The People in the Trees (22 page)

“Let’s begin,” said Tallent, and took a breath and turned to Mua, who tipped his head attentively, ready for what might follow. And so I raised my pen.

“My family was not like the other families,” said Mua. “Other families here on Ivu’ivu, they are born on Ivu’ivu and they die here, and it is the same with their parents and grandparents and everyone in their family. Ivu’ivu is their world, and there is nothing else.

“But my father was not from Ivu’ivu. He was from U’ivu, and there his family were planters. They planted makava trees—do
you know what those are? They are like manamas, but the fruit is smaller and pinker and the flesh is sweeter. But they don’t have hunonos, so people here don’t care for them as much.

“One day, a day in the year the great king died, my father’s mother grew very sick. She groaned and tossed from side to side. The pain seemed to come from her stomach, which was large and hard. For a day and a night she thrashed and screamed, and my father—he had twelve o’anas then—didn’t know what to do. His father was away in the makava grove, where he spent every lili’aka harvesting the crops. The grove was not too far—my father could have reached it in a day if he hurried—but it would mean leaving behind his five younger brothers and sisters, and his mother, through her moans, had made him promise to watch over them. So what could he do? Nothing. He had to stay and watch his mother flop on her mat like a suffocating fish.

“On the second night, my father’s mother’s screams grew louder, and the neighbors who had come to hold her hand and slap her cheeks, calling her name so that she would come back to herself and rid herself of whatever was inside her, decided they had to have someone perform ka’aka’a. This was a very old practice that involved cutting away the flesh of whatever ailed you and burying it. My father’s father’s father was a ka’aka’a practitioner, and when I was a child, my father would tell me how he watched him once crack a woman’s skull like a coconut with a blunt piece of wood held to one side of the woman’s head, which he struck with a rock repeatedly. The woman’s insides oozed out, and then my father’s father’s father stitched her back up with tava thread, and after that she had no more pains in her head ever again.

“At that time in my father’s village there was only one remaining ka’aka’a practitioner. There had once been many, but then the ho’oalas arrived and there were fewer. The ka’aka’a practitioner came over and chanted to my father’s mother, and the neighbor women held her down as she bucked and shouted. My father and his sisters and brothers were made to wait outside their hut, but there was a small window, and because my father was the tallest, he was just able to peer over the edge and watch as the ka’aka’a man took out a long stick, maybe from my father’s father’s makava grove, where he was harvesting crops because it was lili’aka, and which he had
carved into a sharp point. And my father watched as he held it high above his head and then drove it into the stomach of my father’s mother, who screamed so loudly that my father promised that the roof of the house shook and trembled.

“The ka’aka’a man carved a large wedge of flesh out of my father’s mother’s stomach and held it again above his head, chanting to A’aka and Ivu’ivu to save my father’s mother, to heal her and comfort her. Then he wrapped the piece of flesh in some tava cloth that he would have pounded that morning and asked one of the neighbor women to bury it under a kanava tree. My father’s mother was screaming and screaming.

“Just as the neighbor women were leaving the hut—and by this time the entire village had gathered outside, chanting for the sick woman, and some were preparing to leave and retrieve my father’s father, whose groves were a day away if they hurried, and where he was harvesting makava fruit—my father’s mother’s screams became louder, so loud that the animals of the village, the pigs and chickens and horses, began screaming too, and my father said the whole world seemed made of sound and nothing else. He was tired from standing on his toes to look in the window, but he lifted himself up again in time to see the ka’aka’a man reach into my mother’s stomach and lift something out of it. From my father’s perspective, it looked like a great gleaming wodge of pale fat, the kind that the women would render from horses and cook with. But then it slipped from the ka’aka’a man’s hands and fell to the ground, where, to my father’s alarm, it cracked like a stone, shattering into many shards on the earth.

“Then there was a great uproar, and the ka’aka’a man was pointing at my father’s mother and saying that she had had an opa’ivu’eke inside of her and that she had been carrying a god inside her all along. When the villagers heard this, they started rushing into the small hut to see proof of the opa’ivu’eke, and when they saw what remained of it, its shell broken in pieces, they started wailing, and the men rushed home to get their spears. It was unclear, my father said, what they meant to do. Was his mother a demon, as some said, for carrying the god, or was she to be worshipped for doing so? Why had she not said anything? What did it mean that she was carrying an opa’ivu’eke? Nothing like this had ever happened before, and so
they did not know whether my father’s mother was good fortune or bad, whether she must be slain or healed. Lost in all of this was the ka’aka’a man, who surely bore much of the blame for breaking the god but who had somehow managed to slip away, but not before convincing the others—for ka’aka’a men are known for their ability to persuade people, for their gifted tongues—that he deserved all of the glory and none of the blame for what had happened.

“But before the villagers could decide what to do with my father’s mother, she died, and the people, who were angry at how she decided her fate before they could, set fire to my father’s house and then ran after my father and his siblings, the women leaping out of trees, ululating in that fierce way women have, to scare my father and his sisters and brothers into running in one direction, then another, whereupon the women’s husbands would leap out and stab them with their spears. But my father, because he was the oldest, was the fastest runner, and after he saw his second sister die, he ran as fast as he could toward his father’s makava groves, where he was harvesting his crop.

“He ran and ran, and eventually he came upon a great hog lying dead on the side of the path. This was strange, because hogs normally kept to the jungles and always traveled in packs. Sometimes a sick hog might wander off by itself, but it was very rare.

“Even though the hog appeared dead, my father was wary. Many remarkable things had happened already, and the sight of the lone hog did not seem a good omen. He slowed his pace and walked carefully toward the hog. But as he grew close he cried out, because it was not a hog at all but his father, burned so black that my father had mistaken the little dried flakes of skin that were lifting in the breeze for a hog’s sharp quills. My father said that later he would remember most vividly how his father lay, with his arms and legs bent and tucked into his body, how the fire had been so complete that his legs seemed to have fused into one large trunk. He knew that he must have been on his way home and attacked by some of the village men who had seen the turtle that was inside my father’s mother.

“Now my father was an orphan, and alone. He had begun the day as the oldest child of six, with a father who had makava trees and a mother and sisters and brothers. But now he had nothing. He could not return to his village, and he knew no one else who might
help him—his father’s and mother’s siblings had died long before, and there was no other person he knew in the world.

“My father crawled into a kanava tree not far from his father’s charred body. That night he dreamed that Opa’ivu’eke came to him and told him that his mother was cursed for carrying one of his descendants in her womb, but that my father could reverse this curse—if, that is, he left behind everything he knew and traveled to Ivu’ivu, from which he could never return.

“The next morning my father awoke both frightened and determined. U’ivuans simply did not go to Ivu’ivu—Ivu’ivu was, my father said, a land inhabited solely by gods and spirits and monsters. Sometimes he had listened to the adults of the village tell stories at night about Ivu’ivu, about how in the dark the island came alive and roamed the seas, its huge bulk cleaving the waters and upsetting the tides before returning to its spot before dawn. He had heard stories of how trees there talked in whispery rushes, how stones slid silently across the ground, how there were plants that fed on flesh. Everyone had claimed to know some foolish person who had once gone there to explore and who had never returned.

“But my father knew he had no choice, and at any rate, he knew from what had happened to his father that while Ivu’ivu held the likelihood of danger and death, remaining on U’ivu guaranteed it.

“My father went down to the shore. He had nothing to trade, nothing to give, and even if he had, there were very few fishermen who would venture as far as Ivu’ivu—the trip would take almost a day, and that, and their fear, meant that convincing someone to carry him by boat would be impossible.
Oh
, my father thought,
if only I could fly! If only I could swim like a dolphin!
And then he thought of the turtle’s dream and felt anger, and then despair. How could he fulfill such an impossible command?

“As my father stood near the shore, very sad, he suddenly saw something dark sliding beneath the water’s surface. My father assumed it was a school of the skinny, silvery fish that anyone could scoop up with a bit of homemade net and then cook over an open fire, their bones so fine you could eat them whole. But then, to my father’s great astonishment, the thing rose, and my father saw that it was an enormous turtle, the biggest he had ever seen, both taller and wider than he was, its feet as large as lawa’a ferns, paddling the water in
brisk, forceful strokes and staring at my father with its slow yellow eyes. My father was so amazed he found himself unable to move, but then the turtle waddled the top half of his body onto land, and my father understood that he was to straddle the turtle’s back and the turtle would take him to Ivu’ivu.

“My father had never felt exhilaration like the kind he experienced riding atop the turtle. The turtle swam gingerly through the shallows, careful not to scratch his feet on the great oceans of coral, but once they were in open water his swimming became swift and powerful, and they passed groups of sharks, pods of whales, and once a magnificent fleet of other opa’ivu’ekes, hundreds of them, each as big as the one he was riding, who lifted their heads from the water and stared at him as if in salute with a multiplicity of glowing eyes.

“In no time at all they were at Ivu’ivu, and as my father was climbing off the turtle’s back, he was for a moment certain that the turtle, who had been watching him with his big eyes, as large and yellow as mangoes, was going to speak to him. But the turtle did not, only blinked at my father and turned and swam back to sea, while my father kept his head bowed in the turtle’s direction, in respect, until he could no longer hear the turtle’s strokes, only the sound of the waves.

“For the next many days, my father walked. Although he listened as hard as he could, he never heard the trees speak to one another, and although he stayed awake as long as he could, he never once felt the island make its nighttime perambulations. But he did see flocks of strange birds, their plumage bright blue and yellow and red against the forest, who swaggered through the trees in bustling, clucking groups, and branches so thick with chattering vuakas that they sagged under their weight, and makava groves so wild and tangled with fruit that his father would have wept to see them.

“After a very long time, my father reached a village, and there, although it was not easy—the people were suspicious and thought him a ghost—he was finally welcomed, and on his fourteenth birthday given his spear. And eventually he made a family.

“But even after all these years, no one ever believed my father was from another place. They did not believe in U’ivu. And why should they? They could not see it. My father’s claim that this island
was one of three that made a country called U’ivu was information they had never heard before and had no reason to believe. To us Ivu’ivuans, Ivu’ivu is the world, no more, no less. For many years I myself did not believe my father’s stories—I thought they were tales he had made up to amuse us. But eventually I began to think he might be telling me the truth after all. Why? Well, first, my father is a very honest person. I have never known him to insist that something is true when it is not. And second, he has told this same story for so many years now, I can only believe in him, and because he is my father, I must.”

You must remember that the entire time Mua was speaking, I was looking only at Tallent. I could not understand Mua’s words, of course, so I tried to interpret how Tallent was reacting to them by watching his face. It was not very illuminating. I have to imagine that Tallent was changing some of the words as he went, making Mua’s sentences lovelier and more complex, but I was unable to gauge his reaction—his voice only strode onward, his tone calm and unchanging, even when Mua’s voice pitched up in excitement and then crested down. Later, when Tallent and Esme and I read over my notes and things were explained to me and put into their proper context, I would marvel at just how calm he had remained, how well he had been able to compose himself, when with each sentence Mua spoke he must have felt himself moving closer and closer to a discovery he had not even known to imagine for himself.