People of the Whale Read online

  More praise for

  People of the Whale

  “In her remarkable new novel, Hogan…explores themes of love and loss among the A’atsika people of Washington State…. [Her] style is both dream-like and realistic, with a nonlinear narrative that loops back on itself as more and more is revealed.”

  —Library Journal

  “Deeply ecological, original, and spellbinding, Hogan ascends to an even higher plane in this hauntingly beautiful novel of the hidden dimensions of life, and all that is now imperiled.”

  —Booklist

  “This book brings you deep into the realm of a people who have ancient, complex ties to the natural world…through a compelling and insistent narrative.”

  —Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education

  “This is a fine story that embraces the worthy subjects of modern American Indians, the Vietnam War and the importance of family.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “In telling a story of the fictional A’atsika, a Native people of the American West Coast who find their mythical origins in the whale and the octopus, Hogan employs just the right touch of spiritualism in this engrossing tale…with a powerful, romantic crescendo.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “With her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic, Linda Hogan reinforces my faith in reading, writing, living.”

  —Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible

  “Hauntingly wise, beautifully written, and fiercely tender, People of the Whale goes between realms of animal and human, between Native and non-Native, between the radiant world as it once was and still might become. This book is a bridge, a revelation, an open heart.”

  —Brenda Peterson, author of Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals

  “People of the Whale is pure magic—and pure truth. It’s as perfect as a smooth stone.”

  —Sy Montgomery, author of The Good Good Pig

  PEOPLE of the WHALE

  ALSO BY LINDA HOGAN

  FICTION

  Power

  Solar Storms

  Mean Spirit

  NONFICTION

  Sightings: The Gray Whale’s Mysterious Journey

  The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir

  The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World

  Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World

  The Stories We Hold Secret

  Intimate Nature

  POETRY

  Rounding the Human Corners

  The Book of Medicines

  Seeing Through the Sun

  Savings

  Red Clay

  Eclipse

  PEOPLE of the WHALE

  A Novel

  LINDA HOGAN

  W. W. Norton & Company

  New York • London

  Copyright © 2008 by Linda Hogan

  All rights reserved

  First published as a Norton 2009

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hogan, Linda.

  People of the whale / Linda Hogan.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07282-2

  1. Indians of North America—Fiction. 2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Culture conflict—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.O34726P46 2008

  813’.54—dc22

  2008025040

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  For the healing of the oceans,

  for the healing of our veterans

  coming home from all the wars,

  and for my brother,

  Larry Henderson.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Octopus

  Deathless

  Body Lies

  The Wife of Marco Polo

  Marco: The Son of Thomas

  Ruth

  Dark River: 1988

  Hunt

  Dark Houses

  PART TWO

  He Builds the Fence

  The Rain Priest

  After the Rain

  He Goes Beneath

  Out There

  Light-years

  Red Fish: Human

  Home

  PART THREE

  The Wall: The Names

  Ruth Watching

  DOA: Department of the Army: Rooms

  The Day of Tranquillity

  The Man Who Killed the Whale

  Stirrings Underneath

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  We live on the ocean. The ocean is a great being. The tribe has songs about the ocean, songs to the ocean. It is a place where people’s eyes move horizontally because they watch the long, wide sea flow into infinity. Their eyes follow the width and length of the world. Black rocks rise out of the ocean here and there, lending themselves to stories of sea monsters that might have consumed mere mortals. Several islands along the coast are tree-covered green jewels. The nearby fishing towns are now abandoned, as is the sawmill in disrepair, the forest missing. Down the beach a ways to the south, white piles, shining piles of clam and oyster shells were left behind by the earlier people, the Mysterious Ones, who were said to have built houses of shells, perfectly pieced together. These places truly existed, the secret places where houses were made of shells. Royal ships once anchored there; those who kept journals said the houses were made of pearls. No one sees them now except as a memory made of words. One man passing by at sunset wrote, in 1910, that they were made of rainbows, but of course no one believed him. This was also the year the deadly influenza arrived with the white whalers. The houses of shells were covered in a mudslide that same year.

  Even the land gives in to history.

  Out in the water, in the uplift of black stones, caves are left open and revealed when the tide is out, but there are caves on land also. A pile of treasures still remains in one cleft in black rock where once, not long ago, the old revered man, Witka, used to enter the cold sea naked and converse with whales, holding his breath for long periods of time. “Stay away from there,” the mothers tell their children, making it all the more enticing, and when no one looks, the children go through the offerings left there, tobacco, black shining stones created when lightning struck sand, a glass float from the other side of the ocean. On some beaches are the broken bones of long-ago boats, skeletons of carved wood, even with ribs, that are broken dreams of poor men’s labor. Almost everything from the boats that could be used has been taken years ago. Old and porous whalebones were also used inland as grave markers for the last generations, now as fences for flower gardens, and for occasional carving.

  To the north, there is an old rubbing beach where the whales used to come out of water and flop awkwardly about. “Wake up,” a sleepless person would say back then. “Come.” And others threw on their coats in the early morning to watch the whales rub their backs into sand and stone, to scratch and remove the barnacles that lived on their skin. The whales looked joyful and happily clumsy when they did this, heaving themselves about with great breath and effort. They were sights to behold, and were watched with awe and laughter. The whales have always been loved and watched, their spumes of breath blowing above water, their bodies turning, rising.

  Sometimes this is a turbulent place. Two rivers reach the sea here, sometimes in a muddy rush away from the land. When there are storms, waves re
ach far heights and water crashes against the rocks, still smoothing them through time.

  Sometimes, too, it is peaceful, the water calm. Then the people go out on the still water and fish, or sit on the beach drawing pictures or sifting through the gray sand. They talk with their friends and eat sandwiches. On summer days the sand is warm against their backs and they rest on its heat.

  Across the bay are whitewashed buildings. They look as if they’ve been painted with milk. The old people, the traditionalists, live there.

  It is a secret place, this world. You could say it is in Washington but that is too far north, by degrees and fathoms. I keep it a secret, the place, the people, though the world will soon hear about it.

  But place or time or season, it doesn’t matter to the man who turns his back to the sea. No one knows if he will turn toward life again. They wonder if it is hate he feels, or remorse, or merely human grief. After a while, some forget he is over there.

  PART ONE

  OCTOPUS

  The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there.

  But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it. Every one of these ocean people stood back, amazed to see it walk, the eye of it looking at them, each one seen, as if each one were known in all their past, all their future. Its skin paled at the sight of men smoking cigarettes and women in their cardigans pulled tight, with their dark windblown hair. One child stepped toward it as if to speak before his mother grabbed his arm and pulled him back to her, claiming him as a land dweller and no communicator or friend of any eight-legged sea creature.

  None of them, not even the oldest, had ever seen an octopus do this and their people had lived there for thousands of years. It scared them into silence, then they talked about it. They knew it meant something. They didn’t know what. Four fishermen in dirty clothes wanted to kill it and use it for fishing bait. “It’s only practical!” they argued. “It’s the best thing that could happen to us.” They could take it, undigested, out of the stomach of flounder and halibut and use it again. For days they talked about it. They quarreled. They cried about how blessed they were. A few wild-haired men, afraid of its potent meaning, wanted to throw kerosene in the cave and burn it.

  But one of the powerful women stepped up. She believed it had a purpose for going into the cave and that the humans, a small group of lives beside a big ocean, should leave it alone. Others agreed. Its purpose was a mystery. Or perhaps it was sick or going to give birth. It turned a shade of red as it reached the safety of the cave. And so the people thought it was holy and they left gifts outside the entrance to the black rock cave. Some left sage and red cedar. Some offered shining things, glass smoothed by the sea, even their watches. As for the infant Thomas, his mother, whose own infancy was fed on whale and seal fat, was one of those who thought it was a holy creature and its presence at the time of his birth granted to Thomas a special life. She came from Thomas’s birth at the place of the old people and stood before the entrance of the octopus cave and held her kicking baby up to it, to be seen by it. “Here is my son. You knew his grandfather. Watch over him.” They were poor people. She had little to leave but the pearl she inherited from her father, Witka. She rolled it into the cave. She was convinced the octopus would be the spirit-keeper of her son, because she thought like the old people used to think, that such helpers existed and they were benevolent spirits. An older man named Samuel left his silver ring at the entrance to the cave; it was his finest possession. Not to have given something they cared about would have been no gift at all, so, following his example, others left sparkling glasses, pieces of gold, beads, all the shining things the octopus people love in their homes beneath water.

  For the time it dwelt there, they brought offerings, even the first flowers of morning. The treasures built up like small middens. Even the children didn’t take the treasures, although they did go look at them and marvel at what they found, until their mothers grabbed them away. The younger children tasted them and found them without flavor except the salt from the air.

  Those who were afraid the octopus was created by magic or called into being by some force on land not benevolent kept an eye on how it stood in the back of the cave. But it sensed their emotions and formed itself to fit beneath a ledge. It could shape itself to fit into anything, a bottle, a basket. That was how they were caught in the old days, by baskets lowered into the water at night and lifted in the mornings, the creature inside it. Yet, that quality scared people who knew little about them, but had heard much about shape-shifters and their deceits and witchery on humans, always with poor outcomes for the mortals.

  Nevertheless, the mother of Thomas, in a plain white dress, took the baby Thomas daily across the sand to the cave when the tide was out.

  Then, one night, without any sign, the octopus disappeared from human sight and went back into the water.

  As closely as they watched, no one saw its return to the ocean. It must have been three in the morning, they decided, because early each morning the old people were on the beach singing powerful, old, and still-remembered songs. They sang around four each morning when the atmosphere is most charged with energy. They could say this now that they lived in measured time. Also, they could remain and pray and watch the reflected red of dawn on the rocks and sky. Drinkers might have seen it at two in the morning as they sat on the beach drumming and singing their newer songs. Of course, they may have missed it while kissing a lover or, like Dimitri Smith, the man who never tucked in his shirt and slept often on the beach, while gazing only upward at the sky, searching out and naming the constellations: Whale. Sea Lion. Octopus. Yes, that was one of them.

  With the departure of the octopus went their gifts. The octopus, by accepting the Smiths’ gold ring, Witka’s pearl, gems, the pieces of silver, even a pair of glasses, knew it was loved by them and it would help them as it went back under the sea and stayed there, maybe giving them good fishing or good deer hunting, whaling money, love medicine, all things desperately wanted by humans and shifting in their value day by day, moment by moment, depending on their needs.

  Thomas’s grandfather was the well-known whaler named Witka. He was the one who told them what gifts the octopus loved. He was the last of those who could go under the sea holding his breath for long times and remain, so he had a great deal of knowledge about the ocean and all sea life. He was the last of a line of traditional men who loved and visited the whales to ensure a good whale hunt, along with his friend, the great-grandfather of Dimitri Smith and a man named Akita-si who could also remain beneath water for briefer times than Witka, but long enough to sew a whale’s mouth closed when they killed a whale. This sewing was important so that the lungs wouldn’t fill with water and the whale sink to the bottom of the ocean.

  Witka’s wife lived most of the time in the white town. His other women lived in the wooden houses that used to be up against the mountain before the tidal wave washed the places away, but he himself stayed and dreamed much of the time in the dark gray house he built on top of the thirty-two-foot-high black rock where his grandson, Thomas Witka Just, now dwells, thinking of his grandfather, whose watch on the sea had been constant, that man who spoke with the whales, entreated them, and asked, singing with his arms extended, if one of them would offer itself to the poor people on land. He beckoned and pleaded when the people were hungry. The rest of the time Witka watched their great numbers passing by, spraying or standing in water to look around, or rising and diving, their shining sides covered with barnacles. The infant whales were sometimes lifted on the backs of the mothers. They were such a sight for him to behold, the man who lived between the worlds and between the elements.

  Water was not really a pla
ce for humans, but Witka the whale hunter had courage. He had practiced holding his breath from childhood in preparation for this role. Only for this. He was born to it and his parents were unhappy about it. When he went beneath water, they stood in their clothing woven of sea grass and waited for him to surface. But they couldn’t hope away his destiny. He was born with a job set out for him and his life was already known to them. He wore white cloth that set him apart so the others would know and remember what and who he was. That way they would treat him well. He learned the songs and prayers. By the age of five he had dreamed the map of underwater mountains and valleys, the landscape of rock and kelp forests and the language of currents. He had an affinity for it. He saw it all. At night he dreamed of the way it changed from day to day. They were beautiful dreams and he loved the ocean world. “You should see the circle of shining fish,” he told his mother.

  “Oh my,” was all she could say in return, creasing her embroidered handkerchief, wiping her eyes.

  Later, as a man, he visited the world he dreamed. He traveled there. A person could always think of the old man in any way they wanted, but usually they saw him in their mind’s eye as the old whaler who went underneath the water, white hair flying in the currents, old dark face even more wrinkled from the salt water, the man who was a medical oddity, a human curiosity, a visionary, a hunter and carver, and a medicine man who could cure rheumatism and dizzy spells.