People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  Ruth was tired of her own people, tired of struggling with fishing nets and her boat, tired of Thomas, tired even of grief. She couldn’t yet think that there are always times of respite, a saving grace. For now it seemed she had nothing left. She waited out the waves, wishing Hoist the dog were with her. She looked at the water and the lead color of sky. She had strong arms and she knew the ocean. She thought of the stories of deep sea fishermen, with the sudden winds, flying manta rays, the octopus like the one Witka met, or the octopus who came out of the ocean on the day after Thomas was born and how everyone thought Thomas would be special because of this event. But he was only a man, after all, and a broken one at that.

  What Ruth didn’t know was that on land Thomas was making his own plans. He’d used the brown truck, gone to the lumberyard, and bought wood and posts and cement and was creating a realm for his own sorrow. He was remembering the past. He was moving into Witka’s old house up on the black rock. He was building yet another wall.

  Ruth thought of the history of their breaking, her tribe, even the tsunami of 1967 and its huge wave of water that hit the town, just missing her mother’s house, falling short only a few feet. It was still remembered and talked about with an awe of nature’s amazing destruction. That day the Japanese and Indian women were at work cleaning and cutting fish in the fish factory, a large dark brown building, a roof of rusty corrugated steel, when the water hit. Two women had survived and remembered it and told of the crash of the wave that hit the building like a train, water entering, the tables floating. One reached for her glasses and that reach almost cost her life. “Still,” the woman said, “I could see them there, swirling just before me before I escaped.” Miraculously she floated out on a wave of water that came suddenly and from nowhere. “I saw the other women. Their clothes were like wings. Their legs and arms like angels flying. Then they were gone.”

  After a time, the tide changed. But Ruth knew already what tomorrow would bring, the breakers bouncing back against the storm waves from far out at sea. For every action there is a reaction. It’s true especially in the ocean. And so tomorrow, from what she knew of the ocean, there would be large, rough breakers. The word meant waves, but the thinker in her knew it also meant people, those who unmake other people’s lives. Dwight was a breaker. He’d broken her son. He’d broken the lives of women. He’d broken Thomas in some way even Thomas didn’t know.

  But the breaking went back further, to the Spanish, the Russians, the British, the teachers and American missionaries, the epidemics in 1910 that killed more than three fourths of the tribe, the enormous whaling boats that nearly brought the whales to extinction. A breaker was not just a wall of crashing water, even though people had spoken of the tsunami and collapsing earth walls.

  She even thought of the breaking when she had looked so often at the photographs of Witka and her grandfather and Dimitri Smith in ill-fitting suits, sitting in front of the white church. Yes, they had easily changed from Catholics to Shakers because the Shakers’ beliefs were more like their own, and there was healing and a belief in the significance of dreams, although none of them believed in celibacy.

  Finally, in the rich smell of the sea, she reached the shore of white houses. Now she saw that the houses were still there. They had been blackened and were nearly invisible against the hillside. They were the color of the rocks behind them, rubbed with black charcoal to reveal their grief. Ruth, soaked to the skin, walked up the beach and two old women greeted her. They’d been watching her out there. “We were worried. We saw you go up and down and then out too far.”

  “I’ist ka a,” she said to the women. It meant many things: hello, how are things, are you well, I greet your heart. In this case, I greet your broken heart.

  The charcoal-rubbed houses had black openings and windows and it was a bleak scene. The people were mourning. They, too, had loved the boy who lived with them for so many years. He had been the future. Unlike the fast that had been observed on the other side of the great bay, they had been eating. They ate smoked fish to keep up their strength and their dugout canoes had been pulled far onto the sand, where they looked like dead fish turned on their side.

  “It’s over,” an old man said, his clothes hanging as if on sticks. “But you, you are a strong woman. You fought, you love your people, and we thank you.” He patted her shoulder. “They say when a real whaler dies at sea he will become a great whale. Maybe Marco will travel on. Maybe he will return one day and feed his people.” He tried to sound hopeful, but Ruth saw that he was bent more than before. “When they are ready.”

  Ruth touched his face and felt the unshaved roughness. “I was worried about you. I couldn’t see your houses from the other side.”

  “We’re okay over here. But night is coming on.” Ruth could smell it, the fresh scent of darkness. “You must stay,” he said, breathing the same deepening air, the wind that had no name in English.

  She merely nodded her agreement.

  Inside a blackened house, a woman, Hali, made a bed for Ruth. She set about the task in a full skirt, her long hair down her back. Tule grass with soft-woven blankets over it. And Ruth, without even eating, fell asleep and cried all night without knowing it, tears falling from her eyes, running down her temples into her hair and the blankets.

  “Look,” Hali said to the others. “She mourns in her sleep.”

  The next morning, with damp hair, Ruth drank strong coffee. And then the old man gave her Marco’s things in a bag, some clothing, a canoe Marco had carved, stones he had gathered that were alive from the mountains. Ruth said, “Thank you.” She hugged each person lightly before she left. Some cried and patted her on the heart.

  “Be careful on these waters,” said the woman with hair that looked like string.

  “You know,” said the old man, Feather, who knew Marco’s skills well, “I can hardly think it was an accident. Marco knew the ocean. He was strong. He could swim forever.”

  “I know.” Ruth looked into the water again, as if for her son.

  “Mark my words. There’s going to be a drought. A wrong thing was done. Maybe more than one wrong thing. There will be a drought,” the old man warned Ruth. “Get ready for it. N’a sina.”

  PART TWO

  HE BUILDS THE FENCE

  As predicted, the drought begins, but at first no one notices. Everyone is busy with their lives. Ruth has nets to set. People go to work and home, and Thomas has moved into Witka’s old gray house with the woodstove and the shelves with yellowed, patterned paper remaining from the 1930s and the kerosene lamp, the old Frigidaire. He had forgotten there was electricity and if he felt like it he could put in a light. He thinks how they used whale fat to see in the dark. The people say the whale always brings light. It enlightens. The whale is illumination. They have always meant this in the many meanings of the word.

  He is in the home with the little fireplace and hearth, the light of the ocean, two trees outside permanently bent by ocean winds, leaning. He sits beneath the roof he’d built himself, years before, for his grandfather Witka. Wooden steps climb up and down the rock and a railing he’d also built when his grandfather had become frail.

  Then there is the path to the sea and tide pools he once loved with their rich, changing contents, orange starfish, anemones waiting to return, and out there are the stumps of an ancient forest beneath water which had been revealed only once. They were covered again with sand and water, but he would never forget the two-thousand-year old trees that appeared for a short time, never again to be visible in this ocean, not in his lifetime, he thinks. Yet, they were not as old as his people who have been in Dark River since the beginning, in one form or another.

  He recalls the whale. It was beautiful in its way, gray barnacles on it, sea lice, as if it supported an entire planet. He remembers how it breathed and he didn’t pray except for under his breath, and Marco, too, both of them so secret in their prayers. The others had been drinking and it made Thomas despise them, his own people. Th
en, how the spume of blood came high up to the sky, a fountain of death covering them. The killers didn’t love that whale or sing or care for it the way it was supposed to have been done. He wishes he had not been a part of it.

  Like Witka, Marco had felt the presence of the whale. Except for his tidy, pulled-back hair, Marco had been like old Witka, down to the thin mustache he couldn’t have known about. The whale came right to them, to look at Marco, who said, No not this whale. There was an argument and a struggle, but no one noticed. The action was so sudden. Only Milton sat and watched it, his mouth open through the yelling and noise.

  Marco’s decision should have held, Thomas knew that. He remembers Marco’s look of surprise and something else on his young face when he looked at his father who had fired. He had stared at him. Seeing him. Without respect but with something like understanding and love, nevertheless.

  Thomas fired. Once again in my life, I fired, he thought, against my will. It was not by design but by habit, fear, adrenaline. Maybe even memory.

  He only barely knows how Ruth must feel, losing the son she’d watched from his beginnings. He feels only a fraction of her pain.

  The wretched man no longer wants to see the face of water looking at him. And so he decides to build a fence, the wood already purchased, the fence already planned.

  He builds it taller than himself so he can’t see the eyes of the ocean watching him. He doesn’t want to look at the creator of life, the first element. He doesn’t want to think of countries on the other side of the Pacific, the great swaying body of water named for peace.

  He holds the hammer at its end the way his father taught him. Children come to watch, even as another storm approaches. He ignores them when they ask, “Hey, mister, why are you building a fence so tall?” They don’t even know him.

  He doesn’t want to see. Or be seen. He can’t say that. He wants to disappear. He can’t say that, either. So he says nothing and soon they leave.

  It is as if the fence he builds will be a wall between him and the faces of ghosts, the past, even his son. Marco. He wants a wall.

  His back hurts. He digs in the few places where he can find earth, not rock. He digs the postholes with a digger and no gloves. His hands have blisters. The wood has splintered, but the brand name is still intact, new as if it were just attached. His hands would hurt if he thought about it. Instead he thinks about the cement. Three bags. Four. Damn, he didn’t buy enough and he doesn’t want to have to get a ride back to town for anything. So the north corner doesn’t stretch quite far enough.

  When the work is done, he puts the tools away and goes inside and sits in the corner like a spider and remembers and thinks and Thomas has a full mind. He thinks of the daughter, Lin, he left behind. Digging reminds him of the land mines he had protested. It was a civilian area. It was where their allies walked. “It’s not a war zone,” he’d told the men. “You can’t do that here.”

  Thomas forgot there were no longer any rules.

  “There ain’t no such thing as a civilian,” said one soldier. No such thing as a place where no one was shot. “Everyone here is a VC or pig or enemy of some kind. Remember this. There’s no room for peace on any inch of this goddamned land if you want to stay alive.”

  They kept digging, rigging the mines. The redheaded man said, “Just watch your own step,” as if threatening.

  He remembers the soldier who said that, just a kid, really; he still had freckles. He remembers the way they eyed Thomas with suspicion for his concerns and he knew they would kill him if he didn’t keep silent. He still sees their faces, dirty, angry. After a while, they showed no fear. It had been trained and wrung out of them like water, or blood out of cloth.

  He refused to dig and they all watched that, too, especially the red-haired one. But it was war. It was fast. They soon forgot. Everyone but him. He tried to remember where the mines were so he could go back later and at least build a fence around them, because he didn’t know how to decommission them. He didn’t even remember if that was the right word. No children running toward water were going to be threatened. No water buffalo blown apart in the air. No young lovers roaming or old women going down to wash clothes, or wives going to the floating market where everything from ducks to lotus flowers were sold. No legs lost. Because even in war there were still lovers and there were still clothes to be cleaned in the water. And the people there reminded him of his own people just wanting to live and work.

  And now he has built a fence, a wall, in the hot sun, on the other side of the world, the side which will have no rain with the coming drought.

  He considers the wall he has built. Is it a haven? No. Is it protection from the wind? No. He hates himself too much to seek protection. It is to keep dreams from crossing the ocean and coming to him. But nothing ever comes in from the water that isn’t polished away by the sea.

  One morning Thomas gets up to answer the door. It’s Ruth. “You need me,” she says in as formal a manner as she can muster.

  He laughs. “I don’t need anybody.”

  “Let me in,” she says, walking past him. She opens the old curtains. She looks out the window to see the world, but there is only the wall.

  At first he’s ashamed of his place. Books on the floor, a dirty towel on the doorknob. Food on the dirty counter. He moves aside because she is pushy. She passes him again and sets some food on the counter with tiles no longer grouted, having never been rightly finished. It is a kettle of stew.

  “I won’t eat it.”

  He swears to her again that he won’t.

  “I’ll leave it just in case,” she says, trying not to look at his place, not to smell it.

  “You are losing weight.”

  She knows he doesn’t care.

  “Do you need coffee?” She knows how he loves it. She has a thermos and places it beside the stew.

  Behind her the waves are coming back in, but he doesn’t have to see them now that the wall is up. Still, there are the tide pools, he remembers again, the places he and Ruth used to look at with awe, happily, places of great mystery and discovery for them. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to remember her or anyone.

  She pulls one old curtain aside. “Come here and look, Thomas. Look out this window. Over here. Your fence hasn’t entirely worked. It hasn’t kept everything out. They’ve come up to rest in the shade. Those are your kin.”

  He looks at her to see if she is kidding with him. He gets up to see. And then he sees a seal napping beside his door, waiting for its black-eyed mother. Two others on the other side of the house, their dark soft eyes, and the whiskers. One yawns. He has provided exactly the shade they need.

  He looks at the seal, his cousin. Ruth is serious about the kinship. He’s forgotten all the old stories, although they will soon return to him, the octopus, the whale mother. And now he remembers the story of the woman who married the seal and her family rejected her when they found out that the man with beautiful eyes was a seal with winged, webbed feet. The seal is one of his clan ancestors.

  “Marco was born with webbed feet, you know.” She is just talking, but she is also still grieving.

  He looks at her without commenting. He knows she was born with gills. All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.

  Ruth says to him, the boy she grew up with, “Why didn’t you build yourself a corner instead of a wall? You’ve lost all the beauty now. Even if the rain does come, you won’t be able to watch it fly toward us from over the water.”

  She hasn’t lost any of her own beauty in spite of her grief. She still has her nearly black eyes in a face golden and fine.

  As it happens, he does have a corner in Witka’s little place where he remains trapped with his own memories, where he sits and recalls. Like the water, he reflects. Unlike water, there is no light, no sign of clouds or blue sky.

  Ruth asks, “Do you need anything?”

  “No.” He needs more than he knows, but she has left him a thermos of juice and a
bag of cookies. Pecan Sandies. She remembers his favorites all these years later.

  The next thing he sees is Ruth leaving. She stands in the air and light and holds out her arms and holds her face into the sea breeze and rare sun, eyes closed. The wind blows back her hair, her shirt against her. He remembers her younger, but the years have fit her well. She, like Thomas, looks too thin.

  She should scream at him, he thinks. She should hit him.

  She is kind because he is a lost soul. Now he will live, if you could call it that, behind a wall, in the gray house of his grand father Witka, the old man who sat in this very place and watched for whales and smiled at dolphins and sometimes frowned on his own people for their behaviors.

  Ruth doesn’t know that Thomas, crying, saw the seething of the sea, the pain and death of the whale, that the loss of Marco was the final thing for him as well as for her, the breaking thing. She doesn’t think that she opened his windows only to have him shut them again as he went into the darkness like the octopus coming from water into the cave when he was born. And Thomas doesn’t know how she weeps for hours alone, how when she fishes and empties the nets or repairs them or turns the winch on the Marco Polo, she wishes that she, too, could turn her back on water, close herself in, except at night when it is peaceful and the sea shines in the moonlight, compelling. Then the world is new and she watches the water.

  A month to the day after Thomas built the fence, a memory comes to him, but it comes in flesh and bone and blood, in the shape of two humans, a mother and father, still grieving their own son. So many years later, they arrive, the parents of one of the boys in his platoon, his special operations group, come to find him in Witka’s gray house on the sea. They are Murphy’s parents, visiting him. Murph, who had died on their search-and-destroy mission. Murph, the one with red hair. They drove by the tribal office to ask for the whereabouts of Thomas Just. Ruth’s mother was there that day asking why her health benefits were no longer available. “They broke into my house. Now they are cutting off my health insurance.” She was being persecuted, she said, because her daughter had protested the whale hunt. Without thinking, hardly looking them over, she told the woman where they could find Thomas. She still looked gray.