The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Twenty-three

Because time does not object to passing—not even in the strangest and most unfamiliar situations—time passed for Alma in Matavai Bay. Slowly, haltingly, she began to comprehend her new world.

Just as she had in childhood, when first awaking to cognizance, Alma began by studying her house. This did not take long, for her minuscule Tahitian fare was not exactly White Acre. There was nothing but the one room, the halfhearted door, the three empty windows, the sticks of crude furniture, and the thatched roof full of lizards. That first morning, Alma searched the house quite thoroughly for some vestige of Ambrose, but nothing existed. She looked for signs of Ambrose even before she began the (completely fruitless) search for her own lost luggage. What had she hoped to find? A message to her, written on a wall? A cache of drawings? Maybe a packet of letters, or a diary that actually revealed something other than inscrutable mystical longings? But there was nothing of him here.

Resigned, she borrowed a broom from Sister Manu and swept clean the cobwebs from the walls. She replaced the old dried grass on the floor with new dried grass. She plumped her mattress and accepted the fare as her own. She also accepted, as instructed by the Reverend Welles, the frustrating reality that her belongings would either show up eventually or they would not, and that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—that could be done about it. Though this news was distressing, something about it felt strangely apt, and even just. To be stripped of all that was precious made for a kind of immediate penance. It made her feel somehow closer to Ambrose; Tahiti was where they had both come to lose everything.

Wearing her one remaining dress, then, she continued to explore her environs.

Behind the house was something called a himaa, an open oven, where she learned to boil water and cook a limited assortment of foods. Sister Manu taught her how to manage the local fruits and vegetables. Alma did not think the final product of her cooking was meant to taste quite as much like soot or sand as it did, but she persevered, and felt proud that she could feed herself, which—in her entire long life—she had never before had to do. (She was autotrophic, she thought with a rueful smile; how proud Retta Snow would have been!) There was a sorry patch of garden, but not much to be done about it; Ambrose had built his house upon the burning sand, so it was futile even to try. There was nothing to be done about the lizards, either, who scampered across the rafters all night. If anything, they helped to abate mosquitoes, so Alma tried not to mind them. She knew they meant her no harm, though she did wish they would not crawl over her while she slept. She was happy they were not snakes. Tahiti, mercifully, was not snake country.

It was, however, crab country, but Alma soon taught herself not to be bothered by the crabs of all sizes that scuttled around her feet on the beach. They, too, meant her no harm. As soon as they glimpsed her with their waving, stalked eyes, they skimmed off in the other direction in a quick, clicking panic. She took to walking barefoot as soon as she recognized how much safer it was. Tahiti was too hot, too wet, too sandy, and too slippery for shoes. Fortunately, the environs welcomed bare feet; the island did not have even a single thorned plant, and most of the paths were smooth rock or sand.

Alma learned the shape and character of the beach, and the general habits of the tide. She was not a swimmer, but she encouraged herself to wade into the slow, dark water of Matavai Bay a bit deeper every week. She was grateful for the reef, which kept the bay fairly calm.

She learned to bathe in the river in the mornings with the other settlement women, all of whom were as thickset and strong as Alma herself. They were fiends for personal cleanliness, the Tahitians, washing their hair and bodies every day with the foaming sap of the ginger plants along the banks. Alma, who was not accustomed to bathing every day, soon wondered why she had not been doing this her entire life. She learned to ignore the groups of little boys who stood around the river, laughing at the women in their nakedness. There was no point in trying to hide from them; there was no hour of the day or night when the children would not find you.

The Tahitian women did not object to the children’s laughter. They seemed far more worried about Alma’s wiry, coarse, faded hair, which they fussed over with both sadness and concern. They all had such beautiful hair, which fell in black, billowing sweeps down their backs, and they felt simply terrible for Alma that she did not share this spectacular feature. She felt simply terrible about it herself. One of the first things Alma learned how to convey in Tahitian was an apology for her hair. She wondered if there was any place she could go in the world, ever, where her hair would not be considered a tragedy. She suspected not.

Alma picked up as much Tahitian as she was able, from anybody who would speak to her. She found the people to be warm and helpful, and they encouraged her efforts as a kind of play. She started with the words for the commonest items around Matavai Bay: the trees, the lizards, the fish, the sky, and the sweet little doves called uuairo (a word that sounded exactly like their soft, bubbling cry). She moved on to grammar as quickly as she was able. The inhabitants of the mission settlement spoke English at varying levels of proficiency—some were quite fluent, some simply inventive—but Alma, always the linguist, was determined to keep her interactions in Tahitian whenever possible.

But Tahitian, she found, was not a simple language. It sounded to her ears more like birdsong than speech, and she was not musical enough to master it. Alma determined that Tahitian was not even a reliable language. It did not have the sturdy injunctions of Latin or Greek. The people of Matavai Bay were especially kittenish and rascally with words, changing them by the day. Sometimes they mixed in bits of English or French, inventing imaginative new words. The Tahitians loved abstruse puns that Alma could never have comprehended unless her grandparents’ grandparents had been born here. Moreover, the people at Matavai Bay spoke differently from the people in Papeete, a mere seven miles away, and those people spoke differently from the people in Taravao or Teahupo. You could not trust a sentence to mean the same thing on one side of the island as across it, or to mean the same thing today as it meant yesterday.

Alma studied the people around her carefully, trying to learn the disposition of this curious place. Sister Manu was the most important, for she not only tended the pigs, but policed the entire settlement. She was a strict mistress of protocol, that one, keenly alert to manners and missteps. While everyone at the settlement loved the Reverend Welles, they feared Sister Manu. Sister Manu—whose name meant “bird”—was as tall as Alma, and as heavily muscled as a man. She could have carried Alma on her back. There were not many women about whom one could say that.

Sister Manu always wore her broad straw hat, dressed with different fresh flowers every day, but Alma had seen during bath time in the river that Manu’s forehead was covered with a hash of blunt white scars. Two or three of the older women had similar mysterious marks on their foreheads, but Manu was scarred in another way besides: she was missing the last phalanx of each of her pinky fingers. It seemed such a strange injury to Alma, so neat and symmetrical. She could not imagine what a person could have been doing, to have lost both pinky tips so tidily. She dared not ask.

Sister Manu was the one who rang the bell for worship every morning and evening, and the people—all eighteen of the settlement’s adults—dutifully came. Even Alma tried never to miss religious services at Matavai Bay, for it would have offended Sister Manu, and Alma could not have survived long without her favor. In any case, Alma found that the services were not difficult to sit through; they seldom lasted more than a quarter of an hour, and Sister Manu’s sermons in her stubborn English were always entertaining. (If the Lutheran gatherings in Philadelphia had been as simple and diverting as this, Alma thought, she might have become a better Lutheran.) Alma paid close attention and in due course pulled out words and phrases from the dense Tahitian-language chants.

Te rima atua: the hand of God.

Te mau pure atua: the people of God.

As for the boy who had brought Alma her microscope eyepiece the first night, she learned that he was one of a pack of five small boys who roamed the mission settlement with no apparent occupation other than to play ceaselessly until they collapsed with exhaustion onto the sand, and—like dogs—slept where they fell. It took Alma weeks to tell the boys apart. The one who had shown up in her room and handed her the microscope eyepiece was, she learned, named Hiro. His hair was the longest and he seemed to hold the highest status within the gang. (She later learned that in Tahitian mythology, Hiro was the king of thieves. It amused her that her first encounter with Matavai Bay’s little king of thieves was when he returned something that had been stolen from her.) Hiro was the brother of the boy called Makea, although perhaps they were not actual brothers. They also claimed to be brothers with Papeiha and Tinomana and another Makea, but Alma thought this could not possibly be true, because all five boys appeared to be the same age and two of them had the same name. She could not for the life of her determine who their parents might be. There was not the slightest sign that anyone took care of these children but themselves.

There were other children around Matavai Bay, but they approached life far more seriously than the five boys whom Alma came to think of as “the Hiro contingent.” These other children came to the mission school for classes in English and reading every afternoon, even if their parents were not residents of the Reverend Welles’s settlement. These were little boys with neat, short hair, and little girls with beautiful braids, long dresses, and bright smiles. They took their classes in the church, where they were taught by the bright-faced young woman who had called out to Alma on her first day, “We speak English here!” That woman’s name was Etini—“white flowers strewn along the road”—and she spoke English perfectly, with a crisp British accent. It was said she had been personally taught as a child by the Reverend Welles’s wife, and now Etini was considered the best English teacher on the entire island.

Alma was impressed by the tidy and disciplined schoolchildren, but she was far more intrigued by the five wild and uneducated boys of the Hiro contingent. She had never before seen children as free as Hiro, Makea, Papeiha, Tinomana, and the other Makea. Tiny lords of liberty, they were, and mirthful ones at that. Like some mythical blend of fish, bird, and monkey, they seemed equally at home in the water, in the trees, and on land. They hung from vines and swung into the river with fearless cheers. They paddled out to the reef on little wooden boards and then, incredibly, they stood up on those boards, and sailed across the foaming, billowing, breaking waves. They called this activity faheei, and Alma could not imagine the nimbleness and confidence they must have felt to ride the breaking surf with such ease. Back on the beach, they boxed and wrestled each other tirelessly. Another favorite game was when they would build stilts for themselves, cover their bodies with some kind of white powder, prop open their eyelids with twigs, and chase each other across the sand like tall, queer monsters. They also flew the uo—a kite made of dried palm fronds. At quieter moments, they played a game like jacks, using small stones instead of jacks. They kept as pets a rotating menagerie of cats, dogs, parrots, and even eels (the eels were bricked up into watery pens in the river; at the sound of the boys’ whistles, they would raise their heads up eerily above the surface of the water, ready to be fed bits of fruit by hand). Sometimes the Hiro contingent ate their pets, skinning them and roasting them on a makeshift spit. Eating dog was common practice here. The Reverend Welles told Alma that Tahitian dog was just as tasty as English lamb—but then again, the man had not tasted English lamb in decades, so she was not sure he could be trusted. Alma hoped nobody would eat Roger.

For Roger, Alma had learned, was the name of the little dog that had visited her that first night in her fare. Roger did not seem to belong to anyone, but apparently he had been somewhat fond of Ambrose, who had bestowed upon him his dignified, robust name. Sister Etini explained all this to Alma, along with this unsettling bit of advice: “Roger will never bite you, Sister Whittaker, unless you try to feed him.”

For the first few weeks of Alma’s stay, Roger came to her small room night after night, to bark at her with all his heart. For a long time, she never saw him during the day. Gradually, and with visible reluctance, his indignation wore away, and his episodes of outrage became briefer. One morning, Alma awoke to find Roger sleeping on the floor right next to her bed, which meant that he had entered her house the previous night without barking at all. That seemed significant. At the sound of Alma stirring, Roger growled and ran away, but he was back the next night, and was silent from then on. Inevitably, she did indeed try to feed him, and he did indeed try to bite her. Other than that, they fared well enough together. It was not that Roger became friendly, exactly, but he no longer appeared desirous of removing her throat from her body, and that was an improvement.

Roger was a dreadful-looking dog. He was not only orange and mottled, with an irregularly shaped jaw and a bad limp, but it appeared that something had worked rather relentlessly to chew off a large section of his tail. Also, he was tuapu’u—hunchbacked. Still, Alma came to appreciate the dog’s presence. Ambrose must have loved him for some reason, she thought, and that intrigued her. She would gaze at the dog for hours and wonder what he knew about her husband—what he had witnessed. His companionship became a comfort. While she could not claim that Roger was protective or loyal toward her, he did seem to feel some sort of connection to the house. This made her feel somewhat less afraid to fall asleep alone at night, knowing that he was coming.

This was good, for Alma had abandoned hope for any other measure of security or privacy. There was no gain to be had in even attempting to define boundaries around her home or her few remaining belongings. Adults, children, fauna, weather—at any hour of the day or night, for any reason at all, everybody and everything in Matavai Bay felt quite free to enter Alma’s fare. They did not always come empty-handed, to be fair. Pieces of her belongings reappeared over time, in bits and fragments. She never knew who brought these items back to her. She never saw it happen. It was as if the island itself were slowly coughing up portions of her swallowed luggage.

In the first week, she recovered some paper, a petticoat, a vial of medicine, a bolt of cloth, a ball of twine, and a hairbrush. She thought, If I wait long enough, it will all be returned. But that was not true, for items were just as likely to vanish as to appear. She did get back her one other travel dress—its hemful of coins amazingly intact—which was a true blessing, though she never recovered any of her spare bonnets. Some of her writing paper found its way back to her, but not much of it. She never again saw her medicine kit, but several glass vials for botanical collection showed up on her doorstep in a neat row. One morning she discovered that a shoe was gone—just one shoe!—though she could not imagine what somebody wanted with just one shoe, while, at the same time, a quite useful set of watercolors had been returned. Another day, she recovered the base of her prized microscope, only to see that somebody had now taken back the eyepiece in exchange. It was as if there were a tide ebbing and flowing in and out of her house, depositing and withdrawing the flotsam of her old life. She had no alternative but to accept it, and to marvel, day after day, at what she found and lost, and then found and lost once more.

Ambrose’s valise, however, was never taken from her again. The very morning it was returned to her doorstep, she placed it on the little table inside her fare, and there it remained—absolutely untouched, as though guarded by an invisible Polynesian Minotaur. Furthermore, not a single one of the drawings of The Boy ever disappeared. She did not know why this valise and its contents were treated with such reverence, when nothing else was safe at Matavai Bay. She would not have dared to ask anyone, Why do you not touch this object, or steal these pictures? But how could she have explained what the drawings were, or what the valise meant to her? All she could do was keep silent, and understand nothing.

Alma’s thoughts were on Ambrose at all times. He had left no trace in Tahiti, other than everyone’s residual fondness for him, but she sought signs of him ceaselessly. Everything she did, everything she touched, caused her to wonder: Had he done this also? How had he spent his time here? What had he thought of his tiny house, the curious food, the difficult language, the constant sea, the Hiro contingent? Had he loved Tahiti? Or, like Alma, had he found it too alien and peculiar to love? Had he burned under the sun, as Alma now burned on this black sand beach? Had he missed the cool violets and quiet thrushes of home, as Alma did, even as she admired the lush hibiscus and the loud green parrots? Had he been melancholy and sorrowful, or was he full of joy to have discovered Eden? Had he thought of Alma at all when he was here? Or had he forgotten her rapidly, relieved to be free of her discomfiting desires? Had he forgotten her because he fell in love with The Boy? And as for The Boy, where was he now? He wasn’t really a boy—Alma had to admit this to herself, especially when she studied the drawings again. The figure in them was more of a boy on the brink of manhood. By this time, some two or three years later, he must be a fully grown man. In Alma’s mind, though, he was still The Boy, and she never stopped looking for him.

But Alma could find no trace or mention of The Boy at Matavai Bay. She looked for him in the face of every man who came through the settlement, and in the faces of all the fishermen who used the beach. When the Reverend Welles told Alma that Ambrose had taught a native Tahitian the secret to tending vanilla orchids (little boys, little fingers, little sticks), Alma thought, That must be him. But when she went to the plantation to investigate, it wasn’t The Boy at all: it was a stout older fellow, with a cast over one eye. Alma took several outings to the vanilla plantation, pretending an interest in the proceedings there, but never saw anyone who remotely resembled The Boy. Every few days or so, she would announce that she was going botanizing, but she would actually return to the capital of Papeete, borrowing a pony from the plantation for the long ride in. Once there, she would walk the streets all day and well into the evening, looking at every passing face. The pony followed behind her—a skeletal, tropical version of Soames, her old childhood friend. She looked for The Boy at the docks, outside the brothels, in the hotels full of fine French colonists, in the new Catholic cathedral, in the market. Sometimes she would see a tall, well-built native man with short hair walking ahead of her, and she would run to him and tap him on the shoulder, ready to ask him any question, merely to make him turn around. At every encounter she was certain: This will be him.

It was never him.

She knew that soon she would need to expand her search, go look for him beyond the environs of Papeete and Matavai Bay, but she wasn’t certain how to begin. The island of Tahiti was thirty-five miles long and twelve miles wide, shaped something like a lopsided figure eight. Great stretches of it were difficult or impossible to traverse. Once one left the shaded, sandy road that wound partly around the coastline, the terrain became dauntingly challenging. Terraced plantations of yams crawled up the hills, along with coconut groves and waves of short scrub grass, but then, quite suddenly, there was nothing but tall cliffs and inaccessible jungle. Few people lived in the highlands, Alma was told, except the cliff dwellers—who were nearly mythical, and who had extraordinary capacity as climbers. These people were hunters, not fishermen. Some had never even touched the sea. The cliff-dwelling Tahitians and the coastal Tahitians had always regarded each other warily, and there were boundaries that neither was meant to cross. Perhaps The Boy had been from among the cliff-dwelling tribes? But Ambrose’s drawings depicted him at the seaside, carrying a fisherman’s nets. Alma could not puzzle it out.

It was also possible that The Boy was a sailor—a hand on a visiting whaling ship. If that was the case, she would never find him. He could be anywhere in the world by now. He could even be dead. But absence of proof—as Alma well knew—was not proof of absence.

She would have to keep looking.

She certainly gleaned no information from within the mission settlement. There was never any wicked gossip about Ambrose—not even at the bathing river, where all the women gossiped so freely. Nobody had made so much as a sidewise comment about the much-missed and much-lamented Mr. Pike. Alma had even gone so far as to ask the Reverend Welles, “Did Mr. Pike have any particular friend when he was here? Somebody he may have cared for more than the others?”

He had merely fixed her with his frank gaze and said, “Mr. Pike was loved by all.”

This was on the day they had gone to visit Ambrose’s grave. Alma had asked him to take her there, such that she could pay her respects to her father’s deceased employee. On a cool and overcast afternoon, they had hiked together all the way to Tahara Hill, where a small English cemetery had been established near the top of the ridge. The Reverend Welles was a most agreeable walking companion, Alma found, for he moved quickly and ably over any terrain, and called out all manner of fascinating information as they strode along.

“When first I came here,” he said that day, as they climbed the steep hill, “I tried to determine which of the plants and vegetables here were indigenous to Tahiti, and which had been brought here by ancient settlers and explorers, but it is most vexingly difficult to determine such things, you see. The Tahitians themselves were not much help in this endeavor, for they say that all the plants—even the agricultural plants—were placed here by the gods.”

“The Greeks said the same thing,” Alma said, between huffs of breath. “They said the grapevines and olive groves had been planted by the gods.”

“Yes,” said the Reverend Welles. “It seems that people forget what they themselves created, doesn’t it? We know now that all the people of Polynesia carry taro root and coconut palm and breadfruit with them when they settle a new island, but they themselves will tell you that the gods planted these things here. Some of their stories are quite fabulous. They say that the breadfruit tree was crafted by the gods to resemble a human body, as a clue to humans, you see—to tell us that the tree is useful. They say that this is why the leaves of the breadfruit resemble hands—to show humans that they should reach toward this tree and find sustenance there. In fact, the Tahitians say that all the useful plants on this island resemble parts of the human body, as a message from the gods, you see. This is why coconut oil, which is helpful for headaches, comes from the coconut, which looks like a head. Mape chestnuts are said to be good for kidney ailments, for they resemble kidneys themselves, or so I am told. The bright red sap of the fei plant is meant to be useful for blood ailments.”

“The signature of all things,” Alma murmured.

“Yes, yes,” the Reverend Welles said. Alma was not sure if he had heard her. “Plantain branches, like these ones here, Sister Whittaker, are also said to be symbolic of the human body. Because of that shape, plantains are used as gestures of peace—as gestures of humanity, you might say. You throw one on the ground at the feet of your enemy, to show your surrender or your willingness to consider compromise. It was most useful for me to discover this fact when first I arrived in Tahiti, I tell you! I was tossing about plantain branches in every direction, you see, hoping not to be killed and eaten!”

“Would you have been killed and eaten, truly?” Alma asked.

“Most likely not, though missionaries are always afraid of such things. Do you know, there is a fine and witty example of missionary humor, which asks, ‘If a missionary is eaten by a cannibal, and the missionary is digested, and then the cannibal dies, will the missionary’s digested body be resurrected on the Day of Judgment? If not, how does Saint Peter know which bits to send to heaven and which bits to hell?’ Ha-ha-ha!”

“Did Mr. Pike ever speak to you about that notion you just mentioned a moment ago?” Alma asked, only half listening to the missionary’s jest. “About the gods creating plants in various peculiar shapes, I mean, in order to display their uses for the assistance of man?”

“Mr. Pike and I spoke of so many things, Sister Whittaker!”

Alma did not know how to ask for specifics without revealing too much of herself. Why should she have cared so much about her father’s employee? She did not want to arouse suspicions. But he was such an odd arrangement of a man! She found him to be candid and inscrutable, all at the same time. Whenever Ambrose was discussed, Alma studiously examined the Reverend Welles’s face for clues, but the man was impossible to read. He always gazed upon the world with the same unperturbed countenance. His spirit was unchanging in any situation. He was as constant as a lighthouse. His sincerity was so complete and so perfect, it was almost a mask.

They reached the cemetery at last, with its small bleached headstones, some carved into crosses. The Reverend Welles took Alma straight to Ambrose’s grave, which was tidy and marked by a small stone. It was a lovely spot, looking over the entirety of Matavai Bay, and out to the bright sea beyond. Alma had feared that, when she saw the actual grave, she might be unable to contain her emotions, but instead she felt unruffled—even remote. She could sense nothing of Ambrose here. She could not imagine him buried under this stone. She remembered the way he used to sprawl across the grass with his wonderful long legs, speaking to her of marvels and mysteries while she studied her mosses. She felt that he existed more in Philadelphia, more in her memory, than he did here. She could not imagine his bones moldering beneath her feet. Ambrose did not belong to the soil; he belonged to the air. He was barely of the earth when he was alive, she thought. How could he possibly be inside the earth now?

“We did not have lumber to spare for a coffin,” the Reverend Welles said, “so we wrapped Mr. Pike in native cloth and buried him in the keel of an old canoe, as is sometimes done here. Planking is such difficult work here without the proper tools, you see, and when the natives do get proper lumber, they prefer not to waste it in a grave, so we make do with old canoes. But the natives showed such tender consideration to Mr. Pike’s Christian beliefs, you see. They oriented his grave east to west, you see—so he faces the rising sun, as do all Christian churches. They were fond of him, as I have said. I pray he died happy. He was the best of men.”

“Did he seem happy when he was here, Brother Welles?”

“He found much to please him about the island, as we all learn to. I am certain he wished for more orchids, you see! Tahiti can be disappointing, as I have said, for those who come to study natural history.”

“Did Mr. Pike ever seem troubled to you?” Alma dared to push.

“People come to this island for many reasons, Sister Whittaker. My wife used to say they wash up upon our shores, these jostled strangers, and most of the time they do not know where they have landed! Some of them seem like perfect gentlemen, yet later we discover they were convicts in their countries of origin. On the other hand, you see, some of them were perfect gentlemen in their European lives, but they come here to behave like convicts! One can never know the state of another man’s heart.”

He had not answered her question.

What of Ambrose? she wanted to ask. What was the state of his heart?

She held her tongue.

Then the Reverend Welles said, in his usual bright voice, “You will see the graves of my daughters here, on the other side of that low wall.”

The statement knocked Alma into silence. She had not known that Reverend Welles had daughters, much less that they had died here.

“They are just wee graves, you see,” he said, “for the girls did not live long. None of them saw their first year. They are Helen, Eleanor, and Laura on the left. Penelope and Theodosia rest beside them, on the right.”

The five gravestones were tiny, smaller than bricks. Alma could find no words to offer as comfort. It was the saddest thing she had ever seen.

The Reverend Welles, regarding her stricken face, smiled kindly. “But there is comfort. Their youngest sister, Christina, lives, you see. The Lord gave us one daughter whom we were able to usher into life, and she lives still. She resides in Cornwall, where she is the mother now of three little sons herself. Mrs. Welles stays with her. My wife resides with our living child, you see, while I reside here, to keep company with the departed.”

He glanced over Alma’s shoulder. “Ah, look!” he said. “The frangipani is in bloom! We shall pick some, and take it back to Sister Manu. She can dress her hat freshly for tonight’s service. Won’t she enjoy that?”

The Reverend Welles would always bewilder Alma. Never had she met a man so cheerful, so uncomplaining, who had lost so much, and who lived upon—and with—so little. Over time, she discovered that he did not even have a home. There was no fare that belonged to him. The man slept in the mission church, on one of the pews. Often he did not even have an ahu taoto to sleep under. Like a cat, he was able to doze off anywhere. He had no belongings aside from his Bible—and even that sometimes vanished for weeks on end before somebody would eventually return it. He kept no livestock of his own, nor did he tend a garden. The small canoe that he liked to take out to the coral reef belonged to a fourteen-year-old boy who was generous enough to lend it. There was not a prisoner or a monk or a beggar in the world, Alma thought, who had less than this man.

But it had not always been this way, Alma learned. Francis Welles had been raised in Cornwall, in Falmouth, right on the sea, in a large family of prosperous fishermen. While he did not vouchsafe to Alma the precise details of his youth (“I would not wish you to think less of me, if you knew the acts I committed!”), he indicated that he had been a rough lad. A knock on the head brought him to the Lord—or at least that was how the Reverend Welles reported his conversion experience: a tavern, a brawl, “a bottle to my loaf,” and then . . . revelation!

From there, he turned to learning and a life of piety. Soon he married a girl named Edith, the educated and virtuous daughter of a local Methodist minister. Through Edith, he learned to speak, think, and behave in a more dutiful and honorable way. He became fond of books and had “all sorts of high thoughts,” as he put it. He undertook ordination. Young and vulnerable to fanciful ideals, the newly Reverend Francis Welles and his wife Edith applied to the London Missionary Society, pleading to be dispatched to the most distant of heathen lands, to introduce the word of the Redeemer abroad. The London Missionary Society welcomed Francis, for it was unusual to find a man of God who was also a rugged and able sailor. For this line of work, one does not want a soft-handed Cambridge gentleman.

The Reverend Francis and Mrs. Welles arrived in Tahiti in 1797, on the first mission ship ever to reach the island, along with fifteen other English evangelicals. At that time, the god of the Tahitians was embodied by a six-foot length of wood, wrapped in tapa cloth and red feathers.

“When first we landed,” he told Alma, “the natives showed the greatest wonderment at our clothing. One of them pulled off my shoe, and, taking glimpse of my sock, jumped back in fear. He thought I had no toes, you see! Well, soon enough, I had no shoes, for he took them!”

Francis Welles liked the Tahitians immediately. He liked their wit, he said. They were gifted mimics, who loved to tease. It reminded him of the humor and play of the Falmouth docks. He liked how, whenever he wore a straw hat, the children would follow him around shouting, “Your head is thatched! Your head is thatched!”

He liked the Tahitians, yes, but he had no luck converting them.

As he told Alma, “The Bible instructs us, ‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto me.’ Well, Sister Whittaker, perhaps two thousand years ago it was thus! But it was not thus when first we landed in Tahiti! The mildness of these people notwithstanding, you see, they resisted all our efforts at conversion—and most heartily! We could not even sway the children! Mrs. Welles arranged a school for the young ones, but their parents complained, ‘Why do you detain my son? What riches will he gain through your God?’ The lovely thing about our Tahitian students, you see, was that they were so good and kind and polite. The troublesome thing was that they were not interested in our Lord! They would only laugh at poor Mrs. Welles, when she tried to teach them the catechism.”

Life was arduous for the pioneering missionaries. Misery and perplexity dogged their ambitions. Their gospel was met with indifference or mirth. Two of their members died in the first year. The missionaries were blamed for every calamity that struck Tahiti, and credited for none of the godsends. Their belongings either rotted away, or were eaten by rats, or were looted from beneath their noses. Mrs. Welles had brought along only one family treasure from England: a beautiful cuckoo clock that chimed on the hour. The first time the Tahitians heard the clock strike, they fled in terror. The second time, they brought fruit to the clock and bowed before it in awed supplication. The third time, they stole it.

“It is difficult to convert anyone,” he said, “who is less intrigued about your god than he is about your scissors! Ha-ha-ha! But how can you fault a body for wanting scissors, when he has never before seen them? Would not a pair of scissors seem a miracle, by comparison to a blade fashioned of shark’s teeth?”

For nearly twenty years, Alma learned, neither the Reverend Welles nor anyone else on this island was able to convince a single Tahitian to embrace Christianity. While so many other Polynesian islands came willingly toward the True God, Tahiti remained stubborn. Friendly, but stubborn. The Sandwich Islands, the Navigators, the Gambier Islands, the Hawaiian Islands—even the fearsome Marquesas!—they all embraced Christ, but Tahiti did not. So lovely and gay were the Tahitians, and yet so obdurate. They smiled and laughed and danced, and simply would not let go their hedonism. “Their souls are cast from brass and iron,” complained the English.

Weary and frustrated, some of the original group of missionaries returned home to London, where they soon found themselves able to make a handsome living by relating their South Seas adventures in speeches and books. One missionary was driven off Tahiti at spear-point for having attempted to dismantle one of the island’s most sacred temples, in order to build a church from the stones. As for those men of God who remained in Tahiti, some drifted into other, simpler pursuits. One became a trader in muskets and gunpowder. One opened a hotel in Papeete, taking up not one but two young native wives to warm his bed. One fellow—Edith Welles’s tender young cousin James—simply lost his faith, fell into despair, set off to sea as a common sailor, and was never heard from again.

Dead, banished, lapsed, or exhausted—so it came to pass that all the original missionaries were weeded out, except Francis and Edith Welles, who remained at Matavai Bay. They learned Tahitian and lived without comforts. In their early years, Edith bore the first of their girls—Eleanor, Helen, and Laura—who each died, one after another, in infancy. Still, the Welleses would not relent. They built their little church, largely by themselves. The Reverend Welles figured out how to make whitewash out of bleached coral, by baking it in a rudimentary kiln until it powdered. This made the church look more inviting. He made bellows out of goatskin and bamboo. He attempted to plant a garden with sad, damp, English seeds. (“After three years of effort, we finally managed to produce one strawberry,” he told Alma, “and we divided it between ourselves, Mrs. Welles and I. The taste of it was enough to make my good wife weep. I have never managed to grow another one since. Though I have been fairly lucky, at times, with cabbage!”) He acquired, and subsequently lost to theft, a herd of four cows. He attempted to grow coffee and tobacco, and failed. Likewise potatoes, wheat, and grapes. The pigs of the mission did well, but no other livestock took to the climate.

Mrs. Welles taught English to the natives of Matavai Bay, whom she found to be quick and clever with language. She taught dozens of local children to read and write. Some of the children moved in with the Welleses. There was a little boy who progressed—in the space of eighteen months—from absolute illiteracy to the ability to read the New Testament without stumbling over a single word, but the boy did not become a Christian. None of them did.

The Reverend Welles told Alma, “They often asked me, the Tahitians, What is the proof of your god? They wanted me to speak of miracles, Sister Whittaker. They wanted evidence of boons for the deserving, you see, or punishments administered to the guilty. I had a man with a missing leg ask me to please instruct my god to grow him a new leg. I told him, ‘Where can I find you a new leg, in this country or any other?’ Ha-ha-ha! I could not make miracles, you see, so they were not much impressed. I watched a young Tahitian boy stand at the grave of his infant sister and ask, ‘Why did God Jesus plant my sister in the ground?’ He wanted me to instruct God Jesus to raise that child up from death—but I could not even raise up my own children from death, you see, so how could I perform such a marvel? I could offer no evidence of my savior, Sister Whittaker, but that which my good wife Mrs. Welles calls my ‘internal evidence.’ I knew then and I know now only what my heart feels to be true, you see—that without the love of our Lord, I am a wretch. This is the only miracle I can evidence, and sufficient miracle it remains for me. For others, perhaps it is not sufficient. I can scarcely fault them, for they cannot see into my heart. They cannot see the darkness that was once there, nor can they see what has replaced it. But to this day, it is the only miracle I have to offer, you see, and it is a humble one.”

Also, Alma learned, there was much confusion amid the natives as to what sort of god this was—the god of the Englishman—and where did that god live? For a long while, the natives at Matavai Bay believed that the Bible Reverend Welles carried was, in fact, his god. “They found it most disturbing that I carried my god so casually tucked under my arm, or that I left my god sitting unattended on the table, or that sometimes I lent my god to others! I tried to explain to them that my god was everywhere, you see. They wanted to know, ‘Then why can we not see him?’ I said, ‘Because my god is invisible,’ and they said, ‘Then how do you not trip over your god?’ and I said, ‘Verily, my friends, sometimes I do!’”

The London Missionary Society sent nothing in the way of assistance. For nearly ten years, the Reverend Welles did not hear from London at all—no instructions, no aid, no encouragement. He took his religion into his own hands. For one thing, he commenced with baptizing anyone who wanted to be baptized. This was much at odds with the guidelines of the London Missionary Society, which insisted that nobody receive baptism until it was quite certain they had renounced their old idols and embraced the True Redeemer. But the Tahitians wanted to be baptized, because it was so entertaining—while at the same time wishing to maintain their old beliefs. The Reverend Welles relented. He baptized hundreds of nonbelievers, and half-believers, too.

“Who am I to stop a man from receiving baptism?” he asked, to Alma’s amazement. “Mrs. Welles did not approve, I must say. She believed that potential Christians should be put to the strictest test of sincerity before baptism, you see. But to me, this felt like an Inquisition! She often reminded me that our colleagues in London wished us to enforce a uniformity of faith. But there does not even exist a uniformity of faith between me and Mrs. Welles! As I frequently said to my good wife, ‘Dear Edith, did we come all this great distance only to become Spaniards?’ If a man wants a dunking in the river, I shall give him a dunking in the river! If a man is ever to come to the Lord, you see, it shall be through the will of the Lord—not through anything that I do or do not do. So what is the harm of a baptism? The man comes out of the river a bit cleaner than he went in, and perhaps a bit closer to heaven, too.”

In some cases, the Reverend Welles confessed, he baptized people several times a year, or dozens of times in a row. He simply could not see the harm in it.

Over the next few years, the Welleses had two more daughters: Penelope and Theodosia. They, too, died in infancy, and were laid to rest on the hill, beside their sisters.

New missionaries arrived in Tahiti. They tended to stay away from Matavai Bay, and from the Reverend Welles’s dangerously liberal notions. These new missionaries were firmer with the natives. They established codes of law against adultery and polygamy, against trespass, Sabbath-breaking, theft, infanticide, and Roman Catholicism. Meanwhile, Francis Welles drifted even further from orthodox missionary practices. In 1810, he translated his Bible into Tahitian without first securing approval from London. “I did not translate the entire Bible, you see, but only the bits I thought the Tahitians might enjoy. My version is far briefer than the Bible with which you are familiar, Sister Whittaker. I left out any mention of Satan, for instance. I’ve come to feel it is best not to discuss Satan overtly, you see, for the more the Tahitians hear about the Prince of Darkness, the more respect and intrigue they feel toward him. I have seen a young married woman kneeling in my own church, praying most earnestly for Satan to please send her a boy as her firstborn. When I tried to correct her from this sad direction, she said, ‘But I wish to earn the favor of the one god whom all the Christians fear!’ So I desist from discussing Satan anymore. One must be adaptive, Miss Whittaker. One must be adaptive!”

The London Missionary Society eventually heard about these adaptations and, much displeased, sent word that the Welleses were to stop preaching and return home to England immediately. But the London Missionary Society was quite on the other side of the world, so how could they enforce anything? Meanwhile, the Reverend Welles already had stopped preaching, and was allowing the woman named Sister Manu to deliver sermons, despite the fact that she had not yet quite renounced all her other gods. But she liked Jesus Christ, and she spoke of him most eloquently. News of this angered London further.

“But I simply cannot answer to the London Missionary Society,” he told Alma, almost apologetically. “Their law is left behind in England, you see. They have no idea how things are. Here, I can answer only to the Author of all our mercies, and I have always believed that the Author of all our mercies is fond of Sister Manu.”

Still, not a single Tahitian had embraced Christianity fully until 1815, when the king of Tahiti—King Pōmare—sent all his holy idols to a British missionary in Papeete, along with a letter, in English, saying that he wished for his old gods to be committed to flames: he wanted to become a Christian at last. Pōmare hoped his decision would save his people, as Tahiti was in much distress. With every new ship came new plagues. Whole families were dying—from measles, from smallpox, from the dreadful diseases of prostitution. Where Captain Cook had estimated the Tahitian population at two hundred thousand souls in 1772, it had plunged to some eight thousand by 1815. Nobody was exempt from illness—not the high chiefs or the landowners or the lowborn. The king’s own son died of consumption.

The Tahitians, as a result, began to doubt their gods. When death visits so many homes, all certainties are questioned. As maladies spread, so spread the rumors that the God of the Englishmen was punishing the Tahitians for having rejected His son Jesus Christ. This fear readied the Tahitians for the Lord, and King Pōmare was the first to convert. His initial act as a Christian was to prepare a feast and to eat the food in front of everyone without first making an offering to the old gods. Crowds gathered around their king in panic, certain he would be struck dead by the angry deities before their eyes. He was not struck dead.

After that, they all converted. Tahiti, weakened, humiliated, and decimated, became Christian at last.

“Weren’t we fortunate?” Reverend Welles said to Alma. “Weren’t we fortunate, indeed?”

He said this in the same sunny tone with which he always spoke. This was the puzzling thing about the Reverend Welles. Alma found it impossible to comprehend what, if anything, lay behind that eternal good cheer. Was he a cynic? Was he a heretic? Was he a simpleton? Was his innocence practiced or natural? One could never tell from his face, which was perpetually bathed in the clear light of ingenuousness. He had a face so open it would shame the suspicious, the greedy, the cruel. It was a face that would shame a liar. It was a face that sometimes shamed Alma, for she had never been candid with him about her own history or motives. Sometimes she wanted to reach down and take his small hand in her giant one, and—forgoing their respectable titles of Brother Welles and Sister Whittaker—to say to him simply, “I have not been forthright with you, Francis. Let me tell you my entire story. Let me tell you about my husband and our unnatural marriage. Please help me to understand who Ambrose was. Please tell me what you knew about him, and please tell me what you know about The Boy.”

But she did not. He was a minister of the Lord and an honorable, married Christian. How could she speak to him of such things?

The Reverend Welles told Alma his entire story, though, and held little back. He told her that, only a few years after King Pōmare’s conversion, he and Mrs. Welles, quite unexpectedly, had another baby girl. This time, the infant lived. Mrs. Welles saw it as a sign of the Lord’s approval—that the Welleses had helped to Christianize Tahiti. As such, they named the child Christina. During this time, the family was living in the nicest cottage in the settlement, right next to the church, in the very cottage where Sister Manu now lived, and happy they were indeed. Mrs. Welles and her daughter grew snapdragons and larkspurs, and they made a right little English garden of the place. The girl learned to swim before she could walk, like any other island child.

“Christina was my joy and my reward,” said the Reverend Welles. “But Tahiti is no place, my wife believed, for an English girl to be raised. There are so many polluting influences, you see. I disagree, but that is what Mrs. Welles thought. When Christina became a young woman, Mrs. Welles took her back to England. I have not seen them since. I will not see them again.”

This fate seemed not only lonely to Alma, but terribly unfair. No good Englishman, she thought, should be left here, all by himself in the middle of the South Seas, to face his old age in solitude. She thought of her father in his last years: What would he have done without Alma?

As though reading her face, the Reverend Welles said, “I long for my good wife and for Christina, but I have not been completely without the company of family. I consider Sister Manu and Sister Etini to be my sisters in more than name. At our mission school, too, we have been fortunate enough over the years to have raised up several brilliant and good-hearted students, whom I regard as my own children, and some of them have now become missionaries themselves, you see. They now minister to the outer islands, these native students of ours. There is Tamatoa Mare, who brings the gospel to the great island of Raiatea. There is Patii, who extends the Redeemer’s kingdom to the island of Huanhine. There is Paumoana, tireless in the Lord’s name in Bora-Bora. All of them are my sons, and all are much admired. There is such a thing in Tahiti called taio, you see, which is a kind of adoption, a means of making strangers into your kin. When you enter into taio with a native, you trade genealogy, you see, and you become a portion of each other’s lineage. Lineage is most important here. There are Tahitians who can recite their lineage back thirty generations—not unlike the begats of the Bible, you see. To be entered into that lineage is a noble honor. So I have my Tahitian sons with me, so to speak, who live amid these islands, and they are a comfort to this old man.”

“But they are not with you,” Alma could not help but say. She knew exactly how far away Bora-Bora was. “They are not here to help you, nor care for you should you need them.”

“You speak the truth, but it is a comfort merely to know they exist. You think my life quite sad, I fear. Do not be mistaken. I live where I am meant to live. I could never leave my mission, you see. My work here is not an errand, Sister Whittaker. My work here is not a line of employment, you see, from which a man may retire into a comfortable dotage. My work is to keep this little church alive for all my days, as a raft against the winds and sorrows of the world. Whosoever wishes to board my raft may do so. I do not force anyone to come aboard, you see, but how can I abandon the raft? My good wife accuses me of being a better Christian than I am a missionary. Perhaps she is correct! I am not certain I have ever converted anyone. Yet this church is my task, Sister Whittaker, and thus I must stay.”

He was seventy-seven years old, Alma learned.

He had been at Matavai Bay longer than she had been alive.