As we ate, Fego told us, “When the tide goes out, the table is set.” Beyond repeating this comment, he said little else, and all I recall of what he did say is that Aleut folk saying, which explains how this hardy people could subsist in such a forbidding place. Fego, however, also received pay from the United States government as a surveyor and a backup mail pilot, and the next day he flew us to Attu, the remotest island in the chain, with a single delivery and refueling stopover at the naval station airfield on Adak Island, not quite midway between Umnak and Attu.
Luckily, or we wouldn’t’ve flown, the day broke and stayed clear, with no fogs or willawaws arising from the collision of Bering Sea waters and the warmer flow of the Kurishio or Japan current, and an easy pewter chop moving along beneath the high whine of Fego’s prop plane.
On Attu, Henry led me inland on foot from Massacre Bay towards the island’s western mountains. Fego didn’t accompany us. Through most of this trek, it drizzled on us. Towards late afternoon, the drizzle thickened into a light snow, and my injuries put an extra hitch and a gnawing round of lesser and greater pains into my limp.
We took shelter from the snow, the day’s chronic gauziness, and the ache that’d settled in my legs in a Japanese hut not demolished during the U.S. invasion four springs earlier. In the hut’s litter, I found an empty sake bottle, a half-burnt diary in Japanese characters, and two sets of weather-warped snow skis. We ate from tins we’d backpacked in.
“Henry, what’re you doing in this godforsaken place?” I asked between spoonfuls of lumpy pork and beans.
“Escorting you to your father’s grave.”
“I mean, besides that. Did you come back up here to live, to be the Eskimo Hiding Man-?”
“Inyookootuk.”
“Yeah, Inyookootuk. To be the Hiding Man forever?”
“I am not an Aleut. I would hide forever among the Innuit of the mainland, but not in this storm-wracked island chain.”
“Is that what you plan to do? Hide forever?”
“This is a temporary exile, Daniel, a mere sabbatical. I wish to re-create myself. As Wordsworth wrote, ‘So build we up the Being that we are.’ But I despair of the authenticity of my materials.” He removed and pocketed his labrets, so as not to be distracted by them on our hike tomorrow, and refused to say another word that night.
The next day we reached a peak called Sarana Nose. The snow had stopped. The drizzle had stopped. Sunlight dropped through the whirling fog like lamplight through an aquarium full of seaweed. We reached an embankment on the mountain, a tierlike balcony on its flank, where several small stone cairns and a group of flat-nailed wooden crosses jutted up out of the muddy soil to mark burial plots. One cross boasted a round Japanese grave marker with Oriental paint-brush characters on it. I stood next to Henry in the chill, sweeping wind, dwarfed by him on a big volcanic sea rock at the top or maybe the end of the world.
“Here your father lies,” Henry said.
“How do you know?”
“A party of Eleventh Air Force personnel came out here during the Army’s mopping-up exercises-as hunters, not merely observers. They were shot or hand-grenaded by snipers. The snipers buried them here and memorialized their sacrifice.”
“How do you know?” I said again.
Henry read the hand-lettered inscription: “ ‘Sleeping here, five brave soldier heroes who forfeited youth and happiness for their motherland.’ ”
“A Jap wrote that?” I said.
Henry said nothing.
“A Jap my daddy and his pals had come out here to hunt down and shoot?”
Henry still said nothing.
“How do you know it’s the graves of Dick Boles and his friends? Does the inscription list names?”
“I fear it doesn’t.”
“Then how do you know?”
“ ‘Sleeping here, five brave soldier heroes who forfeited youth and happiness for their motherland,’ ” Henry read again.
“That doesn’t answer my-”
“Shhhh,” Henry said, a mittened finger to his lips, exactly between the ugly labret holes at each mouth corner. “In this place, Daniel, before your father’s grave, and in the presence of his enemy’s uncommon integrity, you should stand speechless, humbly mute.”
“B-B-But I-”
“Shhhh.”
I bowed my head. Memories welled. When next I looked up, a bald eagle’d caught a towering updraft. It wheeled in the high Aleutian gauze. Its talons seemed to spiral through my feelings like the threads of a screw. Finally, I looked at Henry, almost blinded by the sting of the wind and the thin wax of grief in my eyes.
Henry reached into his pack and rummaged out a brand-new National League baseball. He flipped it to me. I caught it with both hands, like an amateur. I stood there for a minute turning that ivory ball in my gloves before it occurred to me to wedge it into the natural cup of the stone cairn supposedly marking my daddy’s grave. In that cup, the ball glinted like a lighthouse beacon and focused the whole of Attu Island around it, a pivot for the world to turn on.
I got out Mama’s Brownie and took a picture.
As evening drew on, Henry and I walked back to the hut where we’d spent the night. The ache in my knee had let up some, and my limp seemed less pronounced. I asked Henry what he’d done with his old man. He didn’t answer.
“Come on, Henry. You didn’t leave him in ’Bama, did you?”
He shook his head, still striding, still thoughtful.
“Then what? What’d you do?”
“He lies among a host of ancient Aleut mummies, fur- and grass-wrapped carcasses in a cave on one of the Islands of Four Mountains southwest of Umnak. I never intend anyone to move him again. His traveling days are over. There he will rest until the generative vulcanism of this archipelago drowns its islands, Daniel, or until the world expires in either fire or ice. I am resigned.”
Henry refused to fly back to Kodiak with Fego and me aboard Fego’s battered prop plane. He said he’d eventually return for a look-see to Oongpek, on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula, but in the meantime wanted solitude and a chance to sort through his options. He gave Fego a small stack of U. S. bills of various denominations, for flying us to Attu and for returning me to Kodiak to pick up a commercial flight to Anchorage. Then he hugged me and stood clear as Fego and I taxied for takeoff, under a streaky sky, in a moderate crosswind.
“Whachu thinka that Henry fella?” Fego asked me when were up and rippling over the ashy chop of the Bering Sea.
His question startled me because he didn’t talk all that much. I said, “Why do you ask?”
“Sumfin funny bout him. Not joos how beeg he is- sumfin else. Lak mebbe summa his feelins been cut loose. Lak beeg as he is, you know, sum parta him’s missin.”