We were still humming and laughing when we saw the smoke from Sunward Island. “The feast fires have started,” said Kano. “They realized we were coming, this time. That’s good.”
Grinner splashed him and said, “You like it when the food is ready and you like it when the food is half-cooked, so long as you can bloat.” Kano shook his fat fist as if he was angry but he didn’t mind the joke. We all helped him eat, sometimes it was more fun to watch Kano eat than to finish our own food.
I realized that we were paddling slower and that the Chief hadn’t started the Arrival Song, even though we could now see the full sweep of the island and our song would be able to break on the village.
“What’s wrong?” I asked a man named Two Hooks. He’d placed his paddle atop the canoe and was staring at Sunward, shading his eyes for a better look.
“I don’t know. There’s something....”
“Oh, it’s the smoke,” said Kano. “Look, the cook-smoke has colors.” He was right. I hadn’t seen it before because I was too excited, but the cook-smoke wasn’t just white or black. In places the smoke rising from the cooking rings on the beach held coiled lines of color, shifting ropes of blue or orange and pink or a touch of yellow. The colors disappeared if you looked hard. I’d never seen anything like it, but how did I know what they cooked on Sunward?
“It smells funny,” said Kano. “Not bad. Just, I don’t think I’ve smelled this before. It’s good, actually, like fruit-meat-beer-smoke.”
Now we all laughed, since Kano had managed to say that it smelled like all three of his favorite things. A couple of seconds later the Chief started the Arrival Song, his powerful voice calling out to us to answer. We sang as we paddled toward the island and forgot about the strange smell. By the time we swung around the point, Wide Man and twelve of his most-favored fishermen were singing back to us from the beach.
Friend! Where have you been! We feast, we drink
But it’s not the same without you.
Together now, together we can dance!
I had been preparing myself for greeting songs and an eventual fuss over the great turtle I’d caught. But the giant pink shell on Wide Man’s head distracted us all. I say it was pink, but that may not be true. It wasn’t white. It wasn’t red. It glinted.
I got my first look at the shell when Wide Man jumped off the beach like a man twenty years younger to help us pull our canoes out of the water. I thought, “Well I don’t even know what to call that.” It had spikes and prongs like a king-shell and soft ridges like a yam-snail. There were more openings than I thought a shell could have and one of these holes was placed so that the shell rode on top of Wide Man’s head. He never stopped beaming as we sang the Sunward and Sweetwater Song.
Our Chief promised to hand over Many Yams and I knew that this was when we would get to hear about great events in Many Yams’ kaala line through the islands: the splendid harvests, safe births of twins, and all the other good things that came from this Red-Shells’ kaala-luck, a list that would include my lucky turtle-hunt for at least this telling of Many Yams’ story.
But Wide Man was too excited about his own news to listen. Our Chief was staring at the head-shell too and he didn’t really protest when Wide Man broke into Many Yams’ story with a wave and said, “Yes, yes, we are glad to welcome Many Yams among us and will increase his fortune before sending him up the line of kaala. But look at the magnificent kaala prize I will bring you!”
He rose on tiptoe to acknowledge the shell with his stocky body. “She is Ocean Mother! Her story goes back grandparents and grandparents and grandparents ago, even though we had not heard most of her stories before receiving her from Molawa. I know that she is late to sail to you and your people. I hope you will not think less of me because I have kept Her good fortune among my people longer than we expected. By the time I bring Her to you, in one moon, or two, Her fortune will be tripled again. Come, let us carry your goods to the feast rings. You can clean up and then we will eat, such a feast we will have tonight!”
Of course we were tired from the trip. With the song finished, the ache hit our muscles. But I was not so tired that I had forgotten Rain. She had hung back in the pavilion on the canoe, as she’d been told, waiting for the moment when she could join the First New Family song. But Windhope was missing and Wide Man was trundling up the hill, placing his hand along the shell to keep it from falling off… Not so perfectly fitted, then.
“And for our sister? What welcome for our sister?” I asked.
Wide Man turned back. “Oh! Windhope’s bride! Rain! I am terrible. A new wife! Quickly, fetch Windhope and his wedding musicians!” Several of the dozen men at his side scattered. Within ten minutes, before our yams were even half-unloaded, Windhope and his family were clustered on the beach singing the songs to welcome Rain, promising her several excellent weddings. Windhope was still a strong man, despite his notoriously bad attempts at beer, and his flashing smile and calm humor struck me as steps in a dance he had danced before. He knew what he was doing. Rain was already smiling at a joke he had spoken low so that only she could hear it. I turned and filled my arms with banana-leaf bundles.
To give Sunward its due, the feast started well. From up close the cook-smoke looked normal but the smell was just as Kano had said: fruit, meat, beer, all good things. The cooks laughed and said we would have to wait for the feast for explanations. I felt better when the Sunward women thanked me over and over again for the turtle. It was already baking in the chief sandpit, they’d pulled out lesser fish to make room for it. Soon people were telling the story around the fires. Several men from Windhope’s family asked me to teach them my turtle song. I put them off, saying that it was time for a kaala and for a wedding, that we could share fish songs later.
Finally the women carried in the food. None of our dried yams had been brought to the cooking circles and now we knew why. The yams on the plates being carried up from the cook-rings were twice as big as any I’d seen. They were rich orange, soft yellow. The texture was good and the juices seemed like meat. So many different tastes. In a yam?
Wide Man laughed and gave in to our questions. “It’s the gift of Ocean Mother!” He’d finally removed the shell from his head. It rested on a reed mat at his side, propped up on a heap of just-harvested giant yams, spiky with roots. Up close Ocean Mother turned out to be a shell armband after all, like the other White-Shell armbands that came to us from Sunward, but bigger, as if the person whose arm was right for the band was twice as big a normal man.
“Sometimes when Ocean Mother finds favor with a village, as she loves us here on Sunward, she brings something new, a gift that no one could have thought of! We call them New Yams. They grow twice as fast and twice as big. So the women have more time to sew and help with the nets.”
“And make new dances!” called someone in the back, and everyone laughed, though we were laughing at the dirty joke and a few of the men from Sunward seemed to be laughing at us.
I took four or five bites of the New Yams. They had an aftertaste. I only half-chewed my last bite and then pretended to cough and took it out to bury it in the sand. In the corner of my eye I saw something moving in the dirty yams beneath the great pink shell. Something skinny and black and slow. A worm? Or roots settling?
I moved to the far side of the circle where I couldn’t see the New Yams or the shell. Maybe I was done eating. The wedding musicians came to start the dances of the First Wedding of Windhope and Rain. I sat with my face to the flames, found a gourd of beer, then another.
By the time I threw aside my fourth gourd, I’d watched all the wedding dancing I could stomach. The kaala songs I’d been ready to sing, songs in honor of Many Yams, seemed to have been forgotten. Wide Man and our Chief were still talking about Ocean Mother.
The problem with weak beer is that you can’t get drunk and forget your life. I needed to get away. Five beers at home and I would have been asleep, but four beers here and I could walk smoothly, two steps from the
fire, then ten, then twenty. I made thirty steps from the fire without Grinner calling out to me or anyone from Sunward running after me in protest. Ah! I had escaped!
I walked slowly down the beach feeling sorry for myself. I felt sorry for Rain. I even felt sorry for our Chief, who looked uncomfortable sitting beside Wide Man. But mostly I felt sorry for myself. My stomach hurt. I’d been using beer to scrape at the taste of the New Yams. “They taste like everything but shit and earth and yams, and that’s not right,” I said aloud, and realized that Sunward beer must be strong enough, since I was talking to myself like a drunk man.
I kept walking and turned off the beach toward the village. The paths were clear in the dark and there were night-fires and people dancing in one of the yards. Children who were too young for the feast and some of the Sunward people who weren’t part of this kaala trade or the wedding had gathered in the center place to sing kaala songs. This happened in our village, too: everyone loved kalaa because it brought new things and news of relatives on other islands, so everyone danced and sang kaala songs even if they weren’t directly involved in the trades between the big men.
A couple of the Sunward men nodded to me and made the sign for turtle. I stood in the shadows, happy to just listen at first. I let the familiar rhythms of kaala song roll through me and soothe the thick knot in my stomach.
A young girl wearing a white feather necklace was making up the funny verses that come before the main chorus. She was good at it, making fun of everyone while sounding respectful, and I started feeling better. But then she sang about the New Yams, and I realized that she wasn’t singing the song of the shell that was receiving its feast. The Sunward people were still singing the song of the shell they’d had for months, Ocean Mother. I lost the rhythm for a moment and thought about returning to the beach, but the chorus was coming, the verses that went into every song for White-Shells traveling south. Alright. I could sing the chorus. The line would start at Sunward, go north to Molawa, and so on, tracing the path that Ocean Mother had already taken through all the kaala islands until the path swung back around and finally reached Sweetwater.
I was thinking as the chorus began that it must have been a very long time since Ocean Mother had been at our island. There were kaala shells that got lost for awhile, or stuck between feuding trade partners. And other shells that entered anew, though Wide Man had said Ocean Mother had a long history. There was a story here. Perhaps I would get it from someone after the song.
Together we sang, “Blessed in Sunward, given from Molawa, thanks to Turtle Pond Island, back to Flying Fish and Green Fish and Shark and Solstice, Solstice, Solstice,” we caught our breath as others kept up the Solstice-weave in many beats. This was always my favorite part of the song tracing kaala north, after this the verse slowed down as each distant island got more time inside the beat. The laughing girl with the white-feather necklace was still the leader. She danced while banging two coconuts together. Huh! The song was getting raucous even before reaching North Star, not the way we sang the song at Home, but clearly Sunward danced hard.
“Redrocks! Redrocks! Redrocks!” we yelled. Some of the singers had stopped using words and were just making noise, but the girl’s voice was still clear. “Redrocks beside the smoking bay,” she sang, in a higher voice than I had thought she could find. What smoking bay? We were all dancing now.
“Then Lady’s Island, Lady’s Island, Lady’s Island,” sang the beautiful girl with the white feathers. I was dancing with my eyes closed, willing my pounding heart to wash away the sickness in my stomach.
“Paj-cross! Paj-cross! Paj-cross!” screamed the dancers. My eyes snapped open and I fell, banging off a door-post. “Paj-cross?” I said. “Not Paj-cross, it’s Black Bay, next.” But no one was listening. There were more men and women now dancing among the children, they had joined while my eyes were closed. I got to my knees and tried to catch the glance of a woman who had smiled at me earlier, expecting her to be as surprised as I was that these children were singing the song wrong. But her eyes didn’t focus, she screamed “Paj-CROSS!” with everyone else.
White-Feather Girl held a crescent guaraj shell in her hands above her head. She danced with her eyes closed and a smile I did not expect to see on a child. She reminded me of Rain for a moment, standing on the beach at midnight with her naked arms raised to the stars.
“Gsesh-na-rahgnan Gsesh-na-rahgnan!” screamed the girl. I stumbled around the doorpost looking for the edge of the dancers. This gsesh-thing was not a place at all. The rest of the dancers echoed the call anyway.
“Lhir-kna-ral!” screamed White-Feather Girl, in the beyond-high voice that she had used earlier. I caught a glimpse of her surrounded by the tallest dancers and she reminded me of Rain again, of Rain in the wedding dance with Windhope. But this girl was dancing with five grown men and women. They started moving together and the audience screamed the name of another place that was not a place, and then another.
The wrong vomited from my stomach and smashed out my front teeth.
Light moon, sweet moon, slip past your husband’s warriors
Light moon, sweet moon, to hold us on these waters
Sweetness, to feel your hands,
Light hands, bright hands,
Guide us to our waters.
I woke with roots pressed into the mess in the front of my mouth and the voices of my uncles singing around the sound of the paddles. I was propped off the bottom of the canoe by two reed mats. Mine and Grinner’s, I realized. The thin crescent moon wavered, twinned by double-vision. There was a touch of morning on my left.
We were paddling south towards home? At night instead of waiting for the morning? Grinner was paddling beside me. I tried to sit up and ask him what was going on but the bindings tied into my mouth wouldn’t let me talk right.
“Heyo, sweetness wakes,” whispered Grinner. I heard the flash of his smile as much as I saw it. I felt around in my mouth.
“Careful there,” said Grinner between strokes. I gained my seat, found my paddle in the bottom and caught up with the stroke. “You’re finally really scary-looking. I know how much you wanted that. But I bet you hit the guy who hit you even harder, eh? Knocked him off Sunward, maybe?”
“Why are we paddling the night songs?” I grumbled, around bloody fibers and twitches of pain.
Grinner understood me. “Well, it’s not just that you got drunk and beat up in the village. The Chief had already decided to leave, no one knows why. Maybe we got cheated this time. Or maybe Chief finally figured out that Wide Man screwed his wife the last time he came to visit. Or maybe...”
“What?” I asked.
“Maybe it was just too strange. Right?” Grinner looked puzzled, like he wasn’t sure if it had been strange or not.
I didn’t know what to say, so I nodded. I could feel that I had lost two of my teeth. There was blood in my mouth and another taste I was having trouble figuring out. It was slipping away, a dream. But that seemed wrong. It hadn’t been a dream. It had been real. I reached in and pushed on the place where my teeth were missing. The pain woke me hard.
And there it was. The taste behind the blood was the taste of the New Yam. That was clear. The end of what had happened in the village? I had no idea. It was lost or hidden, somewhere back behind the squirmy taste of the New Yam.
I looked for our Chief, but his canoe was just a shape on the water. I heard his voice and he was singing clearly enough. The uncles in my canoe seemed tired and more or less happy to be going home instead of being scared or sick. So I rowed like someone thinking normal thoughts and stayed quiet through the next day it took us to follow the South-Spiral current home.
Home from the kalaa, I listened as Chief and my uncles told the story of the visit to Sunward. They talked mostly about Rain’s wedding dance, which was clearly what the women wanted to hear.
I held new herbs tight against my mouth and kept listening. No one said anything about the Ocean Mother. Or the new yams. Or Wide Man’s p
lan to bring us the Ocean Mother in a few moons.
I was the only one who had gotten sick. I asked everyone, but we hadn’t brought any of the new yams with us, and the rest of the men weren’t even sure what I meant. When my mother and others asked me how I lost my tooth, the Chief told them I’d gotten in a fight again. Everyone thought I had probably gotten in a fight with Windhope, so when they were assured that wasn’t true, they’d lost the story they wanted to hear. People seemed to feel better that this time I’d gotten beat up and hadn’t hurt anyone.
It was alright with me to be left alone. At first I couldn’t talk so well without my teeth. I was worried that it was going to affect my singing. If I lost my voice, who would I be?
For a week, I took smaller canoes out by myself, instead of fishing with the other men. Everyone, even Grinner, thought I was upset about Rain. But actually I was upset about what no one else claimed to remember, the taste of the New Yam. When I wasn’t eating or drinking, when I was just hauling nets on the beach or falling asleep or shading my eyes and looking north, I had moments when I could feel something in my stomach, thin like a root or a worm.
One day when the nets were in and I was just waiting, I sat on the edge of the canoe and looked at my reflection. The breeze on the water made my face look even more wrong than usual. I heard a deep roaring thrum in the distance, like the sound of a conch shell being blown. The breeze stopped but there were still things wrong with my face and I could feel something moving in my stomach.
I threw myself on my back in the canoe and braced myself against the sides. For the first time since coming home, I started to sing, but this was not a song that I knew. “Ancestors, help me fight. Grandfather, fight alongside me. Grandmother, sing beside me. Ancestors, help me….”
On my back in the canoe I saw five white birds of a type I had not seen before and have not seen since, swoop past, so fast that I forgot my illness and leapt up to watch. Standing and watching as they disappeared in the distance, I thought for the first time about what had really happened to the little girl with the white feathers.
Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 3
