The Signature of All Things (59 page)

Had he ever thought of her, even once, when he was here in Tahiti?

Perhaps he was attempting to send messages to her now, but the breach was too wide. Maybe the words grew soggy and indecipherable across the great gulf between death and earth—just like those sad, ruined letters that the Reverend Welles sometimes received from his wife in England.

“Who
were
you?” Alma asked Ambrose in the leaden night, looking across the silent, reflective bay. Her voice on the empty beach was so loud that it startled her. She listened for an answer until her ears ached, but she heard nothing. There was not so much as a tiny wave lapping the beach. The water might as well have been molten pewter, and the air, too.

“Where are you now, Ambrose?” she asked, more quietly this time.

Not a sound.

“Show me where I can find The Boy,” she requested, in a low whisper.

Ambrose did not answer.

Matavai Bay did not answer.

The sky did not answer.

She was blowing on cold embers; nothing was here.

Alma sat down and waited. She thought of the story the Reverend Welles had told her of Taroa, the original god of the Tahitians. Taroa, the creator. Taroa, born in a seashell. Taroa lay silently for countless ages as the only thing living in the universe. The world was so empty that when he called out across the darkness, there was not even an echo. He nearly died of loneliness. Out of that inestimable solitude and emptiness, Taroa brought forth our world.

Alma lay back on the sand and shut her eyes. It was more comfortable out here than on her mattress in her stuffy
fare
. She did not mind the crabs, who tottered and skittered busily around her. They, inside their shells, were the only things moving on the beach, the only things alive in the universe. She waited on that small sliver of earth between the two heavens until the sun rose and all the stars vanished from both the sky and the sea, but still nobody told her anything.

T
hen Christmas came, and with it the rainy season. The rain brought relief from the infernal heat, but it also brought snails of amazing size, and damp patches of mold that grew in the folds of Alma’s increasingly shabby
skirts. The black sand beach of Matavai Bay grew sodden as pudding. Drenching rainstorms kept Alma in her house all day, where she could scarcely hear her own thoughts over the thundering water on her roof. Nature increasingly took over her tiny living space. The lizard population in Alma’s ceiling tripled overnight—a near-biblical pestilence—and they left thick drops of excrement and of half-digested insects throughout the
fare
. The one shoe that Alma had left in the world sprouted mushrooms within its festering depths. She hung her bunches of bananas from the rafters, to keep wet and insistent rats from absconding with them.

Roger the dog showed up one night, as per his usual evening patrol, and then stayed for days; he simply did not have the heart to face down the rain. Alma wished he would take on the rats, but he did not seem to have the heart for that, either. Roger would still not allow Alma to feed him by hand without snapping at her, but he would now sometimes share her food if she put it on the floor for him and turned her back. Sometimes he permitted her to stroke his head while he dozed.

Storms came in irregularly timed onslaughts. One could hear the storms building from far across the sea—steady roaring gales from the southwest that grew louder and louder, like an oncoming train. If the storm promised to be unusually severe, sea urchins would crawl out of the bay, seeking higher, safer ground. Sometimes they took shelter in Alma’s house: another reason to watch where she stepped. Rain came like a spray of arrows. The river at the other end of the beach churned with mud, and the surface of the bay boiled and spat. As the storm grew heavier, Alma would watch as her world closed in on her. Fog and darkness would approach from the sea. First the horizon would disappear, then the island of Moorea in the distance would vanish, then the reef was gone, then the beach, and then she and Roger would be all alone in the mist. The world was now as small as Alma’s tiny and not particularly waterproof house. The wind blew sideways, the thunder bellowed frightfully, and the rain attacked with full force.

Then the rain would stop for a spell and the blistering sun would return—sudden, brilliant, stunning—though never long enough that Alma could properly dry out her sleeping pallet. Steam rose off the sand in billowing waves. Currents of humid wind swept down the mountainside. The air across the beach snapped and shimmied, like a bedsheet shaken out—as
though the beach itself were shaking off the violence that had just been visited upon it. Then a humid calm would prevail, for a few hours or a few days, until another storm rolled in.

These were days to miss a library and a vast, dry, warm mansion. Alma might have fallen into terrible despair during the rainy season in Tahiti, but for one delightful discovery: the children of Matavai Bay loved the rain. The Hiro contingent loved it most of all—and why wouldn’t they? For this was the season of mudslides and puddle-splashing and dangerous rides through the wild torrential currents of the now-swollen river. The five little boys turned into five otters, not merely undaunted by the wet, but delighted by it. All the indolence they had demonstrated during the hot and dry season of cravings was now washed away, replaced by vivid, sudden
life
. The Hiro contingent were like mosses, Alma realized; they might dry out and go limp in the heat, but they could be revived instantly by a good soaking. Resurrection engines themselves, were these extraordinary children! They had such purpose and vigor and ebullience as they sprang back to action in this newly soaked world that it caused Alma to think back to her own childhood. The rain and mud had never stopped her from exploring, either. This recollection raised a sharp and sudden question: So why was she cowering inside her house now?
She had never avoided inclement weather as a girl, so why avoid it now, as an adult? If there was no place to shelter on this island where a person could stay dry, then why not simply get wet? This question provoked Alma to another sudden question: Why had she not enlisted the help of the Hiro contingent in her search for The Boy? Who better to find a missing Tahitian youth than other Tahitian youth?

Upon these realizations, Alma ran out of her house and hailed down those five wild boys, who—at that moment—were throwing mud at each other with a tremendous sense of purpose. They came running over to Alma as one slippery, muddy, laughing mass. It amused them to see the white lady standing on their beach in the middle of a rainstorm in her soggy dress, getting drenched before their eyes. It was good entertainment, and it cost them nothing.

Alma drew the boys near and spoke to them in a mixture of Tahitian, English, and passionate hand gestures. Later, she would not remember quite how she managed to present the idea, but her central message had been this: ’
Tis the season for adventure, lads!
She asked them if they knew
the places in the center of the island where Sister Manu did not like people of the settlement to go. Did they know
all
of the forbidden places, where the cliff people dwelled, and where the most remote heathen villages could be found? Would they like to take Sister Whittaker there, on some grand adventures?

Would they? Why, of course they would! It was such a diverting notion that they started off that very day. In fact, they started off immediately, and Alma followed them without hesitation. Without shoes, without maps, without food, without—heaven forfend—
umbrellas
, the boys led Alma straight up into the hills beyond the mission settlement, far from the safe little coastal villages she had already explored on her own. Straight up they went, into the fog, into the rain clouds, into the jungle peaks that Alma had first seen from the deck of the
Elliot
, and which had appeared so fearsome and alien to her at the time. Up they went—and not only on this day, either, but every single day for the next month. Each day, they explored ever more remote trails and ever more wild destinations, often in the driving rain, and always with Alma Whittaker on their heels.

At first Alma worried she would not be able to keep up with them, but soon enough she realized two things: that her years of botanical collecting had rendered her exceptionally fit, and that these children were rather sweetly considerate of their guest’s limitations. They slowed down for Alma at particularly perilous spots, and did not ask her to leap across deep crevasses as they did, or scale wet cliffs by hand, as they could with easy proficiency. Sometimes the Hiro contingent got behind her on a particularly steep climb and pushed her up rather ignobly, with their hands on her broad bottom, but Alma didn’t mind: they were merely trying to help. They were generous with her. They cheered when she made ascents, and if night fell while they were still deep in the jungle, they held her hands as they guided her back toward the safety of the mission. On these dark walks, they taught her warrior chants in Tahitian—the songs that men sing, to summon courage in the face of danger.

The Tahitians were known across the South Seas as deft climbers and fearless hikers (Alma had heard of islanders who could march thirty miles a day through this inaccessible terrain without faltering), but Alma was not one to falter, either—not when she was on a hunt, and she felt strongly that this was the hunt of her life. This was her best chance to find The Boy. If he
was still anywhere on this island, these tireless children would track him down.

Alma’s increasingly long absences from the mission did not go unnoticed.

When sweet Sister Etini asked Alma at last, with a worried face, where she was spending her days, Alma said simply, “I am hunting for mosses, with the help of your five most able-bodied young naturalists!”

Nobody doubted her, for it was the perfect season for moss. Alma, indeed, spotted all manner of intriguing bryophytes on the stones and trees that they passed, but she did not pause to look closely. The mosses would always be there; she was looking for something more ephemeral, more urgent: a man. A man who knew secrets. To find him, she had to move in Human Time.

The boys, for their part, loved this unexpected game of leading the peculiar old lady all over Tahiti, to see all that was forbidden and to meet the most remote of peoples. They took Alma to abandoned temples and to sinister-looking caves, where human bones could still be glimpsed in the corners. There were sometimes living Tahitians haunting these grim locales, too, but The Boy was never among them. They took her to a small settlement on the banks of Lake Maeva, where the women still dressed in grass skirts, and where the men had faces covered with macabre tattoos, but The Boy was not there, either. The Boy was not in the company of the hunters they passed on these slippery trails, either, nor on the slopes of Mount Orohena, nor Mount Aorii, nor in the long volcanic tunnels. The Hiro contingent took her to an emerald ridge on the top of the world, so high that it seemed to bisect the very sky—for it was raining on one side of the ridge, but sunny on the other. Alma stood on this precarious peak with darkness to her left and brightness to her right, but even here—at the highest imaginable vantage point, at the collision of weather itself, at the intersection of the
pô
and the
ao
—The Boy was nowhere to be seen.

Because they were clever, the children eventually gleaned that Alma was looking for something, but it was Hiro—always the cleverest—who realized she was looking for some
body
.

“He not here?” Hiro asked Alma with concern, at the end of each day. Hiro had taken to speaking English, and fancied himself quite supreme at it.

Alma never confirmed she was looking for a person, but she never denied it, either.

“We find he tomorrow!” Hiro would swear every day, but January passed and February passed and still Alma did not find The Boy.

“We find he next sabbath!” Hiro promised—for “sabbath” was the local term for “a week.” But four more Sabbaths passed, and never did Alma find The Boy. Now it was April already. Hiro began to grow concerned and morose. He could think of nowhere new to take Alma on their wild jaunts around the island. This was no longer an amusing diversion; this had clearly become a serious campaign, and Hiro knew he was failing at it. The other members of the contingent, sensing Hiro’s heavy spirits, lost their joy as well. This was when Alma decided to unshoulder the five boys of their responsibilities. They were too young to be carrying the burden of
her
burden; she would not see them weighted with by worry and responsibility, just to chase down a phantom figure on her behalf.

Alma released the Hiro contingent from the game and never went hiking with them again. As thanks, she gave each of the five boys a piece of her precious microscope—which they themselves had returned to her
nearly
intact over the last several months—and she shook their hands. Speaking in Tahitian, she told them they were the greatest warriors who had ever lived. She thanked them for their courageous tour of the known world. She told them she had found all that she needed to find. Then she sent them off on their way, to recommence their previous career of constant, directionless play.

T
he rainy season ended. Alma had been in Tahiti for nearly a year. She cleared the moldering grass off the floor of her house, and brought in new grass once more. She restuffed her rotting mattress with dry straw. She watched the lizard population diminish as the days grew brighter and crisper. She made a new broom and swept the walls free of cobwebs. One morning, overcome by a need to refresh her sense of mission, she opened Ambrose’s valise to look yet again at the drawings of The Boy, only to find that—over the course of the rainy season—they had been utterly consumed by mold. She tried to separate the pages one from the other, but they dissolved in her hands into pasty green morsels. Some sort of moth had been at the drawings, too, and had made a meal of the crumbs. She could not salvage any of it. She could not see a trace of The Boy’s face anymore, nor the
beautiful lines made by Ambrose’s hand. The island had eaten the only remaining evidence of her inexplicable husband and his incomprehensible, chimeric muse.