The People in the Trees (29 page)

There was another unseen and not entirely pleasant consequence of bearing witness to these activities, which was that my dreams at night began increasingly to turn to Tallent. I am slightly ashamed to admit this, for it sounds so childish, but I was, after all, barely more than a child myself at the time. In the mornings I could not remember the specifics, only that he was in them and that I was happy, and that the days that followed often felt unbearably dreary and sad, a landscape bled of contentment, and I began to think of them as something to be withstood before I could return to the cosseting blank darkness of night.

III
.

Although it may seem otherwise, I do not mean to suggest that I, or any of us, had lost interest in the dreamers and the particular quandary they presented. I also don’t want to give the impression that my haunts through the village were at their expense. Indeed, a significant amount of time was spent bathing them, feeding them, observing them, and interviewing them, all of which rapidly grew very dull. My disenchantment with them was partly because I now had something new—the village and its inhabitants—demanding my attention, but also partly because the dreamers were, by their nature and limitations, boring specimens to work with. They were in fact not dissimilar to those dim white mice I had spent all those mornings killing: necessary, but not engaging in the least. All of us knew there was something about them that was singular and important, but none of us could determine what that thing was, or even how to frame the question that might lead us to an answer. Here, however, I probably had an advantage over Esme and Tallent: I knew, simply knew, that there was some connection between the dreamers’ advanced age and the youth of the villagers, between the villagers’ refusal to see the dreamers and the dreamers’ longing for the village, even as they refused to contemplate entering it; indeed, they would not even face in its direction and preferred to look into the gloom of the forest at all times. But I couldn’t figure out what that connection was. It was always there, a sprite crouched in a sooty corner, beckoning me at the most unlikely, inconvenient times and then sprinting away, cackling, as soon as I began to creep toward it.

In the meantime, the dreamers remained mostly the same. We could get little more out of them about their lives than we already knew: Vanu’s arrival, Ika’ana’s memory of Ka Weha. We tried to interview them about their lives in the village and their lives in the forest, but their answers were patchy and vague: in Ika’ana’s case because he seemed to have no memory of it; in Mua’s case because of something else—a hesitation, a circumspection.

One morning, some ten weeks or so after our arrival, Tallent came to us as we sat eating our sad breakfast. (It was, however, less sad than before. As Tallent had promised those many weeks before,
we were finally able to light our own fire and were holding over its flames long skewers of vuakas, which Fa’a had procured for us and which were shockingly tasty, like mammalian ortolans.) “We’ve been invited to another ceremony,” he announced.

“Oh god,” Esme muttered.

“Tonight,” Tallent said. “It’s the chief’s birthday.”

It had never occurred to me to think of the chief as an individual; he was simply the chief. I realized then that I didn’t even know his name, or which of the women and children were his, or even why he was the chief. Was it because of an accident of birth or the rewards of accomplishment?
⁴⁴

“What’s going to happen?” asked Esme sourly. She now assumed that any sort of ritual practiced in the village involved having sex with children, when in fact only two or three of them did.

“I’m not sure,” said Tallent. “But I think there’ll be a pretty significant feast of some sort—they’re building an additional fire, and everyone’s tidying up over there.” I squinted toward the village and saw that indeed there were two fires smoking instead of one.

“How old is he turning?” I asked, more to make conversation than anything else.

But here Tallent turned to look at me and smiled. “Sixty,” he said, saying the word as if he were giving me a gift.

Sixty
. The word hung in the air like smoke, and I thought of what I wanted to say next, to separate the one question I knew I needed to ask from the tangle that filled my mind and mouth.

Naturally, Esme had to ruin the moment. “Sixty!” she yawped. “Eve’s age!”

“Eve’s approximate age based on Norton’s physical examinations,” Tallent reminded her gently.

It didn’t matter, however, because Esme wasn’t listening. And to be honest, neither was I. Tallent’s revelation was demanding some recalibration on my part. No longer was this a village filled with young people; now it was a village with people who appeared to be
young but might not be. What this might mean I could not determine, but I knew it meant
something
.

“He’s the oldest person in the village,” Tallent added, looking at me closely, as if he were giving me an essential clue that would make me remember where I’d hidden the answer.

But it didn’t. I had to think, and to do that I had to be alone. I told Esme and Tallent that I was going for a walk. “The ceremony starts at dusk,” Tallent called after me. “Be back by then.”

I walked in widening circles around the circumference of the village, but by the time the light began to thicken into syrup, I was still no wiser. It was very frustrating, and in my frustration, everything about my surroundings—the damp, squishy forest floor, the far-off moans and bleats of the dreamers, the trees’ continual droppings of various crackly dried plant matter onto my head and shoulders—chafed. I began, irrationally, to somewhat hate Tallent, who had brought me to this island and then dropped on me an enormous mystery that he seemed to expect me to solve.

By the time I crossed back into the village, I was in a very foul mood. But I walked over to the fires, where I saw Tallent and Esme sitting among the villagers, who had formed two long rows on either side of the flames. To my surprise, Fa’a was also there, seated next to Esme and staring straight ahead, his spear laid across his lap.

“Fa’a’s here?” I asked Tallent, sitting down to his left.

“Yes,” he whispered back (the villagers were again vibrating with their collective hum). “The chief invited all of the guides, but only Fa’a wanted to come.”

Before I could think about what this might mean, the chief appeared, walking slowly toward the head of the rows. And although he, like the rest of the villagers, was wearing no clothes, he carried himself as if he were heavy with jewels and cloaks: his straight back might have supported a cape made of yards and yards of weighty crimson velvet; his long, thick neck might have been hung with twisted ropes of gold and slabs of diamond-studded metals. He did at least wear a crown, a double strand, about as thick as my thumb, of a gorgeous, shimmery marigold, in a soft material of such lambency that it gleamed even in the firelight. I had never thought of the chief as particularly handsome, but this night he was indisputably majestic: his skin had been oiled to the same mirrorlike gleam
as his crown, and his hair had been brushed out somehow and oiled as well, so that it hung past his shoulder blades and flared around his face in an imitation of the fire; as he drew closer, I could smell the faint rancid odor of fat. His hog—and his hog was, not surprisingly, the biggest and cruelest and most dangerous-looking of the bunch—had been polished as well, and for once his mean little eyes, which were as shiny as lathed bullet shells, were outshone by his slicked, coarse hair and tusks, which seemed to have been honed and scrubbed especially for the occasion. On the chief’s left were the men who had joined him for our negotiations, and on his right were three women, all of whom appeared to be in their thirties, and two boys, one of whom was one of the spear-carrying adolescents I had seen having sex with the boy during the a’ina’ina ceremony.

When he had almost reached the first of the fires, the chief sat down and began to chant, a rolling, rhythmic song without beginning or punctuation, which sometimes rose into a falsetto that was almost a wail and sometimes thickened into a groan that was almost a growl. After a few minutes of this, I sensed a movement at the other end of the rows and saw, staggering into sight, two men who were dragging behind them a boulder, atop which sat another stone of approximately the same size. As they came into view, I heard the crowd break from their humming to give a collective sigh—of pleasure or dismay, I couldn’t tell—and as the men approached our end of the row, I saw that what I had mistaken for the second stone was actually an enormous turtle.

I had never seen, and would never again see, a turtle that large. Even now it is difficult for me to find something to which I might compare it. I can say only what it was bigger than: it was bigger than a truck tire, bigger than a washtub, bigger than a wolfhound. Because it wasn’t particularly thick—only about two feet high or so—its size was almost completely attributable to its exceptional diameter. And although I knew it was an opa’ivu’eke from its distinctive, mountainous back, it otherwise seemed as unrelated to the creature I had seen all those weeks ago in the stream as it was to the chief’s ferocious hog.

The men positioned the turtle in front of the fire closest to us—and the chief—and then stepped away, breathing hard with the exertion. The chief went on chanting, and just as I recognized the
word
opa’ivu’eke
in his song, the turtle, as if on cue, slowly muscled his head out from his shell. He was facing me, and when he opened his eyes, he seemed to look in my direction, as if trying to communicate some message meant solely for me.

“What?” I whispered to him, ridiculously.

He raised his head then, that odd little beautiful head he had, his neck stretching out as he did so, his eyes never leaving mine, and I felt myself leaning toward him. But just as I was doing so, I heard the chief break from his song and give a great, gleeful, terrifying cry, and then bring his spear (which I hadn’t even noticed him holding) down swiftly in front of him, and then the opa’ivu’eke’s head was bouncing into my lap, its black eyes still staring at me, its blood weeping onto my shorts.

“What a bizarre ceremony,” Esme grumbled as we walked back to our mats. Fa’a had left earlier, as soon as he politely could, and so it was only the three of us. “I can’t believe that after all that, we weren’t even offered anything to eat. It’s very unusual, you know, to be invited to these kinds of events and then not be treated to some sort of feast. But I suppose I should just be grateful that no children were raped tonight.”

Although I would never have agreed with her aloud, I did have to admit that it seemed a shoddy and somewhat pointless sort of event. And it did seem odd, given the participatory nature of many of the village’s other ceremonies, that this was such a solo performance: a long and tedious night spent watching the chief dismember the opa’ivu’eke (which he did in a particularly bloody and laborious way, by ripping its carapace off—the sound was upsettingly juicy—and then spooning out the flesh with his hands) and scorch it in chunks over the fire while the rest of the village hummed and looked hungry. Having witnessed the chief’s thoroughness with the boy, I suppose it should not have surprised me that he was also a thorough (though not very fast) eater: we sat there watching as he grilled and ate the soft meat of the turtle’s body, but also sucked the cartilage and blood from its scaly feet and, having retrieved the head from me, crunched down on its eyes and, after heating it in its skull like a soup, greedily slurped down the slurry of its brain. Only one other
man, one of the chief’s advisers—one who had also been with the boy at the first a’ina’ina—was offered any of the turtle to eat; we all watched as he pinched out the liver, a glistening puce thing, and swallowed it as one would an oyster.

“What I don’t understand is where they got the opa’ivu’eke to begin with,” I said. Flies swirled around my groin, attracted by the turtle’s sticky sweet blood. “That was far too large to have ever lived in the stream, but I haven’t seen any other water source around here.”

“It’s a good question,” Tallent said. “There must be somewhere around here—a lake, or a larger river—that they go to find these. But we’ve been asking and asking the dreamers, and they’ve never mentioned anything like that.”

We were all quiet for a moment. And then suddenly I knew what I needed to do. “Mua,” I told Tallent. “We need to talk to him.”

“But he’s asleep!” Esme protested. I ignored her.

“Tallent, please,” I said to him. “I need to ask him some questions.”

Tallent sighed. But what could he do? He had no answers, and if I thought I might be able to get him some, he had to defer to me. “All right,” he said. “Esme, go tell Fa’a to wake him.”

It had been a few weeks since I had last interviewed Mua, mostly because (I am now ashamed to admit) I had begun to find his perseverating exhausting. But now, seeing his sleep-puffed face come into view, I found myself convinced that it was he who had the answers, that if I asked just the right questions, everything would at once reveal itself.