard them in your head.

  I know who you are. You are one of the thirteen. You have taken this form and come among us. You are one of the shining ones.

  The gull chortled; did her eye again double in intensity?

  I see you, said Taromauri in an awed whisper. I see you.

  It is so, said the gull, and again, if you were standing there on the deck, inches away from this bird and this woman, as close to them as you could decently stand, you could not absolutely tell for sure if the gull had actually formed those words with her beak and her tongue, or if you had heard them as if they were cut into your mind as sharp and bright as lines of fire.

  Yes, said, or thought, the gull, it is so. You see clearly. And we see you. We cannot give gifts, we cannot change what is, but we can open things that are closed. We are allowed to remove obstacles. We are the thirteen servants.

  Taromauri began to weep so silently and copiously that the tears slid down her face like a sheen on a rock and the top of her immense red cloth darkened with the wet. She bent to kneel but the gull said, do not kneel; remember we are your servants. We see you. What is it that we can open for you? Remember we cannot change what is, but we are allowed to open that which is closed. You must say it with your mouth. Manewe, as you say in your tongue, the thing must be sung. So many tongues in which to sing.

  But Taromauri was overwhelmed, and could not stop weeping, and all her love and pain for her vanished daughter and hollowed husband, all the grim nights when she sat awake swaying and praying in the hold of the Tanets, all the pain and loss she had witnessed and tried to ameliorate, all the kindness and courage she had witnessed and tried to celebrate, all washed over and through her like a tremendous tide, and she did kneel, she couldn’t help it, and weep from the cellar of her soul, and place her forehead upon the wooden deck, and heave sobs not of sadness but of release, and then relief; the latter not because her people had been right to believe that there are always thirteen shining ones in the world at any one time, taking any and all forms according to their incomprehensible designs and predilections, but relief in some inarticulate way that she had been seen, she was known; without ever admitting it to herself, she was lonely beyond articulation, so lonely and bereft that she had plastered over the pain with a grim mien and constant work, even fending off what few friendships were offered; but that this bright being, one of the blessed ones, of whatever nature it truly was, had seen her, seen the holes the size of her slim daughter and burly husband; this knocked her to her knees, and she wept.

  The gull waited patiently, peering over the edge of the cabin roof; then again she felt a piercing attention on her skin, and looked up to see Pipa staring at her with eyes like wild oceans. The terns leapt into the air and swirled protectively around the child, darting like swallows. Down below, Declan felt some electric jolt in the air and stopped humming, puzzled; what, Jesus fecking lightning, on a clear day, in the blessed fecking tropics? Is this how a cyclone starts? Taromauri also felt the shock and stood up, instinctively reaching for Pipa. At the other end of the island Piko felt it also, and turned instinctively toward Pipa, although the top half of his mind thought is that an earthquake? Taromauri saw Pipa’s stare and turned and looked at the gull and suddenly knew what to ask.

  Can you heal the child?

  We cannot change what is, said the gull.

  Can you … open her? asked Taromauri.

  The gull bowed ever so slightly from the roof of the cabin. We are allowed to remove obstacles, she said, or thought, and then the words be opened were in the air, shimmering, and again the gull bowed slightly and without the slightest effort sailed away into the gracious air. Taromauri watched her soar along the beach until she was a thin white line against the tangled green trees; and just as the gull banked seaward and vanished against the surging surf, Pipa said Papa?

  * * *

  Piko, startled by the electric shiver in the air, concluded that he better get moving, and he rose from the sand, and turned back toward the village to pick up his pieces of pig, but his eye is caught by what surely must be porpoises! just behind the surf line; his mind automatically processes speed (fast), color (black and white), furl of propulsion (considerable), and dorsal evidence (minimal), and he thinks Phocoenoides dalli, this far south? Phocoena dioptrica, this far north? Intrigued, he follows the porpoises—almost certainly dalli, amazing!—along the beach, until they vanished, all at once, in an instant, their speed and grace in the water just as awesome to him now as the first time he ever saw them as a boy, from a boat on the Oregon coast, nine porpoises flashing alongside the boat suddenly so fast and powerful that he gasped, breathless at such beings he had never imagined in what had seemed a bleak and ponderous sea.

  He turns inland, smiling at the verve and power of the creatures, and sees a faint trail toward the village through what looks like a muddy swamplet; once inside the scrim of trees the trail becomes a worn wooden walkway, winding through an increasingly deep and fervent swamp. Piko is a student first and foremost of the ocean and its creatures, but he is alert to all of nature’s profligacy, especially moist gifts, and he examines the welter of plants, some of which he can identify: arum, fern, bulrush, palms of various sorts and hues, and what seems to be an orchid; also there are flitterings of tiny birds, warblers and brilliant little parrots of green and red and blue.

  He kneels down on the walkway to get a closer look at a nest tucked deftly into an old coconut husk, when he sees a second nest built into a soldier’s helmet. Then he sees a circle of ferns bursting from an old tire. Then he sees shards of metal and cloth and men, little by little, as if his eyes were clearing and the swamp was revealing itself as the moist graveyard it had been for twenty years, untouched by the villagers, left to haunt and molder; the villagers had carried out their own dead, two boys blown to bits in the shivering clearing, but left the rest of the soldiers for the bog to bury, and buried they were now, by ferns and bulrushes and flowers; here and there still a flash of metal could be seen if you looked close for it, but the men—boys themselves for the most part, tall beardless boys, except for their sergeant, who had a beard like a bush—sank and dissolved, their atoms and molecules feeding the vibrant green things, the green things feeding the birds, the birds feeding the crabs, the crabs and birds and plants all eventually feeding the swamp again; the swamp always hungry, always patient, always inviting, always gentle in its acceptance of what falls into the shimmer of its surface, and then slowly plummets, the thick warm water closing over the memory with a sigh.

  * * *

  The warbler, smelling land and trees and ferns and bushes and flowers and mud and bogs and lakes, emerges slow and shy from under the water tank; and for the first time in many days she comes all the way out into the overwhelming light, which feels so warm and luxurious and nutritious that she stretches and flaps and whirs and chirrs; and her wing works! her wing works! Not very well, and it’s very sore, but it works! the parts are back in play! A thump and curse from belowdecks sends her skittering back under the tank for a moment, but she cannot resist the light and out she comes again, this time more sure of herself, thrilled by her wingfulness; still cautious enough to see where the Huge Ones are—the largest One and the smallest One are sitting on the stern rail, One is down below, One is missing, that One with the long feather hanging from his chin—but jazzed by the light and by the irresistible smells of soil and sand, which together mean food. For the first time she hops all the way out onto the deck; and then with half a hop and half a flutter she makes it to the top of the water tank; and then, all systems go! and all caution thrown to the wind! she flutters up to the bow railing, and then bounces to the prow, and back to the railing, and if you can imagine a bird essentially the size of your thumb laughing with pleasure and leaping around with a sort of antic joy, go a
head and imagine that. Back to the water tank, quick as a sneeze; back to the prow, then all the way up to the cabin roof—where’s the big white bird, the gull, who lives here?—back to the railing, liquid as water; a tiny feathered pinball, quicker in flight than you can easily follow; she moves so fast that she’s more like a gentle brown blur than a bird giggling at being back in her first form. Then she remembers the kiore, and calls to them in that rippled voice warblers have trilled since before there were people in the world; and one by one the two young wood rats emerge, blinking, from a crack in the hatch cover; the first time they too have seen full sunlight in many days. The warbler launches an incredible tumultuous song covering many subjects, especially the unimaginable foods available and waiting on shore; and there is a moment to savor, as the boat rocks gently, and the warbler sings of vast mountains of fruit and hillocks of seeds, and the kiore, overwhelmed by the song, and the extraordinary light, and the green dense wet redolence of the island in their noses, shiver with pleasure; and fear.

  VII

  22° NORTH, 165° WEST

  PIPA WAS STILL CRIPPLED. Sure she was. Her hands and feet were no different than before, flittering and flapping and wriggling when she was excited; she still could not sit up, or kneel, or walk, or run, or jump, or spin, or skip, or shuffle, or amble, or shamble, or shake hands with another being of any sort or species, or cup miracles in the bowls of her hands, or rub her eyes in weariness or amazement, or dance in a fling of limbs, or thumb-wrestle, or punch someone in the nose, or lean back grinning and weary with her hands behind her head, or wipe away tears, although tears did rise in her eyes and fall down her face, free and untrammeled; as they are right now, when she is so happy and overwhelmed and startled and croaky and out of practice with her voice that every time a word comes out of her mouth she regards it for an instant with absolute astonishment, as if it was a new and brilliant creature emerged from the holy cave of her mouth.

  Declan came flying up the ladder from below when Taromauri shouted, and he too stood there agape as Pipa spouted and sang and bubbled and burbled in her chair. For a few minutes she poured out every word she had wanted to speak for the last four years but could not force past the prison of her teeth; she poured them out in no particular order, and there was no sense or syntax or structure to them at all, just a wild laughing jumbled spill of one headlong word after another, an ocean of phrases, and shards of stories, and threads of tales, and comments and observations, and remarks and ejaculations, and imprecations and recriminations, and jokes and puns, and explanations and fulminations, and musings and murmurs, and jollities and raileries, and snidery and speeches, and drollery and drivel, and mutterings and mumblery, and sarcasm and witticism, and falsification and rationalization, and songs in imitation and reverence for birds; and then, as the minutes passed, more and more songs of her own design and device, for in the four years during which she could not sing or speak, Pipa had somehow become a startling musician, crammed to the ears with notes and chords and snippets of song and rills and trills and runs of melody; and out they flew between the open gates of her teeth, her hands fluttering like wings, as Declan and Taromauri stood there entranced; and just as Declan turned to Taromauri to ask what in the fecking name of Jesus blessed Christmas had happened to the pip, there was a thump as Piko vaulted over the railing and landed by his baby girl and knelt and cupped her face in his hands and she shouted Papa, I can talk! I can talk! I love you! I can talk! Papa, I can sing! Listen! My mouth works and my voice works and I can sing! I love you! Listen, listen!

  * * *

  The two men who had kidnapped the minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs and marooned him at sea on a raft of rough planks were soon enough in their turn marooned by other men for offenses against the ruling cabal; and they drifted east for days, increasingly thirsty and desperate, until one morning they saw a tiny atoll, so tiny it had no name or map coordinates, and treeless and arid and caked with guano it was also; but nonetheless it was fixed and substantial, a refuge, however inhospitable, and they paddled madly toward it, with their blistered hands and blackened feet; but their raft was destroyed by the crushing surf, and one man was flung upon rock and coral, to be cruelly battered and torn, and drowned, and rendered into pieces by two sharks lurking for exactly this happy providential chance; and this man’s bones did drift to the bottom of the sea, and there were covered by silt and the detritus of time, until such a day as bones be revived, if such a day shall come.

  His companion survived the crashing surf, and achieved the atoll, but once there was again marooned, this time in a tiny sea of salt and sand, scoured by the wind and at all times drummed by the roaring of the sea; and there he did bake, and slowly wither, and drown in the heat, and grow so parched that he did drink of his own bodily fluids, even unto his own blood, which is exactly as salty as the sea was when life was born in it, many years ago. After he died his body dried, and dissolved, and was blown back into the sea and into the crevices of the rocks beneath the sea; and so ended the two men who had kidnapped the minister, and set him to drift in the vastness of the ocean. What were their names? Lost and barren, sea and shark, silt and ashes, whispers and insinuations, sounds spoken less by the year until finally they are only words on pages of old ledgers on their island; and even those words will dissolve, in time.

  * * *

  There was a tense intense hour during which Pipa sang and burbled in her chair and then she fell silent for a moment and began to weep and her father still kneeling his face inches from hers said what? what? and she said Papa if I stop talking now will I ever be able to talk again? and then she laughed, realizing that she just had stopped talking and resumed talking, and he laughed also, and all was well and all manner of things were well, for a moment. Taromauri tried and mostly failed to explain what had happened, or what she thought had happened, and Declan finally gave up, grinning, and said okay, fine, hey, bird, thanks, good job, well done, I’m recommending you for promotion, and the gull flittered and Declan laughed and said all right, are we all done here with fecking miraculous stuff, let’s get on the road. So then the ship was prepared for the next stage of its journey, north by west, and stores and provisions laid by, and water tanks refilled, and farewells offered, and debts paid, and gratitude expressed, and so they prepared to sail, taking advantage of a prevailing wind at dusk, the captain still secretly leery of pursuit and confrontation, a feeling he expressed only to Piko belowdecks, as they triple-checked the hull patch.

  We could buy guns here, said Piko quietly.

  What, my bow and arrows are not enough?

  I’m serious.

  I know.

  You think that guy is still after us?

  Yeh. I don’t know why I’m sure, but somehow I’m sure. I don’t know why.

  Pause.

  Maybe we should be better … prepared, said Piko.

  I don’t know, man. If we have guns we’ll end up using them, you know?

  Better us than him.

  Can you shoot?

  No.

  Me neither.

  Pause.

  Can Taromauri? asked Piko.

  I don’t know.

  Pause.

  Is he coming for us or Taromauri?

  Does it matter?

  I guess not.

  She’s one of us now, sort of.

  Yeh.

  Jesus, what a weird crew.

  Hey, you hired us. And your gull.

  Boy, this turned out to be not at all what it was supposed to be. I was just going to take off solo and whatever happened happened.

  We happened.

  Yeh.

  Regrets?

  Nope. I figure carting you all around is payment for my sins or something.

  We’re your fate, man. You’re the ancient mariner.

  I am not so ancient. You are the guy with the old goat beard. We better get moving. I want to be away before full dark. No moon tonight.

  But they look at each oth
er for a second, each man chewing his lip a little; and Declan brings the bow up to the cabin with him.

  * * *

  At dusk several people gather on the dock to which the Plover is roped. There is the balding doctor with one lens missing in his spectacles. There is the tall thin nurse who listened carefully to the minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs. There is the minister himself, barefoot, wearing an old suit of the softest tapa. I do not think I will ever wear shoes again, he says to the nurse, it being a shame to constrain or disguise these shining new feet. There is the Reverend Mister from the chapel choir, standing with his hand on Danilo Somethingivić’s shoulder. There are two men from the village where Piko bought the pig, bearing a gift for him: a large bundle of dried hau and papala sticks, cut to the proper length for throwing fire. Piko bows and accepts the gift with a smile. The Reverend Mister asks to speak to the captain of the vessel. He testifies as to the excellent character and inarguable work ethic of the young man who has been a stalwart of the choir and a trusted and respected worker at the airport since his arrival on the island, and then speaks about the natural and understandable ambition of the young to travel and conduct themselves adventurously, within reason; an urge each of us of a certain age remembers fondly and indeed often returns to in happy memory, sometimes to the rue of young listeners. This has been my experience, says the Reverend Mister with a smile, but be that as it may I conclude by requesting that you find space aboard your capacious ship for my young friend here, whom the choir and chapel community are sending on his way with a small token of our respect and love; just enough money, perhaps, to defray the cost of his passage. With that the Reverend Mister bows and withdraws, but before Declan can open his mouth to say Absolutely Not, the tall thin nurse asks to speak to the captain of the vessel, and formally presents the minister, whose feet indeed are glowing pink like new babies at the end of his legs, and she testifies to his recovered health, and requests that in lieu of payment rendered to the clinic for the repair of Declan’s arm, the minister be afforded passage, as his further residence on the island might put him in the way of unforeseen dangers arising from his past civic responsibilities, and inasmuch as the island community was not equipped to protect guests in such straits and circumstances, perhaps the distinguished captain would be so kind as to be of assistance in this matter, with something of the same spirit in which he himself was afforded assistance when he found himself in similar straits and circumstances; and the clinic would see fit to wipe all accrued and incurred debt from its books, considering the money to be the cost of the minister’s passage. And again Declan didn’t even get his mouth all the way open to say Jesus blessed Absolutely fecking Not before Piko was helping the minister over the railing and Taromauri was showing Danilo where to stash his gear. And so it was that the Plover slid away from the dock at dusk, in a flurry of terns, with four men, one woman, one girl, one gull, and one warbler aboard, the warbler having unaccountably returned from the lush island; but the kiore had not returned, and the warbler crouched in her accustomed spot under the water tank, mourning her companions.