People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  Soon even the river from inland slows to a stream, then to little more than a trickle. There is still enough groundwater for cooking and washing, for flushing toilets. Then, hardly enough water for people to cry, and at a time when weeping might help.

  Afraid, no longer enjoying the weather, those who remain no longer let their children go to the long, wide, far-reaching shore in case the ocean tide really is holding still out there as the leavers said and might change its decision to stay away and return with full force, unwinding in one great curl, then another, swallowing them in dark green waves. But it is a very rocky place, the exposed land, and there are stories out there and the children yearn to search for treasures they know are there, metal from ships, Japanese glass, hunting harpoons of the old ones. There are also the European treasures, most longed for, from storm-wrecked ships. Who knows, maybe even the eyeballs of halibut, lenses they could look through and see a different world, large and curved?

  With everything suspended, they are given time to think, as if thought and the ocean are both great existences, vast and able to change in a single stir of wind, a single moonlit night, a turn of mind with memory or hope.

  They think about the whale and what they’ve done, who they have become in time, each person examining their own world. They do not feel the spirits that once lived in the fogs and clouds around them. The alive world is unfelt. They feel abandoned.

  Nor do they know, as the stench of rotting seaweed stings their noses, about the flooding on small islands on the other side of the ocean, as if the earth has tilted somehow, been thrown off course.

  Who would have thought this drought might continue past any remembered by the people before written history? It may last longer than the one that followed the signing of the treaty by the wrong people, those who were not the true leaders.

  It had happened before, in smaller ways, for briefer times, as when the tree stumps from ancient trees that grew before the birth of Christ were revealed. Everyone had walked across the remains of the sea to touch the stumps with hands that needed a feel of the ancient, as if humans need to remember they are not solitary in time.

  It happened most brilliantly in a coastal region of Asia when a sharp range of crystal mountains that lived beneath water, and were thought to be merely a myth, suddenly rose and shone like the mountains and caves of their ancient stories, as old as Confucius. The mountains everyone had believed in and dreamed about for years were suddenly revealed as prisms, reflecting a blinding light, making the heat in that place all the much worse. Sailors that arrived examined their maps. They thought at first they had lost their way and were in a place not of crystal mountains but of glaciers of ice. Then they tried to chip the clear mountains away to sell, the crystals even more valuable than fish. Then the water returned and everyone, except the fishermen, was grateful.

  In Dark River, the boats, skiffs, and other water travelers dry-docked back along the marina look dark and skeletal. Nevertheless there is a quiet power in it all.

  With everything in silent repose, the situation calls for action, but no one knows what. Prayer hasn’t worked. Old songs haven’t worked. Everyone has dressed up and gone to the church and some have even fallen into spells and spoken in other languages, and so one day Ruth, who stands in good relations with the old ones, walks out where the water had been, eyeing things, the barren distances that were ocean, and, up close, she spots a shining brooch that had come from a woman who must have been leaning over the side of her husband’s old whaling ship. It might have been diamonds, but she thought it would curse her to touch it. She is watched from windows when she walks, as if she might never return, or the wave would come rushing in and drown her. What a shame that would be, with her long dark hair hanging down her back, her lovely form.

  But then, her home is out there, between the black promontories. It is remote, but the boat never looks abandoned like the others, or uninhabited. Her clothes hang in the still air, airing out, if you could call it that, because she doesn’t want to waste any of her spare water on washing them. The boat, on land now, is silent as if awaiting her return.

  But Ruth, walking, does not go to the Marco Polo. She is thinking, as Thomas had done, thinking of the old stories and how so many are still alive and true. She’d heard there was once a man called the Rain Priest who could take away curses or change the waters and call down the rains. He could call water to come. It was his gift. He was called when the signing of the treaty caused the old drought.

  This was, according to the old stories of Thinking Woman, A’atsika ancient law before god had arrived with the missionaries, before they’d ever heard of Moses parting the waters. The Rain Priest was their Moses. He had saved them once and Ruth thinks this may be their only help. She is uncertain, but she thinks time is an element, like air and water and stone. It could be sailed on or dropped into or broken open. Sometimes it is entered like a dark cave and no one returns from it. They pass on to other places. So why shouldn’t time still be this way? Why should stories and truth have existed only in the past? Why shouldn’t the Rain Priest of “long ago” not be able to climb out of that crack of time from the past and crawl into today? Perhaps he could call the water back to them. Or maybe he had sons or grandsons and he taught them how to break a drought.

  The past is its own territory, after its broken laws, its walked-over truths. Ruth knows this. And once people forget that territory of “the way it used to be,” the doorway back is hard to find. But it is still there, she knows it. Maybe it can be found.

  She wants to take this up with the elders. Perhaps they know a ceremony. All this is what Ruth thinks as she walks over the sand to the still-black houses where the old people live. It is no longer a shore because the ocean has gone away from their place, too, leaving large dark rocks, sand, and debris. The sand seems infinite. The birds are gone now. Silent races have lived on this salty ground, whitening in dry places as the once-rare sun now pours down on it. The water in the distance looks like a mirage, a heat wave with gray wavering lines above it in the air.

  Ruth picks her way past the beached trees, enormous ones, her sweater catching on them, as if they are grabbing her to ask for help. She walks with her eyes always scanning the black volcanic rock, the sand, and realizes she is looking for something of her drowned son Marco, a piece of shirt, a bone, as if she could find a particle and use it to revive the whole young man back into being, the way the tree roots want to become trees again.

  When Ruth arrives at the dark houses, no one comes to meet her. Maybe they know why she has come. The absence of people makes the houses look like old carvings with open mouths. She is afraid of two things: that no one is there, that the people have disappeared as was said happened once in the past when the ancestors sought places with water, or that they knew she had arrived to ask for the impossible and perhaps they’d gone into hiding up into the black rocks.

  But then an old woman in a dark dress, her hair loose, comes out of a house and says, “Anina, it’sak amin,” looking at Ruth, the mournful, lovely woman who had let her son come to them to learn how to carve, to make fishhooks out of bone, to dig out a canoe, to speak his own language. The old woman tries not to cry. She pushes back her hair, which itself is still down with mourning and is gray twine undone. She looks at the face of the generous mother of Marco Polo, the man who travels the world somewhere beneath water now. Into Ruth’s dark eyes she looks, seeing there Ruth’s father, and she looks at Ruth’s graying hair. She thinks, Ah, the bones of Ruth’s face are as beautiful as the carving of the women gods, and she thinks, Perhaps one day this woman will come here to live. She is becoming one of us, always she has been becoming one of us, but she ignores what she wants Ruth’s destiny to be and says, “We still have water to drink. Do you?” and she takes Ruth inside and pours a large bowl of it for the younger woman.

  Ruth drinks so fast some spills down her chin, but it feels good. “No. We don’t have much water. The river is just a trickle. There isn�
�t much underground. The drought has gone far inland. It is dry and brown there, too. Anamsi’ika’a ja nin. All the people are becoming afraid.”

  They sit on carved stones. It is cool in the old dwellings, no matter the heat outside. Dried fish are passed around on dishes, cool bowls of water to drink, and they have Girl Scout cookies from the mainland. Chocolate Mint and the new peanut butter ones. Ruth smiles and then laughs out loud. “The girls have their best customers over here. Where do you store these things?”

  “You forget, we have a cool spring. We have to lock them up so the animals don’t get them. Every single creature loves these.”

  They talk about the weather and the water. They talk about the people. They talk about Marco. “He was the best. We miss him, too.”

  After conversation and time pass, Ruth says, “I came for a reason.”

  They look at her and wait. She is shy about her idea, but she tells them. “I have an idea. I was thinking to send word to the people in the north, up to the man who is friend of sharks, octopus, and whales.” She’d heard of him, even if it was from long ago. She wants to know if they could find that man, the Rain Priest, or his relatives, and ask for his help. “I don’t know if he still exists, but why not try? If he was there before, he might still be. Maybe he’s awfully old, but not being fully human, he could be there. Or maybe he’s had a son or daughter. I hope you won’t laugh at me. It’s all I can think. Maybe I’m foolish to think this.”

  But they don’t laugh. He might have been one of the immortals, they aren’t sure.

  The people believe, some of them, that the immortals still exist.

  “Maybe he would come to us.”

  There is a long silence. “Yes, I’ve heard of him,” says the woman whose braids are wrapped around and around her head like one of their old baskets made of whale baleen. “He came before. But that was back when they signed the treaty. Even though they had no choice that time, he came to us when the water left. It was not like losing our Marco and the little whale they killed. That man, he was the one who brought the water back to us then.”

  “It seems like only yesterday, but that was long ago,” says one of the men. “The oceans were so full in those days. That was when you could have walked into the ocean on the back of fish, they were so plentiful.” He looks out, biting into a cookie. “There were so many. But why would the Rain Priest come to us now even if we could bring him up from beneath a whalebone grave somewhere from the north, or if we called him down from a cloud in the sky? Look at what our people have been and done since then.”

  This is considered. The braided woman says to this man with the pipe, cookie, and worn suspenders, “The people are still here and they are visible and thirsty and humble now. They have been through pain. Now their hearts and souls are revealed. In the hard light everything is seen. I can even see the other side from here.” She looked across to where the others lived. “Even their skin is parched over there, they are so thirsty. Maybe they are ready to be Real People again.”

  “What if they aren’t?” someone else says, sitting on a pallet in a corner.

  This, too, is considered, because then it may not work.

  The man looks at Ruth. “Because it is you who ask, we’ll see what can be done.” This man is called Feather, a name his wife called him because he seemed to float everywhere. She even noticed that he floated above the water when he was out fishing and didn’t know he was being watched.

  He goes outside to look at the dried-up place and at the sky, and he walks about. Returning a long time later, he tells Ruth, “I think it’s possible. But it will take some work. What do you have to offer?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A sacrifice.”

  “Haven’t I already made one?”

  “Bitterness won’t work in that world.”

  Ruth is embarrassed. She is turning bitter, is becoming like Thomas, which is what she fears.

  Money or gemstones are not good enough, even though an octopus might have taken them, being a lover of coins and shining things. A healer, too, if it would pay for gasoline to a ceremony. This Rain Priest, once they could find him up north, if they found him, would want something more. Rain is almost too much to ask for. Asking for the water to come back to the river is even more. It means changes not just here, but also inland. And to ask to be given an ocean is like asking to change the earth’s tilt on its axis or to ask for the moon to move away from its course.

  “It will require a great deal. Yes, it will take a large sacrifice.”

  Since it is Ruth who asks, the sacrifice will be hers. She thinks about the Zodiac she has bought to replace the old dinghy. She bought it with some of her salmon money. She offers that. “That would be good,” says old Feather, following her thinking. He knows about the new Zodiac. He’d seen it a few times out there before the drought, orange and moving quickly, better than the cheap and beaten-up dinghy of her father’s, and it was light so it lifted easily onto her fishing boat with ropes so she could haul it. He is thinking, rubbing his chin whiskers. “But it’s not enough. For all that, he might want more. I think he’d want your fishing boat.”

  She doesn’t act surprised, even though something in her stomach lurches. She considers it. Maybe drought isn’t so bad. This crosses Ruth’s mind. Maybe there will be a tidal wave, as some have said. Maybe it is just part of the natural rhythms of the earth and sea, part of the weather cycle, as the newsmen say. She’s already lost so much. Her son. Isn’t that enough? She even feels angry. She’s worked so hard for what she has. Harder than the others. Alone, too. And then the men, angry at her protest, stole beloved items from her boat. But then she exhales and seems to crumple a bit. “Yes. Okay, if that is what it’s going to take.”

  “That’s so much,” the old woman says, leaning toward the man quietly. “Where will she live? What will she do?”

  “I’ll figure something out. There’s my mother’s place. I can live there. She needs help anyway.”

  “That’s not all,” he says, businesslike now. “We also have to pay all the people who will pass word along the way to him, and those who will beseech him.”

  “What will they require?” Ruth is resigned by now.

  “What about Witka’s old house? The Rain Priest would like that, I’ll bet. If you took down the fence maybe he’d even stay there.”

  “No. Thomas lives there now. He would have to give that up, and I’m the one bargaining here. Besides, he could never do it.” It was his grandfather’s. Ruth knows Thomas better than anyone else does. They understand this. The two of them grew up together almost as one person.

  The old man knows it might take even more. But what no one knows is that right now Thomas is sitting in the dark little house on the black rocks considering his own sacrifice. He has broken into his father’s proud glass case, taken his medals out, and put them in a leather bag. He, too, is thinking. Many weeks of drought slid by and the smell of rotting things permeated Witka’s house. At that house with the fence before it, Thomas himself feels responsible for the drought. He knows what is happening, that the ocean is mourning after so much had been taken from it, after Marco and the death of the whale. It is mourning for everything, the death of reefs with the lives he’d watched at night, the dead zones. The water had receded from him and his fence. He doesn’t even hear it at night. Now all he has to listen to are his thoughts.

  As the clouds have deserted them, his own fog, too, has lifted, and now he looks into the chambers of himself.

  He regrets leaving his daughter, Lin. He still sees her bony knees and skinny legs as she ran toward the helicopter toward him, crying. He had never returned for her. He could have told the truth and taken her, but he hadn’t thought of it. He was thinking of her mother, his wife, Ma. She had chased Lin and been blown up by a mine. And all he could think of was his own grief about leaving. He is still in grief. He could have said, She’s my daughter, and taken her. He thinks about what he had left her to, if she was
alive, the life he could have given her.

  He remembers flying over the brilliant green of a beautiful land. He looked down, thinking, I am going to help our country, my people, their country, their people. He is still in battle. Now he calls out in Witka’s home, all the names he can remember, the men he’d seen die, the woman he loved. He cries out for Song, the old man of the village, and for Lin, and he calls out for Ruth. Then for Marco. Saying his name over and over. He cries out for all that is no more, and it is so much. He’d spent all these years living in a fog. Now it is moving away. Instead of the fog of self-hatred, he also sees that he had compassion. He had been wrong, and he was not wrong. I killed, he thinks, but I saved. I ended up loving and then hating myself for it. It was a world of doubleness. There are no clear lines between evil and good. He is both. This is the slow dawn of his knowing.

  And so he makes decisions. A sacrifice is in order and he knows it. Truth-telling is part of the price, if he can do it. He leaves the little house during daylight while Ruth is gone to the elders, and he hitches a ride with a passing truck into town in order to make arrangements.

  At the old white house dwellings it is decided. Ruth stays for the night and the next morning she walks back to her boat in the heat, with remorse and doubt, feeling she’d committed to giving too much, wondering if she believes in things that don’t exist. This is the wrong mind, she knows, but she has been the one always willing to give, always searching for help. She remembers when she was a girl and she was told by her grandmother that she would have to give her dance clothes away to another girl at one of the ceremonies, even the red blanket with the black raven sewn on its back in tiny, nearly invisible stitches. It had been given to her by her cousin in the north and it was not their traditional clothing, anyway. “But this is our way,” said her grandmother, a woman learned about the past, and one given to wearing ribbons woven into her braids. Each time Ruth saw the girl, the happy recipient of the blanket, she had to push down her feelings of envy and loss until one day she saw her and thought how lovely the girl looked, how happy she was to have the dance clothes she wouldn’t have had if not for Ruth.