The Signature of All Things (58 page)

“Christina was my joy and my reward,” said the Reverend Welles. “But
Tahiti is no place, my wife believed, for an English girl to be raised. There are so many polluting influences, you see. I disagree, but that is what Mrs. Welles thought. When Christina became a young woman, Mrs. Welles took her back to England. I have not seen them since. I will not see them again.”

This fate seemed not only lonely to Alma, but terribly unfair. No good Englishman, she thought, should be left here, all by himself in the middle of the South Seas, to face his old age in solitude. She thought of her father in his last years: What would he have done without Alma?

As though reading her face, the Reverend Welles said, “I long for my good wife and for Christina, but I have not been completely without the company of family. I consider Sister Manu and Sister Etini to be my sisters in more than name. At our mission school, too, we have been fortunate enough over the years to have raised up several brilliant and good-hearted students, whom I regard as my own children, and some of them have now become missionaries themselves, you see. They now minister to the outer islands, these native students of ours. There is Tamatoa Mare, who brings the gospel to the great island of Raiatea. There is Patii, who extends the Redeemer’s kingdom to the island of Huanhine. There is Paumoana, tireless in the Lord’s name in Bora-Bora. All of them are my sons, and all are much admired. There is such a thing in Tahiti called
taio
, you see, which is a kind of adoption, a means of making strangers into your kin. When you enter into
taio
with a native, you trade genealogy, you see, and you become a portion of each other’s lineage. Lineage is most important here. There are Tahitians who can recite their lineage back thirty generations—not unlike the begats of the Bible, you see. To be entered into that lineage is a noble honor. So I have my Tahitian sons with me, so to speak, who live amid these islands, and they are a comfort to this old man.”

“But they are
not
with you,” Alma could not help but say. She knew exactly how far away Bora-Bora was. “They are not here to help you, nor care for you should you need them.”

“You speak the truth, but it is a comfort merely to know they exist. You think my life quite sad, I fear. Do not be mistaken. I live where I am meant to live. I could never leave my mission, you see. My work here is not an errand, Sister Whittaker. My work here is not a line of employment, you see, from which a man may retire into a comfortable dotage. My work is to keep this little church alive for all my days, as a raft against the winds and sorrows of the world. Whosoever wishes to board my raft may do so. I do not
force anyone to come aboard, you see, but how can I abandon the raft? My good wife accuses me of being a better Christian than I am a missionary. Perhaps she is correct! I am not certain I have ever converted anyone. Yet this church is my task, Sister Whittaker, and thus I must stay.”

He was seventy-seven years old, Alma learned.

He had been at Matavai Bay longer than she had been alive.

Chapter Twenty-four

O
ctober arrived.

The island entered the season the Tahitians call
Hia
‘
ia—
the season of cravings, when breadfruit is difficult to find and the people sometimes go hungry. There was no hunger at Matavai Bay, thankfully. There was no abundance, to be sure, but neither did anyone starve. Fish and taro root took care of that.

Oh, taro root! Tedious, tasteless taro root! Pounded and mashed, boiled and slippery, baked over coals, rolled into damp little balls called
poi
, and used for everything from breakfast to communion to pig food. The monotony of taro root was sometimes interrupted by the addition of tiny bananas to the menu—sweet and wonderful bananas that could nearly be swallowed whole—but even these were now difficult to come by. Alma looked at the pigs longingly, but Sister Manu, it appeared, was saving them for another day, for a hungrier day. So there was no pork to be enjoyed, simply taro root at every meal, and sometimes, if one was lucky, a good-sized fish. Alma would have given anything to have a day without taro root—but a day without taro root meant a day without food. She began to understand why the Reverend Welles had given up on eating altogether.

The days were quiet, hot, and still. Everyone grew listless and lazy. Roger the dog dug a hole in Alma’s garden and slept there more or less all day long, tongue hanging out. Bald chickens scratched for food, gave up, and squatted
in the shade, discouraged. Even the Hiro contingent—those most active of little lads—dozed all afternoon in the shade, like old dogs. Sometimes they stirred themselves to lackadaisical employments. Hiro had got hold of an ax head, which he hung from a rope and banged on with a rock, as a gong. One of the Makeas beat on an old barrel hoop with a stone. It was a kind of music they were making, Alma supposed, but to her it sounded uninspired and weary. All of Tahiti was bored and tired.

In her father’s time, this place had been lit up by the torches of war and lust. The beautiful young Tahitian men and women had danced so obscenely and wildly around fires on this very beach that Henry Whittaker—young and unformed—had needed to turn his head away in alarm. Now it was all dullness. The missionaries, the French, and the whaling ships, with their sermons and bureaucracy and diseases, had driven the devil out of Tahiti. The mighty warriors had all died. Now there were just these lazy children napping in the shade, clanging on ax heads and barrel hoops as a barely sufficient means of diversion. What were the young to do with their wildness anymore?

Alma continued to search for The Boy, taking longer and longer walks, alone, with Roger the dog, or with the unnamed skinny pony. She explored the little villages and settlements around the shoreline of the island in both directions from Matavai Bay. She saw all sorts of men and boys. She saw some handsome youths, yes, with the noble forms that the early European visitors had so admired, but she also saw young men with severe elephantiasis of the legs, and boys with scrofula in their eyes from the venereal diseases of their mothers. She saw children bent and twisted with tuberculosis of the spine. She saw youngsters who ought to have been comely, but were marked by smallpox and measles. She found nearly empty villages, vacated over the years by illness and death. She saw mission settlements considerably more strict than Matavai Bay. She sometimes even attended church services at these other missions, where nobody chanted in the Tahitian language; instead, the people sang anodyne Presbyterian hymns in heavy accents. She did not see The Boy in any of these congregations. She passed tired laborers, lost rovers, quiet fishermen. She saw one quite old man who sat in the baking sun, playing the Tahitian flute in the traditional way, by blowing into it with one nostril—a sound so melancholy that it caused Alma’s lungs to ache with nostalgia for her own home. But still, she never saw The Boy.

Her searches were fruitless, her census came up empty every day, but she was always glad to return to Matavai Bay and the routines of the mission. She was always grateful when the Reverend Welles invited her to join him in the coral gardens. Alma realized that his coral gardens were something akin to her own moss beds back at White Acre—something rich and slow-growing that could be studied for years on end, as a means of passing the decades without collapsing into loneliness. She much enjoyed the conversations on their excursions to the reef. He had asked Sister Manu to weave for Alma a pair of reef sandals just like his own, of thickly knotted pandanus fronds, so she could walk along the sharp coral without cutting her feet. He showed Alma the circus show of sponges, anemones, and corals—all the absorbing beauty of the shallow, clear tropical waters. He taught her the names of the colorful fish, and told her stories about Tahiti. He never once asked her questions about her own life. This brought her relief; she did not have to lie to him.

Alma also grew fond of the little church at Matavai Bay. The structure was decidedly absent of riches or glory (Alma saw far finer churches elsewhere across the island), but she always enjoyed Sister Manu’s short, emphatic, inventive sermons. She learned from the Reverend Welles that—to the Tahitian mind—there were elements of familiarity about the story of Jesus, and these strands of familiarity had helped the first missionaries introduce Christ to the natives. In Tahiti, the people believed that the world was divided into the
pô
and the
ao
, the darkness and the light. Their great lord Taroa, the creator, was born in the
pô—
born at night, born into darkness. The missionaries, once they learned of this mythology, explained to the Tahitians that Jesus Christ, too, had been born in the
pô—
born into the night, sprung from the darkness and suffering. This had captured the attention of the Tahitians. It was a dangerous and mighty destiny to be born at night. The
pô
was the world of the dead, the incomprehensible and the frightful. The
pô
was fetid and decayed and terrifying. Our Lord, taught the Englishmen, came to lead mankind out of the
pô
and into the light.

This all made a certain amount of sense to the Tahitians. At the very least, it caused them to admire Christ, since the boundary between the
pô
and the
ao
was dangerous territory, and only a notably brave soul would cross from one world to the other. The
pô
and the
ao
were akin to heaven and hell, the Reverend Welles explained to Alma, but there was more
intercourse between them, and in the places where they mixed, things became demented. The Tahitians had never stopped fearing the
pô.

“When they think I am not looking,” he said, “they still make offerings to those gods who live in the
pô
. They make these offerings, you see, not because they honor or love those gods of darkness, but to bribe them into staying in the world of ghosts, to keep them far away from the world of the light. The
pô
is a most difficult notion to defeat, you see. The
pô
does not cease to exist in the mind of the Tahitian, simply because daytime has arrived.”

“Does Sister Manu believe in the
pô
?” Alma asked.

“Absolutely not,” said the Reverend Welles, imperturbable as always. “She is a perfect Christian, as you know. But she respects the
pô
, you see.”

“Does she believe in ghosts, then?” Alma pushed on.

“Certainly not,” said the Reverend Welles mildly. “That would be unchristian of her. But she does not
like
ghosts, either, and she does not want them coming around the settlement, so sometimes she has no choice but to make them offerings, you see, to keep them away.”

“So she
does
believe in ghosts,” said Alma.

“Of course she doesn’t,” corrected the Reverend Welles. “She simply manages them, you see. You will find that there are certain parts of this island, too, that Sister Manu does not approve of anyone in our settlement visiting. In the highest and most inaccessible places of Tahiti, you see, it is said that a person can walk into a bank of fog and dissolve forever, straight back into the
pô
.”

“But does Sister Manu truly believe that could happen?” Alma asked. “That a person could dissolve?”

“Not at all,” said the Reverend Welles cheerfully. “But she disapproves of it most heartily.”

Alma wondered: Had The Boy simply vanished away into the
pô
?

Had Ambrose?

A
lma heard nothing from the outside world. No letters came to her in Tahiti, although she frequently wrote home to Prudence and Hanneke, and sometimes even to George Hawkes. She diligently sent her letters away on whaling ships, knowing that the likelihood of their ever reaching
Philadelphia was slim. She had learned that sometimes the Reverend Welles did not hear from his wife and daughter in Cornwall for two years at a time. Sometimes, when letters did arrive, they were waterlogged and unreadable after the long voyage at sea. This felt more tragic to Alma than never hearing from one’s family at all, but her friend accepted it as he accepted all vexations: with calm repose.

Alma was lonely, and the heat was insufferable—no cooler at night than during the day. Alma’s little house became an airless oven. She awoke one night with a man’s voice whispering straight into her ear, “
Listen!
” But when she sat up, no one was in the room—none of the Hiro contingent, and not Roger the dog, either. There was not even a trace of wind. She stepped outside, her heart beating strongly. Nobody was there. She saw that Matavai Bay had become, in the hushed and balmy night, as smooth as a mirror. The entire canopy of stars above her was reflected perfectly in the water, as though there were two heavens now: one above, one below. The silence and purity of this was formidable. The beach felt heavy with presences.

Had Ambrose ever seen such a thing while he was here? Two heavens, in one night? Had he ever felt this dread and wonderment, this sense of both loneliness and presence? Was he the one who had just awoken her, with that voice in her ear? She tried to recall if it had sounded like Ambrose’s voice, but she could not say for sure. Would she even know Ambrose’s voice anymore, if she heard it?

It would have been precisely like Ambrose, though, to wake her up and encourage her to
listen
. Certainly, yes. If ever a dead man would try to speak to the living, it would be Ambrose Pike—he, with all his lofty fancies of the metaphysical and the miraculous. He had even halfway convinced Alma herself of miracles, and she was not susceptible to such beliefs. Had they not seemed like sorcerers, that night in the binding closet—speaking to each other without words, speaking through the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands? He had wanted to sleep beside her, he’d said, so he could listen to her thoughts. She had wanted to sleep beside him so that she could fornicate at last, put a man’s member inside her mouth—but he had merely wanted to listen to her thoughts. Why could she not have allowed him to simply listen? Why could he not have allowed her to reach for him?