People of the Whale Read online

  His knowledge of the ocean was so great that scientists came to question him. Scientists and anthropologists then wrote papers about what he told them. Doctors from as far away as Russia came to find out how he held his breath and stayed beneath water for as long as he did with no ill effects, how he could remain in a hibernating state without breathing. “He’s like those men in India who do yoga,” said one of them, thinking if they could learn it what a weapon it would make.

  Once Witka remained for part of the time with an octopus. It was a larger one, a fifteen-footer all stretched out, Witka caressing the tentacles. Of course, he could have exaggerated. Who would ever know? The octopus, who had the gift of feeling its way into small places, searched out his pockets and took several coins. It then worked the wedding ring off his hand. That was how they knew what the octopus loved. Witka told them all about it, laughing, his missing tooth showing when he laughed. His left hand he held up for display, naked of the ring. “And not a single tentacle print did it leave!” he said.

  All this was in the days when the women would sing the whales toward them. Witka’s wife, too, was a chosen one. That’s how they came to be matched. She was one of the whale-singers. As for whaling in those days, nothing except the women who sang the whales toward them was more serious than Witka’s knowledge of the sea. When he walked into the cold depths of the ocean, or slipped so carefully out of the canoe, he began in earnest a hunt for the whale. When Witka went into the ocean, everyone and everything on land was still. The town stopped living. No one labored. No one bought or sold. No one laughed or kissed. It was the unspoken rule. All they did was wait, the women singing, eerily, at ocean’s edge. They were solemn and spoke softly and they considered this the great act of a man who sacrificed for them. All they did was think of him out there in the sea and of the whales that would approach. For them. The people of the water. People of the whale.

  When he entered the water, his wife, by spiritual rule, went underground. Even when she was very old and stooped, she dug the hole herself. With a small shovel and with her own thin, wrinkled hands. This was the way it was always done. She dug a hole, like a bear den, deep inside the giant roots of a tree. She covered herself with skins and she stayed under the earth, eyes closed, visions in her head of what her husband was seeing inside the water. She was beneath ground; he was beneath water. Maybe she breathed for him. People wondered if they were that connected because it was known that in the cold and dark they were as one.

  With his mind and heart, Grandfather Witka told Mary, her catholic name, “My hands are swollen and cold,” and about a flotilla of plankton he’d just passed through. He said, “It’s like a snowstorm,” and as he talked she saw it, too, as far away as she was. She asked the water to have mercy on the old man she’d known as a child when he climbed trees, laughed, practiced holding his breath, and hunted his first seal. “Look,” he’d said, his first gift to her, smiling, a tooth missing. “It’s for you. I want to marry you someday.”

  She smiled. “Only a seal? I’m worth more than that.” She laughed and walked away, looking back at him once or twice over her shoulder.

  Mary sang to the whales, onio way no, loving them enough that one of them might listen and offer itself to her people. Entombed with the smell of cedar, curled like an infant newly born, even though her hair was gray now, her face bony, she was suspended and stiff. And then together, when he saw a whale, the two of them pleaded and spoke. Look how we are suffering. Take pity on us. Our people are small. We are hungry.

  It was said the whale listened mostly to the woman because who could ignore her pleading, singing, beautiful voice?

  The last time Witka entered the sea he did not return. Worse, a storm arrived. They all feared that this time, at his age, his heart failed and he would not come back to the air world where they lived. His daughter, the mother of Thomas, was little more than a child. She didn’t know where her mother had buried herself in the trees. Out of grief, she pounded the gray sand beach with her fists. She was such a thin girl, too. She stood by the black rocks in her nightgown looking out into the dark water, watching in vain. She held hands with one of Witka’s girlfriends and together they cried and hugged each other and grieved for the lost old man.

  Then, when all had given up and some turned toward home, someone yelled, “Look,” and he came out of the dark underwater cave where he had anchored himself and rolled out of the green swells of the waves onto the sand, coughing. When he surfaced, the water rolling off his head and face, he took a great breath. He dragged himself up, skinny with age, wrinkled, and walked out from the sea with kelp still on him, looking anything but dignified. A fish caught in the kelp escaped his hair and dropped back down to the tide. He walked like a stick, stiff from the cold, and his face was nearly blue. He walked straight over to his daughter and said, “Girl, do you want to scare the whales away, hitting the ground so hard? I heard it all the way out there.” She ran off, ashamed, while he laughed. Everyone waited for his pronouncement. This time he said, with smiling eyes, “Yes, tomorrow. It is the right time for us to bring a whale back home,” as he looked with great joy at the green land and sunlight and his wife walking—no, floating—toward him, earth and twigs still clinging to her hands and clothes and hair.

  His brother and his best friend called the other men and they went to prepare the wooden canoes. They brought the harpoon, the floats, drinking water, for they might be gone four days or more. When they hunted, the women would be quiet the whole time the men were out. Everyone had to be pure in heart and mind. By then the whale would be coming gladly toward the village.

  “Oh brother, sister whale,” he sang. “Grandmother whale, Grandfather whale. If you come here to land we have beautiful leaves and trees. We have warm places. We have babies to feed and we’ll let your eyes gaze upon them. We will let your soul become a child again. We will pray it back into a body. It will enter our bodies. You will be part human. We’ll be part whale. Within our bodies, you will dance in warm rooms, create light, make love. We will be strong in thought for you. We will welcome you. We will treat you well. Then one day I will join you.” His wife sang with him.

  When Witka truly died, his wife, best girlfriend, and daughter held on to his body longer than they should. They couldn’t be sure he was dead just because he wasn’t breathing.

  Those were the grandparents of Thomas Witka Just. They were the grandparents and mother, on one side, of Thomas, the man who had been missing in war, the man who now lived in Witka’s gray hut on the craggy rocks. Thomas, the man who’d won the Purple Hearts and nearly the last Medal of Honor and other shining tokens of actions that should have made him feel esteemed.

  When Thomas was a boy, he, like his grandfather, always watched the water. As if keeping with the old traditions they’d all heard about, he and his friends, Dimitri III, Dwight, jealous of the abilities of Thomas, and the others would see how long they could hold their breath underwater. “It isn’t funny,” Thomas’s mother said when she thought, more than once, that he had drowned and she pulled him up to air by the back of his shirt. The last time, the shirt, an old Arrow, ripped off and Thomas nearly drowned, laughing.

  Custer died in an Arrow shirt. That was their joke.

  Later, as his grandfather had gone under the ocean, his grandmother under the land, Thomas had taken to the sky, a most unnatural thing for a human. On his way to war, the first plane crashed and he was the sole survivor. Before he could even protest or tell the story of what he’d seen, they put him on another plane. After that, he believed he was saved for a reason.

  But now he hopes he has an appointment with death and all he wants to do is wait for it. He has turned his back on the sea.

  It’s a secret to the rest of the world where Thomas lives, as he wants it to be. If it were known, people would come searching. They would find him. He is a war hero missing for over five years after the war was declared over, until he was found by the army, then, after a stop in Hawaii, he was l
ost again in San Francisco, named for Saint Francis. Now he is missing from himself.

  If you knew about him, you would want to go talk to him and tell him it’s not his fault and you’d tell him to live, or if he is dying, or wanting to die, he should at least do it without closing the doors of the world. But your words would tire you out. Even more, they might convince him out of spite or frustration to go into the water and never come back, or to leap off the high rock where he sits, and throw himself to earth from one side of the rock like when he was ten and made wings and jumped off this very rock cliff. For one moment the air took hold of his sewn wings and he flew for just that moment before he landed, scratched and bruised on the ocean sand. What a moment, that second in air.

  Now you look at him and think he never had a boyhood or wings.

  Now at night he never lights his grandfather Witka’s kerosene lamp. He doesn’t even have a wick for it any longer. Just as it is for him, what ignites and maintains the fire is missing. He doesn’t want light and some people hear voices from the place at night so they stay away.

  Thomas wishes that, like the octopus that came to land when he was born, he could place himself inside something small and pull the last stone over the opening.

  During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came before him. Witka’s grandson, his dark hair unwashed, his face still one of handsome angles, sits in the dark of the old house like an octopus in a dark corner, is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can’t escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard. And Thomas harbors too many secrets.

  Death would be beautiful for him, but he’s destined, miserably, to live. He owes a debt to life. It’s as simple as accounting, as hard math. He owes something. Maybe he will understand what it is now in the dark at the place where the old man Witka once watched for whales. The sea is beautiful, but he looks at it not at all, not even for whales. Soon his clothes grow too large for him. Inside the sleeves and collars and legs are memories inside the body that can’t be forgotten.

  Like the octopus from 1947, the one that could have gone into a basket to hide, the one that portended good things for this child, Thomas is contained in small things, the gray house, cups and cans, packs of cigarettes.

  DEATHLESS

  Here is what happened, how the man was lost. Here is how he lived through death, how he came to live on the dark rock and to pass memories through his heart.

  First there was the war and it was in Vietnam and few of our people had ever heard of that small country before. They knew little of the war except small things on the news. This is a small reserve, village, or town, as some prefer to call it, one with old houses staggered here and there on the flats and on hillsides or near the river. Nothing in Dark River is given to straight lines or planning. The roads curve up one hill and down another. The roofs are of faded blue material on some of the small wooden houses, the blue that was once brighter than sky or water. Other homes are covered with red, also pale so that the colors look like those of dusk and dawn. The houses, sitting here and there, hold people who have grown together, all with the same histories like one tree with the same roots and fallen leaves. They have ancestors in common, most of them. Even the dogs running after food together or sleeping in the winding roads look like they descended from the same Adam and Eve of dogs.

  Then there was Ruth, the woman Thomas Witka Just had married in a tribal ceremony on the beach. What a wedding! All their friends were there. It was even said the fish attended, making the water shine with their silver leaps and splashes.

  Ruth and Thomas had known each other all their lives and it was inevitable, all thought, that they would marry. As a woman, Ruth inherited a well-boned face, the kind that is beautiful photographed but looks sharp in person, like she was carved by the winds that blow there. As an infant, Ruth was born with gill slits. It had happened before, children being born with gills, but her mother, Aurora, said, “It’s an omen. I don’t know what, but I don’t like it. She’s bound for water, this one. Like her father.” She was afraid her daughter might die. In or out of water, at first it seemed she wouldn’t live either way. The midwife had to keep the baby girl in a zinc tub filled with water so she wouldn’t drown in air before they took her to a doctor in town. The gills were right in front of her ears. The doctors were baffled and it took many weeks to sew the gills together and keep Ruth Small breathing through her lungs. Later it seemed she heard things others didn’t. She heard through water, schools of fish and the whales before they surfaced.

  Ruth Small, granddaughter of Akita-si, Witka’s friend and the other beneath-the-water man, was anything but small. Large in spirit, strong in hand, big in heart, she was a tall girl, taller than Thomas until he caught up and finally outgrew the leggy young woman, and then one night kissed her and their love was sealed, lip to lip.

  The night of the wedding there was a full moon and Ruth’s dress, painstakingly made by her mother, had shells and abalone buttons and other things that shine sewn on it. It looked like the reflections of moonlight on the ocean itself. Ruth wrapped herself with a shawl that was also shining. She looked as if she were a spirit that could walk the ocean pathway made by the moon on water, like the woman in one of their stories. In this story, the woman and moon together created the cycles of growing plants, the movement of tides, and the falling rain.

  That night, barefoot, Ruth was not only shining with her dress of shell and bead and white ribbon, but she was glowing from inside. The happiness of the two, who were always meant to be together, was visible to all, especially to Ruth’s father, who married them with words in their own language. All noted how much Ruth and her father resembled one another, their bony good looks, their golden skin tanned from sun, their long fingers. They even fished together, and it was hard work. Their muscled arms showed it. All day they fished and their long fingers and hands had calluses. They would have fished into the night except for the collision they once had with a fisherman named Vince Only. At the wedding, Vince, always a fisherman, watched the sea.

  “What a smart man you are,” someone said to Thomas after the wedding. Thomas smiled at his new wife. “I know it.”

  Linda, Ruth’s friend, her hair curled for the first time, said, “You two have always been married anyway.”

  It did seem that way. Ruth and Thomas were, even as infants, two people who had grown together, who were meant for one another, who sat together as infants in their cradleboards watching the adults fishing, gazing at the world around them, and at each other, talking in their own language. Ruth’s stitches had been removed and she could breathe. Yet she did, even then, long for the water at times. Together they had watched his father carve masks for the dances, frightening ones, raven masks, ones that made the children laugh. At night the older people danced, sang, and played old gambling games for stones while the babies watched, the ocean shining in moonlight. They saw all this from the time they were children and they saw one another as if they were one person sharing the same world, the same thoughts.

  After the marriage, they moved into a small place by the river and painted it green from top to bottom because it had been the only paint available. They called it “Fruit Box imported from California.” It was where they began their life as a married couple. It was over by the Salmon River. Naked they lay together in the breeze from the windows. Outside was what had once been a fence made of willows, but the posts miraculously took on life and now, in spite of being cut and buried, they bloomed and leafed out, light green, held by wire that Ruth, with her long black hair, set about clipping, calling out, “The liberation of the trees!”
/>   She painted on each end of the house, CALIFORNIA ORANGES.

  Thomas adored her. They were people of scant resources. Ruth helped her father fish. She could hear where the fish traveled beneath water so they had a more or less successful business. Her hands were hardened from the ropes and wires. Thomas worked beneath cars, adding parts, tightening screws, fixing tires. His nails were black. And she was tired. Her father had grown old. That, and he was called on any time of day or night to help people with their ailments. Her mother went with him but only to tell him if the man on the bed should have his leg removed because of diabetes or if it was something that Indian medicine could cure.

  Not far from them was the Shaker church many belonged to, but not Thomas and Ruth who belonged to the age of Aquarius, as they laughingly put it when making love.

  Sometimes at night they swam naked in the sea, plankton on their bodies lighting them when they surfaced. Thomas was a weak swimmer, but like his grandfather he could hold his breath for long times.

  The young couple had no everyday routine except for work and that varied. Sometimes no one brought in a car. At times there were no fish. Even old Vince with his whiskers didn’t go out, unless he went to the deep sea.

  Still, the war finally came to the village. It was on a day Ruth was wearing sea-blue. For some reason, they would both remember that. She looked like a mirage to Thomas.

  “What?” she was surprised. “You have joined the army? You are going to boot camp and we’ve barely been married? Don’t you love me?” she’d asked him when he had enlisted. “Why? We’re just starting together!”

  He loved her. He didn’t know why he enlisted. “We just all did it,” was his only reason. “Together,” he said. They’d been drinking, “the boys,” as she called them. They believed in America. They did. They were patriotic. “I’m not just an Indian. I’m an American, too.”