The Plover: A Novel (12 page)

*   *   *

Piko is dreaming of Elly. She is a young osprey along the river by their house. She is a wriggling flash of something in the sea. She is a scatter of late leaves from the alders along the road. She is a pine marten sliding like furry liquid through spruce branches. She is screaming as she gives birth to Pipa. She tried and tried and tried to emit Pipa but finally the doctors cut a thin door in her belly for Pipa to emerge and Piko ever after thought of it as a smile on her skin. She is singing behind the house. She is singing to her patients in the hospital. She was a nurse. She became a nurse because she had a dream one night in which she was singing to a woman who was about to die but was delighted to die because she said she saw her second son in a clearing waiting for her with his face as bright as the sun in summer. She was a nurse for seven years. She said she would be a nurse until the day she died and maybe after that who knows? They drew signs and symbols by which to speak to each other after she died. They did this at the beach one day. This was when Elly weighed so little that Piko could carry her with one arm and a picnic basket with the other. This will be me, said Elly, drawing an osprey. See the crooked wings? And I’ll whistle, like ospreys do. So look and listen for me. This will be me, said Piko, drawing a frigate bird. See the crazy throat sac? And I won’t say anything. You’ll just see a graceful thing that suddenly looks like a clown with red balloon, and that will be me. Wait for me, okay? And then we will wait for the pip, okay? And maybe the pip will have kids of her own then, so we will wait for her kids, maybe there will be four or five of them, wouldn’t that be funny, but then he noticed that Elly was weeping, and in his dream he stopped talking and laughing about the grandchildren they did not have and would never have now and took Elly in his arms and kissed her all over her head and face including the gleaming moist dome where her hair used to be, and in his dream he called to Pipa, and in his dream the pip darted over to her parents like a minnow, and licked her mother’s tears away like a puppy, and Elly started laughing so hard she got the hiccups and couldn’t stop hiccupping until Pipa said Mama I have to pee more than
two
horses, which arrested her hiccups but started her laughing again.

The inimitable seaside brightness of the air, said the minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs to his interviewer, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the seafront of the isle, to quote our friend Robert Louis Stevenson in full eloquentery; is that what you were thinking when you first saw these islands? Because while these things are so, other things are also so, for example parents who get so drunk they beat their children bloody, and young men who have no prospect of any other work than legal or illegal theft, and young women with no prospects except to marry a man who is working in legal or illegal theft, those are also things that are so here. Not to denify our friend Robert Louis Stevenson, who was honest about what he saw in Pacifica, and he saw a good deal of our blue continent, the Îles Marquises, Tahiti, Hawaii, the Îles Samoa, and he was here also in these islands, although his sojournery here was not as pleasant as one would wish, as many residents in the first place he arrived were inebriated, the king wandering the streets in his pajamas, and the king of the second place he arrived wearing a top hat and using sewing machines as anchors for his fishing boats, which is not something we do on a regular basis now, although there is a good deal of using things designed for one purpose for another purpose altogether. In my view this is the essence of creativery, rather than something shaggy and raggy. You must remember that here there is a great deal of sea and air and rain, but essentially little of everything else, even island material itself. I find it instructory to consider the islands as they actually are, the tiny tips of mountains in the sea, and it seems to me also, if we take the long view, which I think we should, that mother sea has loaned us these islands for a while, and might well take them back at her leisure or fury; so that the whole idea of
owning
slices of islands is silly talk. The sea owns them and we reside at her pleasure, and we can all too soon unreside; and of course this has happened again and again in the islands, for all sorts of reasons, hurricanes and tsunamis and the ravages of disease, and other reasons lost now to understanding; even myself, the least travelest of men, I know of villages standing empty, their stones slumped, their thatch dissolved, their hearth fires long covered with sand. To live here you must be comfortable with the idea of not living here at all. Do you see what I mean? The way to reside is to visit every day. This is one of the ideas I would very much like the National Dreamers to take up when I am elected, so that we can be clear about this with our children and grandchildren. We cannot leave them slices of land, as we do not actually own the land, and we cannot leave them money, as we do not generally have money, but we
can
leave them charts for living, in a manner of speaking. We can leave them good stories like compasses that point toward true things. We can do
that,
at least, if we cannot do much more than that.

*   *   *

Pipa woke first. Hints and intimations of dawn, intuitions and premonitions of dawn; and then dawn pouring infinitesimally into the boat as if from a vast sifter filled with grains of light; and then full dawn, quietly, shyly, coming from nowhere and everywhere, the boat brightening slowly as if someone were turning on a vast lamp. Pipa, half-awake, sent her larger soul aloft, groggily, the spirit scratching and yawning; but just as she sensed the gull on the cabin roof, and the crabs on the beach, and the lorikeets burbling sleepily in the trees, she also sensed a new being on the boat. She snapped awake and mewed and flittered her hands at her father, her right hand almost at his cheek, and she
yearned
with all her soul to send her fingers that final inch between them, that awful inch, the inch she could not span, the inch she never would span again; but he sensed her hand like a wing by his cheek and he snapped awake, saying what? what? are you okay? She tried with every cell of her extraordinary body and soul and itch and urge to form a word but she could only mew and gibber, and she wanted to shriek with rage, but she could not even scream; but he knew what she wanted to say, and he leapt up, wide awake. He crouched by the ladder for a second, listening, and Pipa had a startling flash of insight into her father’s beings, his total selves, all of him at once, all the hymn of him, just for an instant, an epiphany so powerful that she sagged back in her bed as if from a shock of light; his long arms like wiry ropes, his muscular patience, the black box deep in his soul in which he locked his memories of her so that they did not shred him like tiny razors; his fear that he was forgetting his wife’s face, now that she was ash and scattered to the wind; his fear of his own selfishness, his desire for love he would not admit he wanted; his silvering ponytail like a dorsal fin against the broad seethe of his back as he crouched alert in the shadow; the infinitesimal swinging of his braided goatee nearly brushing the floor as he tensed like an arrow; his beard weighted at the end by the brilliant coin he had stitched into it yesterday to amuse his daughter, whose tiny fingers had a thousand times stitched into it feathers and coins, leaves and twigs, songs and prayers, wishes and dreams, kisses and tears, once the talons of an osprey.

Piko crept silently back to Pipa and kissed her and motioned her quiet and woke Declan silently. More gestures. Declan found his bow. They crouched by the ladder; two men almost thirty, in the fullness of their strength, seasoned by rage and pain, yet open to adventure and liable to joy, neither man hungry for money or power, each thirsty for something deeper he could not name but only feel it missing; two lean arrows grim in defense of the child behind them; and then they shot up the ladder so fast it was as if one man with two heads and four arms burst onto the deck and instantly split apart, greedy for violence.

*   *   *

The intruder was enormous. The intruder sat cross-legged in the stern. The intruder’s hands were placed flat on the deck, palms up. The intruder wore a vast red cloth from armpits to knees. The intruder had very short very black hair that stood forth like thin young trees starving for the sun. The intruder was barefoot and wore no earring nor adornment of any kind nor mark of any kind except vast blue tattoos covering both shoulders, a muscular sea of ink. The intruder was calm in the face of an arrow aimed at the place on a neck where your thumb fits neat as a pin.

Jesus, said Piko. It’s the crewman from the slime boat. Taro.

I am not a man, said the intruder.

What?

I am a woman.

What?

Nor is my name Taro.

All the rest of his life Piko would remember the oddest things about the next minute: the absolute unshatterable stillness of the three human beings in the stern, as if painted against the boat; the rusted staggered echo of her voice, as if the speaker had not used it in a year; the faint clatter of crabs on the beach, the lick of wavelets against the boat, the breath of breeze in the bush; the flick of the wind that set his goatee swinging again, with the bright coin like a pendulum weight at the bottom; and then Declan lowering his bow, though he did not retract the razored arrow.

Jesus blessed Christmas, said Declan. Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my fecking boat? And there better be a good answer or I stick this arrow through your fecking neck. Keep your hands where I can see them. Jesus.

I have had many names, said the intruder calmly. The last name I had of weight was Maraia, which means one who is accursed.

Where is the
Tanets
? said Piko, finding his voice.

I do not know.

Where is the captain of the
Tanets
?

I do not know.

How did you get here? said Declan, the bow still taut.

I came with you last night when you came for your friend.

You been aboard all night long?

Yes.

Where?

Here. It was dark.

Another remarkable instant of absolute stillness.

Piko? said Declan quietly.

Jesus, said Piko. Jesus. It could be. He—she—I don’t know. He never was pals with the other guy and he, she, was friendly enough to me. It was the other guy who made decisions. The slimeball. This one just did the work. Jesus. A woman. Why did you leave the
Tanets
?

I was finished, said the intruder.

Finished with what?

It was time to be finished.

Jesus, said Declan, what is this shit? Answer the question straight or I’ll stick an arrow in your ass. You don’t crawl onto someone’s boat at night and talk mystic crap in the morning, especially if you were party to a kidnapping. I got enough trouble without fecking kidnapper hitchhikers. Answer straight or fecking swim home.

Allow me to stand, please, said the intruder, standing. Piko stepped back and Declan raised the bow again.

She stood up, her tremendous arms loose by her sides, and then with a curious gesture she brought her folded hands together and said quietly, My people are albatross people. I had a baby girl. She came to me on the beach. I thought she would be a great traveler. She lived her first three days in a house of spirits. We welcomed her with a great feast and a dance that went on all night long, the longest dance anyone could remember. We thought she would be a wonder among us. She was a most attentive girl. She would point to the ocean and then we would notice a school of fish. She would point to the sky and then we would notice flocks of birds. It seemed that she could see ahead both in miles and days. It seemed that she knew things also which no child could know; the place in the ocean where flying fish flew in pairs, the place where the mottled sharks give birth, the place where people suddenly had two shadows, the place where
teuu
the giant fish would eat boats, the place where even turtles jump out of the sea. How could she know these places? Yet she knew them. She knew everything there was to know about the sea without ever spending years upon it like the old men who knew the most. The old men were skeptical of my daughter in the beginning but then they discovered she had true knowledge and then they took her everywhere with them, even to the place where the waves run backward, and the place where the porpoises tell you how to go farther safely, and the secret places of the terns. We thought she was a gift and she would always be among us but one day she dove into the sea and never came up. I was on another boat there when this happened. This was near the
betia,
the sea-mark, of the terns. We had seen the first terns flying together, one spinning circles around the other as they do in that place, when my daughter suddenly stood up, as if she had been summoned or called, and she cried out to me, as I was sitting in the other boat, and her face was shining, and she dove into the sea, and she vanished. We waited there a very long time, and I dove down to find her, and many of us dove down to find her, but we never found her. So it was said that she had died, and a great sadness came upon our people, and I left that place, and went in search of her, taking service on whatever ship would take me, no matter what the service; but now that time is finished, and so I have come here, to this moment, with you.