People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  “It’s true.” The heavy woman behind her desk at the tribal office didn’t bother to get up from her chair. “Your benefits are gone. But you’ll have to take it up with the council, not me.”

  “Nothing any of you do surprises me anymore.” This place, she thinks, I need to leave it, but it’s all she’s ever known and she almost falls as she leaves. Ruth will have to make a scene. She’ll do it, too, thinks Aurora.

  Murph’s parents drove a Toyota Corolla and they had something of a look of hope in their eyes. They knew Thomas had survived. They’d had news some years ago from the Pentagon that this man who had been missing in action was found, but they had no address for him. Nor could they get his address through Social Security. They went over their boy’s letters, finally, and found out Thomas was from a reservation on the coast. They just thought they’d go there and try their luck at finding him.

  The parents, the Murphys, are an elderly couple, the woman quite frail, with short hair and narrow shoulders, overly thin in her dark green slacks and flowered blouse, her back curved with time. She loves Thomas Just only because he’d known her son, so her eyes are warm when she knocks on the door and tells Thomas who they are.

  “Come in.” Thomas holds the door open. He has little to say. His hair has grown. He pushes it out of his eyes.

  “Well, we’ve lucked out finding you. We’re so glad to see you.” She looks at him a moment. “It’s like seeing a part of our son.”

  “Sit down.” Thomas clears the papers and a shirt from the cushioned chair and pulls up a kitchen chair, brushing off the crumbs. He moves them close together, near his own chair.

  The father still holds his hat in his hand, against his body, then sits down and places it on his lap. The mother looks out sadly at the distant sun descending behind the top of the wall.

  The man was himself a veteran of an earlier war and with a slight southern accent he tells Thomas how he had been with the men who had liberated the Jews from one of the camps. He would never forget seeing those living skeletons, seeing them like that. He still talks about it. Thomas can tell he’d once had a straight, taut body, that old man, and he was proud of his life in the war. He had saved people. It was only time and the loss of his son that had made him stoop and age. His was a life lived that had worn him out, but at least he hadn’t been diminished by his own deeds.

  With Thomas, his own actions had reduced him, his memories ever inescapable. And now Murphy’s parents. What could be worse, he thinks. A small smile on the mother’s face. Of course Thomas remembers their son. He sees him at night when he should be sleeping, the water buffalo Murphy carved his name on. It was the beginning of the war for him, Thomas, newly arrived, chilled in spite of the heat. Murphy was the beginning, whooping, shooting at everything, everyone.

  “What did you build the fence for?” asks the mother. “You ruined your view. It’s so pretty here.”

  He doesn’t tell her he can’t look at the ocean or across it. He doesn’t say anything. He just tries to smile. Then he asks, “Can I get you some coffee?”

  The father, a small man with thin gray hair and jeans perfectly creased, says, “I think I understand,” placing his hand on his wife’s knee, silencing her. It must remind him of the war, the man thinks. “I couldn’t face the Atlantic after World War Two. We even had to move to the Midwest.”

  Thomas is quiet for a long while. He sees Murph, the violent one, the worst of the batch, but they want to know about their son. Then he says, “He always talked about you.” Tears brim even though he is lying; he can’t help it. “He said he’d be happy just to sleep in his own bed and know you were nearby. He wrote you letters, but there was no one to give them to. He had them in his pocket. They disintegrated. In the jungle weather it all comes apart. Especially in the monsoon season. They were ruined before we could get back to have them sent.” He gazes off toward the ocean, seeing only his fence, not yet gray with age and sea wind, seeing roads running like rivers during the fierce rains. He tells them, “He died quick, you know. You should know that he didn’t suffer.”

  That much is true.

  They are all quiet a long, uncomfortable time. Then the mother begins crying.

  “Say,” says the mister, “that’s quite an old refrigerator. You don’t see many of those.”

  “No, sir, you don’t. It’s from the thirties,” says Thomas. Remembering to offer them something. “Would you like some water or something?” Remembering the strangeness of the word sir. Thankful for a moment for Ruth who left behind the food and juice. “It’s fresh berry juice. Made from hereabouts.” And he puts some of the cookies on a plate and offers them to his guests.

  Out of courtesy, the mother takes a cookie and sips the juice. “It’s good. Thank you, son.” She wipes her eyes with a hankie. It is scented. She fusses with her hair. None of them know what to say any longer.

  They seem to be disappointed. Finding him didn’t have the effect on them that they’d expected. They must have thought he would look like their son, that he would be their son, that he would take his place somehow. But they are just three strangers in a little room with a dusty woodstove, three people making small talk until finally the father says, “Well, thank you for visiting with us, son, but we have to be going now. We’re going to go see my nephew in Oregon.”

  Thomas tries to smile, but he cannot bring himself to do anything except stand and go with them to the door.

  The man looks down to the water.

  “Your steps down there look like a real workout.”

  “Yeah. I guess they are.”

  At the door, before they walk away, Mr. Murphy stands and salutes.

  Thomas doesn’t want to, but finally he salutes back, awkwardly.

  He doesn’t say how Murph wanted to torture everyone and pee on them. He thinks how he was turned inside out and the only feeling their redheaded boy had was adrenaline, hate, fear, and insane laughter.

  He stands and watches them leave.

  Thomas sits in the darkest corner of his place on the small bed and he bends over, his face clenched like his fists. He has learned not to feel and now he is forgetting that skill of unfeeling needed by the best of warriors and doctors and priests, those who bear sad news and carry the weight of death.

  Milton, the one they call the idiot, says he saw someone hold Marco down in the water, onto the back of the whale, as it rolled in agony. Milton is not smart enough to lie. Over and over again, Milton has said this, but he was the one whose parents drank more than the rest so he had been born with strange eyes and hands with palms and no lines, and he limped, and no one put stock in what he said. But Ruth does and now Thomas ponders this, that someone injured his son. His son.

  That night when he falls asleep he is nineteen. He is nineteen, and they are sure to die. They are dug in and there is firing around them. Fire falls from the sky. He says to Murphy, “Wouldn’t you just love a Big Mac right now?”

  “It’s the planes trying to block the North,” someone says.

  “Our own planes?”

  They laugh as if hamburgers and fries had never really existed. They laugh even if they may be surrounded by people with guns, people smarter than them. They can’t stop laughing. Even when the fire comes, he is stifling himself laughing. He puts his head down and smells the molds of the earth.

  “Fighting for world peace,” Murphy used to say. “Yeah, and so here we are with bulletproof jackets.” A lie.

  “Yeah, and not even a flak jacket. I lost it somewhere, and it’s damn cold at night. They could at least give us a jacket when we have ’em shot and burned off our backs. So this being down here on the ground is the infantry airborne!”

  “Yeah,” someone says. “Bulletproof jackets. Like those shirts, what do you call them, Tommy? You know, you Indians wore them? They were bulletproof.”

  Thomas’s jaw tightens. “How would I know? I never heard of it.” But he had heard of the ghost dance. His grandmother had been a ghost dancer before t
he massacres, but she said they’d known, they all had, that they weren’t invulnerable humans. “That was just some bullshit the white men made up,” she said. He and his cousins laughed to hear an old lady talk like that. Their grandmother in her navy blue dress and church hat and the ghost dance dress she kept. It had raven feathers off the arms like wings, and a single eagle feather in the center.

  “Get down, you idiot!”

  He escaped being shot one time they were ambushed; he sank as far down into the mud as he could, so deep the earth looked flat. He was walked on. He heard their voices above him. He held his breath a long time after they were gone, waiting.

  I am earth, he thinks now. That’s why I lived. I became the earth. This became his way of surviving.

  As earth he noticed the plants. Even the roots were being destroyed. He thought nothing would grow back on that end of the world. What would his grandfather have thought? Even with war around him, it broke his heart.

  He never challenged or fought their own military action like some did. He was a follower of orders at first. He understood, name, rank, serial number.

  Now he was a container of history, pain, convictions, beliefs, memory, and courage. All those were in him. Now was a carrier, of weapons. M16’s (twenty-three pounds), grenades, grenade launchers. Above were the C-130 transport planes. Out there were the once-green mountains.

  He remembers Murphy. He can still see his eyes.

  There was one boy who lived through their last ordeal together, the saved all-American towheaded blond boy. Thomas has pushed him away. He’d been pushed to safety and he fell to the ground, but he watched, wide-eyed. Afterward Thomas never forgot him. He disappeared. Maybe he ran. Maybe he told their story. Most likely he died; there were fires even at the river and daytime was like night because of the smoke. Thomas was the lone survivor.

  He thinks of his daughter, Lin.

  The lone survivor sees his daughter running toward him when they find him. He remembers. For him, it all became one thing, the many pasts, the present, all one memory; a kite in the sky attached to a string, his daughter Lin running, he and Ruth once running together with a kite across a field near the river, an eagle with its wings spread, a fish in its talons. There were the sheer curtains blowing in a breeze, blowing inward as in the summer at their little newlywed house, their green fruit box house by the river. Everything falling, wind in a plastic bag floating down. Fishing weights in water. Bombs. Ruth with skinny legs holding up her skirt filled with fresh-picked apples and then letting them drop, watching them fall on the very bed where he now lay, at Witka’s where they hoped they’d live together one day, the house willed to them.

  Remembering, in Spanish, means to pass something through the heart again, and now all the years are going through his heart again as he tries to turn away from the ocean. But he hears it and he knows it is out there. Some sleepless nights he goes out. But this night in his sleep he says, “Oh, look at all those beautiful life rafts.”

  THE RAIN PRIEST

  In Dark River where the A’atsika live, no one seems to remember or notice when the clouds first abandoned the sky or when the coastal rains ended, but what the old man predicted after the killing of the whale is coming true. Without observation the ocean tides slowed and then the winds of the world decided not to blow, even the gentle ocean breezes that move the curtains of summer windows, breezes that blow the long hair of women and ring bells that were once on ships. This is not noticed at first.

  At first, with the long days of sunlight, there are picnics on the warm, bright beach. Women and children walk in the ocean and it feels nearly warm against their legs, so rare a feel, so luxurious that there are no complaints.

  But suddenly it is realized that the moon no longer pulls water back and forth with its love and will. The tide goes out and seems to stay out longer.

  One morning Aurora says to Ruth, who stops by on her way to town for supplies, “It’s still out. It’s not right. It just doesn’t seem right. Look.” She pulls back the curtain. “I just did the laundry a while ago.” Her clothes hang on the line, limp and already dry. “It’s like the silence after a death out there.”

  “There was a death,” Ruth reminds her mother. Everything is still. “There were two of them.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s eerie.”

  Ruth tries not to think of Marco. Instead, she remembers the old man from the white houses who said there would be a drought. He is a prophet and she did mark his words, as he asked, writing them in her diary. Now she looks around. With the stark clear light, the flaws on all the houses have become revealed. A cracked window suddenly cries out for repair. Worn paint is revealed as it now peels. A house has settled with age and seems to be sinking. There is dust on siding, warped wood under the trailers. Although these things had once seemed dim or normal, now they stand out in clear detail calling for attention. And the plants Aurora has tended so carefully she now waters and still they wilt.

  Ruth knows there will be a drought, perhaps a long one. The old man said to be ready. She fills drums with water and stores them on the boat and at her mother’s home. She buys dry ice for the fish. She buys towelettes that are premoistened for washing. Aurora watches her daughter shop. “Aren’t you being a little premature about all this?” she wants to know.

  “It was predicted,” Ruth says. “He said to be ready, and I will.” She is already tired from the heavy lifting she did on the boat earlier, before she walked from the marina up the hill to her mother’s house that day.

  “The water is too warm,” Dimitri tells Ruth when she is out walking on the marina. She still has luck because she is salmon fishing. Other fishermen return with small lots of fish. Worse, some have empty nets, winches unused, troll lines reeled in. Their boats are clean, rubber aprons unused and hanging on hooks. Everything is clean. But soon it will be time to go out for the fish coming down from the north.

  Only those who go very far out to deep sea return with their ever-thinning takes of silver and yellow fish, but there are fewer of the bluefin tuna than in the past, not enough for the businesses they have built over generations. Old Vince, who has been around a long time, swears, “Someone put a curse on us. I can’t imagine why. But it’s a curse all right. I know one when I feel one.”

  “Of course we know why.” Ruth reminds him.

  Over the last years, the elders had gauged and counted and made certain the waters weren’t overfished. Now the fish have abandoned them, taking along all they have to depend on to survive. The Times sends two newsmen out to look over the situation and they conclude that the conditions are unusual but it is the drought and a dreadful dry heat in their area that has caused a change in the temperature of water. As for the receding waters, they report it as a cyclical event, though everyone at Dark River carries a long memory and knows this is not true.

  At night, the drummers and singers sitting near fires on the beach have silences they don’t remember between their songs. No ocean. They listen and hear an emptiness painful to the ears. For the first time, they hear their own heartbeats, the blood pulsing. It scares them not to be hearing the ocean louder than themselves.

  For a while Ruth is still able to long-line and fish at the river, still having some amount of luck. Her concerns are less than the others who depend on larger hauls, who have new rigs. Hers, she inherited. She only needs gas, things for maintenance, whatever will support her and help her mother. She has no large bills. But soon, she too catches nothing. The beach begins to widen as the ocean takes itself into the distance, going away from them, turning its back on them. Seabirds arrive in flocks and clouds. They eat the exposed fish. They stand in the wet sand and feast. More arrive and there is much noise, the beating of wings like thunder. The pale ghost crabs try to bury themselves, but everything is vulnerable.

  The old woman Wilma says, “I know what it is. It’s a crack in the ocean floor. We are going to have a tsunami like we had before. The hell with what the reporters think. Th
e water is gathering out there. Then it’s going to turn back and come in.”

  There are people who still remember the tsunami, or lost loved ones in it, and so, many of the tribe decide to pack up what they can and leave. Even if there isn’t a wave of water, it doesn’t feel right there. They leave for towns inland, moving in with relatives, taking belongings whose worth surprises them. They take a satin pillow with SWEETHEART embroidered on it sent during World War II, a pillow they once thought silly. Or they take a whalebone carving. Who would have thought the faded rug someone’s mother made of old clothing would turn out to be the most valuable thing in the house, better than the recliner, or that the small bearskin passed down from a grandfather would be preferred over a large television? Indian still, they take carved wooden masks, some made by the father of Thomas. Or whale vertebrae, old photographs, even a terrible painting by their young daughter. They take their kittens with them, and flea-bitten dogs. Dimitri’s new young wife takes her goat, and the goose sits in the backseat of the car, looking about, as usual. For a day or two in the terrible new smell of the place of the receding sea, the drying seaweed, there is a caravan of leavers, some honking at others as if the reserve is a large city.

  As for Ruth, it seems to her that the wide sea is holding its breath, waiting for something, calling for something, but she believes it is not going to cover them. Besides, Aurora will not leave her home. “Ever,” the older woman says, hands on hips.