Landfalls (43 page)

“What happened to her?”

“My mother? Well…” Now that she had begun, it was easier to continue. She told Vo what she had learned from all the whispered conversations around her—whispers she was not supposed to listen to but was nevertheless meant to hear. That her mother had been taken away by raiders from another island. That later she was rescued or returned, or maybe had managed to escape. That she came back pregnant, and that her husband, the elder, had rejected her and the baby. In despair, she had taken the infant in her arms and walked into the ocean. Oriela had washed ashore alive, but her mother was never seen again.

“But other people tell it differently,” Oriela said. She had simply washed ashore one day, her origins unknown, or no, she had been stolen from the enemy in retaliation for the taking of the elder's wife. And yet others whispered that she
was
the head elder's child—but by his sister, not his wife.

Vo listened in silence, then said nothing for a long time, so long that Oriela wondered if he had understood. Perhaps she had spoken too quickly or used words he did not know. His fingers traced lines in her back—along her shoulder blades, and then each notch in her backbone. “Who raised you?” he said.

“She was called Talimba. She lost her own baby, so she took me.” That answer would have sufficed with her own people, but Vo would want to know more, so she added: “She used to dream all the time about her dead baby telling her things. People came from all over the island to tell her their dreams, and she would help them. I got the fishing spirit from her.”

“Is she dead?”

“Yes. It was before you came.”

He sighed, then said, “When they first brought you to me, I thought you were the daughter of a chief.” He sounded angry, as if he had discovered her in a lie.

Oriela opened her mouth, then closed it, not sure whether to laugh or weep at his pride and disappointment. She remembered his delight with her in those early days, a delight she had attributed to his being so long without female company, and to his need for comfort after being left behind. He had been hungry for her then—for her body, for the food she prepared, for the words she taught him. It had never occurred to her that he had also thought himself honored by the union. A helpless man with no skin color, washed ashore in a storm, then left behind by his longer-named friends, given to the daughter of a chief? Did all the men from his land think so much of themselves? What trouble there must be among them!

“But later,” Vo continued, “I saw how people were around you, and I knew something was wrong—you were sick, or crazy. Or something about your family.” His finger stopped at a point in her midback, as if he had discovered the source of her malady. “That's why they gave you to me. Because you belong to no one. Like me. And no one else would have you.” He lifted his hand away, and she felt a chill spread from the spot.

The baby had fallen asleep again, so Oriela pried her off. Her chest was damp from its contact with the baby's face, and she rolled onto her back to cool off. Staring up, she felt like she was falling, the barely visible roof above her receding. She knew she could right herself by turning toward Vo and offering herself to him. They would then pass from sadness to pleasure to sleep. Instead, she said, “There's a house full of skulls behind the village. Some of your people are there.” So many unsayable things had been said already. Why not that?

Vo sat up. “What?”

“A skull house.” Oriela could feel the ceiling swim back into place. The scrabbling of a rat on the roof sounded just the right distance away.

“We buried all the bodies,” Vo said.

“The bodies you found.”

“I don't understand.”

She sat up too and faced him, although it was utterly dark now and they could not make out each other's expressions. “The big storm was terrible for us too,” she said. “It took trees down all over the island, every village lost houses, people were swept out to sea. When your people started coming ashore, wet and raving and so white, everyone was terrified. We thought you had brought the storm.”

Silence. Then Vo said, “You killed them.”

“Our men did, yes.”

“How many did you kill?”

“I don't know. Ten. Sixteen. Maybe more.”

“Why didn't you kill all of us?”

Why did he keep saying
you
? It made her want to scream. “The men who drowned began washing ashore,” she said, “and then the things from your
vaso
, and we saw that you were just men suffering from the storm, like us. The head elder made them stop.”

“But I've been all over the island. I've never seen this—what did you call it?—
bone
house?”

“Skull house. We've kept you from it.”

He went still; she could not even hear him breathe. But she could sense him remembering all the times he had walked through the steep wooded interior of the island, and how someone, often Alu, always happened by to distract him with some marvelous thing—a flycatcher's nest, a new spear, a waterfall great for diving. He lay back down.

“I wonder who you killed.”

She pulled at her hair, hard, to keep from shouting,
I didn't kill anyone!
“Who were your best swimmers?” she said.

From the sharp intake of breath next to her, she could tell that Vo had thought of someone, or maybe several people—men he had not buried, men whose bodies he had assumed till then had been lost in the ocean.

She felt suddenly heavy, with a deep-down tiredness that pressed behind her eyes and drained through her body, demanding and refusing sleep at the same time. She had been awake this far into the night only twice before. Once as a girl she had been sick all night after eating a spoiled fish. The other time was the long night of birth pangs with the baby. Terrible nights, both of them, but they had ended, and light and life had returned in the morning. And so they would again. It was not sleep that made morning come. Morning arrived each day, guided by its own kind spirits.

When she opened her eyes, however, she knew right away she was wrong—wrong about not falling asleep and wrong that morning would restore the ordinary. She knew it from the relative coolness of one less body in the hut and from the extra layer of quiet beside her. She sat up and looked around. The gray light before dawn was just seeping into the house, but she could see that the heavy ax that hung from the opposite wall was gone. Fear spilled over her. Had he taken it and killed the men in the village? But no—there would have been shouts, an uproar that would have wakened her. The skull house—perhaps he had gone in search of it. What would he do if he found it? She strained to hear the angry sound of splintering wood, even though she knew the dense, green distance between the skull house and the village would swallow up any noise.

She got to her feet. One of her baskets was missing, along with two water gourds, and a few of the coconuts she had lined up along one wall. Then she knew. He must have taken one of the canoes. She stood before the altar, regarding it with both relief and dismay. He had taken neither his own stick spirit nor her hooked fishing spirit, which meant he was out in the ocean with no protection at all. Not that either spirit had impressed her lately. Maybe they were trapped in combat with each other and had no power to spare for her or for Vo. She plucked Vo's feeble sticks from the wall, snapped them in one hand, and dropped the pieces to the floor. She should have done it long ago.

She moved to the ledge where Vo stored his old tools, and suddenly she understood: here were the spirits Vo truly revered. He had taken everything except for a small, round object he said was broken. It housed a shiny little needle which spun over a bottom painted with strange markings. The needle was supposed to point in the same direction all the time, “so you can tell where you're going,” Vo had said. Oriela had twirled around with it once, watching the needle spin in her hand. But no matter how she held it or where she stood, it always pointed back at her.

“See, it's no good,” Vo had said, laughing.

“It likes me,” Oriela had said.

Had he left it behind to please her? Or was it to make sure he did not rely on a spirit that would steer him back to her?

Oriela returned to the mat and leaned over her sleeping child. The baby's lips were moist and slightly parted, like a hibiscus about to open. Oriela hated to think of her waking up fatherless and abandoned, and now she sensed the truth of her own mother's story. She knew how easy it would be to walk into the ocean with the baby. Gently she scooped up the child, noticing as she did so that a fistful of ringlets had been clumsily cut from one side of her head. Oriela rubbed her hand over the cut hair, feeling the blunt ends between her fingers. What did it mean? Was it a mark of shame, of rejection? Or had Vo loved the child and wanted something to remember her by? Oh, she had not known him at all, she thought with bitterness. Not even after all the secrets traded during the night. Weeping, she tied the still sleeping baby to her back, then left the hut and padded silently toward the beach.

And there he was, just offshore, struggling against the wind and tide, unable to get past the reef. Oriela stared in amazement, forgetting for a moment her own misery. If he had taken one of the smaller fishing canoes, he would have made it, might already have been beyond her sight. But he had taken the head elder's ceremonial canoe, the least seaworthy in the village and nearly impossible to manage without other rowers. Why? Had he not wanted to trouble anyone by taking a working canoe? Or was he making a claim?
I know now you may be my father-in-law, so you won't mind if I take this.
Or,
I know you married me to the village outcast, so now I'll have your canoe.
Or maybe it was to make sure everyone knew:
I would rather die than stay with people who killed my friends.
But now, fighting uselessly against the water and the wind, he only looked foolish. Oriela did not know whether she felt more relieved or embarrassed as she stood on the beach and waited for him to notice her. When he finally did, his shoulders fell in surrender. Bringing up the oars, he allowed the current and the morning breeze to carry him ashore.

As the first rays of sunlight washed over them, Vo and Oriela dragged the ceremonial canoe to its accustomed place on the beach, then carried everything back to the house—the ax, the gourds and coconuts, the navigational instruments. They worked in silence, shyly, not looking at each other, as if they had just met. Luckily, no one from the village had seen them, or so it appeared, as they saw and heard no one. The baby did not wake till they had put everything away. Sitting in the doorway of their house, Oriela nursed the child and said, “I want to call her Iri.”

“What?” Vo raised his head from where he lay facedown on the mat.

“Our child. I want to call her Iri.”

“Iri,” Vo repeated. “That's pretty.”

“You have to tell everyone.”

Vo's eyes widened in alarm. “Tell everyone
what
?”

“That her name is Iri.”

His tired, lined face relaxed, and he lay his head back down, then suddenly laughed. “Yes, of course. I'll tell everyone.” Then, not looking at her: “Will you take me to the skull house?”

Oriela said nothing and Vo did not repeat the question. Before long, she could hear that he had fallen asleep. When the child finished nursing, Oriela retied her to her back, then shook Vo by the shoulder. “Come,” she said when he opened his eyes. He looked confused, but stretched himself noisily and followed her out. She led him inland, behind their house, behind the village, uphill along a familiar path, to a dense wall of vines he had walked past hundreds of times. She pointed to it. “Only a priest or elder can go,” she said, then walked away, her footfalls swallowed up by the forest.

What looked like a wall was really just a thick curtain and parted easily at his touch, revealing a path beyond. Stepping through, he felt like the prince in the story of Sleeping Beauty. But no castle of enchanted sleepers awaited at the end—just a humble leaf-and-wood structure smaller than the hut he shared with Oriela. He ducked into its entrance and stood, listening to the dense silence while his eyes adjusted to the darkness. And then he saw them—shelf upon shelf of skulls, arranged in tidy rows from floor to ceiling, some forty or fifty altogether, joined in the unbreakable spell of death.

Everything about the place surprised him—its nearness to the village; the care with which the structure was maintained; the deliberation with which each skull, some decorated with seashell rings, had been placed within; the ease with which he was able to identify the fourteen newest skulls, nestled on their own shelf, as belonging to his shipmates. Most were cracked or broken, evidence of the violent ends they had met. He wondered for one pulse-racing moment if honor required him to avenge their deaths, even if it meant, as it surely would, that he too would die. He recoiled at the thought of what this would mean for Oriela, for Iri, for his friends on the island, like Alu. Then he noticed that many of the other skulls in the house were marked by similar injuries, and he began to understand that this was where the villagers placed those who had fallen in battle, friends and enemies alike.

He did not tell Oriela what he had seen, and she did not ask. He asked no more about Oriela's parentage. He never mentioned the broken cross, which he never replaced. Oriela never asked about Iri's hair. He did announce his daughter's name, and the villagers stopped calling her Half-Child. He would continue to hope for rescue, to long for a return to France, but neither he nor Oriela spoke again of the English frigate that had sailed past the island. No other ship returned during their lifetime.

Their Paeu neighbors knew everything, of course. They knew Vo had tried to make off with the head elder's canoe, a story that became funnier with each retelling. They knew Vo had learned about the skull house. At first they feared he might try to avenge his people, but after a few restless nights, the men sleeping with knives under their mats, the fear spent itself, and then it seemed laughable to think that the pale, skinny man who had agreed to take Oriela might act against them. For a few days, little work got done as everyone ignored their weaving and fish traps and taro patches to watch the ocean for another ship. But before long, they resumed their more pressing occupations and amusements. One of the boys thought it would be funny to shout
“Vaso!”
and watch everyone come running, but after the third time he did it, his older sister pinched him very hard, and he never did it again.