David

David stretches and cracks his back as the church bell sounds noon through the bush. It has been a long morning under the hot sun, scraping flat the earth that was left undisturbed for generations. His brother, Tomas, calls to David as he goes to eat his lunch in the shade of their grandfathers’ banyan, where he is joined by Matthew and Naling, emerging from other plots along other paths. All of them sweat and groan themselves to the ground. David stands over them a minute.

“Sit,” Tomas says. “Eat.”

David declines. “I have to go find Jacob. There is still the pig to pick up for the feast.”

“Hezekiah has sent the kava already and we’ll prepare it tomorrow,” Tomas says.

“Good, good.” David nods. Everything is going smoothly. “Do you think we can start building soon? I’ll ask Jacob to join us if we are.”

“Maybe,” Tomas says. “If the weather holds. It would be good to have some young blood to help us out, instead of just us old men.” The four of them laugh.

“I thought Jacob was leaving right after the ceremony?” Naling asks.

“No,” David says with a confidence he does not feel. “He isn’t sure when he is heading back to Vila yet.”

“I heard Robson say he is going to New Zealand.”

David forces himself to laugh. “I think Robson is just talking. You know the way that he is. He always wants you to think he knows everything that goes on.” He feels a small pang of guilt at saying this about his friend, even if it is true.

Naling shrugs.

“He does like to talk,” Tomas admits, though he doesn’t sound convinced.

David leaves the three of them chatting over their lunch as he heads towards his own gardens, where Jacob is helping Rebecca. Clouds scuttle low over the island; he hopes they will burn off. He knows the Stewarts expect a bright blue sky, the water to shine. A tropical paradise, as all white people do of this place. Overhead is the soft coo of a dove and David pauses briefly on the path to peer through the foliage, but its green feathers render it invisible. Today, the sounds of the place soothe him only slightly. The doves; the wind higher up rippling the trees; farther away, the chatter of voices in the gardens. Below it all the rhythmic harmonies of a building song.

He can’t help but think about what Naling said, and he feels a rising anger that others are gossiping about his family, that his son has gone elsewhere for advice. David doesn’t want Robson to lure his son away.

It is true that he and Robson were themselves nineteen when they went to New Zealand together to work farms and fields for a year. Only a few months older than Jacob is now, they were both already married with children. Every time David had news from home, his heart swelled and broke all at once. He longed to hold his son, to speak his name.

David pleaded with Robson to return to Iparei with him, but Robson wanted to stay. Another year, he said to David, and they would make big money. “Think of what we could take home to them. A generator. An outboard motor. We could buy concrete and build homes. We can do more by staying here. It will take years to make this kind of money at home.”

But there was the draw of his wife and son, the hope of more children. David felt uprooted, the better part of himself missing. His feet were itchy, he explained, for the ground he grew up on.

Robson did stay another year, sending home money and letters. When he came back, he returned as a big man, with money and big talk and new connections in Vila and overseas. He took over in the church, having become involved with a congregation in New Zealand who had sent money back with him. He had a new bell cast to look exactly like the one Reverend William was said to have brought with him to Iparei, which had been lost or stolen in the decades since. He had a plaque carved for the church that told of its founding, and he hung a copy of the mission photo that included David’s great-grandfather. Robson built a three-room home, the first concrete building at their end of the island aside from the church, and he paid for the new school building. He leased a large portion of land and planted coconuts that he processed into oil, and he started growing cash crops instead of subsistence ones, all the while urging David to as well. He talked about constructing a hotel. He talked about building a yacht club for rich foreigners. He talked of establishing a ring road that would link all the places on the island together. Yes, he has done well—but his coconut palms were devastated by the cyclone, and it will be a lean year without the copra money. He will be looking for a new venture. And David is worried that Jacob is part of some new scheme.

When David enters the clearing, Jacob is bent over a shovel, scraping out the terraced hillside for the yam plants that he will mark with a twist of cane. Rebecca kneels where she has planted the taro that she loves from her island. It is reassuring to see the plants growing so well.

“You have done so much work,” he calls out, and his wife and son stop what they are doing to look up at him. Nearby, in the surrounding bush, others pause to listen before picking up again. “You’ve done so much!” David says again, trying to keep the anxiety out of his voice.

“Thanks to Jacob,” Rebecca says, her own voice pitched low in the midday air. A troubled shadow passes over his son’s face. They both sweat in the glare of the sun.

“It’s lunchtime,” David says. “You didn’t hear the bell?”

“We’re just stopping,” Rebecca says. “Your son is the one who wants to keep working.”

“Are you trying to make up for something?” David asks, trying to make it a joke, but his wife and son exchange a quick glance before Rebecca goes to the small woven bag she has carried to her garden, to retrieve their lunch.

“Jacob,” he says, ignoring the food that Rebecca holds out to him. “I’m going to the north to get the pig for the ceremony. Come with me. They haven’t seen you in so long.”

“I promised Rebecca I’d . . .” Jacob begins, lifting his shovel and then angling it down like a blade into the earth. “I should stay here.”

“Perhaps you should,” David says, and his stomach turns slightly. They are both avoiding looking at him. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Jacob says quickly. “No, I’ll go with you,” he adds and then glances at Rebecca. “Is that okay?”

She nods her encouragement and whispers something to Jacob as he goes to kiss her cheek and hand her his shovel. He wipes his face with his forearm and heads down the path towards the shore. David watches him go before turning back to Rebecca. She lifts a hand to wave him away without saying anything, and joins the others who are breaking to eat near their own gardens. David hurries after his son, catching up to him easily and falling into step behind him on the path.

Jacob and Rebecca have silence in common, though David wonders if Jacob sees it that way. As a child, whenever Jacob was angry, he would set his jaw the way it is now. He wouldn’t speak, but would creep about as quietly as possible, as though he might be able to make himself disappear. But then his mother died, and it was as if he broke loose. He became a cyclone of noise and action that David didn’t know how to control. He’d long worried about Jacob’s withdrawals, which Jacob’s mother said were just him thinking but which David read as simmering anger. He worried about how his son ran through the bush with slightly older boys, about the rumoured still they had built deep in the woods in one of the old tabu places.

He decided to send his son away to school in Vila, and when he told him, Jacob did disappear. He walked three hours across the island to his mother’s family, his aunt sending word that he was safe with them. It was then David knew he must marry again. But he couldn’t have known how much his son and Rebecca would come to love each other. He could not have known that sometimes they would form an alliance against him. Or how glad he would be for their bond.

“You don’t really need my help,” Jacob says over his shoulder to him as they walk.

He’s right. “Maybe. But I would like it,” David responds, watching his son’s back.

Jacob makes a noncommittal noise. Their feet sound softly on the path. Around them the bush is alive with birdsong, the click and hum of insects. David thinks of Jacob as a boy, standing on a path like this, bow in his hand, and how he used to guide his son’s eye.

“Do you remember,” he says, “when I first taught you to hunt? How many bows did you go through? You made them so easily. More than I ever did.”

“I had to. I lost them all the time.”

“Yes! After you got a pigeon you always forgot it behind, you were so excited. I told you to go back and get it, but you said someone else would need it.” His throat constricts, somewhere between laughing and crying.

“I just didn’t want to go back and look for it.”

David laughs into the humid air, remembering Jacob’s long body, stretched out in a growth spurt, barefoot and scrambling up trunks that even now are still growing. In a flash he sees Ouben at the same age, at seven years or so, rounder than Jacob was, certainly, and a little less sure, a little less bold—and then he is gone.

“I bet he would have been a better hunter than me,” Jacob says. That they are both thinking of Ouben comforts David, who reaches forward and squeezes his son’s shoulder. Jacob stops under the touch and they stand together on the path. The air murmurs around them. The trees sing as their branches slide against each other. The ocean is a distant hum.

“Vila doesn’t sound like this,” Jacob says. He pats his father’s hand on his shoulder and then walks out of his grip.

“Nowhere sounds like this.”

Eventually, they step out into the open space of the nasara, and the few chickens scratching nearby disappear into the bush. The sky is bright and fierce now, cracking open as the sun cuts through the clouds overhead. The two of them stand side by side squinting into the bright of the ocean and the whole of the world laid out in front of them.

It is quiet; everyone is out on their land. David raises a hand to Joyce and Michelle, sitting on chairs angled towards the ocean under the banyan, drinking bottles of water, a plate of fresh fruit untouched between them. Two skinny cats sleep in the shade of their chairs. The women wave back. He takes his son’s arm and steers him towards the pickup truck.

“I hear that you are leaving,” David forces himself to say.

Jacob pulls up short and then bends to the back wheel of the truck, pretends to examine the shocks that David complained about the other day.

“Rebecca said she wouldn’t tell you.”

David feels as though he has been struck; Rebecca knew. “It’s fine,” he says, talking about the rear wheel. “Leave it.”

Jacob stands but doesn’t meet his father’s eyes; instead he climbs into the back of the pickup and plucks fallen leaves out of the bed.

“Did Robson get you the job?”

Jacob only shrugs.

David inhales deeply. “Jacob, why didn’t you come to me?”

“You have enough to worry about.”

“You always come first,” he says, but Jacob sucks his teeth, which irks his father. “Why do you have to go? Do you owe Robson something? Someone in Vila?”

“I owe you something. I owe my brother something.” There is a sudden edge of desperation to Jacob’s voice, as though he is searching for an escape.

David sees the silent child that Jacob once was and worries he will stop speaking and slink away, but his son continues.

“What happened two hundred years ago, the past, it doesn’t matter. We need to be thinking of the future. They say this place will be swallowed by the ocean, will disappear entirely. Not because of anything we have done, but because of them.” He gestures in the direction of the Stewarts, where they lounge in the shade. “If we want to be able to stay here, then we need money. You think I can just plant a little garden and live like that? It’s not enough.”

Maybe he is right. What is there to keep Jacob or any of the young people here, on the island? Most of them have already gone away. Iparei has become a place of children and the older generation. But all he wants is for his son to marry and have children who David can sit with on his knee. Who cares about what else they may not have?

Jacob stands in the bed of the truck and stares out at the sea. “I couldn’t tell you because you wouldn’t have heard it. You’ve changed . . .” He slows and chooses his words carefully. “Since Ouben.” He lets the name sit between them. “I miss him too. He’s my brother, my heart.” Jacob stares up at the sky. “I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want to hurt you. But I have to leave.”

“You don’t.”

Jacob leaps down from the truck and walks around to open the passenger door, refusing to meet his father’s eye. “What choice do I have?” he asks.

David stares at his son, before he turns away and squints at the light reflecting off the water. He tries to think of something to say, but for the first time he finds that any real answers escape him.