It was the custom, when a person died, to keep the houses dark and when the sun went down, to live in darkness and silence, and so it looked like a ghost town. In the old days, darkness meant not to burn the lamps that used whale fat. Later, kerosene. Now the electricity was kept off to show regard for those who lost their loved ones, and the people fasted for three days. On the fourth they came together to sing songs that were so slow and deep and mournful a passerby would cry just to hear them.
Often there was no body because many died at sea. It was the custom once, if it was a land death, to take the body on a slab of wood to one of the islands out in the ocean, the island of ancestors, and to place it in the trees. Next to the body were the person’s favorite items, a special necklace or drinking cup, sometimes a picture or carving. There was a special clan of people and these were the only ones who could go to that island which looked so green from the mainland. They were called the Moon Woman Clan. The moon was related to the wolf and to the women, so most often it was the old women who took the loved human out there, rowing through whatever the ocean offered that day, setting out with the tide in the early morning, returning with it late.
But this custom ceased during the influenza epidemic when so many died that there was no room on the island for the bodies. Then there was the massacre by the Americans seeking gold in the hills and even the babies and elders were bayoneted and shot. There were too few old women left to row and the Americans had burned the canoes so no one could escape. Still, some had lived, had gone into the forest and pretended to be trees and thus became invisible, so there are people remaining today.
Even if the custom of burial in the trees still existed, Marco would not have gone to the island where the eagles and sacred condors once visited to make their meals. He would have been buried near the cemetery marked by whalebones. As it is today. But with no body, now there was just the rule of darkness and silence, the people wrapped in blankets, together, later singing the slow, deep songs.
To the griever there is darkness anyway. Nights are lengthened, time is endless. Even in daylight darkness is a room of corners and shadows, things are not there. After the fourth-day sing, awkward, kind neighbors bring food to be eaten. Those who loved Ruth—so many—touched her hand, her shoulder, held her lightly, but no one could read the world inside other human bones. They could touch the skin and not feel the grief and pain it held only a skin’s-width away.
“You haven’t been sleeping. I can tell.”
Ruth was pale. Her mother wanted her to eat. Ruth’s hands wanted only to touch Marco’s hair, his cheek. She wanted to go backward in time and watch him sleep, count every eyelash, and then to tell him, No, you can’t go. It is all wrong.
No one but Vince, the old weathered fisherman, saw her walking the pier at night. He thought she was a sleepwalker. It would not have been strange. But Ruth was looking for the remains of her son, Marco Polo Just, the one now traveling worlds she would never know, just as she’d always hoped, although she wanted it to be land he traveled, not the spirit world, not water.
She looked for the white shoes he had worn that day instead of his moccasins because the rubber was more secure against the sides of the canoe. She never dreamed how tender the vision of a Nike might become.
Vince, the old, weathered man whose body was created of coffee and cigarettes, wondered if he should tell Aurora, at least, that Ruth was walking in her sleep near water and it might be a dangerous thing.
Because she was so lost, it was a good thing when Ruth looked up one day and saw that the white houses on the other shore had disappeared. “My God,” she said, coming back to her life for a while. “Look!”
Aurora could not see the houses, either. But she had a new worry now, knowing Ruth would go there. “This isn’t a good time to be on the water,” she told Ruth. “It’s so rough.” It was the season of quick changes in the ocean. “I don’t think you should go just yet.” Aurora fiddled with her spoon at the table, warning her strong-willed daughter.
“But they might need help. I have to check it out, at least.” It took her worries off Marco and herself.
“Call someone else. Old Vince could go there.”
Ruth feared that a sudden wave, like the swell that surged high enough to carry the whale back into its world, had taken away the old people and their homes. It had been an unusual wave, too high, too close. Who was to say there wouldn’t be more? Ruth took off her robe, dressed, and went to prepare the dinghy to travel to the shore of the elders, the old houses where the People Who Remember lived.
It was a poor decision in the continuing stormy weather, but she was overcome by the thought that the elders were in need. As it turned out, there was a high wind. Soon the water itself seemed to cry out. She “felt bottom,” as they say about water in ocean storms before the big wave comes.
Then she was carried. By waves so large that Ruth had to make a choice. She could try to return to land, with no guarantee of reaching it, she could fight the water to continue on, maybe running out of gas, or she could wait for the tide to change. She decided that last was the wisest choice, to move with the water and not against it. And so she sat in the waves, covered with her wet cape and warm enough with the life jacket, letting herself go out farther into the ocean until water changed its will. Otherwise, just as in her life, it would take everything she had just to remain in one place.
It was good she had the time to think. She went over Milton’s statement. She believed him. He was not cunning enough to lie. Marco, the child once held in her arms beside her in bed, had been murdered, and she tried to think of why. And who she could go to. The tribal police would not investigate Dwight or the others. Those outside the tribe would not believe her or, if they did, would not give it much thought. Besides, after killing the whale, no one wanted anything to do with them. They were ostracized, disliked right now by most of America.
Thomas knew Milton told the truth, but he’d said nothing. Ruth knew Thomas well enough to know he still had some feelings, even if dwindling, toward the men he had known all his life, those like Dwight, a few years older, who had always fished with him, had gone with him to hunt in the great forests, to drum and sing at the ocean, yet Dwight had always fallen short of Thomas and his resentment wasn’t always held at bay.
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.”