Now she began to feel truly alarmed. These women, like all Tahitians, had learned to swim before they could walk, but Alma had neither confidence nor proficiency in the water. Her skirts were soaked and heavy, which alarmed her more. The waves were not large, but nevertheless they were waves, and they swelled over her. The ball hit her in the ear; she did not see who had thrown it. Somebody called her a poreito—which, strictly translated, meant “shellfish,” but vernacularly was a quite rude term for the female genitalia. What had Alma done to deserve this insult of poreito?
Then she was underwater again, knocked over by three women who were attempting to run over her. They succeeded: they ran over her. One of them pushed off Alma’s chest with her feet—using Alma’s body for leverage, as one would use a rock in a pond. Another kicked her in the face, and now she was fairly certain her nose was broken. Alma struggled again to the surface, fighting for breath and spitting out blood. She heard somebody call her a pua‘a—a hog. She was pushed under again. This time, she felt sure it was intentional; her head had been shoved down from the back by two strong hands. She surfaced once more, and saw the ball fly past her. She dimly heard the cheers of the crowd. Again, she was trampled. Again, she went under. When she tried to surface this time, she could not: somebody was actually sitting on her.
What happened next was an impossible thing: a complete halting of time. Eyes open, mouth open, nose streaming blood into Matavai Bay, immobilized and helpless underwater, Alma realized she was about to die. Shockingly, she relaxed. It was not so bad, she thought. It would be so easy, in fact. Death—so feared and so dodged—was, once you faced it, the simplest thing going. In order to die, one merely had to stop attempting to live. One merely had to agree to vanish. If Alma simply remained still, pinned beneath the bulk of this unknown opponent, she would be effortlessly erased. With death, all suffering would end. Doubt would end. Shame and guilt would end. All her questions would end. Memory—most mercifully of all—would end. She could quietly excuse herself from life. Ambrose had excused himself, after all. What a relief it must have been to him! Here she had been pitying Ambrose his suicide, but what a welcome deliverance he must have felt! She ought to have been envying him! She could follow him straight there, straight into death. What reason did she have to claw for the air? What point was in the fight?
She relaxed even more.
She saw pale light.
She felt invited toward something lovely. She felt summoned. She remembered her mother’s dying words: Het is fign.
It is pleasant.
Then—in the seconds that remained before it would have been too late to reverse course at all—Alma suddenly knew something. She knew it with every scrap of her being, and it was not a negotiable bit of information: she knew that she, the daughter of Henry and Beatrix Whittaker, had not been put on this earth to drown in five feet of water. She also knew this: if she had to kill somebody in order to save her own life, she would do so unhesitatingly. Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of alclass="underline" she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This fact was not merely true about the lives of human beings; it was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest. It was even true of mosses. This fact was the very mechanism of nature—the driving force behind all existence, behind all transmutation, behind all variation—and it was the explanation for the entire world. It was the explanation Alma had been seeking forever.
She came up out of the water. She flung away the body on top of her as though it were nothing. Nose streaming blood, eyes stinging, wrist sprained, chest bruised, she surfaced and sucked in breath. She looked around for the woman who had been holding her under. It was her dear friend, that fearless giantess Sister Manu, whose head was scarred to pieces from all the various awful battles of her own life. Manu was laughing at the expression on Alma’s face. The laughter was affectionate—perhaps even comradely—but still, it was laughter. Alma grabbed Manu by the neck. She gripped her friend as though to crush her throat. At the top of her voice, Alma thundered, just as the Hiro contingent had taught her:
“OVAU TEIE!
TOA HAU A‘E TAU METUA I TA ‘OE!
E ‘ORE TAU ‘SOMORE E MAE QE IA ‘EO!”
THIS IS ME!
MY FATHER WAS A GREATER WARRIOR THAN YOUR FATHER!
YOU CANNOT EVEN LIFT MY SPEAR!
Then Alma let go, releasing her grip on Sister Manu’s neck. Without a moment’s hesitation, Manu howled back in Alma’s face a magnificent roar of approval.
Alma marched toward the beach.
She was oblivious to everyone and everything in her midst. If anyone on the beach was either cheering for her or against her, she could not possibly have noticed.
She came striding out of the sea like she was born from it.
Juglans laciniosa
PART FIVE
The Curator of Mosses
Chapter Twenty-seven
Alma Whittaker arrived in Holland in mid-July of 1854.
She had been at sea for more than a year. It had been an absurd voyage—or, rather, it had been a series of absurd voyages. She had departed Tahiti in mid-April the year before, sailing on a French cargo ship heading to New Zealand. She had been forced to wait in Auckland for two months before she found a Dutch merchant ship willing to take her on as a passenger to Madagascar, whence she’d traveled in the company of a large consignment of sheep and cattle. From Madagascar, she’d sailed to Cape Town on an impossibly antique Dutch fluyt—a ship that represented the finest of seventeenth-century maritime technology. (This had been the only leg of the voyage where, in fact, she truly feared she might die.) From Cape Town, she had proceeded slowly up the western coast of the African continent, stopping to change vessels in the ports of Accra and Dakar. From Dakar, she’d found another Dutch merchant ship heading first to Madeira, then up to Lisbon, across the Bay of Biscay, through the English Channel, and all the way to Rotterdam. In Rotterdam, she had purchased a ticket on a steam-powered passenger boat (the first steamer she’d ever been on), which carried her up and around the Dutch coast, finally heading down the Zuiderzee to Amsterdam. There, on July 18, 1854, she disembarked at last.
Her journey might have been both swifter and easier if she’d not had Roger the dog along with her. But she did have him, for when the time had come to leave Tahiti at last, she’d found herself morally incapable of leaving him behind. Who would take care of unlovable Roger, in her absence? Who would risk his bites, in order to feed him? She could not be entirely certain that the Hiro contingent would not eat Roger once she was gone. (Roger would not have made for much of a meal; nonetheless, she could not bear to imagine him turning on a spit.) Most significantly of all, he was Alma’s last tangible link to her husband. Roger had probably been there in the fare when Ambrose had died. Alma imagined the constant little dog standing guard in the center of the room during Ambrose’s final hours, barking out protection against ghosts and demons and all the attendant horrors of extraordinary despair. For that reason alone she was honor bound to keep him.